Narrative Being Vs. Narrating Being [1 ed.] 9781443886581, 9781443880930

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Narrative Being Vs. Narrating Being

Narrative Being Vs. Narrating Being Edited by

Armela Panajoti and Marija Krivokapić

Narrative Being Vs. Narrating Being Edited by Armela Panajoti and Marija Krivokapić This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Armela Panajoti, Marija Krivokapić and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8093-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8093-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Armela Panajoti, Marija Krivokapiü PART ONE: TOWARDS HIGH MODERNISM Being in Creation, Creation in Being in Lord Jim ..................................... 12 Armela Panajoti D. H. Lawrence’s Authorial Dilemmas: In Exile around the Great War ... 25 Marija Krivokapiü The “Idea” of the Self: Narrated Identities in D. H. Lawrence’s (Short) Fiction ........................................................................................... 54 Martin Štefl “How Can We Know The Dancer From The Dance?”: Authorial Self-(Re)Production in Joyce’s Narratives ................................ 73 Vanja Vukiüeviü Gariü Joyce’s Religious Being and His Narrative ............................................... 93 Sandra Josipoviü Network Theory Approach to Mrs. Dalloway ......................................... 109 Petar Penda Ernest Hemingway’s (In)Articulate Silence and the Modernist Suspicion of Words ................................................................................. 121 Aleksandra Žeželj Kociü Aldous Huxley’s Island: A Study on a Resurrected Being...................... 140 Gordana Kustudiü Death vs. Eternity in Aldous Huxley’s Novel After Many a Summer ..... 151 Janko Andrijaševiü

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Table of Contents

PART TWO: AFTER MODERNISM Briony’s Polylogue .................................................................................. 170 Sonja Vitanova-Strezova Unreliable Memoirist: The Tim O’Briens of The Things They Carried .. 182 Ginger Jones Narrative Strategies in Contemporary American Women Writers .......... 192 Aleksandra Izgarjan The Manipulation of the Narrative in the Hands of Toni Morrison ......... 209 Mirjana Daniþiü Disgrace: J. M. Coetzee Turning Political Being into Body Narrative ... 219 Marina Ragachewskaya Life versus Fiction: Narration in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot ....... 230 Dijana Tica Notes on Contributors.............................................................................. 253 Index ........................................................................................................ 258

INTRODUCTION ARMELA PANAJOTI AND MARIJA KRIVOKAPIû

This monographic collection of papers focuses on Anglo-American modernist fiction with the intention to inspire challenging perspectives that would move us towards considering modernism in the instances in which it transcends itself, moving, more broadly speaking, towards postmodernist self-irony. Therefore, the papers collected here regard issues such as being in creation, narrativizing being and creation, the relation between being and narrative, the situation of being in narrative time and space, the relation between authority and narrative, the possible authority over narrative and the authority of the narrative, the interaction between narrative and the other, authority of the other over and within the narrative, interreferentiality of text and author, and so on. The book comprises two parts. In the first part, we observe the birth of modernism, the first embryonic narrative strategies that led to the structural break of realist writing. After this, we approach high modernism mostly through the authors’ changed view of being and language, their search for metaphysical truth, the relation of author and text, discomfort within the media of language, and complex three-dimensional characterization. The second part concentrates on modernist heritage, i.e. the postmodernist attitudes to the questions stated above. This chronological angle gives us a chance to follow how the authors’ relation to literature in general has changed with the changing world and the new perspectives on the nature of reality. The collection opens with the paper titled “Being in Creation, Creation in Being in Lord Jim,” in which Armela Panajoti focuses on narrative discourse and how it informs the character’s being, Jim’s in this case. Drawing on Schopenhauer’s essay “On Education,” Panajoti argues that Jim’s condition results from a wrong correspondence between “the whole of his abstract ideas,” to use Schopenhauer’s words, and the reality he has created for himself. Jim’s abstract ideas are informed by his reading of light literature and thus make him live as being in creation in the first part of the novel. His imaginative heroism is not made to match the reality

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Introduction

surrounding him. When in the second part of the novel he finally becomes the hero of his readings, thus a creation in being, and the Patusanian fairy landscape cherishes his deeds, he again misreads the narrative codes regulating his existence and fails. Jim’s story is also framed by a web of narrative discourses and forms with many speech communities, as well as interventions and shifts in language, which question narrative reliability and reinforce the idea that Jim’s failure is above all linguistic. Marija Krivokapiü’s paper “D. H. Lawrence’s Authorial Dilemmas: In Exile around the Great War” sees the Great War as a crucial moment for the author not only in terms of physical, political, and financial arduousness but more particularly, in ontological and authorial terms. Krivokapiü recalls here facts like Lawrence’s wife’s German connections, which would not make his life easy afterwards, his frequent fits of cold and pneumonia, financial trials, the taking away of his passport, and, what is more, an almost complete rejection of his so far best works, the suppression of The Rainbow and rejection of Women in Love for publication. For Lawrence this meant a denial of his existence as a man of letters, which was the only existential form he could envisage his self in. For this purpose, the paper makes a close analysis of Lawrence’s letters written immediately before and after the war. Yet, it is in the works written after the war, namely, in the novels Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo, as well as in a book of travel Sea and Sardinia that Krivokapiü seeks to trace what she refers to as D. H. Lawrence’s authorial dilemmas, his poignant attempts to understand his author-function while facing a choice to stop speaking. This choice is enforced upon him by both the outside world, i.e. the culture that is denying, and the author’s own inner being to in turn deny the repressive culture. One more paper on D. H. Lawrence draws on the novelist’s concern with self, more precisely, his concept of the Self and his idea of the “conflict of wills,” and uses the narrative-identity theory to capture a “character in creation.” In his paper “The ‘Idea’ of the Self: Narrated Identities in D. H. Lawrence’s (short) Fiction,” Martin Štefl attempts to depict this “conflict of wills” as a conflict of individual “ideal-driven narratives” and discusses the role these narratives play in the process of creation, promotion, and preservation of “knowledge.” The process of knowledge-creation, being closely connected with the individual’s ability to “narrate reality,” i.e. to “meaningfully” structure it to fit one’s desires/ideas, becomes for Lawrence closely connected with the development of a complex set of competing “subjective epistemologies.” Relying on a detailed reading of Lawrence’s texts, such as “The Shades of Spring” and “England, My England!”, the paper traces the way different

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“narratives” emerge, evolve and become confronted by competing narratives/realities, and eventually perish when confronted with the other. Showing the process of narration as directly influencing one’s cognitive faculties, the paper discusses the way Lawrence’s (in this respect essentially modernist) texts explore the complex reciprocal relationship between the narrating subject, narrated objects, and narrative process. The concern with authority continues with James Joyce. In “‘How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?’: Authorial Self-(Re)Production in Joyce’s Narratives,” Vanja Vukiüeviü Gariü argues about the ways in which Joyce, an autobiographical author in her view, defies the Barthean notion of authorial “death.” Vukiüeviü Gariü does so by enumerating the ways that account for Joyce’s textual presence and high intentionality. She draws on the view that life and art are united, that the text is inevitably interlinked with biography since the transformation of introspection and retrospection into fiction results in fiction itself becoming a part of life. By bringing several examples of Joyce’s most important works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, Dubliners, she recognises in them the psychoanalytic, existential and ontological potential to explain how the interaction of Joyce’s art with life resembles in many ways biological reproduction. Using A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a starting point for her arguments about the relation of the creator to his creation, more precisely Dedalus’s aesthetic theory and classification of the aesthetic image into lyrical, epical, and dramatic form, a point of reference for Joycean critics as well, she explains the relation several of Joyce’s works bear to Joyce himself. A Portrait is considered here an example of the lyrical novel, that is, in immediate relation to its creator. Ulysses is viewed as epical, that is, as both a personal and impersonal creation. Finnegans Wake is argued as dramatic, that is, as a textual embodiment of the dramatic image from which all traces of the author’s personality are obliterated allowing the narration to move around other characters and their consciousness. As Stephen Dedalus’s case demonstrates, Vukiüeviü Gariü recognises the “Doppelganger metaphysics” in Joyce’s work. Evidence from people around Joyce and his essays and letters suggests the intricate relationship between the author and the text, between the narrating and narrated being. In this way, by identifying the potential life bears for art and drawing on Said’s defence of literary criticism that relied on biographical approaches, the author explains how Joyce used his narratives to overcome his fears, obsessions, conflicts, and frustrations. On the whole, Joyce’s narratives defy “the death of the author” and obey a somewhat reproductive cyclical pattern, which recalls life itself and encompasses life and death. The case of Finnegans Wake

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Introduction

illustrates that this pattern does not have a proper end, instead appears as an incessant, never-ending interaction of text and the author. Vukiüeviü Gariü also explains it in terms of the author’s identity and the impossibility of pinning it down. She views writing and the author’s identity as umbilically interrelated. If there is a chance for the first to be pinned down, that would bring the second to an end and hence the death of the author. In “Joyce’s Religious Being and His Narrative” Sandra Josipoviü focuses on another important aspect of Joyce’s writing—his ambiguous attitude towards the Catholic Church. While he deemed Catholic philosophy as the most coherent attempt to establish intellectual and material stability, Joyce revolted against institutional Catholicism, as a defence mechanism to protect his personality from a system that cancelled character through its plea for obedience. To trace this attitude in Joyce’s work, Josipoviü resorts to the six edicts presented by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle1: “God is an anthropomorphism,” “God is dead,” “to acknowledge the idea that God is an anthropomorphism or that he is dead is not the same as getting rid of him,” “religion is everywhere,” “literature has an evil streak,” and “literature is sacred.” For each, Josipoviü draws on ideas and contexts, namely, Freud’s suggestion that God is a fatherly projection of the human ego on the surrounding universe for the first edict, the impact developments after the theory of evolution in the nineteenth century had upon the credence of the Bible especially among intellectuals for the second, Barthes’s idea of literature as antitheological and revolutionary activity for the third, the reflection that Western culture is theologically embedded, even with regard to how we structure time for the fourth, the belief that literature tends towards the demonic because it is about entrancement and possession for the fifth, and Jacques Derrida’s claims that if there is something sacred about literature it is its untranslatability and singularity for the sixth. All of these are accounted for through examples from Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In this way, Leopold in Ulysses becomes not only a Christlike figure, a spiritual father to Stephen, the prodigal son, but also a Lucifer, a demonic character, upon his renunciation of the Catholic Church and decision to serve Art as his ultimate deity; some characters in Dubliners turn their back on religious and moral values which they had respected before upon experiencing shattered dreams, failed lives, destroyed careers, unfulfilled ambitions, whereas Dublin comes to signify the hell around which they move in circles; the father’s authority, that is, 1

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Harlow: Longman, 2004): 161.

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the genre of Bildungsroman is undermined by the “son,” that is the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; or Finnegans Wake defies any effort of it being translated owing to Joyce’s creation of a language by using more than twelve languages to represent the state of mind of a man asleep. Through elaboration of Finnegans Wake Josipoviü argues that Joyce’s intention as a writer is to challenge the reader by inviting him/her not only to interpret the text, but also to write and rewrite it, hence the structure of Finnegans Wake. Such an intention is again repetitive of a cyclical pattern, typical of Joyce’s art. Petar Penda contributes with “Network Theory Approach to Mrs. Dalloway.” His paper applies and further elaborates Franco Moretti’s fresh idea of introducing quantitative analysis in literary studies by designing a network graph based on characters’ addressing one another in Mrs. Dalloway. The word “networks” is in literary criticism usually used in reference to the artistic, publishing, and social connections between writers. However, Moretti uses it to denote links between characters in a novel or a play realised through their speech acts or interactions. Nonetheless, Moretti’s network graph does not go beyond the demonstration of the novel’s structure and interconnectedness of the characters and leaves out the emotional charge and nuanced relation of the characters. Bearing this in mind, Penda proposes a graph, which combines Moretti’s distant reading with close reading and thus leads to a better understanding of the novel in its entirety. The proposed approach takes into consideration more than just verbal interaction. In this way, considerable attention is given to unspoken thoughts, free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness, and emotions presented via descriptions, to mention but a few. This method leads to a more comprehensive understanding of the relations among the characters. Penda’s analysis also ponders whether Mrs. Dalloway is a break with the literary past or constitutes a continuation of past traditions. “Ernest Hemingway’s (In)Articulate Silence and the Modernist Suspicion of Words” by Aleksandra Žeželj Kociü explores the possibility of genuine communication in the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, while primarily accentuating the author’s dramatic dialogue and iceberg theory, both of which ultimately create nothing but a peculiar medium of verbal Modernist silence. Moreover, the fact that Hemingway’s male and female protagonists either fully understand one another, or alternatively dwell in complete unawareness of themselves and others, gets elaborated through the prism of their real or imagined speech acts, articulation of pain, gendered deafness, talking and taciturnity. To comprehend Hemingway’s fictional world of narrating and its simultaneous suspicion of narration, it

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Introduction

is essential that the essay touch upon the function of language in Modernism at large, Hemingway’s so-called masculine, minimalist style, as well as the dialectics between verbal exposure and muteness. Gordana Kustudiü contributes with “Aldous Huxley’s Island: A Study on a Resurrected Being.” Aldous Huxley’s Island is a result of a longlasting process of research, maturation, spiritual, and intellectual growth. The novel possibly represents the only depiction of an ideal, fertile relationship between the whole and its living elements, the one founded on an equal share of giving and receiving. It is indeed a utopian vision, unlike Huxley’s earlier dystopian novels, and it points out the writer’s new insights, which are revolutionary to a great extent, especially concerning the matter that this paper is delving into, i.e., the growth of an individual into an integral, free, and self-conscious personality. The process is intently grasped through the narrative prism of Will Farnaby, an average worldly person, at the same time being more than convenient material for the metanoia he is about to experience on Pala (the titular island) where he found himself after a shipwreck. Kustudiü pinpoints the way the insular community enables its each and every individual to be happy, this being the end to which they use all available means. Another Huxley’s novel discussed in the volume is After Many a Summer Dies the Swan from 1939. As Janko Andrijaševiü explains, although it belongs to Huxley’s later novels, it has many similarities with the early ones—in form, style, and approach. It is a carnivalesque “multideckered literary sandwich” organised around a “house party” theme (based on the Hearst Castle in California this time). However, there are substantial differences, too. On the one hand, Huxley has more insight into philosophical and spiritual matters, and is not as existentially confused as he had been in his earlier writing phase. On the other hand, his literary technique is less successful now, and the characters in After Many a Summer are flatter than even in his cubist portraiture attempts. The “propagandist urge” is much more pronounced in this novel, which is frequently detrimental to the artistic weaving of a work of literature. Another significant difference is that now plot becomes a central concern, unlike in the past. The main theme running through the novel is death vs. eternity. The title is taken from Tennyson’s poem “Tithonus,” which describes the eponymous mythical character who asks the gods for immortality, but forgets to ask for eternal youth. The final chapters of the novel introduce a bizarre idea of devolution, i.e., a downward evolution that would ensue in case our physical bodies do not perish as they usually do. Another strong theme is the criticism of Californian lifestyle, and a

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strong contrast between British and American mentality, in an age when these differences were much more prominent than they are today. The second part of the book is devoted to modernist heritage and opens with “Briony’s Polylogue” in which, drawing on Genette and Kristeva, Sonja Vitanova-Strezova looks into the narrative discourse in Ian McEwan’s Atonement to discuss matters of narrative and the other, the question of being in narrative time and space and the interreferentiality of text and author. In the first three parts, the story starts in a modernist fashion that can be accounted for by Genette’s concept of the limited point of view (focalization), then the narrative shifts to the first person singular in the postscript with zero focalization, which suggests that the narrative voice in the novel belongs to the aged novelist Briony, thus making Genette’s distinction between narrative perspective and narrative voice insufficient to account for Briony’s story. This postmodernist twist can be best accounted for by Kristeva’s “polylogical discourse” since Briony’s attempt at atonement for the true story instead of the wrong one told in childhood produces a different Briony in every new version of her story. In “Unreliable Memoirist: The Tim O’Briens of The Things They Carried” Ginger Jones adopts a reader-response approach and discusses the interreferentiality of text and author in O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a collection of stories focusing on his Vietnam war experience, whose recollections are described not as memories but rather as realities. In The Things They Carried, the narrator and protagonist, is also named Tim O’Brien. Having in mind a reader disengaged either emotionally or intellectually with the history of the Vietnam War, and assuming a dismissive attitude on his/her part, Jones questions how this reader would classify The Things They Carried, given that the stories, moving between memoir and fiction, are narrated usually in the first-person perspective by a Tim O’Brien who, besides the name, shares the same age, profession, education, and military experience as its author. Among the issues the author problematizes here are also: how he/she, being caught up in this literary construction that feels like truth, differentiates between the two, and how the narrative forces the reader to make it part of his or her own experience. To read the instances of interreferentiality of text and author manifested in the collection, Jones also provides some background about the war, O’Brien’s reports about how he got involved with it, about how he started writing vignettes and later moved up to writing The Things They Carried. While arguing about how the author plays with the distinction between truth and fiction, Jones concludes that O’Brien’s intention is to help readers understand not simply by finding a way between truth and

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Introduction

fiction, but, most importantly, by moving beyond them thus becoming more intellectually and emotionally invested in the narrative. It is the latter that she views as O’Brien’s main intention in doing so. Aleksandra Izgarjan observes narrative strategies in the works of contemporary American women writers, which deconstruct categories of gender, race and class, as well as question political and social acts of reading, writing, and canon formation. The texts discussed in the paper share similar narrative strategies, which include autobiographical fiction, historiographic metafiction, magic realism, genre experimentation, multiple narration, fragmentation, and palimpsest. These strategies liberate the writers from the standards of truth and authenticity, allowing them to construct new, multicultural identities, and to engage with the political aspects of narrative, particularly exile and repression. Through disruption of the ordinary logic of cause and effect, as well as binary oppositions on which Western culture rests, magic realism juxtaposes different cultural patterns of the dominant and minority communities. Past and memory function as a semiotic space in which ethnic and gender identities are recreated. Empty spaces in history, which point to the lack of records about the lives of women, trigger narratives that are attempts not only to retrieve lost stories, but also to circumvent authority and the linearity of history as well as to create the writers’ own versions of history. Thus, from the microcosmic level of individual stories, the focus shifts to the macrocosmic level of social history. In “The Manipulation of the Narrative in the Hands of Toni Morrison” Mirjana Daniþiü argues that at first reading it is easily recognised that in Morrison’s novels the narrative provides opportunities for the author to contemplate various restrictions, sufferings, rebellions of the black people in America, as well as to speculate on history, memory, knowledge of the African peoples. In time, it becomes obvious that the narrative engages in a discourse on historical, social, political, or universal values, in this way being used for the rewriting of history and construction of AfricanAmerican identity. Daniþiü argues that Toni Morrison’s text is a tool of manipulation: it provides irresistible narrative threads to the readers, while it simultaneously plays with endless meanings the author wants to explore. In this paper, the violation of traditional literary forms combined with the limitless exploitation of fragmented narrative is viewed as Morrison’s attempt to revise the existing narrative forms, thus revising the values of conventional narrating. The aim is to illustrate Morrison’s skillfulness in discarding the narrative conventions so that they become mere toys in her masterly hands.

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In “Disgrace: J. M. Coetzee Turning Political Being into Body Narrative,” Marina Ragachewskaya explores the ways J. M. Coetzee interweaves postcolonial existence, traumatic consciousness and the language of the body in his Booker Prize winning novel Disgrace. Faithful to his favoured themes—apartheid and tyranny, Coetzee provides a narrative for various aspects of life—race, history, sex, and communication. All these culminate in a disgrace of the body, which in its turn must find verbalisation too. Ragachewskaya shows how language turns impotent, even mutilated in an attempt to narrate the “nonnarratable,” how the concept of “poetic justice” goes lame, and how history takes revenge in an absolutely “ungraceful” way. Issues of interconnection between politics, psychology, human body and language badly need a reform where the Romantic ideals fail. How is one to heal a gaping wound of lost ties and troubling tensions among generations, sexes, and races is simultaneously an ontological problem and artistic challenge, and the novel resorts to different narratives to address it: political and bodily, verbalised and gapped, explicit and implied. The book closes with “Life versus Fiction: Narration in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot” by Dijana Tica, who opens her thesis by pointing out that the problem of discovering the narrator’s identity has become especially complex with the advent of the postmodern novel. Since a postmodern author often incorporates details of his/her life into the novel, the person telling the story is on many occasions mistaken for the one writing it. As a result, the narrator’s opinions and attitudes are regularly attributed to those of the author. Furthermore, postmodern novels heavily rely on real life characters and historical events, so the line separating life from fiction becomes increasingly blurry. Here Tica proceeds to examine how life and fiction overlap in one of the most critically acclaimed postmodern novels, Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot. Since the novel deals with the lives of a real person, the famous French novelist Gustave Flaubert, and of a fictitious one, Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor and amateur Flaubert scholar, the paper questions the reliability of facts and attempts to answer the question whether there is more truth in fiction than in reality. Furthermore, the paper focuses on Braithwaite as a postmodern narrator who often makes references to famous people and well-known events; constantly discusses the process of writing, sharing his opinions on literary devices, methods and characters more or less directly with the reader or narratee; and, at the same time, delays telling his life story.

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Introduction

The papers in this book are diverse and speak for themselves, yet we trust that we have met our primary aim and that this book will contribute to the ongoing discussion of the ambiguities inherent in the concepts of authorship, narrative, and being, and that, thus, we will provide scholars and students of literature with new challenging readings, as well as stimulate intellectual confrontation and circulation of ideas within the field.

PART ONE: TOWARDS HIGH MODERNISM

BEING IN CREATION, CREATION IN BEING IN LORD JIM ARMELA PANAJOTI

Conrad’s Lord Jim has all the chances of being considered an initiation story. At least its beginning is likely to develop into an initiation story, although the narrative structure of the novel thwarts the prospect of an initiation story. The narrator introduces Jim, more precisely, emphasises his outer appearance as promising of a trustworthy young man. Despite the variety of definitions applying to initiation stories,1 one can still easily recognise two elements commonly found in all initiation stories in Conrad’s intention to introduce a young man who goes through an experience, a journey, and gains something, or loses something in Jim’s case. Thus, so far this story appears to have the three-part structure of initiation shortly described by Müller “as the three stages of ‘innocence’— ‘experience’—‘maturity’.”2 Whether Jim matures, one cannot say as confirmed by Marlow’s blurred epiphanic vision of Jim at the end of the story.3 In his attempt to define the initiation story, Marcus at one point suggests that “Education is always important in an initiation story, but it is usually a direct result of experience rather than of indoctrination.”4 This remark reminds me of Schopenhauer’s essay “On Education,” in which he

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Mordecai Marcus, “What is an Initiation Story?” in Short Story Theories, ed. Charles May (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976): 189-201, and Peter Freese, “Über die Schwierigkeiten des eranwachsens: Amerikanische stories of initiation von Nathaniel Hawthorne bis Joyce Carol Oates,” in Die Short Story im Englischunterricht der Sekundarstufe II, eds. Peter Freese, Horst Groene and Liesel Hermes (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1979): 206-255. 2 Kurt Müller, Ernest Hemingway: der Mensch, der Schriftsteller, das Werk (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999): 41. 3 “He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.” Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Thomas Moser (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996): 246. 4 Mordecai Marcus, op. cit., 185; emphasis added.

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emphasises the value of experience in the education5 of the young, more particularly in the formation of those general ideas that guide our knowledge of the world. Schopenhauer distinguishes between what he calls the natural method of education, by which he, to put it briefly, means that experience or “particular observations,” as he calls them, that precede the formation of general ideas, and the artificial method, the other way round, that is, ideas are already there before the observations come. According to Schopenhauer: This explains why it so frequently happens that, after a long course of learning and reading, we enter upon the world in our youth, partly with an artless ignorance of things, partly with wrong notions about them; so that our demeanor savors at one moment of a nervous anxiety, at another of a mistaken confidence. The reason of this is simply that our head is full of general ideas which we are now trying to turn to some use, but which we hardly ever apply rightly.6

In this paper, I do not intend to analyse Lord Jim as an initiation story, but to draw for my arguments on two premises: 1) the fact that the novel promises to be an initiation story and 2) Marcus’s last remark about education in order to read Jim’s case as an illustration of what Schopenhauer calls the artificial method of education, which will help me to embed Jim’s case in a discussion that will involve the narrative structure and perspective of the novel. Obviously, in his essay Schopenhauer does not go in favour of the artificial method of education, for: the instruction is defective, and the ideas obtained are false; and finally, a distorted view of the world arises, peculiar to the individual himself—a view such as almost everyone entertains for some time, and most men for as long as they live.7

My intention is to show that Jim’s failure results from the fact that his education follows the artificial method, to put it in Schopenhauer’s words. For this purpose, Jim’s narrative behaviour is traced in the two parts of the novel. It might be relevant to point out here that the omniscient narrator emphasises from the very beginning of the novel what type of education 5

By education Schopenhauer means the path that leads to maturity. In this respect, he distinguishes between knowledge received from schooling and knowledge of the world. It is the second type of knowledge that he is interested in. 6 Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Education,” Studies in Pessimism, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (New York: Cosimo, 2007): 54. 7 Ibid., 55.

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Being in Creation, Creation in Being in Lord Jim

Jim has received. Apparently, he has received both types of education. In the first chapter, we learn two things—that Jim’s vocation for the sea was a result of his aroused desire after reading light literature, and that he received some instruction in this respect8. The evidence provided here proves a typical Schopehauerian condition. Schopenhauer advises that no child under the age of fifteen should receive instruction in subjects which may possibly be the vehicle of serious error, such as philosophy, religion, or any other branch of knowledge where it is necessary to take large views; because wrong notions imbibed early can seldom be rooted out, and of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to arrive at maturity.9

Jim’s literary education has preceded practical sea training. In this way, Jim’s knowledge of the world is “indoctrinated” by light literature. As a result, Jim, although he proves to be a good student in navigation, still fails to project a realistic image of himself. Instead of setting himself in a reallife sea context, he envisions himself as a character in a book, as a hero.10 Later defined by Stein, his argued alter ego, as “romantic” and contrasted with a practical man like the French captain, who eventually rescues the Patna, Jim can be said to have failed to obtain “an exact correspondence […] between the whole of his abstract ideas and the things he has actually perceived for himself,”11 which according to Schopenhauer leads to maturity of knowledge. His romanticism, or his inability to read the linguistic codes that guide his identity, fails him in his need. Schopenhauer examines the reasons for this condition: 8

“when after a course of light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had declared itself, he was sent at once to a ‘training-ship for officers of the mercantile marine.’ He learned there a little trigonometry and how to cross top-gallant yards. He was generally liked. He had the third place in navigation and pulled stroke in the first cutter.” Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 8. 9 Arthur Schopenhauer, op. cit., 58. 10 “On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices he would forget himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men—always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.” Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 9. 11 Arthur Schopenhauer, op. cit., 59.

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For the practical man the most needful thing is to acquire an accurate and profound knowledge of the ways of the world. […] The study is difficult enough in itself; but the difficulty is doubled by novels, which represent a state of things in life and the world, such as, in fact, does not exist. Youth is credulous, and accepts these views of life, which then become part and parcel of the mind; so that, instead of a merely negative condition of ignorance, you have positive error—a whole tissue of false notions to start with; and at a later date these actually spoil the schooling of experience, and put a wrong construction on the lessons it teaches.12

In this sense, it follows that Jim is impractical, is young, and that his education or knowledge of the world stems from a narrative form—the novel, that is, from his readings of light literature. As such, he assumes real sea life to resemble light narrative for which reason he fails to act accordingly. He flatters himself with ideas of heroism, which cherish his imagination and distort the reality surrounding him. There is a wrong correspondence between how he projects himself and the world around him. When in his training days he is challenged by the forces of the universe, he finds himself unprepared and recognises “a fierce purpose in the gale, a furious earnestness in the screech of the wind, in the brutal tumult of earth and sky, that seemed directed at him, and made him hold his breath in awe.”13 The sea experience disappoints him, because he finds it “barren of adventure.”14 Having been imbued with ideas of imaginative heroism and without having been tried out as seaman, Jim becomes mate of the Patna. He lives his sea training and later his Patna experience as a creation in being, as a character in his fiction, a condition that makes him feel “he cared for nothing that could happen to him to the end of his days,”15 but utterly numbs him when the Patna collapses. In confronting alone the Patna episode, Jim is puzzled that “they wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!”16 There is, in my view, a verbal contradiction in Jim’s frustration or inability to narrate these facts. From a strictly narrative perspective, facts are events from people’s life, which when related become stories, thus acquiring a narrative dimension. In Jim’s case, this contradiction stems from the fact that he is caught up between two types of narratives—the narrative Jim imagines himself to be part of and the narrative of his life, that is, the actual accounts of his life. Jim lives in the 12

Arthur Schopenhauer, op. cit., 60. Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 9. 14 Ibid., 11. 15 Ibid., 17. 16 Ibid., 22. 13

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narrative he has created as a world for himself and cannot recognise the world of facts, the practical side of life, because it is beyond his education. His narrative expectations do not meet real-life expectations as it can be demonstrated by his comparison with the practical-minded French captain. Seeing himself as part of the narrative inspired by his readings, Jim is unable to make part of the living narrative, that is, the real story of Patna, the court inquiry, etc. This second “narrative” is just as important, if not more important than the first one. It is not just any narrative, it is a way of being. Jim fails to perform what Alasdair MacIntyre defines as man’s role as “a story-telling animal.”17 His verbal failure at voicing his experience stems from the fact that Jim prefers being and living as a narrative being rather than as a narrating being, or as a creation in being, as I would prefer to term it. He is unable to master his own narrative. In the novel, it is Marlow who tries to relate Jim’s story and to master his narrative. On the whole, Lord Jim is a novel inspired and marked by various forms of narrative discourse and structures. There is the main story, the story of Jim, told in two separate narratives, that of Patna, and that of Patusan. Both stories are wrapped up by several narrative forms or structures—the omniscient or impersonal narrator, the use of free indirect discourse, Marlow, his interlocutors, the letter to the privileged reader. Richard Ambrosini makes an interesting point regarding the use of the impersonal narrator and Marlow in Lord Jim. He points out that the impersonal narrator’s knowledge of Jim is thorough, and that it is this narrator who remarks Jim’s weaknesses in becoming a crafted seaman from the very beginning of the novel, a view which Marlow himself somewhat perceives and shares when he first catches a glimpse of Jim: The silent contest between impersonal narrator and Marlow takes place precisely on this ground: Conrad has the reader see Jim first of all through a damning judgment made in the name of the sea code from which Marlow himself departs in his quest. […] On a conceptual level, Marlow initially shares the impersonal narrator’s negative judgment, which can also be that of the reader, but then a doubt emerges to lead him toward an unremitting self-scrutiny.18

17 “A central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his functions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth.” Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981): 216. 18 Richard Ambrosini, Conrad’s Fiction as Critical Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 119.

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Marlow takes up Jim’s narrative soon after the Patna court inquiry and immediately after the impersonal narrator confirms Jim’s frustration with language or speech. From now on, Jim’s story is entrusted to Marlow19: The sound of his own truthful statements confirmed his deliberate opinion that speech was of no use to him any longer. That man there [Marlow] seemed to be aware of his hopeless difficulty.20

By shifting from one type of narrative discourse to another— omniscient to Marlow’s, Patna to Patusan—Conrad gives Jim the chance to master his own narrative. Because Jim lives in the first part of the story as a creation in being and fails to read the codes of his existence, the author grants him the second chance he has so much looked for, and deserved, by sending him to Patusan, a remote and fairy-like habitat suitable for his heroism to find its proper ground. This Patusan becomes the narrative setting of his ideals. The narrative intention here is to possibly let Jim live as he wishes, thus as being in creation. In his relation of Jim’s story, every now and then Marlow displays his frustration at not making sense of Jim’s behaviour because he tries to measure him by the standards of their craft.21 In identifying Jim as “one of us,” a definition by which Marlow most likely has in mind the lot of seamen, of honest people, of professional people, he tries to read Jim’s behaviour in terms of a sea code measured out by an ideal “standard of conduct,”22 the fidelity, to which held together that community of men Marlow identified as “us.” This standard of conduct could be achieved through training in the ships, hence the natural method of education. In this way, Marlow assumes that Jim’s education has followed the natural path, but the contradiction is that Jim’s education has already passed through the artificial method—light literature—and his mind has been imbued with romantic ideals and as a result there is a clash between these two methods of education. In this respect, Marlow tries a different reading of Jim’s case by resorting to a different perspective—youth.23 This perspective takes us 19

“The central element of Marlow’s characterization is that he will take over the burden of explaining Jim’s character.” Richard Ambrosini, op. cit., 122. 20 Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 24. 21 “I couldn’t believe it. I tell you I wanted to see him squirm for the honour of the craft.” Ibid., 32. 22 Ibid., 34. 23 “Was it for my own sake that I wished to find some shadow of an excuse for that young fellow whom I had never seen before, but whose appearance alone added a

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back again to Schopenhauer’s concern with the education of the young. In talking with the French lieutenant, Marlow realises that he too locates the matter in youth. Although he senses a commonality of viewpoints in the French lieutenant’s remark about Jim: “Ah! The young, the young,”24 Marlow is left even more confounded when he senses that the Frenchman, unlike him who takes defence of Jim in the name of youthful illusions, distinguishes between two things, courage and honour. While the French lieutenant recognises that “Man is born a coward,”25 he acknowledges that it is “habit—habit—necessity […]—the eye of the others,”26 by which he probably refers to good training that accounts for courage. As for honour, The honour […] that is real—that is! And what life may be worth when […] when the honour is gone—ah ca! par exemple—I can offer no opinion. I can offer no opinion—because—monsieur—I know nothing of it.27

“The standard ideal of conduct,” as formulated by Marlow, and “honour,” as emphasised by the French lieutenant, are things to be instilled through the natural method of education. Although they are praised in books, they cannot be learned through books. One cannot really say whether Jim lacks them, but one can truly say that Jim cherishes an idealistic view of them. Puzzled even more by Jim’s case, Marlow seeks advice from Stein, once an adventurer, now a merchant in philosophical guise, but still with a “student’s face,”28 and whom Marlow considers “one of the most trustworthy men I [Marlow] had ever known.”29 In judging Jim’s case, Stein dismisses him as romantic. In response to Marlow’s request for a remedy for Jim’s case, Stein suggests that “the question is not how to get cured but how to live, how to be.”30 Defined in purely Hamletian terms, the question for Stein is “How to be! Ach! How to be.”31 The dream metaphor, which Stein uses to illustrate his point about touch of personal concern to the thoughts suggested by the knowledge of his weakness—made it a thing of mystery and terror—like a hint of a destructive fate ready for us all whose youth—in its day—had resembled his youth? I fear that such was the secret motive of my prying.” Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 35. 24 Ibid., 89. 25 Ibid., 90. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 91. 28 Ibid., 122. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 128. 31 Ibid.

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the previous, alludes to another narrative form. Dreams, like fiction or tales are indeed other narratives, whose source is man’s desires, ambitions, and ideals, that is, everything we construct in our unconscious. Stein’s philosophical proposal, based on his personal experience, is living the dream or submitting oneself to the “destructive element,” thus keeping to one’s ideal. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns—nicht wahr? […] No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me—how to be?32

There is a pause following Stein’s question at the end of this passage before he resumes speaking again and answering the question. In acknowledging Jim as romantic, Stein admits his pessimism about his proposal. Although he has managed to keep to his own romanticism and ideal, he recognises that this is probably not the right way, or the right method of education, to return to Schopenhauer. “And yet it is true—it is true. In the destructive element immerse.” […] He spoke in a subdued tone, without looking at me, one hand on each side of his face. “That was the way. To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream—and so—ewig—usque ad finem […]” The whisper of his conviction seemed to open before me a vast and uncertain expanse, as of a crepuscular horizon on a plain at dawn—or was it, perchance, at the coming of the night?33

Anyway, by confirming that Jim is romantic, Stein also exerts his authority of the romantic who has successfully handled his romanticism in proposing this solution. About Stein’s proposal, Ambrosini explains: Coming to life is equated with falling asleep, the sea is like a dream, and breathing—that is, emerging from the sea-dream or waking up—is like drowning or dying. […] however, the notion of the destructive element brings a certain balance to the spinning paradoxes: the notion is equivalent to self-forgetfulness, the condition which enables one to follow an ideal while gaining strength from the potential destructiveness of its content. […] Stein’s authority is not based on his being a philosopher but on the

32 33

Joseph Conrad, op. cit. 129. Ibid., 130.

20

Being in Creation, Creation in Being in Lord Jim fact that he has been able to put his ideal into practice, to live out the paradox. This is the inheritance he will try to pass on to Jim.34

In inviting Marlow to find a practical solution to Jim’s case, Stein recognises that the solution for Jim to retrieve his heroism is outside of life, thus in fiction. Since Jim envisions himself as a literary character, the best thing to do is to grant him the chance to live in a fictional setting. Therefore, the metaphorical burial Stein proposes, an enactment of Brierly’s “let him creep twenty feet underground and stay there,”35 is an encasement in Patusan. Outwardly, Jim seems to have entered a sort of underworld evoked in the gothic appeal of Patusan.36 Cast in the form of romance or heroic tale, the Patusan episode would finally make Jim live the heroism he had so much cherished in his ideals, but above all, return to him what he lost with the Patna, that is, belief: The conquest of love, honour, men’s confidence—the pride of it, the power of it, are fit materials for a heroic tale; only our minds are struck by the externals of such a success, and to Jim’s successes there were no externals.37

Jim now lives as being in creation. If to us, readers, audience or anyone else not cherishing the same ideals as Jim, “externals” are not essential, to Jim they make part of his new being. Above all, Patusan makes Jim acquire the power of words. Those people had trusted him implicitly. Him alone! His bare word.38 they had got into the habit of taking his word for anything and everything.39 His word decided everything—ever since the smashing of Sherif Ali.40

Despite the legendary status41 he achieves through the glory and fame of his deeds, Jim still displays his inability to keep to his narrative 34

Richard Ambrosini, op. cit., 151-152. Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 44. 36 “once before Patusan had been used as a grave for some sin, transgression, or misfortune.” Ibid., 133. 37 Ibid., 136. 38 Ibid., 160. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 161. 35

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condition, the romance. Although Jim’s Patusanian experience complies with most romance conventions, it fails to keep to one of the most important conventions, love. Unlike the typical romance hero who displays complete love and devotion to his lady, Jim forsakes Jewel for what she identifies as the “call.” As Ambrosini puts it: The love story will eventually throw light on Jim’s cruelty in his pursuit of “the call of his exalted egoism” to which he sacrifices Jewel. […] Marlow launches the theme of love, which completes his accounts of Jim’s successes, by making it clear—as he has already with honor and “men’s confidence”—that this is not a conventional story.42

The incompletion of the love convention also flaws the fictional quality of the Patusanian setting: Patusan had been unreal in Marlow’s eyes as long as it was only a setting for Jim’s opportunity. The impossible love story has changed the narrator’s perspective: Jewel’s knowledge of past suffering gives her the authority to foresee the outcome of Jim’s illusions. Jim is caught in the middle. He cannot recover in Patusan the reality he has tried to leave outside, back in the real world.43

The “call” is enacted by the arrival of Gentleman Brown in Patusan. The bitter taste of the Patna episode returns in the words of Gentleman Brown— “[a]nd what did you come for? What did you ask for when you came here?”44 —leaving Jim even more confused. By granting Gentleman Brown free passage in Patusan, he allows the Patusanian massacre to happen and eventually condemns himself to death. Indeed, death appears to be the solution to this middle position Jim finds himself to be. In Ambrosini’s view,45 only death can make Jim real: Jim’s suspension between the world of reality and the world of his illusions has been resolved only with death. He has thus acquired reality; that is, he has fulfilled the vision underlying his self-image with the final opportunity of keeping his word.46

41 “Already the legend had gifted him with supernatural powers.” Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 159. 42 Richard Ambrosini, op. cit., 168. 43 Ibid,. 176. 44 Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 227. 45 Richard Ambrosini, op. cit., 171. 46 Ibid., 191; emphasis added.

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He still lives as Jim the character, with Marlow being the narrator. He remains a narrative being and never achieves the stature of a narrating being. The artificial method of education, to refer to Schopenhauer, dominates his existence and his manner of living and is responsible for his mistakes, if any. Why does Jim fail then? Why is it that even when he finally becomes being in creation, he is unable to keep to it? It can be said that Jim’s failure is verbal. In “The Verbal Failure of Lord Jim,” Eben Bass argues that Jim’s failure results from the several verbal and auditory errors he makes.47 It can be claimed that Jim’s first verbal error stems from his youthful readings. In this respect, Schopenhauer warns: Instead, therefore, of hastening to place books, and books alone, in their hands, let them be made acquainted, step by step, with things—with the actual circumstances of human life. […] It is incredible how much harm is done when the seeds of wrong notions are laid in the mind in those early years.48

Thus, Jim misunderstands the world of his readings for the world surrounding him. This misunderstanding is followed by others: Collectively, however, Jim’s misunderstandings lead one to see them as symptomatic of a kind of inattention or failure on his part—almost, in a sense, as if language has come to mean something different to him from what it does to anyone else.49

Jim lacks the authority to master his own narrative. Because he is ineloquent, stuttering and stammering, it is Marlow, who takes over his narrative for the most part: “Marlow himself is highly articulate and persuasive […]. Significantly, however, most of the incidents Jim recounts are couched in Marlow’s words.”50 According to Bass, even Jim’s jump from the Patna is a result of his verbal anomaly.51 Jim’s departure to Patusan is also a farewell to “the white man’s world and his own failure in it, an index to which is his failure with its

47

Eben Bass, “The Verbal Failure of Lord Jim,” College English 26, no. 6 (1965): 438-44. 48 Arthur Schopenhauer, op. cit., 57; emphasis in original. 49 Eben Bass, op. cit., 439. 50 Ibid., 439. 51 We can recall here that the German skipper and the other members of the crew take him for George and urge him to jump. Thus, he jumps as George, not as Jim.

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language.”52 Conrad grants him the chance to be the master of his own narrative in Patusan: “The language Jim uses in Patusan is his own, as well as that of the natives, but he has a fresh chance to speak authoritatively, in the words of idealised romance and heroism. Yet verbal error still dogs him.”53 Despite his few verbal successes in Patusan, which make him regain his lost courage and honour, it is again words that fail him. Gentleman Brown’s questions activate Jim’s “old speechlessness.”54 These failures once more testify to Jim’s wrong correspondence between narrative and being. His inadequacy to voice his experience results not simply from lack of eloquence, but mainly from his inability to read the linguistic codes governing his identity. Although Marlow takes over Jim’s narrative, Marlow’s vision is still a blurred vision. The presence of other narrative discourses and forms, often marking the various interventions and shifts in language and narrative and representing the different speech communities in the novel, does little to undo this fogginess, most notable in Marlow’s frequent doubts and questions regarding his role as the narrator of the story. What I can finally say is that Jim’s failure is above all linguistic, or I dare say, narrative. It stems from his inability to live and tell his own story and as such he fails to find the equilibrium in the narrative being and narrating being continuum. Marlow’s stepping in to tell Jim’s story and his resulting authorial frustration, along with other narrative attempts made in the novel, question narrative reliability and reinforce Jim’s awkwardness with authority.

Works Cited Ambrosini, Richard. Conrad’s Fiction as Critical Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. Edited by Thomas Moser. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Eben, Bass. “The Verbal Failure of Lord Jim.” College English 26, no. 6 (1965): 438-44. Marcus, Mordecai. “What is an Initiation Story?” In Short Story Theories, edited by Charles May, 189-201. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976. Freese, Peter. “Über die Schwierigkeiten des eranwachsens: Amerikanische stories of initiation von Nathaniel Hawthorne bis Joyce Carol Oates.” 52

Eben Bass, op. cit., 442. Ibid. 54 Ibid., 443. 53

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In Die Short Story im Englischunterricht der Sekundarstufe II, edited by Peter Freese, Horst Groene and Liesel Hermes, 206-255. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1979. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Müller, Kurt. Ernest Hemingway: der Mensch, der Schriftsteller, das Werk. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999. Schopenhauer, Arthur. “On Education.” Studies in Pessimism. Translated by T. Bailey Saunders. New York: Cosimo, 2007: 54-61.

D. H. LAWRENCE’S AUTHORIAL DILEMMAS: IN EXILE AROUND THE GREAT WAR MARIJA KRIVOKAPIû

The complex relations between author and narrative, protagonist/s and narrative, protagonist/s and the author, author and narrator, narrator and the author, author and his author-function, are the subject of this paper. I will approach it focusing on David Herbert Lawrence’s (1885-1930) letters and fiction written and published in a self-imposed exile immediately before and immediately after the Great War because the atrocious events that took place between 1914 and 1918 seem to have had a dramatic impact on Lawrence’s view of art in general, of himself as an artist, and, eventually, on his production. This work results from years of research and relies on my discussions already published at home and abroad in the last decade, such as Il corpo, la fiamma, il desiderio. D. H. Lawrence, Firenze e la sfida di Lady Chatterley (Firenze, 2010), Etudes Lawrenciennes (Paris 2008 and 2009), and Folia Linguistica et Litteraria (Nikšiü, 2010). Thus, what could now be observed as a reduced and rather disconnected research that concentrated on individual works of the author, and mostly his reaction to the reality of the other in the places he travelled through, is brought together in this paper through the focus on Lawrence’s ideas on what being is and what processes it goes through in the narrative. In other words, I will deal with the instruments with which narrative manipulates being, how being manipulates narrative, and, finally, how narrative exists in relation to an external (often implied) readership being. The new minute analysis of Lawrence’s letters written before and after the war supports my idea that the unfavourable social and political circumstances and often judgemental readership significantly modified the flow of the author’s expression—sometimes to his pleasure, but more often to his frustration, impatience, and even wrath. Lawrence, the romantic idealist before the war, became Lawrence, the disillusioned mocker of his own literary enterprise. I am using this construction W. B. Yeats developed in his poem “Among Schoolchildren” (1928), because at the time he wrote his best

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D. H. Lawrence’s Authorial Dilemmas: In Exile around the Great War

mature works Lawrence was painfully aware that the literary ideals he put in front of himself came either too soon for the (primarily novelistic) reading public or were entirely ungraspable when it came to depicting being in words.

Introduction Eastwood, a small colliery town in Midlands in which Lawrence was born, was a dismal place, consisting of monotonous cheap damp redbrick houses built for the poor miners around irregular muddy streets. The ugly industrial surroundings caused deep chagrin in the young artist. The corruption of nature, the country of his heart, as well as of men, brought about by industrial civilisation, forced Lawrence to enter the literary scene as a rebel, who claimed to be able to save “thousands of young Englishmen” from the sick culture and its mechanised forms of living and thinking, its commercialism and general reification. He rebelled in both his life and his work and like many a contemporary artist he chose exile. Lawrence’s voyages over Germany, Italy, Ceylon, Australia, the American Southwest, and back to Europe, although significantly embodying that unrestful ontological odyssey of mankind that pushes one always towards unknown lands, was always in critical evaluation of the underlining principles of progressive civilisation. Trying to divine the mysteries of other places, Lawrence was also trying to stay true to the reality of the other, to avoid the Cartesian extension of self, and smash the restrictions of one’s cultural inheritance that direct one to what is known, seen, and experienced. As Nietzsche (in The Will to Power 1901, posthumous) said that the will to know is actually the will to possess, Lawrence was acutely aware of the intentionality of his mind and felt that an effort to understand the other more often than not turns into an unsubtle attempt to equalise and unify. Therefore, he believed in the paradox that one can know the other only as unknowable and must speak of the other as of the unspeakable. However, this notion of the other spread to all the existential phenomena Lawrence, as a man, a traveller, and a writer, was getting in contact. For that reason, his descriptions often lack explicitness and affect a speech that denies the authority of interpretation and insists on their own limitedness and deceptiveness. While reading Lawrence I will rely on Edward Said’s (Beginnings: Intention and Method, first published in 1975) understanding of authority. Said reasons that authority is always followed by molestation, i.e. a restraint that appears as “a consciousness of one’s duplicity, one’s confinement to a fictive, scriptive realm, whether one is a character or a

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novelist.”1 Molestation occurs “when novelists […] remind themselves of how the novel is always subject to a comparison with reality and thereby found to be illusion.”2 Besides, as “[e]very novel is at the same time a form of discovery and also a way of accommodating discovery, if not to a social norm, then to a specialised ‘novelistic’ reading process,” Said derives that “every novelist has taken the genre as both an enabling condition and a restraint upon his inventiveness.”3 Yet, invention and molestation have together “conserved the novel because novelists have construed them together as beginning conditions, not as conditions for limitlessly expansive fictional invention.”4 Therefore, although constructed, authority preserves intentionality, which is a power to initiate projects in the real world.

“While the Rotten Outsiders Were Planting Nettles in Paradise” To observe Lawrence’s vision of himself as an author and to appreciate the poignant, mature narratives developed after the war, it is necessary to understand Lawrence’s beginnings. Therefore, in this part I will focus on Lawrence’s letters written during his stay at Lake Garda, from September 1912 till the summer of 1914, because Lawrence’s Garda sojourn seems to be of critical importance in his development as a self-conscious artist. This is especially so because the frequent heartrending happenings of this period comprise an unalterable artistic fervour, a fight for the newly envisaged territory for literary expression, but also a constant struggle against poverty. The title of this chapter comes from a letter written on August 4, 1912 to his agent Edward Garnett, when Lawrence was making his crucial decision to leave, as he often described it, the judgmental northern world. One month later by Lake Garda, in a letter to the same addressee, his partner Frieda (at the time still Weekley) described Lawrence as a “blooming artist.”5 The burst of enthusiasm he was going through with his newly discovered, yet still unapproved, love resulted in a sudden change in his writing style and poetics, which is most obvious in

1 Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985): 82. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 83. 5 James T. Boulton, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, September 1901 – May 1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979): 449.

