Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle 9781138503885, 9781315145617

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Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle

The first major collection of essays on the contemporary British short story cycle, this volume offers in-depth explorations of the genre by comparing its strategies for creating coherence with those of the novel and the short story collection, inquiring after the ties that bind individual short stories into a cycle. A section on theory approaches the form from the point of view of genre theory, cognitive literary studies, and book studies. It is followed by investigations of hitherto neglected aspects of the generic tradition of the British short story cycle and how they relate to the contemporary outlook of the form. Readings of individual contemporary cycles, illustrating the form’s multifaceted uses from the presentation of sexual identities to politics and trauma, make up the third and most substantial part of the volume, placing its focus squarely on the past decades. Unique in its combination of a focus on the literary traditions, politics, and markets of the UK with a thorough examination of the genre’s manifold formal and thematic potentials, the volume explores what is at the heart of the short story cycle as a literary form: the constant negotiation between unity and separateness, collective and individual, of coherence and autonomy. Patrick Gill received his PhD in English literature from Johannes ­Gutenberg University Mainz where he is now a senior lecturer. His teaching and publications focus on the efficacy of literary form. He is the author of Origins and Effects of Poetic Ambiguity in Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems (2014) and has published essays on poetry, contemporary fiction, and British and American TV culture. Florian Kläger is Professor of English at the University of Bayreuth. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Düsseldorf and has published several books and essays on early modern literature, ­diasporic fiction, and the contemporary novel. His research interests are linked by the question after the formal resources of literature for the creation of social cohesion.

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

The Waste Fix Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Sinclair to the Sopranos William G. Little Figures of Finance Capitalism Writing, Class and Capital in Mid-Victorian Narratives Borislav Knezevic The Other Orpheus A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality Merrill Cole The Individual and the Authority Figure in Egyptian Prose Literature Yona Sheffer Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle Edited by Patrick Gill & Florian Kläger For a full list of titles published in the series, please visit www.routledge. com

Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle

Edited by Patrick Gill & Florian Kläger

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-50388-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14561-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

1 Introduction: Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle

1

Patrick G i l l and F l orian K l äger

Section I

Theory

15

2 A Continuum of Fragmentation: Distinguishing the Short Story Cycle from the Composite Novel

17

E l ke D ’ hoker

3 Bio-Cognitive Constraints in the Reception of Short Story Cycles

32

A nja M ü l l er-Wood

4 Short Story Collections and Cycles in the British Literary Marketplace

45

C orinna N orrick- Rü h l

Section II

Traditions

69

5 A “shred and patch school of writing”: The Emergence of the Modern Short Story Cycle in Late Romantic Britain

71

M ark I ttensohn

6 Recovered Coherence in an Early Short Story Cycle: Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills R ainer E mig

90

vi Contents 7 A Cycle of Dislocation: Katherine Mansfield, Modernism, and Proto-Postcolonialism

104

G erri K imber

Section III

Transformations

125

8 Two Worlds in One Book: Ways of Sunlight and the Migrant Short Story Cycle

127

M ichae l C . F rank

9 The Fateful Cycle of Fairy Tales: Reading A. S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye

142

Louisa H ad l ey

10 Unity in Diversity? Imagining Europe in Julian Barnes’s Cross Channel

159

J anine H autha l

11 Traumatic Cycles: Ali Smith and A. L. Kennedy

181

Va l erie O ’ R iordan

12 Kazuo Ishiguro’s Portraits of Paralysis

200

J acob H ovind

13 “Consuming themselves endlessly”: Women and Power in Livi Michael’s Short Story Cycle

219

Roxanne H arde

14 Re-Framing Feminist Politics in Helen Simpson’s A Bunch of Fives: Selected Stories

232

E mma Young

15 The Short Narrative Form in David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks

245

G erd B ayer

List of Contributors Index

261 267

1 Introduction Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle Patrick Gill and Florian Kläger

While not nearly as comprehensively researched as other literary forms, the short story cycle has undeniably, over the past fifty years, received its share of critical attention. From Forrest Ingram’s Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre (1971) and Susan Garland Mann’s The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide (1989) to James Nagel’s The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle (2001), J. Gerald ­Kennedy’s ­Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and ­Fictive Communities (1995), and Elke D’hoker and Gert Van den ­Bossche’s special issue of Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties entitled “Cycles, Recueils, Macrotexts: The Short Story Collection in a Comparative Perspective” (2014), every decade has seen the publication of a major study on the form, and every one of these studies favours certain methodological approaches. Thus, Ingram’s book incorporates specimens from several different literary traditions and endeavours to foreground the defining features of the form based mostly on putative authorial intention. Also proceeding from the vantage point of authorial intention, Mann introduces a more formalist understanding of the short story cycle in her book, while her focus is clearly on Irish and American writers of the twentieth century. Nagel not only synthesizes and updates methodological interests on display in earlier studies, but also introduces a clear thematic focus in terms of the geographical and historical provenance of the texts he is interested in. A number of arguments against these earlier critics, whose interest is by and large in the idea of cohesiveness and formal homogeneity in short story cycles, are fielded by Kennedy in the introduction to his edited collection, as well as by ­Robert Luscher in his essay “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book” (1989). Their primary fascination with the short story cycle is based on the form’s openness and the way it relies on readers to discern patterns and activate meanings. Indeed, to critics from Timothy C. Alderman to Rolf Lundén, the short story cycle is fundamentally characterized by this “friction” between “centripetal” and “centrifugal narrative forces” (Lundén 49–50). As D’hoker and Van den Bossche affirm in the introduction to their comparative journal issue tracing “linked stories” (8) in

2  Patrick Gill and Florian Kläger different national traditions, this tension between the part and the whole is not just a feature of the short story cycle itself, but has also arisen as the focus of extensive critical debate (9). Many of the debate’s central issues are rehearsed, with authority, by one of its main protagonists in Elke D’hoker’s chapter in this volume. Crucially, D’hoker stresses that none of the above features identified by critics of the short story cycle as productive of its generic identity are ­exclusive to this form: they clearly lend coherence and unity to any longer narrative, or – when missing or weakly marked – ­signal the ­absence of coherence and unity. If coherence in the short story ­cycle derives from authorial intention, thematic foci, formal cohesion, or the ‘writerly’ participation of readers, how is the function of these features enhanced by use in this form, rather than in a novel or other longer narrative genres? Is there anything specific about their use in the short story c­ ycle? Does the form, through these properties, lend itself to the negotiation of particular topics and concerns more readily than to ­others? In exploring these questions, the present volume makes use of the concept of the ‘­affordances of form’ recently introduced into literary studies by ­Caroline Levine. She argues, in Forms, that “[r]ather than asking what artists intend or even what forms do”, we might usefully inquire instead after the affordances that “lie latent – though not ­always obvious – in aesthetic and social arrangements” (6–7), ready to be ­activated by c­ reative users (be they authors or readers). Just as the material of glass “affords transparency and brittleness” (6), we might view the short story cycle as potentially ‘affording’ both centrifugalism and ­centripetalism, and the tension between them. Other potentials available to be ­exploited to a greater or lesser degree include the performance of individual or collective agencies and the highlighting of certain thematic, spatial, or symbolic arrangements (or ‘organizing principles’ as defined by Dunn and Morris, 14–16) enabling, but also constraining such agencies. The ­specific combination of these ­affordances is what produces the form of the short story cycle, and it highlights both its potentials and constraints. It is easy to see, for ­instance, that these affordances are shared by ‘­imagined communities’ of various types, which might also experience centripetal and centrifugal forces, ­competing attempts at making sense of them and finding common denominators by reference to certain shared features in time, space, or myth. Prominent examples of critical engagements with just such communities of shared fates and identities include the 2007 collection Narratives of ­C ommunity: Women’s Short Story Sequences, edited by Roxanne Harde, and ­Maria Löschnigg’s 2014 monograph, The Contemporary Canadian Short Story in English: Continuity and Change. As short story cycles privilege certain potential affordances in particular ways, they can suggest the relative purchase or legitimacy of one criterion over the ­others with regard to social forms, as well. Thus,

Introduction  3 Löschnigg, for instance, explores the functions of narrative voice, perspective, and polyphony as “structuring ­device[s]” (256) differentiating between narratives of individual lives and ‘­cycles of migration’. Sandra Zagarell, in Harde’s collection, stresses that alongside more positive factors for social cohesion, a sense of community can also arise from exclusion and suffering, and can even “­reproduce forms of intolerance” (434). As one ‘affordance’ of the genre, the ­organizing principles held up for scrutiny in short story cycles thus lend themselves to exploring the origins, processes, and consequences of ­community-fashioning. The specific functions these affordances ­assume in various historical and social contexts are the topic of many of the chapters that follow. While not primarily interested in further extending extant taxonomies or exactly locating individual specimen volumes on a spectrum, the present volume will use three terms to distinguish various degrees of integration where necessary: the term ‘short story collection’ will be used to denote a retrospectively curated collection of previously written stories by one or more authors; the term ‘short story cycle’ will designate a book of autonomous short stories “so linked to each other … that the reader’s successive experience on various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts” (Ingram 11); and the term ‘composite novel’ will be used with reference to books divisible into separate diegetic units but featuring a higher degree of integration than the cycle through a shared chronology or other clearly foregrounded telos. Obviously, these are relative rather than categorical distinctions, and so their usefulness in absolute terms may be limited. In fact, some of the contributors to this volume have chosen to discuss books originally labelled one thing in terms of quite another, which neatly illustrates the permeability of this basic taxonomy. And while some terminological clarity is necessary, it is not the ­intention of the present volume to quibble with, modify, or buttress ­extant taxonomies. Rather, its aim is to situate ‘cyclicity’ and the coherence that produces it on various levels that would fuse theories focusing on formal unity and ‘organization’ (e.g., of character, setting, motifs, as in Ingram, Mann, and Dunn and Morris) with those more interested in formal openness and sequentiality (Luscher, Kennedy; cf. also Smith, and March-Russell 103–105). In their recent survey of the genre of the short story cycle, D’hoker and Van den Bossche helpfully contrast two research approaches to the short story cycle that could be said to differ in their attitudes towards coherence. One inquires after generic traditions and prototypical features and thus, the ‘what’ or the forms of coherence on the level of genre theory; the other is interested rather in ‘coherence effects’ of a wider, potentially intermedial, relevance and thus, the ‘how’ or functions of coherence. In both of these senses, the term ‘coherence’, otherwise of limited critical currency in literary studies, serves us here as an index of the various

4  Patrick Gill and Florian Kläger ‘ties that bind’ the short story cycle into something distinct from its constituent stories. As in linguistics, the term foregrounds semantics over grammar and implies that the textual whole presents a number of propositions that may be usefully viewed in relation to each other. While there is certainly no strict requirement, as in philosophical logic, for “freedom from self-contradiction” (Rescher 5), the sense of coherence is certainly heightened by that freedom. Thus, ‘coherence’ suggests both the idea of gestalt and the concept of the ‘whole’ that has been the subject of much formalist criticism and (especially in recent decades, during formalism’s eclipse by other approaches) opprobrium for its pernicious effects (see Bogel 59–101). As Levine succinctly puts it, “[t]he valuing of aesthetic unity” has been taken to imply, by anti-formalists, “a broader desire to regulate and control – to dominate the plurality and heterogeneity of experience” (25). However, it is also true that “we cannot do without bounded wholes: their power to hold things together is what makes some of the most valuable kinds of political action possible at all” (27). In his book on translation, Douglas Hofstadter cites an ‘odelet’ by James Falen: Every task involves constraint, Solve the thing without complaint; There are magic links and chains Forged to loose our rigid brains. Structures, strictures, though they bind, Strangely liberate the mind. (Hofstadter 272) It is in this spirit that we approach coherence, viewing it as the means to creating, through the imposition of certain constraints, a short story cycle’s ‘cyclicity’ or added value beyond its individual constituents. It is a structure offered up beyond the individual stories that suggests they ought to be viewed in concert in a particular way – readers are asked to take a larger perspective, but one that is not arbitrary (hence, it is also a stricture for authors and readers). Coherence emerges from this also as a potential effect of cyclicity held up for critical reflection, because the effects of coherence-making are by no means limited to creating ‘wellwrought urns’ and suggesting an essential harmonious or monolithic centre to the work of art. As a number of contributors to this volume illustrate, a key effect of leading readers to expect coherence – by a set of conventionalized signals afforded by the genre of the short story ­cycle (perhaps similar to what linguists call ‘cohesive devices’) – is to highlight a tension between the parts of a supposed ‘whole’, to stage centrifugalism as well as centripetalism. As readers struggle to perceive expected coherence, they are made to reflect on the very process of creating unity through meaning.

Introduction  5 This also raises the question of agency, so prominently featured in critical discourse on the short story cycle. Criticism on the genre has focussed extensively on authors and readers as sites for the production of coherence. For the purpose of this volume, we propose two additional sites that might be seen as special instances of these: first, towards the authorial end of the spectrum, the agency of publishers and the dynamics of the literary market; and second, the literary scholar as a special kind of reader. It is quite obvious that we, as critics, need to account for our own observer bias as we study the short story cycle. Genre and structure emerge from coherence-making efforts, not only of the elusive ‘general reader’, but in particular of the scholar. In looking for formal criteria of cyclicity and coherence, we must avoid, as far as possible, arriving at forgone conclusions: as Lundén reminds us, “we as critics and scholars try to create gestalts in order to unify texts” that may not necessarily be (otherwise) “intended to be completely homogenized” (49). Certainly, to look for coherence between constituent parts means to view the cycle as the sum of those parts, rather than as a gestalt in and of itself. However, we would argue that gestalt can also be seen as one possible formal effect of coherence and that in fact, this is precisely what the short story cycle encourages its readers to do. It is our conviction that, as a genre that self-consciously yokes together pieces of writing that, by definition, might also stand for themselves, the short story cycle stages and self-consciously performs this tension between gestalt and multi-part ‘whole’. We suggest that the ‘gestalt shift’ between these two – between homogeneous, ‘natural’ organism and heterogeneous, ‘artificial’ machine, if these metaphors are permitted – is a key effect of cyclicity as we understand it. Readers are asked to progressively contextualize each individual constituent story within the wider frame of the cycle while also, at the same time, revising their idea of the cycle itself in a self-conscious performance of the hermeneutic circle. On a meta-critical level, moreover, short story cycles remind us of the similarity between the critical activity of describing genre and the hermeneutic activity of readers being triggered to seek, and then produce, coherence and ‘cyclicity’. Critics of genre look for structures emerging from separate units, as do readers of individual specimens. However, there is a key difference in that short story cycles have authors, while genres do not – agency is redistributed from author to reader. Undoubtedly, a demand for forms reflecting this dual view of ­separation and connectedness has existed for quite a while. This is ­reflected in the popularity of other artistic genres and modes of expression inviting their audience to seek out coherence between individual items. Across media, such constituent items are arranged (potentially) to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, inviting readers to (co-)create ­coherence from their configuration. Examples of such forms include the  classical symphony and the pop music album of the latter

6  Patrick Gill and Florian Kläger half of the twentieth century (further to be differentiated on a spectrum ranging from the concept album to the compilation), network narratives in film, anthology TV series, as well as scrap books and their digital counterparts. For each of these forms, readers or audiences are entitled to ask the chicken-and-egg question of whether the sense of coherence created by the collection precedes the collection and, hence, determined it, or whether it is only produced by it. This provides one possible perspective on the question of why coherence should be sought, in that it opens an anthropological or cognitive dimension in which the short story cycle might be seen to partake of wider phenomena of coherence-making. Anja Müller-Wood’s chapter, below, offers a trenchant critique of theories approaching the short story cycle from this perspective, and it also suggests that a greater focus on the productive participation of readers might be in order. A number of other contributions also explore the effects of puzzling readers into producing ‘unity in diversity’ in order to lend aesthetic form to social dynamics ranging from the conflict between individual and collective, between various collectives, or between intersections of various individual and collective identities. From the array of conventionalized ‘markers of coherence’ in the short story cycle, readers produce cyclicity by identifying which works best. This privileging of certain forms of parallels, analogies, and other common denominators can articulate a worldview or ideology based around such privileges. For example, on the paradigmatic level, a cycle ‘cohering’ through spatial setting and one foregrounding recurrent characters might tend to suggest a priority of the material and external over the psychological and internal – although of course that very priority can also be contested by the same means. Joyce’s Dubliners, in its very title, stresses the mutually constitutive nature of place and self – no Dubliners without Dublin, no Dublin without Dubliners. The same effect can occur on the syntagmatic level, as stories are arranged in patterns suggesting sequentiality and a sense of progression, or otherwise cyclicality, stasis, or compulsive repetition. These formal configurations can serve to suggest a certain rhythm of experience and a sense of order, as much as broadly paratextual features, such as titles of stories or sections suggesting such patterns and overall ‘plans’ can. Of course, these features include the title of the cycle, but also blurbs and reviews that might be provided alongside the cycle per se. Each of them might designate a degree between centripetalism and centrifugalism, and they might be further differentiated on a matrix of coherence-effects that indicates their respective integrative actors: for recurrent settings, authorial agency might be strongest; the actualization of recurrent themes might also involve an amount of readerly agency, and for blurbs, editorial agency is probably more pronounced. What is more, readers of short story cycles will perceive the co-­ presence of such generic features, as individual stories within a mainly

Introduction  7 thematically linked cycle also form ties on the basis of spatial settings or certain symbols. Each individual story may be part of various subgroups united by different features of cyclicity, with any two stories in a cycle either linked directly or via a ‘nodal’ third (or fourth, etc.) story. As it encourages readers to seek out these direct and indirect connections, the genre affords the potential of a world-making model, both in the sense of a ‘model of the world’ and ‘for the world’, representing as well as producing a certain worldview. Thus, the short story cycle is easily turned into a form that reflects a distrust in grand narratives, in monolithic meaning, and in authority. Perhaps it has, in recent years, increasingly been used for creating a looser, but still recognizable, sense of coherence that satisfies a desire for ‘formal’ harmony (in the aesthetic and social senses) while registering that such harmony might not be readily available in our day-to-day lives. By this we mean not a counter-movement to polyphony, but rather the very creation of a polyphonous, cosmopolitan world that invites readers to make their individual sense of a conglomerate that seems disparate and disjunct – much in the way that, perhaps, the world we live in seems. In this sense, coherence in the genre can be something that is not thrust on us but rather self-consciously withheld: readers of short story cycles might start from the assumption that texts of this genre aim at less coherence than a novel might, and that they as readers have to work harder to (co-)produce it. That is not to say that writers neglect the creation of coherence (they do not work less hard than they would for a novel), but rather that they actively attempt to render the sense of ­coherence more tenuous – for example through the strategic placement of disruptive elements and by balancing them with elements conducive to coherence-making. This highlights the special intergeneric position of the short story cycle, and also the high degree of reader involvement: the implicit ‘task’ of the reader is to look for coherence and not necessarily be satisfied with identifying it in one or two of the features mentioned above. All of these generic features are affordances of the short story cycle as a genre, and in summary, for the purposes of this volume, we suggest a multi-tiered model of the cycle, accounting for the construction of coherence by authors, readers, cultural institutions, and economic factors, and situating coherence on various levels. As specimens of the genre employ the form’s affordances differently, they allow the critic the exploration of its interventions in a cultural field that is at once as pluriform and as homogeneous as the form itself. The contributions to this volume are intended as explorations of this sort. The concept of a literary work that combines autonomous stories into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts can look back on a long and illustrious history in Britain,1 dating at least from The Canterbury Tales, and it might seem tempting to go back in literary history and identify all manner of collections of anecdotes, medieval

8  Patrick Gill and Florian Kläger folk tales, and novellae and trace their development over time. As the present ­volume’s primary interest is in the contemporary British short story cycle, ­however, no extensive historical account will be proffered in its pages. However, a few aspects of these older forms should be noted. First, while the rootedness of many forms of storytelling in an oral tradition led to the explicit establishment of the coherence between their constituent parts through a frame narration or a narrator figure, the nature and very existence of these compendia is determined by the ­dimensions of the book as a ­physical volume of extensive but limited ­capacity. ­Second, it would appear that over time, individual stories begin to shed those of their facets that would dictate their exact moral ­attitude to readers. As the individual story offers less and less background and context, highlighting instead its strengths in foregrounding the single moment, in medias res, and in asking readers to fill its gaps, as it were, the function of the combining volume as a whole in providing coherence comes into its own. If we consider, for example, even a relatively modern text such as “The Two Drovers” from Scott’s Chronicles of the Canongate, we realize its epic, allegorical, and openly didactic nature and intent, which the short story as a whole leaves behind over time: there are long expositions of historical information; the representation of events in a ­mimetically rendered world; general statements on characters who, rather heavy-handedly, represent entire nations; and finally the unequivocal judgement of the narrator. Contrast this to a modernist short story, and you will find these sense-making strategies absent – but they might be replaced by other sense-making strategies on the level of the short story cycle. Thus, when Paul March-Russell locates the rise of the short story cycle in the period of literary modernism, his point obviously proceeds from that particular understanding of what constitutes a short story, or rather, what point in its development the short story had reached when modernists such as James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway sought methods of capturing the many points of view that constitute an objective reality without either dissolving the text altogether or ­subsuming these multiple perspectives within the homogenising tendency of the realist novel. (103) While literary modernism thus constitutes an eminently reasonable starting point, and several of our contributors’ chapters refer back to that foundational moment in short story history, this volume’s “Traditions” section also provides two earlier alternatives highlighting hitherto neglected aspects in the history of the short story cycle in Britain. The volume’s primary purpose, however, is the study of the strategies inherent in the form of the short story cycle in the context of contemporary

Introduction  9 British literature, even though continuities with older text types will become apparent throughout the book. As D’hoker and Van den Bossche note, “theoretical approaches to [the short story cycle] have typically remained within a single literary or ­linguistic tradition” (7). This may perhaps be unsurprising given the fact that the most prominent feature of coherence in many short story cycles has typically been that of a shared locality in which all the constituent stories are set. Thus it is that the short story cycle’s most conspicuous formal property – its balance between part and whole or unity and ­diversity – has been read as typical of various national traditions. C ­ ritics may see in the short story cycle the perfect literary form to express the state of their respective nation or culture (see D’hoker and Van den ­Bossche 10f.). While this has been done with reference to Canada, the US as a whole, and individual ethnic groups within the US, no attempt has been undertaken to look at the uses of the short story cycle in a specifically British context. If the short story cycle is seen, as we suggest, as a form challenging readers to produce coherence from what may seem like a disparate assembly of individual parts, or conversely, to perceive (room for) individuality within what presents itself as a homogeneous gestalt, the potential ramifications in a British context are obvious. In one of Europe’s oldest multinational states; in one of its oldest and most self-consciously forged transnational cultures; and one in which social categories such as class, gender, and ethnicity retain much divisive force, the potential of a form foregrounding the issue of unitas multiplex is immense. It lends itself to proclaiming or challenging national unity, to illustrating internal divisions and exploring commonality, to celebrating national space and criticizing the nation’s character(s), to scrutinizing national symbols and juxtaposing national myths. Especially if ‘form’ is seen as something that characterizes not only aesthetic works and practices, but also social life, it is immediately evident how the affordances of the short story cycle might travel from one domain to the other. However, given the obvious general utility of the form, its affordances and their concrete manifestations must be studied carefully and in detail. Both the production and reception of the form can tell us much about the cultural climate in which they occur, and on the basis of the historical readings offered below, we suggest that the form has always afforded authors and readers with a plethora of potential meanings relating to transnational Britishness. Still, this volume centrally explores specimens from the post-war period during which Britain became part of yet another, larger, multinational political entity, the European Union, which it then chose to leave again. Janine Hauthal addresses the question of Britain in Europe explicitly in her contribution, but the wider problem of how collective identities divide, collide, and intersect informs many of the chapters that follow. In recent decades, there has been a palpable increase in the number of longer fictional texts consisting of shorter and

10  Patrick Gill and Florian Kläger seemingly autonomous stories in Britain. It has been a form of choice among contemporary writers from A.  S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, or Martin Amis, to younger and no less successful writers such as Monica Ali, A. L. Kennedy, Ali Smith, and David Mitchell, and among emerging writers, aided perhaps by the growing influence of creative writing programmes. Thus, over the past forty years, short story cycles and their cognate forms have become an undeniable feature of the British literary landscape. The chapters in Section III inquire into the ways in which the form is tasked with representing heterogeneous collective and individual identities in flux and an emerging sense of cosmopolitanism in a Britain conceived as a postcolonial diaspora space, and ask after the reasons for writers to choose a hybrid genre such as the cycle as a means of resisting the dominance of the novel on the domestic and global market. The volume’s first section on ‘Theory’ offers considerations generally applicable to the form, particularly as it exists in its British context. Elke D’hoker opens the volume with an exploration of the short story cycle and the composite novel qua genre. While critics have tended to taxonomize these terms and their cognates, to establish a clearcut division between them, D’hoker is more interested in discovering central prototypical features of both forms and observing their interplay at work in some exemplary specimens. Her wide-ranging chapter speaks to the volume’s central concerns by addressing the question of the efficacy of literary form, by discussing the workings of textual coherence, and by exploring the uses of coherence’s absence in literary texts. In engaging with previous scholarship on the form of the short story cycle, D’hoker’s approach necessarily proceeds from the side of the author. Anja Müller-Wood’s chapter, in turn, assesses the potential and the limits of this literary form from the perspective of the reader: what cognitive faculties are engaged when encountering texts of this nature? Where do these faculties originate from? And how do they influence not only the reader’s view of the texts but even authors’ and readers’ predilections for certain topics negotiated in the form of story cycles? Müller-Wood’s perspective from the field of empirical aesthetics and cognitive literary studies offers reflections on how to approach these questions conceptually and systematically. Finally, Corinna ­Norrick-Rühl’s perspective is on the cold hard facts of the marketplace. Her chapter outlines the position of short story cycles and collections in the British literary market, offering observations on publishers’ ­policies, literary prizes, and the emergent e-book and self-publishing markets. In a second step, it also develops the idea that the conditions of the marketplace feed back into the artistic process and readers’ conception of genres. In their different but similarly fundamental approaches, the three chapters making up this first section thus explore how short story cycles are produced, read, and sold.

Introduction  11 The second section, on ‘Traditions’, is concerned with the short story cycle’s shifting place in the generic system and the transformations of its formal conventions in time. It examines a selection of key ­moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the genre’s development of those forms and functions so conspicuous in its contemporary ­iterations. Tying in with some observations regarding the literary marketplace, Mark Ittensohn locates a nexus of the genre’s development in late ­Romanticism and the self-conscious use of the form as a way of differentiating one’s aesthetic practice from the dictates of the popular novel. Against the prevalent consensus, then, that sees the short story cycle emerge once the taste for autonomous short stories has developed in late-nineteenth-­century England, Ittensohn argues for a recognition of writers such as Galt, Mitford, and Scott as precursors of a form often suspected to be much more modern. Furthermore, he makes a fascinating case for trans-Atlantic generic connections and cross-fertilizations by discussing the impact, in Britain, of Washington Irving’s complex narrative patchworks. Rainer Emig’s chapter identifies Rudyard Kipling as an unexpected innovator in the cycle. Exploring the short story’s late-nineteenth-century relations with journalism as well as questions of class, decorum, and colonialism, Emig reads Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills as a seminal study of textual coherence at work in a specific historical context, but also as one offering pointers to future uses of the form. Concluding the second section, Gerri Kimber picks up formal, theoretical, and historical aspects of the preceding chapters: her concern being chiefly with the construction of coherence in a retrospectively compiled story collection by New-Zealand-born Katherine Mansfield, Kimber pursues questions of literary form and literary markets as well as the colonial experience in the early (and hitherto neglected) short stories of this key practitioner of the genre. Kimber also offers some meta-­ critical reflections on the ways in which literary scholarship comes to construct cycles retrospectively. In their comparative or individual readings of specimens of the contemporary British short story cycle, chapters in the third section, on ‘Transformations’, trace the variety of implications following from the short story cycle’s finely poised position between unity and disunity, ­coherence and autonomy. The section is arranged in broadly chronological terms, moving from mid-twentieth-century texts to the present day. Particularly in its concluding chapters, it explores test cases of generic classification and taxonomy, illustrating the continued potential of the form to challenge critical practices. Michael C. Frank’s opening chapter picks up the idea of the short story cycle in its relation to colonial and postcolonial discourses and traces this development from the late 1950s to the end of the century. Singling out a tradition of story cycles outlining diasporic identities in relation to various settings, Frank proposes a focus on the contiguity of ‘two worlds’ as an organizing principle

12  Patrick Gill and Florian Kläger in cycles of migration to represent the sense of ‘double belonging’ and ‘­inbetweenness’ in narrating the postcolonial experience in Britain. The theme of unity in diversity is taken up from the perspective of genre by Louisa Hadley in her chapter on Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), five stories profoundly influenced by common fairy-tale conventions. Hadley examines the way this shared genre imbues the volume with a coherence so strong that it can even be said to lead up to a climax in the title story. This neat idea of coherence, however, is shown to be complicated by the cyclical patterns in fairy tales themselves, as well as the nature of embedded narratives and their uses in Byatt’s oeuvre at large. Janine Hauthal’s chapter similarly offers observations on form linked, like Frank’s, to questions of collective identities, exploring the negotiation of Englishness vs. Europeanness in Barnes’s Cross Channel (1996). In a comparison with the nexus of nation, narration, and the novel, Hauthal discusses the short story cycle’s particular resonance as a form for imagining Europe as a ‘unity in diversity’. Following on from this genre-based construction of cohesion, Valerie O’Riordan’s chapter on short story cycles by A. L. Kennedy and Ali Smith takes subject matter as its principal area of investigation. O’Riordan reads these books as responses to various discourses of trauma, demonstrating how the short story cycle has been used by these prominent writers to cover different ends of the spectrum of trauma theory. It emerges from her discussion that the cycle is a significant, yet typically overlooked, example of how form can be used to explicate trauma in fiction. Taking as its foil Joyce’s Dubliners, Jacob Hovind’s chapter reads Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes (2009) against the grain of the modernist classic with a particular interest in epiphanies. Broadly conceptualized as a brief illumination of a certain truth, critics have found it difficult to agree on whether the epiphany may ultimately lead a given story’s character to the climactic moment’s purportedly immutable truth, or if the epiphanic moment instead belongs only to the story’s readers, while the character remains trapped in blindness and paralysis. Nocturnes’ suite of stories, Hovind argues, provides us with a new understanding of this debate as Ishiguro updates Joyce’s famed portraits of paralysis for the twenty-first century, suggesting that among its characters, insight is rarely found, true revelation is hard to come by, and epiphanies are held out only as a promise. The volume’s final three chapters all engage with the aesthetics of the short story cycle by discussing volumes whose generic status may be open to debate: Roxanne Harde examines Livi Michael’s Their Angel Reach (1997), a book originally marketed as a novel, and reads it as a short story cycle in order to emphasize how the book’s formal features underline the story of Michael’s female characters, separately and in community, as they negotiate the workings of social control of their minds and bodies. The chapter considers aspects of power and the female body in characters who must come to terms with verbal, physical,

Introduction  13 and/or sexual abuse in ways that tie together their stories even as they underscore how the genre itself offers resistance to the dominance of the novel. Helen Simpson’s A Bunch of Fives (2012) is read by Emma Young as contested ground since, as its subtitle “Selected Stories” suggests, it is a collection or compilation, a retrospectively curated volume of stories, and as such would be assumed to display far fewer traits of coherence than a volume designed as a coherent cycle. However, it is in this tension between erstwhile disconnection and retrospectively activated coherence that Young finds a challenge for critical definitions of the form. Gerd Bayer’s investigation of coherence in David Mitchell’s composite novel The Bone Clocks (2014) similarly inquires after the aspects determining that this book, which outwardly shares many traits with the short story cycle, is understood by readers as a novel rather than a cycle. Rather than attributing The Bone Clocks to either this genre or that, Bayer’s ­exploration of generic conventions and readerly expectations enables him to argue that Mitchell’s text subverts them both. As these contributions illustrate, the form of the short story cycle ­affords the means for critical interventions in key social, cultural, and literary debates of present-day Britain. It is a vibrant genre that has a significant role to play, here no less than elsewhere. We hope that the chapters collected here help to break new ground in studying the form’s entanglements with and interventions in British literature and culture, and generate further research in a field situated between literary formalism, cognitive poetics, publishing, and contextualist criticism.

Note 1 It is our conviction that Ireland has too long and too vibrant a tradition of short stories and short story cycles to subsume it into the present volume. Thus, while reference is made frequently to selected specimens of Irish short story cycles, it seemed to make more sense to forgo the inclusion of one or two decidedly Irish chapters burdened with representing what must surely be enough of a short story tradition to justify a volume in and of itself. For substantial recent assessments, see Brouckmans, and D’hoker 111–139.

Works Cited Alderman, Timothy C. “The Enigma of The Ebony Tower: A Genre Study”. Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 31, 1985, pp. 135–147. Bogel, Fredric V. New Formalist Criticism: Theory and Practice. Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2013. Brouckmans, Debbie. “The Short Story Cycle in Ireland: From Jane Barlow to Donal Ryan”. Dissertation, KU Leuven, 2015. D’hoker, Elke. Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story. Springer ­I nternational Publishing, 2016. D’hoker, Elke, and Bart Van den Bossche. “Cycles, Recueils, Macrotexts. The Short Story Collection in a Comparative Perspective”. Cycles, Recueils,

14  Patrick Gill and Florian Kläger Macrotexts, special issue of Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, vol. 12, 2014, pp. 7–17. Dunn, Maggie, and Ann Morris. The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition. Twayne, 1995. Harde, Roxanne, editor. Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story ­Sequences. Cambridge Scholars, 2007. Hofstadter, Douglas R. Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of ­L anguage. Basic Books, 1997. Ingram, Forrest. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre. De Gruyter, 1971. Kennedy, J. Gerald, editor. Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. Cambridge UP, 1995. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton UP, 2015. Löschnigg, Maria. The Contemporary Canadian Short Story in English: Continuity and Change. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2014. Lundén, Rolf. “Centrifugal and Centripetal Narrative Strategies in the Short Story Composite and the Episode Film”. Cycles, Recueils, Macrotexts, special issue of Interférences littéraires. Literaire interferenties, vol. 12, 2014, pp. 47–60. Luscher, Robert. “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book”. Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, edited by Jo Ellyn Clary and Susan Lohafer. Louisiana State UP, 1989, pp. 148–167. Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. Greenwood, 1989. March-Russell, Paul. The Short Story: An Introduction. Edinburgh UP, 2009. Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle. Louisiana State UP, 2001. Rescher, Nicholas. Logical Inquiries: Basic Issues in Philosophical Logic. De Gruyter, 2014. Smith, Jennifer J. “Locating the Short-Story Cycle”. Journal of the Short Story in English, vol. 57, 2011, pp. 59–79. Zagarell, Sandra. “Reflections: Community, Narrative of Community, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s The Jamesons”. Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences, edited by Roxanne Harde. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007, pp. 433–48. We would like to thank Michelle Salyga, our editor at Routledge, for ­supporting this project. The anonymous reviewers offered important suggestions, and ­Marjan Nooh Nezhad was an invaluable help in preparing the manuscript for the press.

Section I

Theory

2 A Continuum of Fragmentation Distinguishing the Short Story Cycle from the Composite Novel Elke D’hoker The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed the publication of several works of fiction that, though marketed as novels, wear that label rather uneasily. These works are highly fragmented texts, made up of separate textual units – short stories, novellas, sketches, textual fragments, or a mixture of these – which become progressively more integrated as the novels unfold. In their juxtaposition of different characters, voices, and lives, these books depart from the single-­protagonistdriven plot of the traditional novel, especially as the characters do not share the usual novelistic ties of family, love, or friendship. Instead, they are connected through a common setting or shared history or are brought together through an accident or coincidence. In this way, these novels participate in the larger cultural debate about forms of human connectivity at a time when the limitations of high individualism have come into focus while state formations, ideology, and personal identity no longer appear as determinative as they did in the latter decades of the twentieth century. A brief description of some representative examples will help to elucidate the thematic and formal characteristics of these novels.1 A first example is Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park (2006), which juxtaposes the stories of different middle-class women living in an English suburb and then brings some of them together at a dinner party. A common setting also unites Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2013), which consists of twenty-one dramatic monologues told by the different inhabitants of an Irish village, and Monica Ali’s Alentejo Blue (2006), which depicts the haphazard lives of locals, expats, and tourists in a Portuguese village. John Lanchester’s Capital (2012) and Jon M ­ cGregor’s If ­Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), similarly, are set on a largely anonymous urban street. In Capital, the inhabitants of Pepys Road live their separate lives under the looming threats of both the ­financial crisis and the anonymous missives they receive in their letterboxes. McGregor’s novel starts from the premise of anonymity but has a tragic accident bring the characters briefly together. Tragic events also form the anchor points in

18  Elke D’hoker the fragmented novels of Zadie Smith and Colum McCann. NW (2012) traces the experiences of four characters in London’s North-West suburb of Willesden up until their lives collide in a disastrous final encounter, while McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) is structured around the 1974 tightrope walk of Philippe Pettit between New York’s Twin Towers as the different chapters depict the partly interconnected lives of characters witnessing this event. In Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001), the five sections contain the widely different voices of five people connected to a big inner-city hotel and in Smith’s subsequent novel, There but for the (2011), similarly, the separate sections evoke the different lives of people who are tangentially related to – and transformed by – the man who locks himself in a room in the opening pages of the novel. In still other novels, the characters are more far-flung in space and time even as hidden connections – existential, metaphysical, or psychological – are gradually revealed. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), with its onion-like structure of enclosed novellas, is perhaps the best-known example here, but Sebastian Faulks’s A Possible Life (2012) and Simon Van Booy’s The Illusion of Separateness (2013) equally hinge on the shared historical or existential connections between a disparate cast of characters. Although these books are all advertised as “novels” in the paratext, reviewers have often expressed frustration with this label. A reviewer of Alentejo Blue, for instance, calls the book “a frustrating novel” b ­ ecause of the absence of a strong plot (Shriver), and another one dismisses the book on this very basis, arguing “[t]his novel is structurally piecemeal, a collection of vignettes with no forward narrative thrust at all” (­Walter). The Illusion of Separateness, similarly, is judged to fall short as a novel, as it offers only “a series of interconnected narratives” (Lakso) and “hopscotches across countries and eras, introducing new characters at each point” (Power). Capital is criticized for the “flimsiness” of the device that connects the different storylines: the anonymous letters with ‘We want what you have’, which the inhabitants of Pepys Road ­receive. In an otherwise positive review, the structure of NW is criticized as a “bit wobbly and lopsided by design, […] a hotchpotch in five parts” (­Lorentzen 21), and a review of A Possible Life states: This is not a novel. The publishers refer to it as such on the inside jacket, perhaps in an attempt to steer the reader away from the concept – apparently anathema to British publishers concerned with sales – of a collection of stories. Sebastian Faulks may well have conceived of it as a novel in his mind, as he has stated in recent interviews, but the truth is that A Possible Life is a gathering of five longish short stories, ranging from 40 pages to about 100, stories that span continents, centuries and subject matter, sometimes extremely skilfully, at other times less effectively. (Johnstone)

A Continuum of Fragmentation  19 Regardless of whether the ‘novel’ tag has been the choice of author or publisher, critical dissension about the pertinence of this tag in these and several other cases points to the more fundamental question of how to label and interpret these narrative texts, which can be said to constitute something of a trend in contemporary literature. Are they indeed novels, perhaps with the qualifying addition of ‘fragmented’, ‘composite’, or ‘postmodern’?2 Or should they rather be read as interlinked short story collections and placed within the tradition of the short story cycle as it has developed since the late nineteenth century, primarily in the US, but also in Britain and Ireland?3 The scope of these questions extends beyond that of ‘mere’ critical pigeonholing. Generic conventions and traditions form a blueprint for writers to use, emulate, transform, or reject, while they also shape readerly expectations and influence the understanding and evaluation of a literary text. As James Nagel has argued, the lack of critical and popular recognition of the importance of the short story cycle in literary history has caused several interrelated story collections to be “misconstrued” and dismissed as failed novels (9). At the same time, the challenge posed by the many fragmented fictions published in the past two decades also uncovers a limitation of contemporary short story cycle theory, viz. its inability to unambiguously delineate the genre and to identify its borders with neighbouring forms: the short story collection, on the one hand, and the novel on the other. Hence, the question of the generic status and tradition of these contemporary narratives also forms a test case for different ways of conceptualizing the short story cycle as they have been developed over the past few decades. A basic distinction to be made in theories of the short story cycle or linked story collection is between Anglophone and Francophone approaches to the form. While the first are obviously the most important in the context of this volume, the second are, I believe, useful to pinpoint and perhaps redress some of the limitations of Anglo-American theories of the short story cycle. These theories are all indebted to the first critical study of the genre: Forrest Ingram’s 1971 Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre. On the basis of a comparative study of cycles from French, American, Irish, and German literature, Ingram sought to define the short story cycle, to describe its most important characteristics, and to propose criteria for classifying different cycles. Although his approach has since been criticized and refined, it did shape all subsequent theories in three important ways. First, Ingram’s definition of the short story cycle has provided a blueprint for all subsequent definitions of the form: “a book of short stories so linked to each other by their author that the reader’s successive experience on various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts” (11). With its rather casual reference to “author”, “reader’s experience”, and “pattern of the whole”, the definition effectively contains the elements that would

20  Elke D’hoker divide later critics over the importance each accrues in a definition of the genre: author, text, and reader. Author and authorial intention were considered very important by ­I ngram himself: they provided the criteria for classifying cycles as “composed”, “completed”, or “arranged” (17–18). In the second monograph devoted to the form, The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide, Susan Mann also foregrounds authorial intention as her different chapters trace the composition process of paradigmatic short story cycles. Yet, she complements this with a more formalist approach that seeks to map the generic markers that can be found in the text and paratext of short story cycles: a table of contents, a title that does not recur as the title of a short story, genre markers in the subtitle, a preface or authorial statement, an epigraph or motto, a frame or a specific structural organization (14–15). Mann’s textual approach has been further developed by James Nagel. In the introduction to The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle, he lists the unifying devices that are most frequent in short story cycles: a recurrence of people, places, objects or symbols; a specific temporal patterning and narrative set-up; shared protagonists, settings, and themes (15–16). Other critics have placed greater emphasis on the third element of Ingram’s definition, the reader. J. Gerald Kennedy, for instance, argues that “textual unity, like beauty, lies mainly in the eye of the beholding reader” (ix). Like Robert Luscher, he emphasizes the sequential unfolding of meaning in the integrated story collection, and therefore prefers the term short story sequence. For Luscher, the formalist and author-based approaches to the short story cycle overly emphasize coherence and closure. Instead, he argues, the short story cycle (or sequence) should be seen as “an open book” that actively solicits the reader’s participation (149). The opposition between critics who emphasize the unity of the short story cycle (Mann, Nagel) and those who foreground its heterogeneity and openness (Luscher, Kennedy, Lundén) interestingly matches one of the central characteristics of the genre: its combination of openness and closure, of diversity and unity. Indeed, the paradoxical status of the component stories as both complete and discrete stories and as parts in a larger whole contributes to the central tension in the short story cycle ­between unity and fragmentation, fissure and interconnection, or – as Ingram already put it – “between the one and the many” (19). For Mann, the “simultaneous self-sufficiency and interdependence” of the stories is the “one and only essential characteristic of the short story cycle” (15), while Nagel argues similarly that “each component work must stand alone (with a beginning, middle, and end) yet be enriched in the context of the interrelated stories” (15). The different ways in which this tension is played out in short story cycles – with differing degrees of unity and fragmentation – leads Ingram to propose that cycles can be placed on a “spectrum”: “the limit of one extreme of the spectrum

A Continuum of Fragmentation  21 would be the ‘mere’ collection of unconnected stories, while the limit of the other extreme would be the novel” (14). As a rule, critics have not really been interested in the outer limits of this spectrum. Instead, they have mostly focused on cycles situated near its “midpoint”, which “illustrate a balanced tension between the independency of each story and the unity of the collection as a whole” (Luscher 163). Indeed, the problem of the genre’s specificity and its distinction from such neighbouring genres as the collection and the novel is addressed only implicitly by most critics: through a discussion of representative short story cycles or by tracing the historical development of the form. While Ingram, Mann and Luscher locate the birth of the genre in the modernist period, with its distrust of the traditional novel, other critics point to its nineteenth-century origins in regional or “local colour” writing, with its collections of tales or stories set in a particular village, town or region. Whether or not these village narratives, or “narratives of community” as Sandra Zagarell has called them, can be called short story cycles proper remains a moot point (see Harde 1–2). Yet, with their shared setting and emphasis on aspects of community, their influence on modernist cycles such Dubliners and Winesburg, Ohio is unmistakable. In fact, short story cycles unified by a shared setting represent a large part of the tradition of the genre (Kennedy xiv), while cycles staging ethnic communities, as in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982) or Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), gave a new lease to the genre in the late twentieth century (see Nagel, Davis). For Michelle Pacht, the short story cycle’s recurrent thematic concern with community is tied up with the formal characteristics of the genre, as it “expresses both the plight of an individual and the fate of a community through its very structure” (1). And Roxanne Harde’s Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences is similarly based on the premise that the short story cycle has lent itself particularly well to an exploration of various forms of communal networks and identities. Precisely this interest in the possibilities and limits of networks and communities can also be found in the contemporary texts I have been describing. Yet, before turning to the question of whether the label of short story cycle can usefully be applied to these works, I will briefly outline an entirely different way of approaching the short story cycle, namely through the Francophone poétique du recueil or the poetics of the collection. Contrary to the Anglophone tradition, French and French-Canadian critics do not approach the collection of interlinked stories as a separate genre, but see it rather as a particular instantiation of the publishing format of the collection.4 Since stories, but also essays, poems, epigrams, and fragments, are too small to be published separately, the “polytextual” format of the collection is at heart but a pragmatic solution to a publication problem (Monfort 158). Moreover, since all collections can

22  Elke D’hoker invite readings that emphasize unity and interconnectedness as well as readings that prioritize difference, fragmentation, and separation, the collection of interlinked stories should not be seen as a separate subgroup of the collection. In his study of the short story collection, Des textes à l’oeuvre: La lecture du recueil de nouvelles, René Audet further describes the two reading processes – of “totalization” and “cross-­ linking” – which any collection invites and which a reader can activate on the basis of textual elements as well as readerly frames of expectation (Des textes à l’oeuvre 71, my translation). Unlike many ­A merican critics, Audet is interested not so much in what a collection is as in how a collection functions: he wants to identify dynamic processes in the text itself, which may or may not be activated in any given reading of the text. This leads him to compare the short story collection to a “hypertext”, since it is “constituted by textual parts and links, which form a non-­hierarchic network in which the sequence of reading and exploring […] is left for the reader to decide” (104, my translation). In an even more radical way than Luscher’s and Kennedy’s reader-oriented approaches, Audet argues that unity is not in any way an essential or inherent characteristic of the short story cycle, but rather an effect of processes of reading. Interestingly, we can also find this more dynamic and open ­approach to the short story cycle in an early and largely forgotten article by Timothy Alderman. He traces, in what he calls “integrated short story collections”, a “tension between cohering, centripetal forces and separating, centrifugal forces”, with the latter “disrupt[ing] the process of integration” invited by the former (135). The value of this more dynamic approach is that the poetics of the ­collection, with its interplay of interlinking and unifying forces as well as diffracting and diversifying ones, can be traced in a wider range of literary texts and genres. Moreover, the refusal to isolate the integrated short story collection as a separate case, let alone a separate genre, saves critics from the contentious issue of distinguishing the short story ­cycle from the ‘mere’ collection of uncollected stories. Still, delineating the ­ etween other end of Ingram’s short story cycle spectrum, the distinction b ­integrated collection and fragmented novel, which this paper is concerned with, remains problematic in the poétique du recueil as well. Discussing late twentieth-century and contemporary Quebec ­fiction, Audet describes the popularity of both “quasi-novels”, story collections that are almost novels, and “fragmented novels”, “novels that reject strong internal cohesion in favour of manifest fragmentation”, but fails to specify the distinction between the two (“To Relate, to Read, to Separate” 108–109). In addition, the Francophone focus on the architecture of the collection also impedes a study of the tradition of the short story cycle, in terms of a “genre memory” (Lynch 14), the formation of a national canon, or the staging of recurring thematic concerns. Hence, theories of the collection and theories of the short story cycle can be considered

A Continuum of Fragmentation  23 complementary rather than oppositional approaches to the same literary texts, and I will draw on both to investigate whether contemporary fragmented novels can usefully be labelled short story cycles. Reading these novels through the lens of the short story cycle easily reveals some common characteristics. Both sets of texts offer a compilation of separate and distinct text pieces, whereby the whole adds up to more than the sum its parts. Both also challenge unity and the single story through an embracing of multiplicity, difference, and fragmentation. The contemporary novels thus share with the short story cycle the tension between “the one and the many”: between centripetal forces that bring the separate texts together through repetition, cross-referencing, similarities, or a shared fictional universe and centrifugal forces that separate the texts in terms of style, narrative perspectives, and protagonists. In most novels, moreover, this tension between separateness and interconnection is explicitly foregrounded as one of the central thematic concerns. In Cloud Atlas, for instance, the distinct narratives could not be more different in terms of stylistic, narrative, and generic features, just as the diversity of protagonists is realized in terms of age, gender, class, ethnicity, and time period. Nevertheless, similarities in ­personality  – symbolized by the same comet-shaped birthmark – as well as subtle cross-references between the chapters do create effects of totalization and cross-linking, as described by Audet. In Cusk’s Arlington Park, to give another example, the unity implied by the bird’s eye perspective of the prelude and interlude and the shared setting of the novel are counteracted by the variations in perspective and experience highlighted in the individual stories. In Hotel World, to give a final example, the radically different voices and styles of the different I-narratives reveal the characters’ very different relation to the same setting and events: the Global Hotel and the tragic accident that happened there. In most novels, indeed, this exploration of the tension between the individual and the collective, or between difference and commonality, is also staged in a shared locale: a street in If Nobody and Capital; a suburb in Arlington Park, NW, and There but for the; a village in The Spinning Heart and Alentejo Blue; and a city in Let the Great World Spin. This reinforces these novels’ closeness to the many short story cycles unified by setting and brings out their indebtedness to the village narrative tradition as one of the earliest instantiations of the cycle tradition. This heritage is ironically invoked in Cusk’s novel through a reference to an idealized “Olde England” of idyllic villages full of neighbourly support (Cusk 217, see D’hoker 17), and The Spinning Heart also flags its awareness of the nostalgic village narrative even as it testifies to the fundamental separateness of its characters in post-Celtic-Tiger Ireland. Even such blatantly cosmopolitan novels as Cloud Atlas, A Possible Life, or The Illusion of Separateness evoke the traditions of the narrative of community and the short story cycle by staging communal networks

24  Elke D’hoker that are explicitly non-localized, offering a more globalized sense of connection and belonging. Nevertheless, there are also several elements that disqualify these composite novels from belonging to the tradition of the short story cycle. On a paratextual level, one cannot help but note the absence of generic markers typical of the short story cycle. There are no references to the genre in the subtitle, blurb, or in author interviews, nor are there any other marks of “genre memory”, such as references to paradigmatic short story cycles or other traces of genre consciousness. Moreover, while most of the different sections have titles, a table of contents – a characteristic feature of collection and cycle – is lacking. This points to the problematic status of these distinct chapters/stories/sections in more general terms. While the component parts of the novels are usually clearly distinct and separate, they do not always qualify as short stories. Several of the novels combine texts that have the unity, independence, and closure of short stories with other narrative texts that lack these properties. In Alentejo Blue, for instance, the closing text brings closure to the plotlines developed in the other stories, but thereby fails to qualify as a story itself. In the books of Cusk and McCann, on the other hand, omnisciently narrated prose sketches alternate with short stories focalized through or narrated by different characters. In other books, the narrative sections, while clearly distinct and different, lack the closure that characterizes most short stories and would rather qualify as sketches or fragments. This is the case for the twenty-one monologues that constitute The Spinning Heart as well as for the short separate texts that describe the lives of the different inhabitants in If Nobody and Capital. Like the longer and more story-like sections in Hotel World and There but for the, moreover, the sections build on one another to carry the plot and, hence, don’t really qualify as independent stories. In Cloud Atlas, A Possible Life, and NW, finally, the discrete sections, though closed and unified, are very long and would qualify as novellas rather than as short stories. Of course, as many critics have observed, short stories can take many different shapes, and providing a single, exhaustive definition is well-nigh impossible. Still, brevity, unity, intensity, and a sense of closure can be said to characterize most stories, and this disqualifies at least some of the component parts of the contemporary novels I am concerned with. As we have seen, this generic specificity of the component parts is not an issue in the Francophone poetics of the collection. What matters are the processes of linking texts, not the generic status of the texts themselves. As Audet notes about French-Canadian literature, “many contemporary works present themselves as collections of narrative texts, rather than collections of short stories. A creative play on genres thus appears, causing many to reject the more conventional label of the short story” (“To Relate, to Read, to Separate”: 108). In these works, too, he sees the poetics of the collection at work, with its dynamic tension

A Continuum of Fragmentation  25 between the parts and the whole. The same holds true, I would argue, for contemporary British and Irish composite novels. Here, too, the reader is invited to search for links between the distinct narrative texts and to unify the different storylines into a single plot or coherent whole. At the same time, these processes of cross-linking and totalization are also constantly counteracted by the gaps and contradictions, the dead and loose ends, or the irreconcilable differences that these narratives also present. Nevertheless, to label these works as collections would be a bridge too far: they have been constructed as textual wholes, not as a retrospective gathering of separate, let alone previously published, texts. In his discussion of French and French-Canadian “fragmented novels”, Audet theorizes the affinity but non-identity of the collection and the fragmented novel by means of a “poetics of diffraction” as a kind of novelistic twin to the poetics of the collection. Fragmented novels, he argues, “represent a world in which unity is lacking (or inappropriate). Views, character roles and stories are disjointed, fragmented, as if the text, the narrative voice and the plot had been put through a prism that decomposed their complexity” (“To Relate, to Read, to Separate” 109). Fragmentation and discontinuity rather than assembly or collection are the “organizing principles” of these works given “their obvious patchwork quality, and their borrowed textual elements lead[ing] to continuous interruptions, diversions and digressions” (110). If this poetics of diffraction might well describe postmodern novels of the 1970s and 1980s, it does not seem entirely adequate for the contemporary novels I am investigating. After all, their narrative set-up is marked as much by connection and coherence as it is by fragmentation and diffraction. Similarly, their formal architecture, with its often tight structure of repetition, alternation, and variation, emphasizes commonality as well as diversity. And in their thematic exploration of communal structures, too, the focus is on what brings people together as well as on what keeps them apart. As I have argued, it is precisely this creative dynamic, based on the tension between the whole and its parts, that the novels have in common with the short story cycle or integrated story collection. In other words, while there are generic and authorial obstacles to reading these composite novels as short story cycles, the profound influence of this literary genre on contemporary fiction at large demands to be recognized. For the novels I have been discussing, this influence manifests itself on two levels. On the level of structure, the novels’ interplay of unifying and diversifying elements borrows from the dynamic tension between centrifugal and centripetal forces, which has long been recognized as a central characteristic of the short story cycle. Hence, the reader’s activity in construing an aesthetic and semantic coherence through strategies of cross-linking and totalization, as described in the poetics of the collection, can usefully be applied to the reception of these novels as well. On the level of theme, secondly, the novels are clearly

26  Elke D’hoker indebted to the short story cycle’s long tradition of staging communities and of exploring the links and barriers between people more generally. Here, too, an awareness of this literary genealogy may contribute to a better understanding of these contemporary works and of the way they criticize, borrow from, or emulate earlier narratives of community. A recognition of this literary heritage in both theme and form would prevent an unjust dismissal of these composite works for failing to adhere to generic norms they have no interest in. If these contemporary novels cannot really be called short story ­cycles, but also violate the generic standards of the traditional, single-­ protagonist-driven novel, what label would then be most appropriate? In the available literary criticism on these works, some alternative ­labels have already been proposed. Emma Smith, in an interesting reading of Hotel World, calls the book a “multivoiced novel” (83) and compares it to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (which many critics, incidentally, would read as a short story cycle). Cloud Atlas, which has received a fair amount of critical attention already, has been labelled “a postmodern novel” (­McMorran 155) and a collection of “six interlocked and rotating novellas” (Wood), while Berthold Schoene also discusses the book as a “cosmopolitan novel”, in view of the large span of countries and eras in the book. With the exception of ‘postmodern novel’, however, none of these labels seems sufficiently broad to encompass more than a few of these novels. ‘Multivoiced novel’ foregrounds a diversity in narrative voices without taking into account the composite or fragmented architecture of these novels and would in fact equally apply to more seamlessly integrated multivoiced novels such as Mrs Dalloway or Parade’s End. ‘Cosmopolitan novel’, on the other hand, only takes the novels’ transnational dimension into account and fails to cover more ­localized novels such as The Spinning Heart, Arlington Park, or Alentejo Blue. ‘Novella cycle’ might be an appropriate term for A Possible Life and Cloud Atlas, as they consist of a handful of very long and largely independent stories. Yet, the term has only a restricted reach and does not apply to any of the other titles, nor to many other twentieth-century texts. Other traditions and terms that can be considered are ‘multiplot novel’, ‘collective novel’, and ‘network novel’. The first has been coined for those Victorian novels that integrate multiple plots with a view to offer an inclusive representation of society (Garrett). Unity is established through coincidence, a shared locale, and the discovery of past connections. Some of these elements recur in the contemporary works: coincidence is a strong factor in A Possible Life and The Illusion of ­Separateness, while Let the Great World Spin, If Nobody Speaks, and Capital aim to give a broad view of contemporary society, staging characters of different ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, and occupation. Yet, the Victorian multiplot novel typically does have one privileged ­plotline and a central protagonist. Its subplots are unified to a far greater

A Continuum of Fragmentation  27 degree as the different characters marry, discover hidden family links, or simply know each other well. The characters and plotlines in the contemporary novels, to the contrary, tend to remain far more separate and isolated, their interactions typically fluid and transient. This is reflected in the style and structure of the contemporary novels, which also lack the unity conferred by a single narrative voice of the Victorian novels. The collective novel, a modernist counterpart to the Victorian ­multiplot novel, on the other hand, tries to depict and give a voice to “the masses” by staging many different characters, typically belonging to a particular social class (Foley, Butts). Again, this interest in the collective can be traced in some of the contemporary texts, but they are different in their attempt to depict the heterogeneity and diversity of ­t wenty-first-century society. The network novel, thirdly, would seem a good candidate to capture both the structure of the novels, with their network of interlocking stories, characters, and perspectives, and their thematic concern with the networks of links that connect human beings, whether implicit or explicit, tenuous or closely knit, enduring or fleeting. Moreover, the term network novel carries useful echoes of both ­Bordwell’s term ‘network narratives’ for recent films that depict the separate but intermingled life stories of several protagonists (19) and social theory’s characterization of contemporary society as a “network society” (­Castells). Less useful, however, are the digital connotations of the term. ‘Network fiction’ has been used by Ciccorico to describe “narrative texts in digitally networked environments that make use of hypertext technology to create emergent and recombinant narratives” (4). Moreover, the term ‘network novel’ might again be too specific and unfamiliar to cover the whole range of novels that operate on the crossroads of the integrated novel and the short story cycle. ‘Postmodern novel’, finally, is of course a term that covers a wide range of texts and is widely known as a shorthand for literary experiment and the deconstruction of established plots, characters, and conventions. ­Applied to the works in my corpus, it underscores especially elements of fragmentation and multiplicity in their narrative structure. Yet, as with Audet’s poetics of diffraction, this perspective threatens to ignore the novels’ fundamental interest in bringing together a variety of personalities, lives, and stories, for however brief a moment, so as to show the isolation as well as the interconnectedness of these lives in a global world. Moreover, while postmodern novels are typically concerned with questions of identity, these contemporary works seek to abandon this individualist focus in favour of an investigation of human togetherness. Finally, while novels like Hotel World, There but for the, Cloud Atlas, and NW contain a fair degree of stylistic experimentation, Capital, The Spinning Heart, and The Illusion of Separateness are written in a quite straightforward kind of realism, and the work of Cusk and McGregor has been described as modernist or neo-modernist (Boileau). In fact, the differences between

28  Elke D’hoker these twenty-first-century works and the typical postmodern novel highlight precisely the significant literary developments that have taken place since the postmodern movement of the later twentieth century, so it would be a pity to cover up that distance by an enlarged use of the term. Given this new emphasis on connection and coherence as the necessary flipside of fragmentation and difference, ‘composite novel’ would seem the most appropriate term for the works I have been discussing. The term is sufficiently broad to cover a range of texts that consist of ­distinct but interrelated narratives, forming a patchwork of different voices, characters, and storylines. In addition, the term highlights the closeness of these novels to the tradition of the short story cycle, whose composite nature has long been recognized in the definitions and terminology of the genre. It would be necessary, however, to open up the term ‘composite novel’ beyond the narrow definition it received in the hands of Dunn and Morris. Indeed, since their use of the term as a synonym for ‘short story cycle’ has not caught on in studies of the genre, it seems more useful to apply it to literary works that extend some of the characteristics of the cycle to the genre of the novel. The composite novel could then be defined as a work of fiction that consists of several distinct ­narrative texts, storylines, and protagonists, which are integrated by means of cross-­references, thematic concerns, a common plotline or a shared story-world. The composite novel is characterized by a ­dynamic tension between the whole and its parts, which results in an open text that ­demands an active participation of the reader in constructing ­aesthetic and narrative coherence. In this way, the composite novel occupies the other side of the dividing line between short story cycle and novel envisioned by Ingram: some distance from the paradigmatic single-­protagonist-driven novel, but still within the larger remit of the genre. Labelling these and similar contemporary texts as composite novels also allows us to reserve the term ‘short story cycle’ for works that have the short story at the centre of their composition. Given the renewed popularity of the short story in recent years, the short story cycle too has gained wider resonance in Britain and Ireland, with linked collections such as Helen Simpson’s In-Flight Entertainment (2012), Colin Barrett’s Young Skins (2014), Kirsty Gunn’s Infidelities (2014), Jon ­McGregor’s This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You (2014), and Lucy Caldwell’s Multitudes (2016) – all flagging their genre awareness in blurb or subtitle. It is ultimately in the interests of the short story and of integrated short story collections such as these that the term short story cycle remains specific enough, retaining its ties to the genre of the short story, rather than being stretched to include all forms of composite fiction. For if literary texts themselves more often than not exceed genre boundaries and creatively play with genre conventions, as critics we do well to use these labels with precision if they are not to become mere marketing tools or catchall terms that cease to be meaningful.

A Continuum of Fragmentation  29

Notes 1 While there are also many American novels that fulfil this description, such as Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011), Nicole Krauss’ Great House (2010), Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists (2010) or Benjamin Markovitz’ Either Side of Winter (2005), I am limiting myself to British and Irish examples for the present purpose. 2 I should point out that I use the term ‘composite novel’ in the broad sense of novels that consist of clearly distinct parts and foreground different storylines and characters, and not in the restricted meaning given by Dunn and Morris in The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition. As the subtitle of their study makes clear, they propose the term composite novel as an alternative to short story cycle, even while following Ingram and Mann in their approach to the genre. They prefer the term composite novel because it brings out the form’s “kinship to the novel” and “in the pigeon house of genre the novel occupies a lofty level, and any generic label that emphasizes ‘story’ rather than ‘novel’ roosts at a lower level” (5). 3 Given the unfortunate connotation of circularity inherent in the term short story cycle, several rival terms have been proposed for the collection of interlinked stories: “short story composite” (Lundén), “composite novel” (Dunn and Morris), “short story sequence” (Kennedy, Luscher, Ferguson), and “novel-in-stories” (Kelley). Yet, the term short story cycle continues to be the one most widely used (Mann, Nagel, Lynch, Pacht, Smith). 4 For a more fully developed comparative discussion of Francophone/Italian and Anglophone approaches to the collection of interlinked stories, see D’hoker and Van den Bossche (2012).

Works Cited Alderman, Timothy C. “The Enigma of The Ebony Tower: A Genre Study”. Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 31, 1985, pp. 135–147. Audet, René. Des textes à l’oeuvre: La lecture du recueil de nouvelles. Editions Nota Bene, 2000. Audet, René. “To Relate, to Read, to Separate: A Poetics of the Collection and a Poetics of Diffraction”. Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, vol. 12, 2012, pp. 35–45. Boileau, Nicolas. “Introduction”. E-Rea, special issue: Kay Boyle / Rachel Cusk: (Neo)Modernist Voices, vol. 10, no. 2, 2013. Bordwell, David. Poetics of Cinema. Taylor & Francis, 2012. Butts, J. J. “Missed Connections: The Collective Novel and the Metropolis”. Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 2, 2011. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Wiley-Blackwell, 1996. Ciccoricco, David. Reading Network Fiction. University of Alabama Press, 2007. D’hoker, Elke. “The Challenges of Community in Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park”. Anglistik, vol. 26, no. 1. 2015, pp. 13–24. D’hoker, Elke, and Bart Van den Bossche. “Cycles, Recueils, Macrotexts: The Short Story Collection in a Comparative Perspective”. Interférences littéraires/ Literaire interferenties, vol. 12, 2014, pp. 7–17. Dunn, Maggie, and Ann Morris. The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition. Twayne, 1995.

30  Elke D’hoker Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Duke University Press, 1996. Garrett, Peter. The Victorian Multiplot Novel. Yale University Press, 1980. Harde, Roxanne, editor. Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences. Cambridge Scholars, 2007. Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre. Mouton, 1971. Johnstone, Doug. “A Possible Life, By Sebastian Faulks [review]”. The Independent, 22 Sept. 2012. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/ reviews/a-possible-life-by-sebastian-faulks-8165766.html. Kelley, Margot. “Gender and Genre. The Case of the Novel-in-Stories”. ­A merican Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Julie Brown. Routledge, 2013, pp. 295–310. Kennedy, J. Gerald. Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lakso, Jessica. “Behind Enemy Lines: Review of Simon Van Booij’s The Illusion of Separateness”. The Wall Street Journal, 12 July 2013. www.wsj.com/articles/SB1 0001424127887323823004578593542248481784. Lorentzen, Christian. “Why Am I so Fucked Up? Review of Zadie Smith, NW”. The London Review of Books. vol. 34, no. 21, 2012, pp. 21–22. Lundén, Rolf. The United Stories of America: Studies in the Short Story Composite. Rodopi, 1999. Luscher, Robert M. “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book”. Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, edited by Susan Lohafer, and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Louisiana State University Press, 1989, pp. 148–167. Lynch, Gerald. The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles. University of Toronto Press, 2001. Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. Greenwood, 1989. McMorran, Will. “Cloud Atlas and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller: Fragmentation and Integrity in the Postmodern Novel”. David Mitchell: Critical Essays, edited by Sarah Dillon. Gylphi, 2011, pp. 155–176. Monfort, Bruno. “La nouvelle et son mode de publication: Le cas américain”. Poétique, vol. 90, 1992, pp. 153–171. Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle. Louisiana State UP, 2001. Pacht, Michelle. The Subversive Storyteller: The Short Story Cycle and the Politics of Identity in America. Cambridge Scholars, 2009. Power, Chris. “The Illusion of Separateness by Simon Van Booij: A Review”. The Guardian, 10 Aug. 2013. www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/10/ illusion-separateness-simon-van-booy-review. Schoene, Berthold. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Shriver, Lionel. “On the Road to Nowhere: Review of Monica Ali’s Alentejo Blue”. The Daily Telegraph, 11 June 2006. www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ books/3652842/On-the-way-to-nowhere.html. Smith, Emma E. “‘A Democracy of Voice’? Narrating Community in Ali Smith’s Hotel World”. Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 4, no. 2, 2010, pp. 81–99.

A Continuum of Fragmentation  31 Smith, Jennifer J. “Teaching the Short Story Cycle: Teaching American Literature”. Pedagogy, vol. 16, no. 2, 2016, pp. 207–227. Walter, Natasha. “Continental Drift: Review of Monica Ali’s Alentejo Blue”, The Guardian. 12 July 2006. www.theguardian.com/books/2006/may/20/ featuresreviews.guardianreview14. Wood, James. “The Floating Library: What Can’t the Novelist David Mitchell Do?” The New Yorker, 5 July 2010. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/07/05/ the-floating-library. Zagarell, Sandra A. “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre”. Signs, vol. 13, no. 3, 1988, pp. 498–527.

3 Bio-Cognitive Constraints in the Reception of Short Story Cycles Anja Müller-Wood

I. In the scholarly discussion around the literary phenomenon for which the editors of this collection use the term “short story cycle” (another viable label, which I prefer because it retains a certain formal openness, is “short story sequence”), two main trends can be identified: on the one hand, there is the formalist school focusing on the textual features, which presumably lend such collections their inherent (and stable) identity, and on the other, a reception-driven strand concerned with how readers construe this impression of stability. While the one implies that the short story cycle/sequence is an identifiable literary gestalt defined by an integral coherence (even going so far as to argue that a preponderance for short story sequences may be culturally specific), the other sees such collections rather as a less determined textual web providing occasion for coherence-construing attempts on the part of the reader. However, as Elke D’hoker and Bart Van den Bossche point out in their erudite transcultural survey of current scholarly work on short story sequences, the contrast between these two schools might be far less pronounced than seems apparent at first. The unifying feature that they single out is the avoidance of the concept of authorial intentionality. With the exception of outspokenly rhetorically-minded approaches (15), debates around short story sequences marginalize the author, although taking her or him into account, D’hoker and Van den Bossche seem to suggest, might bring a divided scholarly discourse forward. Talking about the short story sequence in terms of authorial intention, however, would tackle only one of the shortcomings of the debate around it, while at the same time perpetuating others. The emphasis on the author might lead scholars to seek out deliberately constructed collections, such as composite novels like Daniel Kehlmann’s Ruhm (2009), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) or Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2002). Yet these books are not only likely to be exceptions within the broad spectrum of short story sequences in general (which might be assembled for very pragmatic reasons and according to far less pronounced causal principles), but also do not really address the issue at stake in the

Bio-Cognitive Constraints  33 present volume of essays: rather than shedding light on the construction of ‘coherence’ by the reader, such collections demand the recognition of a ‘cohesion’ intended by the author (and therefore objectively present in the text).1 An increased focus on the author would therefore allow scholars to continue to ignore what I consider to be the more fundamental problem in the debate around short story sequences, which is connected to the way its representatives conceptualize the production of literary meaning. For when it comes to the question of how information moves between literary texts and their readers, the two apparently conflicting schools take a similarly unidirectional stance. In the formalist approach, meaning is encrypted in the text, to be decoded by recipients, in the reader-focused approach, it is created by readers, in the most radical scenario of reception (such as that proposed by Stanley Fish) even independent of content and textual information. Neither of them thinks of literature as an act of communication or a dialogue between author and reader, however, which reveals not only a one-sided stance, but also suggests that scholars take many aspects of the process of making sense of short stories for granted. After all, a literary text is a communicative act, even though authors and readers do not speak to each other face to face. Writers compose fictional texts with potential readers in mind, who in turn do not merely fulfil authors’ expectations, but in fact establish the cognitive conditions of reception for the former. In turn, these conditions are likely to place limits on readers’ making sense of texts: although there is scope in the way these can be interpreted, it is probably not infinite. The virtual communication between authors and readers is possible because, as members of the species H. sapiens, the two sides share a similar cognitive apparatus evolved to enable navigation of and interaction with the world. It is only appropriate to assume that the kind of shared expectations communicants in everyday speech have are at work in fiction, too:2 while readers expect authors to arrange literary texts according to certain principles or “maxims”, such as “order, relevance, appropriateness, and informativeness” (Toolan 49), authors, in turn, can expect readers to be capable of evaluating the information they provide, creating connections between individual parts of texts, and making inferences on the basis of information that is fragmentary and implicit. Whether or not they do so, let alone whether they understand the text in ways intended by the author, is another matter, however, and despite the shared commitment to communication, authors and readers may ultimately be at odds about the formal character and meaning of the texts via which they communicate. The cognitive faculties underpinning these communicative principles are far less mundane than they might seem at first: as Michael Toolan emphasizes, “profound proficiencies” go into the seemingly ­pedestrian human ability to make causal links across sentences (3). Despite a

34  Anja Müller-Wood substantial amount of research addressing these proficiencies, however, they are still only insufficiently understood. Of fundamental interest for our comprehension of literature in general, they are also crucial to the very specific question of how readers establish coherence in short story sequences, and taking them into account would allow scholars of these collections to avoid the usual pitfalls of the debate around them. The most important of these is related to the “paradox” that characterizes the engagement with all narrative texts: the fact that readers perceive them as “distinct whole[s]” and “unified thing[s]”, although in r­ eading  they are not “created or experienced all at once, but rather as a succession of parts, strung out in sequence along, crucially, a temporal continuum” (Toolan 48). Scholars are usually not concerned with these ‘online’ processes of reading, but tend to consider texts retrospectively. From this vantage point, it is indeed possible – especially for an expert reader – to identify the “organising concept[s]” of texts on a high level of abstraction (part-whole relations, for instance, or counterpoint and contrast; cf. Luscher 153–154, 150). Such retrospective analyses not only, once again, consider the authorial perspective rather than that of the reader – i.e. attend to cohesion rather than coherence – they also might tempt scholars to succumb to their hermeneutic impulses and interpret texts rather than explain cognitive processes on the part of readers. To address that side of the process, scholars of the short story sequence not only would have to ask very different questions, but also to rethink their own disciplinary expectations. More specifically, what they need to consider are the cognitive ‘constraints’ that act upon the human ability to process written texts. For many contemporary literary scholars, this term is likely to be negatively connoted, yet in contexts such as the cognitive sciences, it has a much more neutral, even positive, significance. ‘Constraints’ denotes the cognitive dispositions that make automatic (preconscious, instinctual) responses to environmental information possible, and it therefore makes sense to think of them as fundamentally enabling. Importantly, however, they may act productively in other contexts, too, the reception of cultural products such as literature (including short story sequences) being one of them. An understanding of these constraints thus would allow us to move from the authorial assumptions that can be deduced from the textual orchestration of such collections to the cognitive processes likely to be engaged by them. To understand the latter, additional information from outside of literary studies, i.e. the cognitive sciences, especially cognitive and evolutionary psychology and neuropsychology, is needed. This information forms the background to what follows, but also places constraints on my own argument. To curb undue expectations from the outset, let me emphasize that the aim of this chapter is not to provide an all-encompassing cognitive theory of short story sequences. There is, after all, no cognitive theory of text processing more

Bio-Cognitive Constraints  35 generally, and research aiming at establishing such a theory has often been hampered by the already mentioned text-centeredness. In fact, even scholarship that comes under the heading ‘cognitive’ often results in taxonomical descriptions of textual phenomena (although it often simply equates them with readers’ responses to them). With its emphasis on textual meaning, much of this research reveals an obdurate indebtedness to the very formalist-structuralist viewpoints from which it ostensibly distinguishes itself. As such, it appears to adhere to a general notion of cognition-as-comprehension (cf. Sternberg 476) that pays insufficient attention to the subtleties of literary communication and tends to ignore readers’ cognitive and affective contribution to the construction of textual meaning.3 Shifting the focus onto the reader more emphatically than has been done so far therefore is significant not least because it puts scholarly assumptions to the test. Experimental psychological research into text processing provides evidence that readers are likely not to live up to the high expectations scholars have of them. Although this kind of research has its limitations (one of the problems being the nature of the texts used, which tend to be made-up examples, typically short, rather than authentic and extensive literary sources), it has identified discrete cognitive abilities that readers have recourse to (or not) as they process narratives. These are neither specific to literature (nor indeed the short story sequence), but constitute a fundamental part of the human cognitive make-up. Literary modes, forms, and genres are culturally specific ways of making use of or appealing to these general abilities, with short story sequences being one good example of how the constraints cognition imposes on authors and readers contribute to the creation of diverse literary forms. I will argue that authors’ use of setting as a signal of cohesion in short story sequences ought to be seen as an intuitive appeal to such a constraint, namely to what Karl Eibl has called the ‘induction instinct’: an innate ability (which humans share with other animals) of predicting outcomes from observed information and, if necessary, adjusting behaviour accordingly. In taking up this suggestion, however, my aim is not to provide new interpretations of short story sequences (that would only illustrate the workings of my mind rather than that of readers in general); rather, the underlying argument of the following is that such a cognitive perspective can function as a means of (self-) reflection, aiding literary scholars to rethink their own habits and perspectives (cf. Müller-Wood).