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the daring and impressionist revisions of Paul Morel into Sons and Lovers (1913). The very first letters in which he talks about himself as an artist witness Lawrence’s frustrating insecurity at the beginning of his writing career: Call me ‘Sir’ if you will. I assure you I am a man. My name is David Herbert Lawrence. My age is 27 years. […] Ford Madox Hueffer discovered I was a genius—don’t be alarmed, Hueffer would discover anything if he wanted to—published me some verse and a story or two, sent me to Wm Heinemann with the White Peacock, and left me to paddle my own canoe. I very nearly wrecked it and did for myself. Edward Garnett, like a good angel, fished me out.6

Lawrence was always aware of his status as an outsider in the English literary milieu. Writing to Arthur McLeod, in September 1912, he argues that his book of poems “won’t be a big book—rather a smallish one—a bit exquisite.”7 Moreover, he disputes his authority comparing his writing with Walter de la Mare’s, with a sole purpose “to convince the critics I was well brought up […] Love Poems and Others they are called. Sounds sad, eh?”8 The lure of Romanticism becomes natural to Lawrence’s present idealism. Shortly, he seems to identify with Robert Burns and wants to write a novel about Burns’s life,9 while to Lady Cynthia Asquith he admits that “Shelley and Byron tradition […] might be good for my rhythms.”10 Yet, in December, he confesses having to resist writing poetry because one has to let oneself fuse in the current—but I daren’t. This state of mind is more like a business man’s, where he stands firm and keeps his eyes open, than an artist’s, who lets go and loses himself. But I daren’t let go just now. The strain makes me tired.11

The quoted lines also show that Lawrence’s insecurity is intensified by the constant lack of money. In a letter to De la Mare, Lawrence offers his travel writing from Germany—“German Impressions,” “French Sons of 6

James T. Boulton, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, 471. Ibid., 455. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 488. 10 George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol II, June 1913 – October 1916 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 63. 11 James T. Boulton, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, 488. 7

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Germany,” and “Hail in the Rhineland,” (which originally appeared in the Saturday Westminster Gazette in August 191212)—and wonders if any of this stuff […] would be any good [...] or if anybody else would have it. […] I am about reduced to my last shilling again—it’s a sort of three-monthly poverty—so I must work my untrustworthy soul, somehow or other, to see if I can coin it into gold.13

In November 1912, after having published two novels, some stories and poems, Lawrence still complains to Ernest Collings about his “paltry literary earnings,”14 although he had earlier said he felt “so fearfully conceited since you [Collings] say such nice things about those two books of mine. […] I live in sunshine and happiness, in exile and poverty.”15 Soon after, in December of the same year, he writes to Ford Madox Hueffer about how he actually hates his novel Trespasser because “it seems a bit messy […]. But whether it injures my reputation or not, it has brought me enough money to carry me […] One must publish to live.”16 In August 1913, he still complains of being “woefully poor,”17 while in February 1914 he hopes to “be able to pay the type-writer.”18 Even at the time of his great disappointment in the blindness of his producers to recognise the intentional worth of his works, in the English reading public in general, facing the compulsion to stay within the recognised forms, Lawrence still confesses that “the money one gets from novels feels like the manna which falls from the skies.”19 Having gone deeply into the new novel, The Insurrection of Miss Houghton (to become The Lost Girl, 1920), he is not certain if Garnett will like it, but finds it important that “it might find a good public among the Meredithy people,”20 which he generally despised. In a series of letters to the same addressee, Lawrence complains that his stories and plays may be too daring and “candidly impromptus”21 for the English public, but adds that he “must try and make

12

Cf. James T. Boulton, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, 405. Ibid. 14 Ibid., 471. 15 Ibid., 468. 16 Ibid., 485. 17 George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol II, 53. 18 Ibid., 144. 19 Ibid., 511. 20 Ibid., 511. 21 Ibid., 477. 13

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running money”22 and would not mind even if the publisher cuts “those naked scenes in Paul Morel,” which he “patiently and laboriously constructed.”23 Although he requests to be told “anything considerable [Garnett was] removing”—which process to him “sound[ed] like [removing] furniture”—again, in March 1913, he confirms that he doesn’t mind “if Duckworth crosses out a hundred shady pages in Sons and Lovers. It’s got to sell. I’ve got to live.”24 However, by the summer of 1913 Lawrence had more serious thoughts about fiction and gradually started finding his own voice, feeling he was “coming out wholesome and myself.”25 As one of his main poetic assumptions was that the novel matters because it allows its men and women to be alive and whole (in his essay “Why the Novel Matters”), he now gracefully declares: “I shall always be a priest of love, and now a glad one—and I’ll preach my heart out.”26 Moreover, he introduced his art as earnestly committed: “I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of today: the real, deep want of English people, not just what they fancy they want,” he declares in a letter to Garnett.27 He writes because he wants his “folk to alter and have more sense” and he is “sure that only through a readjustment between men and women, and a making free and healthy of the sex, will [England] get out of her present atrophy.”28 He criticises his friend Ernest Collings because Collings’s work “seems too—too— onesided […] as if it were afraid of the female element.”29 In this same letter Lawrence famously asserts: “My great religion is a belief in blood.”30 He also judges W. B. Yeats as “awfully queer stuff […] as if he wouldn’t bear touching.”31 In his probably first important letter from Gargnano, written to Arthur McLeod, 4 October 1912, Lawrence says he hates “Bennett’s resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery.”32 He believes that the English audience will gradually accept him “just as an audience was found in Russia for Tchekhov,”33 because he is 22

James T. Boulton, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, 430. Ibid., 478. 24 Ibid., 526. 25 Ibid., 427. 26 Ibid., 493. 27 Ibid., 511. 28 Ibid., 544. 29 Ibid., 503. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 488. 32 Ibid., 460. 33 Ibid., 509. 23

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sure that it is “sick of the rather bony, bloodless drama we get nowadays— it is time for a reaction against Shaw and Galsworthy and Barker and Irishy (except Synge) people—the rule and measure mathematical folk.”34 Therefore, he is certain that his contemporaries will have to hate their immediate predecessors if they want “to get free from their authority.”35 That is why at this time Strindberg appears “unnatural, forced, a bit indecent—a bit wooden, like Ibsen, a bit skin-erupty,”36 while Conrad made him furious: “why this giving in before you start, that pervades all Conrad and such folks—the Writers among the Ruins. I can’t forgive Conrad for being so sad and for giving in.”37 By May 1913, Lawrence’s belief in his writing was unwavering. Fighting for his voice to be recognised, he writes to Garnett: “I know I can write bigger stuff than any man in England. […] And I write for men like David and Harold—they will read me, soon. My stuff is what they want: when they know what they want. You wait.”38 Having received a number of good reviews of Trespasser, Lawrence’s hopes for Paul Morel were great, but before he will have a real experience of what being a victim to one’s art exactly means, he exclaims in a letter to De la Mare: “Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!”39 However, by the beginning of July 1913, he is enraged by the first rejection of the novel “on grounds of its indecency”40: And William Heinemann—may his name be used as a curse and an eternal infamy—[…] Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the bellywriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They’ve got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery in it’s a marvel they can breed. They can nothing but frog-spawn— the gibberers! God how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wish-wash. Exterminate them, slime.41

34

James T. Boulton, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, 509. Ibid. 36 Ibid., 465. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 546. 39 Ibid., 417. 40 Ibid., 456. 41 Ibid., 421-422. 35

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The publication of the novel in its revised form as Sons and Lovers, for Lawrence, meant the end of his “youthful period.”42 Now, he felt like “a David that throws stones”43 having to find the means of defending the novel’s “naked scenes” and its form, which, to him, was “slow like life”44 and thus unrecognisable to the hypocritical English and their “moralistic blarney.”45 To Arthur McLeod he complains that the English nation wants to “rend me for having given them anything so good,” and that “‘England, my England’ [now still referring to the refrain of W. E. Henley’s “Pro Rege Nostro” and not to the short story he later wrote] is for me, I suppose, ‘Critic, my critic’.”46 He believes that his novel presents “the tragedy of thousands of young men in England,”47 and that he is “a wonderfully subtle renderer and commentator of history,”48 for which reason he will not apply “their pernicious ossiferous skin-and-grief form.”49 Facing these difficulties Lawrence assumes a specific psychological manoeuvre and declares over and over again that his motto is “Art for my sake.”50 He confesses that “work is produced by passion” with him, “like kisses,” and that the basic difficulty is to find “the form one’s passion […] wants to take.”51 For this reason he cannot apply his “creative self where it doesn’t want to be applied, makes me I should bust or go cracked. […] trim and garnish my stuff I cannot—it must go.”52 Moreover, he presents himself as a “primarily […] a passionately religious man,” whose “novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience. That I must keep to, because I can only work like that.”53 At one point he believes that creation of art is a divine business. One needs something to make one’s mood deep and sincere. There are so many little frets that prevent our coming at the real naked essence of our vision. […] I often think one ought to be able to pray, before one works— 42

James T. Boulton, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, 551. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol II, 105. 44 James T. Boulton, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, 476. 45 Ibid., 41. 46 Ibid., 482. 47 Ibid., 476-477. 48 Ibid., 478. 49 Ibid., 492. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 501. 53 Ibid., 165. 43

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and then leave it to the Lord. Isn’t it hard, hard work to come to real grips with one’s imagination – throw everything overboard. I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of the Almighty God to go through me—and it’s rather an awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious, to be an artist.54

Lawrence repeatedly declares his unwillingness and inability to fight against his inspiration. Writing about the new novel, The Insurrection of Miss Houghton, he defines himself as “a damned curse unto myself.” He was now working on a novel that was a most fascinating […] so new, so really a stratum deeper than I think anybody has ever gone, in a novel. [...] It is all analytical—quiet unlike Sons and Lovers, not a bit visualized. But nobody will publish it. I wish I had never been born. But I’m going to stick at it, get it done, and then write another, shorter, absolutely impeccable—as far as morals go—novel [to be The Sisters]. It is an oath I have vowed—if I have to grind my teeth to stumps.55

This new novel, to become his best piece of fiction—The Rainbow (1916)—at this time described as “a pot-boiler,”56 gradually “developed into an earnest and painful work,” just after Lawrence’s taste of this period, for which reason he has to pray: “God help it and me.”57 In April 1913, he supplements the previous description pronouncing that it is “a queer novel, which seems to have come by itself,”58 and “a novel which I have never grasped. Damn its eyes, there I am at page 145, and I’ve no notion what it’s about. I hate it. […] it’s like a novel in a foreign language I don’t know very well—I can only just make out what it is about.”59 He understands that this is a big “transition stage” for himself60 and expresses his willingness to obey by Garnett’s suggestions, but he also believes that he is not “a child working erratically.”61 He defines his writing as an “exhaustive method,”62 not only because he was rewriting the novel for the eleventh time,63 but because it is quite unlike the one of Sons and Lovers, 54

James T. Boulton, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, 519. Ibid., 526. 56 Ibid., 536. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 546. 59 Ibid., 544. 60 George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol II, 143. 61 Ibid., 165. 62 Ibid., 143. 63 Cf. ibid., 153. 55

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which was a “hard, violent style full of sensation and presentation,”64 and in which, as he says, he was “accumulating objects in the powerful light of emotion, and making the scene of them.”65 Therefore, he feels that the novel may not please Garnett, because it may appear “shaky,”66 as he was not trying “to incorporate it very much,” preferring “the permeating beauty.”67 It was now all about recognition that “the perfect statue is in the marble, the kernel of it. But the thing is the getting it out clean.”68 Although he knew that the novel is “a big and beautiful work,”69 he was afraid that “it would be rejected—I don’t mean by the publishers— you [Henry Savage] understand.”70 He complains of “shedd[ing] so much blood and [making] so many scars and disfigure[ing]” himself, but that he has learned from Greek sculpture that there is something unchangeable and pure in every body which his “soul is hungry for.”71 As a rule one sees only the intertwining of change and a distortion of half made combinations, of half resolved moments. But there is behind every woman who walks, and who eats her meal, a Venus of Melos, still, unseeing, unchanging, and inexhaustible. And there is a glimpse of it everywhere, in somebody, at some moment—a glimpse of the eternal and unchangeable that they are.72

A significant support for the search of this unchangeable inhuman essence Lawrence finds in the futurists. He appreciates their “purging of the old forms and sentimentalities […] this sickly cant,” their denial of “the weary sickness of pedantry and tradition,” by being “honest and stick[ing] by what it is in us.”73 Yet he cannot approach their work as art, but only as a “purely male” intellectual discourse, a kind of an “ultra scientific attempt to make diagrams of certain physic or mental states.”74 However, they helped him explain to Garnett what he was doing with his

64 George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol II, 132. 65 Ibid., 142. 66 Ibid., 184. 67 Ibid., 143. 68 Ibid., 146. 69 Ibid., 164. 70 Ibid., 169. 71 Ibid., 138. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 181. 74 Ibid.

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“wrong psychology” and his unpredictable and alinearly developed characters incompliant with the expected “moral scheme.” [W]hen I read Marinetti—“the profound intuitions of life added one to the other, word by word, according to their illogical conception, will give us general lines of an intuitive psychology of matter”—I see something of what I am after. […] that which is physic—non-human in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element—which causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent. […] In Turgenev, and in Tolstoi, and in Dostoievski, the moral scheme into which all the characters fit […] When Marinetti writes: “it is the solidity of a blade of steel that is interesting by itself, that is, the incomprehending and inhuman alliance of its molecules in resistance to, let us say, a bullet. The head of a piece of wood or iron is in fact more passionate, for us, than the laughter or tears of a woman”—then I know what he means. He is stupid, as an artist, for contrasting the heat of the iron and the laugh of the woman. Because what is interesting in the laugh of the woman is the same as the binding of the molecules of steel or their action in heat: it is the inhuman will, call it physiology […] psychology of matter, that fascinates me. I don’t care so much about what the woman feels […] don’t look for the development of the novel to follow the lines of certain characters: the characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form, like when one draws a fiddle-bow across a fine tray delicately sanded, the sand takes lines unknown.75

Written in June, just before the war started, despite all the arguments with his producer, this letter still shows Lawrence elated about his work. He is certain that if Garnett’s generation does not understand his work, he will get his reception before long,76 and sadly states: “It will seem a bit rough to me, when I am 45 [he died at this age], and must see myself and my tradition supplanted. I shall bear it very badly. Damn my impudence, but don’t dislike me.”77 He strongly disagrees with his friend Henry Savage’s unwillingness to have his works published, saying: “if one writes one must have a tough soul and put up with things, and keep grinding on.”78 At this point Lawrence almost identifies silence, i.e. not writing, with death: “Death is all right in its way, but one must finish one’s job first.”79 Being silent means “hanging on like a bull-dog,”80 with one’s teeth 75

George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol II, 182-184. 76 Ibid., 184. 77 Ibid., 509. 78 Ibid., 28. 79 Ibid.

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shut. But, “in the rear of this damned craven life […] one pulls it down […] and has a triumph. (Mine hasn’t turned up yet.)”81 However, when he said to Garnett that his work was only a result of “outbursts of work” and that for that reason he would not mind casting The Rainbow into fire because it was “like bulbs in the ground, only shadowy flowers that must be beaten and sustained, and for another spring,”82 he did not know that he had predicted what would happen soon after he came back to England. Not only was his proverbial restlessness arrested then, with his passport taken away because of Frieda’s German heritage, but there were also darker prospects that it would no longer be possible for him to find a place that would offer constructive ways of being, especially in England. Lawrence was living through a war as if through a nightmare. Apart from the fact that he disagreed with war in general and, therefore, he could not personally take a side in it, he suffered frequent fits of cold and pneumonia that kept him in bed for long periods of time utterly dependent on Frieda and his friends that were better off and whom he addressed frequently for lodgings and other sustenance help. Because, in the whole course of the war, only a few of his shorter works were published, while the novel he so much relied on while in Italy, The Rainbow, was verboten. Because of its poor destiny, no one wanted to publish its sequel Women in Love (which was published only in 1920). Thus he felt being denied existence as a man of letters, which was the only existential form he could envisage his self in. This terrible share of silence influenced his works written immediately after the war, such as Aaron’s Rod (1922), Sea and Sardinia (1921), and Kangaroo (1923) so that they offer ample material for tracing a modernist’s authorial wonderings, and wanderings, while facing a choice, enforced from both the outside world, the culture that is denying, and the author’s own inner being, to the culture that is being denied, to stop speaking.83 Out of a whirl of emotions that oscillated from the zeal of selfconfidence over the silence of depression and the grudge of mockery and self-mockery, in the course of 1917 Lawrence composed letters full of apocalyptic imagery of the maddened world that were projected in the body of Women in Love:

80 George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol II, 29. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., 143. 83 Cf. Marija Krivokapiü, Vanja Vukiüeviü Gariü, “D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce: Authorial Wanderings and the Great War,” Filolog V, no. 10 (2014): 123129.

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The publishers say “it is too strong for an English public.” Poor darling English public, when it will go in for a little spiritual athletics. Are these Tommies, so tough and brown on the outside, are they really so pappy and unbaked inside, that they would faint and fall under a mere dose of Women in Love? Let me mix my metaphors thoroughly, let me put gravy-salt into the pudding, and pour vanilla essence over the beef, for the world is mad, yet won’t cry “Willow, Willow,” and drown themselves like Ophelia.84

The Mystery of David As soon as it was possible after the war, Lawrence left England for Italy. His response to Piazza della Signoria in Florence, where Michelangelo’s David stands, reads with unusual poignancy, especially because this symbol of resurgence appeared in front of the modernist troubled hermeneutic consciousness, intensified even more by the war. The notion that the old world has ended, providing no past for one to rely on, kept haunting Lawrence so that, unlike his contemporary travel writers, in the first place Henry James, the vital stimulus of Florence went far beyond the visual with him. As I argued in an earlier paper,85 Lawrence experienced the Renaissance as a state of mind and not as a temporal event. Accumulating unique pregnancy of expression, he dives into the spirit of Cinquecento that foresaw, “artistically, what was coming […] [t]he magnificent pride of life and perfection granted only to bud.”86 This suggests that art may only be a gesture towards being, an offer of possibilities, nothing final. While writing, Lawrence felt he was recreating himself anew, but then this elation would cease when he would become aware of the trap of the inherited language. In his ecstatic fashion of identification, he wonders how an artist is to achieve the suggested quenching consummation when the “ambiguous adolescent”87 always belongs to temps perdu, when the present is always already lost, having inherited knowledge of “loss even in the very moment of perfection.”88 84

James T. Boulton, The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 153. 85 Marija Kneževiü, “D. H. Lawrence: A Modernist in Florence,” in Il corpo, la fiamma, il desiderio. D. H. Lawrence, Firenze e la sfida di Lady Chatterley, eds. Serena Cenni and Nick Ceramella (Florence: Consiglio Regionale della Toscana, 2010): 141-158. 86 D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, edited with an introduction and notes by Simonetta de Filippis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999): 188. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid.

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Although written in an essayistic genre, these lines most poetically and, at the same time, most precisely reveal Lawrence’s discomfort with European historical and political reality and, in particular, with its literary scene. As he traced the representational impulse of the Renaissance, Lawrence artistically ventured into Aaron’s Rod, a novel with a pronouncedly experimental and experiential foundation. Embodying the shattered ideologies of post-war Europe, this novel assumes a picaresque form as it follows the protagonist’s quest for a naked reality of being. As he searches for constructive grounds of uttering a voice of his own, the protagonist is also voicing an indispensable need of his author to fence off some of his artistic cosmos from the lumbering inheritance, at the same time being aware that he cannot sever these resilient links. Namely, having rejected the identity of a married man, a father of two daughters, and a secretary for the Miners Union in Midlands, Aaron Sisson, an amateur flute player, feels his life may gain meaning if he abides by a writer, Rawdon Lilly, whom he blindly follows to Italy, where his surrender to the impulse of stripping himself to invisibility is eventually to be realised. He gradually loses his possessions one by one, turns his past into comedy and his present into past: “Everything life has to offer is known to us, couldn’t be known better, from the film,”89 deems Aaron. Therefore, although it is in Florence that Aaron feels he has reached “one of the world’s living centres,”90 his admiration of the Renaissance art is also followed by an awareness of loss as he realises that it is his persona as a worldview that creates meaning to his circumambient universe and that, therefore, his venture is impossible. Fighting the overwhelming suggestiveness of culture, Aaron often flees to the Tuscan countryside, where he imagines that cypresses speak to him like “visitants from an old, lost, lost world,” in which “time passed otherwise than time passes now […] where man had wonder of daemons around them.”91 As the annihilation of time must be followed by annihilation of (human, bodily and cognitive) form—in the image of the formidable demonic emergence—consequently, a hope of arriving to a truth within the humanly known universe must be rendered unreasonable. At this moment Aaron’s flute, which used to help him experience a symbolic connection with those greater realities, gets broken in one of countless street disorders in Florence of the time. Overcome by this sudden blow, Aaron loses the ability to care about anything, including 89

D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins, with an introduction and notes by Steven Vine (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995): 135. 90 Ibid., 212. 91 Ibid., 265.

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life and death. “[T]he loss for him was symbolistic,” we are told. “It chimed with something in his soul: the bomb, the smashed flute, the end,”92 that is, the smashed pivot of values against which to think his experience. The situation that shows Aaron throwing the broken flute in the river Arno, as instructed by Lilly, implies that rejection of the mechanical formatting of life may be an identification with silence, which turns to be an uncompromising reminder to the novel. The narrator, who is stuck with words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, scenes, settings, characters, and so on—that is, the material products and symbols of his culture—seems jealous at this moment. He simply cannot throw his narrative, his flute, into flowing water. Although its prompts may appear broken, the dissolution of his story would inevitably mean a cessation of his own existence. Therefore, he consciously and openly presents his protagonist as a creation of his own imagination, asserting that Aaron as a musician cannot express himself in words, and that his narrating function in this novel is more delicate than usual. Anachronous to the prominent modernist idea, Lawrence, the disputed author, makes his narrator assume an imposing mask, which the late twentieth century, in turn, preferred to understand as an undertaking at metafictional language. Although the narrator implies that the protagonist is inextricably connected with the persona of the narrator, being its undeniable conception, he is also aware that when rendered speechless and turned into an overwhelming impulse of getting rid of the many cloaks of convention, the narrative voice is determined by the protagonist in like measure. At this moment, the reality of the outside world merges with the reality of the novel, that is, what is conventionally taught to be reality stops being hierarchically superior to what is conventionally taught to be fantasy. Moreover, the products of imagination and “thought adventure”93 become as real as the circumambient universe for the artist, as they modify incessantly his experiential being. “Don’t grumble at me then, gentle reader,” the narrator, therefore, apologises, and swear at me that this damned fellow wasn’t half clever enough to think all these smart things, and realise all these fine-drawn-out subtleties. You are quite right, he wasn’t, yet it all resolved itself in him as I say, and it is for you to prove that it didn’t.94

92

D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, 285. Cf. Lawrence’s essay “On Being Man,” published in 1936. 94 Ibid., 164. 93

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Thus the beginning condition which Lawrence authored by this novel is a provocative conversation with the reader who must get involved in the complex life of a book and its unstoppable alterations of meanings that occur with every change of time and place in the reader’s situation.

Sardinia as a Challenge to Authority An especially subtle comprehension of the elusiveness and delicateness of the relation between the author, the narrator, the protagonist, and the reader, i.e. the being that narrates and the being that is being narrated, reveals itself within the multiplied retrospection of the book of travel Sea and Sardinia. While Lawrence defined travel and travel writing as “a fascinating act of self-discovery,”95 this book, describing that characteristic “arc from disillusion to disillusion,”96 also develops an ironic edge towards interpretative expectations. If all “the morning wonder of this world, in Homer’s days”97 declines into global reification, it is not surprising that the narrator’s ironical echoes around the places and people his traveller meets—including the traveller who turns into “a travelling menagerie”— turns into bitter self-irony and an authorial cul-de-sac, which in the honesty of his understanding of himself as an author Lawrence dared accept. More than any other work of his Sea and Sardinia seems to emerge out of Lawrence’s impulse to carnivalize his authority upon the text by dramatising his dependence on previous texts. Exploring thus the controversial task of an artist in words, he begins his narrative journey in Sicily, on the southernmost coast of the disappointing old continent, which, reverberating with frustrating associations to the past, makes the narrator grudge against his perceptual limitedness to linearity determined by linguistic signification. Looking at “that wicked witch” Etna, he becomes a witness that this “pivot of winds in lower heaven”98 was only vaguely glimpsed long ago by the early Greeks in a symbolic manner. Contemporary man, however, needs an experience of “metempsychosis” to realise the sacred connection between the two worlds. Yet, because he is “intelligent and soulless,”99 a deeper understanding is denied to him and he 95

D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, 123. Peter Preston, “A Little Dash to Sardinia: D. H. Lawrence and Departure,” unpublished lecture, Cagliari, Sardinia, 2006. 97 D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, with an introduction by Richard Aldington (London: Heinemann, 1976): 205. 98 Ibid., 8. 99 Ibid. 96

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remains with the devastating knowledge that he can only have “[f]oreground and a transcribed Etna,” and not “Etna, pedestal of heaven.”100 Repeating the dissolving impulse from the previously discussed work, the narrator realises that only if he went nowhere, would it be possible to escape “the circuit of civilization,”101 but, at the same time, he must continue to be a narrator and thus can only go to a place that is “like nowhere.”102 Sardinia appears to be close to nowhere because it has “no history, no date, no race,” that is, because some impersonal “they” say that “neither Romans nor Phoenicians, Greeks nor Arabs ever subdued Sardinia. It lies outside.”103 By admitting reliance on this inherited piece of knowledge, the book denies authority over travel, that is, a possibility of discovering something new, or true, at its very beginning. Thus Sea and Sardinia enables Lawrence-the author to silently celebrate this construction of triple illusion: while the traveller hopes that there is “Sardinia,” and the narrator uses this effort to ridicule the traveller, the author knows that the place, which is nowhere, exists only in his art and that, drily, his reader may delight in his rural vignettes while approaching the book as travel writing and not as the “fascinating act of selfdiscovery.” Insistence on movement—geographical, imaginative, and narrative— is, therefore, always frustrated, while the narrative is impatient, fragmented, and often stressfully personal and sincere. The narrator’s determination to stay within his own present thematically and emotionally inflicts numerous changes of perspective, as already discussed104 and makes Sea and Sardinia, especially when read in its linear flow, appear as a paradoxical statement. The same resolve is also manifested in the temporal blur of the actions performed separately by the traveller, the narrator, and the author, especially in the employment of the simple-present narrative tense105— most strikingly in the depiction of the “broken Roman tomb which lolls right over the garden track” and “does not fall on [the traveller] as [he] slip[s] under its massive tilt.”106 All the while, the narrator is well aware that every narration assumes retrospection and reordering both in time and 100

D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 8. Ibid., 9. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 Cf. Marija Kneževiü, “Changing Perspectives in Sea and Sardinia,” Etudes Lawrenciennes: A Plurality of Selves and Voices 39 (2009): 247-262. 105 Cf. also David Ellis, “Reading Lawrence: The Case of Sea and Sardinia,” D. H. Lawrence Review 10 (1977): 52-63. 106 D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 11. 101

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in the hierarchy of their significance. Therefore, when his traveller is anxious to transgress the border of culture and unite with “the naked sea”107 and final freedom, the narrator openly asserts that the text in front of the reader is a selection of his author, announcing: “[y]ou will look in vain this morning for the swarthy feline southerners”108—perhaps like those to be found in the author’s previous works, primarily Twilight in Italy (1916) and The Lost Girl. While his traveller is on the bus, the narrator slows the action providing a detailed picture of the landscape, but makes sure we understand it is “ancient, and classic—romantic.”109 As he assumes the existence of previous representations of the scenery, this historical perspective makes the esoteric romance surplus. The observer tries to abide by his momentary impressions of the visual phenomena, but when the lemon gardens appear like “pale, primrose-smouldering fires,”110 it is only to turn the image into an everyday banality by making a parodic antidemocratic remark that “America [will be] drinking them next summer.”111 Lawrence unreservedly exploits the openness of the travel writing genre, letting his narrator’s associations jump from Garibaldi over the pair of “odious” convicts to an implausible contemplation of a new law, which would “quickly” give the final word to “sensitive, living hearts: not abstract intellects,” and the case of Oscar Wilde in the Reading Gaol, which reminds the traveller that humanity is “strange and beside itself.”112 When their ship leaves Palermo and turns towards the “strange and unfamiliar and a little fearful”113 southwest, the traveller is left alone with “the magic gallop of elemental space,”114 which is like nowhere. Despite his elation, the unknown coasts soon acquire names. Accordingly, to a traveller who has read Virgil, Monte San Giuliano appears as a forgotten sacred mountain Eryx, even the intimidating Erycina ridens.115 The imaginative journey inescapably takes the form of historical remembrance and leads the traveller to the geographic adventures of the Middle Ages, so that he remembers the Crusaders visiting Trapani, which seems to be “waiting for them still.”116 Moreover, “[i]t has not much to do but wait,” 107

D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 11. Ibid., 12. 109 Ibid., 14. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid., 16. 113 Ibid., 49. 114 Ibid., 33. 115 Ibid., 40. 116 Ibid., 42. 108

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he says, adding “apparently,”117 which serves the narrator to stress his undeniable and ironic authority over the perceived and imaginary world. As was the case in the previous works in which the narrator’s raison d’être is implausible out of the palpable stimuli of an experiential world, it also happens here that although it takes over thirty hours to reach Sardinia by ship, the traveller feels he is moving “in flight” and Sardinia, to his disappointment, appears suddenly. This is probably the most significant moment in the book that witnesses the difference between these two narrative creations—the narrator and the protagonist/traveller, the first impatient to reach the new cost, the later enjoying the “flight” to disillusionment. Retaining the subdued expectations, the image is referred to in the past tense: “This was Sardinia, looming like fascinating shadows in mid-sea.”118 With its traces of Arab architecture, the “golden-looking” Cagliari becomes Jerusalem, surfacing from the depths of memory of the images in books, because it also reminds of “a town in a monkish, illuminated missal.”119 Moreover, the traveller “wonders how [Cagliari] ever got there” when, “like some vision, some memory,” it is also “something that has [paradoxically] passed away.”120 Playing with the projections of his traveller, the narrator safely asserts that the latter saw his “first peasant in costume.”121 At the same time, lamenting his lost chance of knighthood, the traveller adores the “beautiful maleness” which found, he is certain, “its right expression” (emphasis added) in the flashing blackand-white costume. His judgement is unquestionable because he remembers he has “worn it even: to have dreamed it. [...] It belongs in some way to something in [him].”122 A series of paradoxes follow, as the narrator asserts that the Sardinians represent proud humanity that is forever left in the Middle Ages. His idea may be justified by the historical fact that the fabulous geography (as Joseph Conrad named it123) of those times consisted of imaginary continents and fantastic regions for the traveller to explore, and which repeats the annoying notions of the previous works: not only that at the time of the imperialist militant geography there is nothing left to explore, but that also there is nowhere to go in an imaginative and artistic sense. Lawrence described his Sardinian 117

D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 42; original emphasis. Ibid., 53; original emphasis. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid., 59. 121 Ibid., 68. 122 Ibid., 69. 123 Cf. Con Coroneos, Space, Conrad, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 55-56. 118

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venture as “a little dash” and, therefore, as Preston argues,124 he couldn’t have made a closer contact with the natives. Therefore, his traveller’s perception of the “soft, blank darkness” of the natives’ eyes, “all velvet, with no imp looking out of them”125 is without any of the author’s reluctance left in the text to be read as an obvious fantasy. Moreover, as the traveller “searches into the gloom” (emphasis original) of those eyes, the narrator also must remember how “[s]ometimes Velasquez, and sometimes Goya gives us a suggestion of these large dark unlighted eyes. And they go with fine, fleecy black hair—almost as fine as fur.”126 The book thus provides yet another proof of the inevitability of imaginative influence and the fragility of the conception of authority. Therefore, while the spaciousness of the land and the absence of industrial corruption assist the traveller’s wish for lands in which “nothing [is] finished, nothing final. It is like liberty itself,”127 and the narrator searches for ontological and symbolic foundations of the book, the author has to fight two battles: not to order his being within the disciplined system of signs, on the one hand, and to let himself suffer the tension of the inarticulateness he is condemned to by contemporary criticism, on the other. Therefore, in the heart of the island and approximately halfway into the book, although the land gets “so primitive, so pagan, so strangely heathen and half-savage,”128 the narrator has to accept that “[i]t is all conscious. Wherever one is in Italy, either one is conscious of the present, or the medieval influences, or of the far, mysterious gods of the early Mediterranean.”129 The thought now knows its assimilating methods and imagination for a moment steps back: “And then—and then—there is a final feeling of sterility. It is all worked out. It is all known: connu, connu!”130 At this moment, contrary to the beginning of the journey, the return to the mainland can be realised only through a series of quick, seemingly disinterested, sketches. Passing by “the hopeless sprawling of the modern Rome,”131 the narrator articulates the notion of the “solvent property” of “the real active world” that restores the feeling of “uncertainty and momentaneity.”132 This notion that brings us back to the 124

Peter Preston, op. cit. D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 69. 126 Ibid., 74; original emphasis. 127 Ibid., 79. 128 Ibid., 131. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid. 131 Ibid., 189. 132 Ibid., original emphasis. 125

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real world does not belong to one particular individual, which becomes obvious when the narrator suddenly addresses the reader: “I hope, dear reader, you like the metaphor.”133 Hence, this text restores the feeling of uncertainty and shares with its reader its author’s dread of the solvent property of the discourse of the modern age. Finally, far from being ironical, Lawrence-the author relies on this rigorous dialogue not only to acknowledge the life of the text he and his reader have been mutually making, but also to face their joint responsibility in the accumulation of inheritance.

Responsibility of Authority over an Empty Space Feeling he must leave Europe to get past “this crisis of the world’s soul depression, into a new epoch,”134 Lawrence left Italy for Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) and then Australia, but all the approachable coasts emitted emptiness to a man nurtured by a disillusioning culture. Although, on his way to Ceylon, he was determined to think only “of palms and elephants and apes and peacocks,” and the “gorgeous and barbaric”135 colours of the east, he couldn’t rest primarily for the “black, dark, empty apathy”136 and general formlessness of Asia. Finally, this living “at the periphery of life”137 provoked in him feeling of uprootedness (“I feel I don’t belong and never should,”138) and an unexpected nostalgia for England—“after all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America—as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for”139 and he felt that looking for the foundation of life into foreign icons (Buddhist and Hindu, for example) was a betrayal of one’s own self. A feeling of being denied existence by the unrecognisable other prolonged throughout his sojourn not only in Ceylon, but also in the Australian west and among the Native American tribes of the Southwest, complicating Lawrence’s pioneering postcolonial voice.140

133

D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 189. James T. Boulton, Selected Letters, 245. 135 Ibid., 234. 136 Ibid., 237. 137 Ibid. 138 Ibid. 139 Ibid. 140 Cf. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, “Decolonizing Imagination: Lawrence in the 1920s,” in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fenrihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 67-86. 134

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Lawrence’s expectations concerning Australia in general were hazy. Leaving Ceylon, he reveals the reasons for his going there: “We are going to Australia—heaven knows why: because it will be cooler, and the sea is wide.”141 After the heat of Ceylon, Western Australia, in late autumn of the Southern Hemisphere, must have appeared “far more like the England for which he was nostalgic.”142 Finally, it seems what he vaguely hoped to find in Australia was the unexplored quality of the place that would allow an escape from the conflicts of the known world. Unexpectedly, as soon as he arrived in Perth, on 4 May 1922, he wrote that Australia seemed a most mysterious country to disappear into. When one has had enough of the world—when one doesn’t want to wrestle with one single thing, humanly […] just to drift away, and live and forget and expire […] It is a land where one can go out of life.143

He seemed fascinated with Australian difference, its being weird […] empty and untrodden. The minute the night begins to go down, even […] Sydney […] begins to feel unreal, as if it were only a daytime imagination, and in the night it did not exist. That is a queer sensation: as if the life here really had never entered in: as if it were just sprinkled over, and the land lay untouched.144

Yet, Lawrence’s letters show that the longer he stayed, the less he could cope with the very unburdening atmosphere that gradually turned into a sense of futility. What he seemed to most disagree with was commercial democracy, which he experienced as a mere materialisation of life, and which to him was equivalent to human hollowness. He says it was the most democratic place he had ever been to. And the more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else. You never knew anything so nothing, Nichts, Nulluds, niente, as the life here.145

For the bareness of uncommitted life, Lawrence declares that “one could never make a novel out of this people, they haven’t got any insides 141

James T. Boulton, Selected Letters, 239. John Worthen, The Life of an Outsider (London: Allen Lane, 2005): 266. 143 James T. Boulton, Selected Letters, 243. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid. 142

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to them, to write about.”146 By the end of May, his desire for Europe was growing so abruptly that he asks: “Is America awful like this?”147 The lack of mental and nervous tension makes this man of letters “an absolute foreigner,” feeling if he “lived in Australia for ever I should never open my mouth once to say one word that means anything.”148 By the beginning of July, Lawrence announces that he would be leaving Australia on 10 August149 and it seems that he started loving it as soon as he booked his passage. Now, the unbearable newness of lifestyle is replaced by the impenetrable oldness of the soil. He writes he loved it for “its weird, far-away natural beauty and its remote, almost coal-age pristine quality” that laid so inaccessibly far in the past, “[f]urther than Egypt.”150 Here Lawrence goes back to his best and most praised passages of a travel writer: I feel I slither on the edge of the gulf, reaching to grasp its atmosphere and spirit. It eludes me, and always would. It’s too far back. It seems to me that generation after generation must people it with ghosts, and catastrophes, water it with blood, before it could come alive with a new day of its own. Too far for me: strains my heart, reaching. But I am very glad to have glimpsed it.151

Recognising Australia’s unconquerable otherness, and relativising the old visual metaphor that what we see is what there really is, Lawrence exclaims: “But nobody has seen Australia yet: can’t be done. It isn’t visible.”152 However, almost at the same time Lawrence was busy writing a novel with an Australian setting, Kangaroo, which he describes as “a queer show.” Despite all the doubts, he seemed to be really inspired to finish it as quickly as August. This novel, in general, is “a progress report from a European in the middle of his travels,”153 but, as John Worthen argues, it is not just a journey across oceans, it is a travel in a political sense, too, as it considers the ways in which an individual might best belong to his society.154 Thus, Kangaroo gives ample material for studying the complex 146

James T. Boulton, Selected Letters, 243. Ibid., 242. 148 Ibid. 149 Ibid., 245. 150 Ibid., 246. 151 Ibid. 152 Ibid., original emphasis. 153 John Worthen, op. cit., 267. 154 Ibid. 147

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exchange between culture and narrative and the conception and conditions of authority within and over narrative. Heavily autobiographically founded, its protagonist Richard Lovatt Somers is an English writer who has (once again) decided to abandon Europe and rest isolated in the great, vacant, and an uncorrupted space of the newest continent. At the same time, being a man of letters, he is actually always oscillating to his need of connectedness. In the end, Somers’s feeling of inhabiting a virtual space of absence projects on every aspect of his discernible surrounding— geographical, social, political—and, finally, determines not only the contextual but also the narrative structure of the novel. As I have argued earlier,155 the novel originated from the author’s need to relate the threat the old world presented to his existence as an author and a creator of meaning. This time I want to enlarge the notion of authority I dealt with before to instances such as being and narrative. Namely, in the first place, Lawrence’s advanced experiment with imagery and form now questions various institutionalised authorities: 1. the authority of the coloniser who assumes the right to be identified on the basis of political power, 2. the authority of education, which assumes that the absence of its own productions in a place/space of the other (aesthetic or architectural object, for example156) means utter emptiness, 3. the authority of the intentional mind of the perceiver over the reality of the other, 4. the power of narrative to transfer being by creating realities and authorising meanings, and, finally, 5. the power of the writer to become an author. Therefore, the narrative logically leads the protagonist to a place he assumes would be a paradise—literally, a beach emptied of men where he struggles to create some order, that is, which he struggles to authorise. The first point of irony concerning the authority of the protagonist/observer actually is not so much in the fact that he is a stranger in the place as it lies in the fact that he authors a replica of the old world in the new/“empty” world. Hence, unlike Crusoe, who, having regained his strength of spirit, experiences no misgivings about the island he “rightfully” possesses and thus produces a story of re-creation, the chaos, deformation, and, finally, emptiness present in the new novel project the mental torture of the protagonist who finds it almost impossible to remake himself primarily because the past has deprived him of meaningful events, or words, which are sole confirmation of his existence. Therefore, while in 155

Marija Kneževiü, “The Power of Culture, the Authority of the Narrator, and the Law of the Narrative: D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo,” Etudes Lawrenciennes: Power, Creativity and the Law 40 (2010): 159-174. 156 Cf. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London-New York: Routledge, 1992): 201-202.

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a realistic novel the protagonist keeps his journal in a decent chronological order of the cultural map he never disputes, and which is apparently replicated into the narrative of the novel, Somers is a writer of essays and poetry, but having come to the “empty” Australia, where he hoped to evade the imprisonment of his culture, he writes nothing because, he feels, there is nothing to replicate. Moreover, the usurped post-war culture becomes a potent agent in the crash of the conventional narrative into fragmented and often, in the conventional novelistic sense, dysfunctional chapters. Further on, unlike Crusoe who claims his undoubted authority upon the tale and its power to create an illusion of reality, the new novel not only includes the third-person narrator, but also shows how those are always some other words that frustrate the verbalisation of Somers’s present experience and instigate the very problematisation of the concept of reality, whether they are written by some other writers (George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, for example) or by Somers himself. Moreover, the protagonist is frustrated by the narrator who is also frustrated by the author, who is now bitterly frustrated by his then author-function having constantly to defend himself as a serious writer. Corresponding to his author’s, Somers’s first perception of Australia is coloured with apprehension caused by unfamiliarity of appearances. Using the already exploited examples in the said paper I will now problematise the reality of Australia as it appears to Somers. It is “the vast, uninhabited land,”157 with “wonderful, new and unbreathed”158 air, which makes Australia seem “outside everything […] You just walk out of the world and into Australia. And it’s just somewhere else.”159 Walking into the bush, which is like entering “the nowhere,”160 Somers is nervous because of its “curiously unapproachable”161 mystery, its lifelessness, “manlessness,”162 its “unbreakable silence, loneliness.”163 It is “so phantom-like, so ghostly […] so deathly still.”164 His culturally conditioned gaze sees the landscape as “lurk[ing] just beyond the range of our white vision.”165 Unfamiliar quality of the contours styles the scenery 157 D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, with an introduction and notes by MacDonald Daly (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994): 13. 158 Ibid., 14. 159 Ibid., 203. 160 Ibid., 354. 161 Ibid., 14. 162 Ibid., 355. 163 Ibid., 177. 164 Ibid., 14. 165 Ibid., 77.

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of “worn down low and blunt” forms.166 In the next stage Australia takes an inverted shape, in which the sun slopes upwards and northwards, the land disappears “as if the day had been an illusion.” In the night the “unnatural West-Australian moon”167 appears in an upturned sky: “overhead the marvellous southern milky way was tilting uncomfortably to the south, instead of crossing the zenith; […] so that you feel all on one side if you look at it”168 (emphasis added). Finally, the observer feels his being is negated by this utter strangeness and he fears that he is “unlearn[ing] a lot” and becoming “clear of soul.”169 At this moment, the authority of the old world, which was questioned at the beginning, becomes a necessity if Somers is to uphold validity of his voice amid “this Englishness all crumbled out into formlessness and chaos.”170 His fear grows into an agony when he wishes the “empty shell” to be washed up by a “wave about fifty feet high round the whole coast of Australia[!]”171— forgetting that thus he himself is negating himself. The narrated being, as perceived by Somers, has an obvious impact on the narrative being, as the narrator lets this dissolution develop as long as the media of words can tolerate. Thus, exhausted with meaninglessness, the narrative gets drowned into an absurd repetitive musical pattern, as in the example when after spending a day rambling on the beach Somers can only think of how he is expected to go “home, to tea. The clicking of the clock. Tic-tac! Tic-tac! The clock. Home to tea. Just for clock-work’s sake.”172 However, the narrator realises that he cannot be emptied back by the protagonist whom he has fathered so far. So, when Somers exclaims that he’d “rather have the moon for motherland”173 than be gulfed in the politics and social stuff, the narrator pulls down his unobtrusive mask, contradicting: “[a] man must have some ideas about the things he’s up against, otherwise he’s a simple wash-out.”174 Knowing that his position would be rendered redundant in a world emptied of men, the narrator becomes impatient with his protagonist, switches his characterisation from indirect to direct, and turns Richard Lovatt Somers into “the stifling R.”175 166

D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, 76. Ibid., 14. 168 Ibid., 15; original emphasis. 169 Ibid., 213. 170 Ibid., 26. 171 Ibid. 172 Ibid., 333. 173 Ibid., 63. 174 Ibid., 22; original emphasis. 175 Ibid. 167

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If the character can be, to use Said’s term, molested with disillusionment and left with cosmic truths that erase self’s significance within the silent “[i]nsouciant soullessness. Eternal indifference […] timelessness and nowhere,”176 the narrative cannot avoid spatiality and temporality, certain readership, and certain form if only with an intention to break it. Dramatising its right over itself—because, as the novel says, “life starts with a new feeling and ends with a form”177—Kangaroo risks itself, including an almost absent subject, a virtual need of plot, and lack of a recognisable form,178 and calls itself “this gramophone of a novel.” Its playful tone and insistent digressions had profound meaning to a modern picaro who hoped it was possible to evade the ready-made forms and to emerge onto an unknown and narratively almost inaccessible ground of absence. Linguistically, as the novel says, “there is no Morse-code for interpreting the new life-prompting, and there will never be. It needs a new term of speech invented each time. A whole new concept of the universe gradually born, shedding the old concept.”179 And this novel does step onto this empty platform where the absurd schema does not count. But you know that Harriett is brushing her hair in the sun, and Kangaroo looking at huge sums of money on paper, and Jack fishing and Vicky flirting and Jazz bargaining, so what more do you want to know? We can’t be at the stretch of tension all the time, like the E string on a fiddle. If you don’t like the novel, don’t read it.

Conclusion From Lawrence’s unremitting grudge against industrial civilisation, over his poetic and descriptive passages about gender and sexual emancipation, over an idea to make a utopia and, moreover, instigate a whole cultural revolution, to his rapturous involvement in verbalising the importance of a new literary form and, finally, to the metafictional resentful voice we find in his post-war writings, Lawrence’s work is the best witness to Edward Said’s argument that the authority of writing is “nomadic: it is never in the same place, it is never always the centre, nor is it a sort of ontological capacity for originating every instance of sense.”180

176

D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, 334. Ibid., 98. 178 Cf. MacDonald Daly, “Introduction,” in D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, xv-xvi. 179 Ibid., 297. 180 Edward Said, op. cit., 23. 177

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As his protagonists search for a metaphysical truth the modernists still believed in, as his narrators protest the uniqueness of their voice, so Lawrence-the author wants his (implied) reader to acknowledge the power to him as a creator of difference. His novel Kangaroo, more than any other of his works so far, is the novel in which “nothing happens” in conventional terms—which becomes strikingly significant if we have in mind what Lawrence’s readers of the time would expect to happen in the work of the author of obscene novels—but disbanding of the layers of convention. Its achronological positioning of scenes, additionally recomposed by pasting newspaper clips over its fragile structure, its problematisation of and open, however illogical, trust to the unreliable memory as the only true possession of a human being, only seemingly paradoxically keep the authority of its creator over this difference that postmodernity and (post)postrealism now take for granted.

Works Cited Boulton, James T., ed. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, September 1901-May 1913. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Boulton, James T., ed. The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Coroneos, Con. Space, Conrad, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Ellis, David. “Reading Lawrence: The Case of Sea and Sardinia. ” D. H. Lawrence Review 10 (1977): 52-63. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. “Decolonizing Imagination: Lawrence in the 1920s.” In The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, edited by Anne Fenrihough, 67-86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Krivokapiü, Marija, Vanja Vukiüeviü Gariü. “D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce: Authorial Wandering and the Great War.” Filolog V, no. 10 (2014): 123-129. Kneževiü, Marija. “Changing Perspectives in Sea and Sardinia.” Etudes Lawrenciennes: A Plurality of Selves and Voices 39 (2009): 247-262. —. “The Power of Culture, the Authority of the Narrator, and the Law of the Narrative: D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo.” Etudes Lawrenciennes: Power, Creativity and the Law 40 (2010): 159-174. —. “D. H. Lawrence: A Modernist in Florence.” In Il corpo, la fiamma, il desiderio. D. H. Lawrence, Firenze e la sfida di Lady Chatterley, edited by Serena Cenni and Nick Ceramella, 141-158. Florence: Consiglio Regionale della Toscana, 2010.

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—. “Facing the Other to Death.” Folia Linguistica et Litteraria 1-2 (2010): 51-66. Lawrence, D. H. Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose Works of D. H. Lawrence. Edited with an introduction by Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore. London: Heinemann, 1936. —. Study of Thomas Hardy and Introduction to These Paintings. Edited with an introduction by J. V. Davies. London: Heinemann, 1973. —. Aaron’s Rod. Edited by Mara Kalnins, with an introduction and notes by Steven Vine. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995. —. Kangaroo. Edited by Bruce Steele, with an introduction and notes by MacDonald Daly. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994. —. Sea and Sardinia, with an introduction by Richard Aldington. London: Heinemann, 1976. —. Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays. Edited and with an introduction and notes by Simonetta de Filippis. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Preston, Peter. “A Little Dash to Sardinia: D. H. Lawrence and Departure.” Unpublished lecture, Cagliari, Sardinia, 2006. Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985 (first published 1975). Worthen, John. The Life of an Outsider. London: Allen Lane, 2005. Zytaruk, George J. and James T. Boulton. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Vol II, June 1913-October 1916. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

THE “IDEA” OF THE SELF: NARRATED IDENTITIES IN D. H. LAWRENCE’S SHORT FICTION MARTIN ŠTEFL

The phenomenon of narration, as it has been argued by Paul Ricoeur, Charles Taylor and many others, is closely connected to what is traditionally referred to as “subject” or the “Self.” The “definition” of these notions, provided by the narrative-identity theories, may in case of a “narrative identity” be understood as “a considerable advance over accounts based on substance, or bodily continuity, or memory”1 which rely on a roughly stable, fixed and “unproblematic” definition of the Self. As it is going to be demonstrated, these narratives of “human” identity, though mainly connected with the post-modern thought, play an important role within the work of D. H. Lawrence, an author who is typically understood as a member of the modernist tradition. This claim seems to be especially plausible for Lawrence’s “theories” of the Self, the phenomena of polarity and Strife and, perhaps most importantly, with his theory of the “Ideal.” This essay attempts to examine these specific moments of Lawrence’s thought by using the general background provided by the narrative-identity theories and capture a special case of a Lawrentian “character in creation.” Expanding on this, it is going to be argued that the “synthetic activity”2 of narrating the Self is in Lawrence’s fiction closely connected with the individual’s ability to “narrate reality.” This ability to narrate, i.e. to subjectively structure and organise an aggregate of facts to fit one’s ideas or desires, becomes for Lawrence closely connected with an idea of social interaction understood as a dynamic interaction of competing “subjective epistemologies.” This understanding further illustrates how the subject’s treatment of other subjects, things and places fundamentally “changes

1

David Wood, “Introduction: Interpreting Narrative,” Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood (London and New York: Routledge, 1991): 4. 2 Paul Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” Narrative and Interpretation, 22.

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them” by interpreting them against their will or authority by incorporating them into a specific narrative framework. Drawing on the idea of ontology understood as “the fundamental engagement with the world” and representing “a certain sort of fundamental inquiry into place as that in which, to use Heideggerian phrase, human being-in-the-world is grounded,”3 further attention is going to be paid to the phenomenon of knowledge functioning as a means to (re)enforce one’s own ontological status as based on an interaction with one’s environment. Importantly, with the “narrative [becoming] a cognitive process that gives meaning to temporal events by identifying them as parts of plot,”4 the epistemological implications of these theories resonate in Lawrence’s text with Nietzschean echoes. Narrative identity comes here very close to Nietzsche’s claim that our thought is based on “fitting new material into old schemes, making equal what is new,”5 and thereby contributes to the idea that “what we think of as ‘knowledge,’ whether of the world around us or of ourselves, is not a neutral reflection of things but an interested interpretation of them.”6 The idea that the synthetic activity of the narrative process unites “the events or incidents [of our life] which are multiple and the story, which is unified and complete,”7 becomes the very condition of the existence of the Self as a unified whole (i.e. the condition of the Self-identity as such) in many of D. H. Lawrence’s stories. The struggle against the so-called “dissolution of the narrative unity of [one’s] Self-concept”8 and the resulting psychological9 and ontological “identity-crisis,” represent the cornerstone of D. H. Lawrence’s fiction at least since the England, My England collection. Claiming that “the world ought to be a place of fierce 3

J. E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 15. 4 Donald E. Polkinghorne, “Narrative and Self-Concept,” Journal of Narrative and Life History 1, no. 2-3 (1991): 136. 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1968) 6 Colin Milton, Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study of Influence (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987): 30. 7 Paul Ricoeur, op. cit., 21. 8 Donald E. Polkinghorne, op. cit., 150. 9 As Donald E. Polkinghorne argues in his paper “Narrative and Self-Concept”: “One of the reasons people seek psychotherapeutic assistance is the feeling of despair that accompanies the dissolution of their narrative unity with their selfconcept. The reconstruction of a coherent self-narrative has been held as a therapeutic goal since Freud’s inaugurations of psychoanalysis.” Polkinghorne, op. cit., 150.

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discord and intermittent harmonies: which it is,”10 Lawrence presents our everyday reality as a platform where individual narratives and narrativeidentities become juxtaposed against each other, confronted and forced to incorporate one another. This fully illustrates the fact that “[a]lthough selfnarratives are possessed by individuals, their genesis and sustenance may be viewed as fundamentally social.”11 As it will be argued, this “exposure to a milieu of multiple narratives”12 becomes in Lawrence’s text, perhaps paradoxically, a conditio sine qua non of individual existence. Paradoxically, however, this “condition” of the existence of the Self constantly threatens to destroy it.13 With the discussion based on a genuinely Lawrentian concept of the “Self,” let us briefly reconstruct the basics of Lawrence’s psychology.14 Human psyche can be, in Lawrence’s account, schematised as consisting of two fundamental impulses, drives, or wills: (a) the expansive will-todifferentiation and maximum of being, and (b) will-to-dissolution or an unconscious longing to restore its original timeless union with Nature.15 This longing (b), though remaining “suppressed” and/or “unconscious,” is yet active behind the conscious intellect as an instinctive “longing for union.” Against this “longing for union,” however, there works (a) the “will-to-differentiation.” This will (a) can be at the same time understood as a tendency towards “the maximum of being,” and is in certain contexts 10

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Penguin Books, 1977): 152. 11 Kenneth J. Gergen, Mary M. Gergen, “Narratives of the Self,” Studies in Social Identity (New York: Preager, 1983), 256. 12 Ibid., 263. 13 A similar “paradox” is as far as Lawrence is concerned connected with the concept of The Crown and the emblematic unicorn and lion fight. Here, the perpetual fight also becomes a condition for a productive existence. A similar account can be found in other important essays such as The Study of Thomas Hardy (1914), The Reality of Peace (1917). Possibly the earliest account of the productive role of strife is to be found in Lawrence’s travel book Twilight in Italy, published 1916, however written in the years 1912-1913. See especially the chapter “The Lemon Gardens.” 14 For a more detailed, diachronic account of Lawrence’s psychology see for example, Daniel Schneider’s D. H. Lawrence, Artist as a Psychologist (Kansas, University of Kansas Press, 1984) as well as his excellent essay ‘Schopenhauer and the Development of D. H. Lawrence’s Psychology.’(South Atlantic Review 48, no. 1 (1983): 1-19, accessed October 14, 2010, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3199509). 15 For the sake of clarity and to avoid certain terminological inconsistencies of Lawrence’s texts, in the course of the essay these two drives are going to be referred to as (a) and (b).