II. To begin with, however, a few comments about the assumption, which underpins one school of research into short story sequences, that readers are not only capable of establishing coherence amongst the stories in

36  Anja Müller-Wood such collections, but that they have a central function in this process, are needed. In an oft-cited statement, Robert M. Luscher likens a sequence to “an open book, inviting the reader to construct a network of associations that binds the stories together and lends them cumulative thematic impact” (Luscher 148–149). He contends that readers are not only capable of detecting the “larger unifying strategies” (Luscher 150) in short story sequences; for Luscher, the very looseness of these collections makes “our pattern-making faculties bristle with attention”, causing them to “seek to pull together material which might initially seem disparate” (157–158). This assumption sounds plausible, and would deserve further inquiry, yet what constitutes these slightly hyperactive “pattern-making faculties”, let alone which are the cognitive processes that are likely to underpin them, is something he does not identify.4 Claims like these seem to buy into the cliché that human beings have an ‘antipathy for disorder’, an idea presumably based on the observation that the human brain seems to find patterns and coherence in everything we see, hear, or read, however incoherent and incomplete (witness the discovery of faces on pieces of toast, wood, or in cloud formations). One of the earliest attempts to explain such phenomena are experiments from gestalt psychology affirming the existence of stable and universal laws of perception. In the wake of the cognitive turn of the 1980s, these regularities have come under neuroscientific scrutiny, in recent years with the aid of an increasingly sophisticated imaging technology. For instance, the phenomenon of pareidolia, the recognition of images even in meaningless squiggles or nonsense patterns (as used in Rorschach tests), appears to use the same conceptual channels as regular recognition (Voss et al.). A plausible evolutionary explanation of at least some of these phenomena links them to an innate and adaptive ‘face detector’: a hypersensitive propensity to recognize faces even when there are no faces to be recognized. The resulting false positive errors (“false alarms”) may be explained with the fact that making such mistakes is less costly (in evolutionary terms) than not interpreting nonsense patterns as faces (Haidt 292). These examples seem to be evidence of the pattern-making faculties Luscher associates with short story sequences, and yet because the evidence gathered here is drawn from visual materials, it cannot be applied directly to literary texts. Research suggests that reading texts involves two channels, a lexical and a phonological one, the one immediately connecting lexical representation and word meaning and the other creating meaning by mentally identifying, compounding, and manipulating sounds. The latter leads to a process of ‘subvocalization’, a silent or internal speech triggered for instance by text features that are not immediately understood. Being able to circumvent subvocalization makes one a more efficient reader, yet in literary texts authors may deliberately aim at its retarding function. Unfamiliar words, ambiguous rhythm,

Bio-Cognitive Constraints  37 and startling prosodic effects can be seen as express strategies of urging readers to subvocalize and engage more intensely with the text (­Mellmann, “Das innere Ohr”). Such strategies might not only be a means to slow down the reading process, however, they might also contribute to a text’s cohesion, albeit on a level beyond the thematic. Unfamiliar terms or difficult syntactic patterns that recur throughout a text might lead readers to discern coherence in it. Thus subvocalization could shed light on a long-standing assumption in text linguistics that lexis presents more significant cohesive ties in texts than their grammatical or syntactical structures (Toolan 22). Drawing on M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan’s seminal study Cohesion in English (1976), Toolan points out that our understanding of textual structures can be improved if we focus on patterns of lexical cohesion, notably repetition, and on their (informational) function as a “framework […] for seeing change accompanied by recurrence” (Toolan 23), rather than the different forms repetition may take. These considerations also dovetail with the already mentioned psychological research into text processing, which emphasizes the idiosyncratic and partial nature of reading (cf. Graesser et al. 377; Kintsch 294). Authors can rely on readers’ inferential abilities, but these have been shown to be selective (mainly focusing on characters’ goals, causal relationships, and global themes) and usually are not predictive of plot development (Graesser et al. 372). The kind of complex abstractions authors seem to expect their readers to be able to undertake is undermined by the fact that on the whole, readers are better at comprehending and recalling concrete rather than abstract information (Dove 425) (with ‘concrete’ meaning “imageable”, cf. Bird et al.), and superficial similarities rather than structural analogies (Gentner and Landers 13, see also Pinker 274–276) (although there is evidence that the ability to detect analogies improves with expertise). These firmly established insights should disabuse overly optimistic scholars of the idea that the authorial strategies apparent in texts can simply be equated with what readers actually do. This is not to say that readers are unable to process literary texts at all; however, in view of the fact that humans are capable but careless readers, the pattern-making facilities at stake in text comprehension processes may be much more basic and broad than the cognitive abilities on which many scholars base their arguments.

III. I propose that one very fundamental, even basic, cognitive ability authors make use of in short story sequences is what Eibl has called the ‘induction instinct’. An essential capacity in our engagement with the world, its goal is to “identif[y] uniformities in observed objects and phenomena and from that deriv[e] a prognosis which then guides action”

38  Anja Müller-Wood (Eibl 46). Eibl hypothesizes that this instinct is likely to have evolved as a risk management strategy in response to real-life problems in H.  ­Sapiens’ ­ancestral past and continues to provide a functional heuristic in everyday situations: inductive thinking is at work, for instance, whenever a sentient being establishes if-then causalities (an ability that is not limited to humans) (45). But, he claims, it may be the enabling cognitive faculty at work in literature, too, providing a productive tool, for example, in figurative language based on analogy, such as synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor. Yet while in these cases the abstracting link between features is intended, the induction instinct may even be triggered by sequential information whose individual components are thoroughly unrelated. Eibl illustrates his claim with the example of ‘symbolic parataxis’, a literary constellation in which ultimately unrelated entities, events, and objects are placed alongside each other in a way that suggests their connectedness within an overarching normative framework. Other than in metaphoric constructions, which ask readers to recognize actually existing links, symbolic parataxis leads readers to create them (54). In that way, a literary text (Eibl’s example is Musil’s short story “Grigia”) can entrap readers into detecting coherence even when there is objectively none (to adopt a distinction made at the outset: in the a­ bsence of cohesion). Sceptics might question the existence of such an instinct for induction (possibly because the idea that humans are instinctual creatures presents a taboo for many people), yet authors of fiction clearly seem to assume that it is a cognitive ability they can rely on. It is a helpful category to think about the strategy of authors of short story sequences to use setting as a means to signal cohesion. From Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village to John Updike’s Olinger Stories, place has been used as a mechanism to frame texts that are not linked by one coherent and progressive plot: consider also Elisabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, Gottfried Keller’s Die Leute von Seldwyla, Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, James Joyce’s Dubliners, Katherine Mansfield’s In a German ­Pension, and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Within such topographical frames, which themselves already seem to invite the creation of inductive links, this instinct may be appealed to in numerous other ways: from the simple repetitive appearance and reappearance of characters (sometimes underlined by an emphasis on their grotesque marginality, as in Die Leute von Seldwyla and Winesburg, Ohio), to the introduction of pervasive themes and motifs (as well as variations upon them). The connectedness of these texts is sometimes underlined by claims on the part of their authors that the place in question is not only distant and different from that of the reader, but in fact entirely fictitious. Authors of topographically framed sequences often emphasize the otherness of their setting and their symbolic, allegorical quality beyond the here and now. Pronouncements to this effect can be found in the paratextual material

Bio-Cognitive Constraints  39 in sequences by Mitford, Jewett, Keller, and Updike. In a way that is ­entirely typical for such collections, the latter, for instance, emphasizes in the Introduction to the Olinger Stories that the fictional town in Pennsylvania where they are set is “a state of mind, of my mind, and belongs entirely to me” (v). Literary history presents ample evidence that readers are able to accept such a proposition of fictitiousness, and narratives across cultures suggest that there is an ‘epic mode’ that locates story content in a world apart from that of the recipients (Mellmann, “Gibt es einen epischen Modus?”). This ability might be seen in light of a fundamental cognitive faculty to distinguish between information that is relevant in the here and now and that which is hypothetical or valid only in the past. The evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby use the term ‘scope syntax’ for this capacity: a cognitive tool ­allowing people to treat information under advisement. As Cosmides and Tooby hypothesize, this is an adaptive faculty that evolved under the selection pressures imposed by the growth of tribal groups, the attendant increase in information and related need to distinguish and evaluate the latter. It is obvious that such a scope syntax would be crucial to any kind of creative world making (and the reception of these created worlds); in the case of short story sequences, it may additionally be used to foster an impression of overall cohesion. Readers need not, however, grasp the didactic dimension entailed in this separation of reality and fiction, which is suggested by Updike when he describes Olinger as lying “beyond the western edge of Megalopolis” where it “hangs between its shallow hills enchanted, nowhere, anywhere” (vii). That they will not always make the abstracting leap from the fairy-tale setting (“enchanted”) to their own world (“anywhere”) is suggested by the aforementioned psychological research into reading, which documents that precisely such h ­ igher-order analogies present a challenge for all but expert readers. On whatever level of abstraction readers ultimately discover coherence in such story sequences, however, this quality is likely not to be essential to these collections – as those scholars have maintained who take the form to represent a “semblance of community” (Kennedy) or functioning social totality (at a time when there is none) (Shaw) – but an inductive projection on the part of the reader. That authors (and publishers) expect this projection reliably to take place is suggested by the fact that setting has been used as a means of tying together previously published individual stories, such as those by Updike. 5 The same principle is at work in Jim Crace’s Continent (1986), though in this collection – marketed as a ‘novel in stories’ and honoured with the Whitbread First Novel Award6 – the cohesion-signalling potential of setting appears to be a fundamental structural principle inscribed in the collection’s design. The collection consists of seven stories set in different parts and social contexts of a fictitious seventh continent; the cohesion thus announced is affirmed by the book’s Epigraph and the themes it introduces: taken from the Histories

40  Anja Müller-Wood of one Pycletius, apparently an author from c­ lassical antiquity, it describes “a seventh continent – seven peoples, seven ­masters, seven seas. And its business is trade and superstition” (n. pag.). Trade and superstition are indeed topics we find in all the stories in one way or another, the book’s seventh continent being one in transition, marked by conflicting ­interests and world views. The stories themselves deal with characters caught between the poles of reason and folly, insularity and openness to the outside world. Those characters in the stories that a­ ttempt to chart the identity of the continent and its inhabitants, or ­actively participate in the process of its modernization – anthropologists, ethnographers, teachers – all fail in their projects, sometimes outwitted by the characters they seek to study, describe, or enlighten. By analogy, the story-world is likely to remain alien to the reader, for both stylistic and thematic reasons integral to the collection’s plan. Continent, too, is based on the notion of difference and distance that characterizes so many other short story sequences. Symbolic parataxis provides a helpful concept to think about Crace’s book, whose setting, announced by the title and its paratextual material, establishes an overarching frame within which readers are invited to establish coherence.7 Over and above the expectations raised by such authorial signals of cohesion (which the stories need not actually fulfil), they might be linked by the more diffuse sense of strangeness that characterizes them. The exotic setting here is supported by the narrative’s style, its most ostentatious characteristic being the trochaically monotonous and/or monosyllabic names for characters and places (e.g. Awni, Isra, Freti, Loti, Lowdo, the Mu Coast). The particular rhythm established with the aid of this quaintly alien nomenclature is typical of Crace’s writing. He considers this to be a bid to appeal to archaic, pre-scriptural modes of transmitting and receiving narrative: […] my inheritance is not so much what you call my “experience of the written word.” It’s more the thousands of years of unwritten narrative, the oral tradition. That’s why my style is so declamatory, at times, and that’s why the prose is so rhythmic. Some critics have wrongly accused me of using iambic pentameters. Well, they’re not iambic pentameters exactly, but the language I use is very ­musical and percussive. I don’t have to work at it. I have an instinctive ­musical note to my prose and I strike it. Madly. (qtd. in Begley) In addition to creating this particular ‘beat’, Crace’s extraordinary literary language might be said to invite subvocalization. While some character and place names are straightforward in their simplicity, readers may be startled by his linguistically more complex terminology, not only because some of the words are likely to be difficult to pronounce

Bio-Cognitive Constraints  41 (“mullein”), but also because despite their unfamiliarity they sound like contemporary English (“tarbony”, “nutsam”, “Pitchblende”). It is likely that these recurring linguistic features and their supra-semantic effects lead readers to detect a quality of coherence in the collection – in fact it might be the most important strategy to achieve such an impression in a book of stories whose individual protagonists are odd, unconnected monads unaware of each other, the structural similarity of their attitudes and experiences potentially perceived by a reader notwithstanding. What is more (although this is not necessarily immediately apparent), this lexicon is entirely a figment of the author’s imagination, as is the seventh continent on which it is used. So is the Epigraph that appears to direct the book thematically: there is no Pycletius (although we can find a bogus entry on him in the Oxford Companion to English Literature, written by Crace himself). Continent, like all other books by Crace, is absolute fiction (though not fantasy), drawing attention to literature’s powerful world-making potential. While this self-referential gesture does not disavow the collection’s internal cohesion in principle, it nevertheless introduces a tone of scepticism, hinting at the willingness on the part of the readers to recognize coherence when there is actually none (or at least at the author’s expectation that such a willingness exists and can be exploited). For despite what the book jacket and the jury of the Whitbread First Novel Award say, the stories in Continent might well be unconnected tales after all, joined only by the reader’s instinctive readiness to take the author’s markers of cohesion as indications of a higher link between them. I for one am not entirely sure that ‘novel’ is the appropriate term for a collection of tales whose overt fictionality sheds light on the work of the reader as much as it draws attention to the craft of the author.

IV. All this might seem to suggest that I concur with scholars for whom “textual unity [in short story sequences], like beauty, lies mainly in the eye of the beholding reader” (Kennedy, “Introduction” ix). However, if on the whole I agree with this claim, I do so on the basis of very specific assumptions about the cognitive abilities (and their scope) this beholding reader is equipped with. The manifest content and quality of the ­coherence-creating processes triggered by short story sequences might indeed be subjective, but the cognitive abilities that make these processes possible are likely to be neither idiosyncratic nor random. I would think that the great majority of readers respond to signals of cohesion in short story sequences by establishing inductive links between them, or at least trying to do so, whatever the precise character of these links ultimately may be. This hypothesis, however, would have to be tested experimentally. The very existence of short story sequences (as well as

42  Anja Müller-Wood related narrative forms based on the principles of incompleteness and fragmentation) certainly is evidence that authors expect readers to possess this potential. For it to be activated reliably in ever new and different contexts, however, it must be underpinned by very specific constraining (that is, enabling) cognitive capacities. The induction instinct proposed by Eibl might be one of those capacities. Yet if induction is indeed as fundamental to and enabling in the process of reading short story sequences as I assume it to be, then it does not suffice to think of it in terms of pattern ‘recognition’. Precisely because induction is creative and productive – and thus allows readers to establish coherence even in the absence of actual cohesion – it lends itself to being exploited in subtle and ever new ways in fiction. Crace’s Continent is only one variation on a narrative format that is open to modification: an imaginative flexibility on the part of the author grounded firmly in the dependable minds of his readers.

Notes 1 I have adopted the helpful distinction between coherence and cohesion, which I will apply throughout this article, from Hoey. 2 Not least because fiction, especially in written forms, is far too recent a cultural phenomenon to be grounded in a specific adaptive ability. 3 This problem connects older, text linguistic attempts at explaining the processing of texts in terms of ‘text grammars’ or ‘schemas’ with their more recent cognitive variations (e.g. cognitive narratology in its various guises, such as Ryan, Werth, and Emmott). De Beaugrande and Colby’s criticism that text linguistics has been too abstract (too “schematic”) and insufficiently attentive to the affective dimensions of human cognition (de Beaugrande and Colby 44) applies to these newer approaches, too (cf. Miall). 4 In that, Luscher resembles his ostensible academic opponents. D’hoker and Van den Bossche juxtapose him with the Canadian scholar René Audet, whose more recent work on the recueil they see as an innovative alternative to more formal approaches to short story sequences, which they associate with an Anglo-American context. Citing Audet’s claim that the unity that can be detected in some short story collections “is not so much an essence or an intrinsic characteristic of collections, as a perceptible effect in the process of reading books” (Des textes à l’oeuvre: La lecture du recueil de nouvelles (2000), qtd. in D’hoker and Van den Bossche 12), they argue that this is evidence of an even greater openness than that suggested by Luscher’s ‘open book’ metaphor. By contrast, they find in Audet’s research evidence of the argument that “reader[s] […] construe [their] own textual network and, hence, interpretation of the collection” (12). Both the somewhat rigid opposition established here and the view of Anglo-American short story scholarship on which it is based strike me as simplistic. What is more, the subjectivism here praised not only recalls already existing research (e.g. Fish), it also is likely to remain similarly diffuse as long as readers’ actual cognitive abilities are not taken into account. 5 Joyce’s Dubliners, too, contains three stories that had been written and published individually before the rest of the collection. This practice seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

Bio-Cognitive Constraints  43 6 The use of this label for a book of short stories whose coherence might be doubtful in the eyes of at least some readers can be explained as a response to the difficulty of marketing short story collections (cf. Tuch). See also Corinna Norrick-Rühl’s chapter in the present collection. 7 In fact, the stories in the book, which hinge on the clash between enlightenment and superstition, resemble the premise of Musil’s “Grigia”, the novella used by Eibl to illustrate symbolic parataxis. In it, a presumably progressive engineer finds himself confronted with (and enticed by) the archaic life and mentality of a remote village in the Italian Alps.

Works Cited Begley, Adam. “Jim Crace, The Art of Fiction No. 179”. The Paris Review, vol. 167, Fall 2003, www.theparisreview.org/interviews/122/jim-crace-the-art-offiction-no-179-jim-crace. Accessed 22 March 2017. Bird, Helen, David Howard, and Sue Franklin. “Verbs and Nouns: The Importance of Being Imageable”. Journal of Neurolinguistics, vol. 16, 2003, pp. 113–149. Cosmides, Leda, and John Tooby. “Consider the Source: The Evolution of Adaptations for Decoupling and Metarepresentation”. Metarepresentation, edited by Dan Sperber. Oxford UP, 2000, pp. 53–115. Crace, Jim. Continent. 1986. Picador, 2008. De Beaugrande, Robert, and Benjamin N. Colby. “Narrative Models of Action and Interaction”. Cognitive Science, vol. 3, 1979, pp. 43–66. D’hoker, Elke, and Bart Van den Bossche. “Cycles, Recueils, Macrotexts: The Short Story Collection in a Comparative Perspective”. Cycles, Recueils, Macrotexts, special issue of Interférences Litteraires – Literaire Interferenties, vol. 12, 2014, pp. 7–17. Dove, Guy. “Beyond Perceptual Symbols: A Call for Representational Pluralism”. Cognition, vol. 110, 2009, pp. 412–431. Eibl, Karl. “The Induction Instinct: The Evolution and Poetic Application of a Cognitive Tool”. Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 42, no. 2, 2009, pp. 43–60. Emmott, Catherine. Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective. Oxford UP, 1997. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard UP, 1980. Gentner, Dedre, and Russell Landers. “Analogical Reminding: A Good Match is Hard to Find”. Proceedings of the International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Tucson, AZ: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1985, pp. 1–15. Graesser, Arthur C., Murray Singer, and Tom Trabasso. “Constructing Inferences during Narrative Text Comprehension”. Psychological Review, vol. 101, no. 3, 1994, pp. 371–395. Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Penguin, 2012. Hoey, Michael. Patterns of Lexis in Text. Oxford UP, 1991. Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Introduction”. Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, edited by Gerald J. Kennedy. Cambridge UP, 1995, pp. vii–xv.

44  Anja Müller-Wood ———. “From Anderson’s Winesburg to Carver’s Cathedral: The Short Story Sequence and the Semblance of Community”. Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, edited by Gerald J. Kennedy. Cambridge UP, 1995, pp. 194–215. Kintsch, Walter. “Text Comprehension, Memory, and Learning”. American Psychologist, vol. 49, no.4, 1994, pp. 294–303. Luscher, Robert M. “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book”. Short Story Theory at the Crossroads, edited by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Louisiana State UP, 1989, pp. 148–167. Mellmann, Katja. “Das innere Ohr: Zum Phänomen der Subvokalisierung in stiller Lektüre”. Dichtung für die Ohren, edited by Britta Herrmann. Vorwerk 8 (Klang – Kunst – Kultur 1), 2014a, pp. 35–48. ———. “Gibt es einen epischen Modus? Käte Hamburgers Logik der Dichtung evolutionspsychologisch gelesen”. Universalien? Über die Natur der Literatur, edited by Endre Hárs, Mártha Horváth, and Erzsébeth Szabó. WVT, 2014b, pp. 109–130. Miall, David S. “Cognitive Poetics: From Interpreting to Experiencing What is Literary”. Anglistentag 2007 Münster: Proceedings, edited by Klaus Stierstorfer. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008, pp. 187–198. Müller-Wood, Anja. “Kognitive Verfahren als Reflexionsmittel in der Literaturwissenschaft”. Schlüsselkonzepte und Anwendungen der kognitiven Literaturwissenschaft, edited by Roman Mikuláš, and Sophia Wege. Mentis, 2016, pp. 13–27. Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. Penguin, 2007. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington, 1991. Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. Longman, 1983. Sternberg, Meir. “Epilogue: How (Not) to Advance Toward the Narrative Mind”. Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps, edited by Geert Brône, and Jeroen Vandaele, Mouton de Gruyter, 2009, pp. 455–532. Toolan, Michael. Making Sense of Narrative Text: Situation, Repetition and Picturing in the Reading of Short Stories. Routledge, 2016. Tuch, Becky. “Nice Short Story Collection. But Do You have a Novel?” The Review Review, www.thereviewreview.net/publishing-tips/nice-short-storycollection-do-you-have-nove. Accessed 7 March 2017. Updike, John. Olinger Stories: A Selection. Vintage, 1964. Voss, Joel, Kara D. Federmeier, and Ken A. Paller. “The Potato Chip Really Does Look Like Elvis! Neural Hallmarks of Conceptual Processing Associated With Finding Novel Shapes Subjectively Meaningful”. Cerebral Cortex, vol. 2, no.22, 2012, pp. 2354–2364. Werth, Paul. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Longman, 1999.

4 Short Story Collections and Cycles in the British Literary Marketplace Corinna Norrick-Rühl

Short stories have been called everything from the “novel’s poor relation” (Power) to “something people do before they write a novel” (Alice Munro, qtd. in Allardice) or even a “dying form” (Cooke). Comparing the novel and the short story in 2015, Graham Swift observed: What there has been in recent times is a somewhat wilful separation of the two forms, resulting in the sense of a contest. Because one is “big” and the other “small” the short story has almost inevitably come off worse. This has led to the notion that, as publishing propositions, stories aren’t as viable as novels – a prejudice so ingrained that it’s become self-fulfilling. (Swift) Swift is certainly not the first author to make this observation. A number of authors, journalists, and publishers seem to agree: “It’s ­often said short stories don’t sell, or that the form only thrives in the independent sector, or in America, or online” (Power). In 2012, Aaron Zacks argued that this is not a recent development. By the end of the nineteenth century, he states, “the short story collection constituted a disparaged by-product of the literary marketplace. Because books of short stories usually failed to make money and were considered generically inferior to novels, publishers were reluctant to expend resources publishing and marketing them” (Zacks 166). ­B aldwin has documented this publishers’ prejudice for the mid-­t wentieth century as well: if there is a single refrain in the correspondence between authors and agents, agents and publishers, and publishers and authors, it is this: ‘Short story collections don’t sell.’ When and where this maxim began is impossible to say, but […] it [is] regarded by everyone connected with publishing to be an irrefutable truth – perhaps the only one in this otherwise unpredictable business. (Baldwin 34)

46  Corinna Norrick-Rühl This is perhaps a surprising consensus, though, considering the fact that literary forms are not easily labelled and categorized. In Entertainment Weekly, Jason Heller wrote in 2014: On one hand, you have novels. On the other, you have short stories. But is the split that clear-cut? If the world of books has taught us anything lately, it’s that widely held boundaries – between self-publishing and the establishment, cliché and rejuvenation, even one genre and the next – have become blurred. (Heller) The blurring of the boundaries between short stories and novels, and our understanding of what short story cycles are in comparison to short story collections, is an ongoing debate. It is a matter, as Elke D’hoker writes, that “has not yet been settled”, and she suggests that “[p]erhaps we need to look to more circumstantial, material elements for a pragmatic answer to that question” (D’hoker). This chapter ­follows ­D’hoker’s lead and considers the short story cycle from a different, more circumstantial, pragmatic, and material-based angle. We will address long-standing prejudices in the market and their perpetuation. What role do short stories play in the British literary marketplace  – ­especially as published in collections and cycles? How do publishers treat short story cycles and collections – and composite novels? Do they subscribe to these definitions and categories debated by literary scholars? Which actors in the marketplace are champions of the short form, and where does it find its limits? A caveat is in order: The actors in the marketplace, those involved in the production, distribution, and reception of books – that is to say authors, publishers, agents, industry journalists, literary critics, ­readers – do not use the term ‘short story cycle’, at least not consistently. In the UK book industry, it seems the term ‘short story collection’ and any derivative or variation thereof are used widely and rather indiscriminately to mean anything from a rather random collection of stories by a single author to a volume of coherently linked stories, deliberately composed as such. The trade journal Bookseller, for instance, does not differentiate between a “short story collection” and a “collection of linked short stories” (Williams, “Faber”). This, of course, is replicated in the academic debates: literary scholars have not agreed on a uniform terminology either. Nevertheless, the indifference of industry actors vis-à-vis literary terminology and category debates is best described by the reaction of a British bookseller asked to comment on short story cycles and their marketability. This independent bookseller from Nottingham responded: “I think you might have problems getting sensible responses… I am an experienced bookseller but I don’t know the difference between a short story collection

Short Story Collections and Cycles  47 and a short story cycle, never having heard the latter phrase!” Hence, this chapter will make observations about short story collections and short story cycles. In order to situate short story collections meaningfully within the literary marketplace of the twenty-first century, this chapter will first briefly discuss recent findings on and statistics relating to the British literary marketplace. From the perspective of book and publishing studies, it will then analyze the marketability and economics of short story collections more generally. Book market statistics from, e.g., the Publishers Association, data from Nielsen BookScan, for instance, as well as examples of paratexts1 will be used to approach the question of marketing and selling short story cycles and collections. Publishers’ comments as well as results from conversations with booksellers will be integrated into the analysis as anecdotal evidence. It seems that when it comes to the economics of short stories, there is only one truth: hardly any reliable information is readily available. Dean Baldwin wrote in 1993 that scholarship has “swirled around the economic and commercial aspects of the British short story without ever addressing the subject directly or in any detail” (27). This still holds true today, for the most part. Birgit Moosmüller’s chapter on short story publication opportunities in her monograph, Die experimentelle englische Kurzgeschichte der Gegenwart, is an exception (108–115). But neither the premier journal for international publishing research, Springer’s Publishing Research Quarterly, in print since the mid-1980s, nor the newer journal LOGOS: Journal of the International Publishing Community (Brill; published since 1990) has ever featured an article about publishing and publication strategies for short stories, whether individually, in collections, or as short story cycles. The same is true of the journal of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), Book History, in its almost twenty years of publication. Conversely, when reading up on the history of the short story in Britain, it is striking that it has always also been a history of selling short stories. Much more so than with other genres, it seems, the limited research on the short story points to the fact that literary tastes and trends – and the market – define genre. Baldwin ascribes the relatively late development of the form to “literary economics”, stating that writing and publishing short fiction was not financially attractive, bringing neither “financial gain [n]or public fame” to British ­authors until the late nineteenth century, whereas it had been ­lucrative, for instance, in the US many decades earlier (24). In the 1880s, then, Baldwin concludes, “[e]conomic and aesthetic forces were […] fully aligned, and the British short story could proceed apace” (32). Another example is the strong connection made by scholars between the proliferation of creative writing courses in the Anglophone world and

48  Corinna Norrick-Rühl the genre’s popularity today (cf., for instance, Luscher 369) – a clear case of traditional economic principles of supply and demand influencing the marketplace.

I.  The Twenty-First-Century British Literary Marketplace While Claire Squires’s Marketing Literature (2009) focused on the British literary marketplace and other excellent recent studies include analyses of the British book industry (Striphas; J. Thompson), we are hard-pressed to find reliable information about the role of short story collections and cycles in the Anglophone book industries. Where once there was a publishing house relentlessly searching for quality or a bookshop with an owner passionate to promote a good read, now stretches [sic] the desert-like corporate spaces of major multinational conglomerates whose understanding and appreciation of books and reading is close to nil. (Hemmungs Wirtén 403) This dire outlook is, as Eva Hemmungs Wirtén herself admits, an “oversimplified account of the current state of affairs” (403), but it is true that the Anglophone publishing environment has changed dramatically and permanently over the past decades (see, for instance, Clark and Phillips 12–32). Claire Squires and Padmini Ray Murray’s models of the twenty-first century (self-publishing and digital) publishing communications circuit show how complex and multifaceted the paths have become that mediate book products from authors to readers. The literary agent has become a powerful player and intermediary between publishers and authors. “With the growth of global conglomerates, marketing-led publishing, and the profit incentive, readers have increasingly been configured as ‘consumers’” (Ray Murray and Squires). E-reading and the digitization of the book have led to shifts in availability and reading preferences. Increasingly, authors choose to forego traditional publishing models and self-publish their work on internet platforms like Amazon or Wattpad. “The e-book publishing business is still evolving, […] but it is safe to say that electronic books have become a part of the mainstream reading experience” (Bath and Schofield 185). Consumer publishing, also known as trade publishing, is simultaneously the “most visible part of the industry” and at the “high-risk end of the business: book failures are frequent but the rewards from ‘bestsellers’ […] can be great” (Clark and Phillips 50). In general, looking at the UK publishing industry, numbers show that it is “in good health, sustained by annual phenomena that grab consumers’ attention”

Short Story Collections and Cycles  49 (Prior 1). UK publishers netted £563 million in 2015 and £525 million in 2016 for sales of physical (i.e., printed) and digital fiction titles, selling this volume at home and abroad. Fiction – not including children’s books – is still the most powerful market force after academic/professional (£1,049 million in 2015; £1,142 million in 2016) and non-fiction/ reference (£759 million in 2015; £884 million in 2016). From 2011 to 2016, fiction has held an approximate revenue share of 15–20 per cent of all physical and digital book sales (domestic and foreign; PA statistics yearbook 2016, 4). Regrettably, the further breakdown available for fiction titles divides the fiction segment into genres such as ‘thriller’, ‘crime’, ‘fantasy’, ‘classic’, and the vague category ‘general’ – where novels without a clear genre (and those with an easily identifiable genre, which is nevertheless not accounted for in the statistics, such as historical novels) as well as short story collections and cycles would be easily slotted into. Furthermore, depending on the author and content, some short story collections and cycles may be assigned to other subgenres. Hence, it is not possible to determine how many novels as opposed to collections, etc. were published and what their market share was. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the three most successful UK fiction titles in 2015 were novels: the hardback editions of the thriller The Girl on the Train (by Paula Hawkins; Sunday Times number one bestseller for twenty-six weeks; over 546,000 copies sold), Go Set a Watchman (by Harper Lee; over 360,000 copies sold), and the paperback edition of the spin-off Grey – a retelling of Shades of Grey from the protagonist Christian Grey’s perspective (by E. L. James; well over one million copies sold) (cf. Elton 29). 2015 numbers showed that the acceptance of digital reading for ­fiction titles was quite high for readers of UK-published titles. In 2015, 42 per cent ­ K-­published fiction of digital home book sales (net invoiced value) were U titles (2016: 37 per cent), coming in first ahead of academic/professional (41 per cent; 2016: 47 per cent – coming in first ahead of fiction) and non-fiction/reference (9 per cent; 2016: 9 per cent) (PA statistics ­yearbook 2015, 20; PA statistics yearbook 2016, 20). These numbers also raise questions about opportunities for short story collections and cycles in digital formats. Considering the fact that “[i]n recent decades the traditional outlets for individual short stories have dwindled, with literary magazines closing or shrinking” (Kaufman), some industry experts have argued that short stories have much to gain from the shift to digital reading. The American author Amber Dermont stated in The New York Times that “[t]he single-serving quality of a short narrative is the perfect art form for the digital age […]. Stories are models of concision, can be read in one sitting, and are infinitely downloadable and easily consumed on screens” (qtd. in Kaufman). However, the New York Times piece was followed by a scathing response in the online magazine Salon, describing Leslie Kaufman’s analysis as

50  Corinna Norrick-Rühl “bogus”, explaining that Kaufman’s line of argumentation is mere wishful thinking: The idea that today’s time-strapped and mentally scattered readers will find short stories more congenial is far from new […]. Yet there is little to suggest that it is any truer now than […] in 1995. In fact, a survey of Amazon, New York Times and USA Today best-seller lists suggests that most readers crave ever longer and more complex fictional narratives. (Miller) Considering all of this insecurity and speculation, it would be h ­ eartening to have ‘hard facts’ to revert to: sales figures, print run numbers, financial reports, etc. While these certainly exist – fiction publishing is, as we have seen, a multi-million-pound business for UK publishers – they are, unfortunately, almost impossible to access for scholars. Sales fi ­ gures – that is, so to speak, an author’s ‘track record’ – used to warrant protection like the Holy Grail, but the “rules of the game” have changed (J. Thompson 199). Today, the for-profit industry database Nielsen BookScan has made this data available and “transparent to everyone who has access to BookScan, which in practice means individuals who work for organizations that subscribe to the service” (199). Nielsen collects and collates point of sales data from important book retail outlets. For the UK book industry, Nielsen began collecting sales data in 1998. Since then, actors in the industry have started to rely on this data. In the meantime, “[s]ome people are worried that publishers might be taking BookScan as gospel and using it to make acquisition and hiring decisions” (Charman-Anderson). While this data has certainly been a game-changer for the relationship between authors, literary agents, and publishers, it is important to remember that these numbers are not necessarily complete. Nielsen does not collect from every sales outlet. In particular, online sales outlets and sales outlets outside of the regular book trade (supermarket sales, toy store sales, etc.) are more difficult to track. Nonetheless, the data gleaned from the database can be useful for explorative analysis. For the present purpose, we can compare numbers from Nielsen to get an impression of sales of novels versus collections/ cycles of short stories. The numbers used here (see below and Table 4.2 in Appendix) from Nielsen are from a spreadsheet made available by The Guardian, detailing the sales of Man Booker Prize longlisted and shortlisted titles in 2011 (“Man Booker Prize 2011”) and 2012 (“Booker Prize 2012”) as well as the winners’. The Man Booker eligibility criteria demand a “novel” in name and “a unified and substantial work” (“The 2017 Man Booker”), so it is no surprise that short story cycles (even those masquerading as novels) are grossly

Short Story Collections and Cycles  51 under-represented among the longlisted titles. For the year 2011, not one of the ‘Man Booker Dozen’ – thirteen titles in 2011 – is even debatably a short story cycle. Arguably, in 2012, one of the twelve longlisted books falls into this category. While Ned Beauman’s novel is a “genre-bender”, ­ hompson’s it still falls into the novel bracket (Dunthorne). But with Sam T Communion Town, we have what might sensibly be ­described as a short story cycle. Despite the fact that The Guardian’s analysis of the book features the word “novel” in its subtitle, the more fitting terms ­“narrative” and “stories” surface in the review (Purdon). The New York Times refuses to define it as a novel, preferring to describe the content as ­“separate stories”: the book’s narrative is a shape-shifter. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different resident of the city, and these shifts are often accompanied by changes in both genre and style – we find ourselves stepping from an elegiac romance to a Gothic horror story to a noirish mystery plotted with Escher-like intricacy. (DuBois) The publisher, Fourth Estate, chose to market the book without mentioning the word novel on the front or back cover. The subtitle is A City in Ten Chapters, and the blurb clearly states that “this is a story of a city”; and “[e]very city is made of stories: stories that meet and diverge” (S. Thompson, back cover). Thompson’s book is a debut, as are the books by Rachel Joyce, Alison Moore, and Jeet Thayil. For the 2012 Man Booker Prize longlist (Table 4.1), The Guardian divulged the sales information week by week over four months, that is, before the longlist announcements (July), during the shortlist announcement (September), and up until the winner announcement (October). So how do Thompson’s sales compare to his contemporaries and fellow longlisted authors? Before the longlist announcement, Thompson’s weekly sales from July 14 to 21, 2012 amounted to a meagre twenty-one copies (£ 232.49). While this is obviously very low compared to previous Man Booker winner Hilary Mantel’s 2,689 copies (£ 35,114.89) in the same week, it is more than Tan Twan Eng (11 copies, £ 108.09) and Thayil (13 copies, £ 119.99). 2 Anecdotally speaking, there is no evidence here to prove that a short story cycle debut will necessarily sell worse than a debut novel – at least not at first. However, interestingly, if we look at the overall numbers from July to October, Thompson’s book, which was not shortlisted, fared worse than the other books that were not shortlisted. In fact, of all the Man Booker Dozen, Thompson’s book sold the least copies from July to October (776, or £ 9,673.88, from the week ending on July 21 to the week ending on October 13). During a similar timeframe, the other longlisted books without a shortlist mention sold anywhere from 1,004 copies (£ 12,282.59; Brink’s Philida)3

52  Corinna Norrick-Rühl Table 4.1  Man Booker Dozen 2012 Author

Title

UK publisher (ownership status in 2012)

Hilary Mantel Sam Thompson Tan Twan Eng

Fourth Estate (independent) Fourth Estate (independent) Myrmidon (independent)

Alison Moore Jeet Thayil André Brink

Bring Up the Bodies Communion Town The Garden of Evening Mists The Lighthouse Narcopolis Philida

Michael Frayn Deborah Levy

Skios Swimming Home

Ned Beauman

The Teleportation Accident Umbrella

Will Self Rachel Joyce

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Nicola Barker

The Yips

Salt (independent) Faber (independent) Harvill Secker (Penguin/ Pearson PLC) Faber (independent) And Other Stories (independent) Sceptre (Hodder & Stoughton/Hachette) Bloomsbury PLC (independent) Windsor/Parragon (DC Thomson publishing and television company) Fourth Estate (independent)

Shortlisted authors are shown in bold.

to  10,733 copies (£ 106,585.73; Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of ­ arold Fry). As a debut that was not shortlisted, Thompson’s sales stand H in stark contrast to Joyce’s also non-shortlisted debut. Obviously, there are a number of other factors at play here (for instance, one publisher is independent, and the other is conglomerate-owned). As anecdotal evidence, the numbers are interesting nonetheless. The Guardian data also give insight into sales for prizewinning ­novels  – and their popularity. The fact that some Booker Prize winners and other bestselling authors also write and publish short fiction is sometimes misconstrued as a sign that the short story is experiencing a resurgence. However, there’s nothing particularly remarkable or new about best-selling novelists writing stories or wanting to publish collections. In fact, best-selling novelists are frequently the only writers who are able get collections published because publishers can hope to capture some of the readership won by the authors’ novels. (Miller) Publishers may also be convinced to publish a collection by a popular author if they want to make sure the author’s next novel will appear in their programme as well.

Short Story Collections and Cycles  53

II.  The Economics of Short Story Collections Sales numbers can quickly make one’s head spin, but usually do not translate into big earnings for authors. As author Lucinda Hawksley noted, In a world where publishing is huge business, readers should be made aware of the financially struggling elephant in the room: publishers need to change their attitudes to authors and to recognise that the writer of the book is at the heart of book production. (qtd. in Lea) In the UK, “average annual incomes for writers languish […] at £12,500” (Lea). Short stories can be a small lifeline for writers working on longer projects. A published story equals money in the bank ­immediately – at a standard rate, paid for by word, character, or page count. For newcomers, a published story is also a business card and proof of quality and literary standing. And book publication is usually only possible after publication of individual stories, whereas “commercial magazines […] want to publish stories only prior to book publication” (Curtis 122). Part of the dilemma and challenge for authors is the fact that in the past decades, “the [primary] publishing outlets – journals and magazines – for short fiction disappeared” (Malcolm 13). “Individual stories have nowhere to go”, laments Rachel Cooke. In fact, many British short story authors rely on American periodicals such as The New Yorker to build a literary reputation. The lack of adequate publishing opportunities for short stories means that authors sometimes make very pragmatic decisions. They tell a story with the right number of words for a particular publishing outlet instead of writing the story in a way that would make it aesthetically complete. A. L. ­Kennedy admits that a “huge number of Radio 4 stories, where people are placing short stories because there is nowhere else to place them, aren’t perfect for eleven hundred words and have just been made to be eleven hundred words” (2). While Kennedy views this as an aesthetic problem, she also recognizes the short form’s bonuses: “You can stick a whole one in the Guardian. You can put one on the radio. They lend themselves to being placed out in the magazines, in a way that extracts from novels don’t” (8). Selling individual short stories is just the first step towards publishing a collection. Once an author has a few stories on hand, some previously published and others new, a collection can be formed, “arranged from existing stories, completed by the addition of new ones, or composed as a continuous whole” (Luscher 360). Having a collection (or cycle) ready for publication and actually finding a publisher are two entirely different

54  Corinna Norrick-Rühl steps in the process. As elucidated above, “[c]onventional wisdom still says that publishers prefer novels” (Lohafer 78), and “British publishers’ distaste for short fiction is well documented” (Malcolm 13). Often, publishers will only buy the short stories together with a debut novel. Countless writers’ blogs and handbooks counsel authors to “[r]ewrite [their short stories] as a novel” or at least “[g]roup your stories together with a particular angle in mind” to increase chances of publication in book form (Crum; cf. also Tuch). Graham Swift experienced this too: his short story cycle Learning to Swim was “not published till I had already published two novels”, and he adds: “I think this pattern was typical” (Moosmüller 113). According to Alexander Linklater, publishers view short ­stories “as ­ alcolm  13). culturally redundant and economically unviable” (qtd. in M Publishers are not willing to pay an advance, or at least not a sizeable one, for a collection of short stories. In fact, according to a 2004 report, “[a]dvances for short story collections from mainstream or independent publishers are significantly lower than for a novel. Sales are likely to be one-third or one-quarter of the sales expected for a novel by the same writer” (Brown et al. 19). For an author, this means little to no money in the bank upon publication, as opposed to the individually published short story, where the author is paid in full on publication.

III.  Lost in Paratext: Marketing Short Story Collections and Cycles In his thought-provoking “print culture reading” of the short story, Michael J. Collins argues that short stories are “especially conditioned by […] paratexts […;] the form is peculiarly sensitive to social change and can be used as a barometer of […] reading practices”. Indeed, by mining the books (as objects and commodities) as sources and analyzing their paratexts, we can further our understanding of marketing strategies and the attitude of the British book industry towards short story collections and cycles. This approach employs Gérard Genette’s terminology, as formulated in his book Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (originally published in French in 1987, translated into English in 1997). Genette’s ‘publishers’ peritexts’, that is, the paratexts produced and influenced by the publishers, are of greatest interest to us here. Genette explains how book covers and genre indications are created, emphasizing that every word on the cover is well planned. It is also ­important to clarify that authors do not have the final word on their titles and genre indications: “The title’s (legal) sender, of course, is not necessarily its actual producer” (73). Publishers will supply or amend the title to make it more appealing, to avoid confusion with other works in

Short Story Collections and Cycles  55 print, or for other strategic reasons. Genre indications on the cover of a book and on the title page “announce the genre status decided on for the work that follows the title. This status is official in the sense that it is the one the author and publisher want to attribute to the text” (94; emphases mine). In other works, publishers may tweak or choose to withhold genre information for marketing purposes. In his observations, Genette reaffirms the industry’s self-fulfilling prophecy: “Collections of novellas […] are apt to conceal their nature with an absence of genre indication or with the putatively more appealing, or less repellent, indication ‘­stories’ – indeed, with the more or less misleading singular ‘a story’” (97). There are often “quite a few inconsistencies – calculated or not – in the publishers’ recording of the genre indication”, as Genette maintains, as well as “discrepancies between cover and title page or between dust jacket and cover” (97). This was the case, as we have seen, with the word ‘stories’ in Thompson’s longlisted book Communion Town. The front cover omits the word ‘stories’ – but it is used on the back cover. The back cover, known as cover 4, is “another strategically important spot”: here, readers will often find, especially in the Anglophone context, “[p]ress quotations or other laudatory comments about earlier works by the same author or, indeed, about this work itself, if it is a new edition or if the publisher has been able to obtain such comments before ­publication” – this is what Anglophone book industries “customarily refer to by the evocative term blurb” (25). Blurbs are not limited to the back cover, however; they also appear on cover 1 or in the front or back of the book, even before the title pages or on extra pages following the book’s ending. Author branding plays an important role in cover design (cf. Clark and Phillips 175–178). Looking at the paratexts of Salman Rushdie’s works, for instance, as a Man Booker-winning novelist who has also published a short story cycle, the entire design is striking. In 2015, London-based illustrator Sroop Sunar was commissioned to redesign Rushdie’s entire paperback backlist for Vintage (Penguin Random House) as well as his new title in hardback, which was published by Jonathan Cape (Penguin Random House). This gives all of the titles a recognizable look, which according to Sunar recalls “mid-century Indian matchbox label designs” (Sinclair). More importantly for our context, East, West now appears identical to Rushdie’s novels. At a glance, the cover of East, West does not indicate that the book contains a short story cycle instead of a novel. Conversely even, the blurb states that Rushdie is “A glittering novelist” – a press quote from The New Yorker, which is almost certain to convince readers that the book they are holding in their hands is a novel as well. Luscher has also ­observed this trend in the American market: “[T]he canon of short story ­sequences has increased considerably, with more works masquerading as novels (or declaring no generic status) for marketing purposes”

56  Corinna Norrick-Rühl (369). Certainly, publishers’ “coy language”, favouring terms such as “interlinked narratives” and “inter-related fictions”, is ­another signal of “the reluctance of publishers to tell readers the truth and present them with a genre that, they contend, is losing its appeal: the short story collection” (Lister 13). In fact, just like the Nottingham bookseller we encountered earlier, consumers may not be as worried about the categories literary scholars ascribe to their reading material, as John Beevers emphasizes. According to Beevers, the short story cycle “is a rich and varied genre […] that is frequently unrecognized because of the way it is marketed”. Short story cycles, he explains, are often “marketed as novels” – and, more importantly, “presumably read as novels by a satisfied readership” (Beevers 25). As a reader, Heller agrees: “The funny thing is, you don’t need to slap a label on […] any short-story cycle, to enjoy it” (Heller). The factual mention of “receipt of a literary prize” (Genette 7) can also give rise to certain expectations. For Cross Channel by Julian Barnes (another Man Booker winner who has also written a short story cycle), there are several different covers, some of which include no ­paratextual markers of genre, while others do. For instance, the ­Vintage (Random House) edition of 2009 states that Barnes is “­Winner of the Man Booker Prize” – which implies that Barnes is a novelist, since the Man Booker criteria clearly state that it is awarded for novels and not other forms of fiction. Nevertheless, the blurb on cover 1 reveals that the book contains “A glittering collection of stories”. For a third example of a Man Booker-winning novelist publishing a short story cycle, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, all of the covers I have been able to examine clearly state that the book contains Five Stories of Music and Nightfall; the ‘revealing’ subtitle is also listed in the British Library catalogue.

IV. Independent Presses as Champions of Short Fiction A.  L. Kennedy has worked with mainstream, corporate-owned publishers like Jonathan Cape, which is a Penguin Random House imprint; her paperbacks appear with Vintage, another Penguin Random House imprint. Kennedy commends her editors there, explaining that they “made a decision to put an equal amount of publicity and marketing into my short stories as well as the novels, and consistently my sales have been the same” (8). She contends that “[t]he myth of ‘they don’t sell’” is exactly that – a myth. For her, marketing is the only way to sell books – whether novels or short story collections: “They don’t sell because you don’t tell anybody they’re there. I can’t buy something if I don’t know it exists. I can’t even look for something if I don’t know

Short Story Collections and Cycles  57 it’s there”.4 Generally speaking, however, when considering the marketability of a certain form, corporate-owned publishers have different constraints than independent publishers: “[I]ndependents are not subject to the kind of external pressure for growth that governs the corporate publishing houses” (J. Thompson 236). Short story authors have confirmed that their experiences with independents are quite different than in the corporate publishing world. Writer Tania Hershman has said that “[m]ost short story collections these days are published by the wonderful small presses, and they don’t buy into the myth that if you pretend a short story collection is a novel, people will buy it” (Hershman, qtd. in Love). A 2004 report on the short story in the UK, commissioned by the British Arts Council, stated that while “the number of collections published by mainstream publishers has fallen significantly, […] the number of collections published by the independents (including self-publishing) has increased. […] Over half of all short story titles published were by independents” (Brown et al. iii–iv). For instance, Comma Press is an indie publisher in the UK known for their experimental short fiction: “Comma’s Mission is to put the short story at the heart of contemporary narrative culture” (“Comma Press: About”). Founded in 2002, Comma Press is based in Manchester as a not-for-profit publishing initiative that has belonged to the Arts Council’s National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) since April 2012. The Comma Press blog reads: Something happens in good short stories that’s quite unique to them as a form; the imaginary worlds they create are coloured slightly differently to those of the novel. Their protagonists are more ­independent and intriguing. The realities they depict [are] more arbitrary, accidental and amoral. Comma believes British publishing is missing out on something in its neglect of the short story, and to make up for it we are currently the most prolific hard copy publisher of short stories in the country. (“Comma Press: About”) Comma publishes city-themed short story anthologies (Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool, Istanbul, Tokyo, etc.), but also short fiction in translation, which is another non-mainstream decision, since fiction in translation in the UK is not considered economically viable either (cf. Norrick-Rühl and Ramdarshan Bold 127–128). Comma conducts creative writing courses and is a hub for writers, especially of short fiction, since it also offers resources and tips for short story writers on its website. In a 2014 survey, 75 per cent of Comma book purchasers and 78 per cent of Comma newsletter recipients said they considered

58  Corinna Norrick-Rühl themselves writers (“The Comma Survey” 8). Since 2010, Comma has annually published the shortlisted stories of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) National Short Story Award as an anthology. This has proven a smart move, since a significant number of readers/buyers (17 per cent) come to Comma through coverage of the BBC National Short Story Award (8). Comma’s engagement with and championing for the short form has attracted the attention of ­authors and readers, but also of the press. For instance, The ­G uardian called Comma Press a “small but powerful champion of the short story” (Taylor). Other presses mentioned in connection with short stories are Salt Publishing, which in the past has run the Scott Prize story collection competition (but apparently discontinued it), Influx Press, Honest Publishing, Parthian Books, or Tindal Street Press, which is no longer active. 5 If mainstream publishers try to avoid short story collections and indie publishers renowned for their involvement in short story publishing are non-profit or discontinued, that says a lot about the profitability of short story cycles/collections. The aforementioned 2004 report also stated that “[s]mall presses experience more success comparatively with short story collections, and collections are often amongst their bestselling titles” (Brown et al. vi). In keeping with this fact, “[s]mall presses tend to offer similar advances for short story collections and novels” (19). However, the report also admitted that while over half of all 2002 short story titles came from indie publishers, “virtually all of the top 100 short story bestsellers for 2002 were from mainstream publishers, and most were written by novelists” (iv). In other words, making real money off short story collections, cycles, and anthologies is still out of reach. It may be easier if famous and prizewinning authors are involved, but even then, sales will probably be lower than for the authors’ novels.

V. Booksellers and Readers In the introduction, a Nottingham bookseller was quoted as weighing in on the perceived difference between short story cycles and short story collections (or rather the fact that he did not know the difference!). His response was one of those received after sending out an email survey in early 2017.6 The short survey was sent to small indie bookstores in midsized British cities; large independent booksellers such as Blackwell’s and Foyle’s; the headquarters of the two major UK bookstore chains WHSmith and Waterstone’s; and a large English-language bookstore in Berlin, Germany (Dussmann); as well as the English-language sales department of the Frankfurt branch of a major German bookstore chain (Hugendubel). The booksellers who responded all confirmed that short

Short Story Collections and Cycles  59 story collections are “much harder to sell” (bookseller from Liverpool) than novels: “In my experience the collections are never as successful as the novel” (bookseller from Berlin; emphasis mine). The booksellers did verify that sales were “[s]lightly easier with well-established writers […] as customers who already love them will pick up anything by them” (bookseller from Liverpool). Regarding the difference between cycles and collections, a few respondents corroborated the assumption that “when the stories revolve around a theme they tend to be more popular” (bookseller from Stamford) or that a “special subject always helps” (bookseller from Berlin). Others were not so sure that “there’s any difference between short story cycles and ones without a theme” (bookseller from Liverpool). When asked to comment on short story collections more generally, the bookseller from Liverpool spoke about the self-fulfilling prophecy of short stories not selling well: “Part of the trouble is with us booksellers as we don’t tend to order many short story collections due to difficulty selling, so it becomes a vicious circle. […] So we are as much at fault!” This emphasizes the fact that book-industry prejudices trickle down from publishers, booksellers, and authors – to readers. Beevers says that there is a type of “reader resistance” (Beevers 22) against short stories because “the average short story is not as hospitable to readers” as the novel (Trueblood, qtd. in Beevers 24). In the 2004 report, approximately half of those respondents who said they did not read books of short stories said they did read short stories in magazines, “with women more likely (82%) to say this than men (32%)”. Some respondents felt “that magazines have easier stories, or more romance, or stories aimed at the magazine[‘]s readers” (Brown et al. iv). This finding is in line with the (relatively speaking) strong stance of genre fiction in shorter formats: “Of short story collections sold, the majority were by writers best known for genre novels” (Beevers 12).

VI. Conclusions In the past decade or so, there has been a clear increase in interest in short stories in the UK – more prizes and awards, more media coverage, more marketing, etc. The Arts Council funded a “Save Our Short Story” campaign starting in 2002, as well as the oft-quoted research report by Jenny Brown Associates published in 2004. Following up on the 2004 report, Book Trust, the UK’s largest reading charity, started “The Short Story Website” (). In the meantime, the site was discontinued and taken down; more recently, the site was re-established online but is not updated regularly (in late 2017, it was still advertising the call for submissions for the 2011 Short Story Award). 2005 saw the inception of two major short

60  Corinna Norrick-Rühl story awards. The International Frank O’Connor Short Story Award was granted for the first time as part of the literary programme of Cork’s tenure as ­European Capital of Culture and was the single biggest prize for a collection of stories – but it has not been awarded since 2015 (“Frank O’Connor Short Story Award”). Also, in 2005, the BBC Short Story Award was granted for the first time, originally called the National Short Story Prize. It is the world’s largest for a single short story and has been transformative to shortlisted and winning authors, as ­evidenced by their comments on occasion of the tenth anniversary of the prize (cf. BBC National Short Story Award [2014]). An online journal called The Short Review was launched by writer Tania Hershman in 2007 (). In 2008, The Bookseller reported that “[e]fforts are under way to return the short story to its former status in the UK” (Jones) – which seems a bit optimistic and naïve, honestly, considering the research findings on short stories in the twenty-first century presented above. Writer and English professor Alison MacLeod launched the international short story forum website Thresholds in 2010. 2010 also saw the foundation of the UK National Short Story Week, which has since returned ­annually in November (); 2012 was declared “Year of the Short Story” by publisher Bloomsbury (­Williams, “Bloomsbury”); and 2013 marked the foundation of yet another web resource by Hershman, “ShortStops” (). It may not come as a surprise, then, that 2014 was described as a “time of renewed excitement for the form” by the Bookseller (Shaffi). Part of this buzz surrounding short stories has been created with new awards and prizes. As opposed to the US, “where the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction considers short story collections as well as novels, Britain’s leading literary awards such as the Booker, Whitbread, and Orange prizes are open only to novels” (Avgerinou 22–23). And even “the less important prizes for which single-author collections are eligible […] favor novels in their winning lists” (Avgerinou 24). Does this mean we are in fact headed towards a new golden age of the short story – in the UK and elsewhere? Sweden sent a signal to the world in 2013 by awarding Alice Munro the Nobel Prize for ­L iterature – and to a lesser extent, with the decision to award the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature to Kazuo Ishiguro. It is perhaps too soon to tell conclusively what the Nobel for Munro and Ishiguro will mean to the book industry, but given the long-standing history of prejudice and self-fulfilling prophecy delineated here, which permeates all areas of the book trade, it is doubtful two Nobel decisions will act as a game-changer.

Appendix Table 4.2  S ales of 2012 Man Booker longlist Author

Title

UK publisher (ownership status in 2012)

Debut?

Hilary Mantel

Bring Up the Bodies

Fourth Estate (independent)

Sam Thompson Communion Town

Fourth Estate (independent)

Tan Twan Eng

Myrmidon (independent) Salt (independent) Faber (independent) Harvill Secker (Penguin/ Pearson PLC)

Former Man Novel Booker winner; 2012 winner Debut Short story collection/ cycle Second novel Novel

Alison Moore

The Garden of Evening Mists The Lighthouse

Jeet Thayil

Narcopolis

André Brink

Philida

Michael Frayn

Skios

Faber (independent)

Novel or short story collection/ cycle?

Debut

Novel

Debut

Novel

Well-established author; 21st (and final, †2015) novel; Man Booker Shortlist 1978 Eleventh novel

Novel

Novel

Complete sales (£), from week ending 21 July to week ending 13 October 2012

Weekly sales volume, week ending 21 July

Weekly sales (£), week ending 21 July

Complete sales volume, from week ending 21 July (or date of publication) to week ending 13 October 2012

2,869

£ 35,114.89

26,213

£ 330,886.89

21

£ 296.49

776

£ 9,637.88

11

£ 108.09

6,811

£ 78,932.85

Published on 15 August 2012 13 £ 119.99

8,925

£ 67,522.41

4,111

£ 43,470.73

Published on 2 August 2012

1,004

£ 12,282,59

548

£ 7,370.11

6,283

£ 82,747.86 (Continued)

Weekly sales (£), week ending 21 July

Complete sales volume, from week ending 21 July (or date of publication) to week ending 13 October 2012

Novel

33

£ 277.00

2,654

£ 23,023.73

Novel (“genrebender”)

63

£ 873.65

2,663

£ 36,876.55

Published on 16 August 2012

6,531

£ 94,038.43

Title

UK publisher (ownership status in 2012)

Debut?

Novel or short story collection/ cycle?

Deborah Levy

Swimming Home

And Other Stories (independent)

Ned Beauman

Sixth novel (seventh novel shortlisted in 2016) Second novel

The Teleportation Sceptre (Hodder Accident & Stoughton/ Hachette) Umbrella Bloomsbury PLC Tenth novel (Man Booker longlist (independent) 2002) Debut The Unlikely Windsory/ Pilgrimage Of Parragon (DC Harold Fry Thomson publishing and television company) The Yips Fourth Estate Ninth novel (independent) (Man Booker Prize longlist 2004; Man Booker Prize shortlist 2007)

Will Self Rachel Joyce

Nicola Barker

Complete sales (£), from week ending 21 July to week ending 13 October 2012

Weekly sales volume, week ending 21 July

Author

Novel Novel

413

£ 4,175.80

10,733

£ 106,585.73

Novel

98

£ 1,494.69

1,417

£ 21,895.01

Shortlisted authors are shown in bold. Source: Data from The Guardian supplemented by author through research in British Library catalogue and on Man Booker Prize website.

Short Story Collections and Cycles  63

Notes 1 According to Gérard Genette, a paratext “enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, the public” (1). 2 The sales data for Alison Moore’s debut is only available for the time after the announcement, since the book was not published until August 15. 3 From the week ending August 4 to the week ending October 13; Philida was published on 2 August 2012. 4 In an interesting and – if I may say so – disturbing turn of events, it seems that A. L. Kennedy has found a new strategy for publishing her work. Her latest collection of short stories, titled All the Rage (2014), was published with New Harvest, which is an Amazon self-publishing imprint associated with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for distribution purposes. New Harvest and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have garnered plenty of criticism from booksellers and publishers (cf. Rosen). 5 Tindal Street Publishing, founded in 1998, was a Birmingham-based notfor-profit arts organization, part-funded by the Arts Council England and Birmingham City Council. Tindal Street Publishing published numerous short story collections. However, after two years of not receiving funding from the Birmingham City Council, Tindal Street Press was sold to a ­rivalling independent publisher in London, Profile Books, with its imprint ­Serpent’s Tail, in 2012 (“Birmingham book publisher Tindal Street” 2012). 6 The email survey to booksellers was a follow-up to an email survey to publishers conducted in 2015 and 2016. Approximately a dozen major UK publishers were contacted, none of which responded to questions about the marketability of short story collections and cycles. A slightly different survey was prepared for bookstores. The smaller booksellers were more willing to share their experiences. Of the ten indie booksellers contacted, four responded. Both German bookstores sent responses. Their British counterparts Blackwell’s, Foyle’s, WHSmith, and Waterstone’s did not respond despite having confirmed the receipt of the short survey. Both versions of the survey refrained from defining the difference between short story collections and cycles in order to see whether book industry participants were familiar with the difference.

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64  Corinna Norrick-Rühl Beevers, John. “The Short Story: What Is It Exactly, What Do We Want to Do with It, and How Do We Intend to Do It?” The Short Story, edited by Ailsa Cox. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, pp. 11–26. “Birmingham Book Publisher Tindal Street Sold to London Rival”. Birmingham Mail, 8 Nov. 2012, www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/local-news/birminghambook-publisher-tindal-street-281818. Accessed 25 March 2017. “Booker Prize 2012: Sales for All the Winners and the 2012 Shortlist, ­I ncluding Hilary Mantel”. The Guardian Datablog, 10 Oct. 2012, www. theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/oct/10/booker-prize-2012-winnerssales-data. Accessed 19 March 2017. Brown, Jenny, et al. The Short Story in the UK: Overview of the Current State and Exploration of Opportunities for New Initiatives. March 2004, www.theshortstory.org.uk/aboutus/The_Short_Story_in_the_UK_Report. pdf. Accessed 25 March 2017. Charman-Anderson, Suw. “Can Nielsen BookScan Stay Relevant in the Digital Age?” Forbes, 7 Jan. 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/suwcharmananderson/2013/01/07/can-nielsen-bookscan-stay-relevant-in-the-digital-age/# 32213fc8761e. Last updated 9 Jan. 2013. Accessed 19 March 2017. Clark, Giles, and Angus Phillips. Inside Book Publishing. 4th ed., Routledge, 2008. Collins, Michael J. “The Short Story: A Print Culture Reading”. Alluvium, 9. Dec. 2012, www.alluvium-journal.org/2012/12/09/the-short-story-a-printculture-reading/. Accessed 25 March 2017. “Comma Press: About”. Comma Press. http://commapress.co.uk/about/. Accessed 25 March 2017. Cooke, Rachel. “A Shot in the Arm for a Dying Form”. The Guardian, 21 May 2006, www.theguardian.com/books/2006/may/21/fiction.features. Accessed 25 March 2017. Crum, Maddie. “Publishing Tips: 6 Ways to Make Your Short Story Collection Stand Out”. The Huffington Post, 8 Aug. 2012, www.huffingtonpost. com/2012/08/08/publishing-tips-short-story_n_1755566.html. Accessed 12 March 2017. Curtis, C. Michael. “Publishers and Publishing”. On Writing Short Stories, edited by Tom Bailey. Oxford UP, 2000, pp. 112–123. D’hoker, Elke. “Call for Papers: Short Fiction: Co-Texts and Contexts”. UPenn English, 5 Oct. 2016, https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2016/10/05/ short-fiction-co-texts-and-contexts. Accessed 24 March 2017. DuBois, Jennifer. “Close Quarters: Sam Thompson’s Communion Town”. New York Times Sunday Book Review, 27 Dec. 2013, www.nytimes. com/2013/12/29/books/review/sam-thompsons-communion-town.html. Accessed 23 March 2017. Dunthorne, Joe. “The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman: Review”. The Guardian, 26 July 2012, www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/26/ teleportation-accident-ned-beauman-review. Accessed 23 March 2017. Elton, Kate. “Fiction Book Sales”. PA Statistics Yearbook 2015. The Publishers Association, 2016, pp. 29–30. “Frank O’Connor Short Story Award”. Encyclopædia Brittanica, 3 March 2016, www.britannica.com/topic/Frank-OConnor-Short-Story-Award. Accessed 25 March 2017. Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge UP, 1997.

Short Story Collections and Cycles  65 Heller, Jason. “Margaret Atwood, Others Explore the Short-story Cycle”. Entertainment Weekly, 20 Oct. 2014, ew.com/article/2014/10/20/margaret-­atwoodshort-story-cycle/. Accessed 12 March 2017. Hemmungs Wirtén, Eva. “Global Market 1970–2000: Producers”. A Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Simon Eliot, and Jonathan Rose. Wiley, 2009, pp. 395–405. “Impact Case Study: International Impact for Short Story Writers and Writing”. Research Excellence Framework, 2014, http://impact.ref.ac.uk/casestudies2/ refservice.svc/GetCaseStudyPDF/44054. Accessed 25 March 2017. Jones, Philip. “Saving the Short Story”. Bookseller, 11 Aug. 2008, www. thebookseller.com/news/saving-short-story. Accessed 25 March 2017. Kaufman, Leslie. “Good Fit for Today’s Little Screens: Short Stories”. The New York Times, 15 Feb. 2013, nyti.ms/2myznmG. Accessed 12 March 2017. Kennedy, A. L. “Small in a Way that a Bullet is Small”. The Short Story, edited by Ailsa Cox. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, pp. 1–10. Lea, Richard. “Most UK Authors’ Annual Incomes Still Well Below Minimum Wage, Survey Shows”. The Guardian, 19 Oct. 2016, www.theguardian.com/ books/2016/oct/19/uk-authors-annual-incomes-below-minimum-wagesurvey-average-earnings. Accessed 31 Aug. 2017. Lister, Susan. “Open Destinies: Modern American Women and the Short Story Cycle.” Durham theses, Durham University, 2005, http://etheses.dur. ac.uk/1280/1/1280.pdf. Accessed 25 March 2017. Lohafer, Susan. “The Short Story”. The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction After 1945, edited by John N. Duvall. Cambridge UP, pp. 68–81. Love, Tim. “Organising a Story Collection”. Litrefs Articles, 14 Jan. 2011, http://litrefsarticles.blogspot.de/2011/01/organising-story-collection.html. Accessed 24 March 2017. Luscher, Robert M. “The American Short-Story Cycle: Out from the Novel’s Shadow”. A Companion to the American Novel, edited by Alfred Bendixen. Wiley, 2012, pp. 357–372. Malcolm, David. The British and Irish Short Story Handbook. Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2012. “Man Booker Prize 2011: Sales for All the Booker Prize Winners, Including Julian Barnes”. The Guardian Datablog, 26 July 2011, www.theguardian. com/news/datablog/2011/jul/26/man-booker-prize-2011-winners. Accessed 19 March 2017. Miller, Laura. “Sorry, the Short Story Boom Is Bogus”. Salon, 21 Feb. 2013, www. salon.com/2013/02/21/sorry_the_short_story_boom_is_bogus/. Accessed 12 March 2017. Moosmüller, Birgit. Die experimentelle englische Kurzgeschichte der Gegenwart. Fink, 1993. Norrick-Rühl, Corinna, and Melanie Ramdarshan Bold. “Crossing the Channel: Publishing Translated German Fiction in the UK”. Publishing Research Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 2, 2016, pp. 125–138. PA Statistics Yearbook 2015. The Publishers Association, 2016. PA Statistics Yearbook 2016. The Publishers Association, 2017. Power, Chris. “Is the Short Story Really the Novel’s Poor Relation?” The Guardian, 24 March 2011, www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/mar/24/ is-short-story-novel-poor-relation. Accessed 12 March 2017.

66  Corinna Norrick-Rühl Prior, Joanna. “Total Book Sales”. PA Statistics Yearbook 2015. The Publishers Association, 2016, pp. 1–2. Purdon, James. “Communion Town by Sam Thompson: Review”. The Guardian, 9 Sep. 2012, www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/09/communion-town-samthompson-review. Accessed 23 March 2017. Ray Murray, Padmini, and Claire Squires. “The Digital Communications Circuit”. The Book Unbound: Disruption and Disintermediation in the Digital Age, 2012, www.bookunbound.stir.ac.uk/research/infographic/. Accessed 22 March 2017. Rosen, Judith. “Citing Amazon Ties, Booksellers Say No to New Harvest”. Publishers Weekly, 9 July 2012, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/ industry-news/bookselling/article/52918-citing-amazon-ties-booksellers-sayno-to-new-harvest.html. Accessed 28 March 2017. Shaffi, Sarah. “More Evers Short Stories to Picador”. The Bookseller, 19 June 2014, www.thebookseller.com/news/more-evers-short-stories-picador. Accessed 25 March 2017. Sinclair, Mark. “New Salman Rushdie Covers by Sroop Sunar”. Creative Review, 20 Apr. 2015, www.creativereview.co.uk/new-salman-rushdie-coversby-sroop-sunar/. Accessed 24 March 2017. Squires, Claire. Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Striphas, Ted. The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. Columbia UP, 2009. Swift, Graham. “Graham Swift: ‘As Human Beings We’re All Short-story Enthusiasts’”. The Guardian, 7 July 2015, www.theguardian.com/books/2015/ jul/07/graham-swift-short-stories-paperback-writer. Accessed 12 March 2017. Taylor, Catherine. “The Sounds of Silence”. The Guardian, 1 Aug. 2009, www. theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/01/afterlife-the-silence-room-reviewed. Accessed 25 March 2017. “The Comma Survey”. Comma Press. Feb. 2014. http://commapress.co.uk/ about/research/. Accessed 25 March 2017. “The 2017 Man Booker Prize for Fiction: Rules & Entry Form”. The Man Booker Prize, 8 Dec. 2016, http://themanbookerprize.com/sites/manbosamjo/files/ uploadedfiles/files/161208%20MB2017%20Rules%20And%20Entry%20 Form%20FINAL.pdf. Accessed 25 March 2017. Thompson, Sam. Communion Town: A City in Ten Chapters. Fourth Estate, 2012. Thompson, John B. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. 2nd ed., Plume, 2012. “Top-selling 100 Books of All Time”. The Guardian Datablog, 1 Jan. 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/jan/01/top-100-booksof-all-time#data. Accessed 19 March 2017. Tuch, Becky. “Nice Short Story Collection. But Do You Have a Novel?” The Review Review. Views on Publishing, 06 Jan. 2013, www.thereviewreview. net/publishing-tips/nice-short-story-collection-do-you-have-nove. Accessed 12 March 2017. “What Did the BBC Short Story Award Do for You?” BBC, 2014, http://www.bbc. co.uk/programmes/articles/1M41YH6XnC1VQzm8RWTh8d0/what-did-thebbc-national-short-story-award-do-for-you. Accessed 25 March 2017.

Short Story Collections and Cycles  67 Williams, Charlotte. “Bloomsbury Dubs 2012 ‘Year of the Short Story’”. The Bookseller, 16 Nov. 2011, http://www.thebookseller.com/news/bloomsbury-dubs2012-year-short-story. Accessed 25 March 2017. Williams, Charlotte. “Faber Buys ‘haunting, powerful’ Short Story Collection”. The Bookseller, 04 Jan. 2011, www.thebookseller.com/news/faber-buys-hauntingpowerful-short-story-collection. Accessed 12 March 2017. Zacks, Aaron Shanohn. “Publishing Short Stories: British Modernist Fiction and the Literary Marketplace.” Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2012.

Sources Email interviews with British booksellers, 2017. Nielsen BookScan.

Section II

Traditions

5 A “shred and patch school of writing” The Emergence of the Modern Short Story Cycle in Late Romantic Britain Mark Ittensohn I. In recent years, literary scholarship has increasingly acknowledged that textual forms that were long thought to have played a minor role in the British Romantic period – for instance, the tale, the sketch, or the magazine – constituted significant presences in its literary field.1 Such reconsiderations of generic secondarity have also had considerable revisionist impact on the now age-old adage that the British Romantic Era was hostile to precise generic distinctions: The more we learn about the material conditions of writing and reading, the mechanisms of publication, distribution, and review, and the vast hinterland of popular literature that surrounds the golden city of the Romantic canon, the less tenable is the hypothesis that this was a literary culture that had moved ‘beyond genre’. (Duff 6) Indeed, while only some decades ago it was the solitary poets walking the high moors of the Lake District that commanded the attention of critics interested in British Romanticism, it is now the books that spilled over shelves at the circulating libraries that engross scholars. In accordance with Andrew Piper’s pointed claim that Romanticism “happens when there are suddenly a great deal more books to read, when indeed there are too many books to read” (12), the gravitational centre of research on the period has shifted from poetic genius to bibliographic genus. For early-nineteenth-century British readers and writers, this interest in the medium of the book would have come as no surprise. Already in 1826, the English novelist and reviewer Maria Jane Jewsbury remarked in her essayistic Phantasmagoria; or Sketches of Life and Literature that she lived in a veritable “age of books!”: of “book making!”, “book reading!”, “book reviewing!”, and “book forgetting!” (3).

72  Mark Ittensohn The recent bibliographic turn in contemporary Romantic studies seeks to reverse exactly this “book forgetting”, especially with regard to genres now commonly thought to be post-Romantic phenomena. The scrapbook or interactive journal, for instance, has become a publishing sensation in recent years thanks to the works of Keri Smith (This Is Not a Book [2009], Wreck This Journal [2012], The Pocket Scavenger [2013]). However, as Deidre Lynch has shown, the genre already took its first steps as a discrete bibliographic entity in late Regency Britain, when middle-class men and women developed a pastime of cutting out pieces from published books and pasting them into their own journals or albums (Lynch). Similarly, and perhaps more familiarly, it is now accepted that the modern short story established itself not in the mid- to late nineteenth century, as often thought, but already in the early decades of the 1800s, out of a “union” of the “tale tradition” and “the essay-sketch tradition” (Evans 190). A genre that was intimately connected to the tale, the sketch, as well as the scrapbook, and which also underwent its fledgling genrefication 2 in the British late Romantic period, was the short story cycle.3 It is true that studies of the genre’s twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries existence often allude to the origin of the form in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Frequently, however, such scholarly perspectives stress the rareness of these predecessors or make a case for the national specificity of such early instances.4 For some time now, this has not only condemned the early-nineteenth-century British existence of the genre to a life in scholarly footnotes, but also obscured the differential nature, both nationally as well as bibliographically, of the genre’s late Romantic solidification. Modern scholarship’s hesitancy to devote adequate attention to the early British short story cycle is mostly owing to the genre’s similarity to two related but much more prominent types of early-nineteenth-­ century fiction in the British Isles: the novel and the collection. 5 Gary Kelly’s otherwise seminal English Fiction of the Romantic Period (1989), for instance, bundles together Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village ­(1824–1832), a prominent early short story cycle, with Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821), a text that shows strong novelistic tendencies. Similarly, Tim Killick’s encyclopaedic British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century (2008) employs the term ‘short fiction collection’ to refer to both cycles and collections without making precise distinctions between them. Such generalizations may provide a much-desired unified perspective on the late Romantic literary field in Britain, but they risk overriding interpretatively significant boundaries. In the case of the short story cycle, especially, a taxonomical distinction is imperative, not least since period readers were themselves experiencing the emerging genre as something distinct from what they were otherwise used to consuming. One of the first texts that seems to have raised British readers’ awareness of a genre that “had no name then” (Dunn and Morris 29) was

A “shred and patch school of writing”  73 Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. ­(1819–1820). In the same work in which Jewsbury reported on the period’s bibliographic overflow (noted above), she also declared that Irving’s work belonged to a new form of textual organization: “the shred and patch school of writing” (306), with Irving as its “father” (306). From the viewpoint of modern genre theory, The Sketch Book fulfils most criteria of a short story cycle. It features a multitude of short fictional pieces, ranging from the sketch to the anecdote, and from the tall tale to the short story. At the same time, the slightly ironic but always polite voice of Irving’s authorial persona Geoffrey Crayon, an American traveller enamoured with Europe, infuses the book’s multiplicity with an overall sense of coherence. Initially, Irving had released the work only in the US in serial format, but after the work’s success, he also published it on the British market, where its formal difference was noted by readers like Jewsbury. It was not Irving’s work alone, however, that represented a textual novelty for Jewsbury. Rather, as Phantasmagoria claims, a whole “class of literary namewanters” (305) followed in its wake. With The Sketch Book, Irving might have been the “father” of the form, but, as Jewsbury added with an eye towards the half decade that lay between the publication of hers and Irving’s works, such “books of a miscellaneous nature [had] increased beyond calculation” (305). And, indeed, even while Irving kept returning to the form with Bracebridge Hall in 1822, a range of his British contemporaries also began trying their pen at it. Mitford, considerably inspired by Irving, started publishing Our Village in 1824 and expanded it in instalments until 1832. Concurrently, the Irish writer Thomas Colley Grattan worked on High-Ways and By-Ways; or Tales of the Roadside (1823–1827), a series of books composed on Irving’s advice that followed the format and theme of The Sketch Book. In 1822, the Scottish author and businessman John Galt also approached the genre with The Steam-Boat, a periodical piece remediated from magazine serial to short story cycle. Eventually, in 1827, even the literary lion of the period, Sir Walter Scott, found himself employing the form, all the while worrying that his late adoption of the genre might strike the reading public “as an imitation of Washington Irving” (151). Even though it was The Sketch Book that urged Jewsbury to call for a “christening [of] such amphibious productions” (305), and thus seems to have spawned the genre, it is important not to overstress the national affiliation of the text and its writer. For many readers in early nineteenth-century Britain, Irving’s works were far from specifically American productions. Not only did period commentators recognize how texts such as The Sketch Book or Bracebridge Hall propounded a transatlantic worldview,6 they also frequently evaluated such works as being more at home in a British or European literary tradition than in one associated with the New World. In March 1822, for instance,

74  Mark Ittensohn an anonymous critic writing for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine contrasted Irving with Charles Brockden Brown, declaring that while the latter was “purely American”, Irving was “merely one of a crowd of good English writers” since he “grafted himself (style, feelings, allusions, every thing) on our literature” (“London Chit-Chat” 333, emphasis original). Similarly, Mitford excluded Irving’s works from one of her collections of American short stories because she judged his writings to be “essentially European” (vi). And William Hazlitt declared rather testily that Irving had merely “taken off patterns with great skill and cleverness, from our best known and happiest writers, so that their thoughts and almost their reputation are indirectly transferred to his page” (Spirit of the Age 178). Granted, underlying such judgments were often political biases, but there is no denying that especially the works that Irving penned during the early 1820s were strongly influenced by his decades-long expatriation in Europe. This national reorientation of Irving is particularly important with regard to the short story cycle since ‘his’ generic innovation seems to have been strongly contingent on the prominent place occupied by both the novel and the collection in the British late Romantic literary field. As The Sketch Book as well as other such “books of a miscellaneous nature” attest, the emergence of the early nineteenth-century short story cycle proceeded along a differential logic: in other words, according to what the Russian formalist Yury Tynyanov has referred to as the “opposing constructive principle” of genre formation (38). For the early British short story cycle, this principle showed itself not just through a formal interest in binding short fictional pieces together by various textual linkages, but also through the performance of a distinct literary identity ex negativo. Specifically, it did so through an engagement with two fault lines that the novel and the collection had produced in print culture but had left unexplored: the social dimension of reading and the dynamic quality of (trans)national literary exchange. In this way, the late Romantic short story cycle formed its generic selfhood through a trajectory of opposition and revision. Although it was situated on the periphery of the literary field – as a newly emerging textual entity – it embraced what other genres had, so to speak, cast off and, through this dynamic, furthered its own generic emancipation.

II. The popularity of imaginative fiction in Britain after the turn of the century presented somewhat of a conundrum to the late Enlightenment view that the press was “the great organ of intellectual improvement and civilization” (Hazlitt, Napoleon 38). The novel in particular questioned the civic idealization of print due to its presumed tendency to turn readers into passive consumers rather than active members in a Republic

A “shred and patch school of writing”  75 of Letters. Already in 1796, for instance, a contributor to the British periodical Sylph voiced strong concern that novels were responsible for severing readers from personal relations: I have actually seen mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread: and the mistress of a family losing hours over a novel in the parlour, while her maids, in emulation of the example, were similarly employed in the kitchen. (qtd. in Taylor 53) Two decades later, such concerns were still being reiterated by cultural arbiters, as in the following comment by Henry Belfrage, minister in the city of Falkirk: The pleasure which is felt in these imaginations renders the humbler joys of real life insipid […]. It would be easy to state numerous instances in which […] qualities which might have blessed society have withered under peevish repining and gloomy seclusion. (qtd. in St. Clair 284) What such views attest to is an anxiety that reading imaginative fiction divorced readers from their social circles and thereby kept them from contributing to the larger community. Thus, even while late Enlightenment thinkers like Hazlitt could proclaim that the “gift of speech” was “limited and imperfect without the intervention of books, which render the knowledge possessed by everyone in the community accessible to all” (Napoleon 38), some of these books, especially novels, were perceived to counteract this perfectionist potential, and to destroy rather than expand “community”.7 Yet, if in the British literary field of the 1820s the novel was considered to embody a dangerous propensity to alienate readers from their social environment – making them dismiss their own community by becoming absorbed in the extraordinary exploits of a Corinne, a Victor ­Frankenstein, or an Edward Waverley – then the genre of the early short story cycle fostered its generic identity in reaction to this discursive link. It employed its particular form to construct a space of community that was not only imaginative, but also integrative; not only readable, but also enactable in the very process of reading. A key example of this tactic is Irving’s follow-up work to The Sketch Book, Bracebridge Hall, or: The Humorists. A Medley (1822). On a thematic level, the book centres on the invented rural community in the English countryside that Irving had already introduced in The Sketch Book, the estate of Squire Bracebridge. Similarly, the work also re-adopts the generic organization employed in its predecessor: it consists of a variety of individual

76  Mark Ittensohn short narratives brought together through the voice of Irving’s persona, ­ eoffrey Crayon. These narratives all celebrate the multiplicity as well G as the mundanity of provincial life on the Bracebridge estate, and they range thematically from village politics to feasts and customs, and formally from short narratives on eccentric or stereotypical inhabitants to anecdotes about rural pastimes. Moreover, the sociocultural concerns of these texts consistently revolve around the discursive dynamism between the self and the community, between village life and national politics. Considering, as modern scholarship on the short story cycle suggests, that the three most prominent ways in which the genre creates coherence are through character, theme, and/or place, Bracebridge Hall, even more so than The Sketch Book, is a blueprint of later works featuring this ‘trinity of coherence’. And not unlike more modern short story cycles, the main effect achieved by this interlacing of space, character, and theme in Bracebridge Hall is the virtual creation of a sense of community, belonging, and rootedness. Irving’s text employs this formal effect of evoking community not only diegetically, however, but also bibliographically, with the effect of performing a text-reader relationship that is explicitly counterpointed to the absorptive potential of the late Romantic novel. In Bracebridge Hall, the fictionalized rural community evoked by Crayon keeps itself sustained through the celebration of good old E ­ nglish pastimes, most of which are opposed to the perusal of books. Fireside storytelling, for instance, is celebrated by the Squire and his guests as “one of the choice recreations in those days of yore, when ladies and gentlemen were not much in the habit of reading” (60). Indeed, almost no one on the Bracebridge estate is in the “habit of reading”, and the peculiar state of education in the rural community ensures that this is not bound to change. The instructor at the village school teaches the children more about holidays, ancient customs, the drum, the fife, and the pipe than about writing or reading. Crayon concludes: so completely are the ancient customs and habits cultivated at this school, that I should not be surprised if the squire should live to see one of his poetic visions realized, and a brood reared up, worthy successors to Robin Hood, and his merry gang of outlaws. (226) A considerable threat to this pastoral society is outsiders, not primarily because they spread progressive ideas, but because they do so by means of printed matter and the encouragement to read. During Crayon’s visit to the village, the estate’s steward, Master Simon, hurriedly ushers him past the “Village Politician” with the warning that “he reads Cobbett” (228). The reading of novels, in particular, causes stress to the social fabric of the estate. The housekeeper of the Hall is said to have taken to reading Pamela after which “she refused the hand of the village

A “shred and patch school of writing”  77 innkeeper, whom she had previously smiled upon” (22) and fell into the delusion of fancying the lord of the manor. Similarly, the young maid Phoebe Wilkins reads “scraps of novels” (22) and begins to think herself “something between a waiting-maid and a slip-shod fine lady” (23) and thereby alienates her own intended. Even though, as an imaginative work of fiction, Bracebridge Hall is implicated in its own critique, the text attempts to resolve this paradox by means of its generic orientation. There is nothing in the overall work that absorbs, over long stretches of time, the attention of Crayon, and by extension the reader – a fact that Irving has his persona openly proclaim at the text’s outset: I would have it understood […] that I am not writing a novel, and have nothing of intricate plot, or marvellous adventure, to promise the reader. The Hall of which I treat, has, for aught I know, neither trap-door, nor sliding-panel, nor donjon-keep; and indeed appears to have no mystery about it. The family is a well-meaning family, that, in all probability, will eat and drink, and go to bed, and get up regularly, from one end of my work to the other. (15) Such a disavowal of novelistic conventions, and especially of gothic tropes, has somewhat of a tradition in the early nineteenth century. We find it, too, in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) or Amelia Opie’s Father and Daughter (1801). Yet, while Bracebridge Hall partly ­emulates these predecessors, it also deviates from them in its expansion of a ­linguistic difference into a structural one: both Edgeworth and Opie use the term ‘tale’ as a label for their texts, yet, in the late ­Romantic period, as Anthony Jarrells has explained, ‘tale’ often meant little more than “short versions of a novel” (“Tales” 1369).8 Irving’s choice of ‘­Medley’, by contrast, links his persona’s rejection of the novel to a ­paradigm not of shorter plotted progression, but of ­combination, ­mixture, and ­miscellaneity. Bracebridge Hall consistently erases ­overarching and ­coherent narrative strands through its series of brief impressions: glimpses into the lives and concerns of the community’s various inhabitants. And yet this ­experience is not one of constant shifts and d ­ isplacements. Crayon, despite his ­status as a guest, is revealed to be an integral part of ­Bracebridge society. As already a contemporary reviewer noted, Crayon “traverses Bracebridge Hall, explores the grounds, […] not like the stranger from another world, struck at the sort of life, which he had never witnessed, but as one of the inmates” (“Art. X.” 213). Indeed, the various connecting links that Crayon’s voice draws between the tales, sketches, and anecdotes infuses these snapshots of everyday life with a continuity that seeks to emulate how members of a lived, rural community might be thought to experience the social world around them.

78  Mark Ittensohn By perceiving the society of Bracebridge though Crayon’s eyes, the reader of the text is urged to experience this communality in the act of reading, and thereby to become accustomed to, rather than expelled from, a sociable environment. This process is particularly marked in the Bracebridge estate storytelling sessions in which the reader’s integration into community is played out structurally. Bracebridge Hall not only describes the storytelling acts on the estate, but also articulates them by providing the stories that are being told in the act of being told. On the one hand, these fictions – carrying such auspicious titles as “The Student of Salamanca” or “Anette Delarbre”– are highly reminiscent of the gothic and sentimental paradigms that conservative voices of the period lashed out against. On the other hand, however, the placing of these novelistic pieces into the sociable environment of fireside telling shifts the focus away from the narratives themselves and towards their moment of being shared. By having allegedly procured the tales “for the entertainment of the reader” (248), and by weaving them into his narrative web at the scene of their performance, Crayon’s narrative makes readers become part of the Bracebridge pastime of fireside storytelling: they can read themselves into company. As if to overemphasize this point, Bracebridge Hall’s last inset story, “Dolph Heyliger”, is embedded not only in the description of the storytelling session on the Bracebridge estate, but also hypodiegetically framed by a scene in which the tale’s narrator, ­Diedrich Knickerbocker, hears the story from an old American storyteller, and the tale proper even includes its own storytelling session in which the protagonist Dolph listens to a Dutch sea captain tell the tale of “The Storm-Ship”. Throughout Bracebridge Hall, in other words, the reader is almost overbearingly made to be present, through the act of reading, at the performance of a pastime that seemingly was displaced by the popularity of reading imaginative literature. In this way, Irving’s work openly disturbs the alleged dichotomy between ‘reading’ and ‘being part of a lived community’, or, rather, it medially stages the dichotomy as a continuity rather than an antithesis. Thus, when Herbert F. Smith slyly jokes that for “most modern critics” the text is about as “interesting” as a “sociological study” (xiv), his sarcasm falls rather flat since it is based on a perceived deviation of Irving’s work from a generic paradigm to which it does not belong. Bracebridge Hall is indeed “interesting” exactly because it is a kind of “sociological study”, a work that places emphasis on the enactment of social constituencies rather than the performance of what Peter Brooks has called “narrative desire” (37). In writing Bracebridge Hall, Irving was highly aware of his work’s difference from received genres. Anticipating Jewsbury’s christening of him as the “father” of a new “school”, he clarifies in the opening of the text: “I write after no model that I am conscious of, and I write with no idea of imitation or competition” (7). Instead, it was his own work that spawned imitations. Only two years after the publication of Bracebridge

A “shred and patch school of writing”  79 Hall, Mitford decided to collect the various sketches she had submitted to the Lady’s Magazine into a form clearly modelled on Irving’s sequel to The Sketch Book. Even while she attempted to distance herself thematically from “Mr Geoffrey Crayon” – by focusing on “the north of Hampshire”, which, she conjectured, Crayon “probably does not know” (“Bramley” 280) – her work strongly fortified the continuity between reading and community through which Irving had defined and differentiated the genre. As Mitford herself emphasizes, perusing the various tales and sketches from ‘her’ village presents “no fear of forgetting the good-humoured faces that meet us in our walks” (Our Village 12). Rather, it invites readers to “learn to know and to love the people about us, with all their peculiarities, just as we learn to know and to love the nooks and turns of the shady lanes and sunny commons that we pass every day” (Our Village 3). Franco Moretti, in his reading of Mitford’s work, tellingly calls its narrative space “circular” rather than “linear” (84, emphasis original). After mapping the simultaneously disparate and unified narrative spaces of Our Village, he asks: “Where on earth do these rings come from?” (80). The immediate answer, of course, would be to say ‘they come from Washington Irving’, from his intention to forgo the novel and his investment into a poetics of bibliographic community that kept its readers centred through, rather than on, the book. A more general reply would be to say ‘from the short story cycle’, the form of narrative organization that materialized in 1820s Britain by textualizing lived culture, thereby rounding out both the linear development of novelistic plotting as well the alleged retreat of early nineteenth-century readers from the commons to the closet. While the novel constituted one position in the “space of works” (Bourdieu 21, my translation) against which the short story cycle began to differentiate itself in 1820s Britain, a second significant border was articulated through the genre’s contrast to the short fiction collection. In this regard, the distinction pertained not primarily to the form’s relation to the individual reading experience, but rather to the genre’s connection with national cultures and literary exchange. Though often overlooked in scholarship, the short fiction collection witnessed a dramatic rise in popularity during the early nineteenth century (Jarells, “Rise of the Tale” 488): between 1820 and 1829 alone, over 150 such works were published.9 There are various reasons that explain why the genre was so popular. For one thing, the collection attracted a newly professionalizing class of writers because it allowed and endorsed what might be called a strategy of double pay-out: the initial publication of short fiction in magazines and the re-publication of the same in later collections. Even though, as Leitch Ritchie in his Tales and Confessions (1829) acknowledged, “this sort of rechauffé” was considered by some to be “bibliopolical swindling”, it was still largely defendable because periodicals went out of print, “pushed from

80  Mark Ittensohn their stools by succeeding numbers”, and because such re-heated tales could be revised, or combined with other material that was “absolutely new” (vii). Another appeal of the short fiction collection lay in the format’s compatibility with moral didacticism. Inspired by late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Evangelical publishing projects, such as Hanna Moore’s Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–1817), many women writers in the 1820s looked to the collection for a way of binding the narrative straightforwardness and readerly facility achievable through short tales into book-length educational programmes. In the guise of the collection, works with such telling titles as Tales of the Heart (1820), Good-Nature, or Sensibility: And Other Tales (1822), or Tales of Fault and Feeling (1825) reached a much wider audience than they would have in the guise of traditional moralistic genres like the conduct-book (Killick, British Short Fiction 73–115). Arguably the strongest incentive for collections of short fiction after the turn of the century, however, appears to have been provided by the continual expansion of the British Empire and the consequent desire of its subjects to negotiate the national self with/against the ‘Other’. Already the titles of a majority of the decade’s short fiction collections reveal the genre’s strong association with travel and foreign cultures: be it from the (recently) unified parts of Great Britain – Traditional Tales of English and Scottish Peasantry (1822), To-Day in Ireland (1825), Tales of Welsh Society and Scenery (1827) – from past and prospective ­colonies – Tales of an Indian Camp (1829), Chinese Novels (1822) – from regions across the channel – Tales of Ardennes (1825), Hungarian Tales (1829), Tales from Switzerland (1822–1823) – or from the (exotic) world outside Great Britain in general – Tales of All Nations (1827), Tales from Afar (1824), Tales of the Wild and Wonderful (1825). Due to their proximity to oral traditions, short fictional forms in the longer Romantic period were often thought to be particularly fitting expressions of national identity,10 and the short fiction collection especially, as an assemblage, seemed attuned to making cultural ‘Otherness’ graspable through acts of reading. George Cunningham, for instance, in his Foreign Tales and Traditions (1829) sought to illuminate the “Teutonic imagination” (ix)  through the “Fugitive Literature of Germany” (title page), and Mitford, in her collection of Stories of American Life (1830), quite generally suggested that “few things give a completer picture of the habits of living, and the ways of a foreign country, than its lighter literature” (iii). Critics have noted that such traveller’s tales, taken on their own, frequently “challenge[d] in small ways the hegemonic ideas of nationhood and progress” (Killick, British Short Fiction 155). In the form of the collection, however, this potential for the contestation of hegemony was generally disarmed because such books proposed the readability of foreign cultures. By making other cultures perusable within their pages, early ­nineteenth-century short fiction collections propagated not a challenge to

A “shred and patch school of writing”  81 cultural nationalism, but rather a bibliographic institutionalization of it. They operated as a way of reading, understanding, and integrating the national ‘Other’ and, thereby, of defining the national self.11 Early short story cycles were concerned with the relations between tales and national culture at least as often as collections. Already ­I rving’s The Sketch Book included two tales that were (and continue to be) considered almost stereotypical expressions of the early nineteenth-­ century American mindset: “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”.12 And yet, a third tale in the same work, “The Spectre Bridegroom”, already suggests how Irving’s “shred and patch school of writing” complicated the nationalist ideology of the 1820s short fiction collection. Although the story is set in medieval Germany, its embeddedness within the broader narrative structure of Crayon’s European experiences reveals the tale to be considerably metropolitan: not only is this ‘German’ story based on a French anecdote, but Crayon hears it from a Swiss traveller at a tavern in the Netherlands. It is likely that it was this tendency of The Sketch Book to disturb the alignment between narrative and nation that made the Irish writer Thomas Colley G ­ rattan decide to adopt the form for his own collection of traveller’s tales, HighWays and By-Ways, or Tales of the Roadside. Appearing in 1823 (it would spawn two sequels), the work not only openly continued (like Mitford a year later) Irving’s generic legacy – marked by a dedication to him – but also propagated this ‘school’s’ generic difference by employing the form’s structural intricacies to transnationalize the collection’s nationalist outlook. Grattan’s short story cycle opens, like The Sketch Book, with a “Preface” in which the authorial persona outlines the book’s overall project: a reservoir of tales picked up on his travels through France. This introductory piece not only provides information about the tales’ narrator, however, but also promotes a particular type of travel, which, by extension, becomes translated into a particular type of writing and reading cultural difference. Famously, Walter Scott had compared the ideal reading experience to travelling in a carriage (St. Clair 401), but for Grattan, this type of travelling, and this type of reading, would produce only limited insight into other cultures: Who, with limbs to move on, and a heart to feel, would […] engage his body in a public vehicle; and stifle the young buds of thought in its contracted atmosphere? Can we expect to know a people by such flying association? Is it […] from the merchant counting on his fingers in the corner, – from the lover whose thoughts fly back in a direct ratio with the haste of his advance, and whose eyes are so full of his absent mistress, that he thinks he sees her in the gruff old lady, feeding her parrot on the seat before him; – is it from the friend, the parent, or the child, who, going to meet the holy happiness of

82  Mark Ittensohn domestic welcome, thinks the carriage retrogrades; – is it from these the foreign traveller would look for national fact or individual reality; or in their random and undigested chatter hope to find a mine of sound and valuable truth? (ix) As is to be expected, Grattan’s answer to his own question is an emphatic “No, no, Sir!” (ix). To alleviate the risk of cultural ignorance posed by a carriage journey, High-Ways proposes travelling on foot: “take your knapsack, and your stick, and walk! Linger, and lounge, and loiter on the way. Throw yourself among the people, as if you came by chance, and not from curiosity. Spend a day here, and a week there” (ix). ­Grattan’s narrative persona is indeed such a loitering traveller. Accompanied only by his dog Ranger, he “wander[s] for months in foreign scenes; to mix with strange society, yet be not a stranger in it” (5–6). Significantly, what Grattan’s persona comes to realize through this type of travel is that the ultimate wisdom achievable by cultural exchange – the “sound and valuable truth” – is not so much that there is “a difference between man in England and man in France”, but that Man “is still, in all seasons and all climes, essentially the same” (xvi). Grattan does not overlook that his readers are always already distanced from such an experience precisely because they are reading a book. In analogy to Irving’s Bracebridge Hall, High-Ways fashions what might be called a ‘walking reader’ through the experience of its bibliographic format. All the individual tales – “The Father’s Curse”, “The Exile of the Landes”, The Birth of Henry IV”, and “La Vilaine Tete” – are connected through the narration of encounters in which the protagonist comes across places, people, or past events that give way to the unravelling of the tales. Tellingly, these scenes are not depicted as moments wherein a British subject observes and thus reads French culture, but rather as moments of uncertainty and self-displacement. Before coming upon the stories, the narrator gets “utterly lost” (113), witnesses events that leave him “not quite [himself]” (13), or even sinks into a “mood of utter abandonment, and loss of self” (290). The accounts of cultural transmission that link the tales of High-Ways thus question the stability of (national) selfhood and make the act of observation – and by extension what we might call the collection’s national-anthropological ideology – more complex, if not to say more precarious. While the individual tales of High-Ways could ultimately be said to illustrate ‘Frenchness’, their embedding in an account of pedestrian travel not only locates an uncertainty of (national) selfhood in the act of cultural exchange, but also makes this ambivalence, in turn, readable to the work’s audience. In this way, the narrative framework of High Ways, and thus its generic particularity, contributes to the performance of the work as a bibliographical antagonist to its sister genre: the text narratively depicts

A “shred and patch school of writing”  83 the act of cultural exchange in a way that overwrites the short fiction collection’s aspiration for cultural readability. What the (walking) reader is urged to realize is that even though cultural exchange leads one to witness “on every hand a novelty or a wonder”, one is still “all the while […] reading in the same old book” (xvii). While for Grattan it was a slow means of travel that led to this disintegration of national selfhood, for the Scottish writer John Galt, it was a fast one. Allegedly written by a Scottish cloth merchant by the name of Thomas Duffle, Galt’s The Steam-Boat first appeared in serialized form in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine throughout 1821, where it became so popular that both Galt and the magazine’s publisher, William Blackwood, decided to reprint the text in book form a year later. While, as such, the work’s structure built on an older generic tradition of serial publishing, it also clearly referenced The Sketch Book in its focus on travellers’ tales and international contact (Duncan 59). The Steam-Boat consists for the most part of stories that the pseudonymous author ­Duffle picks up in conversation with international travellers on the eponymous vehicle and that he consequently puts down to paper. The national range of these tales is wide. Duffle’s account includes stories he hears from natives of the Lake District and the Highlands, R ­ ussia, France, the West Indies, Spitzbergen, and even Kentucky. While, from this point of view, The Steam-Boat shares with the collection a fascination for the national ‘Other’ depicted through narratives, its generic difference is once again significant. Similar to Bracebridge Hall, The Steam-Boat leaves its stories not to themselves, but binds them into a narrative of their narration, namely the moments of Duffle’s contact with the storytellers on the steam-boat. In this way, the text incorporates a transformative reading of these stories’ national expressiveness, thereby constructing a counterargument to the ostensible readability of national culture that collections propagated. As Duffle’s frame narrative reveals, the steamboat in The Steam-Boat both facilitates the availability of narratives from other nations and also hinders their ultimate readability. As an embodiment of state-of-the-art transport technology,13 the vehicle facilitates global connectivity and helps bring even a Scottish backwoodsman in contact with various other parts of the globe. Conspicuously often, the fictional Duffle feels himself urged to laud the comfort of the steamboat and to praise the sheer number of different travellers that its size can accommodate. At the same time, though, the steamboat travels so quickly that Duffle rarely gets to hear the end of the tales that his fellow travellers share with him. Some of them must get off before they are done narrating, while others are distracted by the rapidly changing scenery or are called away by recently arrived passengers. In The Steam-Boat, the speed of modern travel does not stop for narrative to catch up and make sense. By putting the tales into a connecting framework that interrupts them, Galt’s short story

84  Mark Ittensohn cycle thus unifies these multinational tales not around the readability of foreignness, but around the impossibility of doing so. Rather than being about Duffle’s learning of Russian, Norwegian, French, and American culture, the individual tales become narratives of the lack of national closure. By forcing Duffle to feel, in his reception process, the disorienting speed of modern travel, the text puts the presumed readable ‘Other’ in such close proximity to the reading self that the distinction between the self and the ‘Other’ becomes difficult to sustain. It is not only the Scottish cloth merchant that becomes implicated in this dynamic, however, but also the readers of The Steam-Boat. Ian Duncan has suggested that the incomplete nature of the tales invites “reader participation” (61): it urges them to think about possible endings to the stories and to imaginatively fill in the gaps. In being so called upon to complete the narratives of national ‘Others’, though, readers of Galt’s texts are not only creatively activated, but thereby also integrated into the foreign characters. Like Duffle who, upon recollecting the tales, becomes “transported as it were out of [his] own natural body and put into the minds of the narrators so as to think with their thoughts and speak with their words” (4), (British) readers of The Steam-Boat are urged to complete the foreigners’ stories through their own imagination and thereby to adopt in the process the cultural mind-set of, for instance, a Russian or an American. Rather than emphasizing stable and readable difference, then, The Steam-Boat, like High-Ways, performs through its structure the interrelatedness of national cultures. While the rise of the collection was partly the offspring of an increased cultural interaction across national boundaries regarding which it sought to stabilize the approximation between the British self and the European/colonial ‘Other’, the simultaneously dispersed and connected form of the short story cycle questioned the validity of this antithesis and opened up the possibility of imaginatively locating the foreign within the self, as well as the self within the foreign. In this way, the early nineteenth-century short story cycle once again speaks for the affordance of the genre, in Caroline Levine’s sense, to complicate binary oppositions that were considerably enforced by two of its more canonical sister genres in the late Romantic literary field.14

III. In its refusal to follow the well-trodden paths of the novel and the collection, the “shred and patch school of writing” in late Romantic Britain represents an early but significant nexus of the short story cycle’s modern generic individuation. Though Jewsbury did not translate her awareness of the form’s epistemological difference into a linguistic one, she emerges nevertheless as one of the first scholars of the genre and calls on us, from beyond the grave, not to forget the form’s early nineteenth-century

A “shred and patch school of writing”  85 presence. Yet, Jewsbury’s account not only helps us perceive the genre’s presence in the late Romantic literary world in Britain, but it also urges a revision of the commonplace perception, rarely stated but often implied, that the modern short story cycle is a centrally American form.15 Indeed, even with Irving as its ‘father’, it would take more than two decades before the short story cycle became as firmly established in the US as it was in early nineteenth-century Britain. Even while Charles Dickens earned his first critical acclaim in the 1830s with short story cycles inspired by Irving,16 writers on the other side of the Atlantic struggled considerably in trying to put prospective works in the genre through to publication. Edgar Allen Poe, who in an 1841 review of Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock emphasized the “consistent and agreeable interest” gained by “preserving the unity” of short fiction through a “species of connexion” (“The Old Curiosity Shop” 147), had only five years earlier been rejected by multiple publishers for a similar project. Tales of the Folio Club, as Poe had provisionally named the work, was supposed to bind together tales he had already published as magazine pieces through a frame narrative in which “a company of 17 ­persons […] meet once a month at the house of one of the members” telling the stories and providing criticism on each other’s performance (qtd. in ­Ollive Mabbott 173). Significantly, in their rejection letter, Harper & Brother explicitly noted that such a plan was not suited to the American market: “Readers in this country have a decided and strong preference for works (especially fiction) in which a single or connected story occupies the whole volume, or number of volumes” (qtd. in Thomas and Jackson 212). The year before, Nathaniel Hawthorne had made a similar experience. While his short story cycle The Story Teller was not rejected outright by his publisher Samuel Goodrich, the latter passed it on to the newly appointed editor of the American Monthly Magazine, Park Benjamin, who ignored the work’s thematic unity and published sections and excerpts largely out of sequence and context. After this, Hawthorne allegedly “cared little for the stories” (qtd. in Conway 32), and, indeed, with the exception of the rather fragmentary “Legends of the Province House” section in Twice Told Tales (1837–1842), he never returned to the short story cycle in his literary work.17 By the time the nineteenth century reached its second half, the ­A merican literary marketplace had largely overcome such growing pains. With Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, and Stephen Crane, the American short story cycle began to catch up with its British counterpart. Increasingly, American publishers were registering a rising interest of the American reading public in the “shred and patch school of writing”, a tendency that would eventually give way to the considerable popularity of the form in the American Modernist era. It was then, famously, that a youthful Sherwood Anderson laid claim to the genre, calling it the “Winesburg form”: “I invented it. It was mine”

86  Mark Ittensohn (qtd. in Mann 7). Jewsbury, were she alive, might forgive Anderson for his ‘forgetting’ of the genre’s British past. Young authors, she notes in Phantasmagoria, are prone to “follies” when from “former insignificance” they suddenly burst forth “into the glories of full-blown authorship” (191). We, as literary critics, must be less forgiving. The short story cycle emerged as a distinct genre not because Anderson’s American mind thought it into being, but because under the guidance of the ‘European’ Irving, and the penmanship of Mitford, Grattan, Galt, and other British writers, it carved out its own space in the literary field through a dynamic of contestation and revision.

Notes 1 See, for example, Demata and Wu, Garcha, Killick, Parker, Schoenfield, or Stewart. 2 The term was first employed by Rick Altman in his Film/Genre (1999). I use it here in the sense of John Frow, who draws on it to emphasize “genre as a process” (137). 3 As Mann suggests, the expression ‘short story’ in the generic label ‘short story cycle’ should be considered functionally rather than exclusively: “Although short story cycles generally consist of ‘short stories,’ one has to acknowledge that there are exceptions. Without such flexibility, one is unable to emphasize the adaptability of the genre” (17). This article follows her usage of the genre label, which understands ‘short story’ as “something that is shorter than a novel and generally longer than two pages” (17). 4 See, for example, Dunn and Morris 20–29; Kennedy xi; Mann 4–7; Nagel 2–4. 5 The middle position of the short story cycle between “‘the novel proper’ and the ‘mere collection’” (Dunn and Morris 29) is frequently noted in criticism. See also Lundén 32–51. 6 It is only very recently that modern criticism, too, has come to acknowledge the transatlantic quality of some of Irving’s writings. See, for instance, Giles 142. 7 This is not to say that novelists were unaware of the reputation of their productions. Works like Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) or Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) attest to a playfully self-conscious but also somewhat paradoxical engagement with the ‘dangers’ of novel reading. 8 Although the label could sometimes emphasize a didactic or moral side to narrative, it often promised a densely plotted text. See also Edgar Allen Poe’s famous distinction between the novel and the tale: to be “read at one sitting” (“Tale-Writing” 153), the tale was expected to be at least as absorbing as the novel, if not more so. 9 The number is an estimate based on Killick’s bibliographic overview “The Rise of the Tale”. 10 In 1814, for instance, the Scottish historian John Colin Dunlop suggested that “by contemplating the fables of a people, we have a successive delineation of their prevalent modes of thinking, a picture of their feelings and tastes and habits” (ix). 11 As Yuri Lotman has suggested, the critique of national and cultural selfhood is urged not by that which is different, but by that which resists or negates semioticization in general (133), in other words, that which is simply not understandable.

A “shred and patch school of writing”  87 12 See, for example, Martin or Rubin-Dorsky. 13 In a later work, Galt has one of his narratorial personae proclaim that “the steam-engine […] is the greatest invention, next to that of letters, which the powers of the human mind have yet achieved” (Bachelor’s Wife 194). 14 On Levine’s notion of affordance, see the introduction to this volume. 15 The fact that a majority of studies on the genre predominantly treat texts from American literary history is indicative of the national bias of existing scholarship. For an extreme example of a scholarly alignment between genre and nation, see Lundén 106–123. 16 See, for example, Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837), the planned structure of which Dickens directly linked to Irving’s style of composition (564). 17 Interestingly enough, two of Hawthorne’s children’s works, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) as well as Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys (1853), are structurally reminiscent of the short story cycle, albeit far from aspiring to the scope of his earlier project.

Works Cited Bourdieu, Pierre. “Le champ littéraire”. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences ­Sociales, vol. 89, September 1991, pp. 3–46. “Art. X. – Bracebridge Hall, or the Humorists, a Medley, by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. 2 vols. New York, 1822”. The North American Review, vol. XV, 1822, pp. 204–224. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. ­Harvard UP, 2000. Conway, Moncure D. Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. W. Scott, 1890. Cunningham, George. Foreign Tales and Traditions Chiefly from the Fugitive Literature of Germany. Blackie, Fullarton & Co., 1829. Demata, Massimiliano, and Duncan Wu, editors. British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume One 1820–1839, edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey, Clarendon, 1965. Duff, David. Romanticism and the Uses of Genre. Oxford UP, 2009. Duncan, Ian. “Altered States: Galt, Serial Fiction, and the Romantic M ­ iscellany”. John Galt: Observations and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society, edited by Regina Hewitt, Bucknell UP, 2012, pp. 53–71. Dunlop, John. The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction, from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age. James Ballantyne and Co, 1814. Dunn, Maggie and Ann Morris. The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition. Twayne, 1995. Evans, Walter. “The Early Nineteenth Century: 1800–1840”. Critical Survey of Short Fiction, edited by Charles E. May, Salem Press, 2012, pp. 188–203. Frow, John. Genre. Routledge, 2006. Galt, John. The Bachelor’s Wife; A Selection of Curious and Interesting Extracts, with Cursory Observations. Oliver & Boyd, 1824. ———. The Steam-Boat. William Blackwood, 1822. Garcha, Amanpal. From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2009.

88  Mark Ittensohn Garland Mann, Susan. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. Greenwood, 1989. Giles, Paul. Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of an American Literature, 1730–1860. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Hazlitt, William. The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte. Volume One. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, vol. XIII, edited by P.P. Howe, J.M. Dent, 1931. ———. The Spirit of the Age. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, vol. XI, edited by P.P. Howe, J.M. Dent, 1932. Irving, Washington. Bracebridge Hall; Tales of a Traveller; The Alhambra. The Library of America, 1991. Jarrells, Anthony. “Short Fictional Forms and the Rise of the Tale”. English and British Fiction 1750–1820, edited by Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 478–494. ———. “Tales”. The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, vol. III: Re-Z. ­Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 1368–1374. Jewsbury, Mary Jane. Phantasmagoria; or, Sketches of Life and Literature. Hurst, Robinson and Co., 1825. Kelly, Gary. English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830. Longman, 1989. Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Introduction: The American Short Story Sequence – Definitions and Implications”. Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, edited by Kennedy J. Gerald, Cambridge UP, 1995, pp. vii–xv. Killick, Tim. British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Rise of the Tale. Ashgate, 2008. ———. “The Rise of the Tale: A Preliminary Checklist of Collections of Short Fiction Published 1820–1829 in the Corvey Collection”. Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text 7, December 2001, http://sites.cardiff.ac.uk/­ romtext/files/2013/01/cc07_n04.pdf. “London Chit-Chat”. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. XI, January– June 1822, pp. 331–334. Lotman, Yuri. Universe of the Sign: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Tauris, 2001. Lundén, Rolf. The United Stories of America: Studies in the Short Story Composite. Rodopi, 1999. Lynch, Deidre. “Books on the Move”. BARS Conference, 28 Jul. 2013, University of Southampton. Martin, Terence. “Rip, Ichabod, and the American Imagination”. Washington Irving: The Critical Reaction, edited by James W. Tuttleton, AMS Press, 1993, pp. 56–66. Mitford, Mary Russell. “Bramley Maying”. Lady’s Magazine, 1823, pp. 280–283. ———. Our Village, edited by Sir John Squire, Dent, 1975. ———, editor. Stories of American Life by American Writers. Colburn and Bentley, 1830. Moretti, Franco. “Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History – 2”. NLR, vol. 26, March–April 2004, pp. 79–103. Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Louisiana State University Press, 2001.

A “shred and patch school of writing”  89 Ollive Mabbott, Thomas. “On Poe’s ‘Tales of the Folio Club’”. The Sewanee Review, vol. 36, no. 2, April 1928, pp. 171–176. Parker, Mark. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism. Cambridge UP, 2000. Piper, Andrew. Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. University of Chicago Press, 2009. Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot. Cambridge UP, 2000. Poe, Edgar Allan. “Tale-Writing – Nathaniel Hawthorne”. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Volume XIII: Literary Criticism – Volume VI, edited by James Harrison, AMS Press, 1965, pp. 141–155. ———. “The Old Curiosity Shop, and Other Tales”. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Volume X: Literary Criticism – Volume III, edited by James Harrison, AMS Press, 1965, pp. 142–155. Ritchie, Leitch. Tales and Confessions. Smith, Elder & Co., 1829. Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey. “Washington Irving as an American Romantic”. The Old and New World Romanticism of Washington Irving, edited by Stanley Brodwin, Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 35–48. St. Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge UP, 2007. Schoenfield, Mark. British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The ‘Literary’ Lower Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Scott, Sir Walter. The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, edited by W.E.K. Anderson, Clarendon, 1972. Smith, Herbert F. Introduction. Bracebridge Hall, Or The Humorists: A Medley by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, edited by Washington Irving and Herbert F. Smith. Twayne Publishers, 1977, pp. xiii–xxxiii. Stewart, David. Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture. ­Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Taylor, John Tinnon. Early Opposition to the English Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830. King’s Crown, 1943. Thomas, Dwight, and David K. Jackson. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1949. G.K. Hall & Co., 1987. Tynyanov, Yury. “The Literary Fact”. Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, Longman, 2000, pp. 30–49.

6 Recovered Coherence in an Early Short Story Cycle Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills Rainer Emig When Rudyard Kipling became the first English-language writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, his popularity was unquestioned. It rested both on his extremely popular poetry (although his most popular poem, “ – If”, would only appear in 1910) and on his equally successful stories, among them those of the two Jungle Books of 1894 and 1895 and the Just So Stories for Little Children of 1902. When the Swedish Academy praised Kipling as “the greatest genius in the realm of narrative that that country [Britain] has produced in our times” (Frenz 64), it was obvious that “narrative” did not refer primarily to novels but much more to the still quite recent genre of the short story. As is well known, the modern short story only came into being through the popularization and also increasing accessibility of periodicals in the second half of the nineteenth century, a genre that was relatively cheap and easy to consume and also relied on stories that would fit its scope and mission (cp. Flora xiv–xv; Hunter 6–7). In contrast to his poetry and short stories, Kipling’s only novels, The Light That Failed of 1891, Captains Courageous of 1897, and Kim of 1901, had indeed not been entirely convincing, not even for their author. In his autobiography, Kipling wrote about his first novel: “it was only a conte – not a built book” (Something of Myself 228). In his letters, he called his second one “thin, and tinny, and without passion” (­Letters 323). According to Alan Sandison, Kipling found even Kim, which, according to most critics, is by far his most accomplished e­ xcursion into novelistic territory, “plotless” and “highly episodic” (xiv). He never wrote another novel after these early attempts. John I. M. Stewart supports these views when he states that “Kipling excelled at telling a story but was inconsistent in producing balanced, cohesive novels”. Ironically, though, in our postcolonial and poststructuralist era, Kipling has also been praised for this supposed failure. Thus, Margery Sabin writes: The self-contained brevity of the short story, like a newspaper article, letter, or journal entry, legitimates a fragmentary form of narrative, without requiring a novel’s sustained development of character and plot. Kipling embraced this freedom to perfect a style of terse,

Recovered Coherence in an Early Short Story Cycle  91 worldly-wise insinuation that he knows more than he ever cares to tell. Abrupt turns of events and sudden, often ironic or ambiguous endings control and mask, rather than explore feelings. (267) It is interesting that she assumes that short stories are “self-contained”. She also conflates the narrator of Kipling’s Kim with its author and implies that late Victorian novels are largely about exploring feelings. Yet her emphasis on “[a]brupt turns of events and sudden, often ironic or ambiguous endings” also provides a bridge to the theme of coherence of the present volume. Coherence is indeed a feature that distinguishes novels from collections of short stories. Short story cycles, on the other hand, appear to sit on the fence – halfway between the sometimes rather random assemblage of unconnected short stories by one or more authors and the much more planned and organized array of related narratives in a novel. The present chapter will examine Kipling’s very first published short story cycle, Plain Tales from the Hills, to explore if and how it achieves coherence. A brief contextual sketch outlining the background of the production of this cycle of short stories will be provided before the analysis will embark on a dissection of formal features such as setting, plotlines, major and minor characters, but also narrative perspective. These formal features will be identified as crucial in the construction of coherence. Yet the analysis will also show that, far from unilaterally guaranteeing coherence, these very elements also contribute to an often humorous self-referentiality in Plain Tales from The Hills that undermines coherence again and might be seen to pave the way for even more modern experimental forms. No matter how much planning might have gone into them, short story cycles are as much the result of decisions made by authors as they are shaped by publishers. This is also true for Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills. The cycle consists of forty stories, twenty-nine of which had previously appeared anonymously in the Civil and Military Gazette published in Lahore in 1886 and 1887.1 Kipling had started work as a journalist for this military publication in 1882, when he was not yet 17 (cp. ­Sullivan 48). The cycle was also published in British India by Thacker, Spink & Co. in Calcutta. Notoriously, the journalistic background of the genre tarnished the reputation of the short story at the time of its emergence, even though many periodicals published serialized novels and short stories side by side, for example the Cornhill Magazine and Macmillan’s Magazine (cf. Cachin 187). Plain Tales from the Hills acknowledges this in its doubly ironic title. Its immediate reference is to Simla, one of the North Indian hill stations that served the British colonial forces as a welcome retreat during the hot summer season. But “Plain” as in lowlands also indicates the division

92  Rainer Emig between privileged colonizers and the locals who had to make do with the hot areas. It is certainly no coincidence that Kipling’s initial title for the volume was Punjab People Brown and White, although non-whites only play a larger role in a minority of the stories (Hagiioannu 19). “Plain” in the sense of simple and unadorned is, of course, also a reflection on the predominantly realist style of the new genre of the short story. As in many short story cycles, a cohesive element in Plain Tales from the Hills is the setting: all stories take place in and around the Hill Station at Simla. Another is that all of them deal either with the British colonial forces or their interaction with the local population. But there the similarities end, and the cycle has many surprises in store for the interested reader and critic. The first of these already manifests itself in the opening story. First and last stories in short story cycles, it can be argued, are often as important as beginnings and endings in narratives in general when it comes to directing the reader’s views on what the tales are about. This is, of course, true only if the cycle has a discernible internal structure. In the case of Plain Tales from the Hills, this is indeed the case, as we shall see, with a dramatic opening and eventually a self-referential ending featuring an unfinished book about a tragic character’s Oriental experiences. The first story in Plain Tales from the Hills is entitled “Lispeth”. If the reader now expects the tale of a British character, perhaps the wife of a British official or one of the many supposed ‘surplus women’ who were sent to the colonies to find husbands, they are proved wrong. 2 ­Lispeth is a local girl who is given the clearly aspirational English name ­“Elizabeth” by her poor parents. She grows into a great beauty and one day rescues an unconscious Englishman, whom she then presents to the local chaplain and his wife as her husband. The white couple are shocked at this, but the recovering Englishman is happy to play along and make love to Lispeth – before he leaves the place of his confinement, never to return. Lispeth continues to believe in her marriage to him, and the chaplain and his wife continue to make excuses for the man. It takes three years for Lispeth to see through the charade. Then she gives up, calls the ­British people who conspired to fool her liars, marries a local man who beats her, and starts to drink. The penultimate sentence of the text states that “Lispeth was a very old woman when she died. She always had a perfect command of English, and when she was sufficiently drunk, could sometimes be induced to tell the story of her first love-­ affair” (Plain Tales from the Hills 9). The surprise elements of the story are evident: an Indian character, and a female one at that, is the most active figure in the tale. Although the text calls her “savage” (6) and “heathen” (9) (through the direct speech of the missionary’s wife), and her people “unclean” (9) (in an indirect reporting of the common opinion about the natives), agency rests with Lispeth, and in narratological terms, this is the important point here, besides the obvious issues of gender or colonialism. Inside

Recovered Coherence in an Early Short Story Cycle  93 the frame provided by an anonymous authorial narrator, who is nonetheless clearly white and Western, storytelling remains within Lispeth’s power till the end. To emphasize this, we are informed of her “perfect command of English”. The expression (especially its sly ambiguous use of “command”) jars massively with Lispeth’s initial objectifying description by the narrator, which is both sexist and racist: Whether Christianity improved Lispeth, or whether the gods of her own people would have done as much for her under any circumstances, I do not know; but she grew very lovely. When a Hill-girl grows lovely, she is worth travelling fifty miles over bad ground to look upon. Lispeth had a Greek face – one of those faces people paint so often, and see so seldom. She was of a pale, ivory colour, and, for her race, extremely tall. Also, she possessed eyes that were wonderful; and, had she not been dressed in the abominable printcloths affected by Missions, you would, meeting her on the hillside unexpectedly, have thought her the original Diana of the Romans going out to slay. (2) Although the short story is narrated in seemingly neutral journalistic style, it is deeply ironic since it on the one hand uncritically reproduces the stereotypes concerning Indians of the chaplain and his wife and (through the authorial narrator) those of seemingly all its readers but then ends by permitting an Indian character to relate (repeatedly, it seems) the disgrace of an Englishman in her own words. This already constitutes a challenge to coherence: will these be stories told from a colonial perspective (as the reader expects)? Or will they be stories about the colonizers from a critical outside perspective? The answer, not surprisingly, is both. Kipling, even as a young man, was not blindly fascinated by India, although it offered him an escape from an unhappy life in Britain. It was, after all, the country of his birth, even though he had left it when he was only 5. He was certainly not dazzled by military life either: severely short-sighted, he was denied a military career and, as has been mentioned, worked in a supplementary position as a journalist – an outsider in many ways (cp. Bradshaw 80). The surprises in Plain Tales from the Hills continue in the second story, “Three and – an Extra”. It concerns “the clever, witty, brilliant and sparkling” (14) Mrs. Hauksbee, a character who reappears in three other tales of the cycle, who is bested by Mrs. Cusack-Bremmil when it comes to stealing the affections of Mr. Cusack-Bremmil: After marriage arrives a reaction, sometimes a big, sometimes a little one; but it comes sooner or later, and must be tided over by both parties if they desire the rest of their lives to go with the current.

94  Rainer Emig In the case of the Cusack-Bremmils this reaction did not set in till the third year after the wedding. […] Mrs. Hauksbee appeared on the horizon; and where she existed was fair chance of trouble. […] (13) This is a domestic tale of marital tensions, and once again females ­possess agency and indeed dominate the story. Coherence is achieved in a traditional manner – by having characters reappear in different stories. Here the character is particularly memorable because it is ­stereotypical. “Three and – an Extra” states: “You had only to ­mention her [Mrs. Hauksbee’s] name at afternoon teas for every woman in the room to rise up, and call her not blessed” (14). “Thrown Away”, the third story, returns to the colonial theme, but again with a twist. Its protagonist, an unnamed “Boy” who has had a sheltered upbringing, disappoints his parents’ expectations at Sandhurst and is sent to India for toughening up. There his problems increase through drinking, flirting, and gambling, and he eventually ends up shooting himself. The story opens, like the previous ones, with a detached impersonal narrator spouting conventional pearls of wisdom: To rear a boy under what parents call the “sheltered life system” is, if the boy must go into the world and fend for himself, not wise. Unless he be one in a thousand he has certainly to pass through many unnecessary troubles; and may, possibly, come to extreme grief simply from ignorance of the proper proportions of things. (23) But halfway through the short tale, this very narrator assumes the guise of a “we” to include the readers among the onlookers on the enfolding tragedy. Once it has happened, the narrator mutates into a character in the story who is discovered skulking about near the scene of the suicide: “Presently he came out and found me leaving cards on the Mess” (29). The previously heterodiegetic narrative changes into a homodiegetic one. More than that, together with the Boy’s Major, the narrator becomes a detective searching the Boy’s room, as well as a reader of his intimate farewell letters in which he declares himself a failure. Despite the tragic authenticity of the letters and their proven power that makes even the Major cry, they cannot be accepted as the Boy’s final narrative. Instead, the Major asks the narrator to help fabricate an alternative story of the Boy’s death: “Then he thought for a minute, and said: ‘Can you lie?’ ‘You know best,’ I answered. ‘It’s my profession’” (30): At last the Major dried his eyes openly, and said, “Nice sort of thing to spring on an English family! What shall we do?”

Recovered Coherence in an Early Short Story Cycle  95 I said, knowing what the Major had brought me out for, – “The Boy died of cholera. We were with him at the time. We can’t commit ourselves to half-measures. Come along.” Then began one of the most grimly comic scenes I have ever taken part in – the concoction of a big, written lie, bolstered with evidence, to soothe The Boy’s people at Home. (33) This is a typical strategy with regard to coherence and its simultaneous disruption in Plain Tales from the Hills. A clear cohesion of theme meets an absolute rupture in narrative perspective – including a self-referential questioning of the validity of all the stories in Plain Tales from the Hills. A collection of tales that otherwise signals a detached realism throughout becomes questioned and questionable when in one of its most tragic stories the manufacturing of reassuring lies for an audience at home in B ­ ritain becomes the issue.3 This shows how much formal issues of coherence are related to ethical issues of authenticity, which is, after all, an agreement between parties to consider certain pieces of evidence authentic. In the context of colonial issues, this potential subversion of a contract opens the way for critical postcolonial elements even inside colonial stories. Role reversals between natives and colonizers – such as the one already encountered in “Lispeth” – reappear in the subsequent stories, and so does marriage, but again not in the expected ways. In “Miss Youghal’s Sais”, a colonial officer ‘plays native’ to be with the British girl he loves. Yet, rather than conforming to a prototypical romance plot, the opening paragraph of the tale once again displays a snippet of conventional wisdom like the one already encountered in “Thrown Away”. What is then added in the next paragraph hovers uneasily between the style of objective journalistic reportage and the exoticized tone befitting a tale from the Arabian Nights: Some people say that there is no romance in India. Those people are wrong. Our lives hold quite as much romance as is good for us. Sometimes more. Strickland was in the Police, and people did not understand him; so they said he was a doubtful sort of man and passed by on the other side. (41) In “Yoked with an Unbeliever”, the title is another reversal of expectations, for who is the unbeliever in the tale, and who finds himself trapped in a marriage? The story is that of a failed Englishman who leaves his beloved Agnes behind to redeem himself in India. When she eventually follows him years later, as a widow, she not only finds him married to a local woman, but also discovers that

96  Rainer Emig Phil was very little altered, and Dunmaya was very nice to her. Now the particular sin and shame of the whole business is that Phil, who really is not worth thinking of twice, was and is loved by Dunmaya, and more than loved by Agnes, the whole of whose life he seems to have spoilt. Worst of all, Dunmaya is making a decent man of him; and he will be ultimately saved from perdition through her training. Which is manifestly unfair. (60) Instead of a conventional moral commentary, the reader is confronted with a weak exclamation, and one that stands in problematic opposition to the statements preceding it. Is this a happy ending or not? How can an ­Englishman be turned into a decent man by marriage to an Indian wife – who is even said to provide training for him? What is the meaning of love in the story when two very different women love a man who is not worth thinking about, a man who ruins their lives? The very casual ending of the story subverts not only colonial views, but also some very basic tenets of late Victorian society and culture. Many short stories in Plain Tales end with a twist, and so does this one. But who speaks, and from which perspective? It does not have to be stressed which sex once again has the agency here either. “False Dawn”, the subsequent story, is again about marriage, here the accidental proposal of a member of the Indian Civil Service to the wrong one of two sisters: Never praise a sister to a sister, in the hope of your compliments reaching the proper ears, and so preparing the way for you later on. Sisters are women first, and sisters afterwards; and you will find that you do yourself harm. Saumarez knew this when he made up his mind to propose to the elder Miss Copleigh. (63) In terms of narrative perspective, it is significant that once again the narrator is involved, and the story shifts from a heterodiegetic perspective to a homodiegetic one. Like all of its companion stories, it starts with what appears to be an impersonal pearl of wisdom: “No man will ever know the exact truth of this story” (63). At the same time, though, it also reminds the reader of the constant play with potential unreliability that goes on in the stories. First, the narrator enters the tale innocuously enough in a comment: “I ­ opleigh maintain it was the hot April days that took the color out of the C girls’ cheeks” (66), only to then become an explicit witness of the fatal picnic and eventually an active party in the solution of the conflict: I could not tell her in as many words what Saumarez had told me. I thought he could do that better himself. All her pretence about being

Recovered Coherence in an Early Short Story Cycle  97 tired and wanting to go home broke down, and she rocked herself to and fro in the saddle as she sobbed, and the hot wind blew her black hair to leeward. I am not going to repeat what she said, because she was utterly unstrung. (74–75) The reversal of the narrative situation is astonishing, as is its ­subversion – which nonetheless picks up the tale’s beginning. After seemingly knowing everything, then observing everything, and then even acting, now the narrator tells us that he is withholding information (just as, in the earlier story “Thrown Away”, we were told that a storyteller can be a professional liar). Lest we forget, “Three and – an Extra” had ominously declared “But that is another story” (14), as if it wanted to tease the reader with the possibility of innumerable alternative narratives or just pertinent additional information. In terms of coherence, we once again find that it is simultaneously ­established – if the narrator can be active on all fronts, so to speak, as detached and involved observer and even as a protagonist – and at the same time massively disturbed, since the actual dramatic climax, the reaction of one sister and the subsequent face-to-face talk between the siblings, is strategically left out of the tale. In a later story, “In the House of Suddhoo”, despite his initial declaration, “Then there is Me, of course; but I am only the chorus that comes in at the end to explain things. So I do not count” (198), the capitalized narrator even becomes an accessory to a crime. After the dramatic events of the tale, his confession at its end is again ironic since it is couched, once more, in the language of journalistic reportage or witness statement: Now, the case stands thus. Unthinkingly, I have laid myself open to the charge of aiding and abetting the seal-cutter in obtaining money under false pretences, which is forbidden by Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code. I am helpless in the matter for these reasons. I cannot inform the Police. What witnesses would support my statements? (209) The witnesses here could only be the readers, who would thus become implicated in the story. The text’s self-referentiality becomes unpleasant for its audience, a factor that disturbs its otherwise coherent appearance. “Cupid’s Arrow” is another tale about courtship in which the expert archer, Miss Beighton, deliberately loses an archery contest in which the (at least for her mother) highly desirable Commissioner Barr-Saggott is offering a diamond bracelet to the winner. In the end, she leaves with young ­Cubbon, a junior officer, whom she secretly loves. The really interesting detail is the tale’s final sentence, which takes up the ending of “False Dawn” – but with

98  Rainer Emig another twist: “the rest isn’t worth printing” (100). Kipling’s narrator not only shows an awareness of literary conventions here (after all, already the title of the tale, “Cupid’s Arrow”, is strongly clichéd), but also of the economic production conventions of the short story. Not worth printing is, of course, tongue-in-cheek since the story is complete and printed, and the reader knows very well what its outcome will be. Surprise paired with consolation or disruption that happens inside an ­otherwise clearly signalled coherence: once again, these appear to be crucial elements in the formula of Kipling’s cycle of short stories. Here, this formula again veers towards self-referentiality, a feature that is still relatively rare in short stories of this period but frequent in all of Kipling’s writings. The subsequent tale in the Indian edition of Plain Tales from the Hills, “The Three Musketeers”, goes several steps further in creating coherence even beyond the framework of the short story cycle. It introduces three soldiers, an Irishman, a Cockney, and a Yorkshireman, as personal friends of the narrator. A narrator who immediately claims intimacy with his characters, of course, signals authenticity. The three soldiers indeed reappear, but they do so in another short story cycle by Kipling, tellingly named Soldiers Three, of 1888. Private Mulvaney also reappears in a later story in the Indian edition of Plain Tales from the Hills entitled “The Taking of Lungtungpen”, which incidentally – and rather eccentrically – shows a group of British soldiers taking a hostile Burmese town in the buff. (Although most critics are aware of the differences between the two simultaneous original editions of Plain Tales from the Hills, they still await proper scrutiny.) “His Chance in Life”, a complex story of authority and its loss in the face of a local riot, the result of a conflict between Hindus and Muslims, is also a story of a tragic mixed-race character and full of overtly racist ideas of blood and the ability to rule: If you go straight away from Levées and Government House Lists, past Trades’ Balls – far beyond everything and everybody you ever knew in your respectable life – you cross, in time, the Borderline where the last drop of White blood ends and the full tide of Black sets in. […] One of these days, this people […] will turn out a writer or a poet; and then we shall know how they live and what they feel. In the meantime, any stories about them cannot be absolutely correct in fact or inference. (103–104) Yet, as the final sentence of the above quotation indicates, the story also once again employs a self-reflexive narrative strategy that has now been observed several times – and again in an ironic and subversive way. Here is a text narrated by a white narrator about a racial conflict, and it claims

Recovered Coherence in an Early Short Story Cycle  99 that it can therefore not claim to be entirely correct. “It was a nasty little riot, but not worth putting in the newspapers” (108), the narrator eventually adds. The story is one of those in Plain Tales from the Hills that had not appeared before in the Civil and Military Gazette. So, technically the statement is true. And yet its tongue-in-cheek throwaway remark about editorial decisions is of course countered by the very fact that the riot features in detail in the short story itself. A related attitude is apparent in “The Arrest of Lieutenant Golightly”, where the narrator is told by one of Golightly’s Majors that he “would not tell the Mess about it […], but you can if you like, now that Golightly has gone Home” (193). Even an omniscient narrative perspective can be used for subversive effect in the stories – when it poses as mere journalistic reporting. In “Consequences”, the predatory Mrs. Hauksbee returns once more and helps a young man get promoted by obtaining secret documents that he can then return to the authorities: Mrs. Hauksbee began calculating the prices of all the Heads of Departments and Members of Council she knew, and the more she thought the more she laughed, because her heart was in the game and it amused her. Then she took a Civil List and ran over a few of the appointments. (139) This is the tale’s ending: What Tarion [sic] said when he saw his appointment gazetted was: – “If Mrs. Hauksbee were twenty years younger, and I her husband, I should be Viceroy of India in twenty years.” What Mrs. Hauksbee said, when Tarrion thanked her, almost with tears in his eyes, was first: – “I told you so!” and next, to herself: – “What fools men are!” (145) Once again, cliché is countered by its subversive reversal. And yet, even this reversal – in terms of the gendered perspectives on who evaluates whom – remains a cliché.4 In this way, however, what appears to be a gender issue on the plane of the story’s plot becomes a formal issue of coherence versus incoherence. It replicates the pattern that has already been observed several times. The stories seem to conform to expectations of coherence (through the use of stereotype or cliché, for instance), but they also disappoint the same expectations again by reversing clichés or by exposing them self-referentially through jumps in narrative perspective. Such jumps unmask the entire narrative as potentially biased or even manipulative. The consequences for colonial as well as gendered storytelling are evident.

100  Rainer Emig The final story in Plain Tales from the Hills represents such a shift towards critical self-referentiality. Its appropriate title is “To Be Held for Reference”. It implies the obligation of a journalist to store his sources. In the story, though, the object to be held for reference is the memoirs of a drunkard, McIntosh. More than a drunkard, McIntosh is a mess, a failed Oxford man (“I who was once Fellow of a College”; 446), and now a self-declared hybrid of East and West who has married a local wife and converted to Islam: In most big cities natives will tell you of two or three Sahibs, generally low-caste, who have turned Hindu or Mussulman, and who live more or less as such. But it is not often that you can get to know them. As McIntosh himself used to say, “If I change my religion for my stomach’s sake, I do not seek to become a martyr to missionaries, nor am I anxious for notoriety.” (442) Gail Ching-Liang Low pinpoints that this is exactly what makes the character interesting for the narrator of the short story: The narrator’s nocturnal visits to his loafer friend are a form of education. McIntosh Jellaludin’s mind was a “perfect rag-bag of useless things”, a hybrid list of classical quotations, literary knowledge, native customs and languages. But it is precisely this hybrid world which attracts the narrator’s attention and it is McIntosh Jellaludin’s knowledge of native customs that the frame-narrator covets for his own artistic ends. (254) Ultimately, McIntosh Jellaludin leaves his memoirs to the narrator, that you do not let my book die in its present form. It is yours ­ nconditionally – the story of McIntosh Jellaludin, which is not the u story of McIntosh Jellaludin, but of a greater man than he, and of a far greater woman. Listen now! I am neither mad nor drunk! That book will make you famous. (451) What the narrator finds, however, is a “big bundle of old sheets” (452), which he nonetheless edits with the aim of publishing them: “One of these days, you may be able to judge for yourselves” (452). Playfully or seriously, responsibility for the tale is shifted onto the reader. More than that, in terms of genre, in a clever and again self-referential way, the short story cycle ends with a hint at a teasingly withheld much longer and much more coherent narrative. The cycle creates a coherence

Recovered Coherence in an Early Short Story Cycle  101 between its stories partly through conventional means, such as a unifying setting. It also employs recurring characters, although it is capable of re-evaluating them (even the notorious Mrs. Hauksbee can appear selfless in “Consequences” and in “The Rescue of Pluffles”). Coherence through a common theme is omnipresent (after all, these are all tales of colonial life in British India) – but also often absent, and this opens the parade of ambivalences that is typical of Kipling’s ironically involved and simultaneously detached style. Despite being stories about Britons in India, they are only partly told from a British perspective (a later tale, “The Story of Muhammad Din”, is, like “Lispeth”, entirely about an Indian character and even prefaced with a quotation by a probably invented Indian sage “Munichandra” (397) – in the same way that the name “Jellaludin” is that of a Medieval Sufi poet). The short stories in Plain Tales from the Hills are certainly not uncritical of the British, and this ruptures and destabilizes the characters that ought to provide identification for the reader. The most radical onslaught on coherence, however, is the effect of the constantly shifting narrative perspective. Its strategically employed instability disturbs coherence – by changing position, sometimes from an omniscient heterodiegetic to a homo- and even autodiegetic one. The effect is also a vastly increased self-referentiality of the tales, a knowing acknowledgement of their constructedness that counteracts any semblance of naïve realism. This realism, however, is also not fully established by the sections presented in seemingly objective journalistic reporting style, nor, certainly, is it contained in the many conventional truisms that regularly open the tales – only to be subverted by their plots. The final tale about a teller of tales who is sponged upon by another would-be writer who struggles to turn messy intertextual fragments and hybrid knowledges into a coherent narrative is, of course, nothing but a self-ironizing depiction of Kipling’s position as a writer, especially as the ‘author’ of tales from British India. Yet, all these complex manoeuvres are performed with such stylistic aplomb that the jumps from worldly-wise and often sardonic truisms to personal authentication or even intradiegetic involvement strike the reader as pleasing irony rather than as distressing violation of coherence. Plain Tales from the Hills, this chapter has demonstrated, are not plain at all, but instead offer a vast generic and stylistic plane on which the early short story cycle can already stretch its muscles and tease out its potential.

Notes 1 The publication history of these short stories – and that of Plain Tales from the Hills – is complicated, as Norman Page attests: Actually 29 of the original series of 39 ‘Plain Tales’ [in the Gazette] were included in the collection; three others had appeared in the Gazette but

102  Rainer Emig had not formed part of the original series; and eight were now printed for the first time. Of the original series of 39, it seems that six were possibly not (or not wholly) by Kipling. (36) 2 “The 1851 census showed that 30 per cent of English women aged 20 to 40 were unmarried. By the late 19th century, around a third of British women between the ages of 25 to 35 were unmarried, and census records show that an imbalance of men and women continued in the Edwardian years” (Wall). 3 On lying in Kipling’s colonial tales, see Ambreen Hai. 4 On the ambivalences of depicting femininity and the character Mrs. ­Hauksbee, see Indrani Sen 16–17.

Works Cited Bradshaw, David. “Kipling and War”. The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling, edited by Howard J. Booth, Cambridge UP, 2011, pp. 80–94. Cachin, Marie-Françoise. “Victorian Novels in France”. The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, edited by Lisa Rodensky, Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 185–205. Flora, Joseph M. The English Short Story, 1880–1945: A Critical History. Twayne, 1985. Frenz, Horst, editor. Nobel Lectures Literature, 1901–1967. World Scientific Publishing, 1999. Hagiioannu, Andrew. The Man Who Would be Kipling: The Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Hai, Ambreen. “On Truth and Lie in a Colonial Sense: Kipling’s Tales of Tale-Telling”. ELH, vol. 64, no. 2, Summer 1997, pp. 599–625. Hunter, Adrian. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English. Cambridge UP, 2007. Kipling, Rudyard. Plain Tales from the Hills. 1888. The Nottingham Society, 1909. ———. Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown, The Dominions Edition, Macmillan, 1937. ———. Letters: 1890–1899, vol. II, edited by Thomas Pinney. University of Iowa Press, 1990. Low, Gail Ching-Liang. White Skins/Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism. Routledge, 1996. Page, Norman. A Kipling Companion. Macmillan Press, 1984. Sabin, Margery. “Colonial India and Victorian Storytelling”. The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, edited by Lisa Rodensky, Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 248–271. Sandison, Alan. “Introduction.” Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, 1901, Oxford UP, 2008, pp. xiii–xxx. Sen, Indrani. “Gendering (Anglo) India: Rudyard Kipling and the Construction of Women”. Social Scientist, vol. 28, no. 9/10, September/October 2000, pp. 12–32.

Recovered Coherence in an Early Short Story Cycle  103 Stewart, John I. M. “Rudyard Kipling”. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, www. britannica.com/biography/Rudyard-Kipling. Accessed 31 March 2017. Sullivan, Zohreh T. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge UP, 1993. Wall, Rosemary. “‘Surplus Women’: A Legacy of World War One?” World War I Centenary, http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/?p=2345. Accessed 31 March 2017.

7 A Cycle of Dislocation Katherine Mansfield, Modernism, and Proto-Postcolonialism Gerri Kimber This chapter examines a cycle of five early short stories by the New ­Zealand-born modernist Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923). These stories, four of which were published in the British avant-garde little magazines Rhythm and the Blue Review, display a conspicuous leaning towards an exposé of the harsh realities of colonial life and represent a markedly different cycle from her later, more overtly modernist work. This early cycle can be considered in the context of proto-­postcolonialism, where modernist cosmopolitanism takes second place to the underdeveloped periphery. Mansfield’s stories in this category can thus be read as an important and ground-breaking cycle within her overall oeuvre. In addition, whilst most critics affirm that Mansfield first turned to writing about New Zealand as a response to her brother’s death in 1915, this cycle refutes such a suggestion. As Anna Snaith confirms, she was, in fact, “‘returning home’ from the moment she arrived in London” (113). The case of Mansfield reveals, for Elleke Boehmer, “how aspects of what we now term modernism crystallized around certain colonial experiences (in particular, of exile and cultural alienation), and colonial and nascent national energies (especially of making it new)” (59). In such stories, Mansfield’s sense of place, of her roots in her native New Zealand, is striking, revealing her search for the authentic in a European world where she had initially felt herself isolated and ‘false’.

I. Mansfield’s Posthumous Story Cycles In the second half of the twentieth century, two editors of Mansfield’s stories produced collections concentrating on her stories based in New Zealand, seeing in them a New Zealand cycle, a body of work that might read almost like a novel, with recurring families and backdrops. The first such collection, by Ian A. Gordon (1974), comprises a general cycle of fifty-nine stories, grouped into specific sub-cycles: “Spring: the Burnells”, “Summer: The Sheridans”, “Summer’s End”, “Winter”, and “Scenes from Colonial Life”. In the second collection, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan (1997), there are no such specific cycle groupings; instead, he groups a personal selection of twenty-nine stories into one general “New Zealand” cycle, in chronological order of writing.

A Cycle of Dislocation  105 More recently, the publisher Persephone published yet another posthumously constructed Mansfield cycle, called The Montana Stories (2001), containing the twenty-five stories (including incomplete fragments) ­Mansfield wrote whilst residing in Montana, Switzerland from June 1921 to the end of January 1922. As the publishers themselves admit, Publishing her work as “the Montana stories” is unlikely to have been how Katherine Mansfield herself would have wanted it to be read. [Yet] these stories total about 80,000 words, the length of a novel, a great achievement for someone feverish and in pain. (vii) There is a creative dissonance, of course, in creating these heterogeneous cycles, since Mansfield deliberately chose the short story genre as her preferred mode of writing, and yet the three volumes above seek to corral her work so that it conforms to an entirely different genre altogether: that of the novel. In this way, the short story reverts to its reputation as the poor relation to the longer novel genre. What is more, some of the stories found in the Montana volume are also found in the other two collections edited by Gordon and O’Sullivan, since Mansfield may have been residing in Switzerland but her subject matter was frequently New Zealand. Gordon goes some way to justifying his New Zealand cycle creations by claiming that it is an attempt to underline those themes that dominated her life as a mature artist […creating] a cohesion that Katherine might herself have imposed had she lived to organise the final arrangement of her work. Her mind was working in that direction. In one of her notebooks (begun in August 1920) she writes that she must “really get down to my novel Karori”. The present collection is probably as close as we shall ever come to Karori. (xiii–xiv) In that sense, Gordon’s sub-cycles as outlined above, grouped into specific themes, work very well, and the reader can trace the lives of the ­Burnell/Sheridan family almost as if they were reading a novel. ­O’Sullivan’s rationale is more problematic. He believes that to take these stories in chronological sequence and as a group “defines, rather more acutely than we might have thought, how emphases fall differently than in her other fiction” (14). Thus, his New Zealand selection is ordered chronologically into one basic cycle, with no subject coherence other than that all the stories are set somewhere in that country. This disparate quality, where a story in the collection can seem unrelated to what came before and what follows it, makes the notion of a cycle seem almost redundant (the same is true, of course, of the Montana collection).

106  Gerri Kimber Although still a fabrication, Gordon’s collection in particular reveals how the relationship between authorial and ‘readerly’ constructions of coherence and cyclicity seems to offer the most useful model, creating believable sub-cycles that make the effort seem worthwhile. Nevertheless, all these story cycles, including my own proposed here, serve numerous purposes: they maintain Mansfield’s reputation as a short story writer, they enable scholars to reflect on her stories in new and different ways, and they keep her oeuvre current and accessible. They also affirm Mansfield’s own preference for the short story cycle, especially in her early years as a writer.