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to be identified with the Nietzschean concept of the “will-to-power.” These two forces work throughout human life as contradictory impulses, whose tension creates a metaphysical “gap” which becomes a sort of metaphysical condition for the life of an individual. Since these forces are typically understood as pulses, as “a systole-diastole rhythm of the universe,” the whole of man’s life can be understood as constant balancing and disbalancing of these two opposing powers—a creative tension. In Lawrence’s own words: There is in me the great desire of creation and the great desire of dissolution. Perhaps these two are pure equivalents. Perhaps the decay of autumn purely balances the putting forth of spring. Certainly the two are necessary each to the other; they are the systole-diastole of the physical universe. [...] There is in me the desire of creation and the desire of dissolution.16

Seeing the Self being thus torn apart, it is no wonder that the quintessential quality of the Self is its “ontological insecurity.”17 Perhaps this is the reason why it is so common for characters in Lawrence’s short stories (and novels) to experience some type of disharmony of these forces. This disharmony manifests itself with (a) the character’s tendency towards expansive differentiation, individuation, and assimilation of others (i.e. the centrifugal/creative mode) on the one hand, or, on the other hand, (b) the tendency of the Self towards dissolution, towards becoming one with the universal Will (Nature or Cosmos) or some other will and creating a greater timeless and unrelated whole. As a typical illustration of the above-sketched theoretical background, let us consider Lawrence’s famous story “The Shades of Spring.” Here, a seemingly banal event of a young man returning from his studies to the farm where he grew up evolves into a bizarre story of self-deception and idealisation. The problem of the main character, Syson, lies in his tendency to idealise his former life and believe it to be fixed and unchanging in the time of his absence. This is especially true for his childhood sweetheart Hilda, whom Syson expects to wait for him unspoiled and unchanged while he is gone. As Anna Grmelová concisely points out in her study The Worlds of D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction: 16

D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix I, II: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978): 678. 17 Cf. D. J. Kleinbard, “D. H. Lawrence and Ontological Insecurity,” Modern Language Association 89, no. 1 (1974): 154-163, accessed October 14, 2010, http://www.jstor.org/stable/461678.1974.

58

The “Idea” of the Self his [Syson’s] belief that nothing has changed in the meantime is contradicted early in the story when a handsome young gamekeeper blocks his way, frustrating Syson’s assumptions of idyllic timelessness,

and is soon accompanied by the bitter disillusionment Syson experiences [...] when it is brought home to him that Hilda not only radically differs from his construction of her but that she rejects his mythical version of their former relationship.18

This mythical idealisation of reality, which might be understood as a process of knowledge organisation towards some extra-added end, takes place in a strange pulsation. Syson in turns accepts and rejects, balances and disbalances, the validity of the narrative muster he prepared prior to his return to the farm. Syson’s disillusionment not only reveals the true state of his native landscape, but, more importantly, reveals much of Syson’s behaviour as foolish, completely ideal-driven and not corresponding to the objective reality of his being (him being married, his former lover Hilda being engaged to a young gamekeeper, his friends no longer being his friends, etc.). The following extract from the story demonstrates the way Syson’s “will” to narrate his surroundings turns into a mechanical principle, an “interested interpretation” of reality: She [Hilda] turned to the window. He noticed the fine, fair down on her cheek and her upper lip, and her soft white neck, like the throat of a nettle flower, and her fore-arms, bright as newly blanched kernels. He was looking at her with new eyes, and she was a different person to him. He did not know her. But he could regard her objectively now. “Shall we go out,” she asked. “Yes!” he answered. But the predominant emotion, that troubled the excitement and perplexity of his heart, was fear, fear of that which he saw. There was about her the same manner, the same intonation in her voice, now as then, but she was not what he had known her to be. He knew quite well what she had been for him. And gradually he was realising that she was something quite other, and always had been. [...] The old illusion gone, they were strangers, crude and entire.19

In this extract, it is possible to observe how the idealised image of Hilda becomes something perverting the objective reality of her own existence. Seeing Hilda with “new eyes,” Syson is able to realise that his 18 Anna Grmelová, The Worlds of D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction (Prague: Karolinum, 2001): 85-86. 19 D. H. Lawrence, Selected Stories (London: Penguin Classics, 2007): 285.

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“understanding” of reality was conditioned by a self-deceptive idealised narrative. Eventually he realises that “Hilda is and always has been something else,” something radically different from his construction of her. The distinction between “being” and “being something to someone,” crucial for Lawrence as it is, becomes symbolically present in Syson’s “epiphany.” Syson realises his “knowledge” is a “self and ideal motivated” interpretation of reality organised into a whole coherent narrative. Consistent with the above-presented theoretical background, this scene and the general mood of the story bear significant traces of a competitive, fundamentally Nietzschean philosophy, which, as Colin Milton20 puts it, understands our perception as [being] part of our apparatus of knowledge which has developed as an instrument of the ruling urges, it follows that our awareness of the world is shaped by impulses currently dominant in us and that any significant change in the power relations of the self will find corresponding change in the nature of the “reality” we experience.

Since [m]ore than one plot can provide a meaningful constellation and integration for the same set of events, and different organisations change the meaning of individual events as their roles are reinterpreted according to functions in a particular plot,21

the “experienced reality” of the farm supplies both narratives with the objective set of events and becomes the locus of the struggle between Syson’s and Hilda’s competing narratives. This being said, it is very interesting to observe how this seemingly inert set of facts becomes appropriated and organised into the two mutually exclusive narrative accounts of reality. To develop this idea a little more, let us return to the text and briefly recapture the “narrative topology” of the place from Syson’s perspective. At the beginning of the story, Syson is met “crossing a small field to the wood” feeling “extraordinarily glad” (his narrative-illusion in full strength). On a muddy wood-path a gamekeeper undermines his confidence and makes him feel irritated by asking his name. After a while, at a plum tree, the reader (with entangled emotions) meets Syson with his spirits again rising. In the orchard at the back of the house Syson’s 20 21

Colin Milton, op. cit., 122. Donald E. Polkinghorne, op. cit., 142.

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optimism reaches its maximum. However, later, during the dinner in the kitchen, Syson feels “uneasy and unfamiliar,” only to go to the parlour where the “old glamour [catches] him again.” Yet again, after Hilda joins him in the parlour, the spell definitely shatters and he realises the fallacy of his vision. Symptomatically, the story turns into a Nietzschean struggle for power—a struggle for the primacy of cognition, a struggle for the possibility of interpreting/narrating reality, of narrating places. Syson’s visit in the parlour is followed by a walk to the nearby woods with Hilda. The former couple visits a small hut with a hidden apartment where Hilda and her recent lover meet. Allowing Syson to peep into such a place stands for the last scene in what might be called a guided deconstruction-tour through the intimate places of Syson’s fictive version of reality, which is at the same time the final stage in an ironic deconstruction of Syson’s “selfcreated being.” The above-analysed scene may be described in various ways: on the fundamental level, it is a struggle for power between two individuals. This struggle affects the way individuals “em-plot” particular facts in the structure of their narrative accounts of reality. As part of this, different places and/or objects in the farm (i.e. individual facts) are ascribed their “value” based on their contribution to individual narratives. In addition to this, the competitive nature of the struggle between individuals introduces a very interesting moment of adaptability, of capacity for an interactive actualisation of the individual narrative scheme. Relevantly to our discussion of the formative role of identity-narratives, Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary M. Gergen present in their paper “Narratives of the Self” an interesting remark which deals with the difference between the narrative theories and the so-called “rule-role and/or dramaturgical theories.” According to these theories: [A]n individual is said to consult or interrogate the relevant rule, role prescription, ritual understanding, or script for indications of proper or appropriate conduct. The individual thus carries with him or her a psychological template relevant to interaction sequences, and assesses the propriety of his or her behaviour in accord with the template. In contrast, we view the self-narrative as possessing no inherent directive capabilities. Rather, it may be viewed as a construction undergoing continuous alternation as interaction progresses. The individual in this case does not consult the narration for information. Rather, the narration is a linguistic implement constructed and reconstructed by people in relationships, and employed in relationships to sustain, enhance, or impede various actions.22

22

Kenneth J. Gergen, Mary M. Gergen, op. cit., 256.

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As it was argued above, Syson’s major fault, which eventually leads to the collapse of his narrative, is his inability to adapt this narrative to the changes in real situations, so to say, “on the side of the facts.” This inability leads to his eventual failure to successfully accommodate the changed reality of the farm into an updated version of his narrative. This fundamental lack of adaptability, which is fundamentally Nietzschean as much as Darwinian in its nature, points towards a very important motive in Lawrence’s thought: the notion of the “Ideal.” D. H. Lawrence developed his theory of the ideal and its negative effects first in Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious. In this text he gives the following definition of the whole concept: By idealism we understand the motivizing of the great affective sources by ideas mentally derived. As for example the incest motive which is first and foremost a logical deduction made by human reason, even if unconsciously made, and secondly is introduced into the affective passional sphere, where it now proceeds to serve as a principle for action. This motivizing of the passional sphere from the ideal is the final peril of human consciousness. It is the death of all spontaneous, creative life, and the substituting of mechanical principle. It is obvious that the ideal becomes mechanical principle, if it be applied to the affective soul as a fixed motive. An ideal established in control of the passionate soul is no more and no less than a supreme machine-principle. And a machine, as we know is the active unit of material world. Thus we see how it is that in the end pure idealism is identical with pure materialism, and the most ideal peoples are the most completely material. Ideal and material are identical. The ideal is but the god in the machine—the little fixed, machine-principle which works the human psyche automatically.23

Being the “little fixed, machine-principle which works the human psyche automatically,” the “Ideal,” in Lawrence’s understanding, becomes similar to a rule/role prescription template as described in the abovequoted extract from the essay by Kenneth and Merry Gergen. Therefore, it is possible to introduce an interpretation of Lawrence’s term “Idea” understood as an extreme or hypertrophied form of a personal narrative. Such a “narrative,” losing all of its adaptive and self-actuating faculties, transforms itself into the above-described “fixed behaviour-template”—a “mechanical principle [...] applied to the affective soul as a fixed motive.” Considering this, it is possible to appreciate Hilda’s refusal to be reduced to a particle in the mechanism of Syson’s construct of herself and 23

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious/Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975): 210.

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thereby profoundly transcend the story-of-herself. It is Hilda, who, throughout the story, keeps on emphasising her independent and individual existence on account of Syson’s idealistic construct and thereby refuses to join the line of material objects and places invaded by Syson’s fetishist momentum of idealised narrative. The resistance she gives lifts her above her former lover’s mental objectifications—not accepting one’s epistemology here becomes a question of crucial ontological importance. Such a supreme manifestation of the Nietzschean principle of the “will to power” becomes almost palpable in many of Lawrence’s stories, especially, his later ones. According to Lawrence, the world is full of competing individual wills and perspectives whose encounter devours the weak and promotes the strong. The process of “creating knowledge” thus becomes a dynamic process of an encounter, a strife, which creates meaning from an active differentiation and defamiliarisation, working against the stabilising processes of idealisation. In this respect, Lawrence’s idea of the productive tension, or the so-called “strife,” as it is perhaps most famously presented in Lawrence’s essays The Crown and The Twilight in Italy, resonates with Ricoeur’s conception of the narrative identity continually “making and unmaking itself.”24 For Lawrence, however, this continual “making and unmaking,” this continual “construction and reconstruction,” becomes at the same time the very condition of thought which guarantees that an individual narrative does not collapse into an ideal-driven self-narration. It was already pointed out that the phenomena of polarity and strife play both productive and potentially destructive roles. On the one hand, the confrontation of individual narratives is the only way that gives them at least some degree of relevance (i.e. their relevance as a means of reflecting the “objective” world). This “objectivity” is achieved by forcing individuals to actualise and/or verify their narratives in a confrontation with the “narrative of the other” and thereby prevent this from turning into a static Ideal-driven behaviour. On the other hand, by their potential to destroy one’s vital narrative, polarity and strife carry within themselves a potential to destroy the self-integrity of an individual subject. Knowledge in this respect destabilises the distinction between the fields of the ontological and the epistemological. Importantly, the activity or eventual passivity appears here as another constitutive distinction in Lawrence’s theory of knowledge. As Lawrence25

24 25

Paul Ricoeur, op. cit., 249. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 84.

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states in Studies in Classic American Literature, the active and creative approach which distinguishes life, while ever the soul remains alive […] is the moulder and not the moulded. It is the souls of the living men that subtly impregnate stones, houses, mountains, continents, and give these their subtlest form. People only subject to stones after having lost their integral souls.

The above-quoted distinction between the “moulder” and the “moulded,” or in other words, the “narrated” and the “narrator,” represents the embodiment of the typical Lawrentian “conflict of individual wills,” or—individual “ideal-driven” narratives. The activity of an individual becomes a condition of his existence not only because it provides motivation for his expansive differentiation and creative life as such, but also because (only) by “being expansive” an individual himself becomes a “force” that resists others in their expansion, which, if unchecked, would result into a solipsistic Ideal-based existence. This resistance, thus becomes the condition for the existence of the productive strife, as Lawrence metaphorically puts it: What then, if a man come to me with a sword, to kill me, and I do not resist him, but suffer his sword and the death from his sword, what am I? [...] Do I know a consummation in the Infinite, I, the prey, beyond the tiger who devours me? By my non-resistance I have robbed him of his consummation. For a tiger knows no consummation unless he kill a violated and struggling prey. There is no consummation merely for the butcher, nor for a hyena. I can rob the tiger of his ecstasy, his consummation, his very raison d’être, by my non-resistance.26

D. H. Lawrence further develops the notion of the self-narrative as a stabilising factor of one’s own identity in another famous short story, “England, My England!” The main character and, at the same time, the most profound “self-narrator” in this particularly ironic story is Egbert. Egbert is a typical Lawrentian pseudo-aristocratic antihero who lives with his wife Winifred and his children separated in a country-house surrounded by a garden. This garden plays a vital role in the story. The reason for this is that its cultivation becomes for Egbert a specific way of expressing his life attitude, his preferred organisation of the facts of the world—in other words—his narrative. Having in mind that a “place is one in which both subject and object, both self-and-world are pressed 26

D. H. Lawrence, The Collected Letters of David Herbert Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore (London: Heinemann, 1965): 38.

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together,”27 it may be argued that the story gives a picture of a process of imprinting one’s life attitude into a place (the garden) that would later work as a battery creating a dynamic two-way subject-object relationship and become a self-supporting exterior locus of one’s identity, one’s narrative. Developing a very similar set of motives as in “The Shades of Spring,” the act of accommodating his environment is crucial for preserving Egbert’s existence in the ideal and fixed state of inert vacuum. The garden, if perfected, would serve as a parallel mechanism to support Egbert’s psychological integrity. At the same time, the failure to create a perfect “nest-place” for his identity would mean losing, as it is the case in the story, where the “death” of Egbert’s identity is soon afterwards followed by the physical one. In a playful, but at the same time painfully sarcastic tone, Lawrence draws a picture of the impossibility to maintain such an idealised dreamlore forever. As a token of this, the first part of the story offers a picture of Egbert’s “original effort to create an oasis of horticultural cultivation in the middle of wilderness”28 by cultivating his garden. Given the specific character of Lawrence’s psychology, this effort can readily be described as a manifestation of the expansive will-to-differentiation. It represents an attempt to create a stable Ideal-reservoir, an Elysium to protect Egbert’s idealised vision of existence and keep himself beyond the reach of mundane concerns such as raising money, taking proper care of his children, his wife, etc. To put this differently: creating a fixed place, where no mundane concerns would affect him, Egbert strives to create an a-temporal idealistic narrative that shuns him away from the effects of polarity and strife (i.e. from a confrontation with other narratives) with all the above-discussed consequences. However, this situation, in turn, threatens to result in a lack of demand for Egbert to develop what might be called a “reflexive diachronic identity,”29 that is, a Self-concept capable of any reflection and/or development. Egbert’s “attitude” inevitably causes a conflict between Egbert and his wife Winifred and especially between him and Winfred’s father. As Anna Grmelová fittingly notes, Egbert’s fault [...] is consequently his illusion of the possibility of timeless, effortless existence, disregarding problems (i.e. disregarding the polarity and strife which have now become Lawrence’s key concepts).30 27

J. E. Malpas, op. cit., 39. Anna Grmelová, op. cit., 112. 29 Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary M. Gergen, op. cit., 256. 30 Anna Grmelová, op. cit., 112. 28

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Analogically to the situation in “The Shades of Spring,” the description of Egbert’s struggle to preserve the plausibility of his narrative and his failure to keep the balance between “what is” and what “ought to be,” to use Paul Ricoeur’s terminology here, sets the referential framework to the whole story. This situation becomes asserted from the very beginning of the story: The dream was still stronger than the reality. In the dream he [Egbert] was at home on a hot summer afternoon, working on the edge of the common. [...] He was troubled because he could not get the path straight. He had set up his sticks, and taken the sights between the big pine-trees, but for some unknown reason everything was wrong. He looked again, strained and anxious, through the strong, shadowy pine-trees as through a doorway, at the green garden-path rising from the log bridge between sunlit flowers.31

The image of Egbert creating his garden is indeed an image of a man synthesising the “multiplicity of the objects constituting his environment” into a unity or a whole “with a doorway of pine-trees” to save him from the narration of the other, i.e. from reality and other conflicting interpretations of it: balanced like a nest in a tree, this hollow home, always full of peace, always under heaven only. It had no context, no relation with the world; it held its cup under heaven alone and was filled for ever with piece and sunshine and loveliness.32

In the course of this paper, an attempt has been made to establish the identity of an individual subject, individual Self, based on a narrative which would integrate a more or less dispersed, fragmented and disconnected succession of facts and transform these into a “meaningful” configuration of an identity-supporting narrative. A similar situation can be found in one of Lawrence’s later stories in which a factual dissolution of his living-place marks the symbolic dissolution of the main protagonist’s narrative identity. Having in mind that “to experience life as a meaningful whole, one must maintain and preserve the self against internal dissolution into its component parts,”33 it is possible to consider the story titled “The Man Who Loved Islands” as a story of a man who bought an island and (literally) dissolved with it—both physically and psychically. 31

D. H. Lawrence, Selected Stories, 165. Ibid., 167. 33 Donald E. Polkinghorne, op. cit., 145. 32

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In an ironic manner, “The Man Who Loved Islands” reintroduces the theme of a man who attempts to reinforce the individual and unrelated nature of his existence (desires for creation) by narrating his “spot on the earth” and fashioning it to protect the narrative of his Self. From this perspective, the story can be understood as a sequel to stories like “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” “Shadow in the Rose Garden” or the already discussed stories “Shades of Spring” and “England, My England.” Rephrasing the topic of these in a lucid manner of a bizarre symbolic allegory, the story once more stresses the inherent failure of the Lawrentian over-idealised narrative. As it was already suggested, “The Man Who Loved Islands” is in fact a story of a man who bought an island and (literally) dissolved with it. The text consists of two parts: the first part in which the hero, now entitling himself as the island “Master” acquires an island “which [would hold] one egg, and one only. This egg being the islander himself.”34 The very opening paragraph of the story neatly sums up the content and the ironic undertone of the whole story. There was a man who loved islands. He was born on one, but it didn’t suit him, as there were too many people on it, besides himself. He wanted an island all of his own: not necessarily to be alone on it, but to make it a world of his own. An island, if it is big enough, is no better than a continent. It has to be really quite small, before it feels like an island; and this story will show how tiny it has to be, before you can presume to fill it with your own personality.35

The openly sarcastic tone of the very first sentences, which briefly but fittingly summarise and foretell the content of the story, is comparable to the tone of the opening lines of the discussed “England, My England.” Both openings share a visibly sardonic description of the futility of human endeavour to create and construct a one-sided over-idealised myth of reality in the face of others (in the former story) or in the face of Nature (in the case of the latter). Generally speaking, such cases represent for Lawrence a mockery of the human “idea” that an individual is able to be the one and only “Master” of himself, of the “narrative” of himself, of others, as well as of the whole Universe. The critique of the futility of this type of human undertaking, which grows in intensity in Lawrence’s later stories, is imprinted in the following half-mocking lines:

34 35

D. H. Lawrence, Selected Stories, 286. Ibid.

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Why should it not be the Happy Isle at last? Why not the last isle of the Hesperides, the perfect place, all filled with his own, gracious, blossom-like spirit? A minute world of pure perfection, made by man, himself.36 .

It is very interesting to observe that a number of extracts from Lawrence’s texts contain a recurrent image of a “man filling a place with his own personality.” This metaphor becomes a perfect embodiment of an extreme case of the tendency of the Self towards the maximal promotion of one’s individual existence. This tendency can be, once again, interpreted as a narrative strategy whose main aim is to subsume all things under one interpretative paradigm and turn the multiplicity of facts under one and only one Self-stabilising master-narrative. As it was argued above, being provided with a sufficient counterbalance to a dynamic narrative capable of self-actualisation, the maximal promotion of the self paradoxically becomes necessary for human existence in a state of “equilibrium between me and the rest of the universe,”37 which also means in equilibrium between the “day and night self, ideal and the non-ideal.”38 However, disregarding the “positive effects” of polarity and strife, the idealised “master narrative” becomes a mechanical template obscuring the possibility of any “objective” evaluation of reality. Deprived of the “verification of the other,” unexposed to “the milieu of multiple narratives,” the master narrative becomes a cyclical description of the Self by the Self, a tautological “private language.” As Lawrence has it, “tainting” of “filling” everything with the products of the “Self.” Making no difference between the Self and the outside world of facts, the idealised master narrative confuses the maker and the product, as Lawrence most fittingly puts it in his poem “New Heaven and Earth”: I was so weary of the world I was so sick of it everything was tainted with myself, skies, trees, flowers, birds, water, people, houses, streets, vehicles, machines, nations, armies, war, peace-talking, work, recreation, governing, anarchy, it was all tainted with myself, I knew it all to start with because it was all myself.

36

D. H. Lawrence, Selected Stories, 289. D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix I, II: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, 433. 38 Daniel Schneider, D. H. Lawrence: The Artist as Psychologist (Kansas: Kansas University Press, 1984): 15. 37

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The “Idea” of the Self When I gathered flowers, I knew it was myself plucking my own flowering. When I went in a train, I knew it was myself travelling by my own invention. When I heard the cannon of the war, I listened with my own ears to my own destruction. When I saw the torn dead, I knew it was my own torn dead body. It was all me, I had done it all in my own flesh. I shall never forget the maniacal horror of it all in the end when everything was me, I knew it all already, I anticipated it all in my soul because I was the author and the result I was the God and the creation at once;39

Returning to the “Man Who Loved Islands,” its first part, corresponding to the (a) desire for creation, may be read as a happy-time in which the islander is able to maintain his ideal (his “Happy Isle”) and thereby nourish his individuality towards the maximum of its being. In the second part, the desire for dissolution (b) starts to prevail in him. The “rare place” of his own dissolves, and with it also the individual existence of his Self. First of all, there is the actual process of disintegration, destabilisation and dissolution. This process takes place on the level of the islander’s mind (on a spiritual level, so to say) and is mirrored on the material level (his islands getting smaller and smaller, eventually disappearing): the islander’s final, mad, Cuculain-like fight against the elements is doomed to defeat, not simply because “you can’t win against the elements,” as the narrator admits at the end [...], but because those elements—cold, angry, destructive forces—are in the self and not merely in the environment.40

Moreover, as it was argued by Gerald Doherty in his article “The Art of Survival: Narrating the Nonnarratable in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Loved Island’,” the narrative structure of the story, as well as of the Ideal-narrative of the islander himself, relies on “the displacement of time

39

D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (London: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 2002): 200. 40 David Willbern, “Malice in Paradise: Isolation and Projection in ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’,” D. H. Lawrence Review 10, no. 3 (1997): 235.

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by space as an ordering principle.”41 This substitution, or “displacement,” of time by space in its function as an organising principle of the narrative (this can also be seen as the case in the already discussed stories—the farm in “The Shades of Spring” and the garden in “England, My England”) multiplies the effect of the island actually disappearing at the end of the story.42 Second, the story is based on a tension between the islander’s idealised-narrative (ranging from his attempts to make the island economically self-sustainable to his passion in flower taxonomy) and the “stony, heavy malevolence” of the “seemingly malicious” matter of the island, which refuses to “play its part” in the islander’s narrative. Thereby the “island” demonstrates its uncanny qualities, ceasing to be the “preperformed,”43 ego constructed “island-word” and turning into an “islandthing,” an indifferent part of the universe and a Lawrentian manifestation of: the latent power that will go on producing, no matter what happens to the product, [...] the deep, black source from whence all these little contents of lives are drawn. And the contents of the small lives are spilled and wasted. There is savage satisfaction in it: for so much more remains to come, such a black, powerful fecundity is working there that what does it matter?44

The creeping dissolution of the islander, his self and his narrativeidentity, is restated many times in the text. The entire first part of the story is just a preparatory phase to the inevitable end in dissolution and complete destabilisation of the individual self within the waters and snows of the North Oceans. [H]e was weak, and at times the snow overcame him. It fell on him, and he lay buried and lifeless. [...] He must conquer the snow, this new, white brute force, which had accumulated against him. [...] But his island was gone. Its shape was all gone. [...] In the snow itself, the sea resounded. [...] The elements! The elements! His mind repeated the word dumbly. You can’t win against the elements. [...] As he looked, the sky mysteriously 41

Gerald Doherty, “The Art of Survival: Narrating the Nonnarratable in Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’,” The D. H. Lawrence Review 24, no. 2 (1992): 119. 42 For the relevance of both spatial and temporal organisation of the narrative see also Polkinghorne 1991, 139. 43 Stefania Michelucci, Space and Place in the Works of D. H. Lawrence, trans. Jill Franks (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarlan, 2002): 27. 44 D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix I, II: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, 415.

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The “Idea” of the Self darkened and chilled. From far off came the mutter of the unsatisfied thunder, and he knew it was the signal of the sow rolling over the sea. He turned, and felt its breath on him.45

As it was demonstrated, Lawrence’s interpretation of an individual’s tendency towards an expansive differentiation, individuation and assimilation of others (i.e. the centrifugal/creative mode, with a Nietzschean edge of the “Will-to-Power”), understood as a tendency towards subsuming the multiplicity of perceived objects (including people) into the unity of one’s (self-)narrative, brings a new perspective for our evaluation of Lawrence’s key terms—strife and the Ideal. Through this interpretation, strife, being a conflict of individual wills, acquires an epistemological and ontological importance which is granted by the dialectical pair “interpreter-interpreted”/ “narrator-narrated.” Having in mind Lawrence’s famous discarding of “the old stable Ego of character,”46 the demonstrated affinities between the notions of narration and idealisation (i.e. the “substitution of the creative life with a mechanical principle”) puts Lawrence into one line of thought that connects the Nietzschean accounts of human conduct with recent relativistic notions of self-identity and selfhood, such as Derrida’s deconstruction or Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of supplement in which “the human” is negotiated in interaction with one’s own outside through an “operation of technological becoming.”47 This is not true only for the mentioned stories, but for all Lawrence’s stories that operate on the basis of conflicting interpretations of reality, such as “You Touched Me,” “The Blind Man,” “The Shadow in the Rose Garden,” or even later texts such as “The Man Who Loved Islands.” In these stories the concept of an ideal-driven narrative can be used to explicate the complex reciprocal relationship between the narrating subject, narrated objects, and the narrative process.

Acknowledgement The publication of this article was supported by the “Programme for the Development of Research Areas at Charles University, P09, Literature and Art in Intercultural Relations,” sub-programme “Transformations of the Cultural History of the Anglophone Countries: Identities, Periods, Canons.” 45

D. H. Lawrence, Selected Stories, 312. D. H. Lawrence, The Collected Letters of David Herbert Lawrence, 282. 47 Arthur Bradley and Louis Armand, “Introduction: Thinking Technicity,” Technicity, ed. Arthur Bradley and Louis Armand (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia 2006): 5. 46

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Works Cited Bradley, Arthur and Louis Armand. “Introduction: Thinking Technicity.” Technicity, edited by Arthur Bradley and Louis Armand. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006. Doherty, Gerald. “The Art of Survival: Narrating the Nonnarratable in Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’.” The D. H. Lawrence Review 24, no. 2 (1992): 117-26. Gergen, Kenneth J. and Mary M. Gergen. “Narratives of the Self.” Studies in Social Identity. New York: Preager, 1983. Grmelová, Anna. The Worlds of D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction. Prague: Karolinum, 2001. Kleinbard, D. J. “D. H. Lawrence and Ontological Insecurity.” Modern Language Association 89, no. 1 (1974): 154–163. Accessed 14 October 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/461678. Lawrence, David Herbert. Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places. London: Penguin, 1960. —. The Collected Letters of David Herbert Lawrence. Edited by Harry T. Moore. London: Heinemann, 1965. —. The Complete Stories of D. H. Lawrence in Three Volumes. London: Heinemann, 1966. —. Fantasia of the Unconscious/Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. —. Studies in Classic American Literature. London: Penguin, 1977. —. Phoenix I, II: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. Edited by Edward D. McDonald. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. —. Collected Stories. London: Everyman’s, 1994. —. The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. London: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 2002. —. Selected Stories. London: Penguin Classics, 2007. Malpas, J. E. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Michelucci, Stefania. Space and Place in the Works of D. H. Lawrence. Translated by Jill Franks. Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarlan, 2002. Milton, Colin. Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study of Influence. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage, 1968. Polkinghorne. Donald E. “Narrative and Self-Concept.” Journal of Narrative and Life History 1, no. 2-3 (1991): 135-53.

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Ricoeur, Paul. Time and the Narrative II. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987. —. “Life in Quest of Narrative.” Narrative and Interpretation, edited by David Wood, 20-33. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Schneider, Daniel, J. D. H. Lawrence: The Artist as Psychologist. Kansas: Kansas University Press, 1984. Willbern, David. “Malice in Paradise: Isolation and Projection in ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 10, no. 3 (1997): 223-41. Wood, David. “Introduction: Interpreting Narrative.” Narrative and Interpretation, edited by David Wood. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

“HOW CAN WE KNOW THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?”: AUTHORIAL SELF-(RE)PRODUCTION IN JOYCE’S NARRATIVES VANJA VUKIûEVIû GARIû

He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld.1 He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.2

Widely recognised as a paradigm of modernist narrative impersonality, as a “dancer” who hides forever behind the autonomy of his “dance,”3 James Joyce is also an outstanding example of the most profoundly autobiographical author, whose textual presence and high intentionality constantly challenge the Barthean notion of authorial “death,” which is always revealed, known and reaffirmed within and through his text. The ambiguity of Yeats’s famous verse can serve as an explanation of the paradox that lies at the foundation of Joyce’s authorial principle. On the one hand, everything he wrote was based on a personal, immediately lived, read, or distantly observed and recollected experience, thus establishing an indivisible unity between his life and art, whereas, on the other hand, that experience was always universalised in discursive and stylistic pastiche and mythical patterns which became an essential expression of selfeffacement in modern literary narratives. Joyce-the man and Joyce-theauthor, a duality inherent in probably all narrating practices, are both 1

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man (London: Penguin, 1996): 73. 2 James Joyce, Ulysses, with an Introduction by Cedric Watts (London: Wordsworth Classics, 2010): 191. 3 Cf. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” accessed January 2012, www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Yeats/Among/htm.

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perpetually renewed in a narrated life where private ideas and intentions are embodied into “impersonal” words, which are automatically transformed into ideas and intentions for some other words, texts and narratives that carry on the interaction of life and art to the utmost ontological boundaries. As Richard Ellmann stated in his magisterial biographical study, most events in Joyce’s life, no matter how crucial or trivial they appeared to be, were inseparable from their artistic transfiguration and textual expression: Instead of allowing each day, pushed back by the next, to lapse into imprecise memory, he shapes again the experiences which have shaped him. […] In turn the process of reshaping experience becomes part of his life, another of its recurrent events like rising or sleeping.4

Joyce’s often stated literary martyrdom or, to express it in his own preferred alliterative and metaphorical device, profane priesthood implies all the sacrifices and privileges of an unconditioned devotion to writing as a profession, which reversibly changes and strongly influences the writer’s empirical time and being. Since the transformation of introspection and retrospection into fiction results in fiction itself becoming a part of life, the text is inevitably interlaced with biography—it is incorporated into living just “like rising or sleeping,” love-making or walking, which in the case of authors such as Joyce, who deeply immerged into a relentless, everyday consciousness of the work, has even more interesting ontological implications. His continuous and always partly elusive interaction of living and writing is powerfully connected with libidinal energies that enable the narrating being to complete itself, to be dissolved and created again, deconstructed and reconstructed in a textual process which in many ways parallels biological reproduction.

Lyrical vs. Dramatic Principle, or Stephen Dedalus vs. Universe James Joyce, like his fictional alter-ego Stephen Dedalus and every authorial instance involved in self-narration and attempt to aestheticise one’s own experience, is doubled into a being that lives and a being that observes and creatively transforms the living. This doubling is discernible in the early draft of Stephen Hero (published posthumously in 1944), a precursor of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and is clearly 4

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982): 3.

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evident in A Portrait and in Ulysses (1922), where Stephen acts simultaneously as a passive receiver and a remote, often ironic reproducer of his experience. The double faculty—the faculty of selection and the consequent faculty of artistic recreation of the selected and carefully analysed material5—was one of the most prominent features of Stephen’s author as well, as we can clearly conclude from Ellmann’s biography, from testimonies of Joyce’s friends and from the critically invaluable memoirs of his brother Stanislaus.6 The existential and ontological doubling inherent in probably all autobiographical narratives is closely connected with the aesthetic theory exposed in A Portrait, which can serve as a resolution to the often noticed contradiction of Joyce’s poetics: the oscillation between personal autobiographical urges and the ideal of artistic impersonality and aloofness. In the fifth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen Dedalus expounds his aesthetic theory, the main part of which refers to the classification of art and the tripartite division of the aesthetic image into lyrical, epical, and dramatic form.7 The division is based not on the generic features of a particular form, but, above all, on the position of the creator and his/her distance from the created image, i.e. on the degree of the author’s presence or absence from the creation, as well as on the degree of conscious control exercised in the act of creation. According to Stephen’s, which is also Joyce’s own,8 categorisation, the lyrical form is the simplest because the aesthetic image is in immediate relation to its creator, containing his personality in a raw state and prominently noticeable. Epical form is in this respect more successful as the image stands in mediated relation to both the creator and the audience. The artist is still present, but no longer in the centre of creation, because the narrative flows around others as much as around the artistic self. Finally, dramatic form is the most refined since it entails the highest degree of the textual control and self-control of the authorial instance. Here, the aesthetic image stands in immediate relation to others, whereas those others—the narrated characters—and the narration itself obtain a new status, an autonomous 5

Cf. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spenser (London: Panther, 1977): 73. 6 Cf. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years, ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Ellmann, Preface by T. S. Eliot (Illinois: Da Capo, 2003). 7 Cf. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 243-245. 8 Cf. The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965).

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and wondrous life independent from the instance that creates and narrates them. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluent and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.9

Many critics apply this classification to Joyce’s entire work and to his general development as a writer. Thus, A Portrait is taken as an example of the lyrical novel; Ulysses is considered both personal and impersonal creation, therefore epic, containing both the autobiographical hero and other characters, different from their author. Eventually, Finnegans Wake (1936) is interpreted as a textual embodiment of the dramatic image from which all traces of the author’s personality are obliterated, leaving the lifeforce of the narrative to flow around other characters and consciousnesses. However, Stephen’s boyish inscription on the flyleaf of the geography can be taken as a more precise illustration of his creator’s poetic development: Stephen Dedalus Class of Elements Clongows Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The World The Universe10

As Harry Levin noticed, the direction of this development can be viewed as both centrifugal and centripetal,11 depending on the reader’s standpoint, as both the Universe and Stephen can be the starting point leading one towards another. Joyce’s poetics constantly tended to 9

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 244-245. Ibid., 17. 11 Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (London: Faber & Faber, 1969): 24. 10

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encompass the larger, wider and deeper reality, which would not be only his own but would also belong to others and include others. As his fiction surpassed the immediate social and historical circumstances and contexts that determined his growth, so did his language push forward the linguistic and stylistic boundaries, becoming increasingly complex, demanding and less accessible for many readers. This movement has often been interpreted as elitist withdrawal from common life and author’s distancing from the world of his text. What is evident, although sometimes neglected, however, is that the artist’s own “fingernails,” pared “within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork” are also part of the textual world— Joyce’s thematic and formal expansion moved towards a universe which included his own being in a fuller, humbler and more flexible way than a lyrical form would allow. The change of Stephen’s surname from Daly into Dedalus during the writing of Stephen Hero points to a significant tendency to turn an individual and bourgeois experience into myth and to immerse the hero into a wider, collective consciousness.12 Still, individual characters slip into the mythical and universal heritage only after they themselves become aware of their fictional identities, as well as of their connection with others, which implies the denunciation of the elitist absorption into one’s own interior, lyrically expressed experience. This awareness resulted in parodical and self-parodical strategies in Joyce’s texts: half-comical treatment of Stephen’s aspirations, especially in Ulysses, certainly meant ironisation of the writer’s own youthful attitudes. Additionally, many minor characters can be read as comical distortions of some aspects of their author’s personality. As Hugh Kenner pointed out, the whole of Joyce’s work is permeated by the “Doppelganger metaphysic,” through playing roles with the “shadow-selves.”13 Besides Leopold Bloom, who is one of the most conspicuous shadowy doubles of the artist’s mature self in his role of a family man counterpointed to the bohemian and individualistic Stephen, other evident doppelgangers include Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead,” as an alternative image of what Joyce himself would have become had he stayed in Ireland, then Mr James Duffy from “A Painful Case” with his “odd autobiographical habit,”14 also Richard Rowan in Exiles (1918), and many other less prominent characters who inhabit the world of Dubliners he constantly depicted. Joyce’s self12

Cf. Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Richard Ellmann, “James Joyce in and out of Art,” in James Joyce: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mary T. Reynolds (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1993): 17-26, 22. 13 Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (London: Chatto & Windus, 1955): 354-355. 14 James Joyce, Dubliners (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1993): 77.

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parodying became a channel for extending his authorial as well as empirical being, as it was a mode of abandoning the seductive modernist solipsism that set the text as an exclusive territory for the writer’s innermost preoccupations. The growth of multiple perspectives and pluralism of discourses in Joyce’s later fiction, when combined with the narcissistic and painful selfconsciousness of the author in exile, increased the capacity to recognise the self in others and others within the self and, consequently, to externalise the subjective and internalise the objective experience. Thus, Joyce’s fiction offers microscopic (i.e. detailed naturalistic representation of bodily functions; subtle shifts in stream of thoughts) and macroscopic (i.e. hints at a large historical and mythical framework) views alternately and simultaneously. Successions of poetic lyricism and dramatic irony encourage the sense of indecisiveness concerning his authorial position, since, with the development of the aesthetics of impersonality, the Joycean artist, on the one hand, tends towards anonymity and self-obliteration, whereas, on the other, all his exuberant techniques and strategies employed in such a process (interior monologues, authentic puns, neologisms, etc.) contain inevitable features of their crafty inventor. Furthermore, as noted by Ellmann, Stanislaus Joyce, and Joyce’s close friend Jacque Mercanton,15 or observed by Joyce himself in his essays and letters, as he grew older he relied ever more on the existence of the “umbilical cord” between the author and the text, on the mysterious and ontologically essential relation between the narrating and narrated being. Believing that all great art (such as, for instance, Shakespeare’s and, without false modesty, his own) is unavoidably autobiographical, Joyce produced his works as dramatic according to the criteria he himself defined: rising from deeply personal, lived experience and shaped as intentionally depersonalised verbal constructs, as an emotion belonging no longer to its author only but becoming a generally recognised human condition, his creations always encompass both the wider “real world” and the inner “unsubstantial image” silently beholden.

15

Cf. Jacques Mercanton, “The Hours of James Joyce,” Kenyon Review 24 (1962): 700-730.

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The Life Absorbed and Flung “Abroad Again amid Planetary Music”16 Elaborating his controversial theory of Shakespeare and Hamlet in the famous library scene in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus expounds on the almost alchemical connection that exists between possible and actual lives, that is, between textual and empirical events. This witty, persuasive and halfserious discussion offers a stimulating platform for looking into Joyce’s own conscious, rather than Shakespeare’s (half-unconscious, as Stephen suggested) autobiographical narratives. As art makes an integral part of the author’s life, any possibility in that life bears a potential of becoming a reality for art. Conversely, everything that exists as a possibility in a literary text can become an actuality in life: all our potential lives are also real, their existence is provided by the fact that they have already been imagined, created as internal experience. Thus, the external life reflects the internal, as Stephen underlines more than once, just as every creation bears a reflection of its creator, just as a lyrical subject reflects the whole universe and the world manifests God through signatures such as “a shout in the street.”17 Examining intentionality and the particular position of authors such as Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Proust, Hopkins, Conrad, Mallarme or Flaubert, who incessantly immerged in the consciousness of their texts, Edward Said justifies various biographical approaches in literary criticism, reminding that it is quite commonsensical to consult non-literary writings, such as letters, notes, drafts or laundry bills, when interpreting literary texts by those authors.18 When ideas about a narrative, together with intentions of the stylistic and technical devices planned to be tried on the narrative, consume the everyday living, with all its big and little practical things, then the author’s empirical self and the written self-overlap to the extent of being inseparable. Said therefore explores the relationship between the empirical time and the textual time of the author, especially of the author involved in a self-conscious narration. Are the written life and the writer’s career in a state of opposition to the empirical existence of the writing subject, or do they develop as parallel lines? Is the real life reduced while the written grows? Does writing imitate, stimulate or shun the empirical 16

Cf. “[the poet] alone is capable of absorbing in himself the life that surrounds him and of flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.” James Joyce, Stephen Hero, 75. 17 James Joyce, Ulysses, 32. 18 Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979): 242-243-261.

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existence? The questions posed by Said are, in effect, old literary and philosophical dilemmas, since the state of tension between life and art, between the “ordinary” man and the artist, are recurrent in every epoch and every poetics. Still, these issues are even more relevant to authors, such as James Joyce, for whom the interaction of living and writing had ontological, anthropological and even physiological implications relating to the Lacanian idea that text is crucial for the author’s health, and that his very survival depends on the gratification of authorial urge. Like many other writers throughout the world’s literary history, Joyce used his narratives to confront his fears, obsessions, deep inner conflicts and frustrations. For instance, the preoccupation with sexual jealousy and betrayal is thematically reflected in most of his works. Dubliners (1914) provides the most dramatic and unusually complex situation of a love triangle in “The Dead,” although the hints of infidelity, or a possibility of infidelity (which was pretty much the same for Joyce) can be detected in other stories as well. In A Portrait Stephen is tormented by a doubt that there is something going on between his beloved and his close friend Cranly; in Exiles the oscillations in the relationship Richard-Bertha-Robert make the drama’s skeleton, whereas Ulysses builds a whole concept of a modern marital life through the anthological, and “human, all too human” adulteries of the Blooms. In addition to this, we can notice that Joyce, similar in this respect to Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy, used his fiction also as a revenge weapon, to settle the score with his enemies and come to terms with the old grudges. He modelled most of his characters on the people he knew, sometimes retaining their real names, or other biographical references so that they could be easily recognised. Apart from this, some of the contemporary interdisciplinary studies also provide lists of medical conditions treated in Joyce’s fiction,19 as for him the literary transformation of a case history could have meant a cure for the disease, a way to remove the wound from the body by “dissecting” the narrative. Playing hide and seek behind the fictional screen, or disguising the lived into the textual experience, and the other way around, was particularly prominent in situations that were seen as a threat to the integrity of both Joyce-the man and Joyce-the author. Thus, most of the letters in which he asked for loans were signed by “Stephen Dedalus,”20 which can be seen as another effort to reduce the discomfort and provide self-justification, since the artist does not seek help for himself but for his art, exemplified in his hero. On the other hand, this identification through the name of the 19

Cf. Robert M. Kaplan, “Doctors, disease and James Joyce,” Australian Family Physician 37, no. 8 (2008): 668-9. 20 Cf. Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce, 12.

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fictional character signals not only the precaution, but also the romantic enchantment with the possibilities of matching the interior with the exterior image, fusing the narrating with the narrative being. Even though the real historical and psychological causes out of which a text begins can never be established with certainty, most reasons for one to write have to do with states of existential discomfort, with Angst, with the need to disagree with the world or to preserve the privileged moments from oblivion, to infuse the chaos of being with a kind of form, beauty and joy. Some authors write for fun, some for necessity, because they experience writing as an almost biological need that must be gratified. There are those for whom the encounter with a blank paper is a pathway to the inevitable sense of defeat, the final capitulation of truth before fiction, and, still, there are those for whom every page covered with text means a victory over the abyss of incommunicability. By reproducing his “unsubstantial images” in the text, Joyce confirmed the hope that literary time and being can transform and transcend the empirical time and being of the writing subject, and that the authorial self always modifies—and sometimes even rescues—the empirical self. When his platonic love affair with a Triestine student, Amalia Popper, came to an end, Joyce immediately knew that she would become material for fiction, and that all his passion together with her picture would migrate to the ontological space of the text. Writing for himself “the end is here. It will never be,” he instantly knew what the next step would be: “Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?”21 thus not only moving towards the end of a love story or dealing with the passing of youth, but also opening a door for other stories, those in which the loss of a man can be turned into the gain of an author. Similarly, another example of interrelation between biography and fiction is to be found in Joyce’s Zurich encounter with Martha Fleischmann, who so strongly resembled the birdlike girl previously described in Stephen’s beach epiphany in A Portrait.22 This can be regarded as an instance of a reversed self-reproduction: here the literary image precedes the life experience; moreover, it anticipates the reality, it initiates it, and acts as its cause and a distant, inexplicable origin. The product of the writing activity in turn uncannily produces the empirical event and, consequently, what was once purely authorial, narrating act (an episode in a novel by the young James Joyce) becomes reproduced into a form of personal history of James Joyce, the mature artist living in Zurich 21

Joyce, Giacamo Joyce, 1914. Joyce asked his friend Frank Budgen to arrange their meeting as “it was essential to his spiritual and artistic development.” Edna O’Brien, James Joyce (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999): 88. 22

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at a specific time. Hence, this example provides an illustration not only of the inextricable interconnection between the authorial and the empirical self, the Joyce-who-writes and the Joyce-who-lives, but also the mystical union of the doubles inherent in all autobiographical narratives: the union of character and his creator, of fiction and life, of youth and maturity, a moment and eternity. Believing that text possesses a strange power to modify reality, Joyce was convinced that some elements of his narratives had influenced or would be able to influence the life around him. Literature was not only the past reproduced or a history that might have happened, but also a possible future. It was an anticipatory activity that heralded the experience, an ontological space containing finished events which in the empirical reality had not yet happened and were not certain to happen. Thus, for instance, Joyce was persuaded that in Ulysses he predicted the real death of his “frenemy,” to use a modern slang, Vincent Cosgrave (model for Lynch in A Portrait).23 Yet the most poignant example that life and fiction are magically intertwined is to be found in Joyce’s desperate hope that the completion of Finnegans Wake (1936), which took him seventeen years to write, would somehow result in the healing of his mentally ill daughter Lucia. “When I leave this dark night, she too will be cured,”24 he confided to his friend. Although, unfortunately, Lucia was not cured in the medical sense, the writing of this marathon-long, labyrinthine “night narrative,” as it is often called, remained for Joyce a road to the realm of anthropological mystery, which heals and sets the traveller free in its exquisite display of the power of language to penetrate reality. The selected autobiographical material, distilled in the smithy of artist memory and imagination and transformed into the play of language, is “flung abroad again” into the narrative which surpasses it temporally, spatially and ontologically, extending much further from the autobiographical narrating subject. Reflecting on the popular biographical readings of the date of Ulysses—16th June 1904—Vladimir Nabokov thought that it was somewhat degrading for the readers’ imagination to accept that the sole reason for this choice of date was Joyce’s meeting with Nora.25 While Nabokov’s doubt can be neither confirmed nor denounced, as the first authorial intentions are forever removed from our capacity to know them, the knowledge accessible today, however, reveals that every June 16th is 23

Edna O’Brien, op. cit., 150. Jacques Mercanton, “The Hours of James Joyce,” trans. Lloyd C. Parks, Kenyon Review 24, 1962: 710. 25 Vladimir Nabokov, Esej o Džojsu, trans. Tanja Bulatoviü (Belgrade: NNK International, 2004): 4. 24

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celebrated as Bloomsday: the day when the fictive characters Leopold and Molly Bloom leave their narrative habitus to affect, at least for the duration of this day, the lives of readers all over Ireland, Europe and the world. Furthermore, this projection of textual constructs from fiction to history, from one ontological level to another, also moves the ontological boundaries of Joyce’s and Nora’s status in the mind of readers of Ulysses. The idea of their encounter is forever abstracted and displaced from a narrowly historical, and therefore transient, area by means of narration, of the artistic reproduction of life. If we accept the idea of writing as reading from oneself, a process in which an interior book is translated into the exterior and intention is turned into the ex-tension,26 then we cannot help noticing the double status of the “exterior book”: for, in one sense, it obtains its autonomous life and undeniable ontological position in the minds and lives of its recipients, whereas, in the other sense, it remains perpetually related to its source, i.e. to the “internal book” from which it was translated. Therefore, Joyce’s extensions—the continual narrative prolongations of his being through the writing process—remain forever connected with his intentions—those unreachable existential points where everything began, just as every actuality was once “only” a possibility.

Death and Post-creation of the Author The concept of authorship is commonly related to the activities of beginning, of inventing and initiating something new in the existing order of things. Dictionaries define the word author as “the person who creates or begins sth, especially a plan or an idea”27 and literary history has always encouraged the understanding of the authorship that equates with the origins, with the source of the fresh or the so-far-unknown. However, authorial activities can also be linked with the concept of ending, associated with closures and completions, with finishing rather than starting, performing a symbolic death. This idea of “death,” or disappearance of the author in the process of writing does not have to be, as it is usually assumed, limited to the poststructuralist thesis of the annihilation of the psychological, biographical and historical identity of the writing subject— the annihilation caused by the textual “tissue of quotations”28 in which 26

Cf. Alexander C.H. Tung, “‘The Intentional Fallacy’ Reconsidered,” accessed May 2011, http://personal.centenary.edu/~jhendric/litcrit/2010_wk_8.html. 27 Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, ed. Jonathan Crowther (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997): 67. 28 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 146.

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human entity is replaced by a grammatical subject. Rather than being restricted to one theory or philosophical and critical perspective, the notion of authorial death can be understood in more general and widely symbolic terms as a conclusion of a longer line of empirical experiences which are completed in writing, in a text which puts an end to one epoch of the empirical time giving birth to a virtual time. Since fictional narratives, especially those with autobiographical basis, project phenomena from the immediate or recollected time and space, that is, from the familiar ontological level, onto the new temporal and spatial dimensions (the example of the Bloomsday celebrations), the author acts as an instance that finishes, “destroys” or “kills” the inherent transience of things, turning historical events into artistic permanence and durable narrative “life.” If we consider the essential characteristics of almost all the important modernist creators, we cannot but agree that for most of them the creation of an artefact presents a deeply revelatory act, additionally significant as it always implies “flirting with death,” since the religious and ontological aspects of writing, as Marija Kneževiü concisely put it, inevitably mean “a maintenance of balance between the two ways of not-being—the past (the already said) and the unspeakable.”29 Thus Joycean epiphany, seen as the final destination of creative activity, means a potential death for perception and language alike: it is “a moment of paralysis, an instant of truth,”30 because the transformation of individual histories into the language of metahistory always entails a suspension of the known existence and its transport into the unknown, into the so-far-unspoken. Like many others, Jean Paris sees Joyce’s writing as an effort to wipe out time and to rearrange appearances.31 Authorship conceived in this way has the privilege of continually reproducing appearances in an attempt to bring them to the level of revelations, to move them to a domain in which their essence can be at least suggested if not explained by familiar discursive mechanisms. The privilege is even greater if authorial activity is autobiographically oriented, since the reproduction, based on personal memory and implying “reading out of oneself,” out of one’s own past and present, also means refreshment, repetition and self-reproduction: it prolongs the authorial existence to the final borders of the text. (Self-) repetition, however, inevitably contains a sense of loss, as every 29

Marija Kneževiü, “Facing the Other to Death,” Folia Linguistica et Litteraria 12 (2010): 52. 30 Žan Pari, Džejms Džojs njim samim, preveo Bora Glišiü (Savremena škola, Belgrade: Jean Paris) James Joyce par lui-meme (Paris : Edition du Seuil, 1963): 67. 31 Ibid., 64.

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reconstruction is conditioned by loss. Appearances, or realities, if we prefer to call them as such, once read also “die,” at least temporarily, in the process of translation into the text that transforms and transcends them. The question raised now is whether the author’s intention also dies in the process and whether his/her internal image, now projected into the external, is also lost and dissolved during the authorial activity whose text ontologically exceeds its author. Or, to put it in a more traditional, rather romantic, way: does the author live forever in his/her text, is his/her creation seen as a monument to his/her life, or does he/she exist (as an author, a creator, a writer) only as long as the writing lasts, and only in some (the controlled ones, the intended ones) phases of the writing? Identifying the author’s career with the duration of textual production, particularly in the case of authors strongly focused on the technical and formal aspects of writing, Edward Said defines text as “a multidimensional structure extending from the beginning to the end of the writer’s career.” Writing is, therefore, “the source and the aim of a man’s desire to be an author, it is the form of his attempts.”32 Since text stands as evidence and also the means of the writer’s attempts to actualise his/her authorship, it contains the efforts and achievements (or failures) of the man-who-writes to become an author, thus containing his/her psychology as part of the efforts and all the elements of his/her inner structures that are included in the growing text. Consequently, writing is not only a form of beginning and being for its author, as Said takes for the basis of his study, but also a form of growing and developing, a progressive line that includes various states of its author’s desires, one of which is the very desire to become an author. Text is, therefore, a sort of testimony about the continuation of authorial activity, a statement on the existence of the author who directs its growth. Nevertheless, the synonymy of the author with the text and the complete coinciding of the writing process with the authorial function result in a limited duration of the author’s being, as it implies that the author exists only as long as the text is being produced and developed: the end of the text and the physical cessation of the writing activity entails the death of its author, since the author owes his/her function and existence to the text, beginning with it and ending with its closure. (As Said says: “A text is not the result of a career: rather, it is the career which, when the text reaches an ‘end,’ stops when the writing stops.”33) Now, this leads to another important implication: in view of the fact that the text’s end means the conclusion of the author’s career, caesura of the activity and the 32 33

Edward Said, op. cit., 196. Ibid., 261.

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existence of the author, then it correspondingly means the end of that part of the author’s human existence and psychology that was invested in the creation of the text. Thus, in a phenomenological sense in which the duration of a text—the writing, not necessarily the reading duration—is equated with the duration of authorship, the concept of authorial death (as death coincides with the last page and the last stop in the text) entails also the death of that aspect of the author’s human being which is dedicated to writing, because writing always springs out of the man’s desire to become an author. There are, however, rare texts that have been deliberately structured to overcome the problem of ending and to provide a sense of perpetual becoming and self-reproduction of the authorial principle within the text. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is an obvious example of such a structure: it has no proper ending, because its end is literally at its beginning as the last sentence is interrupted and resumed in the opening line. This novel embodies the idea of circular writing and the incessant, never-ending interaction of text and its author. Besides Finnegans and in somewhat less radical a way, other Joyce’s narratives also suggest the inseparability of beginnings and endings at both structural and semantic levels. Thus, the first and the last story of Dubliners have so many interrelated elements and internal correspondences that their titles (“The Sisters” and “The Dead”) can be easily switched without affecting the meaning. Also, the quotes which frame A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man point to Stephen’s return to the story of himself in which he starts in the role of a listener to grow into a teller of the tale he had heard. The famous multiple “yes” that closes Ulysses, as well as the entire final chapter of Molly Bloom’s interior monologue with its stream-like outpouring, increases the effect of openness and fluidity recalling many other parts of the novel and bringing them into one rounded unity. In fact, all of Joyce’s narratives essentially challenge the concept of ending as closure, destabilising formal, thematic and ontological borders of the text. This can be observed both in separate works and at the level of his oeuvre, since it is well known that every new text brought fresh and increasingly complex innovations, crossing the boundaries set by the previous one. Writing was a road to liberation for James Joyce, the one that should have been travelled and conquered with new strategies all over again in order to provide freedom and renewal for all the travellers, the author and readers alike. As a result, no matter how sadistic his relation to his narratives may be, given the high degree of control and intentionality exerted in their structuring, he can be paradoxically seen as an example of a masochistic author who relentlessly subjects himself to searching for ways out of each written text into a new

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one, into an exile from the familiar in which he had to reaffirm the authorial function again and be born as an author all over again. Whereas the urge to tell stories, to narrate life, has always been popularly identified with the life instinct, indeed, with the very survival, as the One Thousand and One Nights tells us, the widespread notion of writing seen as the writer’s quest for identity has, as a matter of fact, its deeper psychological implications that relate it to death instinct. Namely, since the author acts as an agent of textuality and ever-migrating intertextuality, his/her identity is continually modified during the writing process. As Vladimir Tasiü said, the author’s identity cannot be established, it “‘slips past,’ is never stable, certain and necessary, but rather always hypothetical and contingent, always coming into being.”34 If, by some coincidence, it becomes possible to catch it and fix it, then the writing would cease, because identity is created by writing and writing is created by the author’s identity—accordingly, if writing stops, then the writer would stop being what he is, he would stop being the author, he would be dead (fixed, defined, objectified). However, as impossible a goal as it may be, since the writer cannot be like Lucky Luke, “faster than his own shadow” to grasp his identity,35 it is the goal that still constitutes the writer’s desire to write in order to complete himself/herself. And since the completion is always followed by a dissolution and disintegration, as Tasiü reminds us using Lacanian terms, the author’s quest is seen as something “what he secretly dreams of: his ‘death,’ a collapse of the ego, a direct meeting with the entity of his id.”36 Therefore, we can conclude that the author’s “death instinct” is complementary to his authorial desire to write and, furthermore, with authors such as James Joyce, it is also carried on the wings of that desire, as it is entwined with the libido of the text, which constantly pushes forward its own boundaries. Joyce’s textual libido has been usually analysed in the light of his controversial love letters to Nora, which were published much later than the rest of his correspondence due to their famed sexual explicitness.37 Apart from their contribution to biographical studies, these letters also provide important critical and philosophical insight into Joyce’s understanding of the text as a powerful extension of the senses and a domain of almost primordial, half-real and yet tangible experience which 34

Vladimir Tasiü, “Terminator 2: The Writer in Search of an Identity,” trans. Ralph Bogert, Toronto Slavic Quarterly, accessed July 2011, www.utoronto.ca. 35 Cf. Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Cf. Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber & Faber, 1975): 180-191.

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gratifies not only spiritual and psychological, but also biological and physical needs of the writer’s human and authorial being. The Eros of writing possesses here an unusual strength to renew and invigorate the effect of worn out words and overused phrases with the energy of personal urges, the authenticity of which is guaranteed by their honesty. The libidinal potency of love-writing provides authors, just as lovers, with a privilege to “recreate life out of life”38—a privilege that mysteriously connects endings with beginnings and death with procreation. The analogy between natural and artistic procreation is often mentioned as one of the basic concepts of Joyce’s poetics. There is no irony in his understanding of his own art as a process of reproduction, on the contrary, as Robert Scholes underlines, his attitude is full of reverence: “The physical copulation of the human animal and the spiritual copulation of the artist in which the word is made flesh are valid and complementary manifestations of the same human impulse toward creation.”39 In his essay “Drama and Life,” which contains some of the outlooks that permeated his whole artistic development, Joyce states that drama is a “mere animal instinct applied to the mind.”40 The correlations between sexuality and textuality, between physiological and authorial urges and the activities by which they are actualised, and, eventually, between the outcome of biological and literary reproductions, are perceived at more than one level. The well-known erotic symbolism made of the pen-ink-paper triangle, Said observes, is only a part of the story about the text-as-a-child complex, as well as of writing-as-lovemaking concept.41 The parallels are multilayered: first, in the foundations of every intentional act, of every beginning (which any writing essentially is) lies desire, or, as in the case of great modernist authors, the mixture of memory and desire; second, the creative process is inevitably followed by certain deprivations and denials, which is very conspicuous in Joyce’s famous (and, again, widely modernist) literary asceticism and isolation; and, third, the most obvious resemblance to biological procreation is the fact that at the end of writing stands its product: a text as a child, the author’s legacy to time and space. In both textual and natural reproductions the legacy is obtained through 38

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 196. Robert Scholes, “Stephen Dedalus, Poet or Esthete?” PMLA – Publications of Modern Language Association of America, ed. John Kurt Fisher, Vol. LXXIX, no. 4, Part 1, 1964: 485. 40 James Joyce, “Drama and Life,” in Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Kevin Barry, translations from Italian by Conor Deane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 26. 41 Edward Said, op. cit., 265. 39

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pain and pleasure; in both cases it ends in libidinal satisfaction, which is symbolised by death—another synonym for crossing the bar of the (un)familiar. These similarities between literary and sexual “production” still have deeper ontological implications that refer to the status of the text itself and to its ungraspable interior. Edward Said noticed a particular biological component inherent in the “text’s textuality,” owing to the fact that writers not only apply technical care to the composition of a text, but also invest a “sexual care” normally reserved for human beings.42 The relation between the author and the text is, therefore, regulated by that sort of libidinal energy that shapes, gives sense to, and leads human relations. A text is initiated and filled by a dynamics which is spiritual as well as biological, as it encompasses desires and sacrifices of everything that is invested in it during its coming into being. Drawing on the idea of writing (and the same could be said of the reading process) as lovemaking, as a creative and liberating intercourse between the narrating and narrative entities, Said offers a most convincing conclusion: The text’s volume, its substantial textuality, collects not just the writer’s writing, but also those energies, diverted from his sexual life, or procreative engenderment. As a result, then, the text, besides explicitly accumulating words, just as explicitly attracts special sexual attention. Both the words and the sexual energy are signs of the writer’s activity: they are his product, his text and child.43

If the artist and the work assume the position of lovers in the creative process, then in autobiographical creative narratives this liaison is even furthered, as the duplicated author-hero shifts between narrating and narrative being alternately, one always producing the other in a kind of parental relationship. Joyce explicitly belongs to the authors who conceived writing in terms of parent-child bond. For instance, he wrote to Nora about a book (referring to Dubliners) that he had carried so long in the womb of his imagination, just as she carried her own son and daughter, nourishing the text with his thoughts and memories.44 The metaphors of impregnation, conception and birth reoccur in A Portrait in almost the same form: “in the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh,”45 whereas in Ulysses they are repeated with a very important modification and addition: “In woman’s womb word is made flesh but in 42

Edward Said, op. cit., 263-264. Ibid., 264. 44 Cf. Selected Letters, 202. 45 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 247. 43

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the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation.”46 Even though this sentence is part of Stephen’s half-mocking theoretical and rhetorical acrobatics, it can be easily recognised in Joyce’s earlier statements and aesthetical attitudes expressed in his notebooks47 as a part of his, not only his hero’s, concept of narrative art as a privileged kind of procreation. In effect, Ulysses abounds in contemplations on the figure of the artist as an androgynous being unifying male and female principles (or ink and paper, to restore again the Freudian symbolism), as well as other related binary oppositions, such as the spiritual and the physical, the sacred and the profane, the artificial and the natural, control and chaos, word and body. Being thus composed, as a union of oppositions, the artist is capable of a creation, which is at least one step more advanced than the biological reproduction, because it includes it and surpasses it. On the grounds of this assumption, it can be deduced that postcreation represents a privilege of the greatest among artists, such as Shakespeare, taken by Stephen for the purposes of his philosophical and verbal play, and such as Joyce himself, who postcreates out of words already written, already embodied and now turned again into an authentic tissue of (auto)quotations “that shall not pass away.” Postcreation, therefore, functions as a double-effect deconstruction of the death of the author: first realised through the transgression of borders between biology and ontology of creation, through the extension of desire after the coming of the text to an end and through the appropriation of the text as a child, it is additionally affirmed through elevation of material and bodily quality of the text to the level of spiritual reality with unlimited duration. In this reality, or possibility, only—in the word made flesh and then word again—can the author hope to meet the “unsubstantial image which his soul beheld” and thus be reproduced in his narrative “dance” all over again.

Works Cited “Author.” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Edited by Jonathan Crowther. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” (1968). In Image—Music— Text, edited and translated by Stephen Heath, 142-148. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

46 47

James Joyce, Ulysses, 354. Cf. The Workshop of Daedalus, op. cit.

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Ellmann, Richard. “James Joyce in and out of Art.” In James Joyce: a Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Mary T. Reynolds, 17-26. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993. —. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. —. The Consciousness of Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man. London: Penguin, 1996. —. Dubliners. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1993. —. Giacomo Joyce. www.giacomojoyce.umbrafilm.nl, 1914. —. “Drama and Life.” In Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Kevin Barry, 23-29. Translations from Italian by Conor Deane. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. —. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Edited by Richard Ellmann. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. —. Stephen Hero. Edited by Theodore Spenser. London: Panther, 1977. —. The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965. —. Ulysses. With an Introduction by Cedric Watts. London: Wordsworth Classics, 2010. Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Ellmann. Preface by T. S. Eliot. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2003. Kaplan, Robert M. “Doctors, disease and James Joyce.” Australian Family Physician 37, no. 8 (2008): 668-669. Kenner, Hugh. Dublin’s Joyce. London: Chatto & Windus, 1955. Kneževiü, Marija. “Facing the Other to Death.” Folia Linguistica et Litteraria 1-2 (2010): 51-63. Levin, Harry. James Joyce: A Critical Introduction. London: Faber & Faber, 1960. Mercanton, Jacques. “The Hours of James Joyce.” Translated by Lloyd C. Parks. Kenyon Review 24 (1962): 700-730. Nabokov, Vladimir. Esej o Džojsu. Translated by Tanja Bulatoviü. Belgrade: NNK International, 2004. O’Brien, Edna. James Joyce. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999. Pari, Žan. Džejms Džojs njim samim. Preveo Bora Glišiü. Belgrade: Savremena škola. Jean Paris. James Joyce par lui-meme. Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1963.

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Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. Scholes, Robert. “Stephen Dedalus, Poet or Esthete?” PMLA— Publications of Modern Language Association of America. Edited by John Kurt Fisher, 484-489. Vol. LXXIX, no. 4, Part 1, 1964. Tasiü, Vladimir. “Terminator 2: The Writer in Search of an Identity.” Translated by Ralph Bogert. Toronto Slavic Quarterly. Accessed July 2011. www.utoronto.ca. Tung, Alexander C.H., “‘The Intentional Fallacy’ Reconsidered.” Accessed May 2011. http://personal.centenary.edu/~jhendric/-litcrit/2010_wk_8.html.

JOYCE’S RELIGIOUS BEING AND HIS NARRATIVE SANDRA JOSIPOVIû

Joyce maintained an ambivalent attitude towards the Catholic Church and its teachings, which was also reflected in his literary work. Joyce’s brother, Stanislaus explained that the interest that Joyce always retained in the philosophy of the Catholic Church sprang from the fact that he always considered Catholic philosophy to be the most coherent attempt to establish an intellectual and material stability. Yet Joyce’s revolt against institutional Catholicism was a defence of his personality against a system whose encroachments on the plea of obedience ended only with the complete cancellation of character.1

Considering Stanislaus’s opinion as an accurate reading of his brother’s approach/avoidance relationship with Catholicism, it might be concluded that Joyce’s representations of Catholicism simultaneously signify “his self-aware subjectivity as well as his fictional alter ego’s determination to fly by the church’s nets.”2 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, in their book Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, approach the question of “God” and literary studies by presenting six edicts: “God is an antropomorphism,” “God is dead,” “to acknowledge the idea that God is an anthropomorphism or that he is dead is not the same as getting rid of him,” “religion is everywhere,” “literature has an evil streak,” and “literature is sacred.” This paper studies how these edicts apply to Joyce’s literary work.3 In the light of the first edict: “God is an antropomorphism,” Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle point out that, according to Freud, God is a 1 Mary Lowe-Evans, Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008): 4. 2 Ibid., 4. 3 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Harlow: Longman, 2004): 161.

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projection of the human ego in the universe around us. It comes as no surprise to find that this “ego” is, almost always, male. “God is never ‘it,’ God is ‘he’ or, if you want to get people’s backs up, ‘she.’ Either way, it would seem impossible to imagine God without anthropomorphism.”4 Freud suggests that God is a hyperbolic father-figure or a fathersubstitute. This is exemplified in Ulysses since Joyce gives Leopold the role of a Christlike figure. Like Christ, he is a Jew and he is also a spiritual father to Stephen, the prodigal son. Stephen could also be seen as Lucifer because he renounces the Catholic Church and chooses to serve Art as his ultimate deity. In Ulysses the relationship between Leopold and Stephen is seen by the theologians as consubstantiality of father and son that connotes that God, the Father and God, the Son are of one being. Leopold is, on the one hand, an insignificant, condescending, unloved husband, but, on the other hand, he could be seen as God because he creates his own world and because he is full of childlike curiosity, indefinite understanding, innocent, and unconditional love for everyone and everything. Leopold defies any moral, racial or social classification because he incorporates in himself all these categories. Bloom thinks of himself as of someone who is of ancient lineage and traces his family tree back to Moses.5 In Finnegans Wake the twins, Shem and Shaun, can be seen as Christ and Judas, because there is eternal antagonism and dualism between them. They signify two opposing personality types and two different cultures. According to Bennett and Royle, the second edict “God is dead” can be viewed in relation to the impact Biblical scholarship, fossil discoveries and subsequent developments in the theory of evolution in the nineteenth century had on European culture. By mid-nineteenth century it had become clear to some educated European people, that some parts of the Bible could no longer be trusted in terms of their historical facts and accuracy.6

Bennett and Royle said that the study of fossils made it impossible to suppose that the earth could be, as the Bible suggests, only a few thousand years old. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) offered a scientific account of how human beings evolved, and, at the same time, the book eliminated God out of the equation.7 4

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, op. cit., 162. Jovica Aüin, “The Knots” (Title in Serbian: “ývorovi”), Delo 30, x (October 1984): 45. 6 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, op. cit., 162. 7 Ibid. 5

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Furthermore, as Bennett and Royle suggest, “to acknowledge that ‘God is dead’ is to think in anthropomorphic terms and to imply that ‘He’ was once alive rather than that ‘He’ never existed.”8 More specifically, in relation to Joyce’s work, the second edict is best exemplified in Dubliners. In these stories, some characters turn their back on religious and moral values which they had respected before. Some of them commit simony, which shows their spiritual death and degraded virtues: faith, hope, and mercy. Mary Lowe-Evans claims that during the retreat in the story “Grace,” the distant speck of red light which was suspended before the high altar signals the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament or “Real Presence” of Jesus, body and blood, soul and divinity, in the form of a consecrated host displayed on the altar in a “monstrance.” She also thinks that Joyce no doubt intended to increase the ironic force of his story by emphasizing that the red light, suggestive of a brothel, is both “distant” and “speck.” Joyce’s ironic treatment of the light indicates his belief that the general population of Dubliners has also allowed it to become debased.9

In all the stories we see shattered dreams, failed lives, destroyed careers, unfulfilled ambitions. Evelyn will not be able to break away from the ghosts of the past, her mother’s ghost will haunt, and she will not leave with Frank for Argentina. Bob Dorran seduces his landlady’s daughter without any intention of marrying her. Chandler also wants to leave Dublin, but his wife and son are like a burden that weighs him down. Dublin does not let its victims go free and resignation prevails. The horizon the characters long for is at first in Araby, then in Paris and London and then it narrows to the Dublin docks. Dublin comes to signify the hell for its inhabitants and the characters move in circles around Dublin, as in Dante’s Inferno. According to Mary Lowe-Evans10 “religious artefacts are also employed as symbols of moral and physical degradation in these stories.” To illustrate her point, she brings the example of the chalices in the story “The Sisters,” which, in her view, can be seen to stand for Joyce’s anxiety and worry about the circumstances of his mother’s death. So the first chalice is empty and “loosely retained”11 in the large hands of dead Father Flynn. Later we learn from Eliza that, at some unspecified time, 8

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, op. cit., 163. Mary Lowe-Evans, op. cit., 34. 10 Ibid., 22. 11 James Joyce, Dubliners (London: Penguin, 1996): 14. 9

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Bennet and Royle continue: “to acknowledge the idea that God is an anthropomorphism or that he is dead is not the same as getting rid of him.”13 Barthes insists on a theory and practice of literature that would be an antitheological and revolutionary activity. He describes literature, which by refusing to assign an ultimate meaning to the text, liberates what may be called antitheological activity. The activity is also revolutionary, since “to refuse to fix meaning is to refuse God. The link between ‘God’ and ‘meaning’ is in the Gospel according to St. John: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.’”14 As we are reminded, the original Greek for “word” is logos, which means not only “word” but also “sense” or “meaning.” Bennet and Royle also write: It is in this context that we might consider the notion of what Jacques Derrida has called logocentrism, in other words the entire system of Western thought, culture and philosophy that is implicitly or explicitly governed by notions of essential and stable meaning and ultimately by what Derrida refers to as a transcendental signified, God, for example. To put this more specifically in terms of literary texts, we could say that perhaps our greatest desire in reading a poem or a novel is to know what it “means.”

Bennett and Royle add that knowing what the text “means” is often seen as synonymous with, for example, knowing what the author, who becomes a sort of substitute for God in text, meant by writing it. No doubt a crucial part of reading and doing criticism concerns precisely such a “theological” activity. What Barthes helps us to see, however, is that this activity is theological in the sense that it presupposes a single, stable and authoritative centre. Barthes associates literature with the “truly revolutionary.” He links literature with notions of revolution, anarchy, transgression, and liberation.15 Ljiljana Gjurgjan suggests that with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce subverted and destroyed the genre of Bildungsroman. She 12

Mary Lowe-Evans, op. cit., 22. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, op. cit., 163. 14 St. John 1:1, in ibid. 15 Ibid., 164. 13

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claims that the literary tradition to which this genre belongs can be seen as a “father,” and the writer as a “son” who tries to undermine the father’s authority with his writings and wants to find a new form of expression says that the “son” confronts his “father” with the work in which he gives expression to rebellion, liberation and revolution. This subversion of the genre can be done at the level of language. Gjurgjan thinks that there are two different types of languages: the language of the dominant nations and the language of nations that are being dominated. She further explains that the first type of language represents strong cultures that assimilate the cultures and ideas of other nations and adapt them to their needs and views. The languages of dominant nations have many layers and enable a writer like Joyce to subvert the genre, without destroying the communicative quality of language. The language of the nations that are being dominated consists of only one layer and belongs to one social stratum and to one ideology. Gjurgjan claims that Joyce subverts the bourgeois discourse by undermining its main characteristics: clarity and logic. The main characteristics of Joyce’s text are ambiguity and a multitude of meanings. She finds examples for this subversion in A Portrait. In this novel, Stephen is, at the same time, good and evil, mature and immature, he changes and remains the same. Gjurgjan concludes that the text that leads us to believe that we own it, but keeps escaping us and any attempt to be defined once and for all, is a truly liberated text. Such a text can be written in the language of the dominant nations. Since these languages have many layers, if one destroys one layer, the remaining layers are activated. While Joyce renounces the bourgeois ideology, Irish national and mythical prototypes, he can still rely on other postulates of the Western tradition: the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the work of Ibsen and the French symbolists.16 Also, in Joyce’s novels, there is no plot in the classical sense of the word, the reader comes into direct contact with the characters in the novel. Joyce depicts life as it is reflected in the consciousness of his characters. There is no omnipresent and omniscient author who, like a puppet master, controls his characters by pulling the strings. Being reminded of Nietzsche’s remark that “we shall not get rid of God so long as we still believe in grammar,”17 Bennett and Royle also ponder 16

Ljiljana Gjurgjan,“Joyce and Kamov: The Subverting of the Genre of Bildungsroman as an Act of Reassessment,“ (Title in Serbian: Joyce i Kamov: Subvertiranje žanra bildunsromana kao þin idejnog prevrednovanja. Joyceov Portret umjetnika i Isušena kaljuža Janka Poliüa Kamova“), Delo 32, xi (November 1986): 40-55. 17 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, op. cit., 164.

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“whether this assertion borders on the unthinkable and we could ask ourselves: ‘What could one say about anything if there were no rules governing how to speak or what to say?’”18 If we look at Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake, the answer is that one could say plenty by defying the rules of normative grammar. We cannot assign any ultimate meaning to his novel Finnegans Wake, there are as many interpretations of this novel as there are critics who try to decipher it. In Finnegans Wake, the person who asks questions is the same who gives answers, the writer and the reader are two aspects of one personality. There is no definite answer to the question who tells the story in this novel. This novel can be seen as psychoanalysis with language being the patient and the psychoanalyst at the same time. The binary opposition writer/ reader ceases to exist, which leads to a situation in which the author, in the traditional sense of the word, also ceases to exist.19 Apart from this, in Finnegans Wake there are so many pairs that can be followed: Adam and Eve, Tristan and Isolde, Swift and Vanessa, Kain and Abel. All the characters multiply; one character easily becomes someone else. The twins become two opposing armies, two contradictory opinions, ideas, ideologies. By doing this, Joyce incorporated all the cultural, political and spiritual history of the humankind into the structure of this novel. It is not difficult to see that Joyce traces here the history of humankind from the Fall to the Great Flood. It is also suggested that each and every nation goes through the same stages of the life cycle depicted in the novel: birth, living, suffering, death and resurrection or rebirth.20 Joyce tried to show that although there was only one objective reality, different people saw reality in many different ways. There are as many different perceptions of the same thing as there are people in the world. Each and every one of us builds our own world out of our subjective perception of reality. It is generally believed that Joyce was writing one and the same book his whole life, the book about himself and about every reader who would recognise his own world in Joyce’s books. Bennett and Royle write the fourth edict: “religion is everywhere,” saying that it becomes clearer if we reflect on the fact how deeply Western culture is theologically embedded and if we reflect on the way we structure time. In 18

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, op. cit., 164. Jovica Aüin, “The Knots,” 50. 20 Svetozar Brkiü, “James Joyce and his Endeavours” (Title in Serbian: “Džejms Džojs i njegova nastojanja”) in Sveta lovina, ed. Svetozar Brkiü. (Belgrade: Nolit, 1972): 237. 19

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the most fundamental way, the year is based on the Christian religion. Every year is anno Domini, “in the year of our Lord.”21

Europe and the United States would look very different without the Christian framework. We cannot conceive the year as not involving Christmas or Easter, or the week without Sunday. Bennett and Royle conclude that “Christianity is much more present everywhere than many people, including non-practising Christians, agnostics or indeed atheists, might suppose.”22 Some scientists, like physical chemist Michael Polanyi, think that even rigorous scientific enquiry has its own, intrinsically spiritual, character. Polanyi claims that a scientific theory which calls attention to its own beauty, and partly relies on it for claiming to represent empirical reality, is akin to a work of art which calls attention to its own beauty as a token of artistic reality. It is also akin to the mystical contemplation of nature. Both a mystic and a scientist is always both contemplating the truth and dwelling within it, and yet also always breaking out from his objective detachment towards new truth which is yet undiscovered and unexplored.

If people have both religious and scientific doubts, they can be encouraged to discover more profound meanings of religious truth and experience. In that sense, Polanyi says that an era of great religious discoveries may lie before us.23 Therefore, it is no wonder that the central tenets of Thomistic theology and grace, as a fundamental Catholic doctrine, pervade Joyce’s short stories and novels. Joyce knew exactly what the order of the priest’s functions was during the religious rituals. Mary Lowe-Evans points out that nowhere else in Ulysses, as in “Nausicaa,” are sacramental identities and liturgical substitutions so complex and so revealing. It is true that the benediction service is underway in “Nausicaa,” but it is Joyce’s interweaving of that service with female arousal that accounts for such complexity.24

21

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, op. cit., 165. Ibid. 23 Gordon Mursell, English Spirituality from 1700 to the Present Day (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001): 506-507. 24 Mary Lowe-Evans, op. cit., 14. 22

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Joyce would not be Joyce if he were not always ambiguous and controversial. Joyce had faith in the soul, which is clearly seen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.”25 Deriving his definition from Saint Thomas Aquinas, Stephen defines the soul in Ulysses: “The soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.”26 Later, following Giordano Bruno’s notion of a universal soul more closely, during the Dionysian “All Sorts Jour” celebration in Finnegans Wake: “The soul of everyelsesbody rolled into its olesoleself.”27 Mary Lowe-Evans says that during Joyce’s lifetime, grace was a fundamental doctrine of Catholicism and it was considered to be the pillar which, by a special ordination of God, supports the entire edifice of Christianity. Joyce offers his own exposition of the concept of grace in accordance with Thomistic theology which says that the role of sanctifying grace is to bridge the gap between the natural and supernatural life.28

According to Thomistic theology, “grace resides in the soul, not in the body. Furthermore, only a soul “in the state of grace” can enter heaven.”29 When he gave his story the title “Grace,” Joyce encouraged readers not to question its existence, but to acknowledge the apparent abuses and misinterpretations of grace and its relationship to the soul. The word “grace” appears three times in Joyce’s story.30 First, the narrator reports: “Mr. Kernan had never been seen in the city without a silk hat of some decency and a pair of gaiters. By grace of these two articles of clothing, he said, a man could always pass muster.”31 This first reference to grace is associated with outward appearances. The second reference is applied to Mr Fogarty: He had opened a small shop on Glasnevin Square, where, he flattered himself, his manners would ingratiate him with the housewives of the 25

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 1996): 207. 26 James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983): 32. 27 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber & Faber, 1964): 329. 28 Mary Lowe-Evans, op. cit., 43. 29 Ibid., 44. 30 Ibid. 31 James Joyce, Dubliners (London: Penguin, 1996): 173.

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district. He bore himself with a certain grace, complimented little children and spoke with a neat enunciation.32

Mary Lowe-Evans explains that the second reference suggests the potentially fraudulent uses of grace available to nineteenth-century social opportunists.33 Third, and finally, at the end of the story, Father Purdon avers: “Well, I have looked into my accounts. I find this wrong and this wrong. But, with God’s grace, I will rectify this and this. I will set right my accounts.”34 Mary Lowe-Evans thinks that Father Purdon is the one who expresses the Thomistically correct interpretation of grace. She goes on to say that he even resembled St. Thomas physically35. Father Purdon was described as a powerful-looking figure, and two-thirds of his bulk were crowned by a massive red face. In the closing words of Father Purdon’s accountant’s version of salvation, there is a casual acknowledgement that grace is a freely bestowed gift from God required for obtaining any and all spiritual merit. Mary Lowe-Evans mentions that in perfect alignment with the Thomistic teaching, Father Purdon admits that without the Grace God dispenses, with merely natural powers, we can do nothing to set our accounts right. By assigning this insight to the character who is at once the most likely and the most unexpected suspect in the story, Joyce also reinforces other tenets of Thomistic theology that even the most fallen of creatures can provide the occasion of grace, yet we can never be certain of its efficacy.36

She reminds us that Joyce’s brother Stanislaus linked the name Purdon with Purdon Street, the old name of the street of the brothels in Dublin, but that the name could also implicate a “pur” “don,” or pure gift. She concludes that Purdon, in a way, embodies divine grace.37 The parable of “The Ondt and the Gracehoper,” recounted by Shaun, in book 3, chapter 1 of Finnegans Wake38 reflects Joyce’s continual relationship with Aquinas. Lowe-Evans thinks that “the Gracehoper is a version of Shem the Penman, and thus Joyce himself.”39 Certainly the

32

James Joyce, Dubliners, 188. Mary Lowe-Evans, op. cit., 44. 34 James Joyce, Dubliners, 198. 35 He was described as a huge, heavy bull of a man, fat, slow and quiet. 36 Mary Lowe-Evans, op. cit., 45. 37 Ibid., 46. 38 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 414-419. 39 Mary Lowe-Evans, op. cit., 47. 33

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opening line suggests as much: “The Gracehoper was always jigging a jog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity.”40 Lowe-Evans observes that what makes him Joyce-like is the fact that he is a gracehoper. That is to say, he does not rely on his own spiritual merits to attain the necessary grace or to attain eternal life, but hopes to be granted such favour in spite of his apparent sinfulness which again proves the tenet of Thomistic theology that the most fallen creatures can provide the occasion of grace.41

She asserts that the entire Ulysses can be seen as the Catholic Mass, in which Mulligan says the Introit, Mr Deasy says the Confiteor, Stephen says Kyrie and Gloria by the seaside; while the money collected during the Mass corresponds to Bloom’s financial aspirations, the journalists’ words correspond to the gospels, the mermaids’ singing corresponds to the Sanctus, chapter “Cyclops” corresponds to consecration, Ite missa est is reflected in the father-son meeting. Ulysses is at the same time the calendar of religious holidays: Christmas on Purefoy’s birthday, Easter at Bella Cohen’s, Holy Thursday in Bloom’s carriage, Whitsunday represented by fireworks, All Saints’ Day at the graveyard. We can also notice the traditional Christian rituals: baptism in the shower, confirmation in the library, administering the last rites at Dignam’s funeral. Joyce is obsessed with number twelve. In Finnegans Wake there are twelve customers, like the twelve Apostles and the twelve months of the year. The four minor characters, the Four Masters, have the role of the Four Evangelists. The fourth edict is implicit in the structure of Finnegans Wake, which has four books corresponding to the four Gospels.42 Bennett and Royle’s fifth edict says: “literature has an evil streak,” which “implies that literature tends towards the demonic because it is about entrancement and possession.”43 Stephen, in both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, is something of a demonic character who renounces the Catholic church and is entranced with serving Art as his ultimate deity. He wants complete freedom for his artistic spirit to develop, and the only law he will abide by will be the law of his Art. Both Stephens in Ulysses and A Portrait are sinister and wayward characters. Mulligan reproaches Stephen: “The Aunt thinks you killed your mother,”44 and goes on to say: “But to think of your mother begging you with her last 40

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 414. Mary Lowe-Evans, op. cit., 47. 42 Ibid., 68. 43 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, op. cit., 165. 44 James Joyce, Ulysses, 11. 41

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breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you.”45 By “sinister” Mulligan undoubtedly means evil or mean-spirited. Joyce’s surrogate, Stephen, might be viewed as an off-centre Catholic who “kills” his mother by his lack of orthodox faith. In A Portrait, Stephen fails to comply with his mother’s wishes, in this case to make his Easter duty. Cranly argues that Stephen should please his mother whom he loves since he claims no faith in Easter anyway: “Do as she wishes you to do. What is it for you? You disbelieve in it. It is a form. Nothing else. And you will set her mind at rest.”46 But, of course, Stephen is adamant in his refusal to receive the sacrament. What is more, he uses his Jesuit education to support his position: “Jesus, too, seems to have treated his mother with scant courtesy in public, but Suarez, a Jesuit theologian and Spanish gentleman, has apologized for him.”47 Stephen turns against his mother the religion she has professed. The word “demonic” can refer to both good and evil since it has a double meaning: it means an evil spirit or devil, but can also refer to a person who does something very well or with a lot of energy.48 It may be said that literature, too, has its good and evil sides and that there is something diabolical about the literary. Bennett and Royle mention George Bataille and his study Literature and Evil (1953). In this book, Bataille implies that “a collusion between creation, imagination and evil is characteristic of literary works in general.”49 Bataille also writes: Literature is not innocent. Literature, like the infringement of moral laws, is dangerous. Evil and literary imagination are in cahoots. Literary texts are dangerous because by reading them, they engage us, in a disturbing but creative and singular way, in the obligation to think the evil for oneself. The paradoxically creative force of evil in literary texts is what makes them in turn the exemplary space for thinking about ethics.

Bennett and Royle add that “far from being immoral or even amoral, literature involves us in what Bataille calls a ‘hypermorality’ because it confronts us with questions which call for different kinds of decisionmaking and critical responsibilities.”50 In “Oxen of the Sun,” a chapter in Ulysses, Joyce parodies the views held by the Catholic Church on 45

James Joyce, Ulysses, 11. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 246. 47 Ibid. 48 Sally Wehmeier, ed., Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 334. 49 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, op. cit., 166. 50 Ibid., 167. 46

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abortion. Here, the dilemma whether abortion should be performed at all confronts the reader. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, “infusion” of the human soul occurs forty or eighty days after conception, thus before that time abortion should not be considered murder. Prior to the First Vatican Council in 1896, the Church’s teachings about abortion had been condemnatory, but inconsistent and to some extent flexible. But in 1896, the Church declared automatic excommunication for anyone procuring a successful abortion.51 In “Oxen,” Stephen’s words prove him to be a diabolic figure, who explains in detail and even repeats the Church’s contradictory position on abortion: “Then spake young Stephen orgulous of mother Church that would cast him out of her bosom, of law of canons, of Lilith, patron of abortions.”52 Assuming that by “would cast him out of her bosom,” Stephen means that he has performed some act worthy of excommunication, it seems that he may have had some part in forcing an abortion. Stephen goes on to say: He said also how at the end of the second month a human soul was infused and how in all our holy mother foldeth ever souls for God’s greater glory whereas that earthly mother which was but a dam to bear beastly should die by canon for so saith he that holdeth the fisherman’s seal, even that blessed Peter on which rock was holy church for all ages founded.53

Lowe-Evans indicates that Stephen’s point about the infusion of the soul “at the end of the second month” suggests he is loosely following the Thomistic doctrine. She also adds that in “Oxen” and elsewhere Joyce treats the “old things” he learned from the Jesuits, his own devoutly Catholic mother, and the official doctrines of the Catholic Church in a “new,” often irreverent way. Lowe-Evans thinks that in assigning the womb as the organ of “Oxen,” and setting the chapter in a maternity hospital, for example, Joyce takes the opportunity to expose the inconsistencies and hypocrisy of church doctrine regarding the sacredness of birth and life. Joyce also reveals the ironies inherent in the fact that the group, composed entirely of men, debate the abstract ethics of abortion and contraception in the anteroom of the maternity hospital while “real” women are giving birth.54

51

Mary Lowe-Evans, op. cit., 49-50. James Joyce, Ulysses, 387. 53 Ibid. 54 Mary Lowe-Evans, op. cit., 51. 52

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The sixth edict says: “literature is sacred.” In this edict, Bennett and Royle refer to Jacques Derrida who claims that if there is something untranslatable in literature then it is sacred. If there is any literature, it is sacred: it entails sacralisation […] The process of sacralisation is underway whenever one says to oneself in dealing with a text: Basically, I can’t transpose this text such as it is into another language.

Therefore, it can be concluded that literature is sacred because of its untranslatability and singularity.55 In this respect, it could be said that Finnegans Wake is truly sacred since this novel has not yet been translated into many languages. Since I studied the reception of Joyce’s work in the Serbian-speaking region, I can with certainty say that it has not yet been translated into the Serbian language. This situation proves Derrida’s words that the process of sacralisation is underway whenever one says to oneself: […] there is an idiom here; it is a work; all the efforts at translation that I might make, that it itself calls forth and demands, will remain, in a certain way and at a given moment, vain or limited. This text, then, is a sacred text.56

What makes this novel particularly difficult to translate is the fact that Joyce created a language, using more than twelve languages for that purpose. He did this because he needed to find a new language to express the state of mind of a man who is asleep. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce recreates the experience of sleep and dreams. When we are asleep, the control of our conscious self disappears and we lose our identity. When we are asleep we don’t speak, at least not in the way we would speak when we are awake. A man who is asleep is more likely to speak the “jabberwocky” language created by Lewis Carroll in his novel Through the Looking Glass. In our sleep, all the images that our conscious self tries to keep apart fuse together and intermingle in a way that seems perfectly logical while dreaming. In our dreams, there is no future, no past, only eternal present.57 Joyce wanted to enhance the power of association that words have, that is why he fused two or more words into one. He used portmanteau words 55

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, op. cit., 169. Ibid. 57 Vida Markoviü, “Some problems of a psychological novel of the XXth century” (Title in Serbian: “Neki problem psihološkog romana dvadesetog veka”), Savremenik 11 (1960): 69. 56

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and multilingual puns. The new words are unintelligible at first and some words cannot be deciphered at all because they are based on some personal associations known only to Joyce himself. This novel becomes so individual and individualistic that it ceases to be communicative. In Finnegans Wake, each page reveals some ideas and notions, whose meaning is elusive and constantly keeps changing. Without studying the text of this novel for years and without an attempt to decipher it, the text will remain inaccessible and unintelligible. Finnegans Wake does not have a beginning, a middle, and an end in the classical sense of the word. According to Plato and Aristotle, a work of art represents some reality, but this novel replaces reality or it is reality itself. Joyce did not write the novel about something, he wrote that something. 58 The novel’s title itself is subject to many interpretations. It was taken from a nineteenth-century Irish ballad, “Finnegans Wake,” which is about a hod-carrier who fell from the ladder, his friends put him in a coffin and organised a wake for him. They spilt some whiskey over his corpse, causing him to come back to life. Finnegan can also symbolise Jesus Christ, who died and resurrected. The noun “wake” has a multitude of meanings: being awake, the track that a boat or a ship leaves behind, or the occasion when people gather before the funeral to remember the dead person. “Fine” is a sum of money that must be paid as punishment for breaking the law, “fin” is a French word for the end. As in the Bible, when the tower of Babylon was demolished, a myriad of languages were released. In this novel, Joyce’s language fragments into a multitude of languages and the novel dispels the illusion that anything can be fully interpreted.59 No dictionary contains all the words we come across in Finnegans Wake. If we take the word “farthingale,”60 we can see that it can have different meanings: “far”—distant, “farthing”—an old British coin, “gale”—strong wind, “nightingale”—a bird, “fart”—air from the bowels, “gal”—American word for a girl. Therefore, this word can be interpreted as: “farthing gale”—the storm of farts, “farthing gal”—the girl that farts, “farthing ale”—beer that costs one farthing, “far things”—distant things, “far thin gale”—not so strong a wind coming from far away.61 The word “sanglorians” 62 consists of “sang,” the French word for blood, and “glory,” thus evoking the fact that soldiers’ blood was spilt for their 58

Jovica Aüin, “The Knots,” 52. Svetozar Brkiü, op. cit., 243. 60 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 486. 61 Jovica Aüin, “Errorland,” Delo 29, vi (June 1983): 33. 62 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 4. 59

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country. But this is not the only interpretation of this word. “Sans” is a French word which means “without,” so, “sanglorians” can be interpreted to mean without glory, the war without glory, the blood spilt for nothing.63 The words that Joyce created are not deprived of any meaning. On the contrary, he lavished us with a multitude of meanings, he was obsessed with the process of amalgamation. Joyce did not want to destroy meaning, but to make language absurd by multiplying meanings. This novel requires that the reader be an active participant, that the reader produce the text that is being read, and not be a lazy consumer of literature. Joyce challenges the reader not to distance himself from the text, but to rewrite it. Therefore, the text is something that should not only be read, but it should also be written and rewritten.64 Joyce is a paradox because he exiled himself from Ireland and yet all his work is about Ireland, he could speak fourteen languages, but he refused to learn Irish Gaelic. Joyce certainly rebelled against the overt, coercive, retributive measures of the Catholic Church, such as excommunications and the papacy employed to retain control over its constituents. Nonetheless, he retained and conveyed admiration and even affection for certain Catholic doctrines and practices. Joyce found Catholic Church theologians ruthlessly logical even when he did not agree with them. The Thomistic theology the Jesuits had taught him provided an intellectual edifice to which he could and did endlessly return.

Works Cited Aüin, Jovica. “Errorland.” Delo 29, vi (June 1983): 23-49. —. “The Knots.” Delo 30, x (October 1984): 35-54. Bennet, Andrew and Nicholas Royle. Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. Harlow: Longman, 2004. Brkiü, Svetozar. “James Joyce and his Endeavours.” In Sveta lovina, edited by Svetozar Brkiü, 231-45. Belgrade: Nolit, 1972. “Demonic.” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Edited by Sally Wehmeier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003: 334. Gjurgjan, Ljiljana. “Joyce and Kamov: Subverting the genre of bildungsroman as the act of re-evaluation. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Janko Poliü Kamov’s Isušena kaljuža.” Delo, 32, xi (November 1986): 40-55. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber & Faber, 1964. 63 64

Jovica Aüin, “Errorland,” 37. Jovica Aüin, “The Knots,” 53.

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—. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. —. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin, 1996. —. Dubliners. London: Penguin, 1996. Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years. Edited by Richard Ellman. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2003. Lowe-Evans, Mary. Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. Markoviü, Vida. “Some problems of a psychological novel of the XXth century.” Savremenik 11 (1960): 69. Mursell, Gordon. English Spirituality from 1700 to the Present Day. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001.

NETWORK THEORY APPROACH TO MRS. DALLOWAY PETAR PENDA

The aim of this chapter is to apply and further elaborate Franco Moretti’s1 idea of introducing quantitative analysis in literary studies by designing a network graph based on the characters’ addressing one another in Mrs. Dalloway. Network theory is a foundation for such an analysis and Moretti bases his concept on Newman’s extensive paper entitled The Structure and Function of Complex Networks (2003). Newman defines a network as “a set of items, which we will call vertices or sometimes nodes, with connections between them, called edges.”2 However, Moretti suggests that characters are vertices, points from whom and to whom utterances or speech acts are directed.3 Connections of two or more vertices are called edges (lines that actually denote characters’ interactions) and they enable one character’s connection with any other. Of particular importance for such a network is Newman’s idea that networks may “address issues of centrality (which individuals are best connected to others or have more influence) and connectivity (whether and how individuals are connected to one another through the network).”4 This model, when it comes to novels, offers a better insight into the characters’ mutual relation (how they interact with one another) and helps us get a good picture of the novel’s structure. Apart from dealing with the observation which characters are best connected to others and are the most influential, the issue of centrality also considers which characters are least connected to others and are marginalised. Such a division also leads to better understanding of the social stratification present in the novel under discussion. 1

Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London-New York: Verso, 2013): 211-240. Newman here explains that networks are also called “graphs” in mathematical literature. M. E. J. Newman, Structure and Function of Complex Networks, accessed January 25, 2014, http://arxiv.org/pdf/condmat/0303516.pdf (2003): 2. 3 Franco Moretti, op. cit., 213. 4 M. E. J. Newman, op. cit., 2. 2

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An example of the network graph (Figure 1) based on the given dialogue from Mrs. Dalloway demonstrates how the network functions. “Tell me,” he said, seizing her by the shoulders. “Are you happy, Clarissa? Does Richard” The door opened. “Here is my Elizabeth,” said Clarissa, emotionally, histrionically, perhaps. “How d’y do?” said Elizabeth coming forward. The sound of Big Ben striking the half hour struck out between them extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that. “Hullo Elizabeth!” cried Peter, stuffing his handkerchief into his pocket, going quickly to her, saying “Good-bye, Clarissa” without looking at her, leaving the room quickly, and running downstairs and opening the hall door.5

Figure 1 Dialogue between Clarissa, Peter and Elizabeth

However, this graph, designed in Moretti’s fashion, does not demonstrate the expressive tones the conversation bears. It basically shows the interconnectedness of the characters and “bring[s] some order into literary evidence,”6 but leaves out emotional charge and nuanced relation of the characters. Here one cannot see Peter’s frustration because the moment of closeness between him and Clarissa has been interrupted, or Clarissa’s melodramatic and, at the same time, affectionate “Here is my Elizabeth” (my emphasis). If the edges, conversely, are marked so that they denote an emotional charge to a certain extent, this graph would tell a lot more about the true relation of the characters. Accordingly, if the utterance is affectionate, caring, or charged with positive feelings, I propose red vertices; on the other hand, if the utterance conveys 5 6

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (London: Penguin, 1996): 53-54. Franco Moretti, op. cit., 212.

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apprehension, fear, coldness, or bears any negative feelings, I propose blue vertices. Neutral feelings are to be marked by black vertices. In that case, the above dialogue should be presented as in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Dialogue between Clarissa, Peter and Elizabeth marked by positive (red edges), negative (blue edges) or neutral (black edges) emotions.

The proposed blue, red and black vertices imply taking into consideration more than just verbal interaction. In this way considerable attention is paid to unspoken thoughts, free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness, and emotions presented with descriptions, to mention but a few, which leads to a more comprehensive relation among characters. The above graph is an example that network theory can be applied to a microlevel analysis, i.e., it can be used for the analysis of parts of a lengthier text, which would further elucidate the wider textual context as well. Network theory complies with Woolf’s presentation of a link between the two characters who actually never meet, but still have a strong effect on one another. Namely, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith are linked at the very end of the book when Clarissa, at the party she throws, learns of his suicide. This triggers her contemplation of life’s meaning(lessness) and of “an embrace in death.”7 She sees his suicide as “her disaster—her disgrace”8 and feels related not only to Septimus, but to the whole humankind as “it was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress.”9 This is in line with Julia Briggs’s claim that “Mrs. Dalloway is centrally concerned with the relationship between the individual and the group.”10 Although critical of her parties, Peter Walsh sees them as a “network of visiting, leaving cards, being kind to 7

Woolf, op. cit., 202. Ibid., 203. 9 Ibid.. 10 Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (London: Penguin, 2005): 133. 8

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people,” and admits “she did it genuinely, from a natural instinct.”11 Clarissa herself sees her parties as an “offering” and possibility to link people: Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?12

This relationship between the character of Clarissa Dalloway and other characters of the novel is graphically presented in Figure 3. This graph is based only on direct utterances, or speech acts that characters address to one another. It shows two distinctly separate structural parts of the novel: a central one, significantly bigger, related to Mrs Dalloway, and a secondary structural part, smaller and related to Septimus Warren Smith. Presented this way, the novel’s structural parts are not connected and in that respect they reflect Modernist emphasis on fragmentation and disunity. The separate structures that make this novel do the same as the fragments—they bespeak a broken culture—a disintegration caused by modern war and anarchy, destructive to the modern mind, and reproduced on the page by writers out to give startling formal proof of the way the world has gone out of joint.13

The network grouped around Clarissa Dalloway makes 20 characters, while the network grouped around Septimus makes 6 characters. Only 4 characters directly address Septimus, whereas 16 characters address Clarissa. This unbalanced structure speaks for itself. Clarissa, as a representative of the privileged post-war upper class, dominates the novel and thus epitomises the unscathed members of society. Her centrality, and accordingly centrality of the social class she belongs to, is emphasised by the bigger network cluster. On the other hand, apart from being a minor character, Septimus stands for war veterans’ minority, eventually eliminated so that he does not remind the others of the consequences of the war. In this regard, Sir William Bradshaw and Dr Holmes are characterised as Government employees whose principal function is not to treat people, but 11

Virginia Woolf, op. cit., 86. Ibid., 134-135. 13 Jesse Matz, The Modern Novel: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004): 40. 12

Petar Penda

Figure 3 Mrs. Dalloway’s network

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to clean the society off the undesired. Even the technological progress Peter Walsh admires so much is in service of eradicating the remnants and reminders of war atrocities. One of the triumphs of civilisation, Peter Walsh thought. It is one of the triumphs of civilisation, as the light high bell of the ambulance sounded. Swiftly, cleanly the ambulance sped to the hospital, having picked up instantly, humanely, some poor devil; some one hit on the head, struck down by disease, knocked over perhaps a minute or so ago at one of these crossings, as might happen to oneself. That was civilisation. It struck him coming back from the East—the efficiency, the organisation, the communal spirit of London. Every cart or carriage of its own accord drew aside to let the ambulance pass. Perhaps it was morbid; or was it not touching rather, the respect which they showed this ambulance with its victim inside—busy men hurrying home yet instantly bethinking them as it passed of some wife; or presumably how easily it might have been them there, stretched on a shelf with a doctor and a nurse.14

Septimus’s minor network, that is a number of people connected to him, symbolically represents the lower social class,15 whose presence is not welcome to Clarissa’s party, not even verbally. The moment the incident of Septimus’s suicide is mentioned, Clarissa protests against it and fears her party might be spoiled. What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party—the Bradshaws, talked of death. He had killed himself—but how? Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party!16

This is the part where the two structural wholes overlap and when Clarissa learns of Septimus and his condition. In the graph above this overlapping cannot be seen, because the communication between the two networks is not given. However, Clarissa and some other characters 14

Virginia Woolf, op. cit., 166. Although Sir William Bradshaw and Dr Holmes formally belong to his network as they address one another, they actually do not belong to his social class. It is their status and social position that enforce a gap between them. 16 Virginia Woolf, op. cit., 202. 15

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present at her party indirectly find out about the suicide. And the source of this piece of information is obviously Sir William Bradshaw, the psychiatrist who treated Septimus after Doctor Bradshaw and who proposed his isolation in the asylum. The relation between the two networks is intricate and additionally emphasised as Peter Walsh also sees Septimus in the Regent Park and later the ambulance car that takes away his dead body. Then the plane “letting out the white smoke from behind” and writing something both Clarissa and Septimus can see. Their thinking of what the plane may be writing also joins their seemingly separate networks. As Jesse Matz points out, “the narrator migrates into the heads of other characters” and “so we get a full range of perspectives, woven together into a kind of web.”17 In a letter to Violet Dickinson, thinking about the idea to write Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf stated that she was “going to have a man and a woman— show them growing up—never meeting—not knowing each other—but all the time you’ll feel them come closer and closer.”18 It seems that Woolf here has the intention to eradicate the class difference between Septimus and Clarissa as she depicts two characters with common suffering and the impossibility to adapt socially. However, by functioning as a reminder of war atrocities and anguish, Septimus is undesirable and removed from London streets, while Clarissa’s upper-class status spares her. In this way, Septimus’s suicide and Clarissa’s restored inner harmony lead to a certain balance, “which could be interpreted as Woolf’s imposition of a unity which effaces the negative aspects of London’s and England’s social life in general.”19 Some sort of closure and aesthetic defragmentation has been achieved here in spite of the fact that Modernist “[f]ragmentation and plotlessness typically end in defiance of closure.”20 Woolf, as well as many Modernist writers, was rather preoccupied with the idea of fragmentation and disunity and they echo the style of her narrative. She glorifies the concept of disunity, but ultimately tries to make Mrs. Dalloway, as well as her other works, more orderly by rounding the narrative off—Clarissa eventually decides not to commit suicide and joins her guests at the party. 17

Jesse Matz, op. cit., 52. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, eds., The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One 1888-1912 (London and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975): 60. 19 Petar Penda, “Politicising Cityscape: London in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,” The Literary London Journal 10, no. 1 (2013), accessed February 2, 2015, http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/spring2013/penda.html. 20 Jesse Matz, op. cit., 40. 18

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Another way Woolf achieves aesthetic unity of the two seemingly divergent networks is her intersection of the two distant networks. This she accomplishes by indirect connection of both Clarissa and Septimus, on the one hand, and characters grouped around them, on the other hand. Thus, we do not hear William Bradshaw speak of the suicide, or address any of the characters from Clarissa’s network. According to the speech acts exchanged, he belongs to Septimus’s network. Yet, his speaking of suicide is implied by Clarissa’s sentence: “What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party?” This includes both Lady Bradshaw—who does explain the reason why they are late and tells the incident—and Sir William Bradshaw. According to this (and if the network is not based on the speech acts that are actually presented in the novel), Sir William Bradshaw belongs to both networks and thus stands for the additional link between Clarissa and Septimus, as well as for the link between their networks accordingly. If the implied speech acts are taken into consideration, then the networks, especially the one related to Clarissa, are much more intricate. In this case, we can assume that Richard and Clarissa Dalloway address most of their guests (especially the most important ones, like the Prime Minister or Sir William Bradshaw). However, for the sake of centrality, Woolf does not give evidence of this in the novel, which further distinguishes Clarissa’s character. Still, it is noteworthy to take into consideration at least Clarissa’s, Richard’s, and Sir William Bradshaw’s mutual address to one another, which significantly affects the networks. The implied network is presented below by black edges, as it is presumed neutral. Since it is covert, it is marked by a dotted line. Regarding centrality, Clarissa is still the dominant character with the most edges in the network. However, the two networks become a unified network as they are related by the character of Sir William Bradshaw. Still, their connection is not strong and could be graphically presented in this way, the red field denoting overlapping and unity of a sort.