II. Mansfield’s First Story Cycle: In a German Pension Mansfield’s first published book, In a German Pension (1911), is a perfect example of a place-based story cycle and demonstrates her natural proclivity for the genre. The stories are set in a German spa town, where an unnamed female narrator describes the daily routines of the guests in a typical German ‘pension’, or boarding house, as they undertake their various ‘cures’. The narrator is ‘othered’ by the fact that she is ­English-speaking (though being a New Zealander, is not actually ­English) and is therefore different to the other residents. The stories have many themes in common aside from their location in a German spa town, one of the most obvious being the failure to communicate, both between the sexes and between German- and English-speaking people. Another theme is the revelation of the true horrors of childbirth, as well as the condemnation of voracious male sexual appetites. The unnamed narrator of several of the stories is herself a mystery, for nowhere do we learn why she has come to the spa town; her reasons are never clarified in the way they are with some of the other pension residents. Three of the stories, “At Lehmann’s”, “A Birthday”, and “The Child-Who-Was-Tired”, are different from the others, since their most overt theme is childbirth. In “At Lehmann’s”, an innocent young servant is left traumatized, both by the terrifying realities of her mistress’s pregnancy and labour, and the sexual advances of a predatory male. The physical pain of childbirth is also revealed in “A Birthday”, where a selfish husband considers his own mental strain during the process of childbirth rather than his wife’s physical pain. In the most depressing story of them all, “The Child-Who-Was-Tired”, a very young, overworked, and underfed servant girl resorts to the suffocation of one of the babies in her charge when she finds out her mistress is pregnant again. In a fourth story, “Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding”, the constant assertion of conjugal rights leaves Frau Brechenmacher at the mercy of her husband’s sexual appetites. Here Mansfield sends out a clear message about gender relationships, and the general unhappiness, subjugation,

A Cycle of Dislocation  107 and physical suffering of the female, in contrast to the selfishness, greed, and sexual appetites of the male. In this cycle of stories, the setting is semi-autobiographical, as are a number of the themes. The horrific experience Mansfield underwent during 1909 – giving birth in Bavaria to a stillborn child whilst staying in a Pension – is interwoven into these stories with an insightful mockery of the hypochondriac ‘cure’ residents. In the final story of the collection, “A Blaze”, all previous assumptions are turned on their head. Here the predator is not a man but a cold and calculating married woman who is conducting an affair with her husband’s best friend, the implication being that for once, the woman is the one in control. It’s a clever twist by Mansfield to end the collection on, implying, perhaps, that neither extreme is to be welcomed. Moreover, even though these stories rely on hegemonic, imperial undertones, the unnamed, first-person colonial narrator (for she speaks English but is not English) offers a subversive element to the cycle. Tellingly, the volume was marketed by the publishers as a “six-shilling novel”, rather than a collection of short stories, as well as a “delightful literary novelty” (1911, publisher’s blurb), thus asserting the cyclical nature of the stories themselves. Indeed, the story cycle, in a tradition going back to Homer, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, was particularly popular at this time, as Dominic Head attests, filling “the need of readers for brevity in an increasingly fast-paced and distracting culture, while also supplying the kind of explanatory framework found in the novel” (13). Reviewers were positive, calling the collection “‘impish’, ‘lively’, ‘caustic,’ ‘amusing’ and ‘original’” (qtd. in Tomalin 1987, 94). Mansfield, then, with her first published book under her belt at the age of just 23, was receptive to new literary challenges. Having published a middlebrow first book, presented as a story cycle, written under – and reflecting – her then difficult personal circumstances, she now sought a more worthy, highbrow outlet for her literary endeavours, whilst at the same time contributing satirical sketches and parodies for the weekly paper, the New Age.

III. Rhythm and the Blue Review In December 1911 (the same month that In a German Pension was published), in retaliation for a perceived slight with the New Age, Mansfield sent a story to a new little magazine called Rhythm. Its co-editors, John Middleton Murry, his Oxford friend Michael Sadler, and J. D. ­Fergusson (a Scottish artist whom Murry had met in Paris earlier in 1911), had produced the first issue of Rhythm in the summer of 1911. From the very outset, Rhythm’s editorial slant was towards ‘the ideal of a new art’. As the editors famously stated in the first issue, “Before art can be human it must learn to be brutal.” Our intention is to provide art, be it drawing, literature or criticism, which shall be

108  Gerri Kimber vigorous, determined, which shall have its roots below the surface, and be the rhythmical echo of the life with which it is in touch. (36) The initial, ambitious aim of the magazine was to champion new French art, literature, and philosophy for an English audience; this included the philosophy of Henri Bergson, fauvism, and the French literary fantaisistes. Many of the contributors, alive and dead – such as Picasso, ­Goncharova, Derain, and van Gogh – would go on to become establishment names. Angela Smith notes how many ‘Rhythmists’ displayed a sense of exuberance in their work, partly attributable to their discovery of a more metropolitan milieu in which to develop experimentation and their “voluntary exile from their own national, social, and familial constraints” (78). As far as the established art world was concerned, as exiles they were also outlaws, “occupying a position at odds with or opposed to a received mainstream […] out of a conviction that they stood for something better or more modern. This placed them in an alternative or counter public sphere of cultural formation” (Brooker and Thacker 29). Moreover, roughly half of the regular contributors to Rhythm were, unusually, women; they included Mansfield herself, Fergusson’s then partner, the American artist Anne Estelle Rice, Jessica ­Dismorr, and Dorothy ‘Georges’ Banks. As Peter Brooker notes, discussing “this woven cultured alliance” in Paris between 1907 and 1914, “one senses […] the rare existence of a mixed and congenial, relatively democratically organized, male and female artistic community” (334–335). This then was the little magazine to which Mansfield turned. The story she sent was “The Woman at the Store”, which had almost certainly been written (or drafted, at least) before Mansfield left New Zealand in 1908, reflecting, as it does, images and memories from a three-week camping trip to the then remote Urewera region of the North Island of New Zealand that she had undertaken towards the end of 1907. It fitted the brief of the new magazine perfectly. Raw, stark, with a brutal subplot, it captured colonial life at its most primitive and was a marked departure from the Pension stories, which had all been set in ‘civilized’ Europe. It was Mansfield’s entry into the European avant-garde: a ‘modern’ colonial writer, offering a new mode of writing from the farthest flung outpost of the Empire. As Snaith remarks, “publishing the story in Rhythm was a way of disguising or weakening Mansfield’s connections to the ‘Maoriland’ tradition of outback writing, thus emphasizing the newness of the text rather than its position in a literary tradition” (129). “The Woman at the Store” was not the first time Mansfield had written about the backblocks of New Zealand, or indeed about the Maori. Maori characters are prevalent in some of her juvenile stories such as “A True Tale” (1903), “Summer Idyll” (1907), and “Vignette: Sunset Tuesday” (1907). In these early stories, Mansfield’s sense of place, of her

A Cycle of Dislocation  109 roots in her native New Zealand, is striking. There are realistic characters drawn here, with Mansfield’s acute eye detailing clothes, surroundings, and shapes in order to bring them to life. The five New Zealand-based stories published during 1912–1913 form a subconscious story cycle in Mansfield’s work at a specific moment in her writing career: a proto-postcolonial cycle, indigenous to the land of her birth, framed by the discourses of empire and written at a point in time when she was attempting to distinguish herself amongst a group of London intellectuals by offering something ‘raw’. The other stories in this cycle, written for either Rhythm or the Blue Review, are “How Pearl Button was Kidnapped” (1912), “Ole Underwood” (1913), and “Millie” (1913). To this list I would also add “Old Tar”, which was published in the Saturday Westminster Gazette in October 1913, both Rhythm and the Blue Review having ceased publication by then and Mansfield clearly seeking new outlets for her stories. The postcolonial subject matter of this five-story cycle would never be repeated. Within the space of a year and half, Mansfield created a glimpse into a world she had left behind, and which she would never see again. As Snaith notes, “As she negotiated her place in avant-garde, literary London, she did so via a consideration of how she might ‘write’ New Zealand […] in the context of key modernist magazines” (111). Resonances of such an approach would continue on in her fiction, for many of her most celebrated stories are set in New Zealand, but their subject matter no longer concerned the brutal or the raw aspect of colonialism, but rather the minutiae of daily life, thus putting Mansfield at the forefront of modernist writing and relegating the postcolonial aspect of these later stories to a mere detail.

IV. “The Woman at the Store” (1912) Maoriland writing is the term given to refer to New Zealand literary culture between approximately 1888 (coincidentally the year of Mansfield’s birth) and the outbreak of war in 1914. Maoriland writing utilizes the indigenous mythology, culture and legends of the Maori in order to convey a sort of New Zealand realism. As Janet Wilson notes, the “multi-lingual, generically mixed utterances and diverse lexical strands of Mansfield’s modernist renovation by which she created a transformed verbal environment […] can only be described as colonial New Zealand modernist” (“Introduction” 3). Here, however, and in the other stories which comprise this cycle, Mansfield, negotiating her new European life, deliberately invokes the “savage spirit” of colonial New Zealand, where white settler certainty is “undermined in an aesthetics of narrative ­fracture […] – ellipses, omissions, paradox, […] constituent of the divided and ruptured condition of colonialism” (Wilson, “Mansfield as (Post)Colonial-Modernist” 29).

110  Gerri Kimber “The Woman at the Store” tells the story of three travellers who ask to set up their tent for the night at a dusty backblocks store in the middle of nowhere, run only by a haggard woman, old before her time, and her dim-witted, traumatized, small daughter, the husband having, according to the woman, gone “shearing”. One of the travellers remembers the woman from before her marriage, when she was much prettier and less careworn, and sleeps with her. The other two travellers engage with the young child who, in a drawing, reveals exactly what happened to her father, in an image showing him being shot and then buried by her mother. The story is immediately recognizable as colonial in subject matter as a result of its ‘othered’ description from the very outset:1 All that day the heat was terrible. The wind blew close to the ground […] so that the white pumice dust swirled in our faces […]. There was nothing to be seen but wave after wave of tussock grass – patched with purple orchids and manuka bushes covered with thick spider webs. (268) As she wrote the story, Mansfield must have had on her desk in front of her the notebook from November–December 1907, where she recorded every detail of her camping trip to the remote Urewera region in the North Island of New Zealand. Gordon reveals how that the language in the notebook and the story is frequently identical, with phrases and incidents transferred from one to the other: The “heat” and the “chuffing” horses, the “shrilling” larks, the collocation of tussock and orchid and manuka, the rider’s “blue duck” trousers, the whare’s “horsehair sofa”, the “swampy creek”, the absent man who is “away shearing” […] all are in the notebook in virtually the same words. (28) As noted earlier, it is also entirely possible that this story was drafted whilst still in New Zealand and then simply worked up for p ­ ublication in 1912. In an interview many years after Mansfield’s death, Tom S­ eddon, the former New Zealand prime minister’s son, remembered bumping into Mansfield in Rotorua, during her Urewera trip, where he was also staying at that time: Sitting on a bench under some willows in the drizzling rain, and looking very despondent, was Kass. She said, “I’m travelling in a caravan with some people father doesn’t approve of and I feel miserable but I’ve written a marvellous story”. (qtd. in Kimber, Early Years 227)

A Cycle of Dislocation  111 Indeed, Snaith has argued that Mansfield’s early fiction “emerges out of travel writing. She is literally on the move (parts of the notebook were written in the moving wagon), passing by her subjects, constantly shifting the lens through which they are viewed” (127). Even on this trip, in her own country, Mansfield and her travel companions had an insecure status, since, according to Jane Stafford and Mark Williams, [s]he was a member of the colonial upper class, but neither English nor an imperialist. Her status was enmeshed in the shifting relations between New Zealand as a nascent nation (a cause in which the term Maoriland had already been conscripted) and empire. (162) And once in Europe, the bifurcation of her position was upheld, since neither there nor in her colonial homeland was she able to find any sense of permanently ‘belonging’. The ambiguously female-gendered narrator (for much of the story, at least), unnamed, like “the woman”, but unlike the two male travellers, Jo and Hin, complicates the subversive element of the text. As Lydia Wevers notes, such a novel approach “rewrite[s] the preoccupations of colonial self-representation” (45). The story also demonstrates many embryonic features of Mansfield’s later modernist style, as she synthesized and reworked late nineteenth-century techniques, together with this early colonial content, into her own ‘special prose’. As a reminder of the colonial aspect of the story, the walls of the store are “plastered with old pages of English periodicals. Queen ­Victoria’s ­Jubilee appeared to be the most recent number” (270). The Golden ­Jubilee had taken place in 1887 and the Diamond Jubilee in 1897; whichever Jubilee is being referred to, the scene depicted points to one of poverty, where magazines, long out of date, having travelled many thousands of miles throughout the Empire, are deemed a suitable replacement for expensive wallpaper. The contrast between the dazzling scenes of pomp and majesty on the pages themselves and the dirty, impoverished walls they now cover, in one of the most remote outposts of Empire, is deliberate. In this story, and the others in Mansfield’s colonial cycle, the effects of colonialism on women are key. Mansfield reveals how the woman has clearly been abused by her husband, her teeth knocked out, and has had several miscarriages as a result of being battered. In turn, the woman abuses the living things around her, kicking and beating animals and her own small child. Jo remembers when the woman had had “blue eyes and yellow hair” (269) and “knew one hundred and t­ wenty-five different ways of kissing” (272). Brutalized, the woman is still, nevertheless, prepared to sleep with him, taking comfort where she can.

112  Gerri Kimber In this story, Mansfield depicts the frequently brutal repercussions of colonialism, with its legacy of violence, for many women at the edge of Empire. It also reveals “the Gothic strain of psychic decay and murder”, which is “deconstructive to utopian ideas of New Zealand settlement” ­(Mercer 103), for there is seemingly nothing utopian about life in these dark and violent backblocks. Nothing better illustrates the change of direction in Mansfield’s fiction, away from the satirical and ‘clever’ sketches for the New Age, than this first piece for Rhythm. It confirmed, for the first time, Mansfield’s identity as a postcolonial writer, ahead of her later reputation at the vanguard of European literary modernism. This postcolonial stance would, of course, enhance her modernist outlook, where the notion of being ‘an outsider’, as Wilson reveals, enables the ability to challenge the hierarchical ­status quo “of the metropolitan centre over the underdeveloped periphery, of male modernists like Joyce, Eliot, and Yeats, over women writers, of modernist genres of novel and poetry over that of the short story” (“Introduction” 1). The complete fragmentation of society after the First World War, which saw exiled writers migrating towards imperial centres, together with the “disruption of cultural and social certainties” (2) and the contact with new, unfamiliar cultures, is presaged in this story cycle. Mansfield herself remained an ‘outsider’; as Elizabeth Bowen notes, “In London, she lived, as strangers are wont to do, in a largely self-fabricated world. […] Amid the etherealities of Bloomsbury she was more than half hostile, a dark-eyed tramp” (128). Indeed, Mansfield at this time would occasionally dress as a Maori, 2 perhaps, as Bridget Orr notes, in order to exploit the exoticism of her background, but also, perhaps, as means of enhancing her ‘otherness’ within a metropolitan context (56).

V. “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped” (1912) This story, first published in Rhythm in September 1912, continues Mansfield’s cycle of ‘modern’ colonial stories. Its title references an earlier unpublished piece called “The Story of Pearl Button”, written in the autumn of 1907, about a little girl starting school for the first time; the reference to “two great paua shells” in her hands offers the suggestion that she may be Maori. Mansfield clearly remembered the name of the child in this story and liked it, since it was reused in her 1912 story. (In another reworking, “Pearl Fulton” was the name used for one of the protagonists in “Bliss” [1918]). The subject matter is very different, however, and the little girl is no longer Maori but Pakeha (white settler). Here, in Mansfield’s only published story that offers a significant representation of Maori, a young girl is apparently abducted by two Maori women, taken away from her “House of Boxes” (a reference to the uniform banality of settler homes and lives), as she swings on her garden gate (thus emphasizing the liminal, transgressive crossing of boundaries

A Cycle of Dislocation  113 in the story). She is taken on a journey into a natural world setting, free from convention, where physical affection is plentiful. She learns to let go of ‘colonial’, Western societal restrictions such as keeping her clothes neat and tidy and her hair tied back and wearing shoes, stockings, and pinafores. The unbuttoning of her Western clothes by the Maori women signifies a shaking free of restrictive colonial practices. Having a child as the protagonist enables Mansfield to overtly critique the restrictive practices brought to bear upon native New Zealanders. The word “kidnapped” in the title hints at a serious misdemeanour, and yet the reader senses that Pearl is in no danger whatsoever. The Maori women who walk past her house simply see her and appropriate her, as one might pick up a little pearl button lying on the ground and put it in one’s pocket. There is absolutely no sense of any crime having been committed until the last few lines of the story: Suddenly the girl gave a frightful scream. The woman raised herself and Pearl slipped down on the sand and looked towards the land. Little men in blue coats – little blue men came running, running towards her with shouts and whistlings – a crowd of little blue men to carry her back to the House of Boxes. (288) The lawmakers imposed on the indigenous Maori by the colonizers have arrived to reclaim little Pearl Button as their own again, but instead of a sense of relief, Pearl’s reaction is one of fear. She screams. Everything is inverted in this ingenious story, where nothing is quite as it seems and where both cultural and racial norms are critiqued. For Mark Williams, such stories emphasize “the element of subversive agency in the response of indigenous peoples to colonisation. Instead of being passive […] the colonised are seen as resourceful [and] adaptive” (252). The white settlers’ deracination also demonstrates, for Wilson, “an uneasy occupation of colonial territory” (176). The story appeared in issue number 8 of Rhythm, in September 1912, using the pseudonym “Lili Heron”. As if to reinforce her growing confidence, there are four contributions by Mansfield in total in this one issue: a poem by “Boris Petrovsky” on the first page; “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped”; another story, “Spring in a Dream”, under her own name; and finally a book review of Strindberg’s Confessions of a Fool, signed “KM”. Given Mansfield’s prominence as a contributor to Rhythm at this time, it is understandable that she resorts to pseudonyms. Yet, her influence as assistant editor is just as dominant. “Spring in a Dream” is preceded by a poem by William Orton, a former lover from 1910 to 1911, and the story itself is accompanied by a full-page pencil drawing of another former lover, Floryan Sobieniowski, by Casimir ­Wilkomirski. Both stories reveal Mansfield in full ‘Rhythmist’ mode; “How Pearl

114  Gerri Kimber Button was Kidnapped” (originally drafted in 1910) is an astonishingly ‘modern’ story, whilst “Spring in a Dream”, almost completely ­ignored by critics, sees Mansfield in Eastern Europe with her characters ­‘Dimitri’, ‘Gertrud’, and ‘Konrad’ and an autumnal Chekhovian rural landscape setting. As Snaith affirms, this issue of Rhythm signals Mansfield’s “multi-faceted identity as a professional writer. She asserts her inclusion in a European avant-garde, as well as her position as a colonial writer keen to introduce aspects of her culture to an English audience”. Moreover, as with “The Woman at the Store”, the story’s publication in an avant-garde magazine emphasizes “the newness of the text rather than its position in a literary tradition” (129).

VI. “Ole Underwood” (1913) “Ole Underwood” was published in issue 12 of Rhythm, in January 1913, and dedicated to Mansfield’s friend, the American painter Anne Estelle Rice (later Drey), who was at that time the lover of J. D. Fergusson, one of the co-editors of the little magazine. In this story, Mansfield was remembering a scene from her own life, whilst a pupil at Miss Swainson’s school in Wellington. One particular feature of the walk to school was having to dodge ‘Ole Underwood’, a homeless old man who used to hide in the bushes on Fitzherbert Terrace and jump out at the children. As a justice of the peace, Harold Beauchamp, Mansfield’s father, after hearing one too many stories of his daughters arriving dishevelled and flushed at Miss Swainson’s, having been chased by Ole Underwood, had him “charged as a rogue and a vagabond, to serve some time in jail” (Mantz and Murry 148). In ­Mansfield’s story, he is described in all his outlandish glory, a perfect subject for Rhythm, where the rawness of life was celebrated: Down the windy hill stalked Ole Underwood. He carried a black umbrella in one hand, in the other a red and white spotted handkerchief knotted into a lump. He wore a black peaked cap like a pilot; gold rings gleamed in his ears and his little eyes snapped like two sparks. Like two sparks they glowed in the smoulder of his bearded face. (139) Erin Mercer reads a gothic element to this story, as well as “The Woman at the Store” and “Millie”, with their strains of “violence, pursuit and madness” (87). Re-entering the colonial space through Mansfield’s childhood memories, as here, develops for Wilson “what Edward Said calls ‘re-filiation’” (183), as a result of her early sense of alienation once back in the European metropolis. “Ole Underwood”, “The Woman at the Store”, “How Pearl ­Button was Kidnapped”, and, as we shall see, “Millie” are crime-centred

A Cycle of Dislocation  115 stories. “The Woman at the Store” reveals how a woman shot her abusive husband and buried him; “How Pearl Button was Kidnapped” tells of a young girl’s abduction by two Maori women; and the protagonist in “Ole Underwood” is an ex-convict who has spent twenty years in jail for killing the man who murdered his wife. His social rejection, as Bruce Harding attests, “provokes his violent actions and outlook” (123). Now a vagrant, he is also a victim, as Mansfield makes clear in her narrative, since he has been rejected by the very society that made him what he now is. Mansfield shows, through the repetition of a few words, how Ole Underwood is unable to let go of his past experiences: Something inside Ole Underwood’s breast beat like a hammer. One two – one two – never stopping, never changing. He couldn’t do anything. It wasn’t loud. No, it didn’t make a noise – only a thud. One, two – one, two – like someone beating on an iron in a prison – someone in a secret place – bang – bang – bang – trying to get free. Do what he would, fumble at his coat, throw his arms about, spit, swear, he couldn’t stop the noise. Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Ole ­Underwood began to shuffle and run. (319) The clanging sounds of being in prison reflect the harsh and painful beating of his heart, as he wanders through a small town near the sea, where he once lived, frightens hens and children, buys a drink in a bar before getting kicked out for destroying a vase of flowers, and eventually drowns a small kitten in brutal fashion. Having been incarcerated for so long, Ole Underwood has become a misfit. There has been no sense of rehabilitation in “the prison with high red walls” (319), on the other side of the hill. As with “The Woman at the Store”, the natural, colonial landscape is given prominence and reflects the atmosphere of the story, as well as Ole Underwood’s inner turmoil: The pine-trees roared like waves in their topmost branches, their stems creaked like the timber of ships; in the windy air flew the white manuka flower. Ah – k! shouted Ole Underwood, shaking his umbrella at the wind bearing down upon him, beating him, half strangling him with his black cape. Ah – k! shouted the wind a hundred times as loud, and filled his mouth and nostrils with dust. For Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr, the wildness and disorder of the landscape reflects Ole Underwood’s mental turmoil. We see the landscape as if through his fractured

116  Gerri Kimber vision. The extremity of the language also suggests his heightened, unnatural sensitivity to external stimuli, with collocated words such as smoulder, roared, snapped, beating and strangling. (41) As with “The Woman at the Store”, the protagonist finds himself in a hostile environment, which precipitates his downfall. Ole Underwood’s wanderings are without purpose, mirroring his life, which also no longer has any meaning. In New Zealand’s colonial world, he reflects the itinerant and rootless lives of so many of the young colony’s inhabitants, for we learn that before prison he had been a sailor, an “immigrant adventurer” (Hanson and Gurr 42), who belonged nowhere. As a result (and similar to “The Woman at the Store”), his foreign and unnatural environment has precipitated his downfall. There is also a personal element to Mansfield’s writing of this story, not just as a rootless colonial herself, but also, perhaps, reflecting on her own ancestors “who had kept on the right side socially and financially, and figures like Ole Underwood, who had failed” (Hanson and Gurr 43). The story is also inherently modernist, both in its vague subject matter, where almost nothing happens, the repetition of words and phrases, giving the story an almost lyrical quality in spite of its subject-matter, and the foregrounding of colours – here red and black – symbolizing violence, bloodshed, and the overall mood of the story. Underwood carries a black umbrella; his cap is black, as is his cape; the clouds are continuously described as black; his handkerchief is red; the prison walls are red; a woman’s clenched fist is red; the woman in the bar is a redhead; the flowers on the bar that he crushes are red; in his brain, a hammer continually beats “Red – red – red – red!” (320); the prison is described as a red bird; and the pillow of the sleeping sailor at the end of the story is also red. Both colours summon up anger and violence in this polished story, which is both postcolonial and modernist in equal measure.

VII. “Millie” (1913) As with “Ole Underwood”, “Millie” returns us to the violence and ­‘brutal art’ of “The Woman at the Store”, though by this time, Rhythm had folded due to lack of finances and been replaced with its shortlived sequel, the Blue Review, where “Millie” was published in June 1913. In the story, a young Englishman, Harrison, a recent arrival to the backblocks of New Zealand, has apparently shot dead his boss, Mr ­Williamson, who lived nearby. A posse of men are out looking for him, led by Millie Evans’s husband, Sid, wanting to take the law into their own hands and exact revenge on the young ‘johnny’ (a recent arrival). Millie, left on her own at the sheep station, hears a noise and

A Cycle of Dislocation  117 discovers young Harrison hiding behind a woodpile, traumatized and half-starved. Millie, initially frightened, soon realizes who he is, but her maternal instinct (dormant for so long) rises to the surface, and she offers to feed him. That night, when the men are back at the station and sleeping, Harrison makes his getaway on Sid’s horse, and rides off to an unknown fate, with Millie half-crazed with delight as she watches the men chase after him, pursuing their prey: She rushed into the road – she laughed and shrieked and danced in the dust, jigging the lantern. “A – ah! Arter ’im, Sid! A – a – a –h! ketch ’im, Willie. Go it! Go it! A – ah, Sid! Shoot ’im down. Shoot ’im!” (330) Her delight comes from knowing she has helped the boy, though she has to feign the opposite feelings by encouraging the men to chase him. Given that Harrison is so young, “not much more than a boy, with fair hair, and a growth of fair down on his lips and chin” (328), Mansfield implies that this is no murderer and that he must have been provoked into shooting his boss. He also stirs up long-forgotten maternal feelings in the childless, middle-aged woman: A strange dreadful feeling gripped Millie Evans’ bosom – some seed that had never flourished there, unfolded, and struck deep roots and burst into painful leaf. (328) The pain in her bosom half suffocated her. (329) “They won’t ketch ’im. Not if I can ’elp it. Men is all beasts. I don’ care wot ’e’s done, or wot ’e ’asn’t done. See ’im through, Millie ­Evans. ’E’s nothink but a sick kid.” (329) Millie may have come to terms with the drudgery of her daily routine in the colonial outback of New Zealand, but there is still enough fighting spirit in her to want to do the right thing. As with the previous stories in this cycle, the stark reality of colonial life is brought to the fore in this complex, polished tale. Millie, as a woman, is isolated in the backblocks, whilst the men get on with the ‘real’ work. Her role of cook and housekeeper is an exhausting and lonely one, where neither the landscape nor the climate is conducive to fulfilment or happiness: Oh, my word! it was hot. Enough to fry your hair! Millie put her handkerchief over her head and shaded her eyes with her hand. […]

118  Gerri Kimber […] Languidly, the sweat pouring down her face, and dropping off her nose and chin, she cleared away the dinner, and going into the bedroom, stared at herself in the fly-specked mirror, and wiped her face and neck with a towel. She didn’t know what was the matter with herself that afternoon. She could have had a good cry – just for nothing – […]. (326–327) The unsavoury description of both Millie and her surroundings enhances the turgid, stultifying ambiance of the story overall. Millie’s life is an empty shell of repetitive, meaningless tasks that take her from morning to night. Occasionally, as today, her misery almost overwhelms her, though she dares not probe the reasons why. On one wall hangs a large print of Windsor Castle, once more, as in “The Woman at the Store” (where the walls are wallpapered with old English periodicals), referencing New Zealand’s colonial heritage. The title of the print, “Garden Party at Windsor Castle”, only serves to highlight the stark difference between that privileged, verdant setting and Millie’s dusty, sweaty, fly-ridden one: “In the foreground emerald lawns planted with immense oak trees, and in their grateful shade, a muddle of ladies and gentlemen and parasols and little tables” (327). Green, shade, parasols, and immense oak trees – the steady dependability and security of the old world are contrasted in this story with the harsh reality of colonial life at the furthest edge of the world. And juxtaposed with this image of the old world is a description of a photograph taken on Millie’s wedding day, which hangs on another wall above a packing-case, which serves as a dressing table (accentuating the impoverished nature of her dwelling): She was sitting down in a basket chair, in her cream cashmere and satin ribbons, and Sid, standing with one hand on her shoulder, looking at her bouquet. And behind them there were some fern trees, and a waterfall, and Mount Cook in the distance, covered with snow. She had almost forgotten her wedding day; time did pass so, and if you hadn’t any one to talk things over with, they soon dropped out of your mind. (327) The fake backdrop to the wedding photo reflects the fake happiness of the wedding day and all the fake promises that a young Millie would have believed in. For Millie, there are no fern trees or waterfalls or beautiful mountain landscapes with snow; instead, there are flies and dust and makeshift furniture and red, swollen hands and not even children to help her bear her burden of loneliness. Her discovery of Harrison offers her a chance to mother and nurture, if only for a brief moment, before

A Cycle of Dislocation  119 Sid and the other men reclaim the sheep station, the house, and ­M illie herself. Both Millie and the unnamed protagonist in “The Woman at the Store” are “victims of patriarchal, colonial structures” (Wilson 183). The story’s inherent modernism, as in those previously discussed, revolves around Mansfield’s ability to “confront and manipulate an experience of dislocation and homelessness that is both personal and historical” (Williams 257). In these early stories, then, Mansfield is honing her modernist techniques, whilst informing her European reader of the colonial world she has left behind.

VIII. “Old Tar” (1913) After the Blue Review went the way of Rhythm, folding in the summer of 1913, Mansfield found herself without an easy publishing outlet for her stories. “Old Tar”, which appeared in the Saturday Westminster Gazette in October 1913, 3 was the only story she would publish until September 1915 and the creation of Signature, a Murry/Lawrence edited short-lived little magazine, which lasted barely a month. It is the final published story in Mansfield’s story cycle of modernist/postcolonial tales. Whilst “The Woman at the Store”, “How Pearl Button was Kidnapped”, and “Millie” have, as their backdrop, the rugged and sparsely populated interior of the North Island, which Mansfield had explored on her camping trip to the Ureweras in 1907, “Ole Underwood” and “Old Tar” derive from characters and places in the Wellington of her childhood. Here, the protagonist is based on a real-life man called Jack Tar, whose large and isolated house stood on the hill at the end of the Karori Road, now a suburb of Wellington, but at the time a quite separate settlement some four miles from the city. Wilson reads the story as “a narrative of psychic encounter and indigenization, touching on white settler guilt with its implications of injustice and the return of the repressed” (“Where is Katherine?” 183). “Old Tar” in fact tells the story of ‘young’ Tar, Old Tar’s son. Old Tar has inherited a valuable plot of land on a hill, bought for a song by his father from the original Maori owners: “my Pap bought this from the Maoris – he did. Ye–es! Got it off Ole Puhui for a ‘suit of clothes an’ a lookin’-glass of yer Granmaw’s’” (341). He tells young Tar that one day the land on the hill will be his, and from that moment on, young Tar becomes fixated with building a grand house on the land. Time goes by, and young Tar gets married, has children, and saves hard, almost willing his father to die so that he will inherit the land and can finally build the house of his dreams. But Old Tar does not play ball and finally dies at the age of 95, when his son is a middle-aged man. He sets to work the very next day, instructing builders to start work on his dream house, which gradually becomes a reality. On the day it is finished, Tar goes up the hill alone to inspect every inch of his longed-for dream, now, at last,

120  Gerri Kimber a reality. But as he walks through the rooms of the large white house on the hill, something inside him cracks: He saw the great trampled patches the timber piles had made, and he saw, between him and the sea, the white house perched, the big white nest for his wife and her brood on the top of his hill. As though he saw it for the first time. Old Tar muttered in a strange voice, “Wot’s it doing there – wot’s it for?” and “Oh, Lord, wot ’ave I done – wot ’ave I done, Lord?” A long time Old Tar stood there, while the dark sifted over him and the house paled and stretched up to the sky. His feet seemed to freeze into the cold grass of the hill, and dark thoughts flew across his mind, like clouds, never quiet, never breaking. (344) The dream that has sustained him since a small boy, of building his dream house on the plot of land bought by his grandfather, once realized, has almost destroyed him. The purchase of land by Pakeha (white) settlers from the Maori is still a contentious subject today. In this story, Mansfield affirms how many Maori were, in effect, robbed of their land in exchange for a few, worthless novelty items. Tar’s father seems to delight in the fact that his father had virtually robbed a Maori of his land, buying it for a suit of clothes and a looking glass. As Aimee Gasston notes, stories such as “Old Tar” “articulate a palpable colonial guilt and displacement which may bear resonance with Mansfield’s decision to leave her native country to play the tourist in Europe while enacting the ‘savage spirit’ of New Zealand in her fiction” (15–16). Tar is witness to how the construction of his house has wreaked havoc on the surrounding land: “He saw in the dusky light the pits the workmen had dug in his hill. He saw the great trampled patches the timber piles had made” (343–344). It has also awakened the ancestral spirits of the true owners: “Ooh Hee! Oooh Hee!” it sounded. “A rare, sad noise,” thought Old Tar, shaking his head to it. “Sounds as if it’d lost something an’ couldn’t find it again.” “Lost for evermore,” and the sad words fell into his quiet heart and started strange, uneasy ripples. Sitting by himself like that, he felt queer and frightened, somehow. “Ooh Hee! Ooh Hee!” sounded the wind, rattling the window sashes. “Tain’t like it used to sound up here,” he thought. “Tain’t like it was in the old man’s time.” (343) The spirits of the place have been disturbed and seek their revenge, which comes with Tar’s understanding of what he has done and his knowledge that he will never live there; his settler dream is a false and deadly one, since it annihilates the true, indigenous owners through the

A Cycle of Dislocation  121 exploitation and arrogance of the white settler. For Wilson, “hauntings by the dispossessed ‘other’ create atmospheric destabilisation and undermine the settler’s ostensible ownership of land” (29). Old Tar wants none of it. The savage spirit of the land will not be tamed and roams free, haunting the settlers who dare to disturb the indigenous ancestors, who, though they may be temporarily displaced, can never be replaced (see Lawson  28), since Maori identity is so inextricably bound to the territory each community inhabits. Wilson reads this story as a critique of colonial ideology in that it dramatizes the white settler’s insertion of himself into the physical and discursive space of the indigene. […] Mansfield’s ‘postcolonial’ perspective appears in the way the lost voices and repressed presences return to haunt and disempower the settler who, following the dream of settlement, has been deluded by western notions of possession. (“Where is Katherine?” (184–185) As with the other stories in this cycle, the story is modernist in its style and content; for example, in the final epiphanic moment – that internal crisis – when Tar understands his guilt and that of his ancestors; the exploration of the protagonist’s psychology via the use of free indirect discourse; the repetition of words and phrases; and the inconclusive ending, where Tar’s fate – and that of his newly built house – remains uncertain.

IX. Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated how the short story cycle played an ­important role in the early work of Mansfield. Her first published collection of stories was an overt story cycle, with all the stories set in ­Bavaria, in a specific location. During 1912–1913, Mansfield published five ­stories, which all had a common theme of life in colonial New ­Zealand but written with a postcolonial mind-set, and in a modernist style that she would hone to perfection in her later stories. As Williams notes, Mansfield “took a small world and made the larger world take note of it” (267). Although for many years in New Zealand she was considered a British writer rather than a New Zealand one, nevertheless, these stories, and the cycle to which they belong, affirm the importance of her homeland, since they become “a means of unsettling the cultural-­ nationalist project, indeed the whole post-settler legacy” (ibid.). Modernism did not arrive in Britain in the early years of the twentieth century as a ready-made concept. It was a response to a variety of stimuli – cultural, political, historical, and literary. In the case of Mansfield, the cultural landscape she had grown up with in New Zealand, and chose to dislocate herself from, enabled her to view modernity from a postcolonial viewpoint. In the story cycle discussed in this chapter, she merges

122  Gerri Kimber both concepts, as she experimented and honed her skills as a writer. Though this cycle has been constructed for the purposes of my argument, it reveals that without the coming together of the influence of both early British modernism and New Zealand colonialism, these stories might never have been written. Modernism’s early desire for the ‘raw’ and the ‘savage’ brought memories of Mansfield’s homeland to the fore, enabling her to depict a darker underbelly to the accepted notion of colonialism: what we now, of course, call postcolonialism. This story cycle also, as I have demonstrated, represents an important early phase in Mansfield’s development as one of Britain’s key exponents of literary modernism. In conclusion, the heuristic function of viewing my chosen Mansfield stories as a cycle is that first, they form a coherent whole, emphasizing a decisive phase in Mansfield’s development as a writer, and second, they contribute to the formation of Mansfield’s proto-postcolonial aesthetic that is in tune with modernism, thus highlighting the interdependencies between the two genres in her work. In addition, the ‘construction’ of coherence, as evidenced by my cycle as well as the two New Zealand collections by O’Sullivan and especially Gordon, becomes a tool for the literary critic to make posthumous sense of a writer’s work. There seems to be an element of circular logic to the idea of choosing, on the basis of established critical criteria, a textual corpus, which then serves to corroborate the appropriateness of these very criteria. That is a remarkable function for the cycle form, and one that is neither ‘intended’ by the author (Mansfield) nor necessarily noticed by the ‘common reader’ – it is a genuinely ‘institutional’, academic function. Gerald Lynch notes how the short story cycle appears to “thrive in countries and cultures as they strive to establish or recuperate national identity and character” (518), and this notion certainly applies to Katherine Mansfield, as the land of her birth reasserts its claims on her as very much a New Zealand writer.

Notes 1 All references to Mansfield’s stories are to the edition by Kimber and O’Sullivan. Hereafter page numbers are placed parenthetically after each quotation. 2 Mansfield’s first husband, George Bowden, for example, talked of her dressing ‘more or less Maori fashion’ (see Alpers 87). 3 It was published in the New Zealand Times on 11 December 1913, with its original subtitle, “A Karori Story”.

Works Cited Alpers, Antony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Viking, 1980. Boehmer, Elleke. “Mansfield as Colonial Modernist: Difference Within”. Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, edited by Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson. Palgrave, 2011, pp. 57–71.

A Cycle of Dislocation  123 Bowen, Elizabeth. “A Living Writer”. Cornhill Magazine, vol. 1010, winter 1956–1957, pp. 120–130. Brooker, Peter. “Harmony, Discord and Difference: Rhythm (1911–13), The Blue Review (1913) and The Signature (1915)”. The Oxford Critical and ­C ultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker. Oxford UP, 2009, pp. 314–336. Brooker, Peter, and Andrew Thacker, editors. The Oxford Critical and C ­ ultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955. ­Oxford UP, 2009. Gasston, Aimee, “Katherine Mansfield, Cannibal”. Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, edited by Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson. Palgrave, 2011, pp. 15–28. Gordon, Ian A., editor. Katherine Mansfield: Undiscovered Country. The New Zealand Stories. Longman, 1974. ———. Katherine Mansfield: The Urewera Notebook. Oxford UP, 1978. Hanson, Clare, and Andrew Gurr, Katherine Mansfield. Macmillan Commonwealth Writers Series. Macmillan, 1981. Harding, Bruce. “Mansfield, Misogyny and Murder: ‘Ole Underwood’, ‘The Woman at the Store’ and ‘Millie’ Revisited”. Journal of New Zealand Literature, vol. 6, 1988, pp. 119–136. Head, Dominic. “Introduction”. The Cambridge History of the English Short Story, edited by Dominic Head. Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 1–15. Kimber, Gerri. Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years. Edinburgh UP, 2016. ———. “Mansfield, Rhythm and the Émigré Connection”. Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Susan Reid. Continuum, 2011, pp. 13–29. Kimber, Gerri, and Vincent O’Sullivan, editors. The Collected Fiction of ­K atherine Mansfield, 1898–1915, vol. 1 of the Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (4 vols). Edinburgh UP, 2011. Kimber, Gerri, and Janet Wilson. “Reconfiguring the National Canon: The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield”. Journal of New Zealand Literature, vol. 31, no. 2, 2013, pp. 122–144. Lawson, Alan. “Postcolonial Theory and the ‘Settler’ Subject”. Essays on Canadian Writing, vol. 56, 1995, pp. 20–36. Lynch, Gerald. “Short Story Cycles: Between the Novel and the Story Collection”. The Cambridge History of the English Short Story, edited by Dominic Head. Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 513–529. Mansfield, Katherine. The Montana Stories. Persephone, 2001. Mantz, Ruth Elvish, and John Middleton Murry. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Constable, 1933. Mercer, Erin. “‘Manuka Bushes Covered with Thick Spider Webs’: Katherine Mansfield and the Colonial Gothic Tradition”. Journal of New Zealand Literature, vol. 32, no. 2, 2014, pp. 85–105. Murry, John Middleton. “Aims and Ideals”. Rhythm, vol. 1, no. 1, 1911, p. 36. Orr, Bridget. “Reading with the Taint of the Pioneer: Katherine Mansfield and Settler Criticism”. Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield, edited by Rhoda B. Nathan. G. K. Hall, 1993, pp. 48–60. O’Sullivan, Vincent, editor. Katherine Mansfield: New Zealand Stories. ­Oxford UP, 1997.

124  Gerri Kimber Smith, Angela. Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life. Palgrave, 2000. Snaith, Anna. Colonial Woman Writers in London 1890–1945. Cambridge UP, 2014. Stafford, Jane, and Mark Williams. Maoriland: New Zealand Literature ­1872–1914. Victoria UP, 2006. Tomalin, Claire. Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life. Viking, 1987. Wevers, Lydia. “How Kathleen Beauchamp was Kidnapped”. Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield, edited by Rhoda B. Nathan. G. K. Hall, 1993, pp. 33–47. Williams, Mark. “Mansfield in Maoriland: Biculturalism, Agency and Misreading”. Modernism and Empire, edited by Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby. Manchester UP, 2000, pp. 249–274. Wilson, Janet. “Introduction: Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial”. Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial, edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Delia da Sousa Correa. Edinburgh UP, 2013, pp. 1–11. ———. “Mansfield as (Post)colonial-Modernist: Rewriting the Contract with Death”. Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial, edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Delia da Sousa Correa, Edinburgh UP, 2013, pp. 29–44. ———. “‘Where is Katherine?’: Longing and (Un)belonging in the Works of Katherine Mansfield”. Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, edited by Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson. Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2011, pp. 175–188.

Section III

Transformations

8 Two Worlds in One Book Ways of Sunlight and the Migrant Short Story Cycle Michael C. Frank

I. When Trinidadian émigré writer Sam Selvon published Ways of Sunlight in 1957, his seventh year in London, the collection of nineteen short stories represented a new departure for the author. Although he had started his career as a prose writer with a string of short stories printed in newspapers and magazines (see Nasta 269–271), his first three books had all been novels, and Ways of Sunlight was to remain the only work of its kind in Selvon’s novel-dominated oeuvre. The collection is further distinguished from the author’s other books by its use of two main geographical locations. Whereas Selvon’s novels tend to be set in either the East Indian agricultural communities of Trinidad or the Afro-Caribbean diaspora of London, the short story collection brings these heterogeneous settings together “within one cover”, as Jane Grant (xi) notes in the Longman reissue of the book. Yet, the division of the volume into two parts keeps both settings neatly separated: while the first nine stories are grouped together under the title of “Trinidad”, the remaining ten appear in a section named “London”. Although the London stories ultimately bridge that separation by depicting West Indian immigrants in the British capital and by offering a decidedly West Indian outlook on the city, the sudden move from the Caribbean to England in the middle of the book is an essential aspect of the reading experience. For that reason, the above description of Ways of Sunlight as a “collection of short stories” does not, in fact, do justice to the structural cohesion of the volume, even if it echoes Selvon’s own choice of terminology (qtd. in Fabre 64). Because the programmatic juxtaposition of two geographical locations can only be appreciated if the book is read as a whole, the collection is clearly more than a short story miscellany. The peculiar arrangement of Ways of Sunlight is designed to encourage readers to bring the individual stories from both parts of the book into a dialogue with one another. Rather than making the author’s country of origin and his current place of residence the “before” and “after” of a teleological story of migration, the collection conveys a sense of their synchronicity, their coexistence “here” and “there”. In this way, “Trinidad” and “London” gradually emerge in the reading process as two distinct but nonetheless connected life-worlds.

128  Michael C. Frank Like other collections with a similar spatial layout, Selvon’s sequence corresponds to current definitions of the short story cycle to the extent that its nineteen narratives “both stand on their own and gather accretively to form more meaningful communities of fictions that, in turn, enlarge the meanings of each individual story” (Lynch 513). The fact that Ways of Sunlight is made up of previously written material seems to indicate that it was not “composed as a continuous whole” but that its individual stories were “arranged into a series” (Ingram 17; capitalization removed). According to the taxonomy suggested by Forrest L. ­Ingram, this qualifies it as an “arranged cycle” rather than a “composed” one: “An arranged cycle consists of stories which an author or ­editor-author brought together to illuminate or comment upon one another by j­uxtaposition or association” (18) – although such inferences about the composition process necessarily involve some degree of speculation. Even if none of the tales in Ways of Sunlight was written with the end product in mind, however, the final sequence still has a cyclical character, and this cyclical character does not, primarily, depend upon the reader’s knowledge of the author’s compositional intentions and strategies. What counts, according to Robert M. Luscher, is the way in which the finished text “invit[es] the reader to construct a network of associations that binds stories together and lends them cumulative impact” (189). Significantly, this “cumulative impact” (or “accretive gathering”) is realized in a markedly different fashion here than it is in cycles with more tightly interlinked stories. As theorists of the genre have repeatedly emphasized, short story cycles rely on a certain degree of “coherence” (Lynch 513; see also the editors’ introduction to the present volume), which commonly takes the form of continuity at the level of form, content, or imagery. In the type of cycle pioneered by Selvon, on the other hand, coherence is mainly (though not exclusively) achieved by means of another “organizing principle” (Dunn and Morris xiv) – namely, contiguity, that is, a structure bringing together two geographically distant cultures. The present chapter argues that Ways of Sunlight is of twofold i­nterest for an investigation into the construction of coherence in the short story cycle. For one thing, Selvon’s marked use of two geographical locations represents an early instance of a specific technique of constructing ­coherence between different narratives. For another, this technique can be considered the key feature of a particular subset of short story cycles, in which the meeting of two worlds in one book reflects a history of migration and conveys a sense of double belonging. There is no need to postulate that Ways of Sunlight has acted as a kind of founding text to observe that it represents an innovation in the genre of the short story collection, which set the pattern for several subsequent cycles by ­British-based writers with a history of migration. Most notably, a similar (albeit somewhat more complex) spatial organization can be found

Two Worlds in One Book  129 in Salman Rushdie’s East, West (1994), the title of which plays upon the stereotypical East/West dichotomy at the core of Orientalist discourse. Unlike Selvon’s Ways of Sunlight, Rushdie’s “collection” (as it is commonly known) has a tripartite structure – the first two sections, “East” and “West”, being followed by a third one, “East, West” – which works against the binary logic of the title (and which gradually reveals the collection’s cyclical nature). There is no such subdivision in Shape-shifter (1990), the debut of Guyana-born British writer Pauline Melville, which abandons the idea of grouping its stories according to their geographical setting and repeatedly crosses the Atlantic, both between and within individual stories. In Melville’s little-discussed collection, the marked separation of “worlds” into different sections is substituted by a continuous alternation between settings. Yet, here, too, we see the same basic principle of juxtaposition at work. Manzurul (now Manzu) Islam’s The Mapmakers of Spitalfields is another case in point. Published in 1997, Islam’s first book of fiction takes the reader back and forth between the Bengali community of East London (where four of the seven narratives are located) and the author’s native Bangladesh. In what follows, I approach the migrant short story cycle in three steps. After a short survey of previous research into postcolonial short story writing (which has largely sidestepped short story cycles), I introduce the concept of the “organizing principle” to elucidate the spatial organization of migrant short story cycles, which tend to shift from – or alternate between – stories set in Britain and stories set in various places in (or near) the author’s respective country of origin. On this basis, I then provide a more detailed analysis of this principle of juxtaposition, drawing not only on Ways of Sunlight, but also on two of the aforementioned later cycles, East, West and Shape-shifter.

II. An edited volume on the British short story cycle is a good opportunity to address a caveat in the research on that genre: namely, the relative neglect of works by Anglophone authors with roots outside the UK. If the British short story cycle has generally received less critical scrutiny than its far more systematically researched American counterpart (see, e.g., Kennedy; Nagel), then this is especially true of works by British-based writers from, or with ties to, formerly colonized countries. As the example of Rushdie’s East, West (1994) indicates, this relative neglect affects even otherwise widely discussed authors. To be sure, East, West is covered in several surveys of Rushdie’s complete works, where it is usually considered alongside Haroun and the Sea of Stories (see, e.g., Goonetilleke 122–130; Grant 100–106; or Gurnah 141–151), but it nonetheless plays a marginal role in comparison to Rushdie’s more extended works. It may be argued, of course, that the critical reception

130  Michael C. Frank of East, West was always destined to be eclipsed by that of Rushdie’s earlier novels, especially the Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Children (1981) and the fatwa-inducing Satanic Verses (1988). It has been suggested, moreover, that the short story genre is “perhaps not the most congenial form of expression for Rushdie” (Grant 106), or, put less politely, that Rushdie’s slim and unimposing collection simply does not live up to the standards set by his monumental novels, making it no more than a “modest” achievement (Goonetilleke 130). Yet, East, West is not the only collection that stands in the shadow of its respective author’s novels – or that flies under the radar of literary scholarship altogether. Like other collections, it has suffered from a certain novel-centrism in the field of postcolonial literary studies. This tendency is further indicated by the fact that, to date, there are only two book-length studies on the postcolonial short story. The first, Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English (Bardolph), is a pioneering survey attempting to – literally – cover as much ground as possible by grouping its many individual chapters according to the geographical origin of the authors and texts discussed. The resulting excursion through Anglophone short story writing from five continents is ground-breaking in the sense that it offers a first tentative map of this vast and hitherto little-explored body of work. Due to the untimely death of the project’s initiator, however, the volume was published without a comprehensive introduction bringing together the various threads of the book, and the study largely lacks a synthesizing perspective. In his short description of the volume’s contents, André Viola (who stepped in as co-editor to see the thirty-eight contributions to publication) explicitly emphasizes that “a comparative approach has not been generally adopted”, adding that the majority of chapters provide “case studies” that limit “generalisations to a paragraph or two” (ix, x). Published twelve years later, The Postcolonial Short Story: Contemporary Essays (Awadalla and March-Russell) is a much slimmer and less comprehensive, but theoretically more ambitious, volume. In it, the editors propose an encompassing criterion to characterize postcolonial short stories. As Maggie Awadalla and Paul March-­Russell suggest, postcolonial short stories tend to invoke oral tradition, and, in doing so, they counter the modern (European) decline of orality ­ Storyteller” esdiagnosed by Walter Benjamin in 1936. Benjamin’s “ say famously postulates that the “‘short story’ […] has removed itself from oral tradition” (93). In postcolonial short stories, on the other hand, orality becomes a kind of “resource” (Awadalla and March-Russell, ­“Introduction” 6), whereby it provides “evidence of cultural survival, acting as one of the contrary means by which the onslaught of colonization and the eradication of indigenous cultures are challenged” (4).

Two Worlds in One Book  131 Orality is also at the centre of John Thieme’s contribution to ­ ominic Head’s recent Cambridge History of the English Short Story. D ­Programmatically titled “After Empire: Postcolonial Short Fiction and the Oral Tradition”, Thieme’s chapter sets out to examine the refashioning of the short story form at the hand of “Anglophone postcolonial writers, with a particular focus on how the incorporation of oral elements has reinvigorated the genre” (Thieme 377). Consequently, Thieme embarks on a tour de force through Anglophone short story writing from West, East, and South Africa, the Caribbean, and the ­I ndian subcontinent, respectively, with a short addendum on indigenous writers from the former “settler” colonies Canada and New Zealand. After having ­demonstrated – in a necessarily cursory fashion – that many postcolonial short stories playfully oscillate between orality and literacy, Thieme concludes that the “intersection of the oral and the written” (393) ­constitutes one important way in which “the postcolonial short story” has challenged “the English conventions associated with the genre” (394). He adds: Sometimes it extends the range by insisting on the importance of oral demotic voices; at other times it is content to work closer to more “literary” conventions, while invariably evoking a suggestion of difference that disturbs many of the assumptions that have historically been associated with the short story form. (394) The present chapter is more modest in its scope and purpose. Rather than making any wide-ranging statements about the nature of postcolonial short fiction as such (or, for that matter, the “English conventions” so ominously hinted at by Thieme), it focuses on just one particular mode of composing, arranging, and presenting such fiction. As a literary form, the short story collection has received even scarcer attention in the field of postcolonial literary studies than the short story itself. When scholars have turned to such collections, they have for the most part concentrated on individual stories, so the collections in question have rarely been considered in their entirety, let alone in their dimension as potential short story cycles, in which each narrative is an interlinked part of a larger whole. Thus, Louis James’s chapter on Sam Selvon in Telling Stories only considers those tales from Ways of Sunlight that explicitly simulate oral storytelling. After having noted that Selvon “chose the terms ‘ballad’ and ‘episode’ to define his short story form”, James observes: “Ballad” indicates a folk-narrative that has been sifted through popular retelling into a simple, dramatic form. It is essentially oral; when printed, its colloquial style, its use of sound effects, voice

132  Michael C. Frank rhythms and emphasis implies performance interacting with an audience. In this Selvon owes much to the immediate dramatic style and bitter-sweet content of Trinidad calypso […]. (105) Selvon’s indebtedness to orality is most obvious in the first of the ­ London” stories, in which the link to the calypso tradition is evident “ at both the level of content and the level of form. A characteristically anecdotal narrative, “Calypso in London” relates how the unemployed, single, and penniless “Mangohead” composes lyrics for a calypso song, ­ Hotboy”, which he presents to his friend, the Trinidadian calypsonian “ in the hope that the latter will lend him money. Not only are the ­nicknames of the principal characters reminiscent of the pseudonyms of real-­life calypsonians like “the Mighty Sparrow”, but the narrative also reproduces various other features of calypso music, such as the sustained use of Creole. There is even an element of call-and-response when the narrator mocks his (English) readers’ supposed ignorance about the geography and vegetation of the West Indies: Mangohead come from St Vincent, and if you don’t know where that is that is your hard luck. But I will give you a clue – he uses to work on a arrowroot plantation. Now I suppose you want to know what arrowroot is, eh? (Selvon 113) Another direct narratorial address occurs in the first sentence of ­“Eraser’s Dilemma” when the narrator turns to London commuters: “If you are one of the hustlers on Route 12 I don’t know how you could fail to notice Eraser, he such a cheerful conductor” (134). It must be emphasized, however, that this nod to oral storytelling is just one of several narrative modes tried out by Selvon, and one would be hard-pressed to see a calypso aesthetic at work in stories like “My Girl and the City”, a declaration of love to both the “girl” and the “city” of the title written in Standard English and in the style of a prose poem. In the case of the other cycles under investigation here, the “literary” dimension of the stories included is even more prominent. One way in which it manifests itself is in the stories’ intertextuality, which is especially pronounced in East, West. As is his habit, Rushdie references mul­ olumbus, tiple cultural texts and icons. The list features Christopher C Judy Garland’s ruby-red slippers from the Wizard of Oz movie, The Arabian Nights, and the Star Trek franchise. In some stories, these ­intertextual references are multi-layered and palimpsestic. For instance, “Yorick” not only revisits the eponymous character from Hamlet (and, hence, Shakespeare’s play itself), but simultaneously imitates the notoriously digressive style of Laurence Sterne’s previous literary appropriation

Two Worlds in One Book  133 of that character in Tristram Shandy. In the words of Deepika Bahri, Rushdie “tries to out-Sterne Sterne” (144), and this can be described, in Rushdie’s own (now somewhat worn-out) phrase, as an instance of “[t]he empire writ[ing] back, speaking in many voices” (144). It should be noted, however, that Rushdie’s “writing back” in East, West is far removed from any immediate invocation of orality, especially when compared to his novel Midnight’s Children. An even more important reminder of the “writerly” character of the works under investigation here is the oft-neglected fact that they are short story collections (or, as I suggest, cycles) that have been carefully put together to form cohesive wholes. Written by authors with a history of migration, they have been sequentially arranged in such a way as to reflect their author’s familiarity with different “worlds” through the juxtaposition of two or more geographical locales. What gives collections like Ways of Sunlight and East, West their cyclical nature is precisely this characteristic spatial organization. Borrowing the felicitous phrase of Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris, the principle of juxtaposition underlying migrant short story cycles can be identified as their shared “organizing principle” (xiv), as the next section will elaborate.

III. Dunn and Morris introduce the concept of organizing principles to describe what they insist on calling “composite novels” (1–19). If we imagine the genre of the short story cycle to be positioned between two poles – the novel and the short story, respectively – then Dunn and Morris wish to move it closer to the novel end of the spectrum. They do so by emphasizing “the integrity of the whole”, in contradistinction to “the integrity of the parts”, although this dichotomy seems notably contrived: it is by no means self-evident that these two possibilities are “diametrically opposed” (5). After all, definitions of the short story cycle invariably emphasize the synergy between what Susann Garland Mann terms the self-sufficiency and interdependence of the individual narratives: On the one hand, the stories work independently of one another: the reader is capable of understanding each of them without going beyond the limits of the individual story. On the other hand, however, the stories work together, creating something that could not be achieved in the single story. (15) Even though Dunn and Morris employ the concept of “organizing principles” to demonstrate the unity and coherence of “composite novels”, the concept can also be applied to works that stand closer to the short story end of the generic spectrum, as the cycles considered in this chapter

134  Michael C. Frank clearly do. For example, Rushdie’s East, West largely consists of ­previously ­ Acknowledgments” testify). published material (as the author’s detailed “ Only the final three stories were written especially for the volume, making East, West an instance of what Forrest Ingram terms “completed cycles”: By “completed cycles” I mean sets of linked stories which are neither strictly composed nor merely arranged. They may have begun as independent dissociated stories. But soon their author became conscious of unifying strands which he [sic] may have, even subconsciously, woven into the action of the stories. Consciously, then, he completed the unifying task which he may have subconsciously begun. (18) Although I would be wary of diagnosing “conscious” and “ ­ subconscious” impulses in the process of composition, it is safe to say that in the present instance, the completion of the cycle took the form of “adding stories which collect, develop, intensify, and extend the thematic patterns of the earlier stories in the series” (18). The addition of three concluding narratives enabled Rushdie to complete his cycle as a “tight little syllogism […] with thesis (‘East’), antithesis (‘West’) and a final synthesis (‘East, West’) wherein the twain do meet” (Coover). Despite this unifying ­spatial structure, however, the individual stories are deliberately heterogeneous with respect to both subject matter and form, using a wide range of linguistic registers, literary modes, and narrative techniques. Here, as in the cycles of Pauline Melville and Manzurul ­Islam, the individual stories clearly stand apart from one another. Yet, they nonetheless constitute elements of a larger whole, being interlinked by means of an “organizing ­principle” – even if that interlinking is far too loose to j­ustify a comparison with the novelistic genre. The fact that “place” can serve as an organizing principle in short story cycles has already been pointed out by Dunn and Morris (30–46) themselves. In the corresponding chapter of their monograph, the authors emphasize the significance of recurrent locations, which they describe as an “element of interconnection” (30). They argue that “common setting[s]” have repeatedly been used by writers of short story sequences to provide a “frame of reference” or “‘referential field’ upon which one can register meaning and establish connections during the act of reading” (30–31). They go on to trace the importance of place to the village sketch tradition spanning from Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1824) to Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days (1985), cycles that are “firmly anchored in a small town with familiar landmarks” (31). As Dunn and Morris go on to suggest, even cycles that “extend the village sketch tradition to encompass a city setting” (31) or that “extend their grounding

Two Worlds in One Book  135 in ‘place’ to encompass large regions and areas” (32) can be considered continuations  of that same tradition. Following this highly condensed survey of the evolution of the village sketch, Dunn and Morris present a series of more extensive case studies devoted to Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1983), respectively. In all of these, Dunn and Morris conclude, “place acts as a ‘gathering factor’” (46), although it is (needless to say) not the only organizing principle operating in the cycles in question. In a more recent, complementary study, Jennifer Joan Smith proposes the phrase “limited locality” to denote the “organizing principle” ­described above (5). Smith explains: Limited locality refers to the ways in which such short-story cycles depend upon the construction of a restricted geographic terrain to contain and ground the narratives within. They are limited because they take as their focus a bounded geography and because the texts emphasize descriptions of particular, selected features of that geography. (5) More specifically, Smith reconstructs a characteristically American genealogy of short story cycles from Caroline Matilda Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839) to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) to demonstrate how cycles making use of “limited locality” reflect the permeating tension between “regionalist and modernist concerns” (5). The studies of Dunn, Morris, and Smith illustrate that the practice of grounding short story cycles in common settings has a long-standing tradition in both British and American literature. From the point of view of postcolonial studies, it may be added that the practice has since been taken up by writers from other parts of the Anglophone world, as the example of V. S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street (1959) – named after its fictive setting in Port of Spain – illustrates. Published two years before Miguel Street, Sam Selvon’s Ways of ­Sunlight takes a related, but decidedly different, direction. What mainly distinguishes Selvon’s cycle from Naipaul’s is the fact that it seems to offer two short story collections in one. Moving beyond the use of a single setting, it divides its individual narratives into two groups, based on the geographical locales covered within each: on the one hand, various places in Trinidad (with a short excursion to Venezuela in the story “Down the Main”); on the other hand, London. Borrowing a phrase coined by Sandra Zagarell (1988), Jennifer Smith describes short story cycles that are confined to “limited localities” as “narratives of community”. As she explains, paraphrasing Zagarell (503), such narratives

136  Michael C. Frank “privilege a singular setting, emphasize localized language and practices, […] render the quotidian in episodic tales, and depict narrators who are ‘participant/observers’” (Smith 23). This definition would be perfectly fitting for Ways of Sunlight if Selvon did not use two main localities instead of one. Owing to the collection’s incorporation of a double setting, each part of the book appears to relate its own independent “narrative of community”, the first consisting of nine episodic tales about East Indians in or from rural Trinidad and the second presenting ten vignettes from the lives of Caribbean immigrants (predominantly of African descent) in post-war London. Upon closer examination, however, the two “narratives of community” are connected at both a linguistic level and a thematic one. Throughout the collection, the narrators use different varieties of ­English, including the “modified Trinidadian dialect” developed by ­S elvon in his previous work, The Lonely Londoners (1956), for the purpose of moving ­Creole “close[r] to ‘correct’ Standard English” and thus making it “more recognizable to the European reader” (Selvon qtd. in Fabre 67). In Ways of Sunlight, Selvon takes his experimentation with vernacular several steps further. As Jane Grant helpfully illustrates (xxix), the short stories encompass a whole spectrum of “levels, or dialects, of language use” ranging from “the pure use of Creole at one end […] to the pure use of Standard English at the other, with many different levels in between” (xxviii). The appearance of Creolized forms of English in both groups of stories provides an element of continuity within discontinuity. ­Spanning across the Atlantic, the “language continuum” described by Grant ­(xxviii) connects the worlds of ­London and ­Trinidad. This connection is reinforced by the occurrence of certain motifs – such as obeah, the West Indian variant of voodoo – in both halves of the book. These thematic correspondences act as a reminder that the migrants depicted in the “London” section share folk beliefs and customs with the characters appearing in the stories set in ­Trinidad  – and that Caribbean cultural practices have now become a permanent part of British society.

IV. In a short commentary on Ways of Sunlight, Barbara Korte observes that “[t]he volume’s division into stories set in Trinidad and London respectively reflects the migrant’s cultural inbetweenness” (47). This description is helpful but requires some qualification, since evocations of states of “inbetweenness” have long been a staple of postcolonial writing. Accordingly, the same may be said (and has been said) about texts of various other genres. What needs to be explained more specifically is what the short story cycle can do that other forms cannot achieve in quite the same fashion.

Two Worlds in One Book  137 In one of the rare discussions of The Mapmakers of Spitalfields, Paul March-Russell argues that the “division” in Manzurul Islam’s collection “between four stories set in England and three in Bangladesh […] reflects on the fractures within the postcolonial experience”, conveying a “sense of atomization” (88). For March-Russell, the fact that this feature recurs in several other “collections” (as he calls them), such as Ways of Sunlight and East, West, testifies to the ability of the short story form to represent the “liminal or in-between” (93). In a Bookseller interview that accompanied the publication of East, West, Salman Rushdie made a somewhat similar point: “[W]hen I started thinking of calling the stories East, West, the most important part of the title was the comma. ­Because it seems to me that I am that comma – or at least that I live in the comma” (qtd. in ­ ypographically and grammati“Homeless Is Where the Art Is” 163). T cally, commas both separate and connect the words that come before and after them. In the case of Rushdie’s title, the comma represents a symbolic boundary between “East” and “West”. At the same time, however, it makes both words and their meanings part of the same enumeration, implicitly suggesting the possibility of a smooth transition from the one to the other. In his contextual discussion of East, West, which compares the collection to Rushdie’s previous works, D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke asserts: “The hyphen had represented the earlier Salman Rushdie, the earlier version of hybridity. The comma indicates a change in perspective – an understanding of separate but connected worlds” (129). It seems to me that this – seemingly paradoxical – interplay of separation and connection is paramount to an understanding of the specific narrative potential of the migrant short story cycle. Whereas the individual stories (and, in the case of Ways of Sunlight and East, West, the different groups of stories) create a sense of separation, the sequential arrangement of these stories (and groups of stories) gradually reveals their interrelatedness. Although they are interwoven in a much looser fashion than the constituent parts of other cycles, the stories thus essentially correspond to Forrest Ingram’s influential definition of the short story cycle as “a set of stories so linked to one another that the reader’s experience of each one is modified by his experience of the others” (13). This is accomplished by means of the juxtaposition of two “worlds” in one book, which creates points of contact and relations between them. In East, West, the principle of juxtaposition is extended from space (geography) to time (history) as the narratives in the first two sections engage in joyful period-hopping, producing a seemingly random sequence of different space-time configurations, or chronotopoi. In the second section in particular, the reader is taken on a breathless journey from the legendary (pseudo-)medieval world of Yorick, Hamlet, and ­Ophelia through the nottoo-distant dystopian future of “post-­millennial” ­A merica (Rushdie 94) to the Spain of Isabella of Castile in 1492. As a result of these abrupt shifts between different historical and mythical time frames, the story of

138  Michael C. Frank Columbus’s exile at the court of Queen Isabella I is immediately followed by the final three (somewhat less diverse) narratives about Indian immigrants in late-1970s, mid-1980s and early-1960s Britain. In this context, Columbus – whose name symbolizes the beginnings of modern European overseas colonialism – appears as just one “foreigner” (107) among several other displaced people, including the narrator of the following story, whose life as an Indian immigrant in England is marked by “difficult questions about home and identity that I had no idea how to answer” (139), leading to a sense of suspension “between here-and-there, between my two othernesses” (141). Hence, the principle of juxtaposition creates both contrasts and surprising correspondences between the different contexts evoked by each story (or group of stories). Pauline Melville’s Shape-shifter ends with a narrative that displays this principle in a highly concentrated and vivid form. “Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water” consists of a series of short narrative segments separated by asterisks – a miniature short story cycle, as it were. Most of these segments describe episodes from the narrator’s own life as the daughter of a Guyanese father and a British mother, jumping back and forth between the recent past and more distant events set alternately in London and Guyana. Interspersed in this fragmentary account of the narrator’s feeling of double belonging (or double homelessness, since she does not feel fully rooted in either of these places) are episodes about the narrator’s father and grandfather, respectively. By means of the inclusion of these episodes, “Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water” relates the narrator’s own sense of unrest – her constant desire to “go back” (Melville 148) to ­Guyana, where she spent formative childhood years – to a previous family history of migration, thus adding two more layers to an already densely layered narrative. In a more radical move, Melville also includes narrative segments devoted to Sir Walter Raleigh’s second search for “El Dorado” in what is now Guyana in Venezuela in the year 1616, during which Raleigh’s son Walter (“Wat”) was killed in a Spanish attack. Consequently, the narrative switches between the early modern period and various decades of the twentieth century. Instead of ordering these episodes chronologically, Melville arranges them into a spatial pattern so that Raleigh’s dreams of a golden city, a mountain of crystal, and other colonial chimeras – which are cited directly from The Discovery of Guiana (150), Raleigh’s account of his first expedition in 1595 – are juxtaposed with the dreams of migrants from the British crown colony of Guyana, who imagine London as a different sort of “El Dorado”, a cultural hotspot epitomizing cosmopolitan culture and metropolitan sophistication (151, 153). In this way, the experience of West Indian migrants is made to resonate (though it is of course not equated) with that of British explorers in the Caribbean. Both types of travellers are included in the personal pronoun “we” when the narrator spells out the underlying “message” of her story at the beginning of the narrative: “We

Two Worlds in One Book  139 do return and leave and return again, criss-crossing the Atlantic; but whichever side of the Atlantic we are on, the dream is always on the other side” (149). By composing a sequence of returns, departures, or arrivals set in different times and places, Pauline Melville reflects this predicament at a structural level. The final narrative of Shape-shifter thus crystallizes the organizational principle of Melville’s short story cycle as a whole, which creates both contrasts and continuities by juxtaposing different geographical settings and historical contexts in an attempt to explore the experience of displacement – and the corresponding yearning for “the other side” – in its multi-fold manifestations.

V. Paul March-Russell observes that “[t]he blind spot of critics towards the short story […] means that a crucial treatment of the postcolonial condition has been omitted” (88). The above discussion has attempted to address this lacuna by elucidating the “organizing principle” at work in one particular type of postcolonial short story cycle. By capturing the migrant experience not in one comprehensive view, but in a series of fragmentary glimpses, Ways of Sunlight and other, similarly devised, cycles both oppose and connect the social and cultural space of Britain with that of the migrants’ country of origin. Crucially, they do so without harmonizing them: both “worlds” are covered within one and the same book, but they do not become part of one and the same continuous or overarching narrative. The main emphasis is on their contiguity, their coexistence “here” and “there”, which allows the author (and reader) to move from the one to the other without reaching any final destination or end-point. This can be interpreted in terms of “inbetweenness”, as the literary reflection of a state of homelessness, of belonging fully neither to the one place nor the other. However, it can also be read more optimistically as displaying a sense of being part of both communities depicted in the short stories at the same time. The fact that the cycles considered in this chapter all create a sense of simultaneity strongly suggests that they ultimately lean to the former point of view, de-centring Britain (and its capital, London) by placing the stories set in the former imperial “mother country” next to stories that happen elsewhere. On the final page of “The Courter”, the last story in East, West, the narrator says that gaining British citizenship as an Indian immigrant has given him previously unknown freedom, allowing him “to come and go”, a privilege that his father lacked. Yet, he goes on to exclaim: But I, too, have ropes around my neck, I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose.

140  Michael C. Frank I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, I kick. Ropes, I do not choose between you. Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you, and both. Do you hear? I refuse to choose. (Rushdie 211) This apostrophe to the readers clearly serves as a metatextual commentary on the book that we hold in our hands: the cyclical character of Rushdie’s volume is the product of precisely this refusal “to choose”. At the same time, the sequence of narratives destabilizes the very distinction between “East and West” by emphasizing mutual relations and overlaps that make it impossible to draw any clear-cut boundary between them. However, as this chapter has attempted to demonstrate, the refusal to choose is not merely negative; it also implies a positive affirmation on the part of the authors of migrant short story cycles that they “can do both”.

Works Cited Awadalla, Maggie, and Paul March-Russell. “Introduction: The Short Story and the Postcolonial”. The Postcolonial Short Story: Contemporary Essays, edited by Maggie Awadalla and Paul March-Russell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 1–14. ———, editors. The Postcolonial Short Story: Contemporary Essays. Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2013. Bahri, Deepika. “The Shorter Fiction”. The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah. Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 139–152. Bardolph, Jacqueline, editor. Telling Stories: The Postcolonial Short Story in English. Rodopi, 2001. Benjamin, Walter [1968]. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn and edited by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 2007, pp. 83–109. Coover, Robert. “There’s No Place Like Oz”. The New York Times, 15 Jan. 1995. www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/18/specials/rushdie-eastwest.html. Accessed 12 Nov. 2017. Dunn, Maggie, and Ann Morris. The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition. Twayne Publishers, 1995. Fabre, Michel. “Sam Selvon: Interviews and Conversations”. Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon, edited by Susheila Nasta. Three Continents Press, 1988, pp. 64–94. Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. Salman Rushdie. 1998. 2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Grant, Jane. “Introduction”. Ways of Sunlight, by Sam Selvon, Longman, 1987, pp. v–xxx. Grant, Damian. Salman Rushdie. 1999. 2nd ed., Northcote House, 2012. Gurnah, Abdulrazak, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. Cambridge UP, 2007. “Homeless Is Where the Art Is”. The Bookseller, 15 July 1994. Reprinted in Conversations with Salman Rushdie, edited by Michael R. Reder. University Press of Mississippi, 2000, pp. 162–166.

Two Worlds in One Book  141 Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre. Mouton, 1971. Islam, Manzurul. The Mapmakers of Spitalfields. 1997. Peepal Tree, 2003. James, Louis. “Writing the Ballad: The Short Diction of Samuel Selvon and Earl Lovelace”. Telling Stories: The Postcolonial Short Story in English, edited by Jacqueline Bardolph. Rodopi, 2001, pp. 103–108. Kennedy, J. Gerald. Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite ­Fictions and Fictive Communities. Cambridge UP, 1995. Korte, Barbara. “The Short Story and the Anxieties of Empire”. The ­C ambridge Companion to the English Short Story, edited by Ann-Marie Einhaus. ­Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 42–55. Luscher, Robert M. “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book”. Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, edited by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, ­Louisiana State UP, 1989, pp. 148–167. Lynch, Gerald. “Short Story Cycles: Between the Novel and the Story ­Collection”. The Cambridge History of the English Short Story, edited by Dominic Head. Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 513–529. Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and ­Reference Guide. Greenwood Press, 1989. March-Russell, Paul. “‘And Did Those Feet’? Mapmaking London and the Postcolonial Limits of Psychogeography”. The Postcolonial Short Story: ­C ontemporary Essays, edited by Maggie Awadalla and Paul March-Russell, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 79–95. Melville, Pauline. Shape-shifter: Stories. Picador, 1990. Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Louisiana State UP, 2001. Nasta, Susheila, editor. Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon. Three Continents Press, 1988. Rushdie, Salman. East, West. 1994. Vintage, 1995. Selvon. Sam. Ways of Sunlight. 1957. Longman, 1988. Smith, Jennifer Joan. “Locating the Short-Story Cycle”. Journal of the Short Story in English, vol. 57, 2011. http://jsse.revues.org/1182. Accessed 21 Aug. 2017. Thieme, John. “After Empire: Postcolonial Short Fiction and the Oral ­Tradition”. The Cambridge History of the English Short Story, edited by Dominic Head. Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 377–394. Viola, André. Introduction to Telling Stories: The Postcolonial Short Story in English, edited by Jacqueline Bardolph, Rodopi, 2001, pp. xi–xiii. Zagarell, Sandra A. “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre”. Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, vol. 13, no. 3, 1988, pp. 498–527.