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Figure 4 Mrs. Dalloway’s network with implied address further strengthening the connection between Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith.

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Figure 5 Intersection of the two networks

This forced unity of the above networks, and thus of social classes as well, bears certain ideological traits. Such a structure is in compliance with how Eagleton sees the concept of “organic form,” “as one crucial nexus between history and literary production.”21 Namely, the novel’s given network is “a certain production of ideology” which “‘produces’ the text transforming it into a unique and irreducible entity.”22 It is this “unique and irreducible entity” that speaks in favour of social unity and does not allow any outsiders within it. In these terms, Septimus’s eradication by his suicide brings social harmony and unity of a sort. The idea of relief and liberation is presented in his wife’s Lucrezia’s wish to end it all and Clarissa’s reaction upon the news that Septimus has committed suicide: “She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living.”23 Lucrezia’s and Clarissa’s thoughts do not reflect their personal liberation only, but, figuratively, also stand for the societal deliverance of the unwanted, which enables the rest of society to keep on, uninterrupted by the burden of the past. This also has to be achieved structurally within the novel and could be the reason why Woolf links the two networks and thus, speaking in Eagleton’s terms, “produces” the ideology of social stability and peace. 21

Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London, New York: Verso, 2006): 104. 22 Ibid., 64. 23 Virginia Woolf, op. cit., 204.

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In a diary entry Woolf states that she “want[s] to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.”24 Although she does give a critical perspective on the then society to a certain extent, as Zwerdling notes, “[t]he novel is in large measure an examination of a single class and its control over English society”25 given through its main character’s lenses, purposely scrutinising its object from the inside. The majority of characters belong to the upper class and most of them are influential social and political figures and belong to what Peter Walsh calls the “governing class.”26 Out of the numerous characters introduced and dealt with in the novel, only a few of them belong to the lower class. And only two of those attend the central novel’s event, Clarissa’s party: a poor cousin Ellie Henderson, whose invitation was debated and the student, who is seen as a curiosity. Their presence and the insistence on mixing the two classes again speak of the imposed and artificial unity, which implies the ideological attempt to hide huge social differences present in English society after the Great War, as well as its consequences. The ideology lying behind this is that networks need to be obliterated or integrated with a single network so that the differences are less obvious and the centre strengthened. And Clarissa Dalloway, a member of the privileged governing class, eventually becomes the sole centre of the novel, more so by effacing Septimus Warren Smith.

Works Cited Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume Two 1920-1924. Florida: A Harvest Book, 1980. Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. London: Penguin, 2005. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London, New York: Verso, 2006. Matz, Jesse. The Modern Novel: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London, New York: Verso, 2013. Newman, M. E. J. The Structure and Function of Complex Networks, 2003. Accessed January 25, 2014. http://arxiv.org/pdf/condmat/0303516.pdf.

24 Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume Two 1920—1924 (Florida: A Harvest Book, 1980): 248. 25 Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1986): 120. 26 Virginia Woolf, op. cit., 86.

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Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, eds. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One 1888-1912. London and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. Penda, Petar. “Politicising Cityscape: London in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” The Literary London Journal 10, no. 1 (2013). Accessed February 28, 2015. http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/spring2013/penda.html Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Penguin, 1996. Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1986.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S (IN)ARTICULATE SILENCE AND THE MODERNIST SUSPICION OF WORDS ALEKSANDRA ŽEŽELJ KOCIû

“Communication between human beings is not very good.” (Ernest Hemingway, Letter to Bernard Berenson, La Finca Vigía, 20-22 March 1953)

Introducing Doubt This essay explores the possibility of genuine communication in the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, while primarily accentuating the author’s dramatic dialogue and iceberg theory, both of which ultimately create nothing but a peculiar medium of verbal Modernist silence. Moreover, the fact that Hemingway’s male and female protagonists either fully understand one another, or alternatively dwell in complete unawareness of themselves and others, gets elaborated through the prism of their real or imagined speech acts, articulation of pain, gendered deafness, talking, and taciturnity. To comprehend Hemingway’s fictional world of narrating and its simultaneous suspicion of narration, it is essential that the essay touch upon the function of language in Modernism at large, Hemingway’s socalled masculine, minimalist style, as well as the dialectics between verbal exposure and muteness. Hemingway’s narrative space is emotionally intense despite its verbal silence. While endeavouring to comprehend his concept of communication, Hemingway’s readers alternatingly reside in two worlds: the first might be labelled universally Modernist and explicated with the aid of Charles Simic’s words that “language is inept at expressing experience;”1 the other is individual that forever seems to have been based on the intrinsic incongruity between men and women. Suggestively, talking about Sigmund Freud’s critical position, Mikhail Bakhtin emphasises that 1

ýarls Simiü, Nezaposleni vidovnjak (Vršac: KOV, 1995): 112.

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censorship explicitly lies at the boundaries of the systems of the conscious and the unconscious, whereby the latter is “afraid of words.”2 Hence, we base our research on the assumption that the unconscious is non-verbal and that it can be linked to Hemingway’s notions of speech and silence. Simultaneously, Hemingway’s criticism reminds us of “the ironic discrepancy in Hemingway’s fiction between expectations and fulfillment, fabrication and fact, intention and individual act, sent and received message.”3 Hemingway’s stories are replete with “nervous pressures of individual conversations,”4 ceaselessly coming back to the theme of unproductive communication between men and women, while “catching moments when they stop listening to one another.”5

Harmony Unimpaired communication between Hemingway’s male and female characters is often twofold. First, the protagonists turn their relationship into a specific clique, complying with the principle of contrast to all o/Others who do not belong to it. Second, they find themselves in a quandary due to the very fact that they understand one another only too well, and consequently they do not know how to tackle the truths that come about from their relationships. Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises reveals a New Woman figure, Lady Brett Ashley, who, whenever in doubt, consistently turns to Jake Barnes believing that he is the only person who understands her. For instance, when the two of them are alone in a taxi, Brett informs him that she has been feeling miserable,6 pleading with him to understand why she cannot even dream of being close to him since she “simply turns to jelly” when he touches her.7 Knowing that there is nothing else like looking into his eyes, Brett is afraid and does not want to go through the same hell all over again. Taking into account the nature of Jake’s sexual wound, Brett 2

Mihail Bahtin, Frojdizam—kritiþka studija (Belgrade: Logos, 2009): 38. E. M. Halliday, “Hemingway’s Ambiguity: Symbolism and Irony,” in Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert P. Weeks (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, 1962): 65. 4 Leo Gurko, Ernest Hemingway and the Pursuit of Heroism (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1968): 191. 5 Rena Sanderson, “Hemingway and Gender History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 190. 6 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (London: Arrow Books, 2004): 21. 7 Ibid., 22. 3

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implies that he could never fulfill her sexual desire, while he begs her not to talk about it since what happened to him is “supposed to be funny.”8 Furthermore, after an episode with Count Mippipopolous, Brett visits Jake in the middle of the night not only to tell him that the Count is “one of them,”9 thus underlining the dichotomy between We and Others, but also to once more confess her love for him, literally shaking with sentimentality before leaving him again.10 Later, when she accompanies Robert Cohn on an outing, Brett misses her appointment with Jake, knowing that the strength of their relationship will not be in the least changed by her heedlessness. When Jake in turn confesses his love for her, Brett beseeches him not to talk about it,11 thus creating one of the mirror-like responses between her and Jake. Paradoxically, pleading to stop with verbal communication in Hemingway’s fiction is a sure sign that the characters understand each other intimately, but does not suggest that their relationship will improve for it. Namely, Hemingway depicts the relationship between Jake and Brett as instinctive and, to a certain extent, inherent in them to the point that they cannot free themselves from it, even when the external events around them seem to be facilitating their separation. Furthermore, caught in an escapist fishing adventure with Bill, Jake refuses to talk about Brett,12 though later watches the beautiful Brett with “a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening.”13 Jake starts hating Robert Cohn for he reminds him of his own damned suffering.14 Also, after falling in love with the irresistible matador Pedro Romero, Brett, again, finds her auditor in Jake, attempting to explicate to him why she feels like a bitch, not losing an opportunity to underline “the things a woman goes through.”15 Whatever she does and wherever she goes, Brett continually returns to Jake, halting at the same point of understanding. She even comes to him when she wishes to share her feeling of happiness about Pedro’s professional successes.16 When finally physically distanced from Brett, Jake receives a telegram from her in which she writes that she is

8

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 23. Ibid., 28. 10 Ibid., 29. 11 Ibid., 49. 12 Ibid., 108. 13 Ibid., 127. 14 Ibid., 158. 15 Ibid., 159-160. 16 Ibid., 180. 9

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“rather in trouble.”17 So, after she informs him of her reasons for ending her relationship with Pedro—i.e. her inability to overcome the young matador’s wish that she become a true woman—Brett, for the umpteenth time, pleads with Jake not to talk about any of it.18 Associatively bringing his readers to the taxi scene at the beginning of the novel, Hemingway presents the last conversation between Jake and Brett in yet another taxi, choosing an ironic ending, which is still target of criticism—“Oh Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together.—Isn’t it pretty to think so?”19 At times, Hemingway’s protagonists do seem to be a mouthpiece for their creator’s (utter) distrust in articulate language. Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms paints a love couple who through their union create a unity strikingly contrasted with o/Others. Namely, after she has informed Frederic Henry about her pregnancy, Catherine Barkley expresses her wish that the two of them do not let each other “ever misunderstand on purpose.” She does not want to do things the way others do, and should anything ever come between them, they will still have the world created “only for the two of them.”20 Catherine and Henry are on one side, while all the others are on the other. When he is not with her, Henry feels as if he “hasn’t a thing in the world,”21 wondering whether he would feel worse if Catherine should die, practically questioning our dependence on others and bringing ourselves into a position of complete passivity. Also, we should bear in mind that successful communication between Hemingway’s characters is not solely to be found in his romantic couples. In this respect, the relationship between Nick and his sister Litless in “The Last Good Country” is based on the discrepancy between their clique and others. Litless emphasises that the two of them are “different from the others,”22 and that the others might be jealous of their mutual affection.23 Yet again, it is vital to mention that understanding between Hemingway’s men and women is not exclusively based on sexual act, but rather on (sexual?) desire to become one with the o/Other. In Hemingway’s “The Sea-Change” a girl informs her boyfriend Phil that she is leaving him for another girl, though assuring him of her 17

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 209. Ibid., 212-213. 19 Ibid., 216. 20 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (London: Vintage, 2005): 125. 21 Ibid., 228. 22 Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway—The Finca Vigía Edition (New York: Scribner, 2003): 534. 23 Ibid., 538. 18

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resolution to eventually come back. Since Phil is not ready to immediately embrace the change, “the woman is first to break the silence.”24 Charles Nolan Jr. calls this story a little masterpiece primarily due to the depth of the author’s psychological delineation of male jealousy.25 With the aid of his dialogue technique, Hemingway underlines the connection between homosexuality and betrayal, bringing his readers close to the issues of essentialism and constructivism. One thing that makes the two characters’ situation unbearable is the fact that they understand each other only too well—she knows that he knows that she could never ever leave him for another man. What is more, the girl remarks that “since they understand each other so well it is no good that they pretend that they do not.” With her heart almost breaking because she needs to leave him, he fully understands that she must go.26 Evoking the importance of the things they did together, Phil’s girlfriend demands that he understand her precisely through this act. In addition, she reminds him that “people are made up of all sorts of things,” although she is convinced, remembering their past life together, that he already knows it. Notwithstanding Phil’s incapability of conquering his emotions that instant—his bitterness comes from his conviction that perversion is a subtype of sexual behaviour—we perceive that he understands that she will eventually come back to him and tell him “how it was.”27 Albeit the event proves harmful to his own sense of masculinity, his girlfriend’s choice of lesbian love over his provides him not only with new material for his future story, but also with even deeper understanding of sexual ambivalence—his own and o/Others’. With almost a direct parallel, the writer Philip in Hemingway’s short story “Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog” suggests to his wife that she should travel somewhere and return enriched with new experiences. Although she understands that he wants her to leave because he would rather have her enjoy herself than become a seeing-eye dog to a blind man, she starts crying because she does not wish to leave him to “sleep alone with that pillow.”28 After he convinces her that everything will be just fine, Philip continues to think up ways how to send her somewhere, avoiding hurting her at the same time.29 Finally, Hemingway’s protagonists know that to

24 Charles Nolan Jr., “Hemingway’s ‘The Sea Change:’ What Close Reading and Evolutionary Psychology Reveal,” The Hemingway Review 21, no. 1 (2001): 56. 25 Ibid., 64. 26 Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 303. 27 Ibid., 304. 28 Ibid., 490. 29 Ibid., 491.

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understand means to see the truth. But they also become aware that the truth carries a heavy burden of pain.

Dissonance Given its limited scope, this essay cannot sketch the multitude of levels and types of misunderstanding among the characters in Hemingway’s fiction. Nevertheless, in the following part we will focus on a number of specific forms of verbal and non-verbal discord: shattered illusions and sexual unease, linguistic confusion and “speaking different languages,” intolerance between husband and wife, fear of change, the rich and the concept of sexuality. In 1938 Hemingway felt the need to explain to Maxwell Perkins30 the reasons why he had not wished his story “Up in Michigan” to be expelled from the short story collection The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Namely, Hemingway insisted that this story was sad, not in the least dirty as some readers might have deemed it.31 Although he reluctantly spoke about his fiction, Hemingway came to the rescue of this particular work initially printed as the third story of Three Stories and Ten Poems. “Up in Michigan” takes place in Hortons Bay, Canada, rather bigoted surroundings known for its cattle rearing and woodcutting industry. Liz Coates happens to be increasingly thinking about Jim Gilmore, who does not, to her mind, resemble a blacksmith. At the very beginning, Hemingway contrasts their physical descriptions, emphasising that Liz is the cleanest girl, while Jim has “big mustaches and big hands.”32 Even though she yearns for sexual experience with him, Liz eventually becomes terrified, while her fright increases with her sensations of pain and unpleasantness.33 Unlike typical Hemingwayan stories, this story insists on the descriptions of sexual act itself, notwithstanding his specific technique of verbal suppression. Hereby, Hemingway projects himself into a woman’s consciousness displaying her feelings after sexual penetration by a drunken man who does not seem to take heed of her refusal, while readers become witnesses to “a female powerlessness before the unstoppable sexual violence.”34 Analysing the story, Richard Fantina insists on Hemingway’s “outstanding ability to accurately show a 30

His editor at the time. Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters 1917-1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981): 468. 32 Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 59. 33 Ibid., 61-62. 34 Kenneth Lynn, Hemingway (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987): 213. 31

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woman’s viewpoint.”35 The blow that Liz’s self-assurance receives by her first sexual experience cannot be overstated, since she is a respectable provincial girl who falls in love with a man for the first time, and because of whom she even feels “weak and sick sort of inside.”36 Her misery can be linked to the surrounding fog and its telling coldness. Sadly, Liz feels “cold and miserable and everything felt gone.”37 But Jim couldn’t have understood her in the right way, if we recall his drunken, stereotypically masculine flaunting of hunting prey before other men.38 Hemingway’s first short story collection In Our Time deals with the loss of geographical, cultural and temporal coordinates in the modern age. Thus, his story “Out of Season” discloses many a level of unfruitful communication. Namely, misunderstanding between husband and wife precedes narration at the beginning of the story when the married couple go hunting “out of season” accompanied by an Italian ex-soldier Arturo Peduzzi. The woman, visibly aggravated, literally walks behind the two men, when her husband suggests she should have a drink at a café to make her feel better.39 When husband and wife are left alone, he expresses his regret that he might have behaved improperly, but is ultimately convinced that the two of them see eye to eye although it does not seem so. Expectedly, his wife feigns indifference to his remark and insinuates that things will never be rectified either way they end: “I’m sorry you feel so rotten, Tiny,” he said. “I’m sorry I talked the way I did at lunch. We were both getting at the same things from different angles.” “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “None of it makes any difference.”40

Incompatibility between husband and wife is highlighted by their literal ignorance of what Peduzzi endeavours to articulate, taking into account that he addresses them using a variety of languages not knowing which language would be best to hurl at them. The young husband is obviously upset over becoming part of illegal hunt, so he finally manages to persuade his wife to go back home and leave the male company, but 35

Richard Fantina, Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 94. 36 Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 60. 37 Ibid., 62. 38 Ibid., 61. 39 Ibid., 135-136. 40 Ibid., 137.

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only after she has uttered that “he, of course, must go on so as to prove himself.” While Peduzzi is shocked by the fact that she chooses not to stay with them, her husband feels relieved that the hunt finally goes awry, due to his intentional not bringing the necessary fishing equipment. So, he arranges another hunting expedition that will not take place as readers are made to believe.41 Almost one century after New Criticism, Charles Nolan, Jr. emphasises the importance of close reading, elaborating his view using as example this short story whose title symbolically links the young married couple with illegal fishing.42 Besides, the story’s linguistic confusion becomes a metaphor for the misunderstanding between husband and wife,43 which has occupied Hemingway’s critical disputes ever since. An abortion is often deemed to be the reason for their disharmony, or else their decision to go their separate ways.44 There are also interpretations that choose to focus on the man’s sexual impotence, justified by the lack of phallic fishing rods.45 Since marriage in Hemingway’s fiction is almost always sterile, though not always for sexual motives, “Out of Season” can be linked to many other Hemingway’s narratives that treat the topic of (innate?) misunderstanding between men and women, sterility in marriage and linguistic masculine–feminine confusion. Furthermore, the contrast between the rich and the poor in Hemingway’s fiction is not used to delineate social or class differences only. Therefore, finances in Hemingway’s fiction are closely connected to the themes of sexuality and sexual (dis)satisfaction. In this respect, in Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not, we become aware of the link between the sexual and creative infertility of a writer, who uses his wife’s disappointment and suffering for the benefit of his writing, but, who, unfortunately, does not obtain more than a feeling of hollowness.46 Should we remember another writer from the same novel who imagines himself to be a different animal every day, we can conclude that the happy in Hemingway’s fiction are often literally insane.47 The rich also worry— which is a sure sign of passivity in Hemingway’s fiction—or postpone 41

Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 138-139. Charles Nolan Jr., “Hemingway’s ‘Out of Season:’ The Importance of Close Reading,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 53, no. 2 (1999): 46. 43 Ibid., 49. 44 Ibid., 50-51; Paul Smith is one of the critics who believes that the couple eventually decide to divorce. 45 Ibid., 52. 46 Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not (London: Arrow, 2004): 132. 47 Ibid., 138-139. 42

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suicide, or think too much about the true nature of their and the others’ souls, or seem to be sexually impotent,48 proving that money does not succeed in overpowering the basic misunderstanding between the protagonists in Hemingway’s work.

Silence and Speech This section presupposes several lines of interpretation. Before we start analysing some of Hemingway’s works individually focusing on speech implications, the articulation of pain, non-verbal communication, gendered deafness, speech and silence, we will first refer to the understanding of language in Modernism, Hemingway’s masculine, minimalist style, as well as the dialectics between verbal display and restraint. Literary Modernism has repeatedly been characterised by a consciousness of the overall inability to relate artistic expression, thus often focusing on the taciturnity of the modern agent, articulation of the message and estrangement of individuals from themselves and others. To this end, we believe that Ernest Hemingway, preoccupied with linguistic boundaries and verbal possibilities of reality distortion, might have used his work as an agent to talk about the inadequacy of language to express the world, very much in line with D. H. Lawrence’s sentiment that “language enables but also frustrates.” According to Lawrence, writing is solely a symbolic expression of reality that exists outside words, though an expression, while sexual experience should “reveal realities that are inaccessible to language.”49 In addition, taking into account that “truth cannot be more than a function of our conceptual system,”50 language comprises a series of metaphors that highlight certain aspects while hiding others.51 Hemingway’s use of irony perfectly shows how human intention hides behind the uttered word, while often being masked more than it is stereotypically thought to be. Analysing a variety of Hemingway’s fictional works, Roland Berman observes his steady use of these Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical ideas: the inability of language to depict reality or explain the experience, language distorts reality, not only the value of words, but also of silence should be perceived, language is

48

Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, 161-168. As cited in D. J. Gordon, “Sex and Language in D. H. Lawrence,” Twentieth Century Literature 27, no. 4 (1981): 362-374. 50 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003): 185. 51 Ibid., 149. 49

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ambiguous and scarce, language is often a barrier to thought, language sets traps, communication itself is rather dubious.52 Communication between characters in Hemingway’s fiction should be linked to his minimalist style. Likewise, Malcolm Bradbury emphasises that Hemingway’s works are replete with hidden tensions and emotions, never fully verbally spoken.53 Furthermore, discussing Hemingway’s particular style, Peter Schwenger concludes that a certain “mistrust in words” might be characteristic of the masculine mode at large, including Hemingway’s.54 Similarly, though somewhat from another angle and in the context of the prototypical masculine freedom, Mark Schorer dwells on Hemingway’s masculinist style to underline its suppression of verbal embellishments, the brevity of syntactic constructions, the silencing of information and the sharpness of repetitive effects.55 It is worthwhile resorting to Hemingway’s singular iceberg theory precisely at this point. Specifically, the above-mentioned theoretical concept rests on the belief that texts should comprise the minimum of verbosity, whereby the subdued information is equally important as the stated: If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only oneeighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.56

This time in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway also draws attention to his theory claiming that “you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.” To this end, Hemingway 52

As cited in Roland Berman, Fitzgerald—Wilson—Hemingway: Language and Experience (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2003): 75-94. 53 Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern American Novel (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 94. 54 Peter Schwenger, “The Masculine Mode,” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 4 (1979): 632. 55 As cited in Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Heritage, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (London and New York: Routledge, 2005): 257. 56 Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (London: Arrow, 2004): 165.

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provides an example from “Old Man at the Bridge,” whereby he omits its real end in which “the old man hanged himself.”57 In one of his interviews, Hemingway reminds us that should a writer omit a piece of the text because he does not possess enough knowledge of the topic he deals with, his text would consequently suffer from a hole. Rather, it is necessary that he rid of the unnecessary information.58 Beatriz P. Ibañez stresses the importance of Hemingway’s revolutionary theory that leaves out the seven eighths of the text. Therefore, Hemingway’s narratives rely on “the minimum of verbosity that seems to minimize the possibility of the linguistic distortion of any text.” The suppressed textual contents become equally important as the openly stated information, while the readers’ imagination gets activated by the gapped form.59 Thus, the meaning of Hemingway’s text is articulated by both the said and the unsaid. The readers are asked to fill in the textual gaps and reach “beyond the visible,”60 not forgetting that they decipher the implied, rather than know the final truth. What is more, the iceberg theory ought to be linked to the influence of Paul Cézanne’s art on Hemingway’s fiction. In close resemblance to Cézanne’s paintings, Ernest Hemingway’s verbal landscapes frequently rest on a single detail creating an intense feeling and fortified clarity.61 We should pay attention to particular details in Hemingway’s stories that resemble parts of Cézanne’s canvas painted in white.62 We assent to the view that names Hemingway’s writing a multifocal aesthetics that can be likened to “a glacier of multiple viewpoints.”63 What is more, Hemingway’s fiction concurrently resides on the explicit and implicit level. Consequently, it bursts with “hidden, repressed or subconscious

57

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (London: Arrow, 2004): 43. As cited in Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1986): 125. 59 Beatriz P. Ibañez, “Very Sad But Very Fine: Death in the Afternoon’s Imagist Interpretation of the Bullfight-Text,” in A Companion to Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, ed. Miriam B. Mandel (New York: Camden, 2004): 156-157. 60 Beatriz P. Ibañez, op. cit., 159. 61 T. L. Gaillard Jr., “Hemingway’s Debt to Cézanne: New Perspectives,” Twentieth Century Literature 25, no. 1 (1999): 65-67. 62 Kenneth G. Johnston, “Hemingway and Cézanne: Doing the Country,” American Literature 56, no. 1 (1984): 36. 63 Zoe Trodd, “Hemingway’s Camera Eye: The Problem of Language and an Interwar Politics of Form,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 210; 216. 58

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contents.”64 Yet again, though from a psychoanalytical perspective, Hemingway’s skill could be interpreted as “the palimpsest of erasing the author’s personal family drama.”65 Although critics unanimously agree that the theme in “Cat in the Rain” is the discord between husband and wife, “they are not in unison when it comes to the reason of the couple’s misunderstanding.”66 Namely, the story is ambivalent primarily about the husband’s consistent gendered deafness, who rejects to respond to his wife’s emotional and verbal outbursts. Leo Gurko rightfully acknowledges that it is precisely the wife’s exuberant speech and the husband’s exuberant silence that produce the vacuum in their communication.67 “Hills Like White Elephants,” surely one of Hemingway’s masterpieces in the short story form for the use of restrained language, boasts many categories of speech and silence: misunderstanding caused by verbal communication and vice versa, strengthened communicative tension between the protagonists, implications of speech, deep irony stemming from the depth of sorrow, and performativity of speech. There are also critical viewpoints that insist on one of the story’s themes being the difference between male/masculine and female/feminine reactions at the moment of life-changing crossroads, as well as “the confrontation of destructive mechanism of regression and active mechanism of progression.”68 In a biographical note, Kenneth Lynn emphasises that Hemingway turned his first wife Hadley Richardson into a mythologised being, whereby, in fact, she became a subdued theme of the story, while the frustration over the birth of their child Bumby got the fictional shape of white elephants.69 The girl in the story is “not able to defend her desire with words,” and so she chooses bitterness and irony.70 Her attempts to

64

Kenneth G. Johnston, “Hemingway and Freud: The Tip of the Iceberg,” The Journal of Narrative Technique 14, no. 1 (1984): 69. 65 Kenneth Lynn, op. cit., 158. 66 David Lodge, “Analysis and Interpretation of the Realist Text: A Pluralistic Approach to Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Cat in the Rain’,” Poetics Today (Narratology II: The Fictional Text and the Reader) 1, no. 4 (1980): 13. 67 Leo Gurko, op. cit., 88. 68 Vladislava Gordiü, Hemingvej—poetika kratke priþe (Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 2000): 71. 69 Kenneth Lynn, op. cit., 363-364; Bumby is Ernest Hemingway’s first son. 70 Lionel Trilling, “Hills Like White Elephants,” in The Experience of Literature: A Reader with Commentaries—Fiction, ed. Lionel Trilling (New York and Chicago: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967): 307.

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reach an understanding with her man do not succeed, so she pleads with him—precisely seven times—to stop talking before she screams.71 “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen” is another in the series of stories that, through the failure of communication between doctors and patients, speak about the inadequacy of language to show emotions. So the young male protagonist has tried to—in a somewhat grotesque act of selfmutilation with the razor—free himself of the despicable (sexual?) lust that he deems sinful, but against which he is unable to fight.72 His insistence on his doctors’ help faces up to their complete absence of compassion. He beseeches them to help him many times,73 but is only given their assurance that everything is all right with him, having, of course, the seriousness of his intention to cripple himself previously doubted. Together with the protagonists’ own suffocation of their inner struggle, Hemingway himself refuses to talk, thus doubling the story’s narrative silence beyond measure, concurrently carrying his iceberg theory to extremes. Henceforth, “Cat in the Rain,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” and “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen” show not only the difference between masculine and feminine speech, but also the limitations of language itself, which is incapable of telling the experience and so chooses to speak through “suffering and uneasiness of silence.”74 Infirm masculinity is, in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, delineated through Frederic Henry’s inability to articulate his pain and his past. Respecting the code of masculine verbal silence, one of Hemingway’s most prominent heroes is undecided between his desire to communicate his pain and the feeling that he is not going to survive the war. His reaching the state of numbness and anesthesia could be a topic of a separate study. Nevertheless, we remind the novel’s readers of the fact that after Catherine’s death, Frederic Henry “becomes equally silent, having learnt not to feel.”75 Likewise, that language cannot adequately accentuate the inner experience is shown by Henry’s sentimental plead to God to save Catherine. Ten times does Henry beg God to fulfil his wish,76 allowing 71

Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 214. Ibid., 299. 73 Ibid., 301. 74 Ann Putnam, “On Defining Eden: The Search for Eve in the Garden of Sorrows,” in Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice, eds. Lawrence R. Broer and Gloria Holland (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 2002): 123. 75 Diane Price Herndl, “Invalid Masculinity: Silence, Hospitals, and Anesthesia in A Farewell to Arms,” The Hemingway Review 21, no. 1 (2001): 49. 76 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 291. 72

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Hemingway to draw a parallel with his diverse (mostly male) characters who beg, scream or stay silent, while their language simply proves insufficient. When language loses its touch with reality, it becomes especially abstract or vulgar, as Robert O. Stephens aptly suggests.77 Basing their research on the premise that Renata is a female passive auditor, traditional critics of Hemingway’s novel Across the River and Into the Trees emphasise that Colonel Richard Cantwell’s narration of his own life to Renata has especially therapeutic qualities for him. Nevertheless, to our mind, despite his many trials, Richard’s emotional cleansing does not help him succeed to talk about his physical and psychological war wounds. Richard represents a true example of “the language of injury” in literature that Jennifer Travis speaks about,78 since it proves too hard for him to articulate his emotional wounds. Since the Western society suffers from the idea that masculinity is either insensitive or emotionally subdued, Travis draws our attention to “the danger of the sentimental subaltern identity” through which the articulation of problems or expressed emotions is deemed sentimental or feminine.79 What is more, Jackson J. Benson presupposes that “Hemingway hates sentimentality so much that at times he becomes sentimental attacking it.”80 Unless we are convinced that Hemingway’s obsession with death and loss of masculinity is by definition sentimental, it is hard to understand why some critics do not allow Hemingway to consciously become a different writer from the one he is stereotypically fixed to be. We talk about the fact that Hemingway’s style in Across the River and Into the Trees is not typically linguistically repressed, and we remember how “his subject-matter never is.”81 Also, let us not forget that this novel alternates between two contrasting registers—courtly love and erotic desire.82 With the aid of a dynamic dialogue, Hemingway creates a “subtle sexual

77

Robert O. Stephens, “Hemingway and Stendhal: The Matrix of A Farewell to Arms,” PMLA 88, no. 2 (1973): 276. 78 Jennifer Travis, “Introduction: Soldier’s Heart: The Vocabulary of Injury and the American Civil War,” in Wounded Hearts: Masculinity, Law, and Literature in American Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005): 27; 9. 79 Ibid., 16; 43. 80 Jackson J. Benson, Ernest Hemingway: The Writer’s Art of Self-Defense (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969): 122. 81 Peter Schwenger, op. cit., 627. 82 Andrew S. Keener, “Is It Unmaidenly?: Courtly and Carnal Language in Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees,” The Hemingway Review 33, no. 1 (2013): 44.

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tension”83 between Richard and Renata, showing again that gender identity is just a fluid pose. While Richard Fantina claims that Hemingway consciously suppresses love scenes, thus creating “a highly stylized and often erotic prose,”84 Leslie Fielder underlines that Hemingway is “dependent on showing the sexual act.”85 On the other side, we believe that Hemingway unflinchingly sexualises his texts leaving the seven eighths of the iceberg underneath the surface. It is precisely why his heroes’ sexual ecstasies are displayed in muted sentences that speak with silence and humour.

Concluding with Doubt Dealing with the narrative techniques of Modernist writers such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf, Biljana Dojþinoviü critically approaches “the invaluable value of things taken for granted,” as well as of silence that represents the “contribution to the textual narration.” Moreover, we cannot but agree with her idea that some writers are “holding information” while leaving “enough elements to let readers build on the forever ambivalent meaning,”86 believing that it might equally apply to Hemingway’s style. Several of Hemingway’s works question the nature of language itself. In accordance with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ideas, Hemingway’s fiction proves that linguistic communication, resting its use of either words or signs, seems to be much more dynamic and fluid than we are willing to accept.87 Merleau-Ponty also claims that “language is silence.”88 Finally, Hemingway’s writing can be thought to represent the dialectics between verbal demonstration and suppression, while the overall meaning of his works is contingent on murky places that speak through reticence. Hemingway’s fiction consists not only of verbal articulations, but also of desperate whimpers that any form of oral talk should be abolished. There are many examples of a conspicuous lack of (successful) communication between the protagonists, which can be most evidently discerned in 83

Andrew S. Keener, op. cit., 58. Richard Fantina, op. cit., 24. 85 Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960): 304. 86 Biljana Dojþinoviü, Susreti u tami—Uvod u þitanje Virdžinije Vulf (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2011): 100-101. 87 As cited in Arnold E. Sabatelli, “Nowhere, Nothing, Now: The Awkward Beauty of Language in For Whom the Bell Tolls,” The North Dakota Quarterly—The Centennial Issue 66, no. 2 (1999): 148. 88 Ibid., 149. 84

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Hemingway’s drama-like dialogues. Namely, Hemingway shows how language often does not succeed in realising its connotative character, i.e. the involvement of oneself with the O/other. Nadine Gordimer similarly declares how she has “learnt to listen to everything that Hemingway’s protagonists do not say.”89 Relying on the general Modernist premise that language is unable to express the world, we have attempted to show how communication between Hemingway’s characters is often conditioned by social gender constructions. Typical male verbal taciturnity and female hysterical emotional seizures ought to be analysed in the wider context of dictated gender roles, while failed understanding between Hemingway’s men and women ought to be understood in the context of the twentiethcentury (Anglo-American) societal constructions that lose their universally value mooring. Paradoxically enough, Hemingway’s silence becomes an “eloquent artistic tool,” while his sentence “tests the limit of communicativeness.”90 Let us not forget that Carlos Baker compares Hemingway’s iceberg theory not only with Henry David Thoreau’s concept of dusky knowledge that presupposes things having other connotations beneath the surface forms and colours, but also with Henry James’s hovering subject that can be sensed through allusion.91 With respect to all the above-mentioned, communication between Hemingway’s characters often takes place at the level of connoted or non-verbal consciousness. Somewhere within the cracks of meaning, Hemingway’s fiction does manage to speak, though enveloped in silence.

Works Cited Bahtin, Mihail. Frojdizam—kritiþka studija. Belgrade: Logos, 2009. Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1956. Benson, Jackson J. Ernest Hemingway: The Writer’s Art of Self-Defense. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. Berman, Roland. “Hemingway’s Plain Language; Hemingway’s Limits.” In Fitzgerald—Wilson—Hemingway: Language and Experience, edited by Roland Berman, 75-100. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2003. 89

Nadine Gordimer, “Hemingway’s Expatriates,” Transition 80 (1999): 86; emphasis added. 90 Vladislava Gordiü, op. cit., 143-147. 91 As cited in Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1956), 178; 185.

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Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern American Novel. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Bruccoli, Matthew J, ed. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Dojþinoviü, Biljana. Susreti u tami—Uvod u þitanje Virdžinije Vulf. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2011. Fantina, Richard. Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion, 1960. Gaillard Jr., T. L. “Hemingway’s Debt to Cézanne: New Perspectives.” Twentieth Century Literature 25, no. 1 (1999): 65-78. Gordiü, Vladislava. Hemingvej – poetika kratke priþe. Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 2000. Gordimer, Nadine. “Hemingway’s Expatriates.” Transition 80 (1999): 8699. Gordon, D. J. “Sex and Language in D. H. Lawrence.” Twentieth Century Literature 27, no. 4 (1981): 362-375. Gurko, Leo. Ernest Hemingway and the Pursuit of Heroism. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1968. Halliday, E. M. “Hemingway’s Ambiguity: Symbolism and Irony.” In Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Robert P. Weeks, 52-71. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1962. Hemingway, Ernest. Across the River and Intro the Trees. London: Arrow, 2004. —. A Farewell to Arms. London: Vintage, 2005. —. A Moveable Feast. London: Arrow, 2004. —. Death in the Afternoon. London: Arrow, 2004. —. Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises. London: Arrow, 2004. —. For Whom the Bell Tolls. London: Arrow, 2004. —. Selected Letters 1917–1961. Edited by Carlos Baker. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. —. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway—The Finca Vigía Edition. New York: Scribner, 2003. —. To Have and Have Not. London: Arrow, 2004. Ibañez, Beatriz P. “Very Sad But Very Fine: Death in the Afternoon’s Imagist Interpretation of the Bullfight-Text.” In A Companion to Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, edited by Miriam B. Mandel, 143-164. New York: Camden, 2004. Johnston, Kenneth G. “Hemingway and Cézanne: Doing the Country.” American Literature 56, no. 1 (1984): 28-37.

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—. “Hemingway and Freud: The Tip of the Iceberg.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 14, no. 1 (1984): 68-73. Keener, Andrew S. “Is It Unmaidenly?: Courtly and Carnal Language in Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees.” The Hemingway Review 33, no. 1 (2013): 44-60. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Lodge, David. “Analysis and Interpretation of the Realist Text: A Pluralistic Approach to Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Cat in the Rain’.” Poetics Today (Narratology II: The Fictional Text and the Reader) 1, no. 4 (1980): 5-22. Lynn, Kenneth S. Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Meyers, Jeffrey, ed. Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Heritage. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Nolan Jr., Charles J. “Hemingway’s ‘Out of Season:’ The Importance of Close Reading.” Rocky Mountain Review Of Language and Literature 53, no. 2 (1999): 45-58. —. “Hemingway’s ‘The Sea Change:’ What Close Reading and Evolutionary Psychology Reveal.” The Hemingway Review 21, no. 1 (2001): 53-67. Price Herndl, Diane. “Invalid Masculinity: Silence, Hospitals, and Anesthesia in A Farewell to Arms.” The Hemingway Review 21, no. 1 (2001): 38-52. Putnam, Ann. “On Defining Eden: The Search for Eve in the Garden of Sorrows.” In Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice, edited by Lawrence R. Broer and Gloria Holland, 109-130. Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 2002. Sabatelli, Arnold E. “Nowhere, Nothing, Now: The Awkward Beauty of Language in For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The North Dakota Quarterly— The Centennial Issue 66, no. 2 (1999): 147-158. Sanderson, Rena. “Hemingway and Gender History.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, edited by Scott Donaldson, 170-196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Schwenger, Peter. “The Masculine Mode.” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 4 (1979): 621-633. Simiü, ýarls. Nezaposleni vidovnjak. Vršac: KOV, 1995. Stephens, Robert O. “Hemingway and Stendhal: The Matrix of A Farewell to Arms.” PMLA 88, no. 2 (1973): 271-280. Travis, Jennifer. “Introduction: Soldier’s Heart: The Vocabulary of Injury and the American Civil War.” In Wounded Hearts: Masculinity, Law,

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and Literature in American Culture. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005: 1-50. Trilling, Lionel. “Hills Like White Elephants.” In The Experience of Literature: A Reader with Commentaries—Fiction, edited by Lionel Trilling, 305-8. New York & Chicago: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. Trodd, Zoe. “Hemingway’s Camera Eye: The Problem of Language and an Interwar Politics of Form.” In Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, edited by Harold Bloom, 209-22. New York: Infobase, 2009.

ALDOUS HUXLEY’S ISLAND: A STUDY ON A RESURRECTED BEING GORDANA KUSTUDIû

Aldous Huxley’s only true utopian vision, the novel Island, has triggered some fervent discussion on its literary value. This is because ideas exceedingly pervade the novel thus casting a shadow over its artistic dimension. The writer himself was well aware of the flaws of his novel. However, there were certain voices that recognised what Huxley’s goal in this novel truly was—to (in a completely new way when compared with his earlier novels) call for something that appeared to be the leitmotif of the text, i.e. attention. The novel is a result of a long-lasting process of research, maturation, spiritual and intellectual growth, so that the writer’s ideas and his knowledge were clustered in this work. Thus, it is somewhat expected that the outcome is to the disadvantage of the aesthetic aspect of the novel—it reveals a completely innovative, almost revolutionary attempt to raise awareness. Island is set on an imaginary insular land named Pala, situated in the southeast Pacific. The title of the novel, as well as the location, is most certainly not merely coincidental; an island is quite symbolic as a term, as we will discuss later on. Besides, Pala exists as an isolated community— isolated in every sense of the word. It is unique, different, far from civilisation, but still more than a civilised community—in a word, happy, and, after all, only utopian. Its prosperity is founded on the well-being and integrity of every single citizen and not on the technological progress. This certainly does not imply that the island is not familiar with the trends of civilisation known to the rest of the world; however, the insular community carries out a careful selection when accepting offered values. In other words, Pala cultivates a very special synthesis of all the positive aspects of different cultures; it nourishes a certain blend of seemingly confronting communities, especially the West and the East, taking, of course, only the fertile and constructive ideas and values of the two antipodes. At the same time, Pala is a heterogeneous society that creates

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and maintains its system of values through a successful communication among its citizens, which necessarily excludes every kind of clear social stratification and discrimination: Huxley’s true utopian vision, Island, illustrates this basic principle by creating social cohesion through social interaction among the citizens, not the social isolation of various classes as we find both today as well as in Brave New World.1

This is why it does not come as a surprise that the writer introduces a protagonist from the known world who is to lead us (and be led at the same time) through the harmonious world of Pala. We get to see Pala through the eyes of Will Farnaby who, by bringing values completely opposed to those of the island, is both literally and figuratively shipwrecked there. His shipwreck, being one of the many instances of layered symbolism in the novel, provides other support for Will’s unwilling transportation to this world. Farnaby becomes our eyes and ears, he is a catalyst for everything new, yet unseen and unheard of what we are to encounter on Pala. First of all, Pala does not have a centralised government. However, a certain kind of government belongs to the family of the young Raja Murugan and his mother Rani, who happen to be the only problematic personalities on the island. They still do not have that kind of power which is able to compromise, seduce and blind the inhabitants of the island. This is neither to be attributed to the two mentioned rulers, nor is it their approach to freedom and democracy; quite contrary, these two have strong aspirations to rule in every sense of the word. The real reason why the inhabitants of the island are not susceptible to any kind of manipulation is their own fully mature awareness, their complete, rounded individuality and their intact integrity. Pala is simply a community of happy people. This does not mean that they do not know of pain, suffer and temptation, but it indicates their prowess in dealing with ordeals, while still managing to be happy. They are not endowed with this skill, but it is acquired and learned as they grow. This fact contains the reality of Huxley’s utopian vision—the writer makes it clear that a community like Pala is thus possible for everyone. The best definition of Pala is possibly that given by Abdul Bahu, the ambassador of the neighbouring island (which is eventually to invade Pala 1

Ronald Ree Zigler, “Democratic Values and the Social Visions of Aldous Huxley: the SAT as Our Brave New World, ” in Aldous Huxley’s Annual, vol. 8, ed. Bernfried Nugel and Jerome Meckier (Berlin: LIT VERLAG, 2010): 153.

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for the purpose of exploiting its natural resources), when he bitterly notes: “so perfectly designed to make every man, woman and child on this enchanting island as perfectly free and happy as it’s possible to be.”2 Therefore, happiness is founded on both individual and collective freedom. Every person is offered the freedom of choice, the freedom of existence— they are given the right to live a full, healthy life. Values are neither “served” as they are, for instance, in the progressive West, nor “commanded” as they are in the problematic, extremely communistoriented East. Pala’s inhabitants choose their own values, they are actively engaged at every single level—the intellectual, spiritual, emotional, physical. The prospects of their homeland are a result of their own work, responsibility and involvement in everybody’s welfare. The products of civilisation, like advanced technology, are not misused. There is much more to their way of living than just science and technology; they do not try to blur the harsh realities of life, to alleviate pain, either physical or mental, at any cost and in an artificial way that only postpones it without teaching them how to actually cope with it. In Pala every single person learns how to deal with their own pain and how to struggle with their own temptations. At the same time, they maintain their personality firmly unimpaired and are fully aware of their place and role in life. The ultimate aim is compact, undeterred foundations of individuality, as well as the recognition of the purpose, which now gets a wholly new dimension considerably different from the general aim of modern civilisation. Their sense of purpose and meaning is quite well represented in the following extract: No means but ends have priority—the ultimate one being fundamental, global harmony. Identity refers to true individuals; maximum elbow room is provided for each person top find peace; however, no complete adjustment is expected: in a sane society that would not be sound. Stability means peacefulness, harmony, perfectly indifferent transience.3

Man has finally realised that he/she does not need material trivialities or megalomaniac aspirations to live. The process of spiritual maturation turns into a road to enlightenment—this appears to be the most important aspect of social stability in Pala. Their spiritual growth is gradually 2

Aldous Huxley, Island (London: Flamingo, 1994): 59. Michel Weber, “Perennial Truth and Perpetual Perishing: Aldous Huxley’s World-view in the Light of A. N. Whitehead’s Process Philosophy of Time,” in Aldous Huxley, Man of Letters: Thinker, Critic and Artist, ed. Bernfried Nugel et al. (Berlin: LIT VERLAG, 2007): 36.

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diminishing the temptations of materialism which brutally numb perception and commonsense judgement. Thus Pala people view American society in the following way: For example, what are boys and girls for in America? Answer: for mass consumption. And the corollaries of mass consumption are mass communications, mass advertising, mass opiates in the form of television, meprobamate, positive thinking and cigarettes.4

Similar comments are made on Russia and China, where, as observed by Pala’s inhabitants, young people aim at strengthening the state mainly in a military way. Moreover, Pala cherishes completely different values and sees its own prosperity in nurturing its youth to grow into selfconscious individuals. As a result, the young people of Pala do not need to take out their frustration and their insatiable hunger for the material by identifying either with the state or with the masses. Therefore, the stress is on awareness of both individual and society: “there is a holistic culture of awareness: the goal is to provide the possibility for everyone to become a fully human being. Happiness here means awareness, spiritual growth, liberation.”5 A holistic approach to individual development and maturation becomes the nucleus for the philosophy of existence on Pala. Pala is a community which integrates its citizens into a compact, healthy social tissue, but, unlike Brave New World, it prevents the formation of a dull, distorted, depersonalised mass. On the contrary, individuality and difference among its people are what makes this community successful and integral. Although it may sound as a kind of oxymoron, this is possible because the people of Pala are taught how to accept every distinction and how to love each other for what they really are. It is the way to crossing boundaries, breaking taboos, eliminating prohibitions for the people’s free manifestation of their own personal choices. It is the way of loving a person primarily for what a person is, not for what collective imperatives and expectations are. On Pala everybody is given a chance, especially those without some strikingly obvious talent, as is clearly explained below: I’m too dumb to be any good at the things that Dr Robert and Vijaya are good at—genetics and biochemistry and philosophy and all the rest. And I’m no good at painting or poetry or acting. No talents and no cleverness. So I ought to feel terribly inferior and depressed. But in fact I don’t. […] So you see, Mr Farnaby, Pala’s the place for stupid people. The greatest

4 5

Aldous Huxley, op. cit., 229. Michel Weber, op. cit., 37.

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Aldous Huxley’s Island: A Study on a Resurrected Being happiness of the greatest number—and we stupid ones are the greatest number.6

Pala thus strives to make its each and every inhabitant a necessary, irreplaceable gear in the social mechanism in a simple way—by enabling them to be happy. To this end, it uses all available means, so that everybody is able to find their own place. This community actually thrives on a holistic axiomatic condition that the desired result is only achieved when each element works together with another. The characters in Island also serve not so much artistic as philosophical purposes. The writer does not try to make a meticulous analysis or give a psychological profile of his characters; in fact, through their relationships, conversations, social practices and rituals we become familiar with a new, extraordinary and magnificent community. As discussed earlier, this community thrives on its individuals, which makes Island perhaps the sole depiction of an ideal, fertile relationship between a whole and its living elements. The relationship we are referring to is based on equal sharing of giving and receiving. To make the community more striking and even exotic, the writer introduces a complete stranger as the protagonist and third-person narrator of the novel, Will Farnaby, a war journalist from London, who ends up in Pala after a shipwreck. Farnaby is a cynic, a latent nihilist, an outcast both from his own and the real world, a person who hides his true nature behind witty remarks: “I’m the man who won’t take yes for an answer.”7 He carries a heavy burden on his conscience. He sees himself as a vile sinner who struggles with his own past, or, more precisely, runs wildly away from it. He is a man with his thoughts and memories tied up into the Gordian knot, still a boy who hates his own father, while cherishing lovely memories of his deceased aunt, perhaps the only person he ever loved. He is a notorious adulterer who blames himself for his girlfriend’s death. At the same time (or perhaps for the same reasons), he is more than convenient material for the metanoia he is about to experience and for the lessons to learn on Pala. Farnaby is a limited narrator; however, since he comes from the world we live in, it is through his narrative prism that we acquire deep understanding of the philosophy of Pala. Farnaby’s first encounter on Pala happens to be with children; namely, with Mary Sarojini and Tom Krishna. Will Farnaby is panic-stricken when he remembers the shipwreck, his fall and some repulsive snakes he spotted, but Mary does not let him get rid of them—on the contrary, she 6 7

Huxley, op. cit., 210. Ibid., 16.

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encourages him to remember everything he saw, thus liberating him from fear, i.e. she teaches him how to deal with it. She also encourages him to cry, which is something Will could not afford for a long time, while Mary, both very young and wise, knows that his tears are essential so that the destructive inner energy can find its way out and leave his body safe and sound. In spite of all his education and occasional intellectual pretentiousness, Farnaby has never discovered this simple truth. “No” was his answer to everything, even to his own self. However, Pala helps him to finally utter the controversial, yet natural, beautiful and necessary “yes”: “His bravado in asserting that he will not take ‘yes’ for an answer is really an attempt to provoke/evoke from others a ‘yes’ that he can perhaps at last say ‘yes’ to himself.”8 Will Farnaby has been warmly accepted by the community, and the writer conveys the values of Pala through his character and the community’s spiritual and emotional growth. The representatives of the peculiar community of Pala are unique individualities, and every single of them is appealing in their own way. Susila, a widow who is raising two children (the aforementioned Mary and Tom), and who is trying to fight the ghosts of the past and finally depart from her deceased husband, becomes a new inspiration for our Londoner. She is pulling him back from the abyss into which he has been slowly falling. Susila is a strong personality, she is an emotion donned in fragile femininity, she is patience and peacefulness in human shape. At the same time, she also represents pain, grief and temptation, all of which are being overcome with motherly love and warmth. She is bravery and beauty in their purest form. As we have already mentioned, Susila is one of Farnaby’s spiritual leaders and by the visionary senses of a guru she teaches him new truths and values, which the world Will comes from has long forgotten. Farnaby is painfully pessimistic: Do you know what it’s like, […] to feel that nothing is quite real— including yourself? […] You know those little pale worms with black heads that one sees on rotten meat. Nothing had changed, of course; people’s faces were the same, their clothes were the same. And yet they were all maggots. Not even real maggots—just ghosts of maggots, just the illusion of maggots. And I was the illusion of a spectator of maggots. I lived in that maggot-world for months […] without the least interest in what I was doing.9

8

Peter Firchow, “Brave at Last: Huxley’s Western and Eastern Utopias,” in Aldous Huxley Annual, vol. 1, ed. Bernfried Nugel and Jerome Meckier (Münster: LIT VERLAG, 2001): 168-169. 9 Huxley, op. cit., 109.

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This is Will Farnaby, who finally finds his lost self in the islanders’ way of living and accepts the real Will Farnaby, an adulterer and a sinner, who is eventually to say “yes” to the meaning of life. Then he will manage to recognise the beauty of common, simple things: The poor idiot hadn’t wanted to take yes for an answer in any field but aesthetic. And all the time he had been denying, by the mere fact of being himself, all the beauty and meaning he so passionately longed to say yes to. William […] Farnaby was nothing but a muddy filter, on the hither side of which human beings, nature and even his beloved art had emerged bedimmed and bemired, less, other and uglier than themselves. Tonight, for the first time his awareness of a piece of music was completely unobstructed. Between mind and sound, mind and pattern, mind and significance, there was no longer any babel of biographical irrelevancies to drown the music or make a senseless discord.10

Therefore, Will Farnaby finally understands that meaning and harmony do exist behind the locked door of one’s own subconsciousness. What is needed is dare unlock the door. Besides Susila, there are two young people from Pala who are pioneers of an almost avant-garde kind of romantic relationship. Their names are Ranga and Radha, and they represent the living blood of the island, whose healthy pulsating is to convey a new type of tradition and heritage. They represent not only romantic love, but also love for another human being in general. They also dare to rebel against every possible convention that we know of. They make every other personification of freedom seem grotesque—they are its most prominent example. While their personalities are slowly revealed, Will Farnaby gets an opportunity to grasp the essence he needs for his own transformation. They give him an example of pure love and sincere forgiveness—after Radha’s tragicomic affair with Murugan, the young Raja, Ranga is still there waiting for her, without bitter resentment, without fierce revenge—he is still waiting for her with the same love and fervour as before. Thus, they break taboos; they do not lose their senses, or their souls, when confronted with the scandalous. On the contrary, they remain calm and capable of forgiving, providing the other with the luxury of making a mistake and of repenting. In addition to this, they insist on complete freedom and independence of other human beings, without asking for explanations or promises—their kind of love contains what its true purpose is—giving: “‘Dozens of girls are going to find him irresistible. And some of those 10

Huxley, op. cit., 306.

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girls will be charming. How will you feel if he can’t resist?’ ‘I’ll be glad for his sake.’”11 Or from Ranga’s point of view: “‘Will you make her promise to be faithful?’ ‘I won’t make her promise anything.’ ‘Even though she’s your girl?’ ‘She’s her own girl.’”12 We may find this kind of relationship unusual, or even unacceptable, but it still represents the true meaning of respect and love for a person and his/her freedom. There are, of course, certain characters in Island who stand as antipodes to those described above, and they surely deserve our attention, for they make a special kind of cosmic balance on Pala. Two of them belong to the ruling family, the Rani, who appears to be an evil omen of the impending fate of the island, and her son, the young Raja Murugan who is totally lost in what he has suppressed and what he is aware of. And, finally, Bahu, the ambassador of the neighbouring Rendang and a Mephistophelian emissary who announces Pala’s fall (it is somewhat natural for Bahu to be an outsider on Pala, for he comes from the outer world). The young Raja’s mother, the Rani, is quite a peculiar person; however, she is most certainly not peculiar in the sense of a remarkable individuality, but in the sense of a peculiar superficiality, quasispirituality and intellectual snobbism. This happens to be mainly a product of her aspirations and eagerness for power, while her affected spirituality serves only as a disguise. In addition, she is excellent at manipulating her own son. The writer deftly uses a description of her appearance to introduce her corresponding personality: Will turned and saw in the doorway a large florid woman swathed […] in clouds of white muslin. She stood there smiling with a conscious mysteriousness, one fleshy brown arm upraised, with its jewelled hand pressed against the door jamb, in the pose of the great actress, the acknowledged diva, pausing at her first entrance to accept the plaudits of her adorers on the other side of the footlights.13

This grotesque walking is completely in accordance with her inner self; her physical appearance is yet a reflection of her affected spirituality and theatrical religiosity. In fact, what she is only interested in is to make Pala a profitable marketplace and end up among the world’s money elite. However, the self-conscious citizens of Pala have prevented her from doing so, for they do not accept any kind of rule which could jeopardise 11

Huxley, op. cit., 78. Ibid. 13 Ibid., 47. 12

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them or their freedom. Thus the Rani has decided to disguise her real intentions in cheap religious demagogy and intellectual tirades. Of course, she could not possibly escape Farnaby’s cynical discerning eye: “a female tycoon who had cornered the market, not in soya beans or copper, but in Pure Spirituality and the Ascended Masters, and was now happily running her hands over the exploit.”14 Since she is too shallow to come up with anything innovative, in her ecstatic gibberish about the arduous quest for the spiritual we come across the already well-known ideas (i.e. their arbitrary modification): “the World-Wide Crusade of the Spirit. You will be laughed at, you will be called a fool, a crank, a fanatic. The dogs bark, the Caravan passes.”15 It is the religious, spiritual Rani who paves the way for those who want to monopolise the market, like Farnaby’s boss, as well as for the imperialistic affinities of the neighbouring island. The Rani’s greatest tragedy is, in fact, her son Murugan, the young Raja, mainly because neither of them is aware of that, or, perhaps, neither of them wants to be aware of that. Murugan is a puppet in his mother’s fleshy hands; therefore, he has lost his freedom and suppressed his desires deeply into the subconscious. He has found the outlet for his frustrations in striving for another world, the one outside Pala. It almost pains to see that someone who has been deprived of his freedom actually loathes the cultural context founded on the very freedom. His frustrations have different sources. Namely, Murugan did not manage to experience his own masculinity when he had a chance, i.e. when Radha, who had been obsessed with him, wanted to make love to him. Instead, he fled to the toilet. As a matter of fact, it was the very moment when the truth emerged from a corner of his subconscious, revealing that his sexual orientation actually diverged from the “regular” stream. He suppressed this shy incident of the surfacing of his libido by condemning his fellow-citizens for their disgusting (in his own point of view) manifestations of sexual freedom. Murugan has one more problematic distraction. He is feverishly interested in catalogues of any kind coming from the outer world. The writer purposefully uses the catalogue as a symbol of consumerism in order to depict the intellectual fall of young Murugan. While being inhibited from channelling his physical energy, the Raja also acquires useless contents which handicap his intellectual engagement: “The catalogue is a symbol of waste and over-consumption that should not warrant attention. For Murugan, however, the catalogue is a distraction, an

14 15

Huxley, op. cit., 53. Ibid., 54.

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obstacle, a superficial knowledge of facts that defeat understanding.”16 In such a way, Murugan’s senses have been systematically deadened, while his intellect has been reduced to a kind of prostitution.  Huxley’s novel Island represents the writer’s attempts to point to some new ways of ennobled life, of individual growth, of sophisticated improvement of a particular society towards a harmonious whole. Through his characters, he offered love, tolerance, and enlightenment in order to show us how one can actually attain these supreme categories. It seemed an easy thing to do—it was only necessary to look intently into one’s inner self. It is certainly not a coincidence that Huxley chose an island for such self-realisation: It is, to begin with, an “is”-land, a land where, as the mynah birds continually remind us, we live in the “here and now.” It is also an “I”-land, a country where people are at last able to realize their individual identities to the full. […] Pala is also “Eye”-land, the country where you need to look carefully before you leap, where even the birds exhort you to pay “attention,” to “see” in both senses of the word.17

In Island Huxley shared his most valuable intellectual experience to help humanising the circumstances in which modern man lives. He wanted to help people to finally start living a nobler life. The fact that he failed to do so, which he implicitly admitted at the very end of the novel, is a great tragedy of human existence.

Works Cited Deshaye, Joel. “Attention from Saskatchewan: Huxley, Osmond, and the Psychedelic History of The Doors of Perception and Island.” In Aldous Huxley Annual, Vol. 2, edited by Bernfried Nugel and Jerome Meckier, 181-205. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2002. Firchow, Peter. “Brave at Last: Huxley’s Western and Eastern Utopias.” In Aldous Huxley Annual, Vol. 1, edited by Jerome Meckier and Bernfried Nugel, 158-174. Münster: Lit, 2001. Huxley, Aldous. Island. London: Flamingo, 1994.

16

Joel Deshaye, “Attention from Saskatchewan: Huxley, Osmond, and the Psychedelic History of The Doors of Perception and Island,” in Aldous Huxley Annual, vol. 2, ed. Bernfried Nugel and Jerome Meckier (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2003), 198. 17 Peter Firchow, op. cit., 162.

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Weber, Michel. “Perennial Truth and Perpetual Perishing: Aldous Huxley’s World-view in the Light of A. N. Whitenead’s Process Philosophy of Time.” In Aldous Huxley, Man of Letters: Thinker, Critic and Artist, edited by Bernfried Nugel, Uwe Rasch and Gerhard Wagner, 31-45. Münster: Lit, 2007. Zigler, Ronald Lee. “Democratic Values and the Social Visions of Aldous Huxley: The SAT as our Brave New Test.” In Aldous Huxley Annual, Vol. 8, edited by Bernfried Nugel and Jerome Meckier, 153-165. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2008.

DEATH VS. ETERNITY IN ALDOUS HUXLEY’S NOVEL AFTER MANY A SUMMER JANKO ANDRIJAŠEVIû

The British novelist Aldous Huxley moved from the UK to the USA in 1937. His first American novel appropriately has an American theme. The title of the book After Many a Summer (1939) was taken from Tennyson’s poem “Tithonus,” in which the Greek goddess Aurora gives immortality to a mortal man (after whom the poem is titled) “at his request—and who omitted to ask for perpetual youth along with immortality—so that life became unbearable to him.”1 Huxley’s version of this theme is set in the American context, but although the criticism of contemporary life in America dominates the book both by the sharpness and the space it occupies (it inspired Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz to make the classic movie Citizen Kane2), the main problem underlying the novel, however, is the question of “the difference between survival and eternity.”3 This dilemma is personified in the character of the multimillionaire Joe Stoyte, who is obsessed with death and is willing to pay any price to postpone it for as long as possible. Formally, the book After Many a Summer has many elements in common with Huxley’s earlier novels, such as Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925). There is a description of a “house party with its usual quota of oddities, bores, and intrigues,”4 so some critics unambiguously call it “a novel of ideas”5 Huxley was famed 1

Lilly Zähner, Demon and Saint in the Novels of Aldous Huxley (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1975): 61. 2 See David King Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood (New York: Harper & Row, 1989): 80. 3 George Woodcock, The Dawn and the Darkest Hour (London: Faber & Faber, 1972): 221. 4 Peter Firchow, Aldous Huxley, Satirist and Novelist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972): 157. 5 Donald Watt, ed., Aldous Huxley—The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975): 328.

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for in his youth. The author spoke of this novel as of a “fantasy, at once comic and cautionary, farcical, blood-curdling and reflective.”6 However, the most interesting description of it was given by Edgar Johnson, a lecturer in literature at the City College of New York and a literary critic. For him, this novel is “a sort of multi-deckered literary sandwich with slices of burlesque, jazz, melodrama, and horror alternating with slabs of philosophical wry.”7 Despite formal similarities with his earliest novels, After Many a Summer is pervaded by a completely different kind of sensibility, for Huxley’s beliefs had significantly changed in the meantime. However, the differences are not only reflected in the philosophical and religious transformations, but also in literary technique. It has to be admitted that the technique used here is much less successful than, for example, the technique used in Crome Yellow or Antic Hay. A much stronger “propagandist urge”8 can now be felt, which had been almost nonexistent before. Perhaps the most significant shortcomings are the very characters, who are “carelessly slapped-down caricatures of types he has drawn more skilfully before.”9 The novel has no “single human being, a mixed-up human being. Everyone is crystal clear”10 and, thus, unconvincing. Of course, Huxley never had the ambition to create his characters as deep and well-nuanced psychological portraits, but in After Many a Summer characterisation falls several steps behind if compared with his previous works. Although the characters again represent certain ideas, they are deprived even of that small grain of convincingness and naturalness that the characters in the previous novels did have, at least to the extent required for a thin but indubitable connection between character and idea. This time, however, they seem artificial and plainly one-dimensional. Unlike his previous novels, this book does contain a clear story that perpetuates the novel, so this is “one of the few pieces of writing by Huxley where plot is of central concern.”11 The story begins with the arrival of the British scholar Jeremy Pordage to California, to the castle of the millionaire Stoyte, in order to research and catalogue for him the 6

Grover Smith, ed., The Letters of Aldous Huxley (New York: Harper & Row, 1969): 441. 7 Watt, op. cit., 329. 8 George Woodcock, The Dawn and the Darkest Hour (London: Faber & Faber, 1972): 221. 9 Watt, op. cit., 330. 10 Ibid., 325. 11 Jerome Meckier, Aldous Huxley, Satire and Structure (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969): 161.

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famous “Hauberk papers,” a heritage of the eponymous aristocratic family from Surrey. Among those who live in Stoyte’s castle is Doctor Sigmund Obispo, who has a laboratory where he works on the discovery of the secret of longevity. Parallel to his experiments, Pordage finds passages in the diaries of Hauberk, the Fifth Earl of Gonister, which reveal that the Earl was as equally obsessed with longevity as Stoyte. Allegedly, he started eating raw carp intestines in order to prolong his life.12 The diary ends with the description of the Fifth Earl’s simulation of his own funeral. Intrigued by this mystery, Obispo, Stoyte and Stoyte’s lover Virginia go to London, only to find the Fifth Earl and his maid still alive in the cellars of the Hauberk family mansion, at the age of over two hundred, transformed by reverse evolution into detestable apelike beings. Such a bizarre epilogue contains multiple symbolism, and essentially equates Stoyte’s obsession with wealth with the Earl’s bottomless desire for physical pleasures, unified in their yearning for immortality. However, the actualisation of immortality “by physical means is as pointless as the quest for fulfilment by possessions.”13 Besides this, the picture of an “ape, [was] Aldous’s (and T. H. Huxley’s) persistent metaphor for men without souls.”14 Aldous used it in some of his subsequent novels, too. The characters in the novel belong to a range of very diverse types. One of the numerous criteria for differentiating among them could be the degree of spiritual development the characters had reached or strove to achieve. Concerning the fact that in the late 1930s Huxley indubitably superimposed the spiritual outlook of the world over the materialistic one, such treatment of the characters is natural and true to the original message of the book. Through these characters Huxley “depicted the struggle between the forces leading to bondage and those which are striving for liberation.”15 The fact that the psychological portrayals are largely unconvincing was interpreted by some critics as Huxley’s selfishness, describing him “interested in the people only as ingredients in the philosophic pill he has been preparing for his own consumption.”16 However, it is unjust to call Huxley selfish, especially after his endeavours to make a contribution to the improvement of the overall situation in 12

The novel emphasises a pseudo-scientific discovery that the secret of longevity is to be found in the intestinal flora of carps, which live much longer than humans. 13 David King Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood (New York: Harper & Row, 1989): 108. 14 Ibid., 107. 15 Kishore Gandhi, Aldous Huxley, The Search for Perennial Religion (New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1980): 49. 16 Watt, op. cit., 331.

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society. Even this pill that he was preparing was certainly not intended for his personal consumption only, and the “ingredients” that he used were not harmed in any way. Quite contrary, they could have only benefitted from partaking in the process. The distribution of the characters on the scale of spirituality is almost diametrically opposite to their distribution on the scale of social standing. Based on spiritual principles, the characters may roughly be divided into five groups, the lowest level of which includes Doctor Obispo and the Fifth Earl. They are closely followed by Stoyte and Pordage, who are almost as equally spiritually held back as Obispo and the Earl, but possess a more rudimentary sense of morality. They also do not reject religion like the other two, but respect it, albeit with an essential misunderstanding. A slightly higher degree of spiritual awareness can be attributed to Virginia Maunciple, Stoyte’s lover, who is “a twentieth-century Lenina, a girl conditioned by the materialist concepts of her time,”17 but who also cherishes basic and almost childishly naïve faith in the Holy Virgin. The young man Pete Boone is Obispo’s lab assistant, an idealist who naively and innocently believes in social reform and love. He had, however, raised his spiritual self-awareness much higher than all the previously mentioned characters. Unlike all the others, he started questioning the accepted truths, which set in motion the process of change within him. This, as is well known, is the first step on the way to inner regeneration, thoroughly described in Huxley’s previous novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936). Finally, the character who epitomises the embodiment of an ideal spiritual attainment is Mr. Propter, a former university professor and Stoyte’s schoolmate, who tries to realise the ideals he believes in by putting them into practice in his personal life. Looking into all of these characters, a conclusion can be drawn that, despite the huge differences among them, “everyone is potentially a mystic trying to identify with something larger than himself.”18 From a wider perspective, such a conclusion is applicable to the majority of humanity, but what Huxley singles out as a problem is the identification with wrong values. If only people turned their inherent needs in the right direction (which, for Huxley, is the direction of spirituality), the world would start becoming a meaningful place. The Fifth Earl is introduced through his journal, and in the grotesque ending scene of the novel. The notes that he left reveal a typical eighteenth-century rationalist, wealthy and rather intelligent, but overly egotistic, greedy and immoral. At times he recalls his hero Marquis de 17 18

Woodcock, op. cit., 220. Meckier, op. cit., 53.

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Sade, for example, when he says that “the infliction of Pleasure can never be so delightful [...] as the infliction of Pain [...] Pain is truly god-like and divine.”19 He makes a rationalistic remark that the cruelty of beasts “depends on Appetite and is therefore only intermittent. Men are systematically and continuously cruel.”20 Still, he thinks that “follies are justified in the names of Religion and Politics,”21 and that a man of reason should “know […] his native Baseness, [and] thereby learn […] to make use of it”22 in the best possible way. Through the character of the Fifth Earl, Huxley gives the example of a man who thwarts his inner development, which leads to degeneration—even to physical disfiguration in the Earl’s case. On this spiralling descent, his best allies are the potentially positive traits that he possesses—intelligence, wealth, social position. His primary aim is to prolong his enjoyments by extending time, unaware that “Time is essentially evil”23 and that values exist only out of it. During the three average human lifespans that he manages to live through, the potential apelike foetus (supposedly inherent in all of us) has the opportunity to reach its full maturity and turn him into a creature which still lives in good health and has regular sex, but which is reduced to the basest animal level, with the loss of awareness and all other human attributes. This pseudoscientific fact reads quite convincingly, and its message is clear: eternity in this world is counterproductive. Doctor Obispo is very similar to the Fifth Earl. The only essential difference between them is that Obispo does not seem interested in the physical prolongation of life, even though he does not count on any kind of spiritual compensation in the afterlife. He is the picture of Huxley’s long foregone illusion that one can get “the best of both worlds”24—in Obispo’s case, the world of science and the world of sense gratification. His morality is so debased that the only tone of humanity heard from him in the whole novel is the outcry “Christ!”25 when he sees his assistant Pete accidentally shot by Stoyte. However, only a couple of minutes later, he carefully walks out of the crime scene in order not to stain his twenty-five dollar suit. As a physician, he thinks that to “waste his time with patients

19

Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer (New York: Avon Books Division—The Hearst Corporation, 1939): 208. 20 Ibid., 191. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 176. 23 Watt, op. cit., 328. 24 Huxley, op. cit., 149. 25 Ibid., 223.

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was simply idiotic,”26 which resounds with Huxley’s personal negative experience with the doctors he had at that time. For Obispo, love is also nothing more than “tumescence and detumescence,”27 and he wonders “why not treat the whole business scientifically?”28 Finally, Obispo’s lack of spirituality of any kind does not come as a surprise. For him, God is “pure imagination,”29 and religion, philosophy and political ideas just “drivel.”30 Obispo’s character, like most characters in this book, is overly simplified and unpalatable, even after taking into consideration the limited and direct function Huxley intended for him. The function of Jeremy Pordage in this novel is doubly significant. On the one hand, Huxley shared his personal experience through Pordage’s first encounter with California, emphasising the enormous difference between British and American lifestyles and even languages. On the other hand, Jeremy is an illustration of how Huxley could have ended up himself—living a life of aimless science, art, and “erudition as a substitute for embroidery.”31 Huxley reproached his own self when he said that Pordage “had read all the significant books on the subject”32 (meaning mysticism) without a true desire to understand them, adding that “the [mystical] feeling means itself, and that’s all there is to it.”33 Due to his inability to give up petty pleasures, Pordage builds around him a wall of willing ignorance and decides that he is “not going to allow religion (of all things!) to invade the sanctities of private life.”34 Among these “sanctities” were “breakfast at nine, lunch at one-thirty, tea at five,”35 then “the pleasure of lying in a hot bath [...] or under bed-clothes”36 and a little bit of fun with prostitutes every other Friday in their apartment in Maida Vale. The very list is ironically critical of the developmental level Huxley could have personally remained at. The character of central importance for the plot is certainly Joe Stoyte. He manages to traverse the road from childhood poverty to becoming an enormously influential multimillionaire. Stoyte was probably modelled 26

Huxley, op. cit., 49. Ibid., 116. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 48. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 158. 32 Ibid., 102. 33 Ibid., 96. 34 Ibid., 140. 35 Ibid., 88. 36 Ibid., 157. 27

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after the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, whose castle San Simeon inspired Stoyte’s castle. Spurred by his childhood and youth complexes about being jeered at for being poor and overweight, Stoyte starts buying all that he considers superior—besides outrageously valuable works of art, he also “buys” friendship, scientists, even the relics of some nuns from Spain. This metaphorical rendition served Huxley to allude to the American feeling of inferiority before the long-standing European tradition, which the Americans have also sometimes tried to quench with money. Stoyte sees progress in “better organization, more service from business, more goods for the consumer,”37 and profit is the highest of all deities. Enormous material wealth, however, does not manage to alleviate Stoyte’s “Calvinistic fear of death and eternal damnation.”38 He sees “selfpreservation as the only goal”39 and takes “a superhuman effort to escape the underlying reality of death.”40 This is why he pays Obispo to find an elixir of longevity, and why he makes enormous efforts to swallow the anger he was prone to in order not to do harm to his heart, for he had already had a stroke. All the time he repeats the phrase “God is love [...] There is no death”41 like a mantra, but to no avail, for in his deepest being those words did not find a single square inch of foothold to get rooted in and become effective. Stoyte’s concept of God is but of an ally in the realisation of material paradise on Earth. Diminishing him to this banally reduced function, Stoyte does not manage to get from God support in other spheres of life. Despite his bouts of philanthropy (Stoyte owns and finances a hospital for children with serious illnesses), his rudimentary charity and religion of superstition do not help him to elude the clutches of materialism. Upon the encounter with the apelike degradation of the Fifth Earl, he reacts in the following way: “And once you get over the first shock—well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course. Don’t you think so, Obispo?”42 Based on this comment, Stoyte’s hope of spiritual awakening in his lifetime is minimal, and the only possibility that might be read between the lines is a new chance in some of his future incarnations.

37

Huxley, op. cit., 111. Peter Firchow, Aldous Huxley, Satirist and Novelist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972): 159. 39 Meckier, op. cit., 161. 40 Zähner, op. cit., 61. 41 Huxley, op. cit., 31. 42 Ibid., 254. 38

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Stoyte’s lover Virginia Maunciple fits squarely into Madonna’s “Material Girl” concept. She shows most sincere admiration for Stoyte, who, likewise, expresses “the purest father-love and the most violent eroticism” for her.43 The world she was brought up in was that of materialism, in which her “parents, friends, teachers, newspapers, radio, advertisements”44 taught her to admire wealth before all other things. Besides that, her modern liberalism suggests that a little fun with men is not a sin, especially “when you’d had a couple of drinks,”45 and especially because Father O’Reilly says that is a sin, while he himself eats “like a hog,”46 and “wasn’t gluttony just as bad as the other thing?”47 Clearly, on one side, Huxley laughs at Virginia’s insubstantial and justifying contemplations, but on the other, expresses an unabated criticism of clerical hypocrisy. Despite obvious materialism, Virginia is a frantic Catholic who sincerely believes in the Virgin Mary. She keeps a statue of the Blessed Mother in a special alcove in her room, while Stoyte has a replica of the Lourdes cave constructed for her in the courtyard (Huxley got the idea for these details about the visit to the bungalow of Hearst’s lover, actress Marion Davies, in an MGM studio, in which he saw “the figure of the Virgin over the door”48). The name Virginia comes from the girl’s devotion to the Madonna. Her faith is superficially fervorous and childishly naïve. She believes that Madonna helped her when she had sinusitis, and ever since the construction of the “Lourdes” she “ha[d]n’t even had a cold.”49 Out of gratitude and love, she plans to make a new blue brocade cloak for the Holy Mother, with “a little gold cord that you could tie in a bow.”50 These details clearly reflect Huxley’s criticism “of personal (and Christian) religion, as well as [of] the childish attachments of Catholicism.”51 Virginia’s belief is the object of rather harsh criticism. She constantly fails to resist Obispo’s seductions, even though she keeps praying to her

43

Huxley, op. cit., 40. Ibid., 42. 45 Ibid., 44. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Dunaway, op. cit., 99. 49 Huxley, op. cit., 74. 50 Ibid., 145. 51 Charles M. Holmes, Aldous Huxley and the Way to Reality (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1978): 127. 44

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statuette and even though she is “ashamed to look Our Lady in the face”52 after the amorous act. Some have dubbed it a “show of repentance to the Virgin Mary,”53 while for others “her religion is a formality powerless to save her from animal desire.”54 However, all seem to ignore the indubitable sincerity of her feelings, and the self-hatred for the weakness before which she is powerless. She irretrievably loses her carelessness, and engages in long and racking dilemmas whether or not she should promise Our Lady not to err again. She decides “better not to make any promise at all—not now, at any rate; not until there seemed to be some chance of keeping it.”55 Even though she breaches the promise that she had eventually given, she should not be judged too severely. Huxley seems to have had more understanding than the judgment of her behaviour, and it was not Virginia herself that was in the focus of his criticism. What he primarily wanted to emphasise here is the idea that an embarkation on a thorough reconstruction of spiritual awareness requires much more than what Virginia was able to give. Similar to Jeremy Pordage, the young Pete also has an ambivalent role in the novel. Huxley criticises his naïve idealism in politics and love: as a participant in the Spanish Civil War, he unreservedly supports the antifascist struggle and internationalism, and believes that by means of war an ideal society can be achieved. Moreover, he is platonically in love with Virginia, i.e. in an idealised image of that girl, and is blind to her real self. After his visits to Propter’s cabin and long conversations with this man, Pete gradually falls into the limbo of reevaluation. Huxley used this situation in the novel to render his own experience. “Everything he saw, would have to be thought out again from the beginning—science, politics, perhaps even love, even Virginia. He was appalled by the prospect and yet, in another part of his being, attracted.”56 Eventually, “he no longer had an opinion; he was just uncertain and bewildered.”57 To his own detriment, life did not procure for him a constructive exit from this crisis (which oftentimes precedes deeper realisations and arrival upon steadier ground). Stoyte shoots him dead with a gun in a fit of jealousy, mistaking him for Obispo, and thus interrupts the commencement of Pete’s process of inner growth. However, what might be read between the lines is again the Hindu-Buddhist consolation in the form of reincarnation. Pete could be 52

Huxley, op. cit., 163. Firchow, op. cit., 160. 54 Woodcock, op. cit., 220. 55 Huxley, op. cit., 163. 56 Ibid., 101. 57 Ibid., 181. 53

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getting a new chance to recommence the process of spiritual transformation in a next life. According to the Far Eastern teachings, death deprives us of everything but of the level of spiritual evolution we had achieved in our previous lifetime. In a future body, at a certain point in life, we go on from exactly the same level at which we had previously stopped our development, or were interrupted in it by an external force. Huxley incorporated all of the major spiritual ideas and personal insights into the character of William Propter, who expounds them in a rather “dead and didactic”58 manner. He “embodies the eastern mystical philosophy of Gerald Heard.”59 However, according to most critics, “the novel is wrecked by Mr. Propter,”60 while some even go to such lengths as to call him “the dullest character in the whole history of the English novel.”61 Despite the didacticism and unconvincingness of his character, Propter’s monologues in the novel offer plenty of data on Huxley’s various ideas, primarily those concerning the spiritual domain. These ideas are for the most part presented in a discursive form. In some of the earlier books Huxley had already analysed certain elements Propter discourses on in this novel, such as pantheism, religious transpersonalism, and the significance of knowledge in the process of spiritual self-realisation. The new elements included in the novel are: the idea of time as essentially evil, the emphasised responsibility of the seemingly innocent for their own suffering, and the distinction between the animal, the human and the spiritual levels of existence. Propter’s monologues represent an overview of Huxley’s “own kind of pantheistic idealism,”62 picking and mixing principles from various religious teachings. Just as in his earlier novels, Huxley attempts to design a feasible framework for a better world, even though his faith in its success is significantly undermined. Global religious wisdom helps him to understand the “pessimism about the world at large and human nature as it displays itself in the majority of men and women,”63 as well as to unearth an “optimism about the things that can be achieved by one who wants to and knows how.”64 These ideas emphasise the belief in the only possible 58

Woodcock, op. cit., 219. Sally A. Paulsell, “Color and Light: Huxley’s Path to Spiritual Reality,” Twentieth Century Literature 41, no. 1 (1995): 97. 60 A. E. Dyson, The Crazy Fabric: Essays in Irony (London: Macmillan, 1965): 183. 61 Watt, op. cit., 323. 62 Ibid., 321. 63 Huxley, op. cit., 199. 64 Ibid. 59

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kind of salvation—the individual one. Although fascinatingly eclectic, Huxley’s notion of achieving this salvation is still predominantly based on Buddhist principles. His combination of elements originating from different religions, but rounded up in a single transpersonal Buddhist whole, is fascinating, but also somewhat contradictory, and deservedly criticised. The transpersonalism of Propter’s ideas is deeply rooted in Buddhism. However, in the novel After Many a Summer this element is even more strongly accentuated than in the earlier works. This time Huxley preaches with much more self-confidence and certitude that “God is pure nothingness.”65 In Propter’s system of phenomena, “personality is categorically rejected,”66 and the ideal of life’s fulfilment is seen in “the busy nothingness of [...] being experienced itself as transcended in the felt capacity for peace and purity, for the withdrawal from revulsions and desires, for the blissful freedom from personality.”67 All those who do not manage to attain this kind of liberation during their lifetime resume existing posthumously in the material world, but only in the form of “fears and cravings,”68 and continue to be meshed in the samsara, i.e. the wheel of life and death, until the moment all fears and cravings cease. Only then would their spirit melt into the eternal and scintillating bliss of nirvana. For Buddhists, even the term “spirit” or “soul” is unacceptable, since Buddhism principally rejects the existence of a continuous, unchangeable personal soul. The already problematic vocabulary of mysticism becomes even vaguer in the face of this transpersonal philosophy. The central problem that determines the orientation towards either the personal or the transpersonal interpretation of the higher ground is the understanding of the term personality, or ego. Huxley adopted the explanation preached by Swami Prabhavananda, according to which “the ego [...] is man’s obsessive consciousness of existence as being a separate self—from his true self, the atman. The ego sense results when we falsely identify the atman with the mind-body.”69 In Vaishnaivism,70 which is one

65

Watt, op. cit., 232. Holmes, op. cit., 121. 67 Huxley, op. cit., 83. 68 Ibid., 235. 69 Gandhi, op. cit., 108; ƖtmƗ essentially means being. However, in accordance with the wide symbolism of ancient languages, this term is sometimes referred to the body, sometimes to the soul, and sometimes to the senses. See Swami PrabhupƗda, trans., Bhagavad-gƯtƗ As It Is (New York: Collier Books, 1972): 866. 66

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of the personal branches of Hinduism, the ego is also understood as “accepting the body as oneself.”71 However, the difference is that in Vaishnavism this kind of ego is called “false ego,”72 or ahankƗrah. Antipodal to it is “being without false egoism,”73 or anahankƗrah. This state of being is not only nothingness but also an ego, in this case the “real ego,”74 which “we cannot give up [...] because ego means identity.”75 So the concept of the metaphysical source beyond the false identification with the body (which is unquestionable) represents the bone of contention between personal and transpersonal approaches to religion. Huxley adopted the idea that there was nothing beyond the false identity, and he could not accept the interpretation that beneath its layers there was also an identity, a pure, primeval, idiosyncratic one, and that God is a person. Several questions concerning the transpersonal approach might be posed here. First of all, if the material universe is seen as a reflection of the spiritual world on the shimmering surface of a lake, how does transpersonalism explain that the source of overall variation is a void? Another one is the understanding of love—how is love explained and justified within this impersonal system of values? Of course, love is put forward as an essential value, but is linked with “no tangible objects and no ends.”76 One can melt into the void, but can one love it?77 Or, are the transpersonalists talking about a feeling that is at a higher level than what we vaguely mean by love, and is this feeling, by its very superior position, inclusive of love? The pros and cons here automatically slide into a discussion that goes beyond rationality, and it is best to leave it at this. Huxley preferred knowing to feeling, for he was experientially and possibly biologically conditioned to perceive the world more by means of the mind than by means of emotions. Hence, he was naturally inclined towards the idea of transpersonal spirituality, although he did have certain private issues with it. For example, he was unable to maintain 70

The Vaishnavis worship Vishnu, one of the three supreme deities of Hinduism: Brahma is the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer; all three are emanations of the Bhagavan, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. 71 PrabhupƗda, op. cit., 632. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 629. 74 Ibid., 632. 75 Ibid. 76 Watt, op. cit., 332. 77 Vaishnavis also accept the idea of nirvana, although they call it brahmajyoti. Brahmajyoti denotes the effulgence of the Godhead Bhagavan’s body. However, the Vaishnavis do not see this as the highest level in the spiritual hierarchy (as the Buddhists do), but put the personal Bhagavan above the level of nirvana.

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concentration, and he also found it impossible to merge with the Clear Light78 during meditation. Nothingness was perhaps not the natural environment for his lush mind. In his earlier books Huxley explained his attachment to transpersonalism, but left room for different, equally valid interpretations. By the end of After Many a Summer, however, he shows a somewhat lesser degree of metaphysical tolerance. At a certain point in the novel he even derogatively speaks about “Swami Yogalinga, founder of the School of Personality”79 in the company of the greatest hypocrites and snobs of Hollywood. The deprecating effect is enhanced by the etymology of the name of the fictitious swami—he uses the word linga, which is the Sanskrit name for phallus. For most Shivaists,80 linga is a holy symbol, but by using it ironically Huxley shows disrespect for an ancient religious concept, the symbol of creativity and fertility, revealing at the same time insufficient knowledge or understanding of the religious traditions of Hinduism. The importance of knowledge and enhanced awareness in the process of self-realisation is strongly accentuated in this novel, and perhaps even slightly superimposed to other equally important elements. Propter says that “ignorance and stupidity are no less severely punished [...] than deliberate malice.”81 Accordingly, he strives for “union with God through, not love, but knowledge.”82 The rich Indian religious tradition, which is generally (though ideally) characterised by an “individualized” approach to believers, enables those like Huxley to engage in spiritual development by means of jñƗna-yoga, “the predominantly empirical process of linking with the Supreme, which is executed when one is still attached to mental speculation.”83 Apart from this form of yoga (yoga essentially means getting in touch with God), other personality types have at their disposal other paths: hatha-yoga (the accent is on bodily exercises and the control of the senses), karma-yoga (unification with God through active service), and a series of other spiritual techniques. Among the personalists, the highest rank is reserved for that version of yoga that Huxley was neglecting, i.e. bhakti-yoga, or “the system of cultivation of bhakti, or pure devotional service, which is untinged by sense gratification or

78

Another Buddhist term for nirvana. Huxley, op. cit., 236. 80 Worshippers of Shiva. 81 Huxley, op. cit., 79. 82 Watt, op. cit., 324. 83 PrabhupƗda, op. cit., 870. 79

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philosophical speculation.”84 It seems that Huxley was overly attached to his mental ego, even though he probably wanted to transcend it. He might have still subconsciously felt that without love as a central power that glues the world together ultimate liberation is difficult to achieve. One of Propter’s most interesting and thorough ideas is his rumination on how people deserve all their suffering, even when they seem to be completely innocent. He fiercely criticises the sentence: “They hated me without a cause”85 as “the stupidest text in the Bible,”86 because people are “in part at any rate […] pretty certainly responsible for their own misfortunes.”87 He gives a bizarre example of St. Peter Claver who was going under the decks of ships that were transporting slaves, where, in the unspeakable stench and heat, the vapours of pus and excrement, he tended the sick, he dressed the ulcers [...] and [...] talked to them about their sins. Their sins! The modern humanitarian would laugh, if he were not shocked.88

No matter how bizarre this idea may sound, Propter poses a very appropriate question: “What faintest glimmer of hope is there for a man who really believes that ‘they hated me without a cause’ and that he had no part in his own disasters?”89 Undeserved punishment is an idea that shatters the picture of a benevolent God, and can often be heard as an argument in the hands of atheists. No one wants a God who punishes us for something we are not guilty of. Huxley only partly managed to justify the idea of one’s own responsibility for one’s suffering. It is true that he touched upon the heart of the matter, but the way he explained it is a little vague. He talked about a Christian saint who was only partly right (apparently due to the shortcomings of his own religious belief), but Huxley himself also made the same mistake. He said that Claver was right when he thought that people were being punished because of the “omissions to make good”90 and in order to “be reminded of their own shortcomings.”91 The Serbian Orthodox priest Nikolaj Velimiroviü expounded this idea quite poetically: 84

PrabhupƗda, op. cit., 867. Huxley, op. cit., 79. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., 80. 89 Ibid., 79. 90 Ibid., 80. 91 Ibid., 81. 85

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“Lord, bless my enemies. I bless them, too, I do not curse them [...] They whipped me when I was reluctant to whip myself [...] They called me names when I was flattering myself.”92 However, Huxley thought that Claver’s main mistake was his belief in “a personal God,”93 who forgives and punishes. Huxley disagreed that one had to expose one’s potential virtues to God, which would then be rewarded. For him, the right solution was not what kind of attitude to take towards God, but “to transform and transcend intelligence”94 and personality in general. It seems that he left no room for the love of the divine as we know it in Christianity and other world’s religions. Besides this, it is also unusual that in the analysis of the suffering of the innocent Huxley never mentioned the principle of karma, i.e. the law of sowing and reaping, nor did he refer to reincarnation, which is a compound element of the law of karma. This is even more astounding when we know that he personally believed in these spiritual principles. Furthermore, this theme is almost a classic example in which the Eastern concept of a successive line of births and deaths applies much more logically to the attempt to explain the punishment of the innocent than do the interpretations that deny the possibility of transmigration of souls. In the novel After Many a Summer Huxley returns to the question of time, which is presented in a rather peculiar way in this book. Apart from the mellower qualifications that “time’s a pretty bothersome thing,”95 and that it is “nightmarish,”96 Propter soon states quite explicitly that time is “the medium in which evil propagates itself, the element in which evil lives and outside of which it dies.”97 The good exists only out of time, and hence it is an illusory thing to attempt to effectuate it within the temporal dimension. This idea is largely vague, for time, just like anything else, can be either an accomplice or an enemy in the process of spiritual progress. The extremity of the previous statement is soon softened by the words that time, after all, is just “the raw material of evil.”98 However, the qualification of time as evil in itself is too bizarre, because time also

92 “Blagoslovi neprijatelje moje, Gospode. I ja ih blagosiljam, i ne kunem [...] Oni su me šibali, kad sam se ja ustezao šibati sama sebe... Oni su me ružili onda, kad sam ja sam sebi laskao.” Vladika Nikolaj, Molitve na jezeru (Belgrade: Neven, 1998): 110. 93 Huxley, op. cit., 81. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., 86. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., 88. 98 Ibid., 90.

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enables advancement in spiritual development, and with its cessation the development invariably ceases. Finally, another unusual William Propter’s idea is his categorisation of the three levels of existence: the animal, the human and the spiritual. The human level is qualitatively equal to the concept of time: “On the strictly human level of time and craving, you can’t achieve anything but evil.”99 This level consists merely of “a swarm of constellated impulses and sentiments and notions; a swarm brought together by the accidents of heredity and language; a swarm of incongruous and often contradictory thoughts and desires.”100 So quite in line with nonacceptance of the idea of personality, the human level is rejected as an impediment on the way to perfection. The quest for the good should be redirected to the two remaining levels: the animal (on which good is manifested as “the proper functioning of the organism”101) and the spiritual, i.e. the “the level of eternity,”102 which represents “the transcendence of personality, the extension of consciousness beyond the limits imposed by the ego.”103 Where the “human level” is concerned, its condemnation could be understood if we equated it with the transitory aspects of human life. However, it is difficult to grasp Huxley’s take on the nature of personality that resides at the human level, and what is particularly difficult to envisage is ethics based on these ideas. In his long monologues Propter also delves into diverse political and economic ideas. His outlook is a highly cynical one. Propter says that one is lost “unless [… one is] steadily and unflaggingly cynical”104 about “most of the things that we’re all taught to respect.”105 If we go back to the Greek myth from the title of the novel, it seems that Huxley is emphasising that Tithonus and Propter “ha[ve] learned a lesson which Stoyte, the earl of Gonister, and the mass of humanity never learn,”106 i.e. the lesson that time is not a value in itself (or more precisely—that it is evil). Huxley did manage to clarify certain ideas in this book, but dimmed others that were clearer in his earlier novels. In comparison with the previous books he showed a higher degree of assuredness in spiritual matters and, at the same time, a lesser degree of tolerance. In the end, and 99

Huxley, op. cit., 99. Ibid., 219. 101 Ibid., 99. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid.,100. 104 Ibid., 97. 105 Ibid. 106 Firchow, op. cit., 162. 100

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with the best of intentions, an impression remains that this novel represents “a backward step in the quest for workable ethic.”107

Works Cited Dunaway, David King. Huxley in Hollywood. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Dyson, A. E. The Crazy Fabric: Essays in Irony. London: Macmillan, 1965. Firchow, Peter. Aldous Huxley, Satirist and Novelist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972. Gandhi, Kishore. Aldous Huxley, The Search for Perennial Religion. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1980. Holmes, Charles M. Aldous Huxley and the Way to Reality. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1978. Huxley, Aldous. After Many a Summer. New York: Avon Division—The Hearst, 1939. Meckier, Jerome. Aldous Huxley, Satire and Structure. London: Chatto & Windus, 1969. Paulsell, Sally A. “Color and Light: Huxley’s Path to Spiritual Reality.” Twentieth Century Literature 41, no. 1 (1995): 81-107. PrabhupƗda, Swami, trans. Bhagavad-gƯtƗ As It Is. New York: Collier, 1972. Smith, Grover, ed. The Letters of Aldous Huxley. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Velimiroviü, Vladika Nikolaj. Molitve na jezeru. Belgrade: Neven, 1998. Watt, Donald, ed. Aldous Huxley – The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Woodcock, George. The Dawn and the Darkest Hour. London: Faber & Faber, 1972. Zähner, Lilly. Demon and Saint in the Novels of Aldous Huxley. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1975.

107

Holmes, op. cit., 128.

PART TWO: AFTER MODERNISM

BRIONY’S POLYLOGUE SONJA VITANOVA-STREZOVA

Ian McEwan has been “frequently concerned with […] the difficulties, possibilities, and complexities of giving an account of things and of telling stories in general.”1 Indeed, ever since his earliest collections of short stories, McEwan has constantly drawn attention to the status of his fiction as discourse. His later fiction shares the same concerns and deals with the issue of storytelling, but in McEwan’s ninth novel Atonement the storytelling of the main heroine Briony becomes the central preoccupation of the author. Through Briony’s multi-layered and complex discourse, McEwan investigates the relationship between fiction and reality to raise questions in the novel concerning the subject of narration as well as the subject in narration. This paper examines the problems of narrative discourse, narrating being and narrative being in Atonement drawing on Genette and Kristeva. It seems that the limited point of view or “focalization”2 can account for the first three parts of what appears to be a modernist novel. However, the postmodernist twist in the postscript, in which the narration shifts to a first person singular, reveals that the narrative voice belongs to the aged novelist Briony. It turns out that the whole novel is Briony’s attempt at atonement through her impossible lifetime mission of telling the “true” story instead of the wrong one which, driven by her imagination, she told in her childhood. Not only is the story told by Briony, but it is about Briony. The heroine’s multi-layered involvement with the story, which is revealed in the postscript, refutes Genette’s focalization3 in the first three parts of Atonement. Thus the postscript with its postmodernist twist challenges the reliability of the narrative told in more than three hundred pages. In addition, Briony herself questions in the postscript the 1

David Malcolm, Understanding Ian McEwan (South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2002): 9-10. 2 Gerard Génette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, New York: Cornwell University Press 1980): 189-198. 3 Ibid., 189-194.

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trustworthiness of her own story. It turns out that McEwan, who slips inside the mind of the thirteen-year-old girl to pursue her all her life until old age, manipulates with our representations of fiction and reality through every different Briony that he creates in the novel. However, it is Briony, who is his creative medium in Atonement. By continually recreating herself in the story she is trying to tell, Briony engenders an infinite number of new stories which are yet to be told. Thus the storytelling is constantly deferred in the novel. Therefore, the argument of this paper is that there is no at-one-ment of the many Brionys because there is no being in fiction. However, the attempt at being by imitating reality is all that fiction is about. The story in Atonement standing for many stories, which have been engendered in this impossible attempt, is seen as Briony’s polylogue in the conclusion of this paper which draws on Kristeva’s notions of “polilogue” and “polylogical discourse.”4 This work initially addresses the questions of narrative discourse, narrating being and narrative being in the first three parts of the novel drawing on Genette. The third-person narration in Part One seems to shift, in Genette’s terms, to a different “focal character,”5 from Briony to Cecilia, then to Robbie and so on, who cannot look into the minds of the other characters and thus she or he presents her/his own version of the events. It appears that McEwan employs what Genette calls “variable internal focalization.”6 Thus, at this point in the novel the attempt at narrating being seems to result in a narrative being. Whenever the narration shifts to a different focal character, it appears to reveal with great realism his or her subjectivity. In other words, it seems that the events are processed through the point of view of each focal character that reveals his or her individualised world. Before the consequential incident when the long-treasured family vase gets broken, the narration, which marks the transition between the first and the second chapter of Part One, shifts from Briony to Cecilia: And so they went on, the cousins from the north, for a full half an hour, steadily wrecking Briony’s creation, and it was a mercy, therefore, when her big sister came to fetch the twins for their bath.7

4

Julia Kristeva, “The Novel as a Polylogue,” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980): 159-210. 5 Gerard Genette, op. cit., 189-190. 6 Ibid. 7 Ian McEwan, Atonement (London: Vintage, 2002): 17.

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Briony’s Polylogue PARTLY BECAUSE of her youth and the glory of the day, partly because of her blossoming need for a cigarette, Cecilia Tallis half ran with her flowers along the path that went by the river.8

In the first extract it seems that we see the events from the point of view of the thirteen-year-old Briony, the would-be writer. Her flirtatious cousin Lola and her twin brothers have been ruining her artistic creation that she wants to perform for her brother’s homecoming and this is why she welcomes Cecilia’s fortunate interruption of the rehearsal of her play. This is a convenient introduction to the following chapter, which focuses on Cecilia, her mood and her habits. It appears that the events are seen from the perspective of the focal character as the narration focuses on her/his perception of the world, thus revealing his or her individuality. In the second and the third part, the narration does not shift to a different focal character, but it seems to be rendered through the point of view of only one character, which, in Genette’s terms, is known as “fixed internal focalization.”9 Robbie, already suffering the consequences of Briony’s crime, appears to be the focal character in Part Two. After spending three years in prison on the grounds of Briony’s false accusation, he is dismissed, but only to serve his nation in the army. Thus Robbie as a soldier in the retreat to Dunkirk at the outset of World War II is in the focus of the second part, just as the young woman Briony as a nurse in St. Thomas’s hospital in London appears to be the focal character in Part Three. In this part, Briony is confronted with the battle casualties and all the crude realities of the war. The implication is that this is the initial point of her long journey to penitence, a journey to which she condemns herself for ruining Cecilia’s and Robbie’s love. In the first three parts of the novel, it seems that the events are witnessed through the eyes of each focal character as the narration proceeds from his or her point of view. Part Two and Part Three are rendered with such crude realism of detail that it is hard to believe that they are not part of the focal character’s experience. As Robbie retreats to Dunkirk together with his comrades, horrifying scenes seem to be witnessed through his eyes: He found Mace and Nettle shoulder-deep in the hole. They were in the final stages of digging a grave. Lying facedown beyond the pile of earth

8 9

Ian McEwan, op. cit., 18. Gerard Genette, op. cit., 189-190.

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was a boy of fifteen or so. A crimson stain on the back of his white shirt spread from neck to waist.10

In Part Three Briony, who is nursing soldiers wounded in the same battle in a London hospital, also appears to witness the worst possible horror: She was not intending to remove the gauze, but as she loosened it, the heavy sterile towel beneath it slid away, taking a part of the bloody dressing with it. The side of Luc’s head was missing. The hair was shaved well back from the missing portion of skull. Below the jagged line of bone was a spongy crimson mess of brain, several inches across, reaching from the crown almost to the tip of his ear.11

Thus the overall impression conveyed in the first three parts of Atonement is that the narration in the novel is reliable, as it is rendered from the point of view of the focal character who seems to have witnessed the event. However, even without considering the postscript, the narration is subtly undermined through the disruptions of the narrative time. For example, the transition from Part One to Part Two, from Briony in 1935 to Robbie five years later at the beginning of World War II, proceeds with a leap in time that disrupts the linearity of the narration due to the missing piece of the story. In addition, the linear narration is undermined when it seems as if time has stopped while the same event is narrated from different perspectives, which, in Genette’s terms, is known as “multiple internal focalization.”12 The vase episode mentioned above—the incident whereby Cecilia strips off her clothes to retrieve the broken piece of the vase from the fountain—appears to be evoked from two different points of view, those of Cecilia and of Briony respectively: Immediately she knew what he was about. Intolerable [...] She kicked off her sandals, unbuttoned her blouse and removed it, unfastened her skirt and stepped out of it and went to the basin wall […] Denying his help, any possibility of making amends, was his punishment. The unexpectedly freezing water that caused her to gasp was his punishment. She held her breath and sank, leaving her hair fanned out across the surface. Drowning herself would be his punishment.13

10

Ian McEwan, op. cit., 224. Ibid., 308. 12 Gerard Genette, op. cit., 190. 13 Ian McEwan, op. cit., 30. 11

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Briony’s Polylogue It was extraordinary that she was unable to resist him. At his insistence she was removing her clothes, and at such speed. She was out of her blouse, now she had let her skirt drop to the ground and was stepping out of it, while he looked on impatiently, hands on hips. What strange power did he have over her? Blackmail, Threats? [...] The sequence was illogical-the drowning scene, followed by a rescue, should have preceded the marriage proposal […] Unseen from two stories up, with the benefit of unambiguous sunlight, she had privileged access across the years to adult behaviour, to rites and conventions she knew nothing about as yet.14

In the case of internal multiple focalization the accent is placed on the storytelling whereby the same event is reprocessed and filtered in two different ways or from two different points of view. The implication is that Cecilia, interpreting Robbie’s behaviour as his attempt to impose his “urgent masculine authority” on her, strips off her clothes in a moment of emotional tension and rivalry with him, just on the threshold of her realisation that she has been in love with Robbie all her life. Eight pages further the same event appears to be rendered from the point of view of the thirteen-year-old Briony, who witnesses the scene “unseen from two stories up.” At this point in the narrative we feel as if inhabiting the mind of the child who, unable to confront the adult sexuality and utterly confused by it, misunderstands Robbie’s spell on Cecilia as his attempt to violate her. This is logically the first step towards her crime of wrongly accusing Robbie for raping her cousin Lola, which would cost her a life of atonement. Not only is the time flow in the novel distorted, as explained above, with leaps in time and with events when the time seems to have frozen, but, even when it appears that time in the narrative flows, in an orderly way, there are some delicate flaws to it. In fact, the narrative time is occasionally distorted by a glimpse into the future or narrative anticipation, which Genette calls “prolepsis.”15 At the beginning of the novel, after Mrs Tallis has read the seven pages of The Trials of Arabella and commended her daughter’s play as “stupendous,” the narration continues: “Briony was hardly to know it then, but it was the project’s highest point of fulfilment. Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration.”16 This is an illustration of narrative anticipation or prolepsis, as the narrator is allowing us a glimpse into the future. Briony cannot know at this point of the novel that her play is going to be acted not then, but sixty years later, and meanwhile her artistic 14

Ian McEwan, op. cit., 38-39. Gerard Genette, op. cit., 67-79. 16 Ian McEwan, op. cit., 4. 15

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imagination, instead of bringing her satisfaction, will bring her years of frustration, regret and atonement. It seems that Briony exists in some parareality—some kind of dual temporality. Another example is the cited episode when Cecilia goes into the fountain, witnessed by Briony. At this point Briony feels an “elusive excitement at a prospect she was coming close to defining.” As we are told that “the definition would refine itself over the years,”17 and further on in the text that “six decades later she would describe how at the age of thirteen she had written her way through a whole history of literature,”18 we learn in fact that this girl will become a writer. This is one of the crucial points in Atonement, told in a leisurely way, as it is a glimpse into the very end of the novel where it is clear that the narrative voice belongs to the aged novelist Briony and that the whole novel is actually one of her possible accounts of events in the attempt to write the version—the novel that would be her atonement for telling the wrong story that ruined Robbie’s and Cecilia’s lives. Drawing back on Genette, his great contribution to the theory of narratology was the fact that he succeeded in distinguishing between the narrative mood and the narrative voice, by setting “who sees?” against “who speaks?” Having made this distinction between who sees and who recounts the story, it turns out that the fictional world in the novel is only “seen” through the eyes of each one of those characters, but the story is told by somebody else. In fact, the question of narrative voice, the question of who speaks in the novel is subtly answered in the first three parts, as in the examples above, through narrative anticipations or prolepses, even without considering the information provided in the postscript. Given the narrative prolepses, it appears that some all-knowing narrator is telling the story, adding, as if in an aside, comments that provide us with glimpses into the future. However, according to Genette, the omniscient narrator is marked by zero focalization, and the first three parts of the novel seem to be narrated from the objective point of view of each of the focal characters. When Briony, now a young nurse in a London hospital, receives a letter from the editor of Horizon rejecting her early novella about the event by the fountain, the encouraging suggestions in it concerning her future career as a writer are compatible with the version of the novel as we read it. We learn that in that early version it is a “Ming vase” that Cecilia and Robbie tussle over, not a “Meissen vase” as in the novel we are reading. Then in the novella Cecilia goes not in her underwear, but “fully dressed 17 18

Ian McEwan, op. cit., 40. Ibid., 41.