9 The Fateful Cycle of Fairy Tales Reading A. S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye Louisa Hadley We are so familiar with fairy-tale patterns and structures that there is a feeling of déjà vu when we encounter them. The repetition of fairy tales within popular culture makes them seem cyclical – a series of repeated patterns that we cannot break out of. This cyclical structure of fairy tales, however, also operates at the level of the individual tale as the recurrent structures and motifs, specifically the movement from ‘once upon a time’ to ‘happy ever after’ and the use of repetition, presents the story as a closed narrative determined by fate. In traditional fairy tales, the movement from ‘once upon a time’ to ‘happy ever after’ is usually achieved through the plot convention of the reversal of fortunes. This reversal of fortunes most often takes the form of the rags to riches story, as in “Cinderella”, where the protagonist starts the story as a poor and unloved girl who is made to toil for her stepmother but ends up becoming the new princess. While a ‘reversal’ of fortunes might seem to suggest a subversion, a complete alteration from how things were at the start, it is more often figured in terms of a restoration of a prior state. Thus, in most versions of “Cinderella”, the backstory establishes that she was originally the daughter of a rich man (Grimm) or a nobleman (Jacobs). The ‘happy ever after’ that is achieved, then, is a closing of the loop, a return to the beginning. Thus, fairy tales are structured not so much around an alteration as a return, or a cycle; the ‘once upon a time’ usually establishes an idyllic life that is then punctured by a catastrophe – the ‘happy ever after’, therefore, restores this perfect life. The frequent use of repetition in fairy tales also presents the narrative outcome as predetermined by fate. For instance, in Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel”, it is remarked that the father “had to” agree to abandon his children a second time “since he had given in the first time” (45). Since fate is presented as inescapable, it works to establish a closed cycle that implies that the ending is always contained in and foretold by the beginning. The operation of fate here is often seen as a distinguishing characteristic of folk literature. In his study on The Poetics of Prose, Tzvetan Todorov identifies folk literature as stories in which “the actions are not there to ‘illustrate’ character but […] on the contrary, the characters

The Fateful Cycle of Fairy Tales  143 are subservient to the action” (66). However, in some fairy tales, the operations of fate seem to be at least partly determined by character. In Grimm’s “Snowdrop”, the stepmother tries to kill the protagonist three times; each time, the innocent and kind-hearted Snowdrop invites the disguised stepmother into the dwarves’ home despite their repeated warnings. Although the repetition of this pattern indicates that the characters’ actions are determined by fate, it seems to be a fate that is at least partly determined by their character; Snowdrop repeatedly invites the wicked stepmother in because she is fundamentally a kind and trusting character. A. S. Byatt’s third short story collection, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories (1994), explores the particular ways in which fate determines the narratives of female characters in fairy tales. As we have seen, fate in fairy tales is inherently linked to the idea of the cycle, and, similarly, the narrative of women’s lives is often conceived of in terms of a cycle. Thus, in exploring the fate of female characters in fairy tales, Byatt’s collection also responds to the cyclical nature of fairy tales, both in adopting fairy-tale structures and motifs and in its own construction as a cycle. Critical responses to Byatt’s collection either see it as lacking an organizing structure or understand it in linear terms. Elizabeth Wanning Harries’s description of the collection as “five unrelated stories” (110) is the most explicit assertion of the lack of structure in Byatt’s collection. Harries supports her view by emphasizing the publication history of the five stories, which were written separately, several years apart, and for different purposes. “The Glass Coffin” and “Gode’s Story” were originally written for Byatt’s bestselling novel Possession: A Romance (1990), where they became part of the complicated texture of pseudo-Victorian texts that Byatt created. Most critics dismiss these two stories as the least substantial, or in the words of the reviewer Sarah A. Smith, the “slightest”, of the five stories. “The Story of the Eldest Princess” and “Dragon’s Breath” were initially commissioned for separate projects, the first for a volume of autobiographical fairy stories and the latter for a theatre project of stories for Sarajevo. Only the title story appears to have been written specifically for this collection, and its disproportionate length seems to demarcate it as separate from the other stories in the collection. Other critics suggest that the shared thematic and structural concerns of the five stories provide an overall sense of coherence to the collection; however, these responses adopt a linear model of understanding that is at odds with the collection’s organizing principles. Francis Spufford notes that while Djinn “at first has the look of a collection made by accident”, the stories “arrange […] into a deliberate succession. They stir, then shake, then metamorphose the ‘power of necessity’” (9). This concern with the ‘power of necessity’ is mediated through the collection’s consideration of fairy-tale structures and the role of fate in fairy-tale

144  Louisa Hadley narratives. Campbell adopts a similarly linear approach in arguing that the stories become both more complex and more overtly feminist as the collection progresses. She argues that Djinn works against the “closed structure and authoritative narration” of fairy tales by exploring possibilities for female characters in its movement from “the old image of the woman unconscious, enclosed in glass” to the image of “the woman free, active, and an interpreter of glass” (144). Campbell’s feminist reading imposes a linear teleology that seems to be mirrored in the collection’s movement from stories that consider women’s position as bride, to mother, to a woman who is past childbearing age. In a real-world letter to Victorian Poetry, Byatt – speaking through her fictional protagonist Maud – positions Djinn as “a self-referring fiction about the life and death of the (female) body” (2). The concern with women’s lives in the collection is explicitly connected to the narrative possibilities that are offered to women in fairy tales and thus draws upon the cyclical structuring principles of fairy-tale narratives. Annegret Maack points out that the collection ends with “icons of the cyclic sequence of growth and decay, renewal and ending”, as the glass paperweights that the djinn purchases for Gillian contain a snake and a flower (129). As many critics have noted, the snake is reminiscent of Coleridge’s conception of imagination as a snake with its tail in its mouth, and glass is a recurring motif for storytelling in Byatt’s work.1 Indeed, the image of the snake reverberates throughout the story. When the djinn first appears in Gillian’s hotel room, he is forced to shrink down to a more manageable size, and the narrator describes how “his sex coiled like a folded snake” (250; cp. Bulamur 80). This image recalls the opening of the story, in which Gillian contemplates Milton’s description of “the primordial coils of the insinuating serpent” in Paradise Lost (99). Thus, the title story coils in on itself as the image of the snake recurs throughout it, setting up a cyclical structure even within the individual story.

I. Feminist Fairy Tales The connection between fairy-tale cycles and the life cycle of a woman is not peculiar or unique to Byatt’s work; the rewriting of fairy tales seems to have been a particular preoccupation of feminist writers since at least Angela Carter’s publication of The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). Byatt’s adoption of fairy-tale structures, then, exists within a broader framework of contemporary women writers rewriting and critiquing traditional fairy-tale models. For Cristina Bacchilega, these “contemporary fairy tales” establish a “conflictual dialogue with a pervasive tradition”, which she understands as characteristically “postmodern” (146). She argues that “Postmodern transformations” of the form “hold mirrors to the magic mirror of the fairy tale, playing with its

The Fateful Cycle of Fairy Tales  145 framed images out of a desire to multiply its refractions and to expose its artifices” (23). As Bacchilega suggests, the desire to “expose [the] artifices” of the fairy-tale genre and “multiply its refractions” implicitly connects to the feminist project of reworking fairy tales since it opens up the possibilities for women’s narratives. In her book Twice-Told Tales, Harries argues that “such play and critique have been part of the genre of the literary tale almost from the beginning” (16). Indeed, she proposes that there might be “two genres of fairy tales” and that “our current understanding of what the fairy tale must be like is too narrow”, based as it is on the “compact model Perrault and the Grimms favored” (16). Alongside this “compact” model championed by male writers, 2 Harries argues that a “more complex, and more self-referential model” existed, which was practiced by the female writers, or conteuses, of seventeenth-century France. She contests that while the “carefully constructed simplicity [of ‘compact’ tales] works as an implicit guarantee of their traditional and authentic status”, “‘[c]omplex’ tales […] work to reveal the stories behind other stories, the unvoiced possibilities that tell a different tale” (17). Consequently, rather than thinking of contemporary women writers as simply working against the male tradition of fairy tales, Harries also acknowledges a continuity between these writers and the conteuses of the past. She explicitly positions Byatt’s fiction in relation to the narrative traditions of these seventeenth-century conteuses, remarking that she “returns more and more frequently to the structures of older narratives: the frame tale, the embedded tale, a multiplicity of narrating voices” (75). The use of the embedded tale is not only part of the postmodern metafictional approach that is considered characteristic of Byatt’s stories, and particularly the stories collected in Djinn, but also connects to the collection’s concern with the ways in which fairy-tale plots structure and delimit the narrative possibilities for women. The title story is most obviously connected to this tradition of embedded stories, incorporating as it does the story of Patient Griselda, the brief anecdote of the peasant who wished for sausages, the three stories of the djinn’s imprisonment, and, threaded throughout the story, Gillian’s life story. Although Gillian seems to be the central protagonist, and the narrator of several of these embedded stories, there are hints that her narrative is itself embedded in a broader one. Commenting on ­Gillian’s meditation on the phrase “floating redundant” (98), which aptly describes both her state of flying in an airplane and her position as a middle-aged, divorced woman with grown children, the narrator conjures up the image of a snake, remarking in an aside: “(I saw him too, in my time)” (100). This interjection raises questions about who is telling this story and when, explicitly drawing the reader’s attention to the fact that the story is an artificial construct and thus opening up the possibility for alternative narratives. The first story in the collection,

146  Louisa Hadley “The Glass Coffin”, similarly calls into question the status of the stories within the collection. At the end of the narrative, the tailor resumes his craft of weaving; as Byatt notes, in these stories, she “associate[s] weaving and embroidery and tapestry with the art of narrative” (“Fairy Stories”). Thus, the story ends by raising the possibility that future narratives will be constructed. Indeed, it might be possible to consider the first story as the frame narrative and the subsequent stories as the narrative productions of the tailor. Thus, Djinn replicates the embedded narrative structures of earlier fairy tales, which Harries has shown were the preferred ­narrative form of the seventeenth-century French conteuses. These “tales […] are often carefully framed, usually within a telling dialogue or a contrasting novella. Their tales, too, often feature distorting mirrors and curious mises-en-abyme, or reflections of themselves, that expose their own artificiality and fictionality” (Harries 15). ­­Harries’s alignment of Byatt’s fictions with the seventeenth-century French conteuses implies that her adoption of the embedded narrative form here is part of a feminist project. Byatt uses embedded narratives to expose the artificiality of the narratives for women’s lives that are constructed by society. In her review of The Little Black Book of Stories, ­Samantha Matthews notes that “[a]s Byatt’s career progresses, ­story-telling appears more than ever a matter of life and death for her, inseparable from the life of the body, rites of passage and an awareness of mortality”. This comment seems equally true of Djinn, which uses fairy-tale structures as a means through which to explore the specificity of the female experience of “the life of the body, rites of passage and an awareness of mortality” (21). By self-consciously alerting the reader to the use of fairy-tale structures, Byatt both demonstrates the ways in which fairy tales construct narratives for women that constrain them within the life cycle of a woman, determined by biology, and seeks to open up fairy tales to provide new possibilities for women.

II. Once Upon a Time, Again All five of the stories in Djinn are explicitly positioned in relation to fairy-tale structures and motifs. Each of the stories opens either with the traditional “Once upon a time” (“The Story of the Eldest Princess” 41; “Dragon’s Breath” 75; and “Djinn” 95) or the slight variation “There was once” (“The Glass Coffin” 3; “Gode’s Story” 27). These openings establish the connections to fairy tales and the cyclical movement from ‘once upon a time’ to ‘happy ever after’ that, as we have seen, structures traditional fairy tales. However, in repeating this traditional opening in each of the stories, Byatt implicitly positions each of them as a ‘retelling’; the story starts again from the beginning and explores alternative possibilities within the fairy-tale narrative structures.

The Fateful Cycle of Fairy Tales  147 Byatt’s exploration of alternative possibilities to traditional fairy-tale narratives is even more apparent in the ways in which the stories engage with the idea of the ‘happy ever after’. The first story in the collection, “The Glass Coffin”, seemingly grants a traditional fairy-tale ending, which appears to have been predetermined; indeed, this is the only story that includes the conventional phrase to signal the end of the fairy tale. Initially, the tailor’s narrative in “The Glass Coffin” seems to be determined by chance; the narrator introduces him as an “unremarkable man, who happened” to stumble into a fairy-tale narrative. However, it soon becomes apparent that his narrative is structured by fate, as he finds “the little house that was waiting for him” (3). At this point, the tailor enters a typical fairy-tale narrative; choosing between three gifts offered by the old man, he opts for a glass key, which marks the start of his quest. At the end, he must choose between three things made of glass as his ‘prize’.3 While the distinction between the three objects is less apparent than in the three-casket version of this tale on which it is based – which presents a choice between gold, silver, and lead – there is clearly a ‘right choice’ that the tailor must make. He realizes that his glass key fits into the glass coffin, and thus his fate is sealed: “he knew – it is always so, after all – that the true adventure was the release of this sleeper, who would then be his grateful bride” (14). Although the tailor acknowledges that she might prefer to “remain […] alone and unwed”, the lady herself recognizes that she is in a pattern she cannot escape, remarking that “a kiss received […] was a promise” (21). That this outcome is predetermined by fate is emphasized by the woman’s lack of agency; when she informs her brother of the outcome, he responds that the tailor “should live with them both in the castle and be happy ever after”. The narrator’s repetition of these words, and the movement from the prophetic future to the past tense, underlines the idea that this outcome was predetermined by fate: “And so it was, and they did live happily ever after” (24).4 However, the story does not end there but includes a brief coda, which breaks the cycle of ‘once upon a time’ to ‘happy ever after’ and implies that stories continue outside the confines of the narrative pattern established by fairy tales. Immediately after the traditional closing words, the narrator implies that the ‘happy ever after’ is not quite perfect as the tailor lacks purpose. As noted above, Byatt associates weaving with storytelling, and thus in resuming his craft at the end of the story, the tailor is creating alternative narrative possibilities. “Gode’s Story” similarly explores the function of the ‘happy ever after’ in traditional fairy tales by presenting multiple endings. The story seems to resist the traditional conclusion; rather than establishing a new family unit that lives ‘happily ever after’, the woman commits infanticide, and the sailor marries Jeanne. However, even this is not the end of the story, as the narrative extends beyond the traditional fairy-tale ending of a marriage to show the subsequent impact on the protagonists.

148  Louisa Hadley Haunted by the ghost of her dead child, which serves as a reminder of the lost ‘happy ever after’, the miller’s daughter ultimately plunges to her death off a cliff. The narrator raises the question of the boundary between the real and the fantastical in presenting the townsfolk’s conflicting reports of this event: “some claimed to have seen a tiny naked child dancing and prancing […]. And some said there was nothing but a bit of blown dust”. Although the narrative initially seems to equivocate between these explanations, it ultimately confirms the existence of the ghost, as it is corroborated by the miller’s apprentice who had “heard little naked feet […] for weeks before”. By informing the reader that this account is dismissed by “the old wives and bright young men who know no better”, the narrator implicitly positions the apprentice’s account as true (34). Moreover, it is interesting that it is “old wives” who disbelieve the supernatural account, given that fairy tales used to be referred to as “old wives’ tales”, and this is still used as an idiom to refer to something untrue, or ungodly.5 Carter pointed out that the term “Old wives’ tale” is “a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it” (qtd. in Harries 51). The fantastical accounts bring the sailor to realize the truth of the situation, that the miller’s daughter had borne, and most likely killed, his child. As a result, he is subsequently haunted by the ghost of their dead child. While this exploration of the tragic consequences beyond the ‘happy ever after’ ending might be assumed to be the end of the story, the narrative provides yet another ending. The final lines of the story return to a more traditional ending in recounting the fate of Jeanne, who subsequently married and gave birth to six healthy and practical children. Thus, even a fairy tale that seems to resist the traditional ‘happy ever after’ by exploring the consequences of infanticide ends with a restoration of the family unit and re-inscribes a woman within a cycle of marriage and childbirth. While the coda to “The Glass Coffin” allows the tailor to find additional purpose in his life through his craft, Jeanne is repositioned in the traditional roles of wife and mother. Interestingly, Jeanne is the only character who is granted a name in “Gode’s Story”; all the other characters are referred to in terms of their occupation, in the case of the male characters, or their relationships, in the case of the female characters. This erasure of the individuality of women in these stories connects with Byatt’s exploration of the ways in which the narratives of individual women’s lives are subsumed into a generic pattern of bride, mother, and crone within fairy tales. In “Gode’s Story”, the main female character is referred to simply as the “miller’s daughter”, which defines her identity in terms of her relationship to her father (27). Similarly, “The Story of the Eldest Princess” identifies the female protagonist in terms of her position within the family and, implicitly, in relation to her father, the king. The lack of individual identity granted to the woman is further highlighted by the fact that the story

The Fateful Cycle of Fairy Tales  149 is eponymously titled, since eponymous fictions usually emphasize the singularity of the protagonists. In “The Glass Coffin”, the female protagonist is frequently referred to as “the beautiful lady” (21). While this does not construct a relational identity for her, it explicitly positions her in the role of archetypal beautiful damsel from fairy tales – a role that, as we have seen, she fulfils in becoming the tailor’s ‘prize’. The lack of individual identity for these characters underscores the fact that the role of women in fairy tales is usually determined more by their position in society than their personality. The final story of the collection initially appears to grant more individuality to its female characters, yet it is equally concerned with the erasure of female individuality in fairy-tale narratives. Although the female protagonist of “Djinn” is named, Dr Gillian Perholt, her name does not belong solely to her, but rather connects her to both the djinn she subsequently meets (especially in his pronunciation of “Djil-yan”, 206 and 213)6 and Charles Perrault, the seventeenth-century fairy-tale writer. Conversely, we have the figure of Patient Griselda in the story that Gillian recounts, whose name is overdetermined. Gillian introduces the character by giving five variations of her name, yet the multiplicity of names has the same effect as the lack of names in the first three stories; it erases the individuality of the woman and reduces her to the role(s) she has been made to play in both the story and in society. Once again, this story highlights the interchangeability of women in fairy tales, as Griselda is forced to prepare the home for her replacement, which turns out to be herself. Byatt explores the ways in which the life cycle of women is socially constructed – as daughter, wife, mother – and the role of fairy tales in making this movement seem inevitable and determined by (biological) fate. Given my claim that Byatt uses fairy-tale cycles to explore the life cycle of women, it appears odd that the first two stories in the collection open with male protagonists: the tailor and the sailor, respectively. However, these stories use embedded narrative structures to demonstrate the ways in which women’s narratives are enclosed within the narratives of men. In “The Glass Coffin”, the woman narrates the story of how she was imprisoned by an evil wizard for refusing to marry him. This is particularly significant since she recounts that the magician had cast a spell so that when she tried to warn her brother, she found that her “tongue would not move in [her] mouth” (18). The spell had relegated her to the position of the silent woman that is so often occupied by women in fairy tales, but in narrating the events to the tailor she briefly breaks out of this role. As we have seen, however, this is only a temporary escape, as her narrative is still determined by the patterns of fairy tales that position her as the ‘prize’ for the tailor. This prohibition against narration is also present in the final story in the collection. After her first encounter with what she later labels as “fate” (172), Gillian discovers she is unable to recount her

150  Louisa Hadley strange experience, as “[h]er tongue lay like lead in her mouth” (122). Byatt’s use of embedded narrative structures recalls the tradition of fairy tales written by women, but also connects more broadly to the feminist project of rewriting fairy tales and imagining alternative outcomes, particularly for the female characters. Maack implies this is the case in “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” in her contention that Gillian’s position as both narrator and audience of various stories make her realize “the potential for multiple metaphorical identities” (126).7 Maack goes on to suggest that Gillian learns that stories provide “a means to master […] fate” (129). Once again, then, fairy-tale narratives are connected to the idea of fate and in particular to the role of fate in women’s lives. However, Byatt is aware of the contradictions and difficulties in attempting to “master […] fate” through storytelling. It is significant that Gillian conceives of her inability to speak in similar terms to the woman in “The Glass Coffin”. This is one of many echoes between the stories in the collection that highlight the similarities in the patterns of women’s lives, even as they seek to break out of existing patterns and narrate their individual experience. In Byatt’s collection, the possibility of imagining alternatives outside of the traditional fairy-tale narrative starts from a self-conscious awareness of the fairy-tale patterns in which women are embedded. In the first story, the tailor seems to be self-consciously aware of the patterns of fairy tales and recognizes that they are especially delimiting for women. As noted earlier, after ‘winning’ her hand in marriage, the tailor defers to the princess and grants her the freedom to decide her own fate. Alexa Alfer and Amy J. Edwards de Campos interpret this “self-questioning” as “a moment in which the realist novel invades the fairytale and disorders its narrative codes”. They go on to remark that “this disordering occurs at precisely the point where the little tailor becomes an attentive and intelligent reader of his own tale – and thus ultimately also the author of his own fate” (111). However, the narrative hints at the idea that while the tailor is able to negotiate his own place within fairy-tale patterns, the woman is not. In a self-conscious aside, the narrator questions “whether [the tailor] spoke there with more gentleness or cunning, since the lady set such store on giving herself of her own free will” (21). Despite the appearance of agency offered to the woman in “The Glass Coffin”, the narrative still ends with the traditional ‘happy ever after’ marriage, which, as argued above, is presented as predetermined by fate. Although aware of the patterns within which she is confined, the woman is unable to imagine an alternate narrative for herself. Thus, while an awareness of the limitations of the narratives provided by fairy tales is a necessary starting point for imagining an alternative, it does not in itself promise an escape from those confining narratives. While the possibility of escaping fate seems illusory in “The Glass ­Coffin”, it appears much more possible in “The Story of the Eldest

The Fateful Cycle of Fairy Tales  151 Princess”. This tale presents three sisters who are initially described as being quite different from each other in both appearance and personality. The story explicitly grapples with the idea of establishing an individual identity within a family identity and the idea that narratives of identity are imposed by families, based in part on the order of birth. Despite their differences, the three sisters are referred to as a complete unit who share the blame for the changes that come over the kingdom. The sky seems to respond to their collective emotional state: “when they were moody girls”, it turns various shades of green until eventually it loses its original blue (42). The third sister, however, is implicitly marked as distinct from the others since she occupies the position of the ‘right choice’, the one who is destined to fulfil the quest. Given that the story was written in response to a commission asking for a fairy story of the author’s life, and that Byatt is the eldest of three sisters, it is tempting to read this comment in the tone of a jealous older child who envies the latitude given to the youngest. However, more broadly, it connects to the story’s, and the collection’s, wider concern with the ways in which fairy-tale narratives construct and delimit the pattern of women’s lives. The eldest princess is self-consciously aware of her position within fairy-tale narratives, yet the story remains ambiguous about whether this allows her the possibility to escape her predetermined narrative. When she is sent to restore the blue to the sky, the eldest princess understands her quest in relation to the stories she had read and fears that she will be unable to escape the predetermined narrative. As we saw above, an awareness of the limitations of fairy-tale narratives does not necessarily offer a way out of them. The eldest princess is despondent about her quest; she knows that she is ultimately destined to fail since it is always the youngest sibling who triumphs in these stories. The princess’s quest, then, turns out to be for self-determination, to decide her own narrative. That this quest is tied to her position as a woman is indicated by the fact that early on in her journey, she saw an old woman ahead of her [who …] vanished at certain bends and slopes of the path, and did not reappear for some time, and then only briefly, so that it was never clear to the Princess whether there was one, or a succession of old women. (46) In some regards, the figure that she sees is an image of the path that women have laid out for them by society and, thus, is an image of herself. Shortly after the first time she sees the figure, the princess encounters a scorpion with an injured tail who wants to be taken to a healer on the other side of the forest. This encounter prompts the princess to alter her narrative, which she sees as an “inconvenient story” (52), since she believes “[i]t would make no difference to the Quest” (53). On the one hand,

152  Louisa Hadley the princess deviates from the pattern that has been established for her and follows an alternate path as she travels through the forest with her injured animal companions. On the other hand, she fulfils the fate that her narrative has prescribed for her, which is to fail in her quest. The princess’s quest for narrative self-determination is threatened by her encounters with three men who seek to co-opt her into their narratives. In the course of her journey, the princess is tempted to stray from her new quest three times by human sounds – whistling, a hunting horn, and singing. The three companion creatures dissuade her from pursuing each of the three humans in turn by informing her of the pain that these men inflict on others. While the third option is usually the ‘right choice’ in fairy tales, here it is shown to be the worst possible outcome. The third man, the woodcutter, sings for a wife, but the cockroach undercuts the idyllic image presented by the singer, adding a verse that indicates the brutal reality of domestic violence that awaits. These men reflect the options available to women in fairy tales and hint at the possible outcome of the ‘happy ever after’. Ultimately, the story ends by simultaneously asserting the power of narratives and raising the possibility of escaping them. At the end of their journey, the princess and her three injured companions reach the home of an old woman who may or may not have been the woman ahead of her on the road. There, the animals recount their stories while the old woman tends to their wounds; it is clearly the combination of the old woman’s ministrations and the opportunity to narrate their own story that allows the creatures to heal. Similarly, the princess tells her own narrative and experiences a similar kind of healing in the process. In all of these instances, it is the ability to narrate one’s own life that seems to grant healing powers. However, the old woman also raises the possibility that escaping predetermined narratives is in itself a form of healing. The old woman declares: “We have no story of our own here, we are free, as old women are free, who don’t have to worry about princes or kingdoms” (66). This declaration underlines the role that the fairy-tale romance plot plays in determining women’s narratives and counters the idea that there is no positive place for old women in fairy-tale narratives. While several feminist scholars have seen the demonization of old women as a negative thing, a way of limiting women’s powers at precisely the point when they become wise, confident, and independent, the old woman in this story implies that this exclusion from fairy-tale narratives grants a kind of freedom. The woman then goes on to narrate the stories of the second and third princess, though she warns that “stories change themselves, and these stories are not histories and have not happened” (68). Thus, the story raises the possibility not only of alternative narratives for women, but also of living outside of prescribed narratives. This idea of alternative narratives for women takes on a very real form in “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”, which uses the fairy-tale

The Fateful Cycle of Fairy Tales  153 wishing trope as a way to explore an alternate physical reality for ­Gillian. “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” considers the fate of women once they are past childbearing age and thus lack a clearly defined role in society, a position that is emphasized in Gillian’s perception of herself as “floating redundant” (98). Ayşe Naz Bulamur explicitly frames this in relation to fairy tales, noting that “Byatt’s novella discards the marriage plot itself with its fifty-year-old divorcée protagonist, Dr. Gillian Perholt, who, unlike the princesses in fairytales, did not live happily ever after with her unfaithful husband” (62). This seems to align Gillian with the position of older women in fairy tales, the crones and stepmothers, who are replaced by a younger, more beautiful maiden. Indeed, the narrator notes that when she received the fax from her husband announcing the end of their marriage, Gillian “imagined herself grieving […] as an ageing woman rejected for one more youthful” (103). Yet, this is only an imagined response. Instead, she feels “like a prisoner bursting chains” (103–104). As noted above, this exclusion from the fairy-tale narrative is experienced as a form of freedom and independence. In the course of the story, Gillian has disturbing visions, the third instance of which is explicitly presented by the narrator as an “encounter with Fate, or […] something” (172). When Gillian is finally able to somewhat explain her visions to her friend Orhan, she notes: “lately I’ve had a sense of my fate – my death, that is – waiting for me” (167). Given Gillian’s position as a middle-aged divorcée, this idea of fate and death is implicitly connected to the story’s concern with the life cycle of women, since in fairy tales, it seems as if death is the only narrative option available for women past childbearing age. Byatt uses these same fairy-tale patterns to subvert this narrative and allow for alternatives by imagining a different physical reality for Gillian; however, there are limits to what can be achieved even within the realm of fantasy. This concern with the materiality of female experience is evident in the first wish that Gillian asks of the djinn. After considerable thought, Gillian wishes “for [her] body to be as it was when [she] last really liked it” – a wish that is both quite vague and yet precise (201). On the one hand, it is quite precise in specifying her “body” rather than just saying she wanted to be as she was. On the other hand, it is vague in that it does not specify an age, but rather her emotional response – almost as if she is not sure when she last really liked her body. Despite this uncertainty over her own relationship to her body, Gillian is very sure of her wish, assuring the djinn: “It is what I have desired hopelessly every day these last ten years” (201). This wish is granted, and Gillian is restored to “a solid and unexceptionable thirty-five-year-old woman”. She retreats to the bathroom to contemplate the results, concluding that she “was not beautiful but […] healthy and lively and unexceptionable” (202). The repetition of the word “unexceptionable” reveals that Gillian’s wish is not about vanity.

154  Louisa Hadley In traditional fairy tales, women’s concern with beauty is seen to be a moral failing and a sign of wickedness.8 The stepmother’s obsessive desire to be “the fairest of all” ultimately leads to her death in most versions of Snow White (Grimm 171).9 Bulamur’s reading of this scene in “Djinn” implicitly casts Gillian as a vain woman who has to be taught by the djinn “to appreciate her body despite its flaws”: “the djinn does not grant her physical perfection but gives her self-confidence to overcome her insecurities” (74). Yet, despite the vagueness of her wish, it is clear that Gillian specifically desired the “unexceptionable” body that she got, rather than that the djinn twisted her wish to teach her a lesson. Indeed, the djinn is confused by her physical transformation, noting that “[y]our ideal is a little meagre” (202). Gillian’s wish implicitly presents a feminist understanding of the way in which women’s lived experience is mediated through their physical form. Rather than wishing to be beautiful, Gillian wishes for an “unexceptionable” body that satisfies herself. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner notes that Byatt’s middle-aged heroines struggle with the question of how to “dissociate the body-for-herself from the body-for-others”. That Gillian has opted for a “body-for-herself” is emphasized in the story she tells the djinn of when she was a bridesmaid for her friend. She remembers seeing herself naked in the mirror and recognizing her body as “perfect”, but when the djinn points out that this is not the body she wished to be returned to, Gillian recalls that her former beauty was “terrifying. […] like having a weapon […] I couldn’t handle” (241). There is a sense in which Gillian’s “perfect” body seems to promise a fate that is out of her control; a fate that resulted in her sexual assault by her friend’s father. Coelsch-Foisner explicitly reads this as a “rape-scene” and presents it as “an extreme example of how the female body is appropriated by men and how this destroys the young woman’s self-esteem”. By contrast, Gillian’s “unexceptionable” body accompanies her newfound freedom and exploration of narrative possibilities now that she is no longer a wife or mother (at least not to young children). Several critics have understood Gillian’s return to her 35-year-old body in terms of the ‘happy ever after’ cycle of fairy tales; however, there are limits to Gillian’s ability to transform her material reality. Alfer and de Campos imply that Gillian’s wish inscribes her within the “perpetually renewable cycle” that she was so sceptical of in fairy tales (113). More explicitly, Coelsch-Foisner argues that “[w]hat is achieved through fantasy is a liberation from sequential time”. This understanding of Gillian’s wish fits with the idea of the ‘happy ever after’ as closing the cycle in fairy tales and returning to the beginning in an endless repetition. Indeed, Gillian self-consciously frames the “happy ever after” of fairy tales as an endless cycle, what she terms “the pseudo-eternity of happy-ever-after” (266). Given that Gillian’s wish is “not malign, or twisted towards destruction”, it would seem to introduce the idea of

The Fateful Cycle of Fairy Tales  155 “beautiful stasis”, and, indeed, the story closes with Gillian contemplating the “work of art” of the glass paperweights, which, as noted earlier, contain the cyclical icon of the snake (266). However, these artworks reassert Gillian’s position within the flow of time; according to Alfer and de Campos, they “reconcile [her] to her human fate” (114), and, indeed, it is while she is examining the glass paperweights that she discovers a “new dark age-stain on the back of [her] hand” (276). The reappearance of age-stains fulfils the djinn’s initial warning that “I cannot delay your Fate” (201). This reminder of the ageing process at the end of the story recalls Gillian’s earlier comments on the Patient Griselda story. There, she had noted the speed with which the story, as with most fairy tales, presents the stages of a woman’s life “from wedding to childbirth to nothing in a twinkling of an eye” (114). As she is about to narrate the restoration of family, and the reconciliation between Patient Griselda and her husband Walter, Gillian has her first encounter with fate, which is figured as an old woman, “flat-breasted […] its withered skin […] exposed above […] the windy hole that was its belly and womb” (118). This description highlights the extent to which the ageing process for women is connected to biology, and, in many ways, the descriptions of Gillian’s encounters with “fate” conjure up the experience of menopause.10 This interruption not only stops the flow of Gillian’s narrative, but also indicates the rupture in the cycle; for all that the story follows the fairy-tale cycle, Griselda cannot begin again, as time has passed and she has aged. Gillian seems to be angered by the ways in which fairy-tale narratives overlook the process of ageing and seek to restore everything with a return to the beginning. Connecting Patient Griselda to Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Gillian explains her dissatisfaction with the ending since “human beings do not die and spring up again […,] they live one life and get older” (114). The restoration of Gillian within the ageing process at the end of the story, then, implies that ultimately, fate cannot be avoided and that the cycle of life continues even within fairy tales. This idea that there are limits to the alternative possibilities that can be imagined for women’s lives is even more apparent when we consider the only one of Gillian’s wishes that was not granted in the story. Significantly, this is the only wish she asks for spontaneously, without careful consideration. Moreover, it is the only wish that the readers are not privy to as it is being made. Much later, Gillian tells the djinn about the circumstances surrounding the wish, noting that she was pressured into wishing and “before I could stop myself […] I wished what I used to wish as a child” (248–249). However, she still does not tell the djinn what she wished; rather, he guesses: “You wished you were not a woman” (249). From a feminist perspective, it seems crucial that this is the only wish that is not granted in the story. The stories in this collection use fantasy and fairy-tale motifs to explore the possibilities of alternative

156  Louisa Hadley narratives for women outside the traditional fairy-tale narratives that have constrained them. The stories explore, as Nancy Willard puts it, the role of fate in the “lives of characters imprisoned by plot” (38), but also use fairy-tale elements to imagine alternative possibilities. However, there seems to be a recognition that fantasy cannot entirely provide an escape from reality; for all their fantastical elements, the stories remain grounded in a realism, which is aware of women’s lived experience of moving through the world as a woman. Similarly, the stories acknowledge the extent to which the cycle of women’s lives is a structuring principle that cannot be escaped at the same time as they seek to find ways out of the cycle. This ambivalence concerning the possibility for women to break out of the predetermined narratives of fairy tales is reflected in the very form of the collection. On the one hand, Djinn seems to promote a linear model of reading that recalls the approach of reading a novel. Indeed, several critics seem to suggest that the final story is closer in form to a novel than a short story. On the other hand, in exposing and exploring the cyclical nature of fairy-tale narratives, as well as in the numerous echoes and connections between the five stories themselves, the collection requires a new mode of reading that is in itself cyclical. The short story cycle as a genre rejects both the linear model of novel reading and the fragmented model of reading isolated stories, instead proposing a hybrid model of reading that understands the stories both individually and as part of a whole. Suzanne Ferguson suggests that the short story collection is a “hybrid genre – in some sense oxymoronic, since the brevity and concentration of the short story are contravened by their assembly in a larger fictional identity” (103). Thus, in reading the stories that comprise Djinn, it is necessary to consider the ways in which the individual stories engage with fairy-tale narratives as well as the way in which these stories combine to offer multiple, alternative versions that present an overall response to fairy-tale narratives and women’s roles within them.

Notes 1 Although the ouroboros is a much older image, Byatt’s engagement with the Romantics throughout her career has prompted many critics to interpret this image in relation to Coleridge’s conception. 2 Suzette A. Henke takes this idea a little further in her claim that “the socalled ‘bedtime story’ was confiscated by male authors like Charles Perrault […] and the brothers Grimm” (48; my italics). 3 Interestingly, the tailor considers the three objects his “adventure” rather than his prize (12). 4 Todorov’s explanation of how the “prophetic future tense” works in the Odyssey draws out its resemblance to “our habitual image of repetition”. He notes that “[t]his narrative modality appears in different kinds of predictions, and it is always seconded by a description of the predicted action once it has occurred” (63).

The Fateful Cycle of Fairy Tales  157 5 The phrase originates from 1 Timothy 4:7. 6 Indeed, Campbell’s interpretation of Gillian and the djinn as “cooperative narrators” hints at a conflation of these two figures, since it “obliterat[es] the distinction between the one who wishes and the one who grants the wish” (143). This clearly has implications for Bulamur’s reading of the djinn’s role in teaching Gillian to value inner beauty. 7 See Hadley 128. 8 Henke argues that the fairy tales of Perrault and Grimm are a “compendium of cautionary tales about shame and retribution”, which explicitly punish women for “shameful libidinal passions” (48). Vanity would seem to be a precursor to such desires. 9 For instance, in the Brothers Grimm version of “Little Snow White”, the queen attends the prince’s wedding, driven by her vain desire “to be seen”, but upon discovering that the new queen is Little Snow White, she is forced to wear hot iron slippers and “dance in them […] until she danced herself to death” (178). 10 The description of Gillian’s second encounter with this vision seems to mirror the symptoms of menopause in its evocation of “a huge buzzing dark cloud, sparking with flashes of fire” (167).

Works Cited Alfer, Alexa, and Amy J. Edwards de Campos. A. S. Byatt: Critical Storytelling. Manchester UP, 2010. Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Bulamur, Ayşe Naz. How Istanbul’s Cultural Complexities Have Shaped Eight Contemporary Novelists (Byatt, Glazebrook, Atasu, Safak, Tillman, Livaneli, Kristeva, and Pamuk): Tales of Istanbul in Contemporary Fiction. Edwin Mellen Press, 2011. Byatt, A. S. Possession: A Romance. Vintage, 1990. ———. The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. Vintage, 1995. ———. “Fairy Stories: The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”, written for Insel Verlag, May 1995, asbyatt.com/onherself.aspx. Accessed 11 August 2017. Campbell, Jane. “‘Forever Possibilities. And impossibilities, of course’: Women and Narrative in the Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”. Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Imagining the Real, edited by Alexa Alfer, and Michael J. Noble. Greenwood, 2001, pp. 135–146. Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. 1979. Vintage, 1995. Coelsch-Foisner, Sabine. “A Body of Her Own: Cultural Constructions of the Female Body in A. S. Byatt’s Strange Stories”. Reconstructions, vol. 3, no. 4, 2003. http://reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/034/coelsch.htm. Ferguson, Suzanne. “Sequences, Anti-Sequences, Cycles, and Composite Novels: The Short Story in Genre Criticism”. Journal of the Short Story in English, vol. 41, autumn 2003, pp. 103–117. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm. “Cinderella”. The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition. Translated by Jack Zipes. Princeton UP, 2005, pp. 69–77. ———. “Hansel and Gretel”. The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition. Translated by Jack Zipes. Princeton UP, 2005, pp. 43–49.

158  Louisa Hadley ———. “Little Snow White”. The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition. Translated by Jack Zipes. Princeton UP, 2005, pp. 170–178. Hadley, Louisa. The Fiction of A. S. Byatt: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Harries, Elizabeth Wanning. Twice upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. Princeton UP, 2001. Henke, Suzette. A. “A Bloody Shame: Angela Carter’s Shameless Postmodern Fairy Tales”. The Female Face of Shame, edited by Erica L. Johnson, and Patricia Moran. Indiana UP, 2013, pp. 48–60. Jacobs, Joseph. “The Cinder Maid”. Europa’s Fairy Books, edited by Joseph Jacobs. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916, pp. 1–12. Maack, Annegret. “Wonder-Tales Hiding a Truth: Retelling Tales in ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’”. Essays on the Fiction of A.  S. Byatt: Imagining the Real, edited by Alexa Alfer, and Michael J. Noble. Greenwood, 2001, pp. 123–134. Matthews, Samantha. “Monsters, Trolls and Creative Writers”. The Times Literary Supplement. 31 October 2003, pp. 21–22. Michell-Bailey, Maud (A.  S. Byatt). “Letter to the Editor”. Victorian Poetry, vol. 33, 1995, pp. 1–3. Shilling, Jane. “The Powerful Magic of the Fairy-Tale”. The Sunday Telegraph, Review, 15 January 1995, p. 10. Smith, Sarah A. “Unexpectedly Witty”. Literary Review, January 1995, pp. 9–10. Spufford, Francis. “A Djinn in the Tale”. The Guardian, G2, 17 January 1995, p. 9. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. 1971. Translated by Richard Howard. Cornell UP, 1987. Willard, Nancy. “Dreams of Jinni”. The New York Times, Book Review. 9 November 1997, p. 38.

10 Unity in Diversity? Imagining Europe in Julian Barnes’s Cross Channel Janine Hauthal

This chapter explores the short story cycle’s particular resonance as a form for imagining collective identities. Focusing on Julian Barnes’s Cross Channel (1996), the case study takes Benedict Anderson’s idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ as its point of departure. In his work ‘on the origin and spread of nationalism’, Anderson argues that the rise of the novel, and of print culture in general, significantly contributed to the emergence of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ at the end of the eighteenth century. In particular, the novel’s ability to create coherence based on the temporal logic of the ‘meanwhile’, pre- and configured the nation by encouraging readers to consider independent characters and events as a collective social organism, anonymously but simultaneously moving through time. On this basis, it can be assumed that transnational entities such as Europe, too, arise not solely out of political institutions and for economic reasons, but result from, and depend on, diverse modes of aesthetic figuration. The chapter, then, sets out to show that Anderson’s way of conceptualizing the nexus of nation and narration in terms of temporality and coherence may apply not only to the novel, but also to the short story cycle. For, based on Rolf Lundén’s claim that “the tension between centripetal and centrifugal narrative forces” (55) is one of the central narrative dynamics of the short story cycle, the question arises whether the short story cycle may not offer a particularly resonant form for the imagination of Europe. The analysis of Cross Channel will show how the construction of coherence in Barnes’s kaleidoscopic depiction of Anglo-French encounters across centuries allows this work to be defined as a short story cycle. The analysis explores three aspects in particular, scrutinizing in the first place elements of coherence that link the individual stories and illustrate the specific affordances of the cycle form. Here, by concentrating on intratextual connections, it complements the work of scholars who have focused on the cycle’s intertextual references and relation to Barnes’s other works.1 Secondly, the analysis investigates the use of national stereotypes in Cross Channel as a way to illustrate how the stories relate national and transnational discourses in different ways. And, as well as examining the inter- and transcultural issues that the short stories

160  Janine Hauthal negotiate, it takes an interest in their narrative strategies and Barnes’s use of multilingualism. In the same vein it goes on, thirdly, to consider narrative situation, focalization, self-reflexive elements, and code mixing in particular as means to guide and engage readers’ sympathies.

I. The Affordances of Form: Cross Channel’s Construction of Narrative Coherence First published in 1996, Cross Channel includes ten short stories that depict Anglo-French relations and encounters of the British in France across several centuries. Most stories refer to significant events in ­European history or in the history of the two nations in question. “Melon”, for ­instance, is set around the time of the French Revolution (1774–1789–1801) and focuses on a young Englishman’s Grand Tour through France and on how he ends up a prisoner under Napoleon. “Evermore” evolves around war cemeteries and the memorial culture of the First World War, while ­“Junction” narrates how English navvies constructed the Paris to Rouen and Le Havre railway at the beginning of the 1840s. The time span covered ranges from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, but the book is not ordered chronologically. “Dragons”, for instance, refers to the earliest period in the whole cycle, the 1685 Edict of Nantes, but is only the seventh of the ten stories. Apart from the blurb, which refers to the book’s content as “stories”, paratextual markers that would explicitly designate the text as a short story cycle are missing. Instead, a common subject matter and location are the primary means by which coherence is achieved. The stories’ joint focus on the British experience in France is aptly captured by the collection’s title. Hence, based on a definition by Paul March-Russell that draws on Forrest Ingram and Susan ­G arland Mann, Cross Channel can be classified as a short story cycle whose ­ unified through the use of a recurring […] locaindividual stories are “ tion” and “a dominant motif” (104), for they share a common interest in the nexus of history and processes of remembering and forgetting. Many of them, like ­“Interference”, “Experiment’, “Melon”, and ­“Evermore”, promote a nostalgia for the past and thematize the fear of amnesia on a personal and collective level. And in “Tunnel”, an unnamed elderly writer, alluding to Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu and its famous ‘Madeleine’ episode, explicitly reflects on storytelling as a technique that creates and recreates historical memory through fictionalization: He [the unnamed writer’s grandfather] was gone beyond memory, and no plump little French cake dipped in tea would release those distant truths. They could only be sought by a different technique, the one in which this man’s grandson still specialised. He, after all,

Unity in Diversity?   161 was meant to thrive on knowing and not knowing, on the fruitful misprision, the partial discovery and the resonant fragment. That was the point de départ of his trade. (CC 206)2 The highly self-reflexive and partly self-mocking tone of this passage suggests that Cross Channel’s most striking feature with regard to the construction of coherence can be found in the cycle’s final story. Set in 2015, “Tunnel” takes place nineteen years into the future from the volume’s date of publication. The short story features an English writer “in his late sixties” (CC 191) who travels by train from London to Paris through the Channel tunnel. Throughout the story, the tunnel is linked metaphorically to processes of remembering, as the triple occurrence of the expression “in the tunnel of memory” demonstrates (cf. CC 199, 207, 210). Next to such motif-based connections relating to the nexus of literature and memory, this final story also contains numerous intratextual allusions, providing those who read the stories in succession, if not with a sense of closure, at least with a sense of recurrence and return. The unnamed writer, for instance, muses whether the European Parliament will decide to “rationalise” First World War graveyards (CC 209). A similar concern is expressed in “Evermore” by the character of Miss Moss who is worried that authorities will not keep the First World War cemeteries “for all future time” (CC 110) but remove them once nobody from the generation buried there remains (cf. CC 109–110). “Evermore” also echoes linguistically in “Tunnel”, when the elderly Englishman, reflecting on his role as a writer, uses the unusual metaphor of ‘grafting memories’: “What was he, finally, but a gatherer and sifter of memories: his memories, history’s memories? Also, a grafter of memories, passing them on to other people” (CC 210). In “Evermore”, the same verb is used twice in the same relation to memory: “She wondered if those too young to have original knowledge could be given memory, could have it grafted on” (CC 100); and “What if memory-grafting did not work […]?” (CC 110). Additional intratextual references in the final story further increase the coherence of the cycle. The unnamed writer has brought “a half-­ bottle of Meursault in a cold-sleeve” (CC 191) to drink with his lunch on the train, where he encounters a Master of Wine who could be one of the two Englishwomen producing wine in Pauillac that feature in the second-to-last story, “Hermitage”. The final story also implicitly cross-­references “Dragons”. While in the latter story the term ‘dragons’ refers to Irish Catholic mercenaries who bully and kill Protestants as heretics in order to spread the French King’s religion in France, “Tunnel” features supporters of a South London football club who are also called ‘dragons’ (cf. CC 200). Finally, a reference to ‘les Rosbifs’ in the final story provides a link to “Junction”, in which a group of French

162  Janine Hauthal characters uses the term to refer to the English navvies building the Paris to Le Havre railway (cf. CC 27, 206). With regard to this story, it is also worth noting that Barnes chose to set “Tunnel” on the Eurostar, locating it in the initially (from a British point of view) highly controversial ‘Chunnel’ that connects Britain with the continent, physically ending the island’s ‘splendid isolation’. It is equally noteworthy that Barnes depicts his writer-­figure on the move from England to France. This makes it possible to see the eponymous tunnel as a symbol of Cross Channel’s literary project as a whole, imaginatively uniting and juxtaposing the two sides of the ‘Chunnel’ in a collection of stories. The coherence-producing techniques in “Tunnel” also include self-­ reflexive strategies. While some of the fictive writer’s musings can be perceived as implicit comments on the narrative production of coherence, 3 the last two lines of the story ‒ and of the cycle ‒ confront readers with a twist: “And the elderly Englishman, when he returned home, began to write the stories you have just read” (CC 211). The last story thus unites all the previous stories into a single narrative universe by stating ‒ at least by implication ‒ that all the characters in the cycle originate from the same imagination. Readers are, then, enticed into revising their view of the cycle’s narrative structure. Rather than a relation based on independence and equivalence, a hierarchical structure emerges, in which the previous stories become part of an intradiegetic universe created by the fictional writer. In other words, the final story’s twist potentially turns the first nine stories of the cycle into intradiegetic narratives to which the final (tenth) story serves as a superordinate frame. Moreover, the final story, with its ‘autobiographical’ claim, relates the nine previous stories to the experience of the fictional writer and his ancestors. This autobiographical dimension has prompted critics to look for ‒ and find ‒ many parallels between what is known of Barnes’s biography and what the unnamed writer remembers of his own.4 By projecting the writing process of the stories roughly twenty years into the future, however, the most obviously coherence-creating strategy paradoxically does not provide closure in a realistic sense, but rather makes readers aware of their desire for it. Finally, in this consideration of techniques of coherence, the ending of Cross Channel can be related to two strands of the short story cycle identified by Elke D’hoker and Bart Van den Bossche. Ingram’s reference to the activities of author and reader in his definition of the short story cycle, they claim, has effectively led to two different strands within the Anglophone context: one which focuses on the formal characteristics of the short story cycle, as shaped by the author and one which foregrounds the reader’s activity of construing links between the different texts. (8)

Unity in Diversity?   163 In this sense, “Tunnel” revisits and emphasizes the unifying strategies with regard to theme and location that formalist approaches to the short story cycle by Susan Garland Mann and James Nagel have attributed to the author. At the same time, its self-reflexive quality, and its final twist in particular, prompts readers to actively seek connections between the ­ erald individual stories – an activity that Robert M. Luscher and J. G Kennedy have stressed in their approaches to the short story cycle. ­Moreover, and in keeping with the self-reflexive disposition of “Tunnel”, the ending of Cross Channel playfully engages with one of the central dynamics of the short story cycle, namely “the tension between centripetal and centrifugal narrative forces” mentioned above (Lundén 55; cf. also D’hoker and Van den Bossche 8). This tension, however, does not apply to Barnes’s use of national stereotyping in Cross Channel, which will be the focus of the second part of my analysis.

II. National Stereotyping: Intercultural (Mis-) Understandings as European Encounters? I will begin the exploration of instances of stereotyping in Cross ­Channel with another reflection of the fictional writer of “Tunnel”, namely the elderly Englishman’s admission that he tends to idealize ‘the French’ from a sentimental point of view: Judgments on other countries are seldom fair or precise: the gravitational pull is towards either scorn or sentimentality. […] As for sentimentality, that was sometimes the charge against him for his view of the French. If accused, he would always plead guilty, claiming in mitigation that this is what other countries are for. […] [They] existed to supply idealism: they were a version of pastoral. (CC 207–208) Given his affirmative stance on national identity, which allows the fictional author to refer here to ‘the French’ as a homogenous national collective, it might not come as a surprise that many of the stories in the cycle resort to national stereotyping and bring assumed differences between ‘the French’ and ‘the English’ to the fore. In turn, these differences lie at the heart of the manifold intercultural misunderstandings the stories focus on. A closer look at the first story, for example, reveals the role of stereotyping in this respect. “Interference” depicts an Anglo-French couple in crisis. It focuses on the reclusive composer Leonard Verity, who left England at an early stage of his career to seek artistic freedom on the European mainland. Falling in love in Berlin, Leonard and his French partner Adeline subsequently live for several years in one European city after another, eventually settling in the small village of

164  Janine Hauthal “Saint-Maure-de-Vercelles” (CC 8) in France. Having agreed neither to get married nor to have children, but to commit their lives to Leonard’s music, the couple initially lead a life that is both markedly cosmopolitan and European ‒ a life that belongs in equal measure to Berlin, Leipzig, Helsinki, and Paris (CC 16), but also to Europe, where – in contrast to England – “they did not laugh at” “being an artist” (CC 12). The story depicts the last days of Leonard’s life and discloses the couple’s feeling of mutual betrayal. Leonard perceives Adeline’s wish to get married as a way of renouncing the artistic ideal they had lived by all their lives (cf. CC 17). The reader, however, learns that Adeline’s wish to marry is an attempt to secure her old age, as she gave up her own career as a singer for him and would not be able to remain living in their house after his death because French law does not respect “concubinage” (ibid.). For the same reason, she could also no longer protect the copyright in his works after his death. Adeline, in turn, feels betrayed by Leonard’s latest composition, “The English Four Seasons”, which in her eyes reveals her partner’s undiminished attachment to England. The very title indicates a longing for England that renounces the artistic ideal they had shared: The truth was, she thought – and this was her truth – that […] you [Leonard] seem to me to be courting the country you deliberately left, indulging a nostalgia of the kind you have always despised; worse, you seem to be inventing a nostalgia you do not truly feel in order to indulge it. Having scorned reputation, you now appear to be seeking it. (CC 7) The story culminates in Leonard’s death while listening to a BBC radio broadcast of his last composition, while Adeline tries in vain to persuade the villagers to switch off their electric devices because these might disturb the broadcast. The story ends with her receiving a package with a pressing of Leonard’s final composition and breaking the records on the edge of the kitchen table (cf. CC 20). The impossibility of reconciliation foregrounded by this ending is also implicit in the story’s narrative form. Leonard and Adeline both act as focalizers, providing readers with access to their contradictory points of view.5 Readers become aware, then, that each character tends to attribute the cause of their mutual misunderstanding to the other’s nationality and his or her deviation from the artistic, transcultural, and ‘European’ way of life on which they had initially agreed. In fact, their respective stereotyping is noticeable right from the start of this story. At first, however, gender stereotypes are more prominent, when L ­ eonard, the initial focalizer, describes his estrangement from his partner with blatantly misogynist claims such as the following: “Women, he had concluded, were at base conventional: even the free-spirited were eventually

Unity in Diversity?   165 brought down” (CC 3). In the course of the story, it becomes clear, however, that he perceives Adeline not just as “a vexing woman” (CC 4; my emphasis) but as an “ignorant, foolish Frenchwoman” (CC 7; again my emphasis). Reflecting the long-standing conflict between English ­A nglicanism and French Catholicism (cf. e.g. Colley), he (falsely) suspects her of harbouring religious sentiments (cf. CC 5, 7, 13). National stereotypes can also be detected in how Leonard is perceived by the inhabitants of the French village, in whose life he refuses to integrate. When Adeline relates her partner’s relationship with the villagers – a relationship that only exists indirectly through her act of mediation – the villagers’ references change from “M’sieur” (CC 8) to “the English artist” (CC 10). This is a national affiliation that Leonard (at least initially) does not feel; for, as the following passage details, he sees himself as neither exile nor immigrant: He was not an exile, since that implied a country to which he could, or would, return. Nor was he an immigrant, since that implied a desire to be accepted, to submit yourself to the land of adoption. […] No, he was an artist. (CC 8) That national stereotyping in “Interference” is not confined to personal characterizations is evident when Leonard evokes just such stereotypes to devalue his own homeland ‒ for instance in his explanation of why he left England: England was death to the true artist. […] In England they had fog between the ears. […] They had no concept of freedom, of the artist’s needs. […] You had to leave England to find the upper slopes, to let the soul soar. That comfortable island dragged you down into softness and pettiness, into Jesus and marriage. (CC 12–13) Leonard’s adversarial attitude towards his homeland is shot through with stock features that have long shaped English national identity, most notably the country’s island position. The ‘fog between the ears’ of his fellow countrymen metaphorically alludes to the frequent occurrence of a meteorological phenomenon brought about by a combination of ­Britain’s exposed position and widespread atmospheric pollution. ­Moreover, speaking of “Continental Europe” (CC 12), Leonard invokes the traditional juxtaposition of Britain and ‘the Continent’ that shapes the “insular mentality” of the British.6 Even when he revaluates this juxtaposition to justify his own Europhilia, his argument betrays a binary logic similar to that of contemporary British Eurosceptics, relying on a presumed dissimilarity between Britain and other European countries.7

166  Janine Hauthal Like this first short story, most others in the cycle contain similar instances of national stereotyping. Some reveal national identity as a construct. The homodiegetic narrator in the story “Experiment”, for instance, insinuates that the two women taking part in the experiment – which, as a third party, involves his (blindfolded) uncle Freddy – were actually one and the same person, even though his uncle insists that one was British, the other French.8 The narrator’s interpretation is corroborated by the fact that only one woman, the Englishwoman ‘K.’ (cf. CC 61), is listed in the historical documentation of this experiment. The narrator even suggests that ‘K.’ is identical with the woman his uncle Freddy met on the boat train to ­England whose name is Kate and who later became his wife – a ­possibility Freddy at no point considered. Stories like “Melon”, on the other hand, in which the protagonist’s ­imprisonment outside his motherland coincides with memory loss, confirm national identity as an indispensable feature of sanity. And although British characters may find their national identity confirmed, or even strengthened, when encountering French people (cf. the first part of “Melon”), the outcome of these stories on the whole confirms that living on the European mainland generally affects the English characters ­negatively. Hence, if we were to regard the anecdotal relations depicted in the cycle as intercultural encounters that point to ways of living across national cultures and thinking beyond national models, a decidedly pessimistic image would prevail. Nevertheless, most of the stories contain some (however rare) moment of intercultural understanding, and it is in such utopian glimpses that a European dimension emerges. In “Interference”, such a moment exists in the happy past of the couple, when they lived in different cities across Europe and Leonard’s work was played “from Helsinki to Barcelona” (CC 9). Back then, the ­A nglo-French couple were “companions” (CC 5) who made “an artists’ pact” as “twin spirits in life and in music”, intent on “conquer[ing] Europe” (CC 16). Their cosmopolitan-European sensibility, as well as their intercultural understanding, becomes palpable, for instance, when Adeline remarks that Leonard was “not at all the stiff Englishman of racial stereotype” (ibid.), and when Leonard affectionately calls his French partner “ma Berlinoise” (CC 8). Likewise “Junction”, set in the France of the 1840s, features a scene where an English ganger, who has crossed the Channel in order to work on the Paris-Le Havre railway, and a French peasant ­“underst[an]d one another perfectly” while they repair a shovel, speaking in a “macaronic” language made up of “partly English, partly French, and […] an olla podrida of other languages” (CC 33). Witnessing this scene, the French doctor, his wife, and his student comment on it as follows: ‘That is how we shall talk in the future,’ claimed the student with sudden confidence. ‘No more misapprehensions. Nations shall mend their differences as these two fellows are mending their shovel.’

Unity in Diversity?   167 ‘No more poetry,’ said Mme Julie [the doctor’s wife] with a sigh. ‘No more wars,’ countered Charles-André [the student]. ‘Nonsense,’ Dr Achille responded. ‘Merely different poetry, different wars.’ (ibid.) The scene demonstrates how the narrator negotiates different views on moments of intercultural understanding. While the student Charles-­ André idealizes the scene as a symbol of the future peaceful convergence of nations, Mme Julie’s view is informed by the idea of a specific cultural and literary tradition that she sees vanishing in a dystopian dissolution of national identities. Dr Achille, in turn, adopts a more realistic stance, balancing the culturally utopian with the politically dystopian. His statement acknowledges the poetic potential resulting from intercultural understanding (‘different poetry’), but he is more cautious than his student in thinking that the convergence of nations will not be without struggle (‘different wars’). Overall, however, moments of intercultural understanding are scarce in Cross Channel, and misunderstandings abound in the cycle’s figuration of Anglo-French encounters. Stories like “Junction”, for instance, expose the prejudices of the French characters. To begin with, the ­Fanal de Rouen’s prejudicial perception of the English navvies shows in its use of the derogatory term “les Rosbifs” (CC 27). Moreover, French characters like Mme Julie, Charles-André, and the curé of Pavilly, in particular, are implicitly ridiculed when their prejudices turn out to be unjust: Mme Julie, for instance, “had heard of gypsies, banditti, wandering ­Israelites and locusts devouring the land. She had enquired of her husband whether they should not carry instruments of protection […]. The shanty-town, however, proved quiet” (CC 23).9 The English navvies equally perceive the French in a stereotypical manner. “Yorkey Tom”, for example, refers to Dr Achille, his wife, and his student as “gawping frog-eaters” (CC 36): “Now he was being examined by ­Mossoo Frog and his Madame and a boy who trailed behind, peeking and peering” (CC 25). While “Junction” sets “Mossoo Frog” off against “les ­Rosbifs”, the final story takes up the latter term and links it to a newer, but equally (if not more) deprecating name for the English, “les Fuck-offs” (CC 207). A closer look at Barnes’s use of language labels in Cross Channel reveals, therefore, that he points to the reciprocity of prejudice in Anglo-French relations. On the whole, however, the portrayal of ‘the English’ is rather more positive than that of ‘the French’. For instance, even the xenophobic French clergyman finds that the English navvies are justly paid more than their French counterparts (cf. CC 38–39). Moreover, the English contractors are described as “respond[ing] manfully” (CC 41) to the collapse of a viaduct by having it rebuilt “[w]ith energy and determination,

168  Janine Hauthal and with the skill of their agents” (ibid.) at their own expense in a short period of time. The story closes reporting how Thomas Brassey, one of the English contractors, reacts “modestly” (CC 42) ten years later, when he is awarded “the Cross of the Légion d’honneur” (ibid.) for his labours in France. The generally more positive portrayal of the English ­characters here, as well as in other stories, is likely to sway readers’ sympathies ­towards the English rather than the French side of the equation. So far, the analysis has shown that Barnes is less guilty of a sentimental view of ‘the French’ than the quote from “Tunnel” placed at the head of this section might lead readers to assume. Even though – in “Junction” at least – characters’ stereotypical views can also be attributed to religion and class (rather than nation), the cycle’s continuous evocation of prejudices of both ‘the French’ and ‘the English’, as well as its slight ­English bias in the portrayal of Anglo-French encounters, points to the persistence of the national as a frame of reference. ­However, its often covert narrators (exceptions are “Experiment”, “Gnossienne”, “Brambilla”, and “Tunnel”) deprive the cycle of a superordinate narrative i­nstance that might explicitly mark individual stereotypical views as such, or reflect on the overall reliance on national characteristics. These tend, then, to be simply reinscribed, implicitly questioning the ­Francophile leanings of the unnamed writer in the final story (who supposedly wrote all the stories in the cycle). Interestingly, this is a view the cover of the third Picador edition (1997) aptly illustrates, with its image of a wine glass on a map of southern Britain and northern France. The glass has been knocked over and red wine has spilled from ­Britain (where the glass presumably stood) over the Channel and northern France, covering most of it including Paris.10 The glass of red wine invokes a national stereotype of ‘the French’. The fact that it is knocked over cites an equally common trope of crime fiction: conflict. The transcultural encounters of Cross Channel, this cover seems to say, are more often than not fraught with tension.

III. Code Mixing: Constructing Alterity – Modelling Proximity A certain linguistic tension also arises from Cross Channel’s frequent insertion of French expressions. But how does the cycle’s evocation of national stereotypes and its rather biased portrayal of Anglo-French encounters relate to this code mixing? My answer will start with a brief overview of the use of foreign-language elements in Barnes’s cycle. The following observations build on research on fictional multilingualism conducted at the interface of postcolonial, linguistic, and narrative studies by Marion Gymnich and Susanne Reichl. This research, however, was concerned exclusively with postcolonial and minority literatures. I will, then, initially reflect on some similarities and

Unity in Diversity?   169 differences between code mixing in these literatures and in the work of a white male British author primarily concerned with inner-European encounters. In Barnes’s short story cycle, to begin with, foreign-language elements are inserted frequently into the Standard English text. They predominantly consist of isolated lexical items in French. Now and then, the stories also include expressions in other European languages such as Italian (“banditti”, CC 23), Spanish (“olla podrida”, CC 33), and ­G erman (“zollverein [sic]”, CC 197; “Kameradschaft”, CC 115). The recurrence of nouns like ‘boulangerie/boulanger’ (CC 9, 11, 18, 120), ‘lavoir’ (CC 11, 122), and ‘mairie’ (CC 8, 105) within and across ­stories – and especially in the final story, which contains expressions from previous stories like “les Rosbifs” (CC 27, 206) or “alembic” (CC 67, 210) – on the one hand attests to the limited French lexicon used in the cycle, but on the other contributes to the cycle’s overall coherence. That most of the inserted lexical items are nouns and noun phrases that leave English syntax unaffected (cf. constructions like “the régisseur and the homme d’affaires”, CC 169) means that their alternation within the sentence fulfils Gymnich’s definition of “code mixing” (Metasprachliche Reflexionen 68). Most of the nouns and noun phrases in question refer in any case to items that have an exact English equivalent (e.g. “boulangerie” – bakery, CC 9), or could have been translated into English (e.g. “vin d’honneur” – reception, CC 8). This, as well as the fact that all these expressions are italicized, provides a first indication that the use of foreign-language elements in Cross Channel serves to inscribe difference and alterity. Barnes even italicizes French words that have been assimilated into Standard English (e.g. “vis-à-vis”, CC 47), as if highlighting already existent French influences in the language – a typographical convention Reichl sees as visualizing (and hence emphasizing) alterity, albeit with “a diffuse and unconcrete sense of foreignness”: the ‘otherness’ of the experience related in the text is echoed in the ‘otherness’ of the printing conventions. By graphically pointing to its linguistic ruptures and irregularities the text challenges its reader to perceive it as a multilingual, multicultural product. (79–80)11 Referring to the semantic fields of everyday life such as eating, drinking, and social forms, the French expressions add local colour and cultural as well as historical specificity. Their frequency varies slightly among the stories. The fact that – next to “Hermitage”, which tells the story of two English women winemakers in the Médoc – the narrative of the fictional writer Monsieur Clements contains most (and the most varied range of) French expressions indicates that the foreign-language

170  Janine Hauthal elements also contribute to characterization. In “Hermitage”, they attest to the women’s occupation; in “Gnossienne”, they underline both the writer’s education and his Francophile leanings. That Barnes takes the historical context into account becomes particularly evident in the first part of “Melon”, which consists of a letter written by the young ­Hamilton Lindsay to his cousin and later wife Evelina while travelling through France in the 1770s. Throughout this letter, the author uses old spelling, e.g., “Nismes” for Nîmes (CC 66) and “macquerel” for mackerel/maquereau (CC 67). In the individual stories, which mainly feature heterodiegetic narrators, the foreign expressions generally appear in the narrator’s discourse.12 On the whole, direct discourse is scarce in Cross Channel. Instead, free indirect discourse with a medium degree of narrator participation prevails. Oral communication is, therefore, principally rendered in English so that the bilingualism of characters speaking French is merely implied. Only two passages in the entire book make it explicit that characters converse in French. For instance, in an interview, the English writer in “Gnossienne” “feel[s] [his] French evaporate and [his] brain dry” when the interviewer poses a first, rather abstract, question to him in French (CC 119). In the final story, “Tunnel”, the elderly English writer remembers a flirtatious encounter with a Swiss woman on a train from Zurich to Munich in the early nineties: “She called him Monsieur, and they addressed one another decorously as vous” (CC 199). In contrast, the French characters Dr Achille, Mme Julie, and Charles-André in “Junction” act as focalizers, but their conversations are rendered exclusively in English (as reported speech), without any explicit markers to show they are speaking French. In general, Cross Channel rarely reminds readers of the fact that characters are using a foreign language. There are few instances where direct discourse is left untranslated, and these usually span no more than a few lines (cf. CC 5–6, 45–46, 119–120, 198–199).13 Standard English clearly prevails. However, since the inserted French expressions are neither translated nor explicitly explained, they inscribe difference into the cycle’s main language and intermittently decentre the predominance of Standard English. In addition, they have a mimetic function, authenticating the intercultural encounters depicted in the cycle of stories. Although, given their brevity, the French insertions in Cross Channel are unlikely to form a major obstacle for English-speaking readers, they still confront them with potentially unfamiliar elements. As Gymnich observes, the incorporation of untranslated and unexplained foreign words, phrases, and sentences tends to restrict the full communication of meaning (cf. “Linguistics and Narratology” 68–69): readers have to rely on the context for their interpretation of these elements. Potentially challenging reader reception, the foreign-language expressions can make palpable a distance between the readers’ world and the fictional world,

Unity in Diversity?   171 without entirely severing the lines of communication between them. In this respect, Cross Channel resembles the postcolonial and minority literature studied by Gymnich, where the occurrence of untranslated elements does not […] lead to serious comprehension problems; in many cases guessing the general semantic field a lexical item belongs to (e.g. food, drink, clothing) is enough to guarantee a basic comprehension of the passage the foreign word(s) occur in. (ibid. 69)14 In view of the unobtrusive, selective nature of the French insertions, it would go too far to claim that code mixing in Cross Channel implies a refusal to privilege the language of ‘origin’ of its author and its predominantly English cast. Nonetheless, allowing French expressions room in a predominantly English text certainly revaluates the ‘foreign’ dimension. The lack of translation and explanation, as Gymnich points out, reinforces the authority of (in this case) the French cultural input (cf. Metasprachliche Reflexionen 71). By incorporating untranslated and unexplained elements, Barnes stresses “not only the alterity, but also the autonomy of the linguistic and cultural world that is presented” (Gymnich, “Linguistics and Narratology” 69). And this world is precisely one of intercultural encounter. The remaining part of this section will examine the shape of this encounter in greater detail, scrutinizing how Barnes integrates code mixing in Cross Channel, and in particular how the foreign-language elements relate semantically to the Standard English text. Throughout the stories, the French expressions cannot be exclusively attributed to a narrator’s or a character’s point of view. In “Interference”, for instance, expressions such as “Punaise de sacristie” (CC 5) in the narrator’s free indirect discourse tend to be indicative of L ­ eonard’s point of view. Moreover, when Adeline remembers this expression at a later point in the story (cf. CC 7) where her point of view prevails, it becomes clear that inserting the French into the Standard English discourse simply imitates the orality of speech.15 That the use of French in Cross Channel can serve as a marker of alterity, orality, and focalization also shows in the following quote where the French expressions in question are accompanied by passages in English that equally mimic oral utterance: “He had not left England, thank you very much, in ­order to attend a vin d’honneur recte, mairie, or to tap his thigh at the local kermesse” (CC 8). The example demonstrates that the narrator’s discourse determines the use of third-person singular and the overall grammatical structure, while syntax and word choice can be attributed to the focalizing character of (a clearly enraged) Leonard. The French expressions convey Leonard’s intimate knowledge of what

172  Janine Hauthal he calls the “social forms and rules and pettinesses” of his adopted village home (ibid.). At the same time, however, the accumulation of French in his angry outburst also serves to mark a distance from the inhabitants of Saint-Maure-de-Vercelles. Except for the few expressions in the narrator’s free indirect discourse that affectionately relate to ­Adeline and the couple’s shared past (cf. “ma Berlinoise”, ibid.; “le coup du chapeau”, CC 14, 16), most of them concern the local factors that interfere with Leonard’s artistic life in general and with his habit of listening to BBC broadcasts of classical music on his wireless in particular (cf. sapeurs-pompiers, boulanger/boulangerie, lavoir, cf. CC 9, 11, 18). ­Focalization thus adds a derogative dimension to the French expressions used in this story. In other examples, French expressions are less clearly attributable to a character and rather indicate the participation of a heterodiegetic narrator. When the word ‘kermesse’ is used as a metaphor near the end of “Interference”, for instance, it illustrates Adeline’s desperation when she realizes how she betrayed Leonard by failing to alert the village for the broadcast of his final composition. The French expression is clearly attributed to the narrator (“A kermesse had started in her head”, CC 18) and serves to implicitly ridicule Adeline’s state of mind, as readers are reminded of Leonard’s use of the word to highlight the pettiness of his socializing obligations towards the village (cf. CC 8). Here, as well as throughout Cross Channel, French expressions are sites of linguistic negotiation, balancing in various ways narrator and character participation.16 A similar example can be found in “Hermitage” – the story of the two Englishwomen producing wine in Pauillac – which abounds with French expressions from the semantic field of viticulture. In a scene where focalization switches between the two women, one of them – Florence – hears French terms for the “maladies of the vine” (CC 174), which the text registers correctly even though the character is said to only understand the two that resemble English: “Altise, Florence heard, and rhynchite; cochinelle, grisette, érinose; there were monstrous beasts called l’ephippigère de Béziers and le vespère de Xatart; then there was le mildiou and le black-rot (those at least she understood), l’anthracnose and le rot blanc” (ibid.). The correct rendering of the French terms evidences the medium degree of narrator participation in this passage and, again, proves French expressions to be sites of linguistic and narratorial negotiation. A medium degree of narrator participation also characterises the few instances where Barnes imitates characters speaking (or rather thinking) in Pidgin French. “Junction”, as I have already mentioned, includes a scene in which the English navvy Yorkey Tom functions as focalizer when he refers to the doctor who – together with his wife and his ­student – is said to “examin[e]” him, as “Mossoo Frog” (CC 25). Both the stereotypical nature and linguistic rendering of this derogatory

Unity in Diversity?   173 name, as well as the expressive syntax (e.g. “Well, let them look”, ibid.) indicate the dominance of the character’s own language register in this passage. Since foreign-language elements are based neither on the mother tongue of the (implied) author nor on that of the cycle’s predominantly British focalizing instances, code mixing in Cross Channel does not indicate vocabulary gaps. Instead, Barnes has his narrators and characters resort to French in order to “ad[d] a distinct flavour to what is said about the topic” (Gymnich, “Linguistics and Narratology” 69). This is particularly clear in Leonard’s use of pet – as well as derogative – names, but equally discernible in references to food, drink, and social forms. Accordingly, in Cross Channel, changes from English to French serve to highlight an affective relationship either positively or negatively. It follows that instances of code mixing in the cycle indicate varying degrees of narrators’ or characters’ cultural assimilation and thus model both distance and proximity. However, while narrators’ and characters’ individual awareness of, and stance on, their own degree of cultural assimilation can differ, instances of code mixing converge in expressing their varying involvement in Anglo-French encounters and relation(ship)s. Hence, in Cross Channel, code mixing can be regarded as a deliberate communicative strategy that ultimately serves as another means of creating coherence within the cycle. By consistently foregrounding the affective dimension of the Anglo-French encounters they illustrate, the French expressions scattered throughout the Standard English text even suggest a dimension of trans-historical continuity in these encounters. At the same time, code mixing shapes the cycle’s implied readership. Eschewing translation and cultural mediation, the cycle implicitly projects a narratee who does not need the narrators’ help to understand the stories’ French expressions. Seen from this angle, Cross Channel constructs a potentially Francophile readership or, at least, addresses a narratee with a prism of experience like that of its cast. This construction reduces the alterity of the world of Anglo-French encounter depicted in the cycle. In fact, the cycle’s advocacy of intercultural understanding is all the more powerful for the balance it achieves between alterity and distance on the one hand and reciprocity and proximity on the other. Taking into account, however, that Barnes’s use of code mixing impinges on national linguistic hegemony, a final question remains: To what extent does the cycle’s advocacy of intercultural understanding affect the claim that Cross Channel as a whole points to the persistence of the national as a frame of reference? In other words, does Barnes’s insertion of foreign-language elements indicate an emerging transnational frame, or indeed a specifically European sensibility? All those French expressions can, after all, be seen to result from what I will call ‘doing Europe’.

174  Janine Hauthal

IV. Ways of ‘Doing Europe’: Cross Channel’s European Dimension In Cross Channel, the integration of untranslated French expressions into the Standard English text results from ‘doing Europe’ across the ages, i.e. from British characters travelling to ‘the Continent’ first by ship (“Melon”), then by ferry (“Experiment”), and finally by plane and highspeed train (“Tunnel”), depending on the period. Continental Europe, the Channel, and France in particular figure in each case as a contact zone.17 However, the persistence of national stereotypes, as well as the bias in Barnes’s portrayal of Anglo-French encounters, indicates that the characters’ exposure to cultural otherness rarely elicits a truly European sensibility. Characters tend to refrain from adopting a European identity in the sense of ‘feeling’ or ‘being’ European. An exception to this rule is Leonard and Adeline in their early days together. Leonard appreciates “Continental Europe” for not laughing at the idea of “being an artist” (CC 12), and Adeline remembers him promising her that together “they would conquer Europe” (CC 16). Another instance that betrays a ­European sensibility is the reference to “his great, historical, European luck” (CC 205) by the elderly writer in “Tunnel”, which alludes to the idea of Europe as a force for peace. At first, the near absence of explicit references to ‘feeling’ or ‘being’ European seems to suggest that the idea of Europe is irrelevant for Barnes’s short story cycle. Against this impression, however, I would argue that – despite the salience of the national – a European sensibility does emerge in Cross Channel. This sensibility is not based on ‘feeling’ or ‘being’ European but rather on the notion of ‘doing Europe’. By depicting acts of travelling, working, and loving across borders, Barnes’s short story cycle imagines what sociologist Adrian Favell has called “everyday ways of being European” (1116): The fundamental unit of society is not an opinion or a belief; it is an action (or interaction). Of course, we can ask people the ‘identity’ question – how do you feel about the EU; does ‘being European’ now come in third, fourth or fifth behind your national ‘identity’ […]? – but […] this extra question is quite simply redundant once you have good behavioural data that tells you what people actually do in an integrating Europe. […] ‘[B]eing European’ nowadays is […] about shopping across borders, buying property abroad, handling a common currency, looking for work in a foreign city, taking holidays in new countries, buying cheap airline tickets, planning international rail travel, joining cross-national associations – and a thousand other actions facilitated by the European free movement accords. (1114–1115)

Unity in Diversity?   175 In the case of Barnes’s cycle, spatial mobility, of course, mostly predates the EU and predominantly concerns movements in France and from ­England to France. However, both the first and last story in the ­ ermany cycle ­expand this restricted horizon by including references to G ­(Berlin, Leipzig, Munich); to Lake Constance at the intersection of ­Germany, Austria, and Switzerland; to Zurich (Switzerland); to ­Finland ­ ogether (Helsinki); and to Spain (Barcelona) (cf. CC 9, 12, 16, 198–199). T with the accumulation of explicit references to Europe in these two stories (cf. CC 12, 16, 191, 196–198, 205, 207), they make it possible to think of the Anglo-French encounters in the remaining eight stories as distinctly European phenomena. But this European dimension emerges against the background of British Euroscepticism. Cross Channel explicitly alludes to this alleged national character (cf. Spiering) and to Britain as “the problem child of Europe” (CC 207) when the final story’s protagonist muses how the English had turned from ‘les Rosbifs’ to ‘les Fuck-offs’. The unnamed elderly writer imagines a French counterpart who, although entranced by English culture, traditions, and national mentality such as “le fair-play, le phlegme, and le self-control” (CC 208), is offended by the behaviour of British politicians towards the EU and that of British tourists abroad: Britain had become the problem child of Europe, sending its halfhearted politicians to lie about their obligations, and sending its civilian guerrillas to swagger the streets, ignorant of the language and haughty about the beer. […] Perhaps the true offence of les Fuck-offs had been the offence against this imagined Frenchman’s sentimentality. (CC 207–208)18 The final story, too, sets off ‘the British’ against ‘the French’, but this time the protagonist’s sympathies are clearly with the latter who, far from offending the sentimentality he values, have supplied him with the “idealism” and the “version of pastoral” he sought (CC 207–208). Following Favell (1115), however, even the continental travels of ‘les Fuckoffs’ can be seen to betray a transnational dimension: These ways of being European […] are notably also enjoyed by many who overtly profess themselves to be Eurosceptic or to have no European identity at all. Thought of this way, we may indeed discover ‘social identities’ that are genuinely transnational, if they turn out to be rooted behaviourally in new forms of cross-national action and interaction. The idea of ‘doing Europe’ makes it possible for national affiliation and transnational identity constructs to co-exist, offering an instrument

176  Janine Hauthal with which to approach a twofold dilemma in Cross Channel: its evocation of Anglo-French stereotypes and simultaneous advocacy of intercultural understanding, and its use of a code mixing that simultaneously expresses alterity and proximity. If the cycle’s relocation of British characters to Europe is an incentive to explore Barnes’s literary transnationalism, the analysis has shown that this is not without ambiguity. The ambiguity is probably most clearly discernible in “Interference”, with its depiction of Anglo-French misunderstandings to which a ‘European’ way of life provided only a temporary alternative. All in all, the cycle confirms that ­transnational Anglo-French encounters do not necessarily result from (or in) ­conviviality and cosmopolitanism. What Cross Channel expresses is a transnationalism embedded in cross-national action and interaction. It might even be argued that the cycle’s dismantling of the unity of the English language through the insertion of French expressions calls on its readers to engage in similar ways of ‘doing Europe’.

V. Unity in Diversity? Nation, Narration, and the Short Story Cycle In conclusion, I would like to briefly return to the nexus of nation, narration, and the short story cycle in order to discuss whether (or not) the short story cycle offers a particularly resonant form for imagining ­Europe as ‘a unity in diversity’. In his work on the nation as ‘imagined community’, Anderson differentiates the secular “idea of a ‘homogenous, empty time’” (24) from previous, sacred conceptions of temporality as providence, “in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical” (36). The new temporality is based on an idea of simultaneity as “transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar” (24). According to Anderson, the classical novel (and the newspaper) “provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation” (25) because both are “device(s) for the presentation of simultaneity in ‘homogeneous, empty time,’ or a complex gloss on the word ‘meanwhile’” (25). Novels conjure up imagined worlds by depicting acts that “are performed at the same clocked, calendrical time […] by actors who may be largely unaware of one another” (26), but whose embeddedness in societies as well as “in the minds of the omniscient readers” (ibid.) connects them. According to Anderson, “[t]his idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history” (ibid.). Cross Channel depicts characters that are equally unaware of their existence and tend to identify themselves and others with national

Unity in Diversity?   177 communities that similarly ‘move down (or up) history’. However, the stories’ dominant motif of intercultural encounter, their common interest in the nexus of history, literature, and memory and their recurrent ‘foreign’ location complicate a national frame of reference. The other strategies by which Barnes creates coherence – his use of national stereotyping and code mixing and especially the self-reflexive twist of the cycle’s final story – also provide a sense of unity and historical continuity. At the same time, however, “the fruitful misprision, the partial discovery and the resonant fragment” (CC 206; my emphasis) of which the final story speaks, as well as the historical, regional, and psychological range of the stories, endow the cycle with diversity. Balancing openness and closure, centripetal and centrifugal forces, alterity and reciprocity, distance and proximity, the genre-specific allowances of the cycle relate directly to its engagement with cross-national ways of living and thinking, and potentially open up possibilities for the imagination of a community beyond the national. Confronted with British characters not only ‘doing France’, but also – as the references to other European countries and cities, as well as to Europe itself, indicate – ‘doing Europe’ without stopping to ‘feel British’, the reader of Cross Channel may well be led to reflect on the idea of Europe as a ‘unity in diversity’, a construct that allows national and transnational affiliations to co-exist in the same time, place and person.

Acknowledgements The research for this chapter was financed by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO).

Notes 1 Guignery, for instance, has pointed to links between Cross Channel and Barnes’s debut novel Metroland, as well as to the cycle’s connection with Flaubert’s Parrot, a novel that also depicts Anglo-French encounters. On the whole, secondary literature on Cross Channel is scarce: except for Childs, who compares it with The Lemon Table 126–138, Holmes 44–45, as well as the contributors to Groes and Childs only mention the story cycle in passing. 2 Quotations from Cross Channel are indicated throughout with the abbreviation CC followed by a page number referring to the 2009 Vintage edition. 3 See, for instance, the following quote: “Was this history coming full circle? No, […] when history tried that trick, it missed its orbit like a spacecraft piloted by someone who’d had too many bottles of this Meursault” (CC 209; cf. also CC 200). 4 Parallels have been found relating to e.g. Barnes’s year of birth (1946), his teaching assistantship in Rennes (1966–1967), his North London residence, and his decorations (cf. Moseley, Guignery). Barnes was made first a ­Chevalier (1988), then Officier (1995), and ultimately Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004. On 25 January 2017, the French ­President appointed Julian Barnes to the rank of Officier in the Ordre

178  Janine Hauthal National de la Légion d'Honneur for his “contribution to raising the profile of French culture abroad, as well as [his] love of France” (www.julianbarnes. com/bio/index.html). 5 This technique is repeated in other stories. In “Junction”, for instance, passages focalized through the “French party” (CC 23) – including Dr Achille, his wife Mme Julie, and his student Charles-André – alternate with passages focalized through the English navvy Yorkey Tom. 6 Cf. Lenz, Kamm and Lenz 82–97, and Kamm and Sedlmayr. 7 For a recent overview of (the history of) British Euroscepticism, see Spiering. 8 See also Pomar Amer’s discussion of the theme of the double in this short story. 9 Similar instances in which French characters are implicitly held up to ridicule can be found throughout the entire story (cf. CC 27–28, 32, 34–36, 38, 40). 10 For an image of this cover, see, e.g., www.goodreads.com/book/show/ 110948.Cross_Channel. 11 Gymnich similarly sees italicization as reinforcing alterity (cf. Metasprachliche Reflexionen 75). 12 Three of the ten stories do not feature heterodiegetic narrators: “Experiment” and “Brambilla” are told by homodiegetic first-person narrators who function as witnesses; “Gnossienne” centres on a writer who features as an autodiegetic narrator. The letter writer of the first part of “Melon” functions as an intradiegetic autodiegetic narrator. Of the ten story headings, the two that consist of a single French word – “Gnossienne” and “Dragons” – could be attributed to the implied author. 13 In contrast to the foreign-language expressions in the narrator’s discourse, conversations in French are not italicized. 14 Apart from these similarities, the use of foreign-language elements in postcolonial and minority literatures differs significantly from that in Cross Channel, where there is no postcolonial condition and the foreign-language elements do not belong to the author’s mother tongue. 15 Already the first insertion of this expression alludes to the oral character of the utterance as the inquit formula “he had challenged” indicates (CC 5). See also the explicit reference to the act of ‘being called’ in the second insertion: “[Adeline] did, however, resent being called a punaise de sacristie” (CC 7). 16 In the case of ‘kermesse’, an originally Dutch expression that entered French as a loanword, an even broader European sense of (historical) linguistic negotiation is at stake. 17 Pratt has coined the term ‘contact zone’ in her work on travel writing and transculturation “to refer to the space of colonial encounter” (8). Seeking to foreground “the interactive, improvisational dimensions of imperial encounters”, she treated “the relations among colonizers and colonized […] not in terms of separateness, but in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power” (ibid.). Even though Anglo-French encounters involve two colonial powers, Pratt’s term also applies to Cross Channel if one takes Spiering’s history of British Euroscepticism and Nyman’s work on early twentieth century British writing about Europe into account. Both scholars demonstrate that British writers tend to imagine continental Europe as ­Britain’s ‘Other’, thus constructing similarly asymmetrical (symbolic) relations as those investigated by Pratt. 18 Cross Channel was published nineteen years before the ‘Brexit’ referendum of 23 June 2016. Yet, post factum, Barnes’s glimpse into a future 2015 seems to anticipate the sentiment behind that vote.

Unity in Diversity?   179

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. Verso, 2006. Barnes, Julian. Cross Channel. 1996. Vintage, 2009. Childs, Peter. Julian Barnes. Manchester UP, 2011. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. 1992. Yale UP, 2005. D’hoker, Elke, and Bart Van den Bossche. “Cycles, Receuils, Macrotexts: The Short Story Collection in a Comparative Perspective”. Cycles, Receuils, Macrotexts, special issue of Interférences littéraires/ Literaire interferenties, vol. 12, 2014, pp. 7–17. Favell, Adrian. “Europe’s Identity Problem”. West European Politics, vol. 28, no. 5, 2005, pp. 1109–1116. Groes, Sebastian, and Peter Childs, editors. Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Continuum, 2011. Guignery, Vanessa. The Fiction of Julian Barnes: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Gymnich, Marion. “Linguistics and Narratology: The Relevance of Linguistic Criteria to Postcolonial Narratology”. Literature and Linguistics: ­Approaches, Models, and Applications. Studies in Honour of Jon Erickson, edited by M. G., Ansgar and Vera Nünning. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002, pp. 61–76. ———. Metasprachliche Reflexionen und sprachliche Gestaltungsmittel im ­e nglischsprachigen postkolonialen und interkulturellen Roman. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2007. Holmes, Frederick M. Julian Barnes. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Kamm, Jürgen, and Bernd Lenz. Grossbritannien Verstehen. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004. Kamm, Jürgen, and Gerold Sedlmayr, editors. Insular Mentalities: Mental Maps of Britain: Essays in Honour of Bernd Lenz. Karl Stutz, 2007. Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Introduction: The American Short Story Sequence – Definitions and Implications”. Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy. Cambridge UP, 1995, pp. vii–xv. Lenz, Bernd. “This Scept’red Isle: Britain’s Insular Mentality, Interculture and the Channel Tunnel”. Journal for the Study of British Cultures, vol. 9, no. 1, 2002, pp. 51–67. Lundén, Rolf. “Centrifugal and Centripetal Narrative Strategies in the Short Story Composite and the Episode Film”. Cycles, Recueils, Macrotexts, special issue of Interférences littéraires. Literaire interferenties, vol. 12, 2014, pp. 47–60. Luscher, Robert M. “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book”. Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, edited by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Louisiana State UP, 1989, pp. 148–167. Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. Greenwood Press, 1989. March-Russell, Paul. “The Short Story Cycle”. The Short Story: An Introduction, edited by Paul March-Russell. Edinburgh UP, 2009, pp. 103–119. Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Julian Barnes. University of South Carolina Press, 1997.

180  Janine Hauthal Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Louisiana State UP, 2001. Nyman, Jopi. Under English Eyes: Constructions of Europe in Early T ­ wentiethCentury British Fiction. Rodopi, 2000. Pomar Amer, Miquel. “Experiment(ing) on the Double with Julian Barnes”. Amaltea: Revista de mitocrítica, vol. 3, 2011, pp. 139–150. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 1992. Routledge, 2008. Reichl, Susanne. Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black ­British Literature. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002. Spiering, Menno. A Cultural History of British Euroscepticism. Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2015.

11 Traumatic Cycles Ali Smith and A. L. Kennedy Valerie O’Riordan

If, following J. Gerald Kennedy, we accept that the short story cycle is defined as much by the “fissures and incongruities that complicate the reading of the sequence and expose the gulf between one text and another” as by the given volume’s connective devices (“From Anderson’s Winesburg” 196), then it is evident that the gap or rupture between the constituent stories in the short story cycle is integral to its form. While Rolf Lundén argues that the ‘genre specificity’ of the cycle consists in its “tension between separateness and unity” (The United Stories of ­America 17), it is true, too, that this specificity extends also to the ruptures that make manifest that tension. Similarly, trauma – as theorized by Cathy Caruth – depends upon rupture: specifically, upon how rupture structures subjective experience. Caruth argues that the key marker of trauma is the structure of its experience, a structure that is characterized by repetition and temporal delay, and that it is identifiable only by the subject’s repeatedly and passively returning to and re-enacting a “missing” traumatogenic event (Trauma 10, 4).1 Caruth’s theories do not, of course, go unchallenged, and in this chapter, I investigate the apparent structural correspondence of traumatic experience and the short story cycle by turning to two contemporary British cycles – Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001) and A. L. Kennedy’s What Becomes (2009) – and demonstrating that these cycles (amongst others) establish the form as a particularly illuminating means not only of exploring trauma in fiction, but also of productively querying Caruth’s hegemonic notions of how ­ urthermore, I trauma can, or ought to be, represented in narrative. F show how these texts (as cycles) complicate any straightforward ascription by critics of what Ruth Leys, in her evaluation of Caruth, calls a singular ‘trauma aesthetic’ (307). It would be disingenuous to argue that the cycle’s gaps are themselves necessarily traumatic ruptures: such a claim would be an unhelpful and uncritical endorsement of what Roger Luckhurst calls the Caruthian ‘trauma paradigm’ that “has come to pervade the understanding of subjectivity and experience in the advanced industrial world” (1); it would be to falsely position the entire genre of the short story cycle as an outcome of what Alan Gibbs calls the (Caruthian) trauma paradigm’s “increasingly monolithic and programmatic cultural

182  Valerie O’Riordan prism” (2). Nonetheless – as Smith’s text in particular illustrates – the utility of the short story cycle in this context lies in its structural proficiency in exemplifying what Leys calls “the messy and intrinsically painful conundrums” of trauma studies (307). I will argue that while both Kennedy’s and Smith’s texts usefully explore the category of the trauma narrative, Smith’s offers a more profound examination of trauma’s complexities. Finally, more broadly, and with reference to Philip Tew’s discussion of the ‘traumatological novel’, I will argue that the cycle’s popularity in the early twenty-first century can be seen to reflect a global crisis in subjectivity following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center; a crisis that has manifested as widespread cultural trauma, and that has heralded, as a result, in Tew’s terms, an inevitably “troubled fractured aesthetic” (xvii, xviii). I will argue that despite Tew’s focus upon the ‘traumatological novel’, the cycle is emerging as a particularly apt literary form to convey such an aesthetic in politically turbulent times.

I. Caruthian Trauma Trauma studies today is dominated by a body of cultural and literary criticism that has stemmed, largely, from Caruth’s conceptualizations of trauma and its (potential) narrativization; while, as we shall see, Caruth’s conclusions have been contested, her writing functions still as a point of reference and convergence for various cultural (that is, non-­medical) conceptualizations of trauma. In Caruth’s account, trauma turns upon “the device of aporia, or unresolvable paradox” – upon, that is, the subject’s repeated literal and passive re-enactment (typically involuntary flashbacks) of an experience that has been separated from ordinary experience such that, crucially, it is unavailable to conscious memory (Trauma 4). Building upon Freud’s idea of Nachträglichkeit, then, she argues that not only must trauma be defined as such retrospectively (or belatedly) – “in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (Trauma 4) – but also that the very shock of trauma causes “a break in the mind’s experience of time” (Unclaimed 61). A void or a rupture – the space absented by the memory from which the subject has become dissociated by virtue of the shocking force of the traumatogenic event – not only exists at the heart of trauma, but literally constitutes that trauma insofar as it structures the victim’s ongoing experience. Whilst the subject cannot undo this process of dissociation, the impulse to return to what is irretrievably forgotten is symptomatic of what Caruth terms the ‘impossible history’ of the trauma survivor – a history that “can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence” (Trauma 5, 8). For Caruth, then, as Luckhurst says, trauma becomes “a crisis of representation, of history and truth, and of narrative time”, a crisis of ­particular significance for writers wishing to explore traumatic experience (5).

Traumatic Cycles  183 That is, if the state of being traumatized precludes access to the instigating event, and yet simultaneously enforces a potentially endless set of repeated and compulsive returns to the site of that loss, how ought, or can, trauma be represented in narrative form? Caruth claims that the representation of a history that revolves around the “unprocessed fragment of the thing itself” (Trauma 13) presents a particular challenge to narrative; that trauma “challenges us to a new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely, of impossibility” (Trauma 10, emphasis in original). This witnessing itself precludes any direct portrayal of the traumatogenic experience because, according to Caruth, the event cannot become “a ‘narrative memory’ that is integrated into a completed story of the past” (Trauma 153). That is, were a writer to explicate the experience of trauma – even fictional trauma – by seeking to narrativize its instigating event, Caruth would say that the attempt was doomed to failure because it would involve “the loss, precisely, of the event’s essential incomprehensibility, the force of its affront to understanding” (Trauma 153, emphasis in original). For Caruth, then, just as there is no moving beyond trauma – since the “essential incomprehensibility” of the event means that survival itself becomes “an endless testimony” to the aporia involved in returning to and yet not being able to know the traumatogenic event – there also is no real narrativizing of it. In Kennedy’s What Becomes, we see this stance played out repeatedly across the text’s constituent stories.

II. What Becomes Kennedy’s What Becomes is a grouping of short stories that, like James Joyce’s Dubliners, falls towards the looser end of the cycle’s continuum: it is linked, that is, by thematic concerns rather than the repetition of specific character, plot, or incident. Kennedy’s text supports a Caruthian reading of trauma insofar as it both presents us with a series of damaged subjects (whose symptoms cohere with Caruth’s prescription) and negates the possibility of recovery. While not every story here is (overtly) concerned with the traumatic, the book’s very title, with its truncated syntax and evocation of ambiguity around identity and ‘becoming’, intimates an interest in traumatic lack and bewilderment. Matt Thorne, in his review for The Telegraph (in which he also describes the book as “dour and difficult”), suggests that this theme dominates Kennedy’s text: “[whether] it’s a bad marriage or an unpleasant childhood, it’s impossible for these characters to get away from what’s marked them”. Likewise, Laurie Ringer notes that “[in] their traumatic (re)experience, Kennedy’s characters are lost in cultural and individual feedback loops of human suffering”, a suffering that, as Caruth would likely agree, “confounds language and distorts time”. Two stories in particular – the title story, which opens the book, and “Saturday Teatime” – illustrate most aptly

184  Valerie O’Riordan trauma as Caruth outlines it, showing us that, echoing ­R inger’s terms, “trauma is not a wound to be healed but an experience to be (re)lived in an echoing present” (Trauma 134). “What Becomes” features Frank, a forensic scientist, on a trip to the movies during which he mentally revisits his final night in his marital home: a night in which he sliced open his finger while cooking, spattered his house and belongings with blood, and argued tearfully with his infuriated wife. The idea of trauma is introduced early on: in the first paragraph, before Frank starts to revisit the physical trauma of his injury, we find him staring at “a kind of hanging absence” (the blank cinema screen), which had “started to bother him” (3). In Caruthian terms, that is, it is the absence of a narrative that prompts him to return to the past: he plays out, again, a scene (his injury) that continues also to “bother” him. His wounded finger is not, however, the real problem: the deeper, psychological trauma is the loss of his daughter, a loss that he can barely articulate – “one terrible thing which had been an accident, an oversight, a carelessness that lasted the space of a breath” (17) – but that underlies his failing marriage (and his attempt to cook for his wife the night of his accident) and that, also, has altered him to the extent that “he might have to accept that he was no longer the man he’d been before” (10). Trauma defines every aspect of Frank’s life, from his career (built around literal forensic examination of other people’s traumas) to his relationship; his existence, at this point, is structured around rupture – his flesh wound, his career “break” (13), the “before” and after of his child’s presumed (and apparently un-narratable) death (10). This daughter herself can only be described as an absence: “The no-one who comes home with you holding your hand. The girl who isn’t there to mind when I hurt myself” (18). The other traumas – his wound and the wounds he encounters at work – act as ciphers for this real, affective trauma so that now, at the cinema, when he thinks about his job (“a dull red shine, streaking, hair and matter”), his conscious mind ruptures: “his mind broke, dropped to silence […]. A numbness began at the centre of his head and then wormed out. He tried retracing his thoughts, but they parted, shredded, let him fall through into an undisclosed location”. He is not the same person anymore: “the man he’d been before was gone from him absolutely […] and whatever was here now stayed suspended, thoughtless” (14). Frank’s subjective identity has been fundamentally affected by his trauma – time and space are, for him, disrupted – and he is unable to work his way back. He begs, in vain, for some stability and continuity – “I want nothing to stop” (20) – but there is no implication that he will escape his rupture-induced cycle of misery and flashbacks. At the story’s end, he longs for the movie to start over (21) – to envelop him in the illusion of an ongoing, alternate reality – but he admits that this is not feasible: as long as Frank is unable to express/narrativize the traumatogenic event, he is doomed, in a classically Caruthian scenario, to live out its consequences.

Traumatic Cycles  185 In “Saturday Teatime”, the narrator enters a flotation tank in an a­ ttempt to “increase [her] happiness” (57); deprived of sensory stimulation, she feels “increasingly unclear about [her] edges, may have misplaced, or forgotten where [she] could stop” (60). With her identity thus in crisis, involuntary memories flood her brain, reminding her, initially, of old parties, TV shows, and laughter, until she remembers standing in front of her parents’ locked door while, behind it, her father hits her mother: “I cannot get in to stop this, but I know that I couldn’t anyway […]. I don’t want to see what’s in there. I am glad that I’m locked out”. In the memory, she goes back downstairs – “I sit down and start laughing again” (68) – and back in the flotation tank she thinks: “I ought to forget more, clean things out […] be rid of it, bounce back and start again” (71–72). The locked door symbolizes, then, the (Caruthian) inaccessibility of the traumatogenic event, while the sensory deprivation brought about by the tank stands in for the lack of agency experienced by a subject disrupted by trauma: “unclear about [her] edges”, she can’t help but be bombarded by these memories. Just prior to (almost) remembering her father’s violence, she describes a similar lack of control, manifested as falling: “that murmur in our ears before we sleep [is] the drop. It’s whatever’s left lashing past you, piece by piece, soaring up out of reach: minutes pulled to rags, ripped out of hours, days, weeks – it’s falling” (65–66). In her subsequent involuntary plunge into the past, “whatever’s left” of her memories does, indeed, “lash” her. As Ringer suggests, “Saturday Teatime” presents trauma as “an experience to be (re)lived in an echoing present”. Not only do past events resonate in the narrator’s present, but Kennedy uses the present tense to further blur the lines between the remembering- and remembered-self, suggesting, again, that the narrator’s trauma will not allow her to move far beyond the locked door before drawing her back into a repeated state of fear and confusion. Like Frank in “What Becomes”, this narrator wants to “start over”, but, again like Frank, lacking the ability (then or now) to access and thus fully account for the traumatogenic moment, she can only “fall” back to relive her own helplessness and rage. What Becomes is, of course, a cycle, and the remaining ten stories repeat and build upon similar themes, creating a feedback loop of iterative violence, repetition, and unhappiness from which the characters fail, again and again, to extricate themselves. The events of “Edinburgh” parallel, in many respects, those of “What Becomes”: Peter, working in a garden centre, thinks about Amanda, a woman he had loved, but who has since left him; while he thinks, he (like Frank) cuts his finger (49), which prompts him to flash back to their break-up – a flashback that yet fails to assuage his pain. “Marriage”, told from the point of view of an abusive husband, echoes “Saturday Teatime” in using architecture, or building materials, to stand in for trauma’s blockages: here, the narrator tracks his wife to a vantage point overlooking a construction site, where

186  Valerie O’Riordan she stares down at “a series of concrete barriers […] and beyond them an artificial chasm”, where the workers have “gouged out blocks of the road it seems she had wanted to follow” (132). These barriers and gouges, and the chasm itself, are concrete manifestations of this woman’s traumatized condition as a victim of domestic violence: her literal path to freedom, but also her psychological path towards self-determination, are riddled with ruptures and blockades; she can escape neither physically nor metaphorically. In addition to holding her tight at the end of the story in a gruesome tableau of “marriage” (135), her husband follows her gaze, contemplating: [The] three or four storeys of digging [needed] to expose something so secret, so permanent, that it shudders the city around him, the laughable buildings, the slow damage that is inside everything. (134) Similarly, he knows – and is unconcerned by the knowledge – that his wife’s experience is of the slow accretion of inertia and numb acceptance around her own secret, permanent damage. In “Story of My Life”, Kennedy repeats the motif of blood, as seen in “What Becomes”: “[even] today, if I take a tumble, suffer a lapse, my blood can halt and then amaze me”. This narrator has suffered from overcrowded teeth and has spent much of her life under anaesthetic in dental surgeries, experiences that have left her in a repeated state of “confusion”, suffering a “not unjustifiable sense of loss” (141). Her “story” (144) is punctuated by a series of drugged gaps (“lapses”), and she feels frequently anxious (143). She tells this story to a date, and, of course, to the reader, but besides her dental history, she finds it “difficult to name what else [she has] done”, and she is aware that what she can recount is not a story but “only a list” (147): nonetheless, she has no other story, no other self. Recounting it, or trying to, does not help her reshape her life into a “kinder and finer” world (139); she is, as Caruth says, defined by her (physical and mental) trauma. She tries to narrativize her life “to make [herself] plain”, to “diagnose” her problems (141), but in fact, she admits that she is “tired of speaking languages that nobody understands” in words that make her stories “weak, impossible” (149). Storytelling, here, is a hopeless endeavour: once again, we hear that trauma cannot be transcended. Kennedy’s cycle, then, uses the form’s unity to reiterate trauma’s impact, and its disunity to underscore the thematic focus upon rupture and fragmented subjectivity. In Lundén’s terms, it employs the “friction between the centripetal and the centrifugal narrative forces” – the friction between “those strategies that try to unify [and] homogenize the composite and those that try to disintegrate it” (“Centrifugal and ­Centripetal Narrative Strategies” 49–50) – to call attention not only to

Traumatic Cycles  187 the devastating effect of violence and abuse upon her characters as any hope of recovery is denied them, but also to how the effects of that abuse are experienced as (Caruthian) trauma. Centripetalism, that is, by drawing upon repetition and similarity between the stories, brings into relief the repetition and horror of this violence whilst also evoking the ‘return’ to the traumatogenic event that Caruth considers a marker of trauma; while, simultaneously, centrifugalism splits apart the constituent narratives, highlighting the fragmentary nature of traumatized subjectivity and exemplifying how the cycle itself can act (centrifugally) as an apt vector for expressing the disunity of (traumatized) identity. Caruth’s is not, however, the only account of trauma, and, as we shall see, the cycle as a form can do more to explore the condition than ­Kennedy’s text suggests.

III. Alternative Trauma(s) and Literary Form While Caruth’s explicatory stalemate (one must revisit trauma, but one can neither adequately represent nor transcend it) is a popular one, it has been queried by a number of subsequent theorists, including, notably, Gibbs and Dominick LaCapra, the latter of whom argued against Caruth’s dogmatic stance on trauma’s ineffability when he claimed that evident “in recent thought” is “a perspective fixed on failed transcendence […] in which any mode of reconstruction or renewal is seen as objectionably totalizing [or] recuperative” (“Trauma” 720). Similarly, Gibbs maintains that Caruth’s derivation of latency from Freud’s original discussion of Nachträglichkeit is a distortion, insofar as Freud’s work presented belatedness as a knowing banishment of knowledge from the subject’s consciousness, whereas Caruth favours a dissociative mode whereby the subject does not consciously reject the knowledge but never actually possessed it in the first place (Gibbs 10). That is, Caruth’s insistence on an amnesiac model of trauma, in which the gap in memory cannot be bridged, is “too rigid, partial and exclusionary” because there is no psychological necessity for that information, however unpleasant, to be inherently inaccessible – at least not according to Caruth’s own theoretical sources (Gibbs 12). To her argument that trauma is symptomatized by the literal and unconscious return of the traumatogenic event in the victim’s “unwitting re-enactments”, Gibbs responds that the claim is backed by a dearth of “convincing scientific and clinical ­evidence”; that Caruth draws too heavily on equally presumptive claims by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (Gibbs 15; a claim that is reiterated by Wulf Kansteiner who refers to Caruth’s “selective reading of Freud” and her “reductive interpretation of the psychological research on trauma” [Kansteiner 203]); and that, given her prior claim that the traumatogenic memory cannot be known, her assertion of literality in its subsequent enactment is logically inconsistent, because without access to

188  Valerie O’Riordan the original event, how can this literality be proven? Susannah Radstone queries literality similarly, arguing that since “even personal memory flashes, in all their apparent immediacy and spontaneity, are constructions mediated by means of complex psychical and mental processes”, we cannot simply claim that “certain modes of personal memory give more direct access to that past than others” (135). Like Luckhurst, however, Gibbs concedes that despite these p ­ roblems, Caruth’s work on trauma has become influential to the extent that “to suggest traumatic memory is not precisely literal is an unorthodox position in cultural trauma theory” (15). He suggests that what has become orthodox as a result of her influence, in both (fictional) narrative and critical writings on trauma, is an “avant-garde” aesthetic that honours “Caruth’s injunction against representation” (26) by prioritizing postmodern techniques, including fragmentation, to the extent that “traumatic content […] becomes subservient to form, as writers become preoccupied more with the sublime jouissance of representing trauma, than with trauma’s actual impact” (47). Gibbs illustrates this by pointing to Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), which he describes as a “notorious” example of the “aestheticizing [of] trauma” thanks to Foer’s formulaic adoption of both an “ ­ array of postmodern techniques” and “elements of [Caruthian] theory” in the service of “lend[ing] traumatic texts verisimilitude” – which results, Gibbs claims, in a “cloying” and “trite” exploration of trauma.2 Whereas Anne Whitehead claims that in what she calls ‘trauma fiction’, “temporality and chronology collapse and narratives are characterised by repetition and indirection” (3) – all of which we have seen in What Becomes, which otherwise evades the slur of the ‘avant-garde’ – Gibbs argues that the label ‘trauma fiction’ marks not fiction that deals with the experience of being traumatized (like Kennedy’s), per se, but fiction (like Foer’s) that corresponds specifically to Caruth’s particular paradigm of how that experience can (or cannot) be narrativized. Whilst Gibbs is then critical of Caruth’s hegemony in trauma studies and the resulting formal prominence of ‘trauma fiction’, he is not categorically dismissive of fiction that deals with trauma. The question then remains: how else might trauma be more effectively or productively narrativized? Or: how can alternative or competing formulations of trauma’s narrativization fit into a literary landscape where so-called ‘trauma fiction’ is expected, as Radstone says, to typically and simply “reproduce the symptomatology of trauma” (20)? Whilst What Becomes is modelled in such a way as to draw affective parallels between its characters’ experiences and Caruthian notions of ineffable trauma, Smith’s Hotel World is more complex, presenting a range of situations that are recognizable as trauma (i.e., referencing the Caruthian ‘paradigm’) while yet disrupting and departing from that paradigm inasmuch as they allow us to acknowledge divergent theoretical and methodological approaches.

Traumatic Cycles  189

IV. Hotel World Although Hotel World (2001) is typically referred to as a novel, 3 its structure coheres with that of the cycle. Its opening and closing narratives (Sara Wilby’s scene-setting story and the omniscient narrator who follows up the same scenes at the end) sit within the tradition of the framed tale (a form that Susan Garland Mann classifies as both a subset and an ancestor of the cycle [14–15]) and the four parts bounded by that frame are internally comprehensible as independent narratives (even if, in this case, they are unlikely to be encountered as such in terms of separate publication). Hotel World explores the affective impact of traumatically ruptured experiential time upon five characters: Sara Wilby (who appears as a ghost), Else (a homeless woman begging outside the Global Hotel, Sara’s erstwhile workplace), Lise (Sara’s colleague), Penny (a travel writer sent to review the Global), and Clare (Sara’s sister). Two of the stories (Sara’s and Clare’s narratives) deal directly with the circumstances surrounding Sara’s death, while the remaining three (Lise’s, Else’s, and Penny’s) enact the more general potential long-term complications of traumatic experience. Together, unlike the stories in ­Kennedy’s cycle, their presentation(s) of traumatic experience works both with and against Caruthian theory, lending the whole text a complexity with regard to representation that surpasses the model suggested by Caruthian theory. The opening story, “Past”, introduces immediately a formal complication to Caruthian readings of trauma. “Past” gives voice to the ghost of Sara Wilby, a promising nineteen-year-old swimmer, who fell to her death down a lift shaft after a bet with a colleague about whether she could fit inside the hotel’s dumb waiter. Sara’s account is difficult to parse within the Caruthian paradigm: while her ghost obsesses about the moment of her death, lingering about the scene and re-enacting the event, her account is not entirely consistent with Caruth’s mimetic parameters for trauma – as Leys reminds us, Caruth requires that “instead of remembering the event, the victim blindly repeated or imitated the scene of origin” (Leys 181). Rather than having blanked it out, Sara opens with an exultant memorial to her fall: Woooooooo -hooooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into dark into light what a glide thud crash what a drop what a rush what a swoop what a fright what a mad hushed skirl what a smash mush mash-up broke and gashed what a heart in my mouth what an end. What a life. What a time. What I felt. Then. Gone. (3)

190  Valerie O’Riordan She goes on to replay the accident in exhaustive detail (“I curled like a snail in a shell with my neck and the back of my head crammed in” [6]). What she has forgotten is how long the fall took, and in order to figure that out, she re-enacts it: “I go every night since I fell last summer […] I throw myself over and it’s all I can do” (8). The implication of passivity here (“it’s all I can do”) is weak: her search is intentional (she interrogates her own corpse for the answer), and her actions, in jumping, are deliberate; she is passive only in that she has run out of other ideas. For Sara, the event (of her death) is not hidden from her conscious mind, and her return to the scene is deliberate; for a while, she is stalled, not by the event’s “essential incomprehensibility”, but rather by a conscious (failed) search for a specific detail (a timing), without which she is nonetheless able still, eventually, to dissipate, or to move on from as she passes from the material world at the story’s end: trauma cannot keep her trapped at the scene. However, while Sara’s account thus refutes Caruth in some respects, it replicates her symptomatology in other ways: Smith’s characteristic linguistic and typographical wordplay, utilized here in the name of trauma, could certainly be filed under what, as we have seen, Gibbs decries as trauma fiction’s “conventionalized […] postmodern techniques”. Each instance of re-enactment (Sara’s nightly plunges down the lift shaft) is literalized on the page as a typographical gap – “woooooooo -hooooooo” – that itself reinstates rupture as central to Sara’s narrative, and, likewise, traumatic rupture is manifested in language as Sara loses her grip on speech/text. First particular words escape her (“I want to ask her the name again for the things we see with” [26]), then the link between signifier and signified weakens (“Remember you must live. Remember you most love. Remember you mist leaf.” [30]), and finally, just before the story ends, syntax abandons her: “Lost, I’ve, the word” (30). This ending is, however, again, ambiguous: either we read it as Caruthian and accept that narrative must inevitably collapse under the weight of trauma, or we highlight Sara’s final exhortation – “Here’s the story” (30) – and argue that her narrativizing of trauma has enabled her to transcend it by allowing her to leave the scene of her death. Is Smith’s text, then, a refutation of trauma theory, or a failed attempt to represent the unpresentable? Smith’s ambiguity speaks, in fact, more closely to LaCapra’s theorization of trauma than it does to Caruth’s. Whilst LaCapra agrees that trauma “indicates a shattering break or caesura in experience which has belated effects” (Writing History 186) and that the past “possesses” the traumatized subject in a way that “may never be

Traumatic Cycles  191 fully overcome or transcended”, he insists also upon “the ­possibility of working-through in which totalization (as well as redemption – whether putatively successful or failed) is actively resisted and the repetition compulsion counteracted” (“Trauma” 720). That is, he ­advocates for a middle ground between endless shattered possession and an impossible reconciliation: his ‘working-through’, or narrative account of traumatized experience, has the potential to “enable some distance or critical perspective” that might itself have recuperative value (“Trauma” 717). In “Past”, Sara’s final dissolution s­ uggests that her narrative has acted as just such a ‘working-­t hrough’: she doesn’t receive the totalizing answer she needs, but she does recuperate, in that she is no longer yoked to the scene of her death; her narrative reflects, or mimics, the symptoms of trauma, but having vocalized her story, she recovers sufficient agency to cease the re-­ enactments and fade away. Sara’s story likewise offers support for Dori Laub’s advocacy of the ­ olocaust conscious narrativization of traumatic experience: Laub, a H scholar whose work is typically concerned with testimonial non-­ fiction accounts of survivors of the Shoah, argues for testimony as a discursive process. Testimony is here to be understood not as a “mode of statement of, but rather as a mode of access to” the truth, such that what “ultimately matters in all processes of witnessing [is] the experience itself of living through testimony, or giving testimony” (Felman and Laub 16, 85; emphasis in original). That is, what one says is of lesser importance in terms of recuperation than the fact that one is seen to be saying it. Just as with Caruth, there is a performative aspect to Laub’s theory, but whereas Caruth’s re-enactments are supposed to act as tributes to the ineffability of the traumatogenic event and to the “fated” continuance of the traumatic experience, Laub’s performativity, like LaCapra’s, is an attempt to heal the fragmented subject. In “Past”, then, in telling her story (“Here’s the story”), Sara releases herself, as a conscious subject, from the repetitive trap of continual questioning and re-enactment. Laub argues that testimony (or witnessed narrative) makes possible for the subject “the resumption of life” (91), and while Sara, already dead, cannot resume her former life, she does escape the trap of her afterlife – moreover, her message to the world (“Remember you must live”) suggests a refutation of trauma’s reflexive fixation. In “Future in the Past”, likewise, we see how Sara’s death has ­a ffected her sister Clare in explicitly Caruthian terms: “it all going round in circles in my head me going over & over it” (186) – “it” referring, of course, to Sara’s fall. This story is told in one breathless, agonized sentence, with typography once again illustrating rupture, as the literal gaps between Clare’s words signify her struggle to ­a rticulate her reconfigured reality: “our mum not our only my”

192  Valerie O’Riordan (193). When Claire thinks about the literal hole down which her sister fell, she says that: [Even] if they did fill it up with concrete in a way even so it would still be there it would still be the same hole just filled with concrete that’s all & even if they knocked down the whole of the hotel & that lift shaft was taken part & wasn’t there any more it would still somehow be there. (200) Trauma is presented here as something that cannot be bridged or ­transcended – and yet, Clare’s account is, in other respects, critical of Caruth’s approach, denying both ineffability and passivity. Clare seeks actively and deliberately to answer Sara’s initial question (how fast did she fall?), and she goes on to solve that central unknown (she “[knows] for sure” what happened [187]: “under four three & a bit that’s all you took I know I counted for you” [221]). Furthermore, narrative is ­testimony: she testifies to Sara (the story’s “you”) and to the reader about her own experience as a traumatized subject. Her successful search, then, speaks to LaCapra’s ‘working-through’, and her address to Sara speaks to Laub’s theory of testimony, even as the story’s syntax and imagery follows on from Caruth. In contrast, “Future Conditional” presents us with a straightforwardly Caruthian account of trauma’s ineffability, and both “Present Historic” and “Perfect” are narrated by characters that enact trauma insofar as their lives have crystalized, or been stalled, around some pivotal (traumatic) event or lack. In “Future Conditional”, set some months after Sara’s death, her colleague Lise is struggling to fill in an Incapacity for Work questionnaire. “Tell us about yourself”, is the paperwork’s imperative, but all Lise can think is: “It was some time in the future. Lise was ­lying in bed. That was practically all the story there was” (81). The “story”, as it emerges, is that Lise let a homeless women (Else) stay in the Global, and Else’s room got flooded; we find out later, in “Future in the Past”, that it was Lise who, that same night, helped Clare figure out how long Sara’s fall took. The logic around Lise’s later “incapacity” is unclear, but it is not unrelated to Sara’s death: lying still, Lise feels herself falling, “as if she had been upended over the wall of a well” (84) – the well, of course, linking us back to Sara’s lift shaft. Meanwhile, Lise is trying to recover the story of what has happened to lead her to her sickbed: the story […] strung between this place and the last and the next” (84). Her memory, that is, is affected; her subjective experience of time, as Caruth would say, has been ruptured, and the story we are told here (about the night she invited Else inside) “had been un-remembered”. (119)

Traumatic Cycles  193 Lise feels her memories surfacing passively (they are “slowly unearthed in her brain, like turf being turned up by someone she could make out only on the distant horizon” [83]), and throughout the story, we find gaps: where Sara ought to be is a “blank […] where there’s almost no face, almost no body” (110). Trauma here, then, is pathological, passive, and rife with experiential gaps: the key moments are blanks, and the story itself questions the point of trying to recover them, as Lise asks herself: “even if she had remembered [the story], what use would the memory have been now?” (119). In “Present Historic”, Else’s life is similarly in stasis, a stasis at the heart of which lies her (lack of) memory of her (presumably dead) lover, Ade. Else can’t clearly remember what Ade looked like, though she does remember his taste (“he tasted of metal”); thinking of love, she admits that “[a] whole time can reduce down to a single taste, a moment” (37), saying too that “[the] taste of it is always on her fingers, always lurking at the back of her throat” (38). Her life has been shaped by love’s, and Ade’s, absence; moreover, later in the story, looking at the point on the footpath where she normally begs, she thinks of her belongings as her “remains”: “each day is piled like a mistake, like rubbish” (67). Her identity, then, is reduced to detritus, and the love to which she circles back is reduced to a smell and the lack of a face: Else’s is, in strongly Caruthian terms, a life moulded by a lack that she cannot face, and she makes little effort to break away from this diminished existence: even invited inside a new life (the Global) by Lise, she cannot consider staying; sitting on the hotel bed, she thinks, still, of Ade; of “[the] taste of silver, metallic, rheumy” (78). Penny, in “Perfect”, is a brittle, emotionally stifled journalist. In stark contrast to Sara’s transcendent command to her listeners (“Remember you must live”), Penny thinks instead: “Remember you must die” (129). Unlike Sara, she does not want to consider the narrative of her life: rather, she invents alternative narratives – optimistic versions of her day that collapse under the oppressive weight of banal reality (“It didn’t matter what it could have been; she was finished with that story” [134]) and ridiculous counter-narratives about the people around her (Clare and Else as eccentric hotel guests rather than as a miserable, panicked kid and an ill homeless woman) that act as unchallenging facades to block out problematic realities. There is no testimony in Penny’s storytelling, and there is no ‘working-out’ in her actions; she works extremely hard (even in her journalism) to rebuff reality. One of the two putatively true stories she tells – the story of her childhood, related to Else – is a (failed) performance designed to elicit information from Else, rather than an act of cathartic self-expression. Penny’s evasiveness is punctured only twice in the story, and both occasions are linked to trauma: first, when she looks down the hotel’s lift shaft with Clare, she is “appalled” by the “nothing” at the centre of the hotel, such that “panic [clawed] up

194  Valerie O’Riordan the inside of her throat” (145); the only way she can stave this off is by telling (another) “true” story, this one about her problems with watches. The panic recedes as a result, and here we glimpse the possibility of recuperation as LaCapra or Laub would describe it, but recuperation remains as a mere glimpse, as Penny refuses to re-examine the cause of her panic. At the heart of her evasions is an event she refers to only obliquely. While cancelling the cheque she had written for Else, something makes Penny “freeze”, and “in the frozen moment” she remembers a series of apparently disconnected events – the Thames, Big Ben, a man, the desire to speak and be heard (177–178). And then reality reasserts itself: For a minute there she thought she’d gone soft. For a minute there the universe had shifted. But no. Good. [Something] inside her which had been forced open had sealed up again. (178) The inability of Penny’s conscious mind to handle that opening, and the passivity in how Penny is forced to momentarily inhabit those memories, is a clear playing-out of trauma as read by Caruth: “Perfect” is a portrait of a subject whose entire way of living is dictated by an inability to face some shattering past moment. Neither “Perfect”, then, nor “Present Historic” suggest that it is, or that it might be, possible to move beyond trauma; neither Else nor Penny is seeking nor able to contemplate recuperation. With regard to these stories as part of a cycle, both Else and Penny represent potential futures for Clare and Lise, should they, in turn, follow a Caruthian trajectory and act in accordance with trauma’s purported ineffability. The constituent stories of Hotel World act as a testing ground for various narrative responses to trauma. Not only do they testify to Caruth’s symptomatology and denial of transcendence, but they question, too, her insistence on ineffability by playing out a range of alternative ­responses that gesture towards possible recuperation through both performativity and testimony. The book’s structure as a cycle is key to this critique of Caruth, insofar as none of the constituent stories in any cycle can be assumed to take automatic interpretative precedence over its fellows (in opposition to the typical teleology of the traditional novel in which the final chapter(s) has greater explicatory power as the plot(s), at last, coheres). The simultaneous independence and interdependence of the stories cohere into what Emma E. Smith calls a “complex communal narrative structure that does not simply share or pluralize narrative authority but actively redistributes it in a ‘radical democracy’, the constitutive parts of which must co-exist in a manner that is both ‘antagonistic and mutually constitutive” (84). The book’s structure thus allows Smith to model a range of narrative reactions to and interpretations of trauma in productive tension with one another. To our earlier question, then – is

Traumatic Cycles  195 Smith’s text a refutation of trauma theory or a failed attempt to represent the unpresentable? – it is clear that it is a successful attempt to diversify the field of trauma fiction by refuting the hegemony of a particular variety of trauma theory. While Kennedy’s cycle effectively and convincingly models a particular (Caruthian) and hegemonic model of trauma, Hotel World instead uses the formal generic specificity of the cycle in a way that can be seen to answer Gibbs’s call for a mode of narrative that can “[draw] on trauma discourse in order to […] question it rather than to reproduce its representational norms” (244).

V. Conclusion: The Cycle and Contemporary Trauma Although the cycle as a genre predates what Gibbs identifies as the midto-late twentieth-century surge in “trauma fictions” (27), and, as stated earlier, it would be simplistic to consider the form inherently ‘traumatic’, nonetheless the continuing critical and popular successes in the early twenty-­fi rst century of cycles such as Smith’s and ­Kennedy’s – and including also Kate Walbert’s Our Kind (2004), Elizabeth Strout’s Olive ­Kitteridge (2008), Judith Hermann’s Alice (2009), Daniel ­Kehlmann’s Fame (2009), Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists (2010), ­Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010), Keith Ridgway’s ­Hawthorn & Child (2012), Sara Taylor’s (2015) The Shore (2015), and David ­Szalay’s All That Man Is (2016) – indicates that the cycle, as a literary form, speaks to a global readership affected (and effected) by what Tew refers to as “the underlying sense of collective trauma and uncertainty that appears to be foundational to the early twenty-first-century aesthetic” (xii). Otherwise put, there is a link to be drawn between the cycle’s recent successes and the rise of this aesthetic; an aesthetic that, as we shall see, can be considered symptomatic of the widespread rupture in political and personal identity brought about by the events of 9/11 and, in the UK, the 7/7 bombings of 2005. As Tew argues with regard to 9/11, while these particular events do not conform to “traditional” (Caruthian) notions of the “elusive” traumatogenic moment (9/11, in particular, being available to re-watch in perpetuity via countless video clips and news reports archived online), they have nonetheless resulted in “an emerging aesthetic of cultural threat and upheaval [and] a collective economy of repetition and symbolic return” that is certainly recognizable to those scholars familiar with Caruth, LaCapra, Laub, Gibbs, and associated trauma theorists (xvii–xviii). Researchers have already construed the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the US Pentagon as a catastrophic rupture in the public narrative that constitutes national (American) identity.4 Kristiaan Versluys, writing on Art Spiegelman’s 2004 non-fiction comic series, In the Shadow of No Towers, frames this in explicitly Caruthian terms, arguing that the attacks constitute “a limit event, an event so

196  Valerie O’Riordan traumatic that it shatters the symbolic resources of the individual and escapes the normal processes of meaning-making and cognition” (980). Judith Butler writes likewise about 9/11 and its aftermath as having “[interrupted] the self-conscious account of ourselves we [as Americans] might try to provide” in a way that challenges “the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control” (23). Given that the “symbolical resources” of the American individual were tied to a particular narrative of what it meant to be a US citizen (a particularly masculinist narrative that revolved around autonomy, unassailability, and political and military might), then the attacks left those individuals reeling, the narrative weft of their identities as Americans unravelling. The US government’s kneejerk attempt to fix (or at least to disguise) this damage was to compile, rapidly, a new narrative to present to the watching world in order to counter the idea that America had, as Butler suggests, lost control. Political scientist Meghana Nayak argues that the story put forth as a response was that of a white, Christian, “hypermasculinist state” (45), a story sustained by the repression of dissenting political agents both outside and within the state’s own borders, as, externally, troops were deployed to Afghanistan, and, internally, the Patriot Act of 2001 was used to ensure that “political agency [could] not be allowed to threaten the US narrative of its identity” (45–46). Those citizens who did not fit the model (non-white, non-Christian, anti-patriarchal) were denied the symbolic resources to conceive of themselves as Americans. Moreover, even for those who did fit the official image, the repercussions of an event as brutally shocking as 9/11 were too damaging for any immediate alternative narrative to convincingly take hold: rather, this radical, traumatic, destabilizing of American national identity brought about a situation in which individual identity was, for many, also ruinously damaged. While this situation is most obviously identifiable in the US context, it is manifest also in the United Kingdom as the unassailability of the ‘West’ has increasingly come into question. This radical destabilization has not gone unmarked in English-­ language literature: a provisional canon of 9/11 literature has already emerged, with Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), and Don ­DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) amongst the earliest and best-known examples. Whilst, as we have seen, Gibbs is suspicious of Foer’s techniques, Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn argue that such books nonetheless “[work] as an awkward substitute for and attempt to compensate for the unpresentable absence effected by 9/11 itself” (2). 5 The reader’s “empathic unsettlement” in relation to the textual trauma “compensates” for her real-life bewilderment and aids her own recuperative process (LaCapra, Writing History xi). That is, in the sociopolitical situation of the post-9/11 era, where the private has been radically disrupted by the public, fiction becomes a key site for explorations of the affective impact

Traumatic Cycles  197 of that disruption on the individual subject. Yet, despite its popularity and the potentialities inherent in its structure for exploring exactly this disruption, the short story cycle has gone unacknowledged as a site for such explorations, even as Gibbs calls for more innovation and a move away from the “vicious circle of mutually reinforcing [trauma] criticism and narratives” (243). The lack of explicit ‘9/11’ or ‘7/7’ cycles on the list of cycles above does not matter: Tew argues that the global nature of the contemporary “cultural threat and upheaval” means that the “emerging aesthetic” he identifies in recent “traumatological” fiction need not be associated narrowly with those texts that deal only and/or explicitly with the aforementioned (or other) traumatogenic events; rather, he says, “the literary aesthetic, perhaps as a collective unconscious, represents inflections of the wider Zeitgeist” (193). That is, overt historical references ought not to be seen as a crucial and/or limiting factor in the identification or categorization of so-called ‘traumatological texts’, and so the lack of explicit 9/11 or 7/7 reference points in a given cycle does not mean that it is neither a product of that culture nor an agent in the development of such an aesthetic. In fact, the short story cycle as a form can be read as both: as we have seen, the specific and defining structure of the cycle, with its centripetal repetitions and centrifugal ruptures, accords with (and re-enacts) the structures of trauma in a such a way that makes the form particularly relevant to Tew’s claim that literary form can reflect a generalized traumatized Zeitgeist. The content of the cycle might not be, in any given case, traumatological, but its structure is, nevertheless, evocative of trauma’s own structure, and its popularity in an age that is, as Tew argues, defined, in large part, by cultural trauma cannot entirely or uncritically be ascribed to mere coincidence. The particular success of texts like Kennedy’s and Smith’s, which engage unambiguously with traumatized subjectivity and the possibility (or otherwise) of recuperation through narrativization, argues in favour of the cultural consequence of the cycle in a time that is overwhelmingly characterized by a public discourse dominated by doubt, fear, and the questioning of sociopolitical and cultural hegemonies. As certainly, then, as the ‘representational norms’ that both informed, and have been informed by, the Caruthian model of trauma have in turn shaped how we understand contemporary (traumatized) subjectivity, the short story cycle, as exemplified by What Becomes, but also, and in particular, by Hotel World, has the potential – hitherto under-theorized – to help to reformulate and re-present that understanding.

Notes 1 Caruth’s theorization of trauma draws upon three main sources: the 1980 edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and ­Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), in which post-traumatic stress disorder was first defined; Paul de Man’s work on referentiality and

198  Valerie O’Riordan signification; and Freud’s writings on repetition, trauma, and melancholia in Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and Moses and Monotheism (1937). See: Caruth, Unclaimed ­E xperience: Trauma, Narrative, and History; Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory. 2 For more, see Gibbs 148–159. See also Leys and Luckhurst for multi-­ disciplinary analyses of the impact of trauma as a medical concept (via the APA’s DSM-III and DSM-IV) upon the humanities, with particular emphasis on the ubiquity of Caruth’s formulation and its influence upon subsequent cultural forms. 3 See Foden; Upchurch; Taylor; E. E. Smith. Smith argues that the ‘markedly innovative structures’ of Hotel World mark it out as a ‘multivoiced novel’ in the tradition of Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Lane and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club – both of which are in fact claimed as cycles by both James Nagel and J. Gerald Kennedy. See also Nagel; J. G. Kennedy “Introduction”. 4 See, amongst many others, Verma; Nayak; Drew; Keeble. 5 Notably, Keniston and Quinn fail to include the short story cycle in their otherwise astute catalogue of ‘diverse’ genres.

Works Cited Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. ———. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns ­Hopkins UP, 1996. Drew, Julie. “Identity Crisis: Gender, Public Discourse, and 9/11”. Women and Language, vol. 27, no. 2, 2004. pp. 71–77. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in ­Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Routledge, 1992. Foden, Giles. “Check in, Drop Out”. The Guardian, 14 April 2001, www. theguardian.com/books/2001/apr/14/fiction.alismith. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017. Gibbs, Alan. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives. Edinburgh UP, 2014. Kansteiner, Wulf. “Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor”. Rethinking History, vol. 8, no. 2, 2004, pp. 193–221. Keeble, Arin. The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics and Identity. MacFarland, 2014. Keniston, Ann, and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. “Representing 9/11: Literature and Resistance”. Literature after 9/11, edited by Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. Taylor and Francis, 2013, pp. 1–15. Kennedy, A. L. What Becomes. Vintage, 2010. Kennedy, J. Gerald. “From Anderson’s Winesburg to Carver’s Cathedral: The Short Story Sequence and the Semblance of Community”. Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, edited by Kennedy, J. Gerald. Cambridge UP, 1995, pp. 194–219. ———. “Introduction: The American Short Story Sequence: Definitions and Implications”. Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, edited by Kennedy, J. Gerald. Cambridge UP, 1995, pp. vii–xv.

Traumatic Cycles  199 LaCapra, Dominick. “Trauma, Absence, Loss”. Critical Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 4, 1999, pp. 696–727. ———. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. University of Chicago Press, 2000. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. Routledge, 2008. Lundén, Rolf. “Centrifugal and Centripetal Narrative Strategies in the Short Story Composite and the Episode Film”. Cycles, Recueils, Macrotexts, special issue of Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, vol. 12, 2014, pp. 49–60. ———. The United Stories of America: Studies in the Short Story Composite. Rodopi, 1999. Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and ­Reference Guide. Greenwood Press, 1989. Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Louisiana State UP, 2001. Nayak, Meghana. “Orientalism and ‘Saving’ US State Identity after 9/11”. ­International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 8, no. 1, 2006, pp. 42–61. Ringer, Laurie. “The Silence between Words: Events of Becoming through Trauma in A. L. Kennedy’s What Becomes”. Les Cahiers de le nouvelle / Journal of the Short Story in English, vol. 62, 2014, pp. 131–47. Smith, Ali. Hotel World. Penguin, 2002. Smith, Emma E. “‘A Democracy of Voice’? Narrating Community in Ali Smith’s Hotel World”. Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 4, no. 2, 2010, pp. 81–99. Taylor, Charles. “Hotel World by Ali Smith”. Salon, 21 Feb. 2002, www.salon. com/2002/02/21/smith_18/. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017. Tew, Philip. The Contempory British Novel: 2nd Edition. Continuum, 2007. Thorne, Matt. “What Becomes by A. L. Kennedy: Review”. The Telegraph. 16 Aug. 2009, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/6022451/WhatBecomes-by-AL-Kennedy-review.html. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017. Upchurch, Michael. “The Ghost in the Minibar”. The New York Times, 3 Feb. 2002, www.nytimes.com/2002/02/03/books/the-ghost-in-the-minibar.html. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017. Verma, Rita. “Trauma, Cultural Survival and Identity Politics in a Post-9/11 Era: Reflections by Sikh Youth”. Sikh Formations, vol. 2, no. 1, 2006, pp. 89–101. Versluys, Kristiaan. “Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers: 9–11 and the Representation of Trauma”. Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 52, no. 4, ­Winter 2006, pp. 980–1003. Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh UP, 2004.

12 Kazuo Ishiguro’s Portraits of Paralysis Jacob Hovind

When does a short story collection become a cycle? What makes so many discrete pieces come together to form a unified and inseparable whole? Is a sustained mood enough? A number of ways of looking at a single feeling, or a way of being in the world? This chapter argues that the five stories comprising Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes (2009) resist any easy generic classification that would mark it as the celebrated novelist’s first published collection of short stories. Instead, the work’s quintet, published together with the subtitle “five stories of music and nightfall”, functions as an interconnected suite, to borrow Ishiguro’s own musical rhetoric, or as variations on a theme. That theme is superficially the paired subjects of “music and nightfall” announced by the subtitle, with each of the story’s narrators being musicians of some sort and nearly all of the collection’s characters existing in nightfalls both literal and metaphoric. But beyond this nocturnal pattern – nocturnal in both the temporal and the musical sense – I propose that the pieces are especially related to one another via their structural resistance to closure. Each of these nocturnes can be seen as a portrait of a life that seems to require and yet never attains that particular form of resolution so common in the modern Anglo-American short story tradition, the ­epiphany, with its flash of self-understanding and its promise of some sort of conversion or change. And in foregrounding their own absence of epiphanies, Ishiguro’s stories stand as a contemporary reimagining and restoration of one of literary history’s most influential short story cycles, James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). What emerges throughout the five movements of Nocturnes can be considered a composite portrait of the artist as the modern global citizen par excellence, unrooted and dislocated in an increasingly homogenized cosmopolitan world and blinded by the illusions of popular music’s omnipresent influence. ­Denied the transformative power of epiphanic insight and without the hope of change, Ishiguro’s characters come to comprise a portrait of collective stagnation just as damning as Joyce’s vision of Dublin’s moral and spiritual paralysis in his landmark collection. In putting Ishiguro’s stories in dialogue with Joyce’s canonical template, particularly regarding the epiphany concept, this chapter proposes that Ishiguro updates Joyce’s

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Portraits of Paralysis  201 famed portraits of paralysis for the twenty-first-century world, depicting its citizens as paralyzed by lost chances and missed opportunities, destabilized by transnational mobility, and blinded by the insecurities of a world in flux. Ishiguro utilizes the short story cycle’s unique structural capabilities, offering a cohesive portrait still marked by heterogeneous multiplicity, in order to show that among today’s cosmopolitan citizens, insight is rarely found, true revelation is hard to come by, and epiphanies exist only as a promise. To understand Ishiguro’s work as a cycle, rather than a collection, challenges many of the established criteria for defining the nature of the cycle form that critics have used. While one of the genre’s earliest and most influential critics, Susan Garland Mann, claims that “there is only one essential characteristic of the short story cycle: the stories are both self-sufficient and interrelated” (15), this definition has proven to be so broad as to require further classification. How, critics have wondered, does this interrelation between stories occur? What is enough to hold them together? Most succinctly, James Nagel has clarified Mann’s earlier definition, and the nature of the genre’s interrelation, writing that “the unifying tendency of the genre of the cycle has been the collection of a group of independent stories that contain continuing elements of character, setting, action, imagery, or theme that enrich each other in intertextual context” (15). And later, he goes on to suggest that among these elements, setting has a distinctive privilege in the cycle form’s history: “The traditional means of unifying a collection has been to place all of the action in a single setting, the method of Winesburg, Ohio, Crane’s Wilomville Tales, Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place” (250). To this list, of course, may be added such other canonical instances of the cycle as Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of Pointed Firs, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples, and, of course, Joyce’s Dubliners. Jennifer Joan Smith has recently defined this organizing principle of the genre as “limited locality”, a term she uses to describe “the ways in which such short-story cycles depend upon the construction of a restricted geographic terrain to contain and ground the narratives within” (2). Smith finds the principle of “limited locality” to be such an essential one through which to understand the short story cycle as a modernist phenomenon, due to how traditional notions of community are increasingly felt by the writers she explores to be under threat of erosion by modern industrialization, corporatization, and cosmopolitanism. So many of the genre’s key modern works’ “emphasis on place and shared experience”, she argues, “evoke questions about the possibilities for sympathy, solidarity, and community” (11).1 But if shared place has become a widely embraced critical lens through which to identify the coherence of a story cycle, even when that shared setting’s ability to create a meaningful sense of community is in doubt, then it quickly becomes apparent just how uneasily Ishiguro’s Nocturnes

202  Jacob Hovind fits into this paradigm. Each of the five pieces takes place in a different setting, from the tourist’s fantasy of Venice’s canals and the Piazza San Marco in “Crooner” to London and the bucolic countryside of Western England in “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “Malvern Hills”, respectively. “Nocturne” travels across the Atlantic, set almost entirely within an isolated ward of an expensive hotel in Beverly Hills, populated by washed-up celebrities and those searching for fame while recovering from plastic surgery, while the final story, “Cellists”, is set in what Chuchueh Cheng identifies as “a fictional composite of assorted scenes from ­Venice, Florence, Rome and other Italian tourist spots” (122). Moving from clearly representational spaces, though ones increasingly made strange by late modernity’s tourist industry (Venice) or ones already inherently strange because anonymous and interchangeable (luxury hotels), to the final story’s unreal pastiche, the stories can be said to comprise a vision of subjective life in a world whose daily life increasingly plays out in what Marc Augé has called “non-places”, those spaces endemic to “supermodernity” that “cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity” (63). In these places characterized precisely by their anonymity, functionality, and transience, such as supermarkets, highways, airports, and hotels, the subject finds himself cast adrift in “a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral” (ibid.). By locating its subjects in this series of non-places – even the pastoral setting of “Malvern Hills” has as the centre of its action a bed and breakfast inn, this thoroughly modern form of signifying, instead of actually embodying, “quaintness” or “authenticity” par excellence – Nocturnes implies that the very nature of the ­t wenty-first-century globalized world becomes ultimately inhospitable to any notion of authenticity or even reality. Any place increasingly looks and feels like a pastiche of various others, and no space feels like home. 2 Beyond this absence of shared setting, or perhaps the unified presence of so many spaces impossible to share, Ishiguro adds another layer of spatial and geographical dislocation in that none of his characters, in so many corners of the cosmopolitan Western world, feel at home wherever it is they happen to be. Nocturnes’ world is one of transients, tourists, immigrants, and strangers, all able to exist anywhere but feeling at home nowhere. As Janeck, the narrator of “Crooner”, remarks, while playing guitar for tourists in Piazza San Marco, “I’m one of the ‘gypsies’, as the other musicians call us, one of the guys who move around the piazza, helping out whichever of the three café orchestras needs us” (3). If Janeck explicitly identifies himself as an itinerant player, one for whom any band would do, then his self-description could equally hold true for any of the other four narrators. Steve, the narrator of “Nocturne”, and the unnamed narrator of “Malvern Hills” both are living in hotels, while the unnamed narrator of “Cellists” tells a story of the encounter between a Hungarian and an American in Italy, all dislocated wanderers

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Portraits of Paralysis  203 in a world in which, as the narrator observes, “the bosom pals of today become lost strangers tomorrow, scattered across Europe” (190). Any setting these five narrators share, then, is only life lived in the absence of a place to call home, and a community that would last seems always out of reach. And if place provides no coherence for Ishiguro’s collection, then, to return to Nagel’s shortlist of unifying elements, character also provides little continuity. As mentioned, each of the five narrators is distinct, though they do share a number of shared characteristics. Beyond their rootlessness, each is a man, and all of them are in some way deeply immersed in music, whether professionally or personally. Two are guitarists, one increasingly wounded by his inability to find success as a singer-songwriter in London’s crowded market, while Janeck in “Crooner” plays with various orchestras wandering the piazzas of Italy for the entertainment of tourists, his music neither personal nor expressive, even remembering once “going from band to band and playing ‘The Godfather’ nine times in one afternoon” (4). Steve of “Nocturne” is a saxophonist, though one still in search of fulfilment and fame, having spent his career so far only “playing behind one or two performers you’ll have heard of” (127), while the unnamed narrator of “Cellists” plays for the same tourists as Janeck, his instrument unidentified, but one with which he spends his days “blowing just quiet notes in the background” (190). Lastly, Ray of “Come Rain or Come Shine” is the only narrator who is not a performer but instead a listener, one who “lean[s] towards the bitter-sweet ballads” (37). Each of the five protagonist-narrators is of a type, in thrall to music but without having found success, trapped playing what doesn’t inspire them, or listening to what offers no relief or solace. But beyond this variation of a type, there is none of the continuation or reappearance of character that would normally distinguish the cycle form from a story collection. There is, however, one character who appears in two stories, Lindy Gardner, the wife of the titular washed-up “Crooner”, and a co-habitant of the Beverly Hills hotel in “Nocturne”, with whom the narrator Steve forges a momentary friendship. Her presence in the two stories assures the reader that all of the pieces seem to be taking place in the same world, though beyond her transatlantic appearances, the stories’ otherwise unrelated characters suggest that this is a world with little possibility for contact or shared experience. Since neither setting nor character offer the “unifying tendency” described by Nagel, that leaves as possibilities for coherence the remaining items from his list: “action, imagery, or theme”. If coherence is to be found in Nocturnes, then it must take one of these subtler forms of connective thread. And Ishiguro himself suggests that whatever it is that holds his collection together, it is something more ineffable than we usually find in the short story cycle. In an interview with The Guardian from 2009, the year of the collection’s publication, Ishiguro comments

204  Jacob Hovind on the difficulty of knowing even how to categorize Nocturnes. Referring to it as a “story book”, he goes on to remark: I’ve been resisting calling it a collection of short stories because sometimes novelists do publish collections of short stories, and they’re basically a rag bag of stories they’ve had sitting around for the last 30 years. Whereas this book I actually sat down and wrote from start to finish. […] I’m just writing this almost like a novelist. It sounds very pretentious, but you know some music forms, like sonatas, you get five what seem like totally separate pieces of music but they go together. Neither a novel nor a collection of discrete and separate works, Nocturnes certainly seems to bear none of the traditional distinctions of the modern short story cycle, as each story’s plot, setting, and characters stand on their own. And yet, like songs on an album or movements of a sonata, the stories work together to create an overall effect and a unified picture, five men standing as so many versions of a type. Written like a novel, “from start to finish”, the work thus follows a linear structure, though one that follows not a single character, as in such famed short story cycles as Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women or Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, but five. And throughout the course of the five movements, as they build upon and echo one another, these five characters emerge as so many versions of a single person: “I personally always thought of them as a single book. It’s just a fictional book that ­happens  to be divided into these five movements” (n.pag.). Or, ­alternatively, “it’s more like an album, and you don’t sometimes want a track released as a single” (n.pag.). We might say that Nocturnes, then, a sonata in five movements, or an album, none of whose tracks would fully work isolated as a single, tells the story not of five lives but of one way of living looked at five different ways – life lived in the same key, but with slight alterations in its melody. So what is this way of living whose movements Nocturnes traces? Later in The Guardian interview, Ishiguro relates a personal anecdote that helps provide the answer to this question. The majority of his friends, he notes, are not “glitteringly successful people” but ones he has known for years before his own rise to global fame, and certainly long before his recently awarded Nobel Prize. For these old friends, Ishiguro describes feeling that his own “worldly success” is “almost like an indictment”. As an example, he tells of a friend who “comes round to play music”: He’s a person I’ve known since I was 12, and we’ve managed to keep that friendship going really by pretending that I’m not a successful writer. Well, we’re not pretending that I’m not. We just don’t refer to it. So I’m aware that some people are having experiences like the

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Portraits of Paralysis  205 people in [Nocturnes], they have built up quite carefully a protection around them, or they comfort each other by saying it’s impossible to achieve dreams without severely compromising yourself. Here, in miniature, not in Ishiguro himself but in his friend of so many years, is the life on display in Nocturnes, one for whom worldly success is always out of reach, one who knows disappointment intimately but bears it quietly, kept afloat by delusions of integrity, and persisting still to play music. 3 Ishiguro’s friend described here is found throughout Nocturnes’ movements. In “Malvern Hills”, we meet our unnamed guitarist retreating to his sister’s small countryside inn to devote himself to his music after a string of unsuccessful band auditions in ­L ondon. There, with distance from his own failures, he comforts himself with the idea that “I hadn’t achieved every goal I’d set my sights on, but then those goals had always been more like long-term targets. And all those auditions, even the really dreary ones, had been an invaluable experience” (89). His dreams may be delayed once again, but he at least feels he can hold on to the achievement of not “severely compromising [him] self”. While the names and specific circumstances may change, it is ultimately one composite protagonist whose story – or whose stalled ­stories  – Nocturnes charts, five variations of a single kind of living.4 This composite protagonist is characterized precisely by his inability to grow or change and his resistance to any sort of authentic or clear-eyed self-understanding. Like the friend Ishiguro describes in The Guardian interview, the sonata here follows the key note of those who, in response to the world’s failures to confer meaning on their existence, or their own existence’s failure to meaningfully make themselves inhabit the world, “have built up quite carefully a protection around them”. The unifying theme in this album of sad songs, in this sonata of a nocturnal world increasingly dimmed, can be called a general failure of insight or of vision, one that leads to a kind of paralysis, life lived in stagnation within the trappings of these carefully built protections. And to speak of “paralysis” as the dominant mood and theme of Nocturnes, as a means to understand what makes it cohere as a short story cycle, suggests a key literary-historical parallel to help understand the overall structure and thematic of Ishiguro’s work. This is to say that, exploring lives lived in so many states of paralysis as it does, Nocturnes ultimately reimagines and updates one of the key twentieth-century story cycles, Joyce’s Dubliners, in order to express the unique entrapments of twenty-first-century life. From the start of its conception, Joyce famously writes to his friend Constantine Curran in 1904 his description of what will emerge as Dubliners ten years later: “I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city” (22). And two years later, amid difficulties having individual

206  Jacob Hovind stories published due to the printer’s objections to their content, Joyce writes to his publisher Grant Richards: My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. (83). And this distinctively moral paralysis runs throughout each of the collection’s fifteen stories, exploring characters trapped by all-pervasive and strangling social institutions such as religion, education, and inescapable poverty, but also by personal failings like pride, aloofness, narcissism, and cruelty. The opening image of the opening story, “Sisters”, sets the collection’s paralytic tone, with the young protagonist imagining his priest Father Flynn, recently having suffered his third stroke: Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work. (3) A word and a concept previously felt to be so foreign and strange, like an especially obscure geometry problem or a theological argument no child would have a need to be familiar with, paralysis seems already for the child a thing he “long[s] to be nearer to”, “to look upon its deadly work close” from a more intimate vantage point. And as the remainder of the stories indicate, following the collective life of Dublin’s inhabitants from childhood to maturity, the young child’s premonitions will certainly be borne out, as each of the stories’ subsequent protagonists will come to know all too well what it means to live in a world that entraps rather than liberates, and to learn just how difficult it is to understand, let alone even see, one self and one’s situation clearly. Find one character after another, frozen by their story’s end not in a flash of insight or self-understanding, but only in pitiful tableaux of stagnation and oppression. We may think, for instance, of the concluding image in “Eveline”, its protagonist caught in a moment of literal paralysis, rooted at the harbour and unable even to recognize the reasons for her inability to seize the opportunity of a new life with her suitor Frank: “She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Portraits of Paralysis  207 or recognition” (32). From one story to the next, we are left not with any of the characters’ radiating moments of insight, but only their blindness and immobility. The great irony, of course, is that the canonical literary-historical narrative suggests that the great gift of Dubliners for the Anglo-American short story was its use precisely of insight as a structural and thematic principle, a natural ending for an inherently teleological form. Following from the form’s inherent logic of condensation, stories have been typically structured so that what accumulation of details and events they do contain build towards a highly condensed ending, wherein the true meaning of those preceding details and events truly emerges. As John C. Gerlach writes of the story form’s distinctiveness, “the short story is that genre in which anticipation of the ending is always present” (160). And following from this centrality of endings for the form, the story goes, Joyce gave the modern story its perfect ending via the epiphany concept, such that after Joyce, the short story, at least in its modern Anglo-­A merican form, is widely understood to be the generic vehicle for understanding, revelation, and insight par excellence. Joyce was famously developing the epiphany concept during the same years of his composition of the stories in Dubliners, writing for instance to his brother in 1903: “I have written fifteen epiphanies – of which twelve are insertions and three additions” (14). Here he alludes to a number of short prose poems, eventually totalling forty, many of which would find their way into his first novel, Stephen Hero, the working version of what would eventually become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). It is also in this earliest novel where Joyce theorizes his understanding of the epiphany concept as a literary phenomenon, rather than as a religious one. In the words of his hero Stephen Dedalus: “By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself” (211). The concept has its origin in Christian discourse, etymologically derived from the Greek epiphaneia, meaning “a manifestation or appearance of some divine or superhuman being” (OED), with this original Greek word used by the early Church fathers to refer to the manifestation of Christ’s divinity on the twelfth day of the Christmas feast. As this origin of the term indicates, it is an experience of revelation, though not when divinity is revealed, but only some new aspect of the quotidian and the profane, when an entire life is revealed in a single and instantaneous event or gesture, or when a character’s transformative self-understanding is caught and frozen by the author in a brief and radiating flash. “The moment which I call epiphany”, Stephen goes on to elaborate, is when a person’s or a thing’s “soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance” (213). It would seem, then, especially given the contemporaneity of the two projects, that the epiphany concept would naturally complement the stories of Dubliners, both