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into the fountain,” which is one of the editor’s remarks.19 Also the editor corrects Briony’s mistake in the early draft concerning the “reproduction of Bernini’s Triton” that he says is in the “Piazza Barberini” as in the novel and not in the “Piazza Navona” as in the novella.20 We again have a glimpse into the future, as we get to know that the whole novel is yet “another draft”—logically the last one—of her early attempt and that the author has written this last version from some other distant point in the future. The anticipation is finally confirmed at the end of Part Three signed: BT London, 199921

BT is the initials of Briony Tallis. The last part of the novel, immediately following, is the postscript entitled “London, 1999.” This is the biggest leap in time in the narrative, which in the previous part ends in 1940 to continue directly in 1999, skipping almost six decades. The postscript is written in the first person singular. Thus we are clearly given confirmation of our anticipation concerning the narrative voice, but only to make the denouement or, to be more in line with McEwan’s text, the nondenouement, more complex. The first-person narration in this last part, which happens almost six decades later, is presented through the recognisable narrative voice of the aged novelist Briony. It turns out that the entire novel—this is possibly the last draft written by Briony—is part of her lifetime mission to tell the “true” story as an attempt at atonement for the crime of her imagination, the wrong story which she told in her childhood. Not only does Briony acquire the discourse in the whole novel, but she also turns out to be the subject in the narrative that supplants the eyes of the “witness.” Thus the postscript with its postmodernist twist refutes Genette’s differentiation between narrative voice and narrative perspective in the whole novel and challenges the reliability of the narration. Briony is not the traditional omniscient narrator who gives an impartial account of the story and endows the narrative with objective reliability. On the contrary, instead of all-knowing, the narrator in Atonement is “not-knowing.” Robbie’s retreat to Dunkirk is only Briony’s possible account of events, probably based on the data that she collected in the Imperial War Museum in London. Moreover, the optimistic ending of Part Three whereby Briony parts from Cecilia and Robbie, who are 19

Ian McEwan, op. cit., 313. Ibid., 314. 21 Ibid., 349. 20

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reunited again after Dunkirk, promising to write a signed statement in order to retract the evidence incriminating Robbie, turns out to be only another possible draft of the story. At the end of the novel Briony comments on this part: It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham underground station.22

Thus the narrator subverts the reliability of her own narration. The whole story told in more than three hundred pages is undermined and the narrative illusion shattered. Although there are subtle implications in the first three parts of the novel that disrupt narrative reliability, it is not until the coda that the narrator herself deliberately draws our attention to the unreliability of her own story. This extract implies not only Briony’s writing, but also McEwan’s writing of the novel, as well as the process of novel writing in general. It turns out that the end of Atonement is without an ending and this won McEwan disapproving reviews from some critics. In an article entitled “A Bad End” Boerner comments on the end of the novel: The author’s failure to come up with a real conclusion dissipates instantly all the plot tension and good will built up in the reader through page after page. But far worse is the way McEwan tries to get out of his problem. Atonement ends up abjuring all responsibility for what its author has evoked. Was there ever a great novel that concluded by saying, in essence, “I was only kidding—it was just a dream”? Someone needs to sit Ian McEwan down and make him read Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending. Someone needs to […] remind him how plots come to conclusions. Someone needs to wake him up.23

In fact, it is this criticism that fails for being unable to “awaken” to all the subtlety of McEwan’s masterpiece and its failure is based on the understanding that Atonement is a realistic novel that in the end inadequately has recourse in a postmodernist twist. These critics are actually deceived by McEwan’s narrative illusion. However, the delicate

22 23

Ian McEwan, op. cit., 370. Margaret Boerner, “A Bad End,” Weekly Standard 29 April, 2002: 45.

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nuances of the novel include the narrative anticipation as well as the concern with writing from the very beginning. This concern in Atonement, which goes beyond the process of writing the novel, expands to metafiction which “self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.”24 Atonement opens with Briony’s play even before we are introduced to the young playwright. Also the epigraph in the novel is taken from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, whose main character is also obsessed with fiction. Hence, the author McEwan built every step in the novel carefully, fitting each part in its right place from the first to the very last word of his artistic mosaic. An open ending in the novel not only makes sense, but it also generates sense, or rather, senses. To be able to discern the multiplying levels of meaning in Atonement sifted through its ending, one has to go to the very core of the novel implied in its title. The aim Briony is trying to achieve through her writing is atonement. This last version of the novel, as many before it in the course of almost six decades, is written in her attempt to atone for the sin that she committed at the age of thirteen, treating people as characters in her fiction. If her guilt is located in fiction, then the question arises of whether it can be expiated through fiction: How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her of course. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists […]. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.25

Apparently the issue raised here develops further in the sphere of metafiction. The aged novelist Briony, as well as the author McEwan, who inhabits her mind, acknowledges both the writer’s “absolute power of deciding outcomes” and his/her inability to substitute reality with fiction. Not only that it is impossible to try to replace reality with fiction, but it can also be dangerous. Briony has spent almost sixty years unsuccessfully trying to atone for the crime of her imagination committed in her childhood. Thus Briony’s crime is embedded in fiction and she has been 24

Patricia Waugh, “What is metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it?” in Metafiction, ed. Mark Currie (London and New York: Longman 1995): 40. 25 Ian McEwan, op. cit., 371.

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trying over the years to expiate it through fiction. The only difference is that the adult novelist Briony, unlike the would-be writer, has been trying to recreate reality, not by imposing the novelist’s “absolute power of deciding outcomes,” but by seeing the world from the position of the other. This is why we need her atonement to be consummated, to succumb ourselves to the narrative illusion and identify with her. However, attempt is all a writer can make, because fiction is only mimesis of the reality it cannot replace. In the end, the impossibility to substitute reality with fiction “was precisely the point” because fiction is engendered in its creative, grand and infinite attempt to imitate reality. This is why Briony’s “true” story continues to be told and the heroine’s atonement remains eternally procrastinated. Atonement as fiction is only mimesis of reality, but McEwan, the writer of the novel plays a multiple trick on us by continually supplanting the factual with the fictional in Briony’s infinitely prolonged attempt to tell the “true” story. Thus Briony is constantly multiplied in the story, which implies many stories: Briony as a character in the novel in her childhood, early adulthood and old age, then Briony as a narrator, Briony as a writer, Briony as himself—the author McEwan, Briony in every version of the story over a period of almost six decades, Briony in any new story by the novelist, Briony in our version of her story, and so it goes on. Thus, there is no at-one-ment of the many Brionys in the novel which becomes Briony’s “polylogue.”26 In Kristeva’s terms, Briony is a “subject in process.”27 According to Kristeva, the speaking subject is questionable as to its identity. In her research of the poetic language she focuses on the split nature of the subject of the novel. The process that the subject undergoes is “unsettling” in terms of its place “within the semiotic and symbolic disposition.”28 The semiotic disposition is related to what Kristeva, drawing on Plato, calls “semiotic chora.” For Kristeva the semiotic chora is a kind of receptacle that “lacks thesis or position, unity or identity.” As Plato puts it, the chora is “an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible.”29 Kristeva emphasises the maternal function of the chora “which receives all things” against the symbolic disposition embedded in the social framework that stands for the paternal laws of 26

Julia Kristeva, op. cit., 159-210. Ibid., 133-178. 28 S. Leon Roudiez, “Introduction” to Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980): 17. 29 Ibid., 6. 27

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language and meaning.30 The semiotic chora continually disrupts the symbolic laws, disclosing the impossibility of the language to convey finite meanings. The symbolic opposes this disruption and tries to suppress the semiotic chora by imposing its social laws as well as the laws of language and meaning. For Kristeva, the subject is divided because of its unsettling place within the dialectical opposition between the semiotic and the symbolic disposition where it is engendered. Thus, by constantly recreating itself through its own negation, the subject undergoes a perpetual process of renewal and becoming. Hence the term “subject in process.” The semiotic, standing for creation through negation and opposition of the symbolic strict laws of language and meaning, is the productive, creative disposition that underlies the poetic language. The heterogeneous polylogical subject in process is embedded in the poetic language of the novel, which is increasingly affected by the semiotic disposition.31 Etymologically, the term “polylogue” comes from the Greek words poly and logos. Poly means “many,” whereas logos can be translated as “word” or “reason.” This etymological analysis implies the multiple meanings of the polylogue. Drawing on Bakhtin’s “dialogical discourse,” in which the meaning of the subject in the poetic language is at least double,32 Kristeva coins her concept of “polylogical discourse” related to the “multiplied, stratified, and heteronomous subject” in the novel.33 Therefore, Briony’s polylogue implies both the polylogical discourse in the novel with an open ending, which continually generates new meanings and Briony as the polylogical subject. In her old age Briony is suffering from dementia, and the question is: “If she forgets who she is and what she did, then what is the point of her lifetime mission of atonement, and of the whole novel for that matter?” As Briony is slowly losing her memory piece by piece, McEwan is reminding us once more that there is no being in narration and that the factual does not really matter in the novel. What matters is fiction as mimesis of reality with its infinite possibilities for telling innumerable stories. Just as the writer Briony constantly supplants the real with the fictive, by considering the possibility of writing the scene, as she puts it in her youth, “three times over, from three different points of view,”34 so McEwan continually multiplies the “true” account of the events through 30

S. Leon Roudiez, op. cit., 18. Julia Kristeva, op. cit., 159-210. 32 Ibid., 77. 33 Ibid., 173. 34 Ian McEwan, op. cit., 40. 31

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his heroine’s polylogue. At the end of the novel, the uncertainty remains unresolved: one possible version of events is always supplanted by another, just as the factual is supplanted by the fictional. Briony, also standing for the author McEwan, subverts through her polylogue her own authority “of deciding outcomes” in the novel, handing it over to the reader. Thus Briony’s attempt at narrating her own being is perpetually procrastinated, and it does not end with a narrative being. Instead, it ends up with the multiplied, heterogeneous subject in the process. The book closes, but Briony’s polylogue is yet to be told.

Works Cited Boerner, Margaret. “A Bad End.” Weekly Standard, 29 April, 2002: 43-46. Génette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, New York: Cornwell University Press, 1980. Kristeva, Julia. “The Subject in Process.” The Tel Quel Reader, edited by Patrick Ffrench and Roland-François Lack, 133-178. New York: Routledge, 1998. —. “The Novel as a Polylogue.” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, edited by Leon S. Roudiez, 159-210. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. McEwan, Ian. Atonement. London: Vintage, 2002. Roudiez, S. Leon. Introduction to Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, 1-20. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Malcolm, David. Understanding Ian McEwan. South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Waugh, Patricia. “What is metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it?” Metafiction, edited by Mark Currie, 39-55. London and New York: Longman, 1995.

UNRELIABLE MEMOIRIST: THE TIM O’BRIENS OF THE THINGS THEY CARRIED GINGER JONES

Were the writer Tim O’Brien to speak with the characters in his “work of fiction” The Things They Carried, he would talk to the novel’s narrator and protagonist, also named Tim O’Brien, who claims that a true war story is a story that matters to whoever hears the story, and is directed to “people who never listen.”1 O’Brien’s novel problematizes the adjective “true” by rendering truth as a relationship between language (description) and knowledge (memory).2 O’Brien is well-known for writing works that appear to document his recollections of the Vietnam War, but according to O’Brien, in fact describe not memories, but realities.3 As Wesley writes, “fighting a war is a matter of personal experience—the effect of weapons on bodies,” yet “inevitably imposes a compromised version on the interpretation of genuine experience.”4 Consider a reader disinclined to engage emotionally or even intellectually with the history of the Vietnam War (as Americans call it— the Vietnamese call it the American War, while Europeans refer to the Second Indochina War). Such a reader might dismiss a particular war memoir as subjective or anecdotal or statistically unrepresentative. He or she would more readily dismiss a work of fiction as fantastic or simply false. How would this “un-ideal” reader classify The Things They Carried, a collection of stories, commentaries, and vignettes narrated by a 1

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Boston: Mariner, 1990): 81. Toby Suzan Roberts, “Wartalk: Tim O’Brien’s postmodern rhetoric of the Vietnam War in The Things They Carried,” M.A. thesis (California State University, Fresno, 2007): 13 3 Tim O’Brien, “The Things That Writers Carry,” Talk delivered at Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina, February 1, 2001. 4 Marilyn Wesley, “Truth and Fiction in Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone and The Things They Carried.” College Literature 29, no. 2 (2002): 2. 2

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protagonist usually in first-person perspective, often in third) with the same name, age, profession, education, and military experience as its author? O’Brien attempts a fiction that continually hugs the coastline between the solid land of memoir and the open sea of fiction, thereby enticing a reader to perpetually decode some truth hidden behind a war story, while being constantly reminded that what feels true and authentic is in fact a literary construction. When reading The Things They Carried, one is constantly revising one’s understanding of what to consider part of the oral history of a war, what to dismiss as fantasy, and where the line between the fictional narrator and real author lies. In perpetually questioning what is true and what is false about what one senses and is being told, readers are compelled to undergo something of the peculiar experience of serving as an American combat soldier in late-60s Vietnam. The narrative compels the reader to engage with it in a manner that makes it part of his or her own experience, forestalling the tendency of a reader to distance himself or herself from what appears to be neither a subjective report nor a fabricated tale, but shifts at times suddenly and at times imperceptibly from one into the other. U.S. involvement in Vietnam occurred during the final years of World War II. In 1946, Ho Chi Minh loyalists attacked French military forces and provoked the French into war. The US supported the French who had been allies in the war. The French began to reassert their power over Vietnam, but the Chinese and Soviet governments allied themselves with Ho Chi Minh. The U.S. President Truman sent first, American military advisors to support the French, and then money because the U.S. feared the growth of Communism throughout the Pacific. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy continued aid to the French and slowly the U.S. had 20,000 military personnel in Vietnam. When two U.S. destroyers were fired on by the North Vietnamese, President Johnson ordered an aerial assault of North Vietnam. Though U.S. Presidents are given the authority to declare war, none ever did declare war on the North Vietnamese, and in fact, war was never declared. O’Brien was sent to Vietnam as an infantryman; he spent his tour of duty in Juan Kni province and was stationed in My Lai one year after the My Lai massacre of over 300 apparently unarmed Vietnamese civilians including women, children, and the elderly. American soldiers were, according to a Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) report (2009), ordered to enter the village of My Lai firing their weapons, though there had been no report of opposing fire. Eyewitness reports indicated that several old men were bayoneted, praying women and children were shot in the back of the head, and at least one girl was raped and then killed.

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The young lieutenant commanding the soldiers, William Calley, was said to have rounded up a group of the villagers, ordered them into a ditch, and mowed them down in a fury of machine gun fire. The massacre would outrage an American public already divided about whether young Americans should be sent to Viet Nam. Lieutenant Calley, a college dropout, served three years under a relaxed house arrest, after his sentence was commuted from life imprisonment.5 In a 2009 PBS interview, O’Brien explains, when I arrived in Vietnam roughly a year after the massacre happened […] I was assigned just by serendipity to a unit battalion that had [to survey] the My Lai area. […] And so [on] a good portion of my tour, I was walking through these villages where this horrible atrocity occurred prior to my arrival to Vietnam. And part of our fear for the place […] had to do with the hostility that you could read on the faces of the people there, even among the little children. [It] was hostility mixed with fear that you encounter now and then but never in that concentrated, distilled form that you would see on the faces of four-year-olds and seven-year-olds who must have heard from their parents about what had happened. And it was beyond the ordinary.6

It was while he was still in Vietnam that O’Brien says he began writing vignettes about his army experience. With several short story publications under his belt, and one poorly-received novel, he published Going After Cacciato, a breakthrough book that won the prestigious National Book Award for 1979 over the popular novel The World According to Garp. In 1986, O’Brien published a short story for Esquire magazine entitled “The Things They Carried”; it would become the basis for his 1990 novel by the same title. The Things They Carried sets literal truth aside, yet offers a clearer, deeper sense of what fighting in Vietnam was like than do many conventional memoirs. O’Brien offers a deeper emotional description of a young American fighting in Vietnam. Inter-referentiality of text and author manifests for the first time in the second chapter of The Things They Carried, “Love,” which begins when “Jimmy Cross came to visit me at my home in Massachusetts.”7

5

Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), “Interview: Author Tim O’Brien,” 2009. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/-features/interview/mylai-obrien. 6 Ibid. 7 Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, 26.

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In a talk at Davison College in 2001, O’Brien likened his writing philosophy to what happened to him as a child, when he wrote his first book: at age nine, possibly ten […] I wrote […] “Timmy of the Little League” […]. I remember on the – my mom and dad, I think, still have this aborted effort—I remember on page ten or so of this—it was hand-written, in big handwriting, but on page ten or so, uh, the Worthington [Minnesota, where the real Tim O’Brien grew up] Ben Franklin team won the Worthington, uh, Little League, you know, championship. And I, in the character of Timmy, got the game-winning hit. On page twenty or so, the team went up to Minneapolis—St. Paul Little League championship, where the Worthington Ben Franklin team defeated a team from Edina, this kind of ritzy-ditzy, rich people's suburb—you guys would fit in there—a place we really despised, and again, the game-winning hit was by little Timmy, and at the end of the book, on page thirty or whatever it was, the team went to Williamsport, Pennsylvania [annual host of the Little League World Series], where they defeated Taiwan, like, eighty to nothing, and again, the game-winning hit was mine.8

O’Brien called the novel Going After Cacciato his “sort of first successful” book, which he says “was essentially that of ‘Timmy of the Little League’, or a book about what a character named Tim O’Brien could do.”9 O’Brien writes not just about “the world we live in, but I also write about the world we ought to live in, and could, which is a world of imagination.”10 In “Spin”, the third chapter of The Things They Carried, O’Brien uses the phrase “I remember” three times to introduce the characters he meets during the war, then he tells his readers that he is “forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over a long while. Much of it hard to remember.”11 The contrast establishes a discourse between what is remembered and what is difficult to remember. O’Brien is asking his reader to hear what the war was like, to listen to the behaviour of the characters in his novel, so that his readers might comprehend the complexities of the war. He is not telling the truth, but is telling the truth as he wants to remember it. Later, in the same chapter, the protagonist 8

Tim O’Brien, “The Things That Writers Carry.” Tim O’Brien, “Writing Vietnam.” Keynote address delivered at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, April 21, 1999. 10 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). 2012. “An Interview with Tim O’Brien.” http://www.neabigread.org/books/thethingstheycarried-/readers04.php. 11 Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, 31. 9

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O’Brien tells us that his daughter wants him to write stories about a pony. The writer Tim O’Brien has no daughter. Timmerman asks whether the “disparity between personal experience and the historical facticity of war [is] irresolvable.”12 O’Brien could answer that “what sticks to memory often are those odd fragments that have no beginning and no end,”13 so in order to give the fragments a beginning and an end, the author imagines what could have happened, and to help readers comprehend, O’Brien passes the “memory” off as real. As he writes at the end of “Spin,” Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.14

It is the following chapter in this fiction, “On the Rainy River,” that is perhaps the most telling example of inter-referentiality. It begins with the narrator O’Brien taking the reader into his confidence, saying he will now tell a story no one knows, not his parents, not his siblings, not even his wife. He is ready, after over twenty years, to write the story, to remember it by “putting facts down on paper.”15 He tells how he was drafted in June of 1968, just a month after he graduated Macalester College, a private institution in eastern Minnesota. The writer O’Brien, a former Macalester College student body president, had graduated with honours and been accepted by Harvard on a full scholarship. Protagonist O’Brien states that after he read his draft notice, his head filled with a “silent howl.”16 He tells us that he began to think about driving to Canada in protest of serving his country in the war. Finally, he does, he drives to Canada to a place on the Rainy River called the Tip-Top Lodge. He meets an elderly man, the lodge’s caretaker and learns much from him about ethics, responsibility, and compassion. The following commentary is taken from the keynote address O’Brien gave to Brown University in April, 1999, nine years after the publication of The Things They Carried: 12 John H. Timmerman, “Tim O’Brien and the Art of the True War Story: ‘Night March’ and ‘Speaking of Courage,’” Twentieth Century Literature 46, no. 1 (2000): 101. 13 Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, 34. 14 Ibid., 36. 15 Ibid., 37. 16 Ibid., 39.

Ginger Jones I came across a closed-down resort along the river, a place called the TipTop Lodge. It wasn’t really a lodge: it was a sort of—ten yellow cabins along the river. Tourist season was over by then, so the place was abandoned, but I stopped anyway, thinking, well, I’ll think it over for one last night before I walk away from my own life and from the world I knew. I went up to the main building and knocked on the door. A little man came to the door. He was really a small guy, he was like a foot tall. I mean he was really a tiny little guy. He was dressed all in, all in brown, you know, the kind of north woods look—brown shirt and brown pants—brown everything. Uh, for the first time in my life I could actually look down at somebody [O’Brien is short in stature]—I remember looking down at the guy, and he looking up at me, and he said, “What do you want?” And I said, “A place to stay.” He introduced himself to me; his name was Elroy Berdahl. The man is the hero of my life. If, uh, heroes come—come in small packages, this guy did. He took one look at me and I know that instantly he knew that here's a kid in deep trouble. Uh, he was no dummy. He knew there was a war on, he knew this was the Canadian border, he could see how old I was, he could see the terror in my eyes, I’m sure. He said, “No problem.” He gave me a key, and walked me to one of his little cabins, and said to me, “I hope you like fish,” and I said, “Yeah.” Well, during those six days at the Tip-Top Lodge, what do I tell you? They were as important as anything that later happened in Vietnam. They were much more traumatic than anything that happened in Vietnam [where] I was wounded, and I saw death all around me. […] I remember old Ellroy watching me all the time during these six days—he was a very quiet guy. As I said, he knew something was wrong, but he was the sort of person who would never talk about it or ask about it. I mean, he was the kind of guy who, if you were to walk into a bar with two heads, and old Ellroy’s sitting there, he would talk about everything except that extra head. He’d talk about the weather, and, you know, and Lutheranism, but not the extra head. […] I remember one afternoon we were out behind his lodge. He was showing me how to split wood. And I began sweating—I just couldn’t shut the sweat off; I just was like a spigot had been turned on inside me, just full of it. One night I vomited at his table. It wasn’t the fish; it was a spiritual sickness inside of me. I remember lying awake at night, full of very peculiar hallucinations—I mean, it wasn’t, it wasn’t hallucination, really, but the kind of thoughts you have when you’re suffering from the flu, or you're really sick. […] Well, near the end of my stay on the sixth and last day there, Ellroy did a thing that, in a way, made me into a writer, as much as, you know, Larry of the Little League. He said to me, uh, “Let’s get in the boat. We’ll go fishing.” So we got into this, you know, little twelve foot boat of his, and we went across to the Canadian side, and he stopped the boat, maybe, I don’t know, fifteen yards or so, from the Canadian, you know, where the

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O’Brien then tells his audience that the story is not true. Or very little of it. It's invented. No Elroy, no Tip-Top Lodge, I'm trying to think of what else. I've never been to the Rainy River in my life. Uh, not even close to it. I haven't been within two hundred miles of the place. No boats. But, although I invented the story, it's still true, which is what fiction is all about. Uh, if I were to tell you the literal truth of what happened to

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me in the summer of nineteen sixty-eight, all I could tell you was that I played golf, and I worried about getting drafted. But that’s a crappy story. Isn’t it? It doesn’t—it doesn’t open any door to what I was feeling in the summer of nineteen sixty-eight. That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth. […] And in my own heart, I was certainly on that river, trying to decide what to do, whether to go to the war or not go to it, say no or say yes. The story is still true, even though on one level it's not; it’s made up.

O’Brien refers to a situation that never happened as if it were a memory in order to tell readers the truth about what being drafted to Vietnam meant to a young American college graduate with other plans for the future. O’Brien presents the truth as something than can be referenced by stories, not facts, and the stories strengthen the shared viewpoints of O’Brien’s readers. O’Brien refers to himself in his fictionalised memoir, and believes that the only way for his “memories” to be taken seriously is for him to make them up, yet the moral dilemma, the emotions O’Brien explains are real. When a writer invents a story the reader can identify with and be a part of, the reader becomes a part of the situation in a way he would not otherwise. To read O’Brien is to experience what filmmaker Errol Morris called “the fog of war,” and is the exact experience O’Brien intends to induce in the reader. The young combat veteran in Vietnam the writer used to be consistently wondered what was real and what was fabricated in his environment and daily life. His secure idea of what was real, who was the enemy, whom to trust, shifted rapidly from day to day. How can one replicate that experience in a reader remote from the conflict in space (safe at home in North America or Europe) and time (a generation or two later, when the book is in print)? Memoir allows readers to dismiss the text as anecdotal or unrepresentative, fiction invites readers to consider the story a fabrication. For the new experience of this kind of war, which was never declared a war by the U.S. Government, O’Brien crafted a new approach to telling what happened. The reader’s grasp of what is real and what is invented is continually undermined in The Things They Carried. Rather than reading for information or pleasure, the reader is compelled to continually question what is true and false, what is real or not in the text itself. The reader is induced to decode a hidden memoir behind the apparent fiction, thereby becoming more intellectually and emotionally invested in the narrative. The reader identifies deeply with the protagonist because he appears to be the writer himself, and then feels disappointed, even betrayed, by the writer when he reveals that he has invented large parts of what he

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remembers. The sense of camaraderie, and betrayal (by the U.S. Government) in Vietnam a soldier experienced is replicated to some extent in the reader through his or her experience of deducing what is factual or fanciful in the text. O’Brien writes in the book that “in any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.”17 A “surreal seemingness” makes the story a lie, but the lie tells the “hard and exact truth as it seemed.”18 In the novel’s last chapter “The Lives of the Dead,” O’Brien writes about the death of a childhood friend, 10-year-old Lorna Lou Moeller who becomes the child Linda in the chapter/story “The Lives of the Dead.” O’Brien writes that he wants to bring Linda back to life, but Linda tells him that being dead doesn’t matter. The Kiowa Indian and environmental lawyer Les Ramirez, who is still living, becomes the character Kiowa, who dies after drowning in a field of human excrement. English professor and critic Marilyn Wesley reminds us that “moral evaluation”19 is essential to the American understanding of our part in the destruction of Viet Nam— we need to see ourselves as a righteous people who gave “them” what they deserved. To O’Brien, the telling and retelling of what happened in Viet Nam is a search for the truth, and not just the truth of events but of accountability, his own and that of America. Finally, Tim O’Brien seems to have been performing in his public life as a reader and speaker some of the same qualities of his eponymous narrator in The Things They Carried. A careful reading of several of his talks and interviews finds him revising his own biography, or declaring parts of his work once thought autobiographical to have been wholly imaginary. One may suspect that O’Brien the writer grows weary of discussing the same book year after year. However, intentionally or not, O’Brien may be inviting us to radically reconceive the relationship between the life and the work of a writer. O’Brien seems to be telling us, in his “work of fiction” and in his public performance as a Famous Author, that the pursuit of some biographical but ultimately trivial truth in stories of war is far less important than understanding whether the stories as they are given help us live our own solitary story with greater depth and dignity.

17

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, 67. Ibid., 68. 19 Ibid., 13. 18

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Works Cited National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). “An Interview with Tim O’Brien,” 2012. http://www.neabigread.org/books/thethings-theycarried-/readers04.php. O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Boston: Mariner, 1990. —. “Writing Vietnam.” Keynote address delivered at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, April 21, 1999. —. “The Things That Writers Carry.” Talk delivered at Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina, February 1, 2001. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). “The My Lai Massacre.” Last modified March 29, 2005. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/-vietnam/trenches/my_lai.html. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). “Interview: Author Tim O’Brien.” 2009. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/-features/interview/mylai-obrien. Roberts, Toby Suzan. “Wartalk: Tim O’Brien’s postmodern rhetoric of the Vietnam War in The Things They Carried.” Thesis (M.A.), California State University, Fresno, 2007. Timmerman, John H. “Tim O’Brien and the Art of the True War Story: ‘Night March’ and ‘Speaking of Courage.’” Twentieth Century Literature 46, no. 1 (2000): 100-114. Wesley, Marilyn. “Truth and Fiction in Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone and The Things They Carried.” College Literature 29, no. 2 (2002): 1-18.

NARRATIVE STRATEGIES IN THE WORKS OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS ALEKSANDRA IZGARJAN

Introduction The literary opus of contemporary American women writers reflects significant changes in the American society during the previous century, particularly the transformation of the immigration policy, since many writers are direct descendants of first-wave immigrants. The works of writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, Julia Alvarez, Gish Jen, Amy Tan, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat and Jhumpa Lahiri (to name but some of the most renowned ones) focus on immigration issues and hybrid identities, which are becoming increasingly relevant topics in American society facing important demographic changes. Ahokas notes that since the early 1990s, critical examinations of the privileged, naturalized whiteness of mainstream American culture and literature have also helped to move to the foreground a more complex view of the interpenetration, blending, and intermixture of cultures and traditions.1

Reconsidering national identity, contemporary American women writers have reshaped the hegemonic and monolithic perception of America as a land of white Anglo-Americans. Shirley Geok Lim notes that crosscultural women writers provide a unique insight into the study of the cultural barriers that they have encountered. “These migrants do not 1

Pirjo Ahokas, “Constructing Hybrid Female Identities: Alice Walker’s Meridian and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine,” in Literature on the Move Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas, eds. Dominique Marcais, Mark Neimeyer, Bernard Vincent, Cathy Waegner (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag, 2002): 200.

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emerge as perfectly acculturated U.S. Americans, but as women of multiple, shifting cultures and identities.”2 Their struggle with the diverse cultural and ethnic identities influences not only their themes and characters, but also their narrative strategies. They are united by their desire to describe multicultural experiences creating a “psychic connection” or “solidarity” with other migrants of all races, genders and types.3 Contemporary American women writers use postmodern narrative strategies often associated with women’s writing in general: palimpsest, cyclic structure, encoded language, magic realism, autobiographical fiction, polyvocality, decentralised narration, historiographic metafiction, and oral tradition. The wide range of strategies and forms that they use reflects the particular moment when they carved their place in the American canon. The shifts in narration between past and present as well as the combinations of different languages and cultures are related to their exploration of specific female and socio-historical identities and help them to distance themselves from cultural nationalisms in order to reinvent female histories, myths, as well as individual and collective identities. For example, Maxine Hong Kinston combines autobiographical fiction, essay and poetry with her translation of Chinese myths and oral stories into English. This strategy enables her to portray her vibrant childhood in a China town in California. As a daughter of poor Chinese immigrants, she navigates between two cultures, and more importantly, between two social systems, acting as a mediator between them and her readers. Amy Tan similarly utilises essay, autobiographical fiction and short story cycle in order to describe her life in different cultures and social settings as a second-generation Asian-American woman. Sandra Cisneros uses multiple genres and forms to convey the diverse experience of the members of Hispanic American communities. Her kaleidoscopic vision includes voices from the margins and their testimonies about the discrimination and oppression they struggle with in the dominant American society. The novels of Julia Alvarez, particularly How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, feature flashbacks, reversed chronological order and multiple narration, which allow the readers to understand the characters’ memories of the past in their native land and the effects immigration and assimilation 2

Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “‘Cultural Roots’ vs. ‘Cultural Rot’: An interview with Pauline Newton,” in Transcultural Women of Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. American Literature, ed. Pauline Newton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 169. 3 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “‘Cultural Roots’ vs. ‘Cultural Rot’: An Interview with Pauline Newton,” 171; Lan Cao, “‘Different Cultural Lenses’: An Interview with Lan Cao”, in Transcultural Women of Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. American Literature, 177.

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have had on them. Edwidge Danticat, apart from multiple narration, uses magic realism to introduce elements of voodoo and Haitian Creole in her works which evoke different phases in Haitian history, particularly the Duvalier dictatorship. While fashioning themselves into being, these writers create a multilingual, multicultural text, rich in intertextuality with both master narratives of the Anglo-American and ethnic communities, giving their readers a glimpse into the daily realities of the immigrants who have to thread a thin line between assimilation and preservation of their native identity. I agree with Clayton’s opinion that the rich mixture of traditional narrative forms and contemporary political concerns found in minority writing represents the most important force transforming the North American novel of the eighties and has made this period and this place one of the most exciting of the century for writing.4

Discussing late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century writers, Rachel Blau DuPlessis observes that they questioned narrative forms and invented strategies that “sever the narrative form from formerly conventional structures of fiction and consciousness about women.”5 She terms such attempts to examine the political and legal forms related to women and gender “writing beyond the ending.”6 In their return to narrative, contemporary American writers have abandoned the experimental fiction of the 1960s and 1970s: In literature, narrative cannot have the same iconoclastic force, but its association with unauthorized knowledge can be and often is stressed by drawing on oral forms-folktales, myths, legends, oral histories; by exploring less privileged written genres—diaries, letters, criminal confessions, slave narratives; by identifying the contemporary text with archaic symbolic modes—rituals, dreams, magic; and by writing about traditional activities—vernacular arts, recipes, folklore, quilting and other crafts, native music and dance.7

Clayton compares a number of writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones and Rudolfo Anaya, who mix narrative and myth, 4

Jay Clayton, “The Narrative Turn in Recent Minority Fiction,” American Literary History 2, no. 3 (1990): 379. 5 Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Writing beyond the Ending Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985): x. 6 Ibid. 7 Jay Clayton, op. cit., 379.

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different time periods and use them to level social criticism in the American society with regard to issues of race, gender and class.8 Certainly contemporary American women writers use the power of narration as the instrumental force in their characters’ struggle with oppression as women and members of ethnic minorities. Maybe the best example is Edwidge Danticat’s short story collection Krik?Krak! which features people who are victims of the Duvalier regime. Although it seems that their stories will inevitably be repressed and forgotten, they endure even when their creators perish and are evoked by those who come after them, often by the members of the Haitian diaspora in the U.S. Similarly, in Erdrich’s novel Tracks storytelling saves not only the main character Nanapush from dying, but, maybe, more importantly, the tradition of his Anishinabe tribe in the period of colonisation of the Native American land and obliteration of their tradition and religion by Christianity. In her discussion of Walker’s and Erdrich’s novels, Ahokas shows how the narrative strategies the writers employ9 allow them to claim that “monolithic and essentialized notions of identity” cannot account for heterogeneity and diversity within their ethnic communities. Their “strategies of resistance” also question gender identity by exposing the sexism and gender binaries of the dominant white society. Their works resist the reductive discourses of the dominant culture as well as those of cultural nationalism.10 While Walker uses irony and hyperbole, Erdrich relies on subversive humour, Native American myths (especially the trickster figure), blending of contemporary narrative practices, multiple narration and oral tradition in order to foreground gender liminality and transformative liminality, which lead to narrative construction of a new, hybrid group identity and possibilities for women’s agencies.11 On a similar note, in her analysis of the reconstructions of genres in Paula Gunn Allen’s and Anna Castillo’s novels (Bildungsroman and soap opera respectively), Köhler demonstrates how the writers’ negotiations of the structures pertaining to gender, race and class reveal “the discursive character of these concepts as institutionalized expressions of the power

8

Jay Clayton, op. cit., 376-378. She uses the framework of Butler and Bhabha’s work to focus on the writers’ strategies of revising stereotypes of African and Native Americans, particularly women in the U.S. as well as the reinscription of American history with the history of women and ethnic communities in the U.S. 10 Pirjo Ahokas, op. cit., 200. 11 Ibid., 206. 9

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relationships that constitute the American symbolic order.”12 As is the case with other women writers I mentioned above, Allen and Castillo’s characters live in “life-long liminality” and reinvent their postmodern and postcolonial identities in order to “transgress the boundaries of the dominant discourses” and be able to refuse being “monolithically categorized.”13

Autobiographical Fiction Apart from the use of multiple narrators, genres and forms, a prevailing number of contemporary American women writers rely on oral tradition, primarily on the stories of their female predecessors. The inclusion of their mothers’, grandmothers’ and other female relatives’ memories adds a political dimension to the writers’ work since they give voice to women whose voices have been silenced by the dominant patriarchal and/or colonial discourse. In Danticat’s words, the voices of nine hundred and ninety-nine women boiling in her blood, urging her to speak through the blunt tip of her pencil.14 The genre of autobiographical fiction allows these writers to include their stories which have previously been submerged in silence. Addressing this silence, the writers leave aside the linear nature of western conceptualisation of history subverting its authority while creating their own versions of histories privileging voices of women and ethnic minorities.15 Autobiographical fiction lends them the freedom to recreate themselves through memories as they travel back to their past, as well as the pasts of their families and communities in order to find out what shaped their identities. Adrianne Rich’s concept of revision, a new reading 12 Angelika Köhler, “Constructing the Ethnic: Gender, Myth, and Genre in the Writing of Paula Gunn Allen and Anna Castillo,” in Literature on the Move Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas, eds. Dominique Marcais, Mark Neimeyer, Bernard Vincent, Cathy Waegner (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag, 2002): 15. 13 Ibid. 14 Edwidge Danticat, Krik?Krak! (New York: Vintage, 1996): 222. 15 In the article I follow Clayton’s explanation of the term: “The term ‘minority’ is not meant to equate the social or cultural position of groups as various as African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, nor to submerge the differences between male and female experience within these groups. We need to keep in mind the different historical forms racism has taken in each case, ranging from slavery to military conquest to genocide. Equally, we need to be aware of what the sociologist Deborah King has called the ‘multiple jeopardy’ of women of color, who suffer ‘interactive oppressions’ from race, gender, and class. But the word ‘minority’ does indicate the shared fact of difference-and, in many cases, exclusion-from the dominant culture.” Jay Clayton, op. cit., 390.

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of literary texts from the female perspective and the inclusion of women’s stories in the literary canon, encouraged women writers to assert their female identity and stop accommodating their writing to the male role models that dominated the literary canon for so long. In that sense, autobiographical fiction functions as a way for the writers to assert their identity as women and members of different ethnic communities and claim their place in the American society which has often denied them this right. The act of writing thus becomes an act of memory through which they establish a connection with their community and its past. Collette T. Hall and Janice Morgan observe that contemporary American writers who belong to ethnic minorities reinvent the genre of autobiographical fiction as they become aware that their hybrid identity as women, members of the dominant American and marginalised ethnic communities is a construction. This awareness of the constant process of reconstruction and negotiation of identity gives them the freedom to merge autobiography and fiction and to put aside the traditional standards of truth and authenticity since they perceive them as social constructs. Autobiographical fiction consequently demands a higher degree of art and artificiality than other genres.16 Leigh Gilmore states that traditional autobiography treats the subject as stable while postmodernism calls into question not only the genre itself but also “the self” and the limits of its presentation.17 For her, critics who offer critiques of the dominant constructions and representations of the subject and the political and social forms of agency […] demonstrate that autobiography gives postmodernism a text and a discourse through which to theorize human agency.18

Having this in mind, it is important to note a substantial change in the way autobiographical fiction has been analysed in the works of contemporary American women writers. During the 1980s and 1990s Maxine Hong Kingston was severely criticised for categorising her work The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts as a memoir, and a number of scholars and literary critics focused primarily on the 16 Collette T. Hall and Janice Morgan, Gender and Genre in Literature: Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth century Women’s Fiction: An Essay Collection (New York: Garland Hall, 1991): xv. 17 Leigh Gilmore, “The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography, and Genre,” in Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters (Boston: University of Massachussets, 1994): 4-5. 18 Ibid., 8.

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search for autobiographical elements in the novels of Amy Tan, Julia Alvarez, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Jamaica Kincaid and Sandra Cisneros. More recently, however, autobiographical fiction has been recognised as a new genre that enables women writers to address their multicultural identities in a way acceptable to them. As Morgan and Hall note: “the writing of fictional autobiography involves more, rather than less, artistry and artifice than the writing of other kinds of fiction.”19 Contemporary critics have moved away from the issue whether a work is purely autobiographical or fictional opting instead to focus on its political aspects and the narrative strategies the writers use in order to describe the process of culturalization their characters experience. Kingston, Tan, Alvarez, Kincaid, Danticat and Cisneros use autobiographical elements that help them to merge those elements of their identity that belong to different communities and cultures. The autobiographical elements they employ in the creation of characters and plots become a way for them and their readers to understand changing aspects of the construction of American identity.20 The result, according to Morgan is a “new kind of autobiographical writing [has] come into being—a writing neither wholly autobiographical nor wholly fictional, but rather a provocative blend of both.”21 The case in point is Maxine Hong Kingston who invented the narrative strategy of talk-story as a way to fuse together narration and oral tradition, Chinese and American culture, autobiography and fiction. An important part of her strategy is to emphasise to the readers to what extent her narrative is a construction, twice or three times removed from the source and pieced together from different, more or less reliable, sources. She often uses features from fairly tales, myths and legends in her storytelling, which she famously compares to a knot that is so complicated that its makers in the old China would go blind after its completion. Her answer to the critics who accuse her of fictionalising her autobiography and distorting Chinese myths by transplanting them to the American soil is that myths need to be alive. American women writers who use autobiographical fiction show us that stories of individuals and families handed down through generations are crucial for the preservation of culture. As can be seen in the novels of Kingston, Tan, Alvarez, Cisneros, Abu-Jaber and Danticat, for example, this is particularly true in their depiction of the first generation immigrants who use storytelling to resist assimilation and acculturation, but also to 19

Collette T. Hall and Janice Morgan, op. cit., 10. Pauline Newton, Transcultural Women of Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. American Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005): 54. 21 Collette T. Hall and Janice Morgan, op. cit., 5. 20

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adapt to the circumstances in the new country through reshaping their native stories and myths. According to Lim, a growing number of autobiographical fictions published in the U.S. at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century testify to “a critical sensitivity to ‘multicultural’ and ‘global’ women’s issues and lives. The current receptivity has much to do with the success of feminism and with changes in the U.S. as an ‘imagined community.’”22 However, it must be pointed out that while dealing with the communal, familial and individual histories, these writers do not claim the authority of historians and the privilege to speak for the whole community. Betty Bergland also uses the case of Maxine Hong Kingston to warn against essentialization of individuals and ethnic groups and use of ethnic autobiographies to serve representative function “evoking so-called minority literatures, cultures and subjectivities.”23 Furthermore, she insists on questioning “any easy relationship between discourse and the speaking subject, particularly the notion that experience produces a voice—that, for example, being a woman means speaking in a woman’s voice.”24 The synthesis of autobiographical material, fiction and history with the writer’s own versions of folk tales, myths and legends serves to inform the readers what it means to belong to two nations. By including the readers in the dilemmas about their cultural identity, the writers of autobiographical fictions enable them to participate in the revision of “the duality of past history.”25 The narrative strategies invented by Kingston, especially autobiographical fiction in the form of the talk-story, as a way to blend narrative, oral tradition and different cultural elements, have had such a decisive influence on the American women writers that there is a term, Kingstonian narrative strategy.26 Julia Alvarez stated that Kingston served as a role model who helped her understand how to express her crossculturality through writing, blurring the categories between fiction, 22

Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “‘Cultural Roots’ vs. ‘Cultural Rot’: An interview with Pauline Newton,” 165. 23 Betty Bergland, “Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject: Reconstructing the ‘Other’,” in Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters, Boston: University of Massachussets, 1994): 130. 24 Ibid., 134. 25 Elizabeth Ordonez, “Narrative Texts by Ethnic Women: Rereading the Past, Reshaping the Future,” MELUS 9 (1982): 20. 26 Cf. Pauline Newton, Transcultural Women of Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. American Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

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autobiography and memoirs,27 and Jamaica Kincaid entitled her short story collection published in 2002 Talk Stories to pay respect to Kingston. In Newton’s opinion, autobiographical fiction enables the writers to present their works as a testimonio. John Beverly notes that “the situation of narration in testimonio has to involve an urgency to communicate, a problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival, implicated in the act of narration itself.”28 Through the use of autobiographical fiction contemporary American women writers connected the issues of racial and/or gender differences with the issues of discourse and authority, which, in Linda Hutcheon’s opinion, are at the heart of postmodern enterprise in general. She takes Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and China Men as examples of merging the forms of novel and autobiography, which has led to the creation of the genre of historiographic metafiction.29 In the next paragraph I will examine the ways contemporary American women writers use the genre of historiographic metafiction and combine it with other genres as part of their narrative strategies.

Historiographic Metafiction The combination of the genres of autobiographical fiction, historiographic metafiction and polyvocality in the works of American women writers as part of their narrative strategies destabilizes the notion that national identities, history and culture are fixed categories and questions their legitimacy through the examination of the connections between history and fiction. The writers suggest that history is not made up of just one version of events; rather it is constantly being remade in the nuanced process of social self-realisation. The genre of historiographic metafiction enables the authors to insert histories of marginalized groups30 into the mainstream American history as well as to juxtapose the patriarchal and matriarchal versions of the past, “memory” and “counter-memory,” youth and adult perspectives of the narrators. Since the works of contemporary American women writers often include stories of immigrants, the past is embodied in the language and the culture of their native land while the 27

For more on Kingston’s influence on Alvarez see in Pauline Newton, op. cit., 53. John Beverly, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004): 65. 29 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1998), 16. 30 Hutcheon names them “formerly ex-centric (women—but also the working class, gays, ethnic and rational minorities and so on).” Ibid., 95. 28

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present belongs to the second generation of immigrants and is embodied in the American language and culture. The country of origin functions as a correlative to America and represents a very different social and historical context from the American master narrative. Empty spaces in American history surrounding women and ethnic minorities, lack of data documenting their lives, and, most importantly, versions of history which privilege the voice of the white male and relegate to the margins or completely obliterate the stories of colonialisation, the imposition of Christian religion, the disappearance of cultures and traditions which do not fit into the western, and Anglo-American symbolic systems serve as triggers for women writers to address these issues in their works and try to salvage what is lost or at least point to the practices which led to this loss. While the genre of autobiographical fiction blurs the boundaries between autobiography in the traditional sense, which rests upon the notion of the stability of history and subjectivity, and fiction, which treats the subject as a construction, historiographic metafiction similarly refutes the natural or common-sense methods of distinguishing between historical fact and fiction. It refuses the view that only history has a truth claim, both by questioning the ground of that claim in historiography and by asserting that both history and fiction are discourses, human constructs, signifying systems, and both derive their major claim to truth from that identity.31

History becomes the text the writers interrogate and translate into various contexts in order to problematise the issues of identity and, maybe even more importantly, of responsibility. Thus, in their novels they often foreground the stories of women, children, immigrants, refugees, gays and other oppressed groups who are victims of the power play of the dominant political forces. For example, in her novel The House of Spirits, Isabel Allende investigates the history of Chile under the Pinochet regime and the role of the CIA in toppling down Salvador Allende. Barbara Kingsolver likewise scrutinises the CIA involvement in the murder of Patrice Lumumba and the history of colonialism and postcolonialism in the Congo in her novel The Poisonwood Bible. In her more recent trilogy (Daughter of Fortune, Portrait in Sepia and Zorro), Allende writes about the history of California from the perspectives of indigenous groups and immigrants whose stories were not included in the mainstream U.S. history. Kingston has accomplished a similar feat with her history of the Chinese American community in China Men. Julia Alvarez has dedicated several novels to 31

Linda Hutcheon, op.cit., 93.

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the description of the Trujillo dictatorship, while Edwidge Danticat has done the same with the Duvalier regime. In her works Bharati Mukherjee examined clashes between Muslim and Hindu immigrants in the U.S. and Canada. Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler and a significant number of other African-American writers have used historiographic metafiction to address the painful history of African Americans in the US. In her essay aptly named “In History,” Jamaica Kincaid juxtaposes the perception of the native communities in the Caribbean and the colonial forces who give themselves the right to subjugate, rename and reinvent the natives and forever change their history and reality. From the abovementioned examples it is obvious that contemporary American women writers use historiographic metafiction to criticise patriarchy as a social system coupled with political and economic systems such as colonialism and postcolonialism that oppress women and members of the ethnic and racial communities. The search of stories too painful to be passed on, as Morrison comments in her renowned novel Beloved,32 testifies to their understanding of the value of marginalised voices in the making of history. Moreover, historiographic metafiction as a genre enables them to comment on the construction of history as a narrative which functions as a semiotic space in which they reshape their ethnic and gender identities. History, past and memory become imaginary territories in which they move from the microcosmic level of individual stories to the macrocosmic level of social history.

Code-mixing Multicultural or translingual literature comprises two or more languages and demands active reading since the signals from different languages engage the readers in a process of decoding. Contemporary American women writers often use code-mixing to experiment with language, to examine its functions and the role it has in the construction of ethnic and gender identity. Their double-voiced discourse reflects their doubly marginalised position as women and/or as members of ethnic minorities. The writers are often defied by the barriers to understanding in the languages and cultures they have to surmount, while overcoming the limits of language and society corresponds to overcoming the limits of standard norms pertaining to genres. Code-mixing represents an important tool in their struggle with homogenising culture and against the disappearance of native languages. They perceive culture and language as heterogeneous 32

Toni Morrison, Beloved (New Tork: Plume, 1988): 275.

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and their writing encourages readers to ponder similarities and differences between languages. Multiple languages in their texts find their correlative in multiple forms and genres. Kingston, Mukherjee, Alvarez, Cisneros, Danticat, Jen, Erdrich, Kingsolver and Abu-Jaber insert words in the languages of their ethnic communities into English, as the language of the dominant culture, in order to subvert its dominance. The features of the communities they come from become visible in the text even on the surface level. Code-mixing allows them to preserve linguistic and cultural particulars and to enrich American culture. As in the case of narrative strategies related to their use of autobiographical fiction, historiographic metafiction and magic realism, code-mixing has a political and social dimension that should not be ignored. At the core of all texts of contemporary American women writers which contain code-mixing is the tension between the vernacular, marginalised culture and the official, dominant one whose language is perceived as standard and the norm. According to Haryette Mullen, language and literacy are the battlefields of cultural and class conflicts as well as the relations between the codes of the dominant and minority communities. The text includes frequent references to the specificity and difference coded into any and all languages; to the violence of inadequacy of translation and interpretation; to the translator’s and, by extension, the writer’s unfaithful role as betrayer of the culture’s inside secrets; and to the existence of encoded messages, which are more accessible to readers familiar with various insider codes and cryptographic devices deployed in the text.33

Insider codes thus become one of the focal points in the works of multicultural American women writers who have an ambivalent relation to the dominant and minority communities in their roles of translators of minority experience. The repression of subordinated cultures and languages by the dominant culture and language is paralleled by, and frequently associated metonymically with other repressed elements that erupt from the ‘unconscious’ of the text to disturb, contradict, or at least complicate its conscious signification.34 33

Harryette Mullen, “‘A Silence Between Us Like a Language’: The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek,” MELUS 21, no. 2 (1996): 3. 34 Ibid., 4.

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English, as the dominant language is recreated through code-mixing in order to encompass the experiences and languages of those who were for a long time excluded from the dominant discourse. The inclusion of the minority language in the English text undermines its authority in the American society and the perception of English as “a unique, linear entity inviting the readers to participate in cultural translation.”35 The connection between narration, translation, history and national and ethnic identities is in the works of contemporary American women writers captured in the metaphor of translation. As Sherry Simon notes, “globalization of culture means that we are all living in ‘translated worlds’.”36 She establishes a relation between translation studies and feminism since both consider the notion of the Other and creation of canons, “both are tools for a critical understanding of difference as it is represented in language.”37 Homi Bhabha proposes that translation creates a “third space” in which meanings and signals of culture lose their primordial unity or fixity and “even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rhetoricized and read anew.”38 That means that translation has the potential to erase binary oppositions since it enables writers and readers to overcome the trappings of a society which presents itself as dominant and monolithic. Commenting on the strategy of code-mixing in the novels of Kingston and Tan, Keg-fan Lee observes that cultural and psychological interaction, which is the result of the process of encoding and translating on the part of the readers, depends on the willingness of monolingual readers to confront multicultural discourse. Kingston and Tan straddling, two cultures and two languages, negotiate and translate cultural differences into identity formation and foreground the process of hybridization. For them, the third space, or “in-betweeness,” opens up possibilities to bring ambiguity into production of meaning and to challenge wholesale cultural hegemony.39

Through code-mixing contemporary American women writers challenge the standard norms of the texts published in the US. The dual perspective of the dominant and minority cultures strengthens their narrative and 35 Ken-fang Lee, “Cultural Translation and the Exorcist: A Reading of Kingston’s and Tan’s Ghost Stories,” MELUS 29, no. 2 (2004): 107. 36 Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation. Culture and identity and the Politics of Transmission (London: Routledge, 1996): 134. 37 Ibid., 8. 38 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 37. 39 Ken-fang Lee, op. cit., 123.