208  Jacob Hovind forms working by means of condensation, and with the latter especially teleologically structured as it is. Yet, of course, this natural affinity between the two was not actually put to use, as the stories end with their characters indeed caught in ­crystalline moments, just ones that promise no insight or understanding. But if the character is denied such insight into herself or her situation, then her truth or “whatness” is made manifest only for her readers. 5 The idea that Dubliners’ fifteen pieces build to so many epiphanic moments, an idea that has drastically come to shape the contemporary Anglo-American short story, was largely promulgated by a series of influential essays from the middle of the twentieth century, most notably by Florence Walzl.6 She argues, for instance, that in Dubliners, the narratives resemble the liturgical epiphanies. The typical story presents a single episode in which prosaic details forward the slight action. The effect is cumulative and near the end some detail, act, or speech will effect a sudden revelation of the inner reality of the situation or character. (443) But as Joyce’s own writing shows, this parallel is not quite so easily borne out. Even the collection’s most famous and widely anthologized story, the final novella-length piece “The Dead”, with Gabriel Conroy standing at the window, having during this night of the Feast of the Epiphany come to awaken from his own egotistical coldness, realizing for the first time how little he’s ever understood another person, might not actually lend itself fully to being read as the transcendent epiphanic moment of grace literary history has turned it into. Having awoken to the fact that “one by one they were all becoming shades”, Gabriel stares at the snow, “general all over Ireland”, falling above both himself and his wife’s long-deceased young lover Michael Furey, and with this realization the story ends with the final lines that launched so many thousand epiphanies in fiction writing workshops all across the Anglo-American world: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (194). This justly famous ending certainly seems to offer the promise that experience may be transformed into truth, and that the world may reveal itself and become meaningful. This straightforward reading, however, would surely be forced to bracket an earlier stage of Gabriel’s epiphanic ascension towards new understanding, one that occurs only a few lines earlier when he finds within himself for the first time “generous tears” through which he comes to understand that “he had never felt like that himself [sc., what Michael Furey felt towards Gabriel’s wife Gretta] towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love” (ibid.). While in another

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Portraits of Paralysis  209 context the story would certainly have to be explored in far greater detail, for my present purposes I would simply suggest that this most famed of modernist epiphanies is really anything but. Rather than a portrait of solipsistic lovelessness awakening to a newfound understanding of shared humanity, community, and even perhaps love, Gabriel ends just as he as he was at the beginning, maybe impotently aware of his own lovelessness but knowing that “such a feeling [that] must be love” is not his to feel. Concerning this way in which “The Dead” seems to veer from Dubliners’ template of paralysis and stagnation, while ultimately only affirming it, Zack Bowen has stressed Gabriel’s unique status as “a writer, an artist”, such that at story’s end, “in order to characterize his own lack of feeling, [he] presents a picture of beauty which belies the very characterization he attempts to develop” (109). In short, ­Gabriel may not actually have much of an epiphany at all, certainly nothing transformative, and maybe even without any kind of revelation he’s never had before; he’s just made to be expressive enough to convince his readers he has.7 And we end the collection ultimately with no ascension from this city in which life has become so difficult to see with any kind of clarity that would confer meaning upon it, let alone ease the collective state of moral, spiritual, intellectual, and economic paralysis. It is certainly one of the strange ironies of literary history, then, that Dubliners’ great influence involves a certain misreading of the work’s overall structure and effect, following from the influence of those early critics such as Walzl. Joyce’s inheritors in the Anglo-American tradition were quick to embrace the understanding of the short story as a vehicle for characters’ spiritual awakening within the realm of the everyday, though this came at the cost of the work’s far bleaker vision of a world in which subjective illumination proves so elusive. Embraced at face value as a psychological phenomenon, the epiphany comes to define a certain strand of widely read domestic fiction by the middle of the twentieth century, such that the short story in English largely seems to comprise a landscape of epiphany overload. As Charles Baxter caustically sums up the literary scene, in his polemical essay “Against Epiphanies”: “Suddenly, it seems, everyone is having insights. Everyone is proclaiming them and selling them. Possibly we have entered the Age of Insight. Everywhere there is a glut of epiphanies. Radiance rules” (47). From many of the most canonical mid-century short story writers, including Updike, Cheever, and Stafford, through contemporaries such as Lorrie Moore and Tobias Wolff, the modern short story has become fully institutionalized as the ideal vehicle for revelation and insight, whether of some previously unseen or known truth, about oneself, about another, or simply about the way of the world. This, then, is the background against which Ishiguro’s cycle appears, and in reaction to which he makes his intervention into the accepted shape and texture of the modern short story. For Ishiguro’s characters,

210  Jacob Hovind the story form’s deeply entrenched illumination proves very hard to come by, and insights only lead nowhere if they even happen at all. But while the characters in Nocturnes are denied the power of insight, their loss becomes the reader’s gain, as Ishiguro, like Joyce before him, lets us see in his characters what they cannot see themselves. We find in these stories flashing and arrested moments that reveal not transcendent truth, but only tangled webs of misreading and empty insights. Ishiguro’s characters end up knowing only how little they actually know – and they may remain unwilling even to see that. What for so many readers and writers has become the genre ideally suited to expressing illumination is also equally suited for expressing its absence and impossibility; the form that can deliver radiance and revelation may just as easily convey blindness, disappointment, and, indeed, paralysis. To be sure, Ishiguro’s cycle provides confirmation of Tim Killick’s argument that the cycle, as opposed to the collection or the story published in isolation, is uniquely equipped to deal with failure, disenchantment, and blindness. While the individual story, as part of a collection or on its own in a magazine, has as its structural raison d’être that ascension towards epiphanic insight previously described, stories making up a cycle exist instead in a pattern of circularity from which no escape can be found: The distinct pieces that go to make up story cycles are often largely static, thereby problematizing any notional progression of the whole. Many cyclic collections are concerned with illusory ­movement – movement into which hopes and energies are poured but which ultimately fails to progress. The characters in such collections struggle to overcome the inertia of their lives and surroundings, but remain frustratingly tethered to a reality that refuses to let them go. (Killick 127) The cycle, then, especially as employed by Joyce and Ishiguro, following a circular logic rather than a progressive one, becomes the ideal vehicle through which to explore paralysis and disappointment, the very lack of movement that comes to characterize both writers’ characters. Ishiguro’s paralysis, though, is not limited to one city or national character as it was for Joyce, but to an entire way of being in a cosmopolitan, heavily mediated world in which authenticity seems ever more difficult to achieve, rootedness is so often only a nostalgic dream, and meaningful connection proves elusive. Nocturnes’ stories, I suggest, become linked by their characters’ inability to achieve any sort of meaningful epiphanies, remaining blind to the possibility of the insight they would need in order to wake themselves up from their nocturnal states of disillusion and inaction. In rejecting epiphany as a psychological awakening, Ishiguro’s work looks back to Joyce’s cycle and rediscovers Joyce’s original vision of paralysis

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Portraits of Paralysis  211 and blindness, as each story builds only to a climactic dead end, rather than the radiating epiphanies that have inspired so many other modern short story writers. Ishiguro updates Joyce’s portraits of paralysis for the twenty-first-century world, suggesting that among its citizens, insight is rarely found, and true revelation is hard to gain. In an interview with Der Spiegel in 2005, on the occasion of that year’s release of Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro’s interviewer asks him about the “horrible situation” of the novel’s characters, doomed to live a life that is not their own to create, and whether this is Ishiguro’s “idea of the human condition”. Tellingly, he responds by speaking about “all my books”, before suggesting about Never Let Me Go in particular: “My subject matter wasn’t going to be the triumph of the human spirit. I was interested in the human capacity to accept what must seem like a limited and cruel fate”. While at the time leaving only implicit whether this “human capacity to accept” is indeed his idea of the “human condition” asked about by the interviewer, the suite of stories of Nocturnes seems to suggest that the answer is certainly yes. Amidst the general feeling of disorientation that pervades all of Ishiguro’s works, even when he works in a form largely dependent upon epiphanic understanding, no such solace is granted his characters, and they remain trapped. I want, thus, to conclude by looking at the endings of some of Ishiguro’s stories as the key to their structural coherence, the place where epiphany is held out as a promise but ironically eludes the displaced and disillusioned characters who could so greatly benefit from its flash. In the first story, “Crooner”, the narrator Janeck wastes his talent playing endless repetitions of worn-out standards for tourists, his days reduced to a pattern of both inauthenticity and immobility. And notably, like so many of the other characters who populate Ishiguro’s world, he is a stranger in a strange land, being an Eastern European in Venice, itself populated by so many cosmopolitan tourists from across the globe: “We’re well liked, we’re needed by the other musicians, but we don’t quite fit the bill” (4). After a chance encounter with Tony Gardner, a once-famous singer idolized by Janeck’s mother, Janeck finally has the opportunity to see musical greatness up close, a rare opportunity in this world in which “a tourist strolling across the square will hear one tune fade out, another fade in, like he’s shifting the dial on a radio” (ibid.). Everything is disposable, fluctuating, and impermanent in the world Nocturnes’ first story introduces us to, but for one rare moment, Janeck finds an opportunity to experience something real and lasting, a singer who doesn’t have to change according to the fickle demands of tourists, but whose voice, Janeck later thinks, “came out just the way I remembered it” (27). However, as Gardner enlists Janeck to help him with a startlingly intimate performance, a gondola-set serenade for his wife Lindy, whom Gardner still loves but whom he feels he must leave in order to rekindle his career, Janeck learns more about what fame, success, and this illusion

212  Jacob Hovind of permanence actually look like in practice, that behind “the world on [the] record sleeve” (26) lie only jaded compromise, hollowness, and lost illusions. As Gardner explains his plan to Janeck, its misguidedness and sheer pitifulness are there for any reader immediately to see. He longingly describes his wedding night with Lindy, the two falling asleep while listening to Chet Baker’s “I Fall in Love Too Easily”: “That’s how it was. That’s why we’re gonna do that song tonight. I don’t know if she’ll remember though. Who the hell knows?” (23). Trying to recreate a past that may not even be remembered, playing the same song even though life has continued on and changed its meaning, Tony Gardner, this ideal for Janeck of artistic integrity in a world in which art has become cheapened and dulled, remains just as paralyzed as any of Joyce’s cast of Dubliners, blind to the present while in thrall to a song sung years ago. But Janeck seems ideally situated to gain some insight into music’s illusory and even narcotic power. As he tells the ageing crooner at one point: “Your music helped my mother through those times, it must have helped millions of others. And it’s only right it should help you too” (24). But glimpsing life’s actuality beneath these popular songs’ soothing ability to make life seem more meaningful or at least bearable, Janeck ultimately remains blind to music’s false comforts. Listening to Lindy sob quietly for her husband’s abandonment – made even crueller by his setting it to such beautiful and romantic music – Janeck can be said to misread this lesson about the uses and abuses of music entirely. In the story’s final sentence, just where we would expect the traditional epiphanic climax, an awakening from music’s trance and a rejection of all that the wasted crooner stands for, Janeck simply looks back on this incident, presumably from his own nocturnal world so dimly lit, and reflects of Gardner that “comeback or no comeback, he’ll always be one of the greats” (33). It is an ending no less ironic than any of Joyce’s case studies in ­Dublin’s collective paralysis, as Janeck chooses the ephemeral solace provided by music at the cost of actually learning anything about himself or the lives around him. Joyce’s characters remain trapped and blinded by rigid ­social institutions such as church, family, and work, or by more markedly personal failings, completely incapable of conceptualizing their own experience or of understanding their selves and their situations. Ishiguro’s protagonist – for following Ishiguro’s own claims towards the collection’s novelistic singularity in the interview previously mentioned, perhaps there is only one protagonist in Nocturnes, scattered over five different embodiments – remains paralyzed by the cult of music. He finds in its irreality a recompense for having nothing to hold onto or to understand in this world.8 Each of the five stories ultimately follows this structure, with the protagonist, a man (a musician specifically in four of the five stories) of little accomplishment but often with great dreams, standing on the verge of some insight about himself and his illusions, about the fractured relations

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Portraits of Paralysis  213 of those around him, or about the uses and abuses of music in his world. But each time, he steps back from actually achieving any such insight, and epiphanies remain ignored or missed entirely as he chooses instead popular music’s beguiling promise of a world in which no problem has to be faced and no mistake or regret has to hurt too badly. Instead, like Steve, the saxophonist who narrates the fourth story, “Nocturne”, he retreats to the space in which he practices his music, “a dim, airless cubicle” (128) soundproofed from the truths of the world beyond its small and isolated confines. All five protagonists find themselves in situations in which things are decidedly not working out for them – any meaningful relationships have proved unfulfilling, professional ambitions remain disappointed, and rootlessness has become a kind of habitual condition. Like those characters described by Ishiguro in the 2005 Der Spiegel interview, they are all as if trapped within a “limited and cruel fate”. But rather than awakening to that entrapment, they each, like Gabriel at the window, end up as if resigned to their own lovelessness, to the world they live in that gives little in return for all the ambitions and hopes placed upon it. In “Malvern Hills”, the unnamed guitarist, in rural retreat from his own failed ambitions in London, wanders about the eponymous hills and develops a tentative friendship with a Swiss couple on vacation, Tilo and Sonja. Alone in the hills, working on the very music that no one else seemed to want in London, the narrator is stumbled upon by the couple, who approach him with “a look of happy amazement” (105), enchanted by his song and especially “the way it fell at the end of each line” (106). They soon reveal that they are musicians themselves, playing traditional Swiss folk music in restaurants and for parties – the same sort of packaged music of inauthenticity Janeck played for Venetian tourists in the opening story. But despite this pursuit of inauthenticity – “So we perform many hits. Beatles, the Carpenters. Some more recent songs” (110) – the couple still assures the narrator that “we play because we believe in the music” (108), and a moment later: “What we have is perfect” (109). But the next day, he encounters Sonja alone in the hills, and her demeanour is noticeably less happy, her outlook far less content. She confesses to the narrator – as characters in Nocturnes’ world tend to confess what is most personal to complete strangers – that any contentment he may have sensed the day before belongs only to her husband, and she has no share in Tilo’s happiness. Having earlier suggested that they had come to ­Malvern Hills only to see the landscape that inspired Edward Elgar’s music (98), Sonja now discovers that the music that inspires and the reality that we live in are in fact two separate entities: These hills, he says, are even more wonderful than he imagined them when we listen to Elgar. He asks me, isn’t this so? Perhaps I become angry again. I tell him, these hills are not so wonderful. It is not how

214  Jacob Hovind I imagine them when I hear Elgar’s music. Elgar’s hills are majestic and mysterious. Here, this is just a park. (120–121) While Tilo believes, like Janeck and Ray before him, in the seductive illusion of music’s power, using it to enchant a reality that on its own invariably remains imperfect, Sonja knows that “as it is, life will bring enough disappointments” (122). While the world of Elgar’s songs is a magical and majestic one, in reality, the same landscape his music depicts ends up being “just a park.” However, when the narrator confesses his own disappointments and failures, wondering even if he ought to go on pursuing his music career that has only led him to playing alone in the Malvern Hills, she urges him to continue his pursuit. As she notes, “I can see you are much more like Tilo. If disappointments do come, you’ll carry on still. You will say, just as he does, I am so lucky” (ibid.). And the narrator himself sees just where such carrying on will get him, gazing at Tilo wandering around hills that can never be what he needs them to be, his marriage in a crumbling state he is unwilling to acknowledge. But instead of focusing on this image and reckoning with its implications, the narrator instead turns to his music, as Sonja urged: “Then I gazed at the clouds, and at the sweep of land below my, and I made myself think again about my song, and the bridge passage I still hadn’t got right” (123); one more potentially transformative encounter, one more opportunity for insight, rejected instead for a life lived in thrall to music’s elusive reality. As Sonja had remarked earlier in the story, “we play because we believe in the music” (108), and while she later reveals just how hollow this sentiment is for her, it becomes transformed into something like a raison d’être for all of Ishiguro’s narrators. In each of the five moments, the possibility for a transformative ending ends up rejected instead for a belief that, despite all evidence to the contrary, everything will turn out fine so long as we continue to believe in the music. No turning point ever arrives, and perspective is never found, as each time again we go back to this character-type lost instead in music’s illusory thrall. As Cynthia F. Wong writes of the ending of the fourth story, “Nocturne”, In Ishiguro’s worlds, people frequently failed [sic] to change, transform or metamorphose into better versions of self, even if they say this is the case. Beyond assessments made at a dusk or nocturne of existence, his characters narrating their ignorance, delusion or pained desires seem both aware of and resistant to change. (139) Like the friend Ishiguro described in his interview with The Guardian, his characters have proven experts in the art of building “up quite

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Portraits of Paralysis  215 carefully a protection around them”, and music proves to be the material with which they construct these comforting cages. In the final story, “Cellists”, the unnamed narrator relates a story of a musician he once knew, Tibor, who falls under the sway of a presumptive virtuoso revealed never to have actually touched an instrument. During one particularly instructive music lesson, she comments on Tibor’s playing: You play that passage like it’s the memory of love. You’re so young, and yet you know desertion, abandonment. That’s why you play that third movement the way you do. Most cellists, they play it with joy. But for you, it’s not about joy, it’s about the memory of a joyful time that’s gone forever. (204–205) In a collection in which characters often debate about different interpretations performers make of a particular song, this false virtuoso can be said to describe the musical interpretations of Ishiguro’s own performers and listeners. They play not with an emotion, but only with an emotion’s absence, and their songs become ones of lives unlived and potentially transformative futures rejected. The sonata they build together, through Nocturnes’ variations on its theme, becomes the soundtrack for the work’s vision of a world in which no place feels like home, in which human encounters are more possible than ever but none of them last, and in which authentic understanding, in the form of epiphanic illumination, proves very hard to come by. Like Gabriel Conroy at the window, they perform their songs beautifully, but that beauty masks the very absence of feeling that will continue to keep them paralyzed – the “snow falling faintly” may be what unites, but it also becomes what covers up, renders immobile, and even entraps. And so, paralysis having spread insidiously outward to become a global phenomenon in ­Ishiguro’s world defined by dislocation, impermanence, and a widening gulf between dream and actuality, each of his characters is left like the guitarist in “Malvern Hills”, “working on the bridge I hadn’t got right”. If the musical bridge is the transition from one section to the next, then for these dislocated subjects, the passage to knowledge, of self, of other, and of world, and the promise of epiphanic illumination and transformation, remains forever delayed. Emotions remain unrealized, as these lost and paralyzed musicians play with the memory of the emotion’s ghosts – a haunting music whose sadness and whose truth becomes ours to hear when they cannot. To borrow the title of another of Ishiguro’s works, the 2003 film he wrote for Guy Maddin, it is the saddest music in the world that is played throughout Nocturnes’ suite – epiphanies missed and misread, characters’ selves unknown even to themselves, the melancholy soundtrack to life unlived. And following

216  Jacob Hovind from the thematic variation made possible by the cycle structure, as with Joyce’s Dubliners, Nocturnes’ template and echo, the characters may change but the song remains the same.

Notes 1 For another influential instance of this critical privilege of setting, place, or community as a means for a collection to attain narrative cohesion, see Lundén. 2 And as Augé suggests, these non-places of supermodernity are ultimately entirely inhospitable to anything like insight, self-knowledge, or clarity, mediated by commerce, text, and contractual obligations as they are. These places create in their inhabitants so many “shifts of gaze and plays of imagery”, which “subject the individual consciousness to entirely new experiences and ordeals of solitude” (75). On Ishiguro’s work in general as an exploration of late modern experience’s increased inorganicity, the increasingly taxing and time-consuming and yet still strangely impoverishing bonds that consume subjectivity lived in non-places, see Bruce Robbins. In The Unconsoled (1995) specifically, Robbins argues that “the novel’s distortions of time and space become a metaphor for the harriedness of ordinary life, and the conflicting demands of home and work become a metaphor for the conflicting scales and rhythms of the foreign and the domestic” (430). To put this in Augé’s terms, we can say that the conflicts Ishiguro’s characters face and which Robbins documents are those of the place and the non-place, the authentic and the inauthentic. 3 On music’s persistent presence in Ishiguro’s fiction, see Mark Mazullo, who argues that “art sometimes runs perilously close in Ishiguro’s work to producing not only alienation but domination and subjection” (80). From A Pale View of Hills, through The Unconsoled, Never Let Me Go, and “Cellists”, Mazullo finds that each of Ishiguro’s performers and musicians ends up isolated from any sustained social or familial commitments by their musical pursuits, their chosen forms of expression uninterpretable by anyone they would seek to reach. But like Ryder at the end of The Unconsoled, each of them also ultimately plays a note of “hope as the dominant expressive point”, sharing “Ryder’s enduring trust that when he arrives at this next urban space he will succeed in making music, expressing himself and forging real human bonds” (94). 4 Similarly, Susan Garland Mann has included among those story cycles “that represent variations on the bildungsroman” those “devoted to the maturation of a ‘composite personality’” (10). She reads most closely as the exemplar of this kind of cycle Hemingway’s In Our Time (71–82), though notably she also alludes to the fifteen stories in Joyce’s Dubliners as being linked by a similar composite effect: “The strong impact of the book is created largely through the cumulative effect of the same basic story – of an individual’s attempt to escape from dullness and paralysis – being told again and again with a different cast” (38). 5 As Robert Scholes writes in his introduction to the collected “Epiphany” pieces, in a volume dedicated to the background material of A Portrait of the Artist: The term [‘epiphany’] has been applied, to Dubliners in particular, as if it referred to a principle of art according to which each story in the collection was constructed. If criticism finds the term useful in this sense,

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Portraits of Paralysis  217 critics will no doubt continue to employ it; but they should do so in full awareness that they are using the term quite differently from the way Joyce himself used it. For him it had reference to life only, not to art. An Epiphany was life observed, caught in a kind of camera eye which reproduced a significant moment without comment. (3) 6 The first critic to read Dubliners’ fifteen stories as fifteen examples of the epiphany concept defined by Stephen Dedalus was Irene Hendry in 1946. Other mid-century critics who influentially argued for this interpretation include Connolly and Tindall. 7 See also David G. Wright’s analysis of the imagery of paralysis is woven throughout “The Dead”, arguing that its presence is actually key to Dubliners’ structure as a short story cycle as opposed to just a collection of discrete pieces: The primary reason for all these associations is to tie the ending of Dubliners closely to the beginning. That tends to shape the whole collection into the circular configuration that, throughout the individual stories, has served as a symbol for Dublin’s paralysis and entrapment. (290) 8 See Cheng’s argument that popular music’s very inauthenticity and reproducibility in Nocturnes manifests in its listeners a “displacement of self” that entails “duplicity, artificiality, promiscuity, capriciousness, and insincerity” (125). In a world in which there is increasingly little that is real to hold onto, the subject himself is reduced to only a parody of a person, and, consequently, his knowledge of himself becomes only a mediated simulacrum of self-knowledge, knowing not himself but only the production of a self that popular art has helped to create.

Works Cited Augé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe, Verso, 2008. Baxter, Charles. “Against Epiphanies”. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Graywolf Press, 2008, pp. 41–62. Bowen, Zack. “Joyce and the Epiphany Concept: A New Approach”. Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 9, no. 1, 1981–1982, pp. 103–114. Cheng, Chu-chueh. “Cosmos of Similitude in Nocturnes”. Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context, edited by Cynthia F. Wong and Hülya Yildiz. Ashgate, 2015, pp. 121–131. Connolly, Thomas. “Joyce’s Aesthetic Theory”. Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques, edited by Thomas Connolly. Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962, pp. 266–271. Gerlach, John. Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story. University of Alabama Press, 1985. Hendry, Irene. “Joyce’s Epiphanies”. Sewanee Review, vol. 54, 1946, pp. 449–467. Ishiguro, Kazuo. Interview with Decca Aitkenhead. The Guardian, 26 Apr. 2009. www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/27/kazuo-ishiguro-interview-books. ———. Interview with Michael Scott Moore and Michael Sontheimer. Spiegel Online, 5 Oct. 2005. www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel-interview-with-­ kazuo-ishiguro-i-remain-fascinated-by-memory-a-378173.html. ———. Nocturnes. Vintage, 2009.

218  Jacob Hovind Joyce, James. Dubliners. Norton, 2006. ———. Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by Richard Ellmann. Faber and Faber, 1975. ———. Stephen Hero, edited by Theodore Spencer. Norfolk, New Directions, 1963. Killick, Tim. “The Paradox of Failure in the Modernist American Short Story Cycle”. Genre, vol. XLI, 2008, pp. 125–149. Lundén, Rolf. The United Stories of America: Studies in the Short Story Composite. Rodopi, 1999. Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. Greenwood Press, 1989. Mazullo, Mark. “Alone: Kazuo Ishiguro and the Problem of Musical Empathy”. Yale Review, vol. 100, no. 2, 2012, pp. 78–98. Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Louisiana UP, 2001. Robbins, Bruce. “Very Busy Just Now: Globalization and Harriedness in Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. Comparative Literature, vol. 53, no. 4, 2001, pp. 426–441. Scholes, Robert, and Richard M. Kain, editors. The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Northwestern UP, 1965. Smith, Jennifer Joan. “Locating the Short-Story Cycle”. Journal of the Short Story in English, vol. 57, 2011, pp. 59–79. Tindall, William York. A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce. Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1951. Walzl, Florence L. “The Liturgy of the Epiphany Season and the Epiphanies of Joyce”. PMLA, vol. 80, no. 4, 1965, pp. 436–450. Wong, Cynthia F. “Oppositional Narratives of Nocturnes”. Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context, edited by Cynthia F. Wong and Hülya Yildiz. Ashgate, 2015, pp. 133–143. Wright, David G. “Interactive Stories in Dubliners”. Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 32, 1995, pp. 285–293.

13 “Consuming themselves endlessly” Women and Power in Livi Michael’s Short Story Cycle Roxanne Harde “Nothing is more material, physical, corporal than the exercise of power.” Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 57–58

I.  Introduction: Story Cycles and Women’s Lives Categorized as a “novel in five parts” on its cover and on commercial websites, and as a “book for adults” on livimichael.com, Their Angel Reach (1994) nevertheless encompasses the required features of the short story cycle. Comprised of five lengthy short stories, each of which stands on its own as a discrete narrative, the book entwines these stories into a somewhat unified whole through a common setting, intersecting minor characters, and repeated references to the shadowy figure of a mass ­rapist-murderer. However, in their explorations of the ways in which power operates in the lives of the female protagonists, circling through the themes of sexuality and violence, marriage and motherhood, the stories in Their Angel Reach come together as a cohesive unit. Robert Luscher suggests that the short story cycle’s kinship to openness and disunity encourages readers to construct networks of associations that invite them to consider wider themes, allowing the cycle to become “an open book […] that binds the stories together and lends them cumulative thematic impact” (149). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s discussions of bodies and power, this chapter analyzes how power operates in the lives of Livi ­M ichael’s women and girls and demonstrates how they negotiate the workings of social control over their minds and bodies. Whether falling into disabling physical or psychological conditions, such as eating disorders, or striving to reclaim control and autonomy, for instance through acts of artistic expression, Michael’s characters react to verbal, physical, and/or sexual oppression in ways that tie together their stories even as they underscore how the genre – as each story re-cycles these topics – can reify an author’s themes in ways the novel cannot. Set on the fictional Marley council estate, the stories focus on the lives of underprivileged and working-class women. Each has at centre a

220  Roxanne Harde compelling female protagonist, none of whom appear in any of the other stories, although they are linked by secondary characters that move from one story to the next. Michael’s choice to keep them discrete ensures the separateness of their narratives, even as her choice to make their lives and futures look similarly bleak connects their stories into a cycle. The first story, “Not Even the Rain”, features Karen, a 35-year old mother of three and former member of a bike gang, who reacts to her stifling existence by seducing her housewife friend. In “A Song for Carol Fisher”, Helen, who is fully developed at fourteen, fantasizes about a pop star even as she copes daily with manifestations of extreme misogyny and sexual objectification. Rachel, in her mid-twenties, tries to manage a failing marriage and extremely sick infant in “As If the Marks Were Made by Him”. Janice, a near-forties library assistant, suffers from an eating disorder and failed relationships in “Lower than Angels”. Lizzie, in the final story, “Living with Vampires”, treasures her art and independence but suffers a violent rape. Aside from the council estate setting, Michael connects the stories in small, but important, ways: Karen’s daughter knows Helen and is a year ahead of her at school; Rachel’s husband is Janice’s younger brother. The narratives are all tied to Lizzie in some way: she lives over the shops Karen frequents and chats on the bus with the woman Karen seduces; Lizzie’s niece is in the same class as Helen, and her sister-in-law knows Rachel; the bus Lizzie rides is driven by Janice’s former lover, and she frequents Janice’s library. The continuous presence of women weaving in and out of each other’s lives provides a comforting counterpart to the darker elements also threaded through the narratives: the ominous and repeated presence of bikers, satanists, child pornographers, and a serial killer called the Sandman, whose victims are girls. In the afterword to my edited collection of essays on the short story cycle, Narratives of Community (2007), Sandra Zagarell notes the important intersections of genre and community in analyses of the story cycle and argues that community as a concept is not always positive. The coherence of story cycles “may be grounded in categorizing certain people as outliers, outcasts, deviants. [… T]hey may be forged around common suffering and womanly bonds but reproduce forms of intolerance such as heterosexism and homophobia” (434). Zagarell’s point fits well with Michael’s topics, though I contend that Michael works to do more than reproduce forms of intolerance; rather, she brings them to light, examines their manifestations and underlying causes, and, at least in part, dismantles them as empty forms of hatred. Following the contributors to my volume, I am more concerned with how the form makes meaning than whether or why a text fits the genre, and like Zagarell, I believe that the story cycle can be written and read as a particularly female genre, one concerned with circularity and process rather than linearity and progress. Her point that community takes many forms – “some are

“Consuming themselves endlessly”  221 sustaining, some limiting, some destructive; all are contingent on the specific history, culture, social structure, economic circumstances, cultural geography […] gender relations, sexual norms” (434) – ­dovetails with Michael’s ideas about the ways in which social space and geographical place affect human lives. In an interview with Patricia Wheeler and Sharon Monteith, Michael reflects on the setting, noting that “Their Angel Reach is based on Mosley, where I lived for a while. It is a community undergoing many changes” and pausing over her interest in how “place shapes a community and shapes what people are able to do in that community and the kinds of things they think and believe in” (99). The vitality of the genre, the ways in which the story cycle enables an author to revisit and restate her or his overarching themes and ideas, comes through clearly in the gendered oppressions shaping the lives of the women in Their Angel Reach, and through the circulations of power that figure women in the book as objects or prey, ready for consumption but at the same time endlessly consuming themselves.

II. “To make her its prey”: Power and Women’s Lives As they detail the everyday, the ordinariness, of women’s lives (or at least the lives of white working-class women in Thatcher’s England), the stories in Their Angel Reach cohere around the movement of power, particularly the gendered power that affects every aspect of how women understand themselves: bodily appearance, sexuality, and motherhood. Following Foucault’s point that power “reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (Power 39), I now examine some of the ways in which Michael’s protagonists react to and are shaped by power, beginning with masculine power over their bodies. As one of the most insidious aspects of dominant masculinist discourses, the issue of gender and women’s bodies, and the social expectations placed upon them, function as underlying themes in all the stories in Their Angel Reach, but most negatively in the stories centred on Helen and Janice. Power operates on these bodies through mandates, particularly as endorsed and expounded by mass media, of how a woman should look. Helen, physically mature for her age, well developed and buxom, tall and dark, hates the way she looks and is mortified by the thought that she is likely taller and heavier than Ashley, the rock star for whom she pines. In a Marxist reading of working-class fiction, Wheeler argues that “Michael’s anger is loudest against the purveying of fantasy to women” and points out that her female characters “are all shown to be affected psychologically by projected media images that they cannot live up to” (208, 209). Continually faced with media depicting the thin and fair body that defines the ideal young woman – which is also

222  Roxanne Harde how she describes Ashley – Helen feels “grotesque” (72). She fantasizes scenes in which Ashley makes her feel petite, kissing her as men kissed women on television, “bearing down on them” (72). She consequently diets, streaks her hair, dresses to hide her size, and, more importantly, comes to despise her own body, to the point where she can no longer recognize anything positive about herself. Her father’s description of her as bonny and strapping does nothing to mitigate the image society has taught her to strive towards. The power of the media holds similar sway over the 38-year-old ­Janice. An intelligent and educated woman who does not want to be or have the things society tells her she ought to desire, Janice nonetheless sees herself through her supervisor’s eyes as “ugly and elephantine” (196). Looking at her thin young co-worker, Janice understands “the gap between them could not be more immense”, but she nonetheless longs to cross it, to diet and remake her appearance, and she hates herself for that longing as well (198). A binge eater, Janice uses food to cope with every emotional challenge. She holds a science degree but stays underemployed in the library, and her attraction to the moor and its many ecosystems cannot outpace her hunger, her compulsion to consume, to fill herself with food until she hurts; she eats with “the kind of concentrated, absorbed energy she couldn’t give to anything else” (209). The narrative juxtaposes Janice’s binging with her mother’s rigid control; a woman who hates cooking and baking but gives food generously to church functions, hates housework but keeps her home spotless, Janice’s mother neither approves of nor seems to love her daughter (216). Janice’s eating, while often out of control, also gives her control. She thinks of her binging in the terms of a self-harmer, dwelling on her impulse to eat as “cutting a little deeper into her own wounds” (214). When she laments that “she didn’t understand the power of food to make her its prey”, she completely misses the point (241). However, when she pauses over media images, “those golden people” who eat little and exercise a lot, she recognizes that the “urge to be like them never quite went away. They were always so much in control”, and Janice finally begins to understand exactly what holds power over her, what actually makes her its prey (248). As Foucault points out, even though “power relations can materially penetrate the body in depth, without depending even on the mediation of the subject’s own representations”, that power does not have to be part of the subject’s consciousness (Power 186). Media representations of the ideal female body, and media endorsement of the idea that self-control can achieve that body in all cases for all women, completely rule the self-image of girls like Helen and, more disastrously, lead women like Janice into a dangerous cycle of self-harm. If social expectations for women’s bodies function as a generative discourse, creating meanings that play themselves out on lived bodies,

“Consuming themselves endlessly”  223 those expectations arise from the dominant masculinist discourse that sees women as primarily, and often only, sexual objects. Foucault may blandly suggest that Power over sex is exercised in the same way at all levels. [… W]hatever the devices or institutions on which it relies, it acts in a uniform and comprehensive manner; it operates according to the simple and endlessly reproduced mechanisms of law, taboo, and censorship. (History 84–85) However, when he goes on to note that it moves “from state to family, from prince to father”, he makes clear that the hegemonies at play are those of male dominance (History 85). Michael involves each of her protagonists in the circulations of sexual power, and in each story, gendered violence accompanies sexuality. Their Angel Reach works purposefully and repeatedly to problematize normalized versions of sexual violence, particularly delineating rape as a structural symptom of gender inequality. Michael weaves details about the Sandman throughout the entirety of the book as he rapes, murders, and mutilates girls. His third and fourth victims are found in the first story, with Karen closely following the story in the newspapers. Helen’s family repeatedly cautions her about being careful; “Five young girls your age, more missing”, they tell her, then wonder that she seems afraid of so many things (70). Rachel’s story begins with the police’s announcement that the girls, though of different ages, were all close to the same stage of physical development, “just entering puberty”, after which Rachel refuses to listen to the news on television or read the papers (105). Janice similarly refuses to think about the Sandman, although his trial takes place during her story. Several of the women feel certain that another mass murderer or rapist will soon take his place and begin targeting women or girls or both. More tellingly, when conversations about the Sandman occur throughout the ­ achel course of the book, they are accompanied by equally grim stories: R and her friends wonder over a news story about women writing to and beginning relationships with serial killers like the Sandman, questioning what would drive otherwise normal women to undertake an action so aberrant, what attracts them to men who would surely see them as less than human, if not worse. The patrons in Janice’s library, while discussing the trial, ponder other bad news, including the story of a pregnant woman from a nearby village who killed herself and both her children (201). Janice’s patrons fail to make the connection between the oppressive conditions that would drive a young mother to murder and suicide, but Michael invites her readers to make connections between a character who destroys children as they are about to become women and other, often violent, manifestations of power over women.

224  Roxanne Harde The Sandman is not the only violent male in the book; each story touches on sexual assault, in passing or as part of the plot. During her biker days, Karen witnesses a member of the gang, Lou, being raped by her boyfriend as punishment for flirting with another man. The rape is meant to be a gang rape, but one of the men prevents that and lets the girl go. During the assault, Karen feels “her own attention grow to a point of absorbed concentration nothing could shake. […] Karen wanted to see. She felt the lure of what you were not supposed to see more powerfully than anything she had felt in her life” (31). In a discussion of the violence and anxious gazes directed at sex, Foucault argues that we “must immerse the expanding production of discourses on sex in the field of multiple and mobile power relations” (History 98). That circulation of power, coupled with increasingly voyeuristic tendencies in sexual power relations, means that women easily take on masculinist tendencies in the exercise of sexual power. Women, in short, quickly learn to respond to violation, whether physical or prurient, with arousal. Wheeler points out that while “Karen’s voyeuristic involvement in the rape could be said to disrupt male power and eliminate the passivity and silence of women regarding this subject”, her empowerment comes “at the cost of the annihilation of another woman, Lou, the rape victim” (211). The story featuring Helen takes its name from one of her classmates: Carol Fisher was violently assaulted and photographed topless by boys at school for a magazine they plan that features photos of all the girls’ breasts. After her photograph is spread about, Carol Fisher commits a horrific suicide by setting herself on fire. Afterwards, the other girls make jokes about her sensitivity about the photo and her horrific death, even as they are all haunted by her suicide. On separate occasions, the boys attack both Helen and her friend Lisa. Lisa furiously fights them off, though she is tiny and undernourished. Helen also fights, then is rescued by her older brother and his friends. Because of her physical maturity, Helen becomes a target for other predatory men: a roadie at the concert she attends with Lisa and the father of a child she babysits. When driving her home, he touches her hair, then comments on her breasts and threatens, “I could do anything now you know […]. I could rape you if I liked” (92). Wheeler points out that as women absorb merchandized images of femininity in seductive packages, these “received images of femininity are quite specifically linked to women’s oppression in other areas of their lives” (209). In all episodes of sexual threat, and like Karen, Helen freezes in fear but also feels aroused. She fantasizes that the man driving her home is Ashley and feels a “sick thrill” (92). That sick thrill, like the lure that Karen feels while watching Lou being raped, demonstrates the ways in which sex and violence have become entwined in the cultural consciousness of mid-1990s Britain, an entanglement that stems directly from the objectification of women, as noted by theorists of rape. Catherine MacKinnon, as one example, insists that

“Consuming themselves endlessly”  225 we attend to the ways in which sexuality has become entrenched in the realm of violence, and that we need to examine “the extent to which the institution of heterosexuality has defined force as a normal part of ‘the preliminaries’ [of heterosexual activity]” (219). Karen and her gang treat the rape as a sort of voyeuristic foreplay, akin to live pornography, and Helen’s understanding from television that men must bear down on women during sexual play leads to a near-­expectation, perhaps anticipation, that she will be sexually assaulted (72). Throughout the stories, Their Angel Reach denotes heterosexuality as marked by a dominance/submission model of desire where women are defined by inequality, and desire must be accompanied by violence. Janice has a desultory affair with Ken, a bus driver the elderly women on his route describe as a shy lad; Janice concludes that, balding and sagging, Ken “wasn’t much of a lad”, and he “wasn’t shy either” (199). She has unsatisfying sex with Ken until they fight over the housework that he demands of her and the house repairs she asks of him. While he had been a disinterested lover, rarely coming to or bringing her to orgasm, the argument leads to forced sex. When she cries out in pain, he becomes more forceful, and they have mutually satisfying intercourse for the first time. After her affair with Ken changes in this way, Janice finds herself fantasizing that a stranger rapes her. She wonders when “sex had become such a sickness with her” and breaks it off with Ken (230). Just as she rejects cultural expectations concerning appearance, although she remains attracted to them, Janice rejects a relationship that categorizes her as victim or object. She may continually feel herself the prey of food, but she refuses to be prey to sexual violence. Michael’s final story offers the most overt sexual violence. Lizzie has a series of indifferent, often impotent, lovers, and then she picks up what turns out to be a serial rapist who tortures her for many hours, sexually and physically, breaking her arm and burning her face. Her recovery is slow and isolated: believing that the rapist has exposed her ugliness, she neither reports the assault nor sees a doctor (310). The man she sees next, instead of helping her heal, makes pornography a part of their relationship and informs her that he has participated in the gang rape of a drunken young woman. The relationship ends when Lizzie, initially fine with the pornography, becomes uncomfortable as he chooses videos with increasingly younger actresses. She finally objects to a film featuring a girl who “looked about twelve” sitting blindfolded between two men who prepare to rape her (331). In a discussion of Michael’s exploration of women’s “relationships to sexuality and pornography”, Wheeler notes that “Michael posits an incredibly disturbing representation of women’s involvement with pornography” (210–211). Like the other women, like all women conditioned to accept force as part of sexual encounters, Lizzie is aroused by the threat of violation and violence. As they watch the film with the young girl, Lizzie feels “trapped between sickness and

226  Roxanne Harde desire”; however, although Rob looks like he might become violent, she nonetheless stops the tape and effectively ends the affair (331). The containment of women’s sexuality is one of the most effective methods of establishing power over women. Regarded as potentially subversive, female sexuality challenges the dominant patriarchal discourse that declares women must be sexually passive. In its discussions of pornography, Their Angel Reach repeatedly challenges ideas about what is considered normal behaviour for women. Michael’s characters are often unashamedly aggressively sexual, but they are repeatedly drawn up short when faced with sexual violence. She disturbs the paradigm whereby the male corrupts and the female is innocent, but when the sex, pornographic or otherwise, is predicated on male power and female oppression, characters like Janice and Lizzie reject it. Michael also disrupts the social codes around motherhood. A basic aspect of human existence, it becomes, in Michael’s hands, another means of patriarchal oppression. Mothers in these stories feel trapped and isolated, consumed by their children. For Foucault, power is co-extensive with the social body, and “relations of power are interwoven with other kinds of relations (production, kinship, family, sexuality)”, and the interconnections of these relations, particularly the husband-wife/­motherchild paradigm, support the conditions of domination (Power 142). Those conditions are apparent in each of the five stories, whether the protagonist is a mother or not. Helen watches her heavily pregnant sister settle into a disappointed life. Janice remembers her mother suffering a miscarriage and then struggling to raise three children after being widowed. Lizzie watches Karen’s daughter with her biker boyfriend, imagines her life playing out until she ends up “pushing a pram […] looking dowdy and grim” (288). None of these three see motherhood as inevitable, or even desirable. Still in adolescence, Helen never fantasizes past the point of kissing; Janice never considers having a child, and, while Lizzie thinks about it, it seems more a passing fancy than an actual plan. Of the two protagonists with children, Karen, on the one hand, seems to have viewed marriage and motherhood as inevitable, even considering the social changes that should have given her more options. And although birth control would have been available in the early years of her marriage, her pregnancies were unplanned and largely unwanted. When she looks ahead towards a future that seems sure to include divorce, she finally recognizes that she has had no preparation for a life outside of the domestic sphere. Rachel, on the other hand, finished school and worked until she had Roy, a few years after marrying Pete. The narrative does not make clear if she plans to return to the workforce, but given her baby’s condition, Rachel’s life looks even more circumscribed than Karen’s. Rachel makes two friends in a mothers group, and the proximity of their healthy babies shows her exactly how ill Roy must be: she watches Marion’s baby girl ferociously sucking her bottle and worries about Roy’s lack of interest

“Consuming themselves endlessly”  227 in food and his continued inability to “meet her gaze or sit up” (117–118). She becomes progressively isolated and consumed by terror about Roy’s condition, finding her life swallowed by his illness and remembering “what Julie had said about babies: they were little vampires who sucked you hollow” (160). However, even with their healthy babies, Rachel’s friends discuss the profound impact motherhood has on a woman’s life. Marion discusses the loneliness that comes with motherhood, and Julie focuses on the lack of control women have: “once you’re a mother you know there’s no such thing as power” (126–127). As the theme of motherhood cycles through these stories, Michael subtly demonstrates how being a mother, for all of the wonder and joy it can add to women’s lives, so often becomes another social tool to control and subjugate them.

III. “To put you back in control”: Resistance in Five Endings “There are no relations of power without resistance”, Foucault argues, and if the disciplinary effects of patriarchal power have shaped the female body as passive and violable, then resistance must be located “right at the point where relations of power are exercised” (Power 142). Although Janice characterizes herself and every woman she knows as “consuming themselves endlessly in their different ways” (245), these women, consumed and self-consuming, resist hegemonic discourse in subtle and overt ways. The book begins with Karen’s habit of hiding housework. She wastes much of each day avoiding it, then, in the few minutes before her husband gets home, does just enough to make her home presentable. Karen is clear that this is a power struggle, and she won’t give her husband “that one small power over her” (7). She enjoys small measures of power over others at other times, outsmarting the bike gang to avoid an unpleasant initiation, and dressing provocatively, using her beauty to give her control over her husband and friends. Her friend, Vi, having never had an orgasm, keeps that part of herself a secret from her husband. However, when Karen seduces Vi, she wonders if she now looked like the men who had tried to seduce her; after Karen tells Steve about the lesbian encounter, Vi equates her to men, never listening, always talking about herself, claiming power over herself and her body (46). The story offers subtle hints about Karen’s bisexuality, the boyish figure she’s proud of, her repeated crushes on pretty girls in school, and then her seduction of Vi (35). At the same time, the narrative also focuses on her husband’s homophobia; it opens with Steve’s story of his bike gang once beating “an old queen” bloody (1). In short, the only way for Karen to extricate herself from an unsatisfying life is through homosexual transgression. She may be following her desires, but she seems to be following them into a life she cannot quite imagine yet. The story ends with her musing on how old she feels at 35 and how bleak are her

228  Roxanne Harde prospects with her lack of education or training (43). At the same time, she resists this nihilistic bleakness, thinking of “all the rules you have to live by […], all the people you have to please”, the rules she has just flagrantly broken and the people she has now broken away from. The story ends with Karen sitting at her table, not caring about her husband or that she might be left with nothing. She looks past her unfinished kitchen renovation and stares out at the “bright, blank square of sky”, a move that suggests hope and possibility (47). Lavinia Greenlaw finds that because of the ways in which Michael’s characters change perspectives, each story ends “on a strangely hopeful note”. When Helen spends much of her time fantasizing about Ashley, she does so to cope with her bleak reality and a future “stretching in front of her, bleak as ash” (65). Michael seems to be punning here on Ash(ley), and at one point, Helen grimly but humorously notes that every way you walked in Marley “seemed to be uphill” (65–66). For Helen, life is all uphill, and she uses fantasy to coat her own world view with A ­ shley. However, the narrative offers an alternative set of conclusions that differ from Helen’s teenage-angst-ridden outlook. Although she hates her body, she does think of her good features; that and her father’s description of her leave the reader with the impression of a robustly pretty girl. Moreover, Helen repeatedly demonstrates decent values: she is kind and respectful, she loves her family, and she treats her friends well. She is a hard worker and performs respectably in school. When faced with sexual mistreatment by men, she resists and always walks away holding her head high. The chances of Helen continuing to resist patriarchal oppressions seem likely, particularly at the end of her story when she rescues Lisa at the concert and firmly sets aside both of their fantasy lives in favour of a reality in which girls and women help each other along. Greenlaw may be correct about these protagonists’ shifting perspectives, however, these shifts are all done internally, not in community. As Wheeler points out, despite the “proclamations of friendship between several of the women characters, Michael’s women are ultimately alienated and alone. […] There is no intimate confiding between Michael’s women” (214). Rachel may spend a good deal of time with her friends, but she never confides in them, only hinting about her fears for her baby and her failing marriage. As she tries to cope with her baby and his illness, Rachel feels like she spends her life waiting for nothing. She notices that Julie looks as worn down and resigned as all mothers and would never “go back to the way she used to be”, and, obviously, neither would Rachel (154–155). Realizing that her husband will always make her solely responsible for the baby, she runs away with Marion’s cousin, taking the child with her, though her lover clearly does not want him. Col is a traveller, a new age practitioner of paganism. The narrative hints that Rachel and Roy might become victims of a satanic sect, but instead the shift in perspective comes in one of Michael’s darkly humorous twists: Rachel’s

“Consuming themselves endlessly”  229 adventure ends with Col ignoring her and the baby just as her husband had. Her foray into the world of the travellers exposes her to darkness and mystery, and to terror. Ultimately, and quite anticlimactically, she simply takes her sick baby and walks out of the dark forest, looking down an autumn road with a perspective that is bleakly hopeful (159). Readers are given reason to believe in a positive outcome for Rachel and Roy when they are mentioned in Janice’s story as simply having left Pete behind. Early on, Janice is defined as being far overqualified for her job in the library, but she uses the knowledge from her science degree when she roams the moors bordering her house, which she has rebuilt inside and out. She repeatedly chooses a lively interiority over the bland and boring community surrounding her. The narrative pauses over her refusal to make small talk with library patrons: “God knows they weren’t asking for much. Maybe that was it, she couldn’t stand the thought of them asking for so little” (197). These patrons are often elderly, working class, and living on constrained means. Janice’s rejection of them seems more a rejection of her own choices. She watches her co-worker, Dora, bantering with the patrons, giving of herself to make their days better, but she also sees in Dora’s face a deep bitterness “as if somewhere along the line she had been led to expect more than this” (198). At various points, these women juxtapose what they expected with what they had, and ­Janice watches them negotiate their disappointment and loneliness, watches them learn to “consume” their own time (198). She finally accepts her choice of solitude. Her resistance to the social status quo, her decision not to marry or have children, and her preference to live alone and tramp about the moors, makes her life no less narrow than Dora’s or any of the other women’s, but that resistance does make it her own. She watches her friend/workmate Gwen become consumed by her work to help found a women’s shelter, and while she respects Gwen’s choice, rejects it for herself (195). She focuses on “the narrowness of [women’s] lives”, and it often seems that her compulsive consumption of food exists as an effort to make her life wider (202). Her visibility as a huge consumer brings into focus her point that all these women are consuming themselves because they are being consumed by others. Her story ends with these ideas, and she concludes with “maybe that was what they all needed, a sudden shift in perspective broadening a narrow view, a chink of sky through the curtains. She turned to find her jacket and boots” (253). Where Karen simply looks outdoors, Janice goes there, where she is happiest. Of all the protagonists, Lizzie has the clearest sense of the workings of power. Karen may watch a gang rape unfold and be aroused, and she may feel disturbed by her arousal, but she neither examines her responses nor resists. Lizzie reacts in similar ways, but she resists both the violence in front of her and her responses to it. Connecting power and violence, Foucault notes that “power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom”

230  Roxanne Harde (History 60). Lizzie is the character most likely to speak truth to power. Her thoughts about power and control – “that was why you needed fantasy, to put you back in control” (333) – could be addressing Helen’s frequents escapes into fantasy or many of the male characters’ reliance on pornography. Michael also encourages readers to revisit the other characters through Lizzie’s eyes, to see the beauty in Helen’s robustness or Janice’s strength, the serenity in Vi’s delicate fragility or ­Rachel’s patience with her son. For Lizzie, “the study of art had also taught her to recognize beauty where it wasn’t normally seen, in the wrinkles of an older woman, or in a dark crooked smile” (260). Moreover, Lizzie resists more than sexual oppressions: when one of her boyfriends, an art history student, analyzes her paintings, offering suggestions until she sees him sucking the life out of them, she feels helpless: “there was no way through the barricade of his reasoning, and time after time she caved in”; however, “frightened for her art”, she ends the relationship, preferring to be a single artist with integrity to being in a relationship that was consuming the best part of her (295). She responds to the trauma of rape in a similarly productive way: her musings about and ramblings in the natural world lead her to the painting that helps her work through that trauma. Her painting is a vast blue landscape, with cliffs inhabited by “women, surrounded by the artifacts of their daily lives, consumer goods, food”; she paints a vampire in the centre of the canvas: “Lizzie didn’t know what he was, some massive draining power, money, or the power of fantasy itself” (335). Lizzie’s painting stands as a female discourse of knowledge, sexuality, and subjectivity; as individuals and as a community, the consuming women circle the vampire but stand apart from him and reject him. In Foucault’s terms, Lizzie shows the cycle’s cumulative understandings of power as multiple force relations and as the processes that work to transform or reverse them (History 92). Having cycled through manifestations of patriarchal subjugations, through story after story in which women are objectified and violated, but are also resistant and resilient, Their Angel Reach ends with Lizzie’s hopeful view of her future, a life that includes her work, “more paintings, more exhibitions”, and possibly motherhood, “another kind of life waiting to grow inside her”, but motherhood on her own terms as a single career woman (337). This final story also ends with Lizzie out of doors, walking jauntily along towards a New Year’s Eve visit with her family. If the first story of the cycle ends with Karen simply sitting and looking at the view outside her window, then the rest of the stories end with the women either heading outside or already there, moving away from confinement and, hopefully, into a life of their choosing. After moving them through violence and oppression, after having them make difficult decisions and resist the status quo, Michael finally completes her story cycle as Karen, Helen, Rachel, Janice, and Lizzie each move forward into lives that might begin to look both empowered and free.

“Consuming themselves endlessly”  231

Works Cited Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. 1974. Trans. Robert Hurley, Pantheon, 1978. ———. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ­1972–1977. Translated by Colin Gordon et al. and edited by Colin Gordon. Random House, 1980. Greenlaw, Lavinia. “Review of Their Angel Reach”. Times Literary Supplement, 6 Mar. 1992, pp. 65–66. Luscher, Robert. “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book”. Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, edited by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Louisiana State UP, 1989, pp. 148–170. MacKinnon, Catherine A. Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination. Yale UP, 1979. Michael, Livi. Interview with Patricia Wheeler and Sharon Monteith. Critical Survey vol. 12, no. 3, 2000, pp. 94–107. ———. Their Angel Reach. Martin Secker & Warburg, 1994. Wheeler, Patricia Ann. “The Red Light of Emotion”: Reading Anger in Contemporary British Women’s Working-Class Fiction. Dissertation, University of Hertfordshire, 2004. Zagarell, Sandra. “Narratives of Community: The Identification of a Genre”. Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences, edited by ­Roxanne Harde. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007, pp. 449–479. ———. “Reflections: Community, Narrative of Community, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s The Jamesons”. Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences, edited by Roxanne Harde. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007, pp. 433–448.

14 Re-Framing Feminist Politics in Helen Simpson’s A Bunch of Fives Selected Stories Emma Young In her introduction to the fiftieth anniversary Penguin edition of The Feminine Mystique (2010), Lionel Shriver points to the enduring relevance of Betty Friedan’s polemic for women today, especially in the context of “New Traditionalism”. Shriver writes: “any woman seriously considering the new ‘freedom’ to choose housewifery and motherhood as a substitute for a demanding career should watch every episode of Mad Men back to back, and then read this book” (xi). New Traditionalism is inextricably bound up with notions of a backlash against feminism, subsequently implicating the discourses of domesticity and women’s liberation. The home becomes women’s sanctuary and the “new traditionalist discourse centralises and idealises women’s apparently fully knowledgeable choice to abstain from paid work in favour of hearth and family” (Genz and Brabon 52). In this context, the domestic sphere undergoes a redefinition as it becomes a space of female autonomy and independence. In this chapter, I suggest that, like Shriver’s introductory remarks, the short stories of contemporary British writer Helen Simpson reaffirm how the domestic sphere shapes women’s experience and remains a significant feminist issue in the twenty-first century. As Simpson contends, “even the blindest of bats must eventually see it’s parenthood that gender-politicises relationships” (“With Child”). Accordingly, in this chapter, I position Simpson as a feminist writer whose writing self-­ reflexively critiques the politics of domestic life and feminism and who, through the retrospective arrangement of stories in A Bunch of Fives: Selected Stories (2012), illuminates the complexity of negotiating these discourses. Furthermore, through A Bunch of Fives, Simpson’s writing demonstrates how individual short stories can be successfully re-situated in multiple collections and, as a consequence, conjure up alternative perspectives and pictures. The relationship between the feminine and the feminist are often positioned as incompatible discourses. Most notably, this tension emerges in scholarship on soap opera and women’s magazines. These two genres also provide useful points of comparison for this chapter’s exploration of the short story because their mutual critical neglect (until relatively recently) and their acknowledged appeal to women based on specific

Re-Framing Feminist Politics  233 formal features illuminates the synergies that exist between these genres and the short story (both individual stories and collections). The formal structure of soap opera includes interweaving stories, narrative disruption that refuses straightforward linear progression or a tidy resolution, and the genre is governed by temporal demands. All of these elements can be mapped on to the short story (brevity and open-ended narratives) and short story collection (interweaving stories); although the context of recollected short stories does perhaps mark a point of departure between the two forms. Moreover, critics of soap opera have noted the genre’s everyday subject matter, its emphasis being placed on marriage, birth, death, divorce, and familial quarrels and dynamics ­(Geraghty 41). ­I ndeed, it is the content of soap opera that conjures up the gritty, ­everyday realism of the genre and that makes it so appealing to its audience, keeping its members captivated on a daily basis. The focus of ­Simpson’s short stories, on issues of domesticity and women’s life experiences, c­ orrelates with the themes cited here. Likewise, with the narrative structure of the short story collection and the commonality of themes within i­ndividual stories, which often create a sense of a community, there is a basis for claiming Simpson’s short story collections are akin to soap opera. However, it is important to remember that soap opera is shaped by chronological narration that perpetuates an endless story, unlike short story collections or cycles, which ultimately reach a point of closure (or at least an ending). In asserting that Simpson’s stories depict feminine issues and are also explicitly feminist, this chapter attempts to re-negotiate understandings of the feminine and feminist to signal their compatibility. Simpson’s short stories offer an interesting critique of women’s everyday lives and contribute to the ongoing desire for gender equality. Importantly, it is in the way in which Simpson uses the short story collection that this fictional dialogue between the feminine and the feminist occurs. The polyphonic voices of women interweave throughout the collections and navigate this issue without expounding a totalizing stance on the subject. Simpson’s A Bunch of Fives: Selected Stories includes five stories from each of Simpson’s original five collections, and this chapter considers how the retrospective arrangement of these short stories influences and even alters the feminist dynamic of the original narratives.1 As such, this chapter explores individual stories and the dynamics of a short story collection to recognize the importance of unique textual entities. At the same time, such a reading illuminates the political potential offered by reading issues (in this instance, the representation of domestic life and women’s everyday experience) across narratives. The title “A Bunch of Fives” (a traditional idiom for a close-fisted, hard punch) suggests that this collection is defined by its power (or punch). In the “Introduction” to A Bunch of Fives, which Simpson structures via an imagined, hostile interviewer asking her purposefully provocative

234  Emma Young questions about her work, this interviewer asks Simpson “are your stories autobiographical?” (xxi), “quite a lot of your stories are domestic. Shouldn’t you get out more?” (xxii), and “are you a man-hating feminist?” (xxiv). These ‘questions’ provide Simpson with the opportunity to respond to many of the literary critics and reviewers of her work who have tended to focus on the domestic, feminine, and feminist politics of her writing in order to dismiss or minimize its overall literary merit. In response, Simpson offers these critics “a bunch of fives”. By focusing on Simpson’s literary response to critics and reviewers of the short story, this chapter consider the ways in which this literary “punch” results in the political impetus of her short stories, especially in relation to the topic of gender parity, being reasserted as significant contemporary issues requiring stories to be told and, indeed, retold about their relevance and enduring effect on society.

I. The Beginning The relationship between the original short story collection and the ­Selected Stories is exemplified by the first section of A Bunch of Fives, which includes five stories from Four Bare Legs in a Bed (1990). The first three stories (“Four Bare Legs in a Bed”, “Good Friday, 1663”, and “Give me Daughters Any Day”) all pivot on matrimony. The final two stories are “The Bed”, which emphasizes the politics of pleasure, and “Labour”, which describes childbirth through a playful use of dramatic form and the Aristotelian unities. The thematic affinities between stories are strengthened in A Bunch of Fives as women’s experience of marriage, sex, relationships, and childbirth are foregrounded. Conversely, in the original short story collection, while these first four stories are grouped together, “Labour” is separated by two other stories. Surrounding these narratives reside tales of women gathering for a coffee morning, driving lessons, a sea journey, and a woman standing trial for her eccentricity. Accordingly, although the critique of heterosexual relationships remains prominent in the original collection, it does not hold the same resonance as it does in A Bunch of Fives. Furthermore, in their entirety, Simpson’s first three short story collections provide a wider narrative that traces marriage, co-habiting, and domestic dynamics, through into parenthood (a sequence commonly depicted in soap opera). In the space of the Selected Stories, these separate books are brought together, and the developmental, life trajectory that these three collections map is emphasized. This overlap between collections is apparent with “Dear George”, the opening story of Simpson’s second collection. “Dear George” sees the unnamed teenage narrator, who is supposed to be completing her ­English homework on Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, in her room writing love letters to a boy at school. Sitting in her bedroom and looking

Re-Framing Feminist Politics  235 outside, the narrator sees her mother and the newborn baby girl in the garden. The narrator is filled with disgust and asks: “how could she, at her age, it was so selfish of her. It was just showing off. As everyone at school had pointed out, she’d probably been trying for a boy this time, so served her right” (75). The daughter’s bitterness and resentment towards her mother, provoked by her mother’s decision to have another child, invokes Adrienne Rich’s theory of matrophobia (1976). Describing an attempt at rejection, predicated on the fear of an already established but not necessarily acknowledged identification, according to Rich, matrophobia is the “fear not of one’s mother or of motherhood but of becoming one’s mother” (236). This fear is provoked by “a deep underlying pull toward her, a dread that if one relaxes one’s guard one will identify completely” (ibid.). At the heart of Rich’s theory is a generational conflict between mother and daughter in which the daughter continually battles against a fear of becoming the mother. This concept links directly to the generational tensions within feminisms, outlined in the introduction to this chapter, and the reoccurrence of this motif in Simpson’s narratives reflects third-wave feminism’s political desire to learn from, build upon, and continue the work of second-wave feminism (the mother), rather than merely to replicate it. Furthermore, while in the original collection “Bed and Breakfast” is separated from “Dear George” by two other stories (“Let Nothing You Dismay” and “The Gourmet”), in A Bunch of Fives, these stories are brought together. Therefore, this re-collection emphasizes the prevalence of matrophobia across the narratives. “Bed and Breakfast” opens with an adolescent couple, Simon and Nicola, on a train going for their first night away together. Attempting to escape the confines of their parental homes and carve out some space for them to be together as a couple, Simon has booked a room in bed and breakfast accommodation in the countryside. Unsure of themselves, the couple are described as “wanting something but [not] quite sure what they wanted. It was to do with something vital, though, it was there at the centre of their nascent sense of selfhood” (85). Unlike in previous stories, here, being in a relationship is about helping individuals to find their sense of selfhood, as opposed to losing it; a point that conflicts distinctly with the subsequent story in the collection, “When in Rome”. As with “Dear George”, in “Bed and Breakfast”, the need for Nicola to find herself is conflated with an equal need to be different from her mother. The couple arrive at their accommodation later than expected because they become lost while walking from the train through the countryside. Nicola is disappointed to discover that “it’s just like back at home” (90). The accommodation’s nylon sheets, ornaments, and cluttered atmosphere cause Nicola to feel trapped in a predetermined pattern that means, as she tells Simon, “we’re going to end up like them” (91). In order to become an individual and discover herself in her own right, Nicola feels the need to dis-identify with her

236  Emma Young parents. By the story’s end, the couple are heading back to the train, and it is only when they stop in the countryside, away from civilization, that they rekindle the joy of being together as they lie on the grass and Simon whispers his previous night’s dream in Nicola’s ear (97). Contrasting starkly with this final image of Nicola and Simon together is the opening paragraph of “When in Rome”, in which ­G eraldine and Paul are standing in front of the “bronze Etruscan she-wolf […]. [T]he July heat had collared them, limp as they already were after a broken night of what Geraldine was starting to call hate-making” (98). ­Narrated from Geraldine’s perspective, in “When in Rome”, love-­making has become “hate-making”, as the couple are described as being in “an ageing deadlock, moody, critical, not sure how to leave each other” (99). The holiday in Rome, far from a romantic break, becomes a battleground, a motif fully realized by their sexual relationship constantly being described through the language of war. The title also establishes this theme of conflict as their relationship is positioned akin to the fall of Rome, evoking a sense of disintegration. That evening at the hotel, Paul tries to coerce Geraldine into having unprotected sex, and Geraldine responds: “I’m not risking it. It’s not flirting any more. I can feel people want it, you do anyway, as a sort of revenge. You don’t want me swanning around” (105). Echoing the feelings of the protagonist from “Four Bare Legs in a Bed”, pregnancy and motherhood are once again viewed by the woman in the relationship as a means of losing control. In “Give Me Daughters Any Day”, during a period of convalescence, Ruth’s grandmother, Vesta, comes to stay with Ruth and her husband Denzil. Like the couple in “Four Bare Legs in a Bed”, Ruth and Denzil are recently married, and tensions fester as they negotiate their individuality in the context of marriage. Following a “grapple on the moonlit bed” (43) with Denzil, the fear of being pregnant causes Ruth to clutch her stomach and rock backwards and forwards on the bed lamenting “No. No. No” (44). Having sampled the daily implications of caring for someone at home, just like for the wife in “Four Bare Legs in a Bed”, motherhood is feared as a self-sacrificing activity. Despite the textual break and separation of stories by the title pages, in A Bunch of Fives, the reader is encouraged to read these stories in the light of preceding and successive collections, and this is illuminated by the thematic overrun between the Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Dear George sections of the collection. The retrospective recollection of stories in Simpson’s Selected Stories format can be seen as an extension of the textual dynamic created by short story sequences. As Robert M. Luscher (1989) proposes, within a short story sequence, “the individual stories do not lose their distinctiveness but rather expand and elaborate the contexts, characters, symbols, or themes developed by the others” (149). Thus, the individuality of a story is not undermined within the context of a collection wherein

Re-Framing Feminist Politics  237 similar or even conflicting narratives exist but, rather, it contributes to a wider expansion of the whole. The same principle applies to A Bunch of Fives, in which the sentiments and themes of stories chime with one another, not just from earlier in the original short story collection, but across collections as well. Furthermore, the emphasis on the themes of domesticity, female experience, and personal politics in A Bunch of Fives is telling, and it illuminates the fact that Simpson is self-consciously responding to reviewers and critics of her short story writing who have often used the focus on women’s everyday lives and domestic experience as reason to dismiss the literary quality of Simpson’s writing. However, as Nicholas Lezard points out in his review of A Bunch of Fives: ­“Simpson is the writer who most famously went where male writers were either too frightened or bored to tread: examining the ‘ever after’ that follows the supposed happy ending” (“A Bunch of Fives”). Seemingly, then, the “punch” of Simpson’s Selected Stories has not passed completely unnoticed by literary critics.

II. The Middle The final two stories in the Dear George section of A Bunch of Fives use intertextual references to shape their meaning. “To Her Unready ­Boyfriend” rewrites Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” (pub. posthumously in 1681). However, in a playful adaptation that returns to the early modern period, Simpson’s story results in a woman trying to encourage her partner to have a child. She argues that “[i]t’s all right for you, you’re like the popes in the Renaissance, you can go on fathering children till you’re eighty-three” (115), whereas for women, time is limited. Moreover, unlike for Geraldine in “When in Rome”, here motherhood is embraced, and a child is described as altering “the balance between us” for the better (116). The narrator assures her partner that “a child would turn the direction of our eyes away from the withering and fattening of our over-familiar selves towards the pleasure of a fresh new presence growing” (ibid.). Described as a unifying presence, a child is heralded as the salvation of this relationship as opposed to causing its destruction. In invoking Marvell’s poem, Simpson situates gendered notions of time in dialogue with each other. While Marvell’s poem opens with the line “Had we but world enough and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime” (ll. 1–2), in “To Her Unready Boyfriend”, the idea of a woman’s biological clock is invoked. Instead of the man’s impatience being the driving force, Simpson’s narrative is consumed with the woman’s fear that she will run out of time to have children. Time is engendered, and the male and female perspectives are placed in conversation through this textual allusion. Crucially, then, the inclusion of this story opens up the variety of perspectives the collection offers more broadly on the topic of

238  Emma Young having children. In the textual space of A Bunch of Fives, the retrospective rearrangement of narratives complicates understandings of motherhood and domestic roles and reveals the diversity of female experience in the context of these issues. Concluding the Dear George section of A Bunch of Fives, “Heavy Weather” tells the story of Frances and Jonathan, following the birth of their second child, Matthew. Following Matthew’s birth, Frances is suffering a form of post-traumatic stress and has recurring nightmares “where men with knives and scissors advanced on the felled trunk which was her body” (120). Since the birth three months ago, Frances reflects on how “she had not had more than half an hour alone in the twenty-­ four [of each day] since his birth in February. He was big and hungry and needed her constantly on tap” (119). Because of this demand on her time, mental and physical exhaustion take hold of Frances. Whereas the first two stories in this selection from Dear George are preoccupied with “finding one’s self” at a key moment of becoming, in “Heavy Weather”, it is the loss of selfhood that is most apparent. In “Heavy Weather”, Frances tells Matthew how she “was thinking, what a cheesy business Eng. Lit. is, all those old men peddling us lies about life and love. They never get as far as this bit, do they” (126). The “this bit” that is being referenced here is the daily life of marriage and children. While the “great men” of literature are noted by Frances to frequently depict the happy-­ ever-after ending, they fail to explore the domestic rituals that govern everyday life thereafter; an issue Simpson’s narratives aim to rectify. ­I mportantly, with the reference to Jude the Obscure, “Heavy Weather” ­ hillotson are ininvokes an unhappy marriage (the characters Sue and P troduced to one another by Jude, and they marry only for Sue to become dissatisfied with Phillotson and subsequently leave him) and a narrative of social ostracism (following Jude and Sue’s co-habitation out of wedlock). Thus, Simpson draws on an established representation of marriage while simultaneously offering her own depiction of contemporary married life. Through this intertextual reference, Simpson develops the initial critique of the “ever after” by placing it in dialogue with other narratives. In this respect, “Heavy Weather” pre-empts the dominant theme of the succeeding collection, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, motherhood. In the context of A Bunch of Fives, it is notable that the five stories selected for inclusion from the Hey Yeah Right Get a Life collection include two that focus on the same characters, Dorrie and her family. Accordingly, the collection emphasizes the significance of motherhood for a woman’s identity, and the confined space of the selected stories heightens the thematic concern of temporal and spatial constraints for mothers. “Hurrah for the Hols” closes the selection of stories from Hey Yeah Right Get a Life in A Bunch of Fives. It returns to Dorrie, Max, and the family, but this time their daily routine is temporally suspended by a family holiday. However, Dorrie experiences the same absorption

Re-Framing Feminist Politics  239 of her time because of the children. Part of the significance of “Hurrah for the Hols” is the effect it has in shaping the dynamics of this collection of stories. By including a further story about the same family, in a different time and space, Simpson provides a second snapshot of their daily lives. Revisiting this family in another story serves to reinforce the residual struggle of Dorrie in navigating her daily existence, and it creates a claustrophobic space that reflects Dorrie’s personal feelings. Equally, it develops the reader’s relationship with these characters, nurturing a sense of intimacy, in the same vein as soap opera with regular stars becoming “household names”. Moreover, adopting a metafictional lens, it also reveals the difference between Hey Yeah Right Get a Life and Simpson’s previous two short story collections. When the family are out walking, they see a sign that proclaims “[f]amily and mixed couples only” (252). When their daughter Maxine asks, “[s]o a couple’s like a family?”, Max responds that a “couple is not like a family. That’s far too easy, just two people. It doesn’t qualify” (ibid.). In a moment of unity, Max and Dorrie laugh, and the children stand around beaming at their parents’ affection for one another. This comment, that a couple and a family are two distinct entities, is the crux of the difference between Simpson’s collections and why Hey Yeah Right Get a Life stands out as scrutinizing most intensely the domestic politics of everyday life. While Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Dear George tend to focus on couples and the prospect of having children, in the third collection, the realities of having children and of parenthood are fully realized. Thus, in A Bunch of Fives, a dialogue emerges that more directly comments on the realities of everyday life, especially for women in the twenty-first century through the mapping of a stereotypical life trajectory.

III. The End With the final two collections of short stories, Constitutional (2005) and In-Flight Entertainment (2010), Simpson continues to negotiate the competing demands of personal and political issues. Importantly, although a shift occurs in which this interaction is transposed onto wider social contexts, Simpson’s stories remain interested in the gender politics of relationships and maintain a focus on the domestic setting. In A Bunch of Fives, the selection of stories from Constitutional opens with “Early One Morning”. This story follows a mother, Zoe, and her daily car journey, taking her son to school. Living in London means the twoand-three-quarter-mile route takes Zoe and her son George forty-five minutes. Time becomes the anchoring motif of the story, and it shapes the narrative and Zoe’s life. Moreover, marking its difference from the stories in Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, here this seeming drain on Zoe’s time is embraced as her opportunity to spend quality time with George. After all, the counter-current that runs throughout the story is Zoe’s

240  Emma Young awareness that time with her son is running out as he grows up; a point illuminated when he gets out of the car without kissing her goodbye, leaving Zoe upset until he sneaks back to kiss her without his friends seeing. Compared to the mothers that have no time in the previous collection, here, time is viewed in a new light as the narratives focus on the phase when children are growing up and adults become aware of the ephemerality of time. As in “Hey Yeah Right Get a Life”, the cultural prescriptions that define women’s behaviour and identity through magazines is critiqued in “Early One Morning” when Zoe notices that the “old advice was still doing the rounds, […] for women to listen admiringly to men and not to laugh at them if they wanted to snare one of their very own” (274). Zoe reflects on the broader trend amongst friends and acquaintances when it comes to having children, before considering her own situation: But if I hadn’t done it, had Joe at twenty-six and Theresa at twenty-­ eight, hammered away at work and sweated blood in pursuit of good childminders, nurseries, au pairs, you name it, […] I wouldn’t know why so many women are the way they are. Stymied at some point; silenced somewhere. Stalled. (269) The use of “stymied”, “silenced”, and “stalled” all repeat Dorrie’s search for a word beginning with “s” to try to explain to Max how she had felt. Later, Zoe thinks how “surrendering your autonomy for too long, subsumption without promise of future release, those weren’t good for the health” (275). In two separate stories, from two different collections, a commonality between women is founded through their experiences of child-rearing. “Early One Morning” is published five years later than “Hey Yeah Right Get a Life”. If Simpson’s collections map a trajectory of women’s lives, then these stories suggest that it is only with hindsight and time that women can articulate their experiences of parenting and domesticity. Significantly, it is through bringing these narratives together into a shared textual space in A Bunch of Fives that Simpson enables the reader to make this direct connection between stories. The retrospective recollection of stories affords the possibility of reshaping the accents of emphasis and subsequently stressing the affinities across short story collections. Moreover, death is a recurring motif in Constitutional. Crucially, death is always located within the domestic setting, allowing the narratives to reveal the implications of a loved one’s passing for friends and family. In “If I’m Spared”, when philandering husband, the foreign correspondent Tom, is told by the doctor that he probably has lung cancer, death preoccupies his thoughts. With his own mortality visible, he sees in his wife Barbara “that these were the qualities he needed in a

Re-Framing Feminist Politics  241 woman, the timeless womanly qualities of fidelity and selflessness and compassion. Plus, he couldn’t help but add, full-time nursing skills. How could he have berated her for being boring?” (303). Previously, Barbara bores Tom because her life revolves around their daughter Daisy and she therefore never has anything interesting to talk about: in his mind, this justifies his infidelities with his colleague Fiona. Poignantly, when Tom reveals the doctor’s diagnosis to his lover, Fiona, her revulsion at this news is palpable (305). The difference in the women’s reactions causes Tom to vow in his mind: “IF I am spared, never again will I complain about anything” (306). In using a moment of realization to structure the story and produce the character critique, the visibility of the self in times of intense stress is realized. Being aware of Tom’s infidelities and being privy to his internal thoughts encourages the reader to judge his actions. When Tom is actually informed that he does not have cancer, he celebrates with Barbara and Daisy, eating cake in the garden. This reminds the reader of the early narrative revelation that Tom wanted to have his cake and eat it (294), in relation to the two women. A picture of domestic bliss is soon disturbed when the story closes some weeks later, with Tom phoning another colleague, Sophie, “just the goddess I wanted to talk to” (309), and his old ways are re-established. Death is the driving force that structures the narrative and invokes alternative conceptualizations of time. However, the narrative remains located in the domestic setting. Tom’s potential death, or at least his realization of his own mortality, is interrogated for the ways in which it changes his treatment of his wife and his view of their domestic arrangements. In this respect, the death motif becomes a vehicle for critiquing the relationship between Tom and Barbara. This narrative disruption is also a reminder that death interrupts life: death is not a simple “end” but only understood in relation to life. This realization resonates with the dynamics of the short story and its position within the confines of a wider collection. The emphasis on death also pervades In-Flight Entertainment, which explores issues from global warming through to cancer and raises political issues that are central to twenty-first-century life. With the coming together of these two collections in A Bunch of Fives, the overlap and thematic continuities are more fully realized. Although pursuing different topics, these stories maintain the relationship between the private and the public spheres and personal and political issues, as social discourses are positioned as extremely personal problems for the stories’ characters. This section in A Bunch of Fives includes three of the socalled ‘global warming stories’, as well as “Charm for a Friend with a Lump” and “The Festival of the Immortals”. The inclusion of these latter two stories, rather than forming the selection entirely of global warming stories, signals Simpson’s desire to emphasize the scope of her latest collection. Arguably, this inclusion is a response to reviewers of

242  Emma Young In-Flight Entertainment, who criticized the collection purely on its coverage of global warming and subsequently overlooked some of the central politics of the work (Gharraie). All three of the global warming stories focus on personal relationships. “Diary of an Interesting Year”, a dystopian narrative in diary form, tracks the narrator and her husband “G” as they leave their home following the “Big Melt” (352) in a bid to reach Russia. Comparatively, “The Tipping Point” centres on Dr Beauman, driving in his car, as he remembers his recent break up with Angelika over what she coins “Selfish miles” (370), their air travel to see one another. Similarly, ­“Geography Boy” tells the story of a teenage couple on holiday in France, where the geography student, Brendan, tries to convince his history student girlfriend, Adele, to join the student activist group concerned with global warming. In all of these stories, a conflict about global warming and the future of the planet is played out. Most notably, “Diary of an I­ nteresting Year”, set in 2040, examines how the political issue of global warming, or more specifically the after-effects of planetary disaster, affect the lives of “G” and his wife. While the couple flee their home together in a bid to survive, “G” is killed. The narrator is then captured by her husband’s murderer, “M”, and her existence comes to depend entirely on “M”. The narrative device of the diary reinforces the personal perspective of the story. Further, the brevity of the entries, and their terse language, contributes to the harrowing effect the story has upon the reader. After murdering “G” and abducting the narrator, “M” systematically rapes her: “What he does to me is horrible. I don’t want to think about it, I won’t think about it” (361). Writing a fortnight later, she confides in the diary that “M can’t seem to get through the day without at least two blowjobs. I’m always sick afterwards (sometimes during)” (361). This is the entirety of the entry, thus illuminating how the violence against her becomes the dominant focus of the story at this point. The diary contains accounts of repeated beatings, before the protagonist writes of her suspected pregnancy. Attempting to abort the child, she drinks a self-made potion of “rank juice” (362), but it fails to work. Eventually she reports in the diary, on 10 November 2040 that “It’s over” (363). When drunk on his vodka, the narrator entices “M” up to the platform in the trees where he has been keeping her before pushing him over the edge (364). The final diary entry of the story sees the protagonist bury the baby in the ground and the “[l]ast line: good luck, good luck, good luck, good luck” (ibid.), before she heads north with only a rucksack of goods for survival. With “Diary of an Interesting Year”, the consequences of global warming, or the “Big Melt” as “G” coins it, are pushed to the extreme, and Simpson fictionalizes the potential aftermath. The bleak, harrowing, and traumatic account foregrounds the humanitarian implications, particularly for women. After all, in the dystopian mayhem, it is the narrator that is raped, abused,

Re-Framing Feminist Politics  243 beaten, and impregnated, highlighting the gendered threat in the context of a prevailing dystopian world. In conclusion, as the analysis throughout this chapter has signalled, the implications of short story collections, or, in this instance, the ­Selected Stories, are important in retrospectively shaping the politics and tone of individual short stories. By placing new stories next to one another and reshaping collections into mini-, or sub-collections, ­Simpson illuminates new themes and preoccupations in individual stories and alters the dynamic of the wider collection. With this flexibility of structure, Simpson’s work highlights a key difference between the short story and soap opera. Thus, while there are insightful synergies to be drawn between the two forms in the context of feminism and on the level of formal features, the re-collection of short stories reinforces the fact that, in terms of narrative drive and chronology, the two forms are motivated by different priorities. Arguably, by including stories that explicitly engage with the politics of domesticity and motherhood, Simpson is reaffirming the significance of these themes in her oeuvre and for society and culture more broadly. ­Importantly, the fact that so many of the narratives are left open, that the reader is not coerced into passing a judgement on characters, their points of view, or lifestyle choices, results in a multifaceted representation of women’s experiences. Significantly, the focus on “parenthood” as opposed to “motherhood” in these narratives highlights the importance of considering men’s roles in ongoing issues of domestic duty and feminist politics. Thus, if feminism “needs to be multiple, be various, be polyphonous and we must encourage this” ­(Gillis et al. xxx), then the variety of narratives, voices, and experiences in A Bunch of Fives is a fictional example of feminism’s continued relevance and of how literature, especially the short story collection, can act as a vehicle for representing such multiplicity. The publication of this selected stories collection is important because it indicates an investment, on the part of the publisher, in Simpson’s short stories. The re-publication of Simpson’s short stories in this format suggests a particular commercial appetite and appeal for the genre. In the “Introduction” to A Bunch of Fives, Simpson reveals that her short stories “earn their living” as “they’ll often sell more than once (to newspapers, magazines, radio, anthologies, in translation etc.)” (xx). In this respect, S­ impson challenges certain myths about the short story being a struggling or financially unviable medium. Further, A Bunch of Fives offers ­Simpson a textual space in which to respond to the questions asked by the imagined interviewer in the “Introduction” to the collection, such as “are your stories autobiographical?” (xxi), “quite a lot of your stories are domestic. Shouldn’t you get out more?” (xxii), and “are you a man-­hating feminist?” (xxiv). Read in this light, Simpson’s re-collection of her short fiction indeed offers literary critics “a bunch of fives”.

244  Emma Young

Note 1 Simpson’s five original short story collections are Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories (1990), Dear George and Other Stories (1995), Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000), Constitutional (2005), and In-Flight ­Entertainment (2010).

Works Cited Genz, Stéphanie and Benjamin A. Brabon. Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories. Edinburgh UP, 2009. Geraghty, Christine. Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps. 1991. Polity Press, 1992. Gharraie, Jonathan. “Helen Simpson on In-Flight Entertainment”. The Paris Review, 28 Feb. 2012, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/28/helen-simpsonon-%E2%80%98in-flightentertainment%E2%80%99/. Accessed 8 Jan. 2013. Gillis, Stacy, et al. “Introduction”. Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, edited by Stacy Gillis, et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. xxi–xxxiv. Lezard, Nicholas. “A Bunch of Fives by Helen Simpson – Review”. The Guardian,22 May 2012, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/22/bunch-of-fives-­helensimpson-review. Accessed 3 Mar. 2013. Marvell, Andrew. “To His Coy Mistress”. Poets.Org: From the Academy of America Poets. www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/his-coy-mistress. Accessed 3 Apr. 2014. Rich, Adrienne. Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. 1977. Virago, 1992. Shriver, Lionel. “Introduction”. The Feminine Mystique, edited by Betty ­Friedan. Penguin, 2010, pp. v–xi. Simpson, Helen. A Bunch of Fives: Selected Stories. Vintage, 2012. ———. Constitutional. 2005. Vintage, 2006. ———. Dear George. 1995. Vintage, 2001. ———. Four Bare Legs in a Bed. 1990. Minerva, 1991. ———. Hey Yeah Right Get a Life. 2000. Vintage, 2001. ———. In-Flight Entertainment. Jonathan Cape, 2010. ———. “With Child”. The Guardian, 22 Apr. 2006. www.guardian.co.uk/books/ 2006/apr/22/featuresreviews.guardianreview3. Accessed 3 Mar. 2013.

15 The Short Narrative Form in David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks Gerd Bayer

A number of David Mitchell’s novels have drawn on the principle of the short story cycle, or, more specifically, of what Elke D’hoker and Bart Van den Bossche describe as short story collection, a term that aims to allow also for cross-generic influence (14). Both Ghostwritten (1999), his first published novel, and Cloud Atlas (2004), his commercially most successful work to date, consist of a number of parallel stories that, published individually, would work very well as short stories. In The Bone Clocks (2014), Mitchell returns to this literary strategy: as with the earlier examples mentioned, this novel (if that is what it is) creates coherence between the individual narratives first and foremost at the moment of reception, inspired by the readerly expectations developed by the novel as a genre. In other words, readers who approach Mitchell’s ‘novel’ from the generic expectation of the form’s tradition – and from its formal orientation towards what Frank Kermode has defined as “the sense of an ending” – will actively look for and then establish the links within individual textual features. When read from a less predetermined angle, each novel’s coherence appears less important, thus turning increasingly into a readerly effect rather than being a textual feature. This chapter accordingly asks how the individual episodes/­chapters/short narratives in The Bone Clocks create a network of references between each other. While re-appearing characters and settings – not to mention the governing principle of metempsychosis – create links, the novel by no means restricts itself to text-intrinsic connections but instead uses the full Mitchell oeuvre as point of reference. This strategy, also applied in earlier Mitchell novels, raises the question of how textual coherence is created (and subverted) both within the novel and within short story cycles. Rather than arguing that The Bone Clocks belongs to either of these generic traditions, I suggest that Mitchell, who has also written over a dozen individually published short stories for individual short story collections as well as for newspapers and magazines such as The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and the Financial Times, aims to subvert both. At least since the nineteenth century, or so Suzanne Ferguson has us believe, both short story and novel develop along similar lines, focusing

246  Gerd Bayer on what she describes as their impressionistic tendencies, that is, a focus on interiority, an economical use of form, and an abandonment of temporal restrictions. In her view, the two forms barely allow for narrow differentiations; much less, one could conclude from Ferguson’s essay, is there a need for a third genre, nestled in between such close bed-fellows in a strange ménage à trois. Yet, the short story cycle has been discovered and properly labelled, and at least since the modernist moment, potentially starting as early as Rudyard Kipling’s reflections on writing within word limitations (Shaw 7; cf. Hanson), a textual tradition has developed that sits squarely against the supposed uniformity of ‘long’ novel and ‘short’ story. In this chapter, I look at the most recent long narrative fiction by Mitchell and ask whether it is, or still is, a novel; or to put this differently, whether Mitchell appropriated formal strategies that point to other textual traditions, in effect subverting both the conventions of the novel and the constraints of the short story cycle. As Mitchell sets out to have his version of fun with the genre of the novel, he can draw on an anti-novelistic formal tradition that goes back at least as far as John Dunton and Laurence Sterne, who were there at the birthing moments of the genre of the novel in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century, respectively, to hold up a mirror to the process of conventionalizing the genre. This gesture was repeated in the aesthetics of High Modernism, aiming as it does at subverting the stale realism of the nineteenth century. The modernist disintegration of an essential belief in narrative linearity and the predictability of reality inspired authors like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce to represent the historical experience that W.  B. Yeats famously described as “things fall apart” through the formal device of discontinuity. In their collections of stories, Joyce (Dubliners, 1914) and Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio, 1919) draw on the lack of community or shared ideals in the description of their chosen cities, Dublin and Winesburg, with the latter representing an archetypal Midwestern American city rather than a specific place. Relying on an aesthetic principle closer to Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, Woolf’s The Waves (1931) also follows a group of characters from childhood to adulthood, with individual sections of her work focusing on short snippets of time, leaving it to the readers’ imagination to turn these short glances into an overarching narrative. Seen as a whole, the modernist take on the short story cycle is based on the directionality of the hermeneutic spiral, of the ever-extended deferral of final signification and stability. Such postponement may well reveal an unspoken trust in the ultimate and maybe even redemptive moment of resolution, and it is at this juncture that the postmodern short story collection parts with the modernist aesthetic. Various of the pieces in both B. S. Johnson’s Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs (1973) and John Fowles’s The Ebony Tower (1974) withdraw this sense of an ending and instead confront readers with a reality that resists

The Short Narrative Form  247 representation and hence also refuses to allow for narrative encoding that implies otherwise (see also Moosmüller). When writing about the generic nature of The Bone Clocks, I accordingly do so with much hesitation and well aware of the fact that authors do not necessarily think in the kind of categorical labels that literary criticism, unable to function fully weaned off structuralist doctrines, posits as if they refer clearly and directly to real-world entities. Yet, we can borrow from Gayatri C. Spivak a way of doing genre that puts the term under erasure at its moment of use: when conceptualized as “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 11–12), doing genre becomes a way of asking why authors (or readers, including even critics) desire a particular genre. In other words, I want to ask not whether Mitchell’s text can be placed in this or that cleanly labelled generic container but rather what may have motivated the author to perform in a particular textual tradition, what traces surface in the text that point to earlier forms, and how readers are affected by such formal choices. As part of this strategy, I will also, a little later in this chapter, exert a little bit of pressure on the essential categories employed in the early short-story-cycle criticism, to reveal what performative strategies surface under such painful investigation.

I. Textual Structure The Bone Clocks is by no means Mitchell’s first experiment that signals beyond the novel in its realist, modernist, or postmodernist shape. Already in his first published full-length book, the 1999 work Ghostwritten, Mitchell took recourse to a formal strategy that can be called a “composite novel” (Dunn and Morris), relying as it does on a series of loosely connected yet independent shorter narratives, much like the later Cloud Atlas. Extending this principle to subsequent works, ­M itchell’s sequel (of sorts) to The Bone Clocks, entitled Slade House (2015), grew out of a short story experiment that had the author publish a short narrative broken down to individual Tweets only to find out that as he reduced an already heavily restrained format, the short story, to additional technological limitations, such as a strict word count, he in fact created the germ for his next (almost) full-length novel. What Mitchell attempts in almost all his books, something that Maurice Blanchot might just about call a book-to-come, is to demonstrate that the outer limits of a text are hardly defined by its physical boundaries; and that as a consequence of this, it is not always easy to define the generic nature of a piece of narrative prose fiction as it undergoes the various stages of its gestation, inviting close study by critics interested in genre. And, had we but world enough and time, a longish digression could well demonstrate that English Restoration fiction already anticipated these issues in its complex process of generic self-fashioning; a topic I have addressed elsewhere (see Bayer, Novel Horizons). To linger a little longer on Mitchell’s

248  Gerd Bayer Slade House, a text that started with less than a short story and has turned into more than a short story cycle, it is obvious that, not only by dint of its genetic history, its genre, too, has already been multiple. Instead of following the temporal impossibilities of this later book’s generic self-fashioning, I now turn to The Bone Clocks, a text whose content traverses time and place, enmeshing realist and fantastical traditions. The narrative text relies once again on the formal principle of offering individual parts to readers in the clear expectation that this readerly text will be concretized into a meaningful whole during the act of reading, something that Mitchell readers will remember from doing for Ghostwritten, number9dream (2001), and Cloud Atlas. Apart from following a central plot, namely the violent battle between two types of immortal humanoid creatures that represent the forces of good and evil, the novel links its individual sections in a rather flimsy manner. It takes a very careful reader to remember individual minor characters from earlier chapters as they make brief cameos later in the text, or vice versa. For instance, in the first chapter, Holly Sykes, the one character that provides some sort of continuity and coherence to the various sections, meets an older woman who scribbles something on the wood planks where they stand. Asked what the writing means, the woman, Esther Little, answers: “They’re instructions”; and when Holly notes that rain will wash away the chalk traces, Esther comments, somewhat mysteriously: “From the jetty, yes. Not from your memory” (24). The continuity in space and time, readers are somewhat cryptically informed, rests on acts of remembering, not on physical persistence. Tellingly, Esther will “return” later in the story, but in a different embodiment, taking on the form of another person in a process that transcends time, place, gender, and ethnicity, and in so doing performs a lack of continuity in physical terms. It eventually undermines what readers normally would associate with literary characters. As such characters come and go, and as the text’s historical and geographical setting changes, the story, or rather what is remembered of it, continues. Readers are thus told, in not so subtle terms, that it is within their memory that stories take shape and gain presence. This presence, to speak in Genettean terms, does not persist within a specific diegetic realm or a clearly defined and limited temporal context but rather moves, in the most extreme form of metalepsis, into the ontological realm of reception. Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks thus undermines conventional diegetic structures, and it does so primarily through the very formal properties that fall between the genres of the novel and the short story collection. While long or multi-plot novels like George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872) also confront their readers with huge amounts of information that may, or may not, be of importance later in the tale, in Mitchell’s novel there are textual incidents that not only connect individual parts, echoing an aesthetic principle also detectable

The Short Narrative Form  249 across Joyce’s writing (Hunter 61), but provide information that enables readers to comprehend later episodes. To make things more complicated, devoted Mitchell readers will also notice that the references are not merely to textual details within The Bone Clocks but that some characters have in fact put in appearances in earlier works, for instance the Marius figure that also plays a significant role in The Thousand Autumns of Jakob de Zoet (2010). As critics of Mitchell’s work have already noted, it makes sense to approach the oeuvre in its entirety. Sarah Dillon suggests that each text Mitchell publishes creates “a room in the house of fiction that he is constructing” (“Introducing” 6). Such a total view also reveals that issues such as rebirth and trans-historical continuities play a significant role in Mitchell’s novels, contributing significantly to what Michel Foucault discusses as the author function and what clearly signals towards the existence of a readerly understanding that goes beyond the individual text. The Horologists in The Bone Clocks can accordingly be seen as better-organized ‘reincarnations’ of the non-corporeals in Ghostwritten, a text that as a result of this trans-textual link now retroactively transcends its separate and original existence and becomes a prequel to The Bone Clocks. One could even speak of Mitchell’s output as a single book, making of each individual novel a mere element in a larger cycle, what Peter Childs and James Green term Mitchell’s “transmigratory dreamscapes” (44). Seen this way, the interior structure of The Bone Clocks repeats, on a different scale, the larger principle of Mitchell’s aesthetics, relying on the kind of fractal geometry already known from other postmodern and chaotic narratives (see Dillon, “Chaotic Narrative”). When, in a central scene of The Bone Clocks, humanoid beings enter and leave the time-space continuum through what in the novel is called an aperture (itself an intertextual borrowing of Murakami’s 1Q84, discussed later in this chapter), the work’s characters embody through their movement the aesthetic principle that also structures the text per se. As in Cloud Atlas, whose film adaptation made much of the mode of rebirth through its cross-scene casting of major stars in diverse roles, in The Bone Clocks, each individual chapter or episode or story, of greater or more modest length, is always already anticipated and will potentially be re-signified through other moments in Mitchell’s textual net. This reliance on what Roland Barthes termed ecriture (“writing” 147) de-emphasizes singularity and through this the importance of the individual story. It opens up the text not merely to textual history but to almost endless generic affiliations. Harking back to a key principle of textual hermeneutics, it requires any reading to be in anticipation of a re-reading. In The Bone Clocks, Mitchell simultaneously engages in this extension of the limitations of one single text and a reduction of his ‘novel’ to a text that approaches the short story cycle. Since the short story cycle is

250  Gerd Bayer frequently discussed in terms of genre, it follows that, like all genres, it has no essential core: while its essence can be described through formal features, it shares with all other genres the characteristic that hybridity and generic instability are written into its functional core. The law of the short story cycle, to adapt Jacques Derrida’s comments on all genres, demands that there is no law. This generic instability works in many directions. And while much of the discussion that relates to the short story cycle concentrates on how such cycles build upon and are different from the short story (see Mann), Mitchell’s novel, and in fact the majority of his literary output, reminds us that the novel, too, encroaches on the short story cycle; or, to reverse the dynamics of this statement, that the short story cycle has left its traces on the genre of the novel. The novel and the short story cycle, seen from the point of view of ­M itchell, form mutual supplements whose process of signification necessarily postpones stable generic points of reference. It is in fact at moments when a Mitchell novel gestures most clearly towards the short story cycle that it comes most fully into its own. That is to say, Mitchell transforms the cyclicality of the short story cycle into a line of flight. This deterritorialization of the novel also connects the aesthetic form to the author’s politics of resistance. The cosmopolitan reach of works like The Bone Clocks transcends the frequently found Eurocentrism of Western generic traditions such as the novel and thus forms part of a movement that has been described as “critical cosmopolitanism” (Kurasawa). As a consequence of this, the formal moment of disruption that readers encounter in the non-traditional format of Mitchell’s fictions gestures towards the insufficiency of literary conventions and the manner in which they continue to be invested in questions and traditions of empire. Picking up on this dynamic, Patrick O’Donnell, in the first book-length critical study of Mitchell’s work, calls The Bone Clocks “a succession of interconnected narratives occurring across scattered latitudes, temporalities, and dimensions” (157). His description invites further comments about time and place, to which this chapter will return in its conclusion, after lingering a little longer on the novel’s cosmopolitan investments.

II. Global Places In Mitchell, readers frequently move beyond conventionalized frames: the temporality clearly extends outside the contemporary, and the localities make global claims, as exemplified by the author in previous works such as Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas. Whereas a sense of national nostalgia clearly marks Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, while still insisting that British politics frequently have global consequences (Bayer, “Loss”), The Bone Clocks has planetary fish to fry and accordingly also takes for its temporality a frame that could easily be called the Anthropocene, that is, the most recent period in the history of the planet, marked as

The Short Narrative Form  251 it is by how the species of Homo sapiens impacts the fate of the earth. In this spatial and temporal move, Mitchell’s work runs counter to what Jennifer Smith has described as a shared concern in short story cycles like those by Anderson or Joyce with what she calls “limited locality” and the fact that the individual stories are placed in a “shared temporal setting”. She connects this to a national discourse of belonging and nostalgia: “Limited localities provide the language, form, and framework for regionalism’s and modernism’s treatment of anxieties of affiliation, alienation, urbanization, industrialization, and the past and present” (11). These anxieties, for Mitchell, are no longer reduced to the here and now of his historical present and regional home. In The Bone Clocks, Mitchell instead continues his project of contributing to what Berthold Schoene has defined as the cosmopolitan novel. In doing so, “Mitchell’s novels are aimed at weaving an all-­ embracing cosmopolitan network of mutually interpermeating lives and stories” (Schoene 116). Mitchell’s fictional spaces create forms of identification based on a sense of “community beyond the bounds of the nation” (123). They echo the communitarian spirit that also resides in Paul Gilroy’s After Empire, there built around the classical tradition of the convivium that saw a group of locals and strangers share a meal in friendship and with mutual respect. While Gilroy draws hope from what he calls “the chaotic pleasures of the convivial postcolonial urban world” (167), clearly inspired by cities like London or New York, his book seems uncannily hesitant about parochial settings at a distance from metropolitan centres. On this count, Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks can serve as a complement, as it envisions conviviality as occurring in a range of diverse settings, such as the camaraderie amongst the farm helpers in the first chapter or the various episodes in Crispin Hershey’s travels where he befriends strangers in places as remote as Iceland’s hinterland. Through these gestures, Mitchell appears to draw on the kind of thinking that causes Anthony Kwame Appiah to turn to urban centres in Ghana and their hinterland as a means of exemplifying how true cosmopolitanism has always already coexisted with the parochial and supposedly peripheral. While economically driven globalization is perceived as a threat (Appiah 103), “critical cosmopolitanism” wants to shed light on bottom-up perceptions of diversity and inclusion (Kurasawa 281); and it is with the urgency that drives such critique that Mitchell’s novel – even his work at large – seems truly invested. As part of his reflections on what a “new cosmopolitanism” could consist of, Bruce Robbins remarks that “ethical obligations to strangers are not atemporal and absolute” (19) but instead are contingent on forms of communication and means of transport that put us in contact with others. While his book is mostly concerned with how nationalist discourse in the US (even before the Trump administration) underwrites an inherent othering of non-US territory that makes violence and aggression

252  Gerd Bayer towards others not just excusable but unremarkable, his arguments can also serve to demonstrate how exposure to times and places other than ours, as habitually offered to readers on the pages of fiction, can contribute to cosmopolitan thinking and politics. This kind of commitment to a politics of fiction that extends beyond the presentist logic of consumerism by addressing the historical importance of political decisions also drives Mitchell’s aesthetic project. Art, for Mitchell, is essentially a form of engagement with reality, and this despite the fact that on the surface his literary output appears to be marked by a shift from realist engagement to forms of more abstract phantasy. In the end, though, Mitchell’s literary output stands as a stark reminder of how cultural discourses frequently attempt to single out closely confined areas of interest when actual reality, like a Mitchell short story collection, is defined by complex forms of interlinking. It is this ideology that underwrites the author’s formal principles of structuration and genre.

III. Generic Roots When we view The Bone Clocks as a cosmopolitan novelistic short story cycle, what we see in the text are not just variations of the genre that inspired it, we also encounter echoes of precursor texts that, in a similar manner, have opened up one genre to invite in another. To stay close to Mitchell’s direct precursors, and to writers whose influence is openly visible (see Posadas), this section will turn briefly to two writers with whom Mitchell shares more than a mere interest in Japonica, namely Kazuo Ishiguro and Haruki Murakami. In looking at Ishiguro, I am not so much interested in what may or may not count as his short story cycle, the delicately eclectic Nocturnes, but rather in his most experimental novel, the almost unreadable The Unconsoled, published in 1995, while the author was still surfing on the wave of his Booker Prize splash, The Remains of the Day. Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled violates numerous rules of novel writing: neither the narrator nor the protagonist seems to have a clear idea of what the work’s plot might possibly be, the setting turns out to be as unstable and non-descript as a poorly designed computer game, and the various non-sequiturs make it difficult for readers to become fully invested in the fictional experience of this text. In The Unconsoled, Ishiguro follows Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Johnson, Fowles, and a number of other postmodernist writers down the forking paths of a rather Borgesian aesthetic; partly doing so through the very tropes of affiliation that link him to these earlier writers (see Quarrie). The work refuses to be a novel, but it can be said to contain various sections that might well qualify as individual short stories. The book has just about sufficient coherence and sense of development to make it a potential candidate for a weird blend between the novel and the short story cycle.

The Short Narrative Form  253 Yet, the persistent exposure of its protagonist to situations where he finds himself unable to cope strains the generic expectations readers may well have for a novel. So, for instance, when the protagonist, the musician Mr Ryder, is rudely pulled from sleep by the hotel director who apparently seems assured of their shared and urgent plans, Ryder remains clueless. Confused yet willing to oblige, he responds on the phone: “What I meant was, I was lying down, as it were. Naturally I won’t be having a full sleep until […] until all the day’s business is concluded” (117). The Kafkaesque sense of an institution putting stress on an i­ndividual who is not in the know about the inner workings of the environment in which he finds himself persists throughout the novel; and it may well be this lack of directedness, also extending to the reader, that has turned this Ishiguro novel into his least accessible text. Unlike ­M itchell’s writing, Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled only allows for coherence in the most subtle of moments. In that sense, Ishiguro puts even more stress on the generic confines of the genre of the novel. However, by creating individual segments within a novel whose precise manner of connectivity to the overall narrative remains dubitable and only rarely becomes explicit, Ishiguro clearly moves the form of the novel in a direction that also interests Mitchell. In short, what Mitchell may well have taken from Ishiguro’s non-novel is an interest in expanding the novel towards the formal features of, say, Winesburg, Ohio, which resisted Victorian linearities in an attempt one may already detect in Eliot’s collection of short narratives, the beautiful Scenes of Clerical Life (1857). While Anderson and Eliot invite their readers to create a total image of their individual narratives, and while Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled refuses to provide the grounds for such exercises in conjecture, Mitchell’s readers, inured by his earlier writings, settle for the middle ground, where connections are expected and hence coherence is being created. In Murakami’s 1Q84, the genre of the novel is also put under stress. Originally published in three volumes and at separate dates, the text may well qualify as a long novel cycle (also known as trilogy), and in this it already signals towards some of the aesthetic principles found in ­Mitchell’s take on the short story cycle. In Murakami’s rewriting of the English dystopian classic 1984, the imagined reality is not projected into some distant future in the manner done by George Orwell but rather set in the historical past while simultaneously playing out in an alternative but nevertheless coeval reality. 1Q84 avoids clear historical specificity in that neither characters nor readers can be all too sure when and where the setting is located. One after another, the protagonists notice that their reality is suddenly illuminated by two moons, and this reality, while otherwise identical with the world as we know it, is nevertheless marked by aspects that clearly set it apart, making it fantastically strange and alien. Murakami’s playful undermining of generic conventions, echoed in the ethical outline of his novel as a comment on how an increasingly

254  Gerd Bayer technologized society turns individuals into self-optimizing loners deprived of the ability to empathize, stresses cataphoric references in that it rewrites and thereby redefines the past that characters and readers otherwise would take for granted. Rather than envisioning a different future that would then be taken as a comment on our present, Murakami, like Mitchell, folds time inwards so that past, present, and future coexist, making it next to impossible to rely on a linear chronology. Both in terms of its (un)chronological structure and its formal extension beyond the normal confines of the novel that result from its blend of popular genres, intertextual references to canonical works and intense engagement with both popular culture and virtual gaming, Murakami’s 1Q84 provided Mitchell with aesthetic recipes ready to be adopted for his own contribution to the generic pool of novelistic and short narrative forms. Ishiguro and Murakami thus stand as two writers whose take on form invited Mitchell to conceive of narrative prose fiction as a literary field that allows for a broad range of authorial inventiveness and for a sizeable dose of the kind of generic self-fashioning that brings into being formal innovation.

IV. Outlook on Mitchell’s ‘Short Story Cycle’ It is from performative gestures like this, with all their temporal and spatial implications, that we may glimpse something about the textual strategies on which Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks depends. For the remainder of this chapter, I shall try and derive from the figure of the cycle, providing as it does an essential feature in the short story cycle, some clues about its generic legacy. To link stories or to form cycles: both these concepts imply a positive act of creation or construction; they promise an added sense of value or meaning, they hint at a surplus. Or, to put this differently: when we speak of a short story cycle, we speak of a group of short stories plus something more; something that has developed out of and in extension of the earlier genre. Such a progressivist or Enlightened approach to the history of genre, implicitly built on time-tested teleological principles, certainly works for a good number of collections, from Anderson to Ishiguro. Reviewing early examples of the short story cycle, James Nagel accordingly concludes that Throughout these early works two ideas became clear in the concept of a cycle: that each contributing unit of the work be an independent narrative episode, and that there be some principle of unification that gives structure, movement, and thematic development to the whole. (Nagel 2) While such an approach requires readers to follow textual cycles through a process of quasi-hermeneutical circles, Nagel’s definition nevertheless

The Short Narrative Form  255 relies on an unspoken principle of progression. Yet, I hesitate to approach this form, or maybe even genre in general, from such a mono-­ directional pathway. If we appropriate what Barbara Fuchs has done for the romance – when she suggests that instead of looking for texts that fulfil generic requirements critics would benefit from seeing in romance primarily a mode – we can then ask what the mode of the cycle does when it surfaces in a novelistic context. Or to follow the usual change in word class we encounter in the move from genre to mode, one can ask what it means for a text not to be a cycle but to become affected by something cyclical. If the composite novel gestures towards a certain generic insufficiency in realist modes of representation in our decidedly unreal or even unrealistic postmodern reality, then the short story cycle invites readers to reflect on the implicit limitations that the generic form of closure as institutionalized for the short story brings with it. Yet, to see in both forms symptoms of the postmodern literature of exhaustion might undervalue their aesthetic potential. The very notion of exhaustion implies a kind of finality that the cyclical nature of the kind of generic supplementarity I have been tracing clearly undermines. The manner in which Mitchell employs the mode of the short story cycle in his novelistic The Bone Clocks engages with its generic or palimpsestic legacy through temporal and spatial figures. In exposing a short story, marked as it essentially is by its temporal limitation, to the iteration of a cyclical repetition, the short story cycle subverts the very history it extends. In Mitchell’s work, whose peculiar temporalities have turned into a major thread in the critical reception (see O’Donnell; Bayer, “Perpetual”), the temporal is enmeshed with the spatial through the peculiar virtualities that define his increasingly fantastic protagonists. Temporality also serves as a crucial descriptor in the discussion of the short story cycle. In Forrest Ingram’s programmatic outline of what he proudly called a new genre, time accordingly serves in a central function for detecting examples of this new genre. He writes about the short story cycle that in it, Time does not exist […] for the sake of hurrying through a single series of events, but rather for going over the same kind of action again, for repeating the situation while varying its components, for deepening one’s appreciation of the significance of action. (Ingram 24) Much could be said here about the Catholicism of Ingram’s implicitly eschatological belief in salvation and atonement; and it is indeed noticeable throughout his study of the short story cycle that, via its intellectual forefathers, it is rooted in the same tradition of Biblical exegesis that also inspired hermeneutical strategies of reading; and that, around the same time at Lake Constance in Southern Germany, were transformed

256  Gerd Bayer into somewhat more Protestant and democratizing reader-response criticism. In emphasizing the importance of how a single story relates to a complete cycle, or how part and whole mutually depend on each other, Ingram ultimately betrays a stubborn belief not just in the essential explicability of textual signs, but also in the readers’ ultimate ability to redeem themselves through close textual study. When in the passage just quoted Ingram writes that as a reader of a short story cycle one is “deepening one’s appreciation of the significance of action”, he reveals his trust in the kind of didacticism that, in the tradition of Chicago School ethical criticism, sees in the manner in which art, rhetorically, affects readers its ultimate goal and legitimation. It is at this ethical crossroads that a text like Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks parts ways with the focus on redemption that drives Ingram’s view on short story cycles. For Mitchell as well, and one could add Ishiguro and Murakami, “time does not exist in a cycle for the sake of hurrying through a single series of events”; but for Mitchell, the very singularity of time is put in doubt by the abandonment of progressivist narratives. The apocalyptic sense of an ending that marks Mitchell’s ­fiction – most prominently in Cloud Atlas – in a very non-linear manner comes dressed in the eternal garment of perpetuity. The difference in quality can indeed be described through the change in word class that we encounter when genre turns into mode: while mythology and religion have seen in the cycle a symbol of both eternity and closure through its perfect shape, something cyclical exists always already under the signature of deferral and erasure. This modal understanding of the short story cycle Mitchell turns into the aesthetic backbone for his narrative structures. When time and civilization no longer progress, they cannot fold back in cycles; at best, history is allowed to deteriorate through the incremental passageways of entropy, evoking a regressive principle that clearly denies any form of return as promised in a cycle. One could think here of T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: Mitchell’s characters likewise do not cease in the explorations, but they do not tend to return, nor do they know any place. Such a post-apocalyptic, or, better, anti-apocalyptic, tendency indeed attaches to most of Mitchell’s fiction; but it does not prevent the author from lapsing, for reasons of plot or sentimentality, into more conventional and predictable narrative patterns. Thinking only about The Bone Clocks, one cannot help but notice that the book’s lingering threat of eternal damnation is laid to rest in the salvation that meets at least some of the younger characters in its final chapter. As a reader, it is easy to respond to such last-minute rescue with relief; and Mitchell’s editors may well have counselled him not to close his book on an overly pessimistic or even violent note. Yet, from a more principled perspective, Mitchell’s final pages feel like a betrayal in that they reinstate the very predictability that a sense of closure under the auspices of poetic justice

The Short Narrative Form  257 affords. In the end, then, the conventionality of genre catches up with Mitchell’s performance of modal experimentation, putting on its head the supposed transition from genre to mode. Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks thus can serve as a reminder that a reading based on the conventionalized confines of any particular genre tradition always risks leaving the particular features of a text sidelined. His novel clearly sets out to reach beyond genre, toying with the idea of the novel just as much as it engages forms known from the short story cycle. It is for these reasons that a turn to modal understandings of generic features seems promising; and for the text at hand an understanding of its formal properties from the point of view of a cyclical mode reveals that such a turn to the effects of modes allows a critical engagement with a text that moves within the conceptual sphere of strategic essentialism: it simultaneously assumes the presence of genre and its merely positioned existence. The way in which Mitchell performs this two-step move relies substantially in an active form of readerly engagement. As the novel frequently requires readers to share responsibility for the process of meaning creation, and specifically in the detection of links or connections between what appear to be separate sections, it also invites a collaborative approach to the text’s formal or generic definition that evades final assignation. One effect, potentially unintended by the author, of these features consists of an almost nostalgic return to postmodern features of metafictionality. As Mitchell’s novel evades generic identity and as it invites readerly collaboration, it openly emphasizes its own status as a piece of literary writing. The sheer workmanship of The Bone Clocks signals towards the process of writing just as much as the needs for interpretation. With genres like the short story cycle merely existing as heuristic tools for the process of analysis, Mitchell’s novel stands as a reminder that far from being inherent features of this novel (or, in fact, any other) genres eventually persist at the moment of reception and as such depend essentially on decisions made by the readers.

Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Norton, 2006. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author”. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. Hill & Wang, 1977, pp. 142–148. Bayer, Gerd. “The Ethics of Breaking up the Family Romance in David ­M itchell’s Number9Dream”. Contemporary Trauma Narrative: Liminality and the Ethics of Form, edited by Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau. Routledge, 2014, pp. 120–130. ———. “Loss and the Nation in David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green”. Narrating Loss: Representations of Mourning, Nostalgia and Melancholia in ­C ontemporary Anglophone Fiction, edited by Brigitte Johanna Glaser and Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz. WVT, 2014, pp. 15–26.

258  Gerd Bayer ———. Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction. Manchester UP, 2016. ———. “Perpetual Apocalypses: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Absence of Time”. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 56, no. 4, 2015, pp. 345–354. Blanchot, Maurice. The Book to Come. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford UP, 2002. Childs, Peter, and James Green. “The Novels in Nine Parts”. David Mitchell: Critical Essays, edited by Sarah Dillon, Gylphi, 2011, pp. 25–47. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre”. Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff. 2000. Routledge, 2014, pp. 219–230. D’Hoker, Elke, and Bart Van den Bossche. “Cycles, Recueils, Macrotexts: The Short Story Collection in a Comparative Perspective”. Interférences littéraires / Literaire interferenties, vol. 12, 2014, pp. 7–17. Dillon, Sarah. “Introducing David Mitchell’s Universe: A Twenty-First Century House of Fiction”. David Mitchell: Critical Essays, edited by Sarah Dillon. Gylphi, 2011, pp. 3–23. ———. “Chaotic Narrative: Complexity, Causality, Time, and Autopoiesis in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten”. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 52, no. 2, 2011, pp. 135–162. Dunn, Maggie, and Ann Morris. The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition. Twayne, 1995. Ferguson, Suzanne C. “Defining the Short Story: Impressionism and Form”. Modern Fiction Studies, 1982, pp. 13–24. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. Pantheon, 1984, pp. 101–120. Fuchs, Barbara. Romance. Routledge, 2004. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Routledge, 2004. Hanson, Clare. Short Stories and Short Fictions: 1880–1980. Macmillan, 1985. Hunter, Adrian. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English. Cambridge UP, 2007. Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Unconsoled. 1995. Vintage, 1996. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford UP, 1967. Kurasawa, Fuyuki. “Critical Cosmopolitanism”. The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, edited by Maria Rovisco and Magdalena ­Nowicka. Ashgate, 2011, pp. 279–293. Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. Greenwood, 1989. Mitchell, David. The Bone Clocks. Sceptre, 2014. ———. Cloud Atlas. Sceptre, 2004. ———. Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts. Sceptre, 1999. Moosmüller, Birgit. Die experimentelle englische Kurzgeschichte der G ­ egenwart. Fink, 1993. Murakami, Haruki. 1Q84. 2009 & 2010. Translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. 2011. Vintage, 2013. Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Louisiana State UP, 2001.

The Short Narrative Form  259 O’Donnell, Patrick. A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell. Bloomsbury, 2015. Quarrie, Cynthia. “Impossible Inheritance: Filiation and Patrimony in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled”. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 55, no. 2, 2014, pp. 138–151. Posadas, Baryon Tensor. “Remediations of ‘Japan’ in number9dream”. David Mitchell: Critical Essays, edited by Sarah Dillon. Gylphi, 2011. 77–103. Robbins, Bruce. Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence. Duke UP, 2012. Schoene, Berthold. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh UP, 2009. Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2013. Smith, Jennifer Joan. “Locating the Short-Story Cycle”. Journal of the Short Story in English, vol. 57, 2011, pp. 59–79. Spivak, Gayatri C. The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by Sarah Harasaym. Routledge, 1990.

List of Contributors

Gerd Bayer is Professor and Akademischer Direktor in the English department at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, having previously taught at the University of Toronto, Case Western Reserve University, and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He is the author of a book on John Fowles and of Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction, as well as the (co-)editor of seven essay collections, most recently of Early Modern Constructions of Europe (with Florian Kläger) and Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (with Oleksandr Kobrynskyy). He has published essays on postmodern and postcolonial literature and film, early modern narrative fiction, Holocaust Studies and heavy metal. Elke D’hoker  is Senior Lecturer of English literature at the University of Leuven, where she is also co-director of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies and of the modern literature research group, MDRN. She has published widely in the field of modern and contemporary British and Irish fiction, with special emphasis on the short story and the short story cycle, women’s writing, and narrative theory. She is the author of a critical study on John Banville (Rodopi, 2004) and has edited or co-edited several essay collections: Unreliable Narration (De ­Gruyter, 2008), Irish Women Writers (Lang, 2011), Mary Lavin (Irish ­Academic Press, 2013), and The Irish Short Story (Lang, 2015). Her new monograph, Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story, was published by Palgrave in 2016. Rainer Emig  is Chair of English Literature and Culture at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. He was educated at Frankfurt am Main, Warwick, and Oxford, and has taught at Cardiff, ­Regensburg, and Hanover. He is especially interested in the link between ­literature and the media and in Literary, Critical, and Cultural Theory, especially theories of identity, power, gender, and sexuality. His ­publications include the monographs Modernism in Poetry (1995), W.H. Auden (1999), and Krieg als Metapher im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (2001) as well as edited collections on Stereotypes in ­Contemporary ­Anglo-German Relations (2000), Ulysses (2004),

262  List of Contributors Gender ↔ Religion (with Sabine Demel, 2008), Hybrid Humour (with Graeme Dunphy, 2010), Performing Masculinity (with Antony Rowland, 2010), Commodifying (Post-) Colonialism (with Oliver Lindner, 2010), and Treasure in Literature and Culture (2013). Michael C. Frank is Acting Professor of English Literature and ­Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz. The author of The ­C ultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse, Literature, and Film (Routledge, 2017), he will be co-editing a special issue of the ­European Journal of English Studies on “Global Responses to the ‘War on Terror’” in spring 2018. Other current research interests include literary and cinematic approaches to the tabooed figure of the terrorist, the narrativization of space (particularly in migrant literature from and about London), as well as the interaction between culture and fear. Patrick Gill received his PhD in English literature from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz where he is now a senior lecturer. His teaching and publications focus on the efficacy of literary form. He is the author of Origins and Effects of Poetic Ambiguity in Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems (2014) and has published essays on British poetry, contemporary fiction, and British and American TV culture. Louisa Hadley  is a Faculty member in English at Dawson College, ­Montreal where she teaches courses on neo-Victorian fiction, contemporary fiction, and language and power. Her research focuses on ­contemporary British fiction in terms of its engagement with the past, and she is particularly interested in the work of A.  S. Byatt in this regard. She has published widely in the area of neo-Victorian fiction, and is the author of Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The ­Victorians and Us (Palgrave, 2010), as well as ­articles in j­ournals and edited collections, most recently “Teaching Neo-­Victorian ­Literature” in Teaching Victorian Literature in the 21st Century ­(Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2017). Her research also examines the impact of Thatcher and Thatcherism on British literature and culture from the 1980s to the present; her publications in this area include ­Responding to Margaret Thatcher’s Death (Palgrave Pivot, 2014). Roxanne Harde  is Professor of English at the University of ­Alberta’s ­Augustana Faculty, where she also serves as Associate Dean, ­Research. A Fulbright Scholar and McCalla University Professor, Roxanne researches and teaches American literature and culture, focusing on popular culture, women’s writing and children’s literature, and Indigenous literature. Her most recent books are The ­Embodied Child, co-edited with Lydia Kokkola (Routledge, 2017), Walking the Line: Country Music Lyricists and American Culture, co-­edited with Thomas Alan Holmes (Lexington, 2013), and Reading the Boss:  Interdisciplinary

List of Contributors  263 Approaches to the Works of Bruce S­ pringsteen, co-edited with ­Irwin Streight (Lexington, 2010). Her essays have appeared in many ­journals, including Mosaic, ­Critique, Christianity and Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, The Canadian J­ ournal of American Studies, and International Research in Children’s ­Literature. She has published chapters in more than twenty collections of essays. An award-winning teacher, Roxanne has been invited to present ­workshops in Canada and ­Europe, and has published pedagogical essays in The Feminist Teacher, The Canadian Journal on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Team-Based Learning in the Social Sciences and H ­ umanities, and Collected Essays on Teaching and Learning. She is currently dividing her time between a study of southern singer-­songwriters and new research on acquaintance rape in recent novels for young adults. Janine Hauthal  is postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2014–2021). She holds a PhD from the University of Giessen; her dissertation on “Metadrama and Theatricality” received the biannual award of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English in 2008. Her research interests include metareference across media and genres, contemporary (Black) British writing, post-­dramatic theatre (texts), imaginary Europe, and transgeneric/­intermedial narratology. Her research has been published in Modern Drama, Journal for ­Postcolonial Writing, and English Text Construction as well as with Brill, De ­Gruyter, and ­ ritain in Routledge. She is currently completing a monograph on B ­Europe: The Emergence of Transnational Discourses in Contemporary British Literature. Jacob Hovind  is Assistant Professor of English at Towson University. His writing, on figures including Alice Munro, David Foster Wallace, Samuel Beckett, and Erich Auerbach, has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Partial Answers, and a number of edited collections. He is currently completing his first monograph, Being Literary, which explores the rhetoric and ontology of literary character within the language of modernism, while beginning research into a second book, exploring the legacies of modernist epiphany on latter twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction. Mark Ittensohn  is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Zurich, where he specializes in print culture of the longer Romantic period. His forthcoming dissertation examines the Anglo-­A merican frame tale in the early nineteenth century, with a focus on the relation between genre, authorship, and transnationalism. His recent research has been published in Studies in Romanticism (Fall 2016) and Victoriographies (Spring 2017).

264  List of Contributors Gerri Kimber, Visiting Professor at the University of Northampton, is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies and Chair of the ­Katherine Mansfield Society. She is the deviser and Series Editor of the four-­ volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2012–2016). In addition to numerous edited collections, she is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (2016), Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2015), and ­K atherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008). Florian Kläger is Professor of English at the University of Bayreuth and the author of Forgone Nations. Constructions of English National Identity in Elizabethan Historiography and Literature: Stanihurst, Spenser, Shakespeare (2006), and of Reading into the Stars: Cosmopoetics in the Contemporary Novel (forthcoming, 2018). He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Düsseldorf and has published on early modern literature, diasporic fiction, the novel in English, and contemporary Irish drama. Anja Müller-Wood  is Chair of English Literature and Culture at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. The author of Angela Carter: Identity Constructed/Deconstructed (1997) and The Theatre of Civilized Excess: New Perspectives on Jacobean Tragedy (2007), she has published extensively on early modern and contemporary English literature and culture. Her current research draws on the cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology to investigate the emotional effects of literature, with a special focus on Renaissance theatre. These research interests are related to her long-standing commitment to exploring the interface between literary scholarship and linguistics. She is co-founder and co-editor of the open-access International Journal of Literary Linguistics, editor of a special issue of Language and Dialogue dedicated to this topic, and an Executive Committee member of the Linguistics and Literature Forum in the Modern Language Association Corinna Norrick-Rühl  is Assistant Professor for Book Studies at the Gutenberg Institute for World Literature and Written Media at ­Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She teaches and researches topics related to publishing and book history/book studies (twentieth and twenty-first centuries). Her research interests include children’s publishing, book sales clubs, translation culture, and green publishing. She is series co-editor of Kinder- und Jugendliteratur intermedial (Königshausen & Neumann) and a member of the editorial boards of Quaerendo (Brill) and Publishing Research Quarterly (Springer). She has been Recording Secretary of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) since 2012.

List of Contributors  265 Valerie O’Riordan is a lecturer at the University of Manchester, where she teaches Creative Writing in the Centre for New Writing. Her doctoral thesis (2016) addressed the relationship between literary form and the narrativization of identity and trauma in the short story cycles of Jennifer Egan and David Vann. Her fiction has been published in Tin House, The Lonely Crowd, Unthology, LitMag, and The ­Mechanics’ Institute Review. She is currently working on a novel manuscript and researching feminist narrative practices. ­ ldham. Emma Young is Head of Student Journey at University Campus O Her research expertise lies in the field of contemporary British literature, the short story, and gender, sexuality, and feminist theory. She is the co-editor of British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now (2015, EUP) and author of Contemporary Feminism and Women’s Short Stories (2018, EUP), as well as having published journal articles on the writings of Emma Donoghue.

Index

9/11 182, 195–197 Alderman, Timothy C. 1, 22 Ali, Monica 10; Alentejo Blue 17–18, 23–24 Alterity see otherness Amis, Martin 10 Anderson, Benedict; ‘imagined communities’ 2, 159, 176 Anderson, Sherwood; Winesburg, Ohio 85–86, 135, 246, 251, 253, 254 Appiah, Anthony Kwame 251 The Arabian Nights 95, 132 Audet, René 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 42n4 Augé, Marc 202, 216n2; see also short story cycle, setting authenticity 94–95, 98, 101, 104, 145, 170, 202, 205, 217n8 Awadalla, Maggie 130 Bacchilega, Cristina 144–145 Bahri, Deepika 133 Banks, Dorothy ‘Georges’ 108 Bardolph, Jacqueline 130 Barnes, Julian 10, 56, 159, 177n1, 177n4; “Brambilla” 168, 178n12; Cross Channel 12, 56, 159–177; “Dragons” 160, 161, 178n12; “Evermore” 160, 161; “Experiment” 160, 168, 174, 178n12; “Gnossienne” 168, 170, 178n12; “Hermitage” 161, 169–170, 172; “Interference” 160, 163–165, 166, 171–172, 176; “Junction” 160, 161–162, 166–167, 168, 172, 178n5; “Melon” 160, 166, 170, 174, 178n12; “Tunnel” 168, 170, 174

Barthes, Roland 249 Baxter, Charles 209 BBC National Short Story Award 58, 60 Beauchamp, Harold 114 Benjamin, Walter 130 Bergson, Henri 108 The Blue Review (magazine) 104, 107, 116, 119 blurb 6, 24, 28, 51, 55–56, 107, 160; see also paratext Boccaccio, Giovanni 107 body 81, 84; female b. 12, 106–107, 144, 146, 153–157, 193, 221–222, 227–228, 238 book covers 51, 54–55, 56, 168, 178n10, 219; see also paratext book industry 46, 48, 50, 54–55, 59, 60, 63n6; conglomerates 48, 52; marketing 28, 43n6, 45, 47, 48, 54–55, 56, 59; trade publishing 48; author branding 55; self-publishing 10, 46, 48, 57; independent publishers 45, 52, 54, 56–57, 61–62, 63n5 booksellers 46–48, 58–59, 63n6 Bowen, Elizabeth 112 Bowen, Zack 209 Butler, Judith 196 Byatt, A. S. 10, 12, 143–145, 151, 156n1; “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” 12, 143–145, 150, 152–154; The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye 12, 142–156; “Dragon’s Breath” 143, 146; “The Glass Coffin” 143, 146–150; “Gode’s Story” 143, 146–148; Possession: A Romance 143; “The Story of the Eldest Princess” 143, 146, 148, 150–152

268 Index Carter, Angela 10, 148; The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories 144 Caruth, Cathy 181–184, 185–191, 192–195, 197, 197n1 Chaucer, Geoffrey 107; The Canterbury Tales 7 Chekhov, Anton 114 Cheng, Chu-chueh 202, 217n8 Civil and Military Gazette 91, 99, 101n1 class, social 9, 11, 17, 23, 26, 27, 72, 111, 168, 219–221, 229 cliché 36, 46, 93–94, 98–99, 159, 164–166, 168, 174, 176 code mixing 160, 168–169, 171, 173, 176–177 cohesion 2, 12, 22, 33–35, 37–41, 95, 105, 127, 216n1 colonialism 91–103, 107–122, 138, 178n17 Columbus, Christopher 132, 138 Comma Press 57–58 composite novel 3, 10, 13, 19, 24–26, 28, 29n2, 32, 46, 133, 247, 255 Coover, Robert 134 Cornhill Magazine 91 cosmopolitanism 7, 10, 23, 26, 104, 138, 164, 166, 176, 200–202, 210–211, 250–252 Crace, Jim; Continent 39–42 Cusk, Rachel 17, 23–24, 26, 27 cycle, women’s lives 144, 149, 153, 157, 234, 236–237, 240 Derain, André 108 Derrida, Jacques 250 D’hoker, Elke 1–3, 9–10, 13n1, 32, 42n4, 46, 162, 245 diaspora 10, 127; see also postcoloniality/postcolonialism Dillon, Sarah 249 Dismorr, Jessica 108 domestic sphere 94, 112, 152, 184, 186, 222, 225–227, 233–243 Dunn, Maggie 3, 28, 29n2 and n3, 72–73, 86n5, 128, 133–135; see also short story cycle, organizing principle Dunton, John 246 eating disorders 219–220, 222, 229 ebooks 48 Eibl, Karl 35, 37, 38, 42, 43n7 Eliot, George; Middlemarch 248; Scenes from Clerical Life 253

Eliot, T.S. 112; “Little Gidding” 256 embedded narrative 8, 12, 20, 38, 40, 78, 81, 83, 85, 93, 100, 145–146, 149–150, 162, 189 epiphany 12, 121, 200–201, 206–215, 216n5, 217n6 Europe 9, 12, 73–74, 108, 111, 114, 120, 159, 164–166, 174–177, 178n17, 203 European Union 9, 174–175 fairy tale 12, 39, 142–156; see also Grimm; fate in 142–143, 147–150, 152–156; “happy ever after” in 142, 146, 147–148, 150, 152–154, 238; “once upon a time” in 142, 146, 147; repetition in 142–143, 147, 153–154; reversal of fortunes in 142 feminism 144–146, 150, 152, 154–155, 219–230, 232–236, 243 Ferguson, Suzanne 156, 245–246 Fergusson, J. D. 107, 108, 114 Foer, Jonathan Safran 188, 196 Foucault, Michel 219, 221–224, 226–227, 229–230, 249 Fowles, John 252; The Ebony Tower 246 frame narrative see embedded narrative Fuchs, Barbara 255 Galt, John 11, 86, 87n13; The Steam-Boat 73, 83–84 Garland, Judy 132 gender 9, 23, 92–94, 96, 99, 106, 111, 164, 221, 232–234, 237, 239, 243, 248; sexual objectification 220, 224; sexual oppression 106–107, 154, 219, 221, 223–226, 230; see also sexual violence Genette, Gérard 54–55, 63n1, 248 genre fiction 51, 59, 254 genre memory 22, 24 Gerlach, John C. 207 Gibbs, Alan 181–182, 187–188, 190, 195–197 Gilroy, Paul 251 Goncharova, Natalia 108 Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. 130, 137 gothic 51, 77, 78, 112, 114 Grant, Jane 127, 136 Grattan, Thomas Colley 86; High-Ways and By-Ways 73, 81–83

Index  269 Greenlaw, Lavinia 228 Grimm (Brothers) 145, 156n2, 157n8; “Cinderella” 142; “Hansel and Gretel” 142; “Snowdrop” 143; “Snow White” 154, 157n9 The Guardian 50–53, 58, 62, 203–205, 214, 245 Harde, Roxanne 2, 3, 21 Harries, Elizabeth Wanning 143, 145–146 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 87n17; The Story Teller 85 Head, Dominic 107, 131 Hemingway, Ernest 8; In Our Time 216n4 Hendry, Irene 217n6 heterosexuality 225, 234; see also gender Hoey, Michael 42n1 Hofstadter, Douglas 4 Homer 107 homophobia 227 homosexuality 227 housework see domestic sphere induction instinct (Eibl) 35, 37–38, 41–42 Ingram, Forrest L. 1, 3, 19–22, 28, 128, 134, 137, 160, 162, 255–256 interculturality 163, 166–167, 170–171, 173, 176–177; see also colonialism, diaspora, postcoloniality/postcolonialism The International Frank O’Connor Short Story Award 60 Irving, Washington 11, 73–74, 79, 81, 85–86; Bracebridge Hall 75–78, 79, 82 Ishiguro, Kazuo 60, 200–205, 209–216, 252, 254, 256; “Cellists” 202–203, 215, 216n3; “Come Rain or Come Shine” 202–203; “Crooner” 202–203, 211–212; “Malvern Hills” 202, 205, 213–215; Never Let Me Go 211, 216n3; “Nocturne” 202, 213–214; Nocturnes 12, 56, 200–205, 209–216, 252; A Pale View of Hills 216n3; The Unconsoled 216n2, 216n3, 252–253 Islam, Manzu (Manzurul); The Mapmakers of Spitalfields 129, 134, 137

James, Louis 131 Jewett, Sarah Orne; The Country of the Pointed Firs 38–39, 135, 201 Jewsbury, Mary Jane 71, 73, 78, 84–86 Johnson, B.S. 252; Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs 246 journalism 11, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99–101 Joyce, James 8, 112, 246, 252; Dubliners 6, 12, 38, 42n5, 135, 183, 200–201, 205–212, 215–216, 216n4, 216n5, 217n6, 246, 251; A Portrait of the Artist 207, 216n5; Stephen Hero 207–208 Keillor, Garrison; Lake Wobegon Days 134 Kennedy, A. L. 10, 12, 53, 56; “Edinburgh” 185; “Marriage” 185–186; “Saturday Teatime” 183–184, 185; “Story of My Life” 186; “What Becomes” 183–184, 186; What Becomes 181, 183–187, 195, 197 Kennedy, J. Gerald 1, 3, 20, 22 39, 41, 163, 181, 198n3 Killick, Tim 72, 210 Kipling, Rudyard 11, 90–103, 246; “The Arrest of Lieutenant Golightly” 99; “Consequences” 99, 101; “Cupid’s Arrow” 97–98; “False Dawn” 96–97; “His Chance in Life” 98; “In the House of Suddhoo” 97; “Lispeth” 92–93, 95, 101; “Miss Youghal’s Sais” 95; Plain Tales from the Hills 11, 90–103; “The Rescue of Pluffles” 101; Soldiers Three 98; “The Story of Muhammad Din” 101; “The Taking of Lungtungpen” 98; “Three and – an Extra” 93–94, 97; “The Three Musketeers” 98; “Thrown Away” 94–95, 97; “To Be Held for Reference” 100; “Yoked with an Unbeliever” 95 Kirkland, Caroline Matilda; A New Home, Who’ll Follow? 135 Korte, Barbara 136 LaCapra, Dominick 187, 190–192, 194–196 Lanchester, John 17–18, 23–24, 26–27 Laub, Dory 191–192, 194–195

270 Index Levine, Caroline 2, 4, 84; see also short story cycle, affordances Leys, Ruth 181–182, 189, 198n2 literary marketplace 46–49, 55, 73, 85 literary economics 7, 47–49, 53–54, 57, 98 Löschnigg, Maria 2–3 Luckhurst, Roger 181–182, 188, 198n2 Lundén, Rolf 1, 5, 20, 159, 181, 186–187, 216n1 Luscher, Robert 1, 20–22, 36, 42n4, 55, 128, 163, 219, 236 Lynch, Gerald 22, 122, 128 McCann, Colum; Let the Great World Spin 18, 23–24, 26 McGregor, Jon 27; If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things 17, 23–24, 26; This Isn’t the Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone Like You 28 MacKinnon, Catherine 224–225 Macmillan’s Magazine 91 Man Booker Prize 50–52, 55, 56, 60, 61–62, 130, 252 Mann, Susan Garland 1, 3, 20–21, 29n2, 86n3, 133, 163, 189, 201, 216n4 Mansfield, Katherine 11, 104–122; “A Birthday” 106; “A Blaze” 107; “Bliss” 112; “The Child- Who- Was- Tired” 106; “How Pearl Button was Kidnapped” 109, 112–115; “At Lehmann’s” 106; “Summer Idyll” 108–109; “A True Tale” 108–109; “Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding” 106–107; In a German Pension 38, 106–107; “Millie” 109, 114, 116–119; “Old Tar” 109, 119–121; “Ole Underwood” 109, 114–116; “Spring in a Dream” 113; “The Story of Pearl Button” 112; “Vignette: Sunset Tuesday” 108–109; “The Woman at the Store” 108, 109–112, 114–115 Maori 108, 112–113, 115, 119–121, 122n2; see also Maoriland writing March-Russell, Paul 3, 8, 130, 137, 139, 160 Mazullo, Mark 216n3 Melville, Pauline; “Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water” 138; Shape- shifter 129, 134, 138–139

Michael, Livi 12; “As If the Marks Were Made by Him” 220, 226–227, 228–229; “Living with Vampires” 220, 225–226, 229–230; “Lower than Angels” 220, 222, 223, 225, 226, 229; “Not Even the Rain” 220, 223, 224–225, 226, 227, 229; “A Song for Carol Fisher” 220, 221–222, 223, 224–225, 226, 228; Their Angel Reach 219–230 misogyny 164, 220; see also gender, sex/sexuality, sexual violence Mitchell, David 10; Black Swan Green 250; The Bone Clocks 13, 245–257; Cloud Atlas 18, 23–24, 26–27, 32, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 256; Ghostwritten 245, 247, 248, 249, 250; number9dream 248; Slade House 247–248; The Thousand Autumns of Jakob de Zoet 249 Mitford, Mary Russell 11; Our Village 38–39, 72–74, 78–79, 81, 86, 134; Stories of American Life 80 modernism 8, 12, 21, 27, 85, 104–122, 135, 201, 209, 246, 251 Monteith, Sharon 221 Morris, Ann 3, 28, 29n2 and n3, 72–73, 86n5, 128, 133–135; see also short story cycle, organizing principle multilingualism 109, 136, 161, 166, 168–171, 173, 176, 178n13 and n14 Munro, Alice 45, 60; Lives of Girls and Women 204 Murakami, Haruki 252, 256; 1Q84 249, 253–254 Murry, John Middleton 107 music 5–6, 40, 132, 164, 166, 172, 200–216, 217n8 Nagel, James 1, 19, 20, 29n3, 129, 163, 198n3, 201, 203, 254 Naipaul, V. S.; Miguel Street 135 national stereotypes 80–84, 86n11, 159–160, 163–168, 174, 177; see also cliché Naylor, Gloria; The Women of Brewster Place 21, 135, 198n3, 201 New Age (weekly paper) 107, 112 New Zealand 104–105, 108–109, 111, 116–118, 120–122, 131; Urewera 108, 110, 119; ‘Maoriland’

Index  271 writing 108, 109; Pakeha 112, 120; see also Maori Nielsen BookScan 47, 50 Nobel Prize for Literature 60, 90, 204 novel 2, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17–19, 21, 23, 26–28, 39, 41, 45–46, 49–63, 72, 74–79, 84, 86n7, 90–91, 105, 107, 112, 127, 130, 133–134, 150, 156, 159, 176, 194, 198n3, 204, 219, 245–257; see also composite novel Orton, William 113 Orwell, George; 1984 253 otherness 80–81, 83–84, 106, 110, 112, 121, 138, 168–173, 178n17 Pacht, Michelle 21, 29n3 paganism 28 paratext 6, 13, 18, 20, 24, 28, 38–39, 40, 47, 51, 54–56, 63n1, 107, 160, 168, 178n10, 200, 203–205, 211, 212–213, 219, 221 parenthood 232, 234–236, 239, 240, 243 patriarchy 119, 196, 226–230 Picasso, Pablo 108 Poe, Edgar Allan 86n7; Tales of the Folio Club 85 pornography 225–226, 230 postcoloniality/postcolonialism 10, 11–12, 95, 104–122, 129, 130–131, 135, 136–137, 139, 168, 171, 178n14, 251 postmodernism 19, 25, 26–28, 144–145, 188, 190, 246, 249, 252, 255, 257 power 121, 143, 152, 178n17, 219–230, 233 Publishers Association 47 quest 147, 151–152 racism 92–93, 98 Radstone, Susannah 188 Raleigh, Sir Walter; The Discovery of Guiana 138 reading 34, 36–37, 39, 42n4, 59, 71, 74–84, 86n7, 127, 134, 156, 248, 255; digital 48–49; short stories 49 realism 8, 27, 92, 95, 101, 109, 150, 156, 233, 246–248, 252, 255

resistance 13, 59, 200, 205, 227–230, 250 Rhythm (magazine) 104, 107–109, 112, 113–114, 116, 119 Rice, Anne Estelle 108, 114 Rich, Adrienne 235 Robbins, Bruce 216n2, 251 Romanticism 11, 71–86, 156n1 Rushdie, Salman 10, 55; “The Courter” 139–140; East, West 55, 129–130, 132–133, 134, 137, 139–140; Haroun and the Sea of Stories 129; Midnight’s Children 130, 133; The Satanic Verses 130 Ryan, Donald; The Spinning Heart 17, 23–24, 26–27 Sadler, Michael 107 Saturday Westminster Gazette 109, 119 Schoene, Berthold 26, 251 Scholes, Robert 216n5 scope syntax (Tooby and Cosmides) 39 Scott, Sir Walter 11, 73, 81; “The Two Drovers” 8 self-referentiality 41, 91–92, 95, 97–101, 144, 145, 160–163, 177, 232 Selvon, Sam; “Calypso in London” 132; “Down the Main” 135; “Eraser’s Dilemma” 132; The Lonely Londoners 136; “My Girl and the City” 132; Ways of Sunlight 127–129, 131–133, 135–137, 139 sex/sexuality 26, 106, 234, 236; sexism 93, 96; sexual violence 13, 106–107, 154, 219–230, 242–243 Shakespeare, William; As You Like It 234; Hamlet 132, 137; The Winter’s Tale 155 short fiction collection 2, 3, 6, 10, 13, 18–28, 29n3 and n4, 32–37, 42n4, 44–63, 72, 74, 79–84, 91, 95, 104–106, 127–129, 131–133, 137, 143–144, 150, 156, 162, 200–201, 203–204, 210, 216n1, 217n7, 232–243, 245–246, 248, 252, 253 short story cycle; affordances 2–3, 7, 9, 84, 159–160; authorship 1–6, 10, 19–20, 32–42, 46, 48–54, 55–58, 91, 101, 106, 122, 128–129, 134, 140, 162–163, 219, 247, 249–252; centripetalism/centrifugalism 1–2, 4, 6, 22–23, 25, 159, 163, 177,

272 Index 186–187, 197; characters 3, 6, 8, 17–18, 26–28, 40–41, 57, 76, 82, 94, 101, 108–109, 113, 116, 136, 143, 145, 148–149, 156, 162, 176, 183, 192, 200, 202–203, 204, 206, 210–216, 219, 221, 226, 228, 238, 245, 248–249, 256; closure 20, 24, 84, 161–162, 177, 200, 211, 233, 255, 256; coherence 2–9, 20, 25, 28, 32–36, 39, 41–42, 42n1, 73, 76, 91, 94–95, 98, 100–101, 105–106, 122, 128, 143, 159–163, 173, 177, 201, 203, 211, 220, 245, 253; as critical construct 4–6, 105–106; cyclicity 1–13, 19–28, 29n3, 32–43, 46–52, 56, 59, 72–74, 76, 86n5, 91, 100–101, 104–106, 107, 121–122, 128–129, 131, 133–135, 137–140, 142–143, 144–145, 156, 159, 160–163, 173, 176–177, 181–182, 187, 194, 195, 197, 200–205, 210, 216n4, 217n7, 219–221, 230, 233, 246–247, 249–250, 251, 254–257; frames 5, 8, 20, 22, 37–38, 40, 82–85, 93, 100, 134, 145–146, 162, 177, 189, 250–251; gestalt 4–5, 9, 32, 36; migrant short story cycle, cycles of migration 3, 12, 129–141; narrative perspective 3, 8, 23, 27, 51, 94–101, 232, 237, 242; “narratives of community” (Zagarell) 2–3, 21, 26, 135–136, 220; national identity 72–74, 80, 85–86, 122, 163–177, 196; organizing principle 2–3, 25, 128, 129, 133–34, 137–139, 143, 201; “poetics of the collection” 21–22, 24–25; reader involvement 1–8, 10, 13, 18–20, 22, 25, 28, 32–43, 48, 55, 58–59, 71, 74–84, 92, 94, 96, 100, 106, 119, 122, 127, 132–134, 136–137, 140, 145–146, 159–160, 164, 169, 170, 173, 176–177, 192, 196, 208, 210, 219, 223, 230, 236, 239–241, 243, 245–250, 254–257; setting/place 3, 6–7, 17, 20–21, 23, 35, 38–40, 91–92, 101, 107, 127, 129, 134–136, 139, 201–204, 219–221, 239–241, 245, 251, 252; themes/motifs 3, 6, 20–23, 25–27, 36–38, 40–41, 57, 59, 73, 75–76, 79, 85, 94–95, 101, 105–106, 121, 134, 136, 142–144, 146, 160–161,

163, 177, 178n8, 183, 185–186, 200–201, 205, 207, 215, 219–221, 227, 233–240, 243 Shriver, Lionel 18, 232 The Signature (magazine) 119 Simpson, Helen; “The Bed” 234; “Bed and Breakfast” 235; A Bunch of Fives 232–244; “Charm for a Friend with a Lump” 241–242; Constitutional 239–241; “Dear George” 234–235; Dear George 234–238; “Diary of an Interesting Year” 242; “Early One Morning” 239–240; “The Festival of the Immortals” 241–242; “Four Bare Legs in a Bed” 234, 236; Four Bare Legs in a Bed 234–237, 239; “Give Me Daughters Any Day” 234, 236; “Good Friday 1663” 234; “The Gourmet” 235; “Heavy Weather” 238; Hey Yeah Right Get a Life 238–239; “Hurrah for the Hols” 238–239; “If I’m Spared” 240; In-Flight Entertainment 28, 239, 241–243; “Labour” 234; “Let Nothing You Dismay” 235; “To Her Unready Boyfriend” 237; “When in Rome” 235–236, 237 Smith, Ali; Hotel World 18, 23–24, 26–27, 32, 181, 182, 188–195, 197, 198n3; There but for the 18, 22, 24, 27 Smith, Emma E. 26, 194 Smith, Jennifer Joan 3, 29n3, 135, 201, 251 Smith, Zadie; NW 18, 23–24, 27 soap opera 233 Sobieniowski, Floryan 113 social control see power Spiegelman, Art; In the Shadow of No Towers 195, 196 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 247 Star Trek 132 stereotype see cliché Sterne, Laurence 132–133, 246 Strout, Elizabeth; Olive Kitteridge 195, 204 subversion 95–99, 101, 107, 111, 113, 142, 153, 226, 245, 254–255 suicide 94, 223–224 Swift, Graham 10, 45, 54 symbolic parataxis 38, 40, 43n7

Index  273 text processing 33–37 Tew, Philip 182, 195, 197 Thieme, John 131 Todorov, Tzvetan 142, 156n4 trauma 12, 106, 110, 116–117, 181–198, 230, 238 Tuch, Becky 43n6, 54 Twitter 247 unreliability 96 Updike, John 209; Olinger Stories 38–39 Van Booy, Simon; The Illusion of Separateness 18, 23, 26–27 Van den Bossche, Gert 1, 3, 9, 29n4, 32, 42n4, 162, 163, 245

van Gogh, Vincent 108 Viola, André 130 violence 112, 114–116, 152, 185–187, 219–230, 242, 251–252 Walzl, Florence 208–209 Wheeler, Patricia 221, 224, 225, 228 Whitehead, Anne 188 The Wizard of Oz (film) 132 Wong, Cynthia F. 214 Woolf, Virginia; The Waves 246 Wright, David G. 217n7 Yeats, W.B. 112, 246 Zagarell, Sandra 3, 21, 135–136, 220