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political vision since they manage to bridge their differences and merge their dualities.40

Conclusion The narrative strategies of contemporary American women writers point to the transition from the position of isolation to repositioning ethnic identity and its relation to the process of narration and translation. Their texts reconstitute American identity through the duality and ambiguity foregrounded in their strategies with the constant focus on challenges to the status quo of the stable, homogeneous identity. They champion active engagement in the creation of culture and the problematization of American identity instead of being arrested in the stereotypical position of the Other, isolated and alienated individuals either as women or members of minorities.41 Their dualistic vision enables them to recognise contradictions, paradoxes and ambivalences in the process of identity construction and prevents them from establishing a monolithic identity. The narrative strategies they employ reflect their courage to ask questions, to name the unnamed and to distinguish cultural heritage from stereotypes. The fusion of multiple narrative strategies reveals their fragmentary or kaleidoscopic vision which consists of various elements, loyalties to different cultures, languages and traditions, making them transcend the borders between them. As Eakin claims, those who have managed to survive this “transcultural search for self” are those who can explain themselves and tell their stories.42 For the contemporary American women writers claiming the third space and third language is much more than the mere creation of a hybrid identity, it is enlivening the rich oral traditions to which they belong and honouring the women who came before them. Maybe the best examples are Gloria Anzaldua, who in her groundbreaking work Borderlands/La Frontera: New Mestiza mixed genres with two forms of English and six forms of Spanish and her literary descendant Sandra Cisneros whose collection Woman Hollering Creek is a supreme feat of the mixture of genres and codes. In the works of contemporary American women writers we can find a range of narrative strategies that reflect a polyvocality which blurs the lines between narration and history, between fiction and memory and leads us to new ways of envisioning and 40

Yuan Yuan, “The Semiotics of China Narratives in the Con/texts of Kingston and Tan,” Critique 40, no. 3 (1999): 292-303. 41 Ibid. 42 John Paul Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985): 275.

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defining narrative genres. In Judith Oster’s opinion, the texts of ethnic writers open up the space for development of multiple visions, enable us to see the effects of multiple discourses within one culture and contribute to better understanding of difference as a cultural construction.43 Multiple narrative strategies and fusion of different forms and genres also lead to a new type of novel. According to Kingston, the novel as a form is increasingly on the way to abandon the exploration of national in favour of global identities leading her to conclude that the time of the great American novel has ended: “[i]f you are going to write a great American novel, then it is also the global novel.”44 The works of a number of contemporary American writers (Kingston, Tan, Lahiri, Erdrich, Danticat, Adichie, and Kingsolver), which feature elements of this translingual and multicultural stylistics, point to this new trend with the characters who speak different languages and come from various cultural backgrounds crossing the borders of culture and languages of several nations. In the novels of all the writers mentioned in this article the visions of difference, even when they are not paired with those of unity, help the readers to form a perception broader than the one at the starting point and come to the conclusion that a dialogue between cultures is possible despite the differences.

Works Cited Ahokas, Pirjo. “Constructing Hybrid Female Identities: Alice Walker’s Meridian and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” In Literature on the Move Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas, edited by Dominique Marcais, Mark Neimeyer, Bernard Vincent, and Cathy Waegner, 199-207. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag, 2002. Bergland, Betty. “Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject: Reconstructing the ‘Other’.” In Autobiography and Postmodernism, edited by Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters, 130-166. Boston: University of Massachusetts, 1994. Beverly, John. Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.

43

Judith Oster, Crossing Cultures: Creating Identity in Chinese and Jewish American Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003): 46. 44 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Reading Back, Looking Forward: A Retrospective Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston,” MELUS 33, no. 1 (2008): 166.

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Blau DuPlessis, Rachel. Writing beyond the Ending Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Cao, Lan. “‘Different Cultural Lenses’: An Interview with Lan Cao.” In Transcultural Women of Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. American Literature, Pauline Newton, 173-184. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Clayton, Jay. “The Narrative Turn in Recent Minority Fiction.” American Literary History 2, no. 3 (1990): 375-393. Danticat, Edwidge. Krik?Krak! New York: Vintage, 1996. Geok-lin Lim, Shirley. “‘Cultural Roots’ vs. ‘Cultural Rot’: An Interview with Pauline Newton.” In Transcultural Women of Late-TwentiethCentury U.S. American Literature, Pauline Newton, 165-172. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Geok-lin Lim, Shirley. “Reading Back, Looking Fordward: A Retrospective Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston.” MELUS 33, no. 1 (2008): 157-168. Gilmore, Leigh. “The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography, and Genre.” In Autobiography and Postmodernism, edited by Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters, 3-18. Boston: University of Massachussets, 1994. Eakin, John Paul. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of SelfInvention. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Hall, Collette T. and Janice Morgan. Gender and Genre in Literature: Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth century Women’s Fiction: An Essay Collection. New York: Garland Hall Publishing, 1991. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1992. Kingston, Maxine Hong. “Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers.” In Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities, edited by Guy Amirthanayagam, 55-65. London: MacMillan, 1982. Köhler, Angelika. “Constructing the Ethnic: Gender, Myth, and Genre in the Writing of Paula Gunn Allen and Anna Castillo.” In Literature on the Move Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas, edited by Dominique Marcais, Mark Neimeyer, Bernard Vincent, and Cathy Waegner, 15-24. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag, 2002. Lee, Ken-fang. “Cultural Translation and the Exorcist: A Reading of Kingston’s and Tan’s Ghost Stories.” MELUS 29, no. 2 (2004): 10527. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New Tork: Plume, 1988.

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Mullen, Harryette. “‘A Silence Between Us Like a Language’: The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek.” MELUS 21, no. 2 (1996): 3-20. Newton, Pauline. Transcultural Women of Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. American Literature. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Ordonez, Elizabeth. “Narrative Texts by Ethnic Women: Rereading the Past, Reshaping the Future.” MELUS 9, no. 3 (1982): 19-28. Oster, Judith. Crossing Cultures: Creating Identity in Chinese and Jewish American Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Simon, Sherry. Gender in Translation. Culture and Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London: Routledge, 1996. Yuan, Yuan. “The Semiotics of China Narratives in the Con/texts of Kingston and Tan.” Critique 40, Issue 3 (1999): 292-303.

THE MANIPULATION OF THE NARRATIVE IN THE HANDS OF TONI MORRISON MIRJANA DANIýIû

Introduction In her collection Playing in the Dark, which contains three lectures given at Harvard University in 1992, Toni Morrison asserts that certain facelessness has been imposed on black expression by the dominant (white) literature: “black people signified little or nothing in the imagination of white American writers.”1 Morrison’s narrative has constantly confronted this “literary” absence that resembles the social, cultural, historical, and political absence of black community. The aesthetic identity of her fictional characters fills in this dark hole and creates African-American “literary” presence, thus her novels are often interpreted as the monumental reconstruction of history, memory, knowledge of the black people in America. On countless occasions she has stated that she writes out of her culture, out of African (American) folklore, out of the stories she heard from her grandmother: “The gap between Africa and Afro-America and the gap between the living and the dead and the gap between the past and the present does not exist.”2 Her writings are deeply entrenched in her own black roots, the community she grew up in. Her text is pregnant with the cosmology and mythology of African tribes from which her ancestors originated. For instance, the foundation of Song of Solomon (1977) is the Flying Africans myth—a well-known Gullah story she learned from her maternal grandparents, full of folktales and legends from the African Diaspora. In folklore there is a story about a group of African-born slaves who rose up one day from the cotton field where they were working and flew back to Africa. In the 1

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993): 15. 2 Danielle Taylor-Guthrie, ed., Conversations with Toni Morrison (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994): 247.

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novel, this tale becomes a metaphor for the protagonist’s search for identity—he “finds” himself when he learns the story of his greatgrandfather Solomon who could fly. Nevertheless, Morrison never takes a particular African belief and places it “intact” into her novels. Instead, she combines most common elements from African folktales with her fictitious stories. Numerous examples may be found in her three novels Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998) (often regarded as the Morrison trilogy, or called the Dantesque trilogy), which the author herself has described as one artistic endeavour. There are obvious and superficial links among the three novels such as the temporal and spatial locus of each, or the appearance of spirits and their interaction with the living. For instance, the character of Beloved combines the characteristics of ancestral spirits with those of the genii (non-ancestral spirits) as defined in Mende3 mythology. In her narrative, Morrison mixes the Mende belief with the Yoruba4 abiku (“the wanderer child”)—a child who died before reaching puberty and who returns again and again to plague the mother. But, even though Beloved possesses many of the characteristics attributed to ghosts, she also displays some human characteristics, even becomes pregnant. This integration of different folk myths into her fiction is Morrison’s attempt to revise conventional narrative forms. Jazz focuses on the traumatic and humiliating memories that are part of black cultural memory. The author weaves her narrative around the newfound form of the African traditional oral songs—jazz music, which sprang up from the sorrow songs of the black people working in the fields. With its format reminiscent of detective fiction (the novel tells a story of a modern urban crime), the narrative explores the search for one’s self and the (im)possibility of spiritual recovery of the main characters. The novel ends with Morrison’s personification of the reader-book “relationship” as a lover’s embrace, the proof of the author’s ever so present desire to engage her readers in the “making and remaking” of the text. We can certainly say that through structure, characters and events, African-American folk culture is used to provide ethos for Morrison’s fiction. To a careful and persistent reader of her works, it will become obvious that such a narrative is employed not only for the purpose of reconstructing African-American identity, but also for establishing a discourse on historical, social, political, or universal values, in this way being used for the rewriting of American history. The author wants to 3

The Mende people are one of the two largest ethnic groups in West Africa. Yoruba is an ethno-linguistic group whose language is spoken by more than 25 million people in West Africa. 4

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explore endless meanings of the text, thus the narrative threads she provides for the reader are often mere pebbles to be followed until the author runs out of the pebbles and the reader is left on their own. As it is stated in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel, the most important element of Morrison’s fiction is “the space it affords the reader who must work with the author in constructing the book’s meaning.”5 It is not surprising that Toni Morrison has often been criticised for breaking with traditional forms and fragmented narration. She has been accused by some of crossing genres, styles and narrative perspectives. In this paper, the multiplicity of both the language and the constitution of the story will be analysed as an attempt to revise the values the conventional narrative encourages. The paper will concentrate on the third novel of the Morrison trilogy—Paradise.6 We will try to show that her narrative emerges at a point where the oral African discourse, the Western literary conventions and the postmodern cross.

The Manipulation of the Narrative by Discarding the Conventional Both Beloved and Jazz are constructed over a ghost story whose conventions Morrison uses on purpose only to subvert the readers’ expectations: Beloved plays with the traditional gothic story, but “the ghost” has its internal monologues and a history of its own. In Jazz, a detective-story framework is used for a historical metanarrative that reassesses the cultural and political history of the black community in America. Morrison’s experimental use of the medieval (gothic) in Beloved and modern (detective) form in Jazz daringly challenge the conventions of the canonical literary narrative. The genre is a vehicle for the author—the readers play the detective, they note clues, follow traces, make deductions, only to miss coming to a revealing end: both novels leave the central puzzles (Who is Beloved? Who is the Narrator?) unanswered.

5

Maryemma Graham, ed., Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 11. 6 Morrison’s breach with the traditional literary forms in the first two novels of the trilogy, Beloved and Jazz, has already been analysed in M. Daniþiü, “On the Borders of Storytelling: Do Unconventional Beginnings Lead to (Un)conventional Endings?” in On the Borders of Convention, eds. Aleksandra Nikþeviü Batriüeviü and Marija Kneževiü (Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle upon Tyne, 2010), 47.

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Paradise, the last novel of the trilogy, opens with the violent act of a massacre: “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here.”7 The novel is set in Oklahoma immediately after the Civil Rights struggles in the 1960s. Through a wide repertoire of narrative techniques and skills, it most strikingly documents the development of Ruby, a self-sufficient all-Black town in the American South. The town was established in the late nineteenth century and used to be a spiritual Mecca and a sanctuary for the community, but, meanwhile “has become a festering sore, teeming with greed, rivalry.”8 On the outskirts of the town, there is the Convent, a refuge and safe house for the forlorn women. After a visitation of a spiritual presence, it begins to tame the demons that affright its female occupants. However, the town fathers, full of rage and anger, decide to scapegoat and murder the women at the Convent, but after executing their murderous plan, the story becomes complicated since none of the bodies of the slain women are ever found. Moreover, all of the slaughtered women reappear to family members and then on the shore of a mysterious ocean “down here in paradise.”9 Magic, miracle and faith have a part in the story, alongside history, memory and self-knowledge. In this novel too the genres are entwined, since the novel resembles the literary and film Western: the “black fathers” who founded Ruby try to penetrate the Oklahoma wilderness as deep as possible in order to hide from the main roads and build a community isolated from the rest of the world in the same way a small-town American Old West community in the Western (film or fiction) lead a peaceful life until something/someone from the external world disrupts their harmony. Both Paradise and the Western show that isolation itself does not guarantee permanent safety. Connie (Consolata Sosa), one of the Convent women, is gifted with magical-spiritual powers and has a supernatural gift—she can miraculously “step in” between the dying and death. In Morrison’s novels, the reader is so repeatedly exposed to the world beyond the ordinary. After being visited by a spirit, Connie commences a spiritual feat of taming the internal demons that terrorise the women around her. Her mediations and interventions result in bringing consolation, relief from pain, succour, and at least temporary salvation for the women in need. Connie, the spiritual leader of the Convent, offers rehabilitation and redemption to the castaways. If the town excludes the unworthy, or the strange, the Convent 7

Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Plume, 1999): 3. Justine Tally, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 66. 9 Toni Morrison, op. cit., 318. 8

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takes in members of all these categories and helps them to confront their problems, as an act of exorcism of their pain.10 The African-American Christianity of Ruby is juxtaposed with the unorganised “magic” practised by the Convent women, or more precisely the Candomblé AfricanBrazilian religion, which is a hybrid mixture of Catholicism and African spirit worship. Consolata, of Brazilian origin, introduces the occult knowledge of her ancestors to the other women, helping them to discover the true, authentic self, hidden behind the social layers of personality. Under her guidance, the Convent women find peace of mind and “are no longer haunted.”11 Their psychological and spiritual liberation, their catharsis, is metaphorically shown in the scene when they dance in the purifying rain, entering a state of religious ecstasy that purges them from all sorrow and pain. Their feelings in this scene are juxtaposed with sinister accounts of the Ruby men collecting their evidence that the women represent a threat to the community: Bitches. More like witches. [...] Before those heifers came to town this was a peaceable kingdom. [...] These here sluts out there by themselves never step foot in church. [...] They don’t need men and they don’t need God.12

Each of the men, as the narrative explains, needs someone else to blame for personal or family troubles and readily agrees to participate in the wanton assault on the innocent women. Similarly, in the Western genre, a certain community follows a code of honour and has its own rules and ways of serving justice, whereas the main protagonist respects his own moral code and generally fights the villains and saves the lady in distress, as his literary ancestor—the knight-errant—did in the medieval times. Morrison applies these main features of the Western genre ironically so that the main male protagonists (the true image of the Western gunmen) attack and kill the helpless women who are the genuine heroines of the novel. The killers justify this bloodshed by their honest intentions “to save” the code established by Ruby town fathers, without noticing that they have completely misinterpreted and bent this code. Morrison’s play with the conventions of the genre only emphasises the narrative structure—the ironic application of the genre elements transforms the meaning of the written text. For instance, very visual descriptions of the gruesome scenes can be associated with the aggressive scenes from the 10

Jill Matus, Toni Morrison (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998): 163. 11 Toni Morrison, op. cit., 266. 12 Ibid., 276.

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Western film subgenre Spaghetti Western. The features of the subgenre can be recognised as early as page thirteen of the novel when the attitude of the local inhabitants towards unknown passers-by is described: More men come out, and more. Their guns are not pointing at anything, just held slackly against their thighs. Twenty men; now twenty-five. Circling the circling cars. Ninety miles from the nearest O for operator and ninety from the nearest badge. If the day had been dry, the dust spuming behind the tires would have discoloured them all.13

The scene of subdued violence shows the enmity of a closed-minded community towards anyone who is an outsider and who is different. In Ruby there is obviously nothing, not a single facility that could be of use to foreigners and tourists: “no diner, no police, no gas station, no public phone, no movie house, no hospital.”14 The strangers are not welcome, for they may disrupt the apparent harmony of the local community. The mentioned Italian Westerns differ from Hollywood Westerns by the enormous violence they show. Additionally, the motivation of the protagonists is often selfish, such as money and revenge, which is never the case in the classic Western. The founder of the genre, Italian director Sergio Leone, has explained that the main characteristic of the Spaghetti Western is that in it life has no value at all. The violent scenes are so explicit and brutal that they inevitably shock the audience. In the film jargon, such scenes of macho violence are called home-on-the-range scenes and are followed by less aggressive parts of the film, either romantic or family scenes. Morrison sequences the story in the same way the Western film is edited—action scenes are followed by peaceful scenes of pleasant atmosphere. For instance, the organization of the killing sweep is mixed with the romanticised historical descriptions of the foundation of the town that retells the genealogy of the oldest families and the most important events from the lives of distinguished persons. However, even family scenes are introduced with the same brutal words the author uses to describe violence and the reader is left with the impression that violence in Ruby is never-ending: “God at their side, the men take aim. For Ruby.”15 This last sentence of the first chapter is followed by the ominous introductory sentence of the second chapter: “The neighbors seemed pleased when the babies smothered.”16 13

Toni Morrison, op. cit., 13. Ibid. 15 Ibid., 18. 16 Ibid., 21. 14

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Similarly, the scenes of the massacre at the Convent are occasionally interrupted with the descriptions of how men gathered and decided to organise the onslaught. These scenes resemble the summoning of posse in the Western films with an ironic difference: the posse in the Wild West is organised with the aim to search for and catch an outlaw, a bank robber, a gunman or kidnapper and it consists of honourable and respectable men who intend to bring the criminal to justice, whereas Morrison’s posse is led by a vengeful killing instinct of Shakespearean nature: “Like boot camp recruits, like invaders preparing for slaughter, they were there to rave, to heat the blood, or turn it to icicle cold the better to execute the mission.”17 The author seemingly accepts the genre conventions, thus her posse also includes ‘honourable’ men and the idea of defending Ruby from “witches” belongs to the priest Reverend Cary, who persuades the other eight men that it is high time they protected personal, family and town sacred things: “These here sluts out there by themselves never step foot in church and I bet you a dollar to a fat nickel they ain’t thinking about one either. They don’t need men and they don’t need God.”18 The irony lies in the fact that the Convent, a shelter for the suffering women, is the only threat nine men can see. They are convinced that by killing these women they would return the past harmony which spread through the town when it was founded. It seems here as if Morrison were mocking the genre and manipulating its conventions. This impression lingers while approaching the end of the novel. A happy and romantic ending is conventional for the Western genre, but there is no optimism at the end of Morrison’s novel—all women are killed, which somewhat betrays the mythical tradition of the American Old West. Paradise does not punish the attackers, it erases the physical evidence that a massacre has occurred. In tune with the strange disappearance of Beloved, the bodies of the Convent women disappear without a trace. Relieved that there are no bodies to report, the nine men change their story over time, trying to wash away their guilt. The deconstruction of a significant period in the history of the American nation through the elements of the film genre, which was extremely popular with the American audience at the time the novel takes place (1960s), should lead to a revision of values taken for granted for fear that a deeper analysis of historical events might bring undesirable discoveries. From today’s perspective, it might be difficult to assess these 17 18

Toni Morrison, op. cit., 280. Ibid., 276.

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discoveries from a politically correct viewpoint in a seemingly civilised society in which racial conflicts should be a matter of the past. Nine men who are concerned with maintaining an idyllic image of life in Ruby forget that by assassinating the Convent women they harshly violate the founding principles the town fathers set back in 1890. Their murderous zeal will never make Ruby a desired moral oasis, but [a] backward noplace ruled by men whose power to control was out of control and who had the nerve to say who could live and who not and where; who had seen in lively, free, unarmed females the mutiny of the mares and so got rid of them.19

However, Morrison creates some kind of parallel universe for the dead women, opening again (as in Song of Solomon and Beloved) the passageway between the material and spiritual worlds. The women now “exist” in this liminal space, and, such as Pilat’s father and Beloved, are able to travel from one world to another. The men’s misinterpretation of Ruby’s founding fathers’ teachings brought them to commit a heinous crime: when founding Ruby almost a hundred years ago, the town patriarchs “envisioned a paradise free from the violence and depravity of the outside world.”20 Ironically, by tyrannising the Convent women, their descendants tyrannise the members of their own community. The violent act of massacre in the opening of the novel obliterates any possibility of their attaining spiritual tranquillity. Brutality, violence, vengefulness, aggressiveness, envy and greed in Paradise surpass even the most brutal Spaghetti Westerns despite the irony with which they are described in almost biblical tone. Morrison metaphorically insists that new significance should be seen in the traditional accounts of forefathers. In the final scene of the novel, the reader is invited to walk to a realm “just yonder”21 as each of the Convent women revisits a significant aspect of her past on her way to the future. Whereas Beloved insists on the collective memory, Paradise suggests that collective memory and tradition should be adapted so as to respond to the present and make a desired future.22 Limitless exploitation of the discourse based on African-American folklore pervaded with distorted genre conventions illustrates Morrison’s postmodern insistence on the need to

19

Toni Morrison, op. cit., 308. Justine Tally, op. cit., 69. 21 Toni Morrison, op. cit., 312. 22 Jill Matus, op. cit., 161. 20

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transform the understanding and interpretation of the past (historical, social, political, as well as literary and linguistic).

Concluding Remarks Each text discussed here falls in line with Morrison’s intention to write African lore into the black American experience, since the interaction of characters in her fiction brings forward stories, legends, rumours and folk beliefs of the African (American) folk communities. Focusing on the process of creating a particular myth or belief instead of just giving a static description of it, Morrison shows how this belief or superstitious practice may influence the attitude of the entire community towards a person or an event. The function of folk knowledge in Morrison’s writing is multiple: psychological, educational, and self-defining. Apart from this, each text discussed here subverts the conventional features of the genre it employs. The reader is left without answers to the key questions in the trilogy: What happened with Beloved? What caused the blackout of Joe Trace, the main protagonist in Jazz? What happened to the bodies of the women killed in the Convent? None of the genres Toni Morrison uses would ever allow such a game with the reader’s curiosity, which makes us conclude that the author’s imitation of the genres is free and original, but simultaneously fake. Morrison does not want to employ all the features of the mentioned genres faithfully, she only uses some of the conventions to underline the meaning of her narrative. Her text becomes a tool of manipulation: it provides irresistible threads to the readers, while it simultaneously plays about with endless meanings the author wants the reader to explore. She chooses the popular genres only to betray the reader’s expectations: Beloved has plenty of gothic elements, but solely to provide an insight into the internal life of this female spirit; Jazz begins as a detective story, but ends as a love story; Paradise opens up as a Spaghetti Western, but ends as an evangelical text about afterlife in paradise. The choice of the genre, as well as the text structure and narrative techniques, serves to highlight the topic(s) of the trilogy. Morrison herself has admitted that “the plot, the lean plot, is information. This is what happened. But the meaning of a novel is in the structure.”23 The author wants her reader to be active and the genres she chooses easily allow the reader to create their own meanings—they carefully follow clues and make inferences to fill in the gaps Morrison intentionally leaves. However, it is obvious that Morrison 23

Carolyn C. Denard, ed., Toni Morrison – Conversations (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 218.

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only ironically plays with the genre conventions, since Beloved can never be solely a gothic novel, or Jazz a detective story, or Paradise a Spaghetti Western. Her postmodern, asymmetric usage of the genre is an instrument to resist the conventional Western narrative forms and to introduce a different discourse in which characters interact, regardless of whether they are the living, or incarnated spirits of the dead. In this way, Morrison intertwines the traditional African narrative elements with the established Western literary forms, skilfully manipulating the reader’s expectations and the text itself.

Works Cited Denard, Carolyn C, ed. Toni Morrison—Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Graham, Maryemma, ed. Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Matus, Jill. Toni Morrison. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993. —. Paradise New York: Plume, 1999. Tally, Justine, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Taylor-Guthrie, Danielle, ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

DISGRACE: J. M. COETZEE TURNING POLITICAL BEING INTO BODY NARRATIVE MARINA RAGACHEWSKAYA

You will know that any creature or race is still alive with the Holy Ghost, when it can subordinate the lower creatures or races, and assimilate them into a new incarnation. […] There will be conquest, always. But the aim of conquest is a perfect relation of conquerors with conquered, for a new blossoming. Freedom is illusory. Sacrifice is illusory. Almightiness is illusory. […] All that is real is the overwelmingness of a new inspirational command, a new relationship with all things. (D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine)

The essay in which these words appear was published in 1936, when South Africa was living through a surge of new sets of laws diminishing the rights of the non-whites, as if to forecast what would be afterwards. Sixty years later, writing about the post-apartheid Nelson Mandela era in his novel Disgrace (1999), J. M. Coetzee states: “The more things change the more they remain the same,”1 proving and subverting D. H. Lawrence’s words at the same time. The present paper targets to examine the intricate interweaving of a personal psychic and bodily experience of a postcolonial subject and his/her social and political consciousness with the larger “history machine,” and the role language plays, using as insights Freud’s, Lacan’s, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theories. Referring to Frederic Stendhal’s famous phrase: “Politics in a work of literature is like pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention”2— in relation to J.M. Coetzee’s novel—several interpretations can be suggested. Donn Webb understands it as reference to political moralising and propaganda. Tip O’Neill implies, “All politics is local,” meaning the 1

J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000): 22. Quoted from Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New Jersey: Horizon, 1957): 15.

2

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limited scope of the issues raised. One more could be added: While the concert grips you inadvertently—with the pistol, you cannot escape its evident eloquent message. The metaphor interpreted this way may apply to the connection between the political and psychological in J.M. Coetzee’s novels, where a human character captivates you to the state of empathy, and the broader context makes them akin to such masters of the political novel as Franz Kafka, Albert Camus and George Orwell. Some critics use the political and psychological novels in the same category. And there is reasonable ground for it. Mass psychology and politics seem to have had no less strong ties than psychoanalysis and literature. It was Nietzsche who remarked about the inherent desire/will of a human being—the desire for power which is the most potent and allembracing passion in all humans. Nietzsche argued about the utmost pleasure that power can grant. Freud saw pleasure as the principle governing all unconscious drives. Nevertheless, the role of the unconscious in social behaviour was a major concern for Freud, too. This resulted in Christopher Lasch’s argument for a synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis. Marxism, he persists, “cannot explain how coercion is interiorized in the psyche, how this internalization of authority reconciles the lowly men to the “idea of a necessary domination of some men over others,” and how it affects not only “his mind, his ideas, his basic concepts and judgments, but also his inmost life, his preferences and desires.”3 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offer another version of the coexistence of the political and the unconscious: “the desire/desiring machine,” actually, a further elaboration of the Nietzschean “will to power.” They worked out an approach to analyse desire outside the pleasure principle of the libido, showing that desire has many forms, almost as many as there are subjects to represent it, and that desire is there only because it is constantly repressed, so it needs to put on a mask. For, if desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is asocial; on the contrary. But it is explosive; there is no desiring machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors.4

3

Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic, 1979): 87. 4 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (New York: Viking, 1977): 21.

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The novel Disgrace came out in 1999 not only to conquer the Booker Prize committee, but also to demonstrate the flow of history as a desire production whereby the sickness of the fin-de-siècle was the symptom of the will to nothing. The novel magnifies the issue of postcolonial traumatic consciousness (of both the blacks and the whites) to the global scale. The Sunday Telegraph observed that “by this late point in the century the journey to the heart of narrative darkness has become a safe literary destination.”5 To contradict this last point to some extent, the narrative of Disgrace seems to make its way back to referentiality. Coetzee put his foot firmly into the South African postcolonial chronotope abandoning the dreamy parable universality of the Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and The Life and Times of Michael K (1983). Disgrace is fully breathing the air and burning with the agony of the post-apartheid times. Being faithful to his favoured themes—tyranny, the colonised and colonisers—Coetzee also provides an amalgam of controversial aspects of life: race, history, sex and communication—which culminate in the disgrace of a person as well as his and her body. The central character of the novel, David Lurie, toes the line with his literary precursors—Michael K. (The Life and Times of Michael K.) and the Judge (Waiting for the Barbarians). However, David, a middle-aged, twice divorced Modern Languages professor, seems to be at an advantage. He occupies quite a high academic position teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town to a group of uninterested students. The third-person narrator whose confession-like tone draws the reader all the way side by side with David, thus making it one person’s story, begins with professor Lurie as a male, a typical and incorrigible womaniser. The novel’s narrator seems to choose “he” as the subject in order to articulate “the body without organs” metaphor—or David at the beginning of the novel—into which power will ooze through the production of desire. We are even allowed a generous portion of intimate rumination of a man whose two marriages have been a failure, but who is nevertheless subtle, romantic and almost aristocratically choosey about his “bed-company.” This sincerity is puzzling, however: the sexual story of a homo eroticus capable of psychoanalysing himself, does not seem to leave any fertile soil for Freudian analysis. It is already anti-Oedipal: no motherson ambiguities and childhood memories, but Father-daughter strains within the society. Simultaneously, however, he is referred to as a Father figure, combining this intrinsic ambiguity of age, authority and power—

5

J. M. Coetzee, op. cit., back cover.

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like a mini desire machine consciously rejecting the canons of society to indulge in his own producing desire. The first chapters of the novel can be read as the translated desire (in Lacanian terms). David, hiding behind his narrating double, tries to vocalise what it means for him to have a desire by defining the nature of his relationship with Soraya: “Because he takes pleasure in her, because his pleasure is unfailing, an affection is grown up in him for her.”6 But is his desire purely erotic by nature? “Desire emerges, as Lacan says, at the moment of its incarnation into speech.”7 And yet, its fate is never to be incarnate in speech; it always passes beyond. “Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing namable.”8 This is what finally constitutes the tragedy of any desire: by trying to find an adequate verbal expression to it, a person is doomed to the impossibility of doing it. David verbalises desire in several linguistic disguises: through the metaphor of a dog that accepts the justice of punishment for chewing a slipper, but starts to hate his own nature for being punished for following his instincts; then through the trite metaphor of Eros, and then through the silent music of his opera. Desire fluctuates, changing its own shape. Though David does his best, his “oasis of luxe et volupte” with Soraya in “the desert of the week” dries out. The purely sexual and corporeal did not retain their isolation: for the intrusion of the social machine into their intimacy spoiled the relationship the day David ran into his “mistress” in the city with two of her children. And he knew that she knew that he knew. This is to prove the Freudian definition of desire: that the object of desire is ultimately contingent or arbitrary. The desire for Soraya is here only to make satisfaction possible. David’s early history of desire is Freudian. He has to harness it at length, for there must not be a social reality interfering (and Soraya’s disappearance from his bed was due to social censorship and taboo). Further development of the sexual aspect unfolds rather according to Lacan’s theory: pleasure or enjoyment (jouissance) is a libidinal imperative. The subject “does not simply satisfy a desire, he enjoys desiring.”9 The pursuit of the ability to desire brings David to an impulsive affair with a student. But again, the sexual persona is “not to be” for there is the social machine around. Even more so—the political.

6

J. M. Coetzee, op. cit., 2. Jacque Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock-Routelage, 1977): 273. 8 Ibid., 261-262. 9 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre V: Les formations de l'inconscient, 19571958, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1998): 313. 7

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Even a mid-replacement between his feats of “an anxious flurry of promiscuity”10—wives of colleagues, tourists in bars and whores—a new secretary of his department, Dawn, hints at the impossibility of staying within this intimate circle unaffected: “Now people just pick and choose which laws they want to obey. It’s anarchy. How can you bring up children when there’s anarchy all around?”11 With Melanie Isaacs, David trespasses the borders of the purely sexual—the satisfaction of desire. Foucault’s questions in his Preface to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s book Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia point towards the “schizoanalysis” of David’s desire: How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action? How can and must desire deploy its forces within the political domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the established order? Ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars poitica.12

In South Africa, where brutal tyranny has been replaced by brutal anarchy, the affair between him and Melanie is doomed to sour. Like Theodore Dreiser, who refused to state with definiteness—whether Clyde killed Roberta deliberately or accidentally—Coetzee refuses to make the case either/or: seduction or rape. “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core.”13 The action performed by the body is just the same in either case, but the language to define it is different. He calls it the power of Eros—they call it abuse, he feels it to be his longdesired pleasure—they call it rape. David is trying hard to refute the thesis in Communications 101 handbook—“Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other,”14 but, ironically, elaborates an evidently false ideology of seduction when he woos Melanie: “Because a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone, it is part of the beauty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it,”15 adding “more widely.” Equally impotent is the classic poetic pentameter: “From fairest creatures we desire increase / that thereby beauty’s rose might never

10

J. M. Coetzee, op. cit., 7. Ibid., 9. 12 Michel Foucault, “Preface,” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, xiii. 13 J. M. Coetzee, op. cit., 25. 14 Ibid., 4. 15 Ibid., 16. 11

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die.”16 Language in this case does seem to have the power to construct the subject: “Smooth words, as old as seduction itself. Yet at this moment he believes in them.”17 Not the “object,” alas, for this is as passionless to Melanie Isaacs as Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. “More and more [David] is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa,”18 be it Melanie’s or Petrus’s story. Echoing the act of Melanie’s inevitable seduction, the meaning of the word “usurp” springs up in class, inserts itself in the midst of the drama, like a pistol shot, as if to anticipate the discourse of power that in fact underlies David and Melanie’s affair. Deleuze and Guattari offer a further elaboration of desire, going beyond Freud and Lacan, and this might enlighten the protagonist’s story: David yields to one of the workings of the desire-machine—the pleasure of possession—and—inevitably (as it is a constant reproduction process)—to the pleasure of being possessed – the desire for the very thing that, in fact, turns out to dominate and exploit him, desire for his own repression: “She is learning to exploit him […]. But if she has got away with much, he has got away with more; if she is behaving badly, he has behaved worse.”19 This seems to be the merging point of the psychological and the social within the subject. The two stories the novel has been telling so far—the sexual and the social—interlace in the trial scene, or the political. The mind, human consciousness, is left to make sense of the traumatic experience. And to do this, humans use the only common tool, a translator, a mediator— language. David Lurie tries to stand up to the well-beaten and obsolete ideas of the members of the Committee about right and wrong, good and bad, sin and repentance. He refuses to use language in the way they expect him to. David refuses to defend himself against charges of sexual harassment. At first he resists the spectacle of public “prurience and sentiment” the committee expects. When he finally blurts out an apology, members of the tribunal refuse to be satisfied, demanding to know whether it reflects his sincere feelings and comes from his heart. David proves unable to comprehensibly put across his message because the words he says do not mean the same to the members of the committee. Language turns impotent, even mutilated. Words, torn out from their first safe environment are like the severed parts of the body:

16

J. M. Coetzee, op. cit., 16. Ibid. 18 Ibid., 117. 19 Ibid., 28. 17

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First, the name of the plaintiff: MELANIE ISAACS, in careful block letters. Down the column of boxes wavers the hand, searching for the one to tick. There, points the nicotine-stained finger of her father. The hand slows, settles, makes its X, its cross of righteousness: J’accuse. Then a space for the name of the accused. DAVID LURIE, writes the hand, PROFESSOR. Finally, at the foot of the page, the date and her signature: the arabesque of the M, the l with its bold upper loop, the downward gash of the I, the flourish of the final s.20

For a Lacanian reader, this is to demonstrate how language exacerbates the tragedy of the signifier in its attempt to coincide with the signified. For, as David put it earlier, scorning the Communications handbook and calling it preposterous: “The origins of speech lie in song.”21 To ridicule this split, one of the Committee members asserts: “The criterion is not whether you are sincere. […] The criterion is whether you are prepared to acknowledge your fault in a public manner and take steps to remedy it?”22 Coetzee seems to be attacking the New Age tyranny of therapeutic discourse here, but David’s own language does not seem any more trustworthy. “I became a servant of Eros.”23 His whole theory of desire as being the working of this symbolic God looks even more pointless in the light of the desiring machine discourse. Calling Blake to his rescue— “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” provides no help for what is still to happen to his body. David’s story reads further on as the deconstruction of the Grand Narrative of Man’s seduction and fall: “Were he to choose a totem, it would be the snake”24 whose obsolete Shakespearean pentameter of outdated passion failed “to oil the serpent’s words.”25 David is both: the seducer and the seduced. As the Serpent was cursed to crawl on its belly in the Book of Genesis, so is David’s banishment and disgrace. With Guattari in mind, David becomes part of the “deterritorialization” which is the posteffect of the desire machine that had replaced the primary “territorial” type of social organisation. “Deterritorialization” is a decoding, and for David Lurie—a continuum into a loosening of the world view, his beliefs and theories, loss of the rigid position in the urbanised social structure. David turns into a country recluse, a dog man, a frontier farmer, a self-made opera composer. 20

J. M. Coetzee, op. cit., 40. Ibid., 4. 22 Ibid., 58. 23 Ibid., 52. 24 Ibid., 2. 25 Ibid., 16. 21

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His deterritorialised consciousness reworks the impact of the desire machine that has been implanting its organs into David as a “body without organs.” Everything around turns into one multifaceted disgrace, which, like a machine itself, produces an endless number of disgraces in the reproduction of desire: a professor’s daughter is a lesbian and a peasant affected by “the dogs, the gardening, the astrology books, the asexual clothes: in each he recognizes the statement of independence, considered, purposeful”26; Lucie is attacked, robbed and raped, which “happens every day, every hour, every minute […] in every quarter of the country”27; the rapist is one of Petrus’s folk, “his people,” with whom in the old days one might have had things out in the nick of time; silence that falls like a veil over a woman’s body; the police who are not going to save you any more; the prospect of Lucie’s becoming Petrus’s third wife and property; and— in an endless row—a spitball in David’s face, a vandalised house, confidence turning into public humiliation, stolen property, colleagues averting their faces, his kneeling in front of Melanie’s mother and sister and touching the floor with his forehead, and even the dog healer and the dog killer in one person… Is there an end to it, to this devouring desire machine of disgrace? It turns out he desired this disgrace initially, and disgrace desired him: “Evidently there are more installments to come. He must grit his teeth and pay, what else?”28 The desire consumes itself. And it is not personal, it is not even the desire of revenge (“Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets”29), but “It was history speaking through them […] A history of wrong.”30 One race trampling on the other—the others responding with silence to the “superior” race being thwarted. The fall and the banishment from the “Garden of Eden” of Cape Town was a disgrace. David’s eviction is rather self-willed and half-consciously self-inflicted. Going to his daughter Lucie’s farm is like going back to the Garden of Eden, the difference being that in the times of Deleuze and Guattari, this is also a desire machine producing and reproducing, with the land/earth acting as one of its most pronounced masks, or disguises. Indeed, as the theoreticians of postmodernism argue, there is hardly any binary opposition between technology and nature. The change in the Mandela era makes David a victim of “the great rationalization,” and this

26

J. M. Coetzee, op. cit., 84. Ibid., 98. 28 Ibid., 31. 29 Ibid., 112. 30 Ibid., 156. 27

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change is just the reenactment of the power roles: the colonisers become the colonised. The character’s philosophical approach to hardship likens him to Michael K.’s resilience and therefore spares the reader’s empathy. But only at first glance. David’s relations with Petrus, the African farmer who is their nearest neighbour, proving the point, become increasingly troubled and ambiguous. Outrages are committed against him and his daughter. From here on, the story becomes the narrative of the body. For, disgrace that does not seem to affect him psychologically, at least in the light the narrative voice chooses to inform us, goes into the body. David’s “case” which he rests proudly “on the rights of desire” crashes against its own self-righteousness when the abusers come to the farm to enact this very desire—be it motivated by Freudian neuroses or the Nietzschean power drive—and now it gradually becomes clear what it means to be part of the machine that causes its own breakdowns in order to break through: the “body without organs” acquires them one by one and becomes aware of them as they burn in pain. The agonised bodies of a man and a woman are now part of the machine which unconsciously works through its agents—local terrorists—to make these two parts of it. The preceding disgrace of colonialism produces another disgrace in an endless flow. Disgrace comes as a social solution, a political step, as punishment for a misdeed, as gap filler for the age difference. But the “poetic justice” for the novel’s conflict—one gets what he deserves—is too doubtful a notion. It goes lame. “One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet,”31 he reflects. Coetzee has always put his characters into extreme situations. Lucie seems to understand what David cannot: that to live where she lives she must tolerate brutalisation and humiliation and simply keep going. “Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept,” she tells her father. “To start at ground level. With nothing [...] No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity [...] Like a dog.”32 There does not seem to be much remorse in his heart and burden on his consciousness for what he has done, and the way he interprets the events do not qualify for what defines a psychological novel. If not for one outstanding device: animalistic imagery pervasive throughout the whole of the book. “This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals.”33 Besides the evident parallels with human lives, animal images are a tool of 31

J. M. Coetzee, op. cit., 120. Ibid., 205. 33 Ibid., 80. 32

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body imagery. Sometimes, when the language is no longer capable of describing the agonised body, synaesthesia helps: “They can smell what you are thinking.”34 Towards the end of the story, David reflects that the language he and others use has become “tired, friable, eaten from the inside as if by termites”35 and that he, an expert practitioner, is also hollow, “like a fly-casing in a spiderweb.”36 The only part of the whole battle between the political, the social and the psychological—the body—remains to hold a long dialogue with the mind, for it is the body that takes final responsibility and bears witness to the past war. It turns out body and mind can sometimes speak different languages. The language all people use is the language of the mind: the body is often doomed to be mute. David is a symbol of the bitter recognition of guilt: what he did is what he did—there is no escaping from it. And even the Romantic ideals are lame here, too. How is one to heal a gaping wound of lost ties and troubling tensions between generations, sexes, and races—is an artistic and discursive probing with hardly any ready-made solution. Disgrace is also a revenge history taken in an absolutely “ungraceful” way against the injustice done to it. The levelling of radical binary oppositions takes place: the well-deserved and the unjustified, the right and the wrong, crime and punishment—all balance on equal grounds. Arguing further, we might note that this is also the light showing us the road to the journey far beyond South Africa and postcolonialism. Issues of interconnection among politics, psychology, human body and the language need a profound reform. Even post-apartheid and “globalized,” a minor human destiny in South Africa can evoke universal associations and parallels with the whole humanity.

Works Cited Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles, Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated from French. New York: Viking Penguin, 1977. Foucault, Michel. “Preface.” In Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Viking Penguin, 1977. Howe, Irving. Politics and the Novel. New Jersey: Horizon, 1957. 34

J. M. Coetzee, op. cit., 81. Ibid., 196. 36 Ibid. 35

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Lacan, Jacque. Ecrits: A Selection. London: Tavistock-Routelage, 1977. —. Le Séminaire, livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, 1957-1958. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1998. Lasch, Christopher. Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged. New York: Basic, 1979.

LIFE VERSUS FICTION: NARRATION IN JULIAN BARNES’S FLAUBERT’S PARROT DIJANA TICA

Flaubert’s Parrot as a Postmodern Experiment The relation between life (reality) and fiction is one of the most dominant themes in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which has almost unanimously been defined as postmodern. It is also one of many other postmodern novels which fall into the category of historiographic metafiction, “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages.”1 The term “metafiction” usually refers to fiction about fiction, which means that it is “drawing attention to its own artifice, announcing its status as fable rather than reality, or exposing, in a systematic way, the writer’s process of tale-telling.”2 To successfully link reality, which here mainly exists in the various facts concerning the life of the famous nineteenth-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert, and fiction, which is connected with the retired English doctor and Flaubert enthusiast Geoffrey Braithwaite, the protagonist, firstperson narrator and fictional author of this novel, Barnes had to create a mixture of genres, a so-called hybrid. The discussion about what kind of novel it is and whether it is a novel at all has been going on since its publication, especially after 1986, when it won the Prix Médicis in the nonfiction category. Peter Brooks was one of the first who defined it as “a splendid hybrid of a novel, part biography, part fiction, part literary

1

Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988): 5. 2 David Mikics, A New Handbook of Literary Terms (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007): 180.

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criticism,”3 and the others just followed suit, calling it “a kind of collage,” “a tour de force of fiction, criticism, and biography combined,” and “a clever, if at times gamesy, compendium of genres.”4 Considering the fact that the novel contains a lot of lists and catalogues, James Fenton goes further and states that “it doesn’t look like a novel, particularly. It looks like a thing […] like a dictionary, a set of lecture notes, an examination paper and—yes—a short story or two, a disquisition, an argument.”5 Peter Childs lists the incredible range of narrative types Barnes uses in this novel: “apocrypha, autobiography, bestiary, biography, chronology, criticism, dialogue, essay, exam, guide, and manifesto.”6 The difficulty of categorising this novel increases because Barnes uses a lot of quotations from Flaubert’s correspondence, some of them even without inverted commas, which can be considered a sort of plagiarism, while the chapter called “Braithwaite’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas” seems to be written in emulation of Flaubert’s work, making it “a parody and a stylistic pastiche of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.”7 That Barnes was aware of this controversial aspect of his novel can be seen from the interview he gave to Vanessa Guignery in 2002, in which he referred to it as “an upside down, informal piece of novel-biography.”8

Life versus Fiction: The Reliability of Facts When it comes to “hard” facts in this novel, they are mostly connected with Flaubert’s life and seem to be, if we are to believe Barnes’s words, completely true: “It seemed to me that all the information that Geoffrey Braithwaite gives you about Flaubert is true, or as true as he and I together could make it.”9 Moreover, since Braithwaite compares biography to a fishnet, which a jocular lexicographer once defined as “a collection of

3

Peter Brooks, “Obsessed with the Hermit of Croisset,” The New York Times, 1985, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/10/books/obsessed-with-the-hermit-ofcroisset.html (accessed December 20, 2014). 4 Quoted in Vanessa Guignery, The Fiction of Julian Barnes (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006): 38. 5 Ibid., 39; emphasis original. 6 Peter Childs, Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction since 1970 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005): 89. 7 Quoted in Guignery, Fiction of Julian Barnes, 49. 8 Vanessa Guignery and Ryan Roberts, eds., Conversations with Julian Barnes (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009): 105. 9 Ibid., 107.

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holes tied together with string,”10 the problem with the presented facts is that they belong to only those precious few a biographer managed to catch in his net: “Yet consider what he doesn’t catch: there is always far more of that […] think of everything that got away, that fled with the last deathbed exhalation of the biographee.”11 So what Braithwaite is saying here is that we draw our conclusions about somebody’s life on partial information. Since we are unable to know it all, then we never get the opportunity to see “the whole picture”—only its visible fragments. Another problem with the facts that a biographer manages to “catch in his net” is how to interpret them. Throughout the novel Braithwaite presents many instances from Flaubert’s life, which could be interpreted in different ways. Flaubert’s relationship with Elisa Schlesinger, the wife of a German music publisher, is considered mostly a mere adolescent infatuation of the great novelist, although some stress the possibility that it was consummated either in 1848 or, more probably in the early months of 1843.12 Similarly, Juliet Herbert, the governess to Flaubert’s niece Caroline in the mid-1850s, played a minor role in the author’s life according to some biographers. But some others, basing their conclusion on a single paragraph from one of Flaubert’s letters as well as on the fact that Flaubert visited London after she had returned to England, think that she was his mistress, “possibly the Great Unknown Passion of his life, and perhaps even his fiancée.”13 Another controversial aspect of Flaubert’s life is his sexual orientation. Even though Flaubert himself in a letter expresses his fondness for Cairo bathhouse boys and makes a reference to sleeping with his friend Louis Bouilhet, his famous biographer Sartre discards Flaubert’s homosexuality as the author’s mere teasing and wishful thinking.14 The same is with the question of his death, which is mostly considered a result of an apoplectic fit he had while he was having a bath, after which he stumbled to a sofa in his study, where he was later found by a doctor. But this was not enough evidence for a man called Edmond Ledoux, who claimed that Flaubert committed suicide although, according to Braithwaite, this version would require the following ludicrous chain of events: “Flaubert got into his bath, hanged himself, then climbed out, hid the rope, staggered to his study, collapsed on the sofa and, when the doctor arrived, managed to die while feigning the symptoms of an apoplectic 10

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (London: Vintage, 2009): 38. Ibid., 38. 12 Ibid., 100-101. 13 Ibid., 40. 14 Ibid., 100. 11

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fit.”15 This suicide scenario becomes even more nonsensical when we consider Flaubert’s strong opposition to this way of ending one’s life: Let us have the modesty of wounded animals, who withdraw into a corner and remain silent. […] People like us must have the religion of despair. By dint of saying “That is so! That is so!” and of gazing down into the black pit at one’s feet, one remains calm.16

One of the most glaring examples of different interpretations of facts is the famous chapter called “Chronology,” in which Braithwaite gives three chronologies of Flaubert’s life: the first one, written in impartial thirdperson narration, depicting the novelist’s life as a great success; the second one, also third-person, implying it was more of a failure; and the third one, which consists completely of quotations taken from Flaubert’s letters in the form of metaphors and comparisons, presenting the middle ground between the first two and showing the author’s life as a combination of high and low points, happiness and sorrow, success and failure, fame and infamy. Unlike some of his readers and commentators, Barnes does not find these chronologies confusing but rather illuminating: I don’t think that, if you read the three chronologies, all the facts, all the statements there are incompatible with one another in terms of human life and human psychology. I think it’s like giving an extra dimension or extra depth of focus.17

Braithwaite finds more problems that decrease the reliability of facts. The first one refers to our inability to form appropriate conclusions about other people based simply on facts. He first wonders what can be concluded from the fact that his name is Geoffrey Braithwaite or that his eyes are brown, and then questions the conclusion that Caroline, Flaubert’s niece, made about her uncle’s regrets. While they were walking by the Seine after a visit to some friends, Flaubert said that they had got it right, “alluding to that household with its charming and honest children.”18 Caroline did not ask him to explain what he had meant by this remark but formed her own conclusion that he regretted not having a wife and family, which is, according to Braithwaite, completely incompatible with everything we know about Flaubert, especially with his fear of 15

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 181-182. Ibid., 181. 17 Guignery and Roberts, Conversations with Julian Barnes, 107. 18 Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 103. 16

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commitment and emotional instability. Furthermore, Braithwaite explains that Flaubert could only have praised the “particular talents of the family they had just visited.”19 One more difficulty with facts is that their meaning can change with time, that is, what they meant in the nineteenth century does not have to be their meaning today.20 As an example of this, Braithwaite gives Flaubert’s height. On the one hand, Gustave was six feet tall and his contemporaries considered him a giant; on the other, Braithwaite, who lives in the twentieth century, is taller than six feet and nobody calls him a giant.21 Does that mean that people back then were generally shorter and that today we would not consider Flaubert a tall man? Similarly, in 1853, at Trouville, Flaubert watched the sun go down over the sea, and said that it resembled “a large disc of redcurrant jam.”22 The question that Braithwaite puts to himself is whether redcurrant jam was the same colour in Normandy in 1853 as it is now. He even wrote to the Grocers’ Company and asked them about that and, although they replied that the colour would have been almost exactly the same because redcurrant jam is one of the purest jams,23 he was still not convinced. Braithwaite’s distrust of facts and the knowledge based on them can be connected with the philosophy of solipsism, which can be seen in the novel when Braithwaite discusses the postmodern take on the omniscient point of view and concludes that “omniscience is impossible, man’s knowledge is partial, therefore the novel itself must be partial.”24

The Truthfulness of Fiction It does not mean that something invented or fictitious cannot be true or possible. Examples of this can be found in the chapters in which fictitious characters and real people from Flaubert’s life exist side by side. The first one of these is “Finders Keepers,” in which real and fictitious characters are joined together to solve the mystery of Flaubert’s relationship with Juliet Herbert. Here Braithwaite meets another fictitious character, American scholar Ed Winterton, who claims to have stumbled upon some 19

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 103. Similarly, we could wonder whether the meaning of facts changes geographically and culturally or, to be more precise, whether their meaning changes depending on where we live, which nation, religion or race we belong to. 21 Ibid., 90. 22 Ibid., 92. 23 Ibid., 93. 24 Ibid., 88-89. 20

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seventy-five letters Juliet Herbert and Flaubert wrote to each other. Since these letters have never been discovered, Braithwaite is anxious to find out their contents. Through his interview with Winterton he learns that Flaubert and Juliet had an affair, that he visited her in England, and that they were most probably engaged. Furthermore, the letters contained several of Juliet’s photographs as well as some information about Flaubert’s knowledge of English and his opinion of London. The chapter ends with Braithwaite’s painful realisation that Winterton has burned the correspondence in respect of Flaubert’s desire expressed in one of the letters. On top of this request, Winterton claims, there was another one Flaubert made to Juliet: “He said, If anyone ever asks you what my letters contained, or what my life was like, please lie to them. Or rather, since I cannot ask you of all people to lie, just tell them what it is you think they want to hear.”25 Although these letters are a product of Barnes’s imagination, it does not mean that some other letters with similar contents do not exist just because they have not been unearthed yet. Barnes confirms this in an interview: Incidentally, when I talked to Jean Bruneau, the extremely distinguished editor of the Pléiade Correspondance, he said that he still thought that the letters would turn up, which was very interesting, because that was some years after I had written this chapter.26

Another invented chapter, which also deals with real characters from Flaubert’s life, is “Louise Colet’s Version,” in which Barnes gives voice to Louise Colet, Flaubert’s most (in)famous mistress and successful poet in her own right. Brooks considers it the most brilliant chapter of this novel, “a wonderfully Flaubertian exercise in getting under the skin of another person, reinventing history from inside one of its nearly forgotten actors.”27 Since most information about Louise comes from Flaubert’s letters, we are not able to hear the story about their turbulent relationship from her point of view. Barnes tries to correct this mistake by letting her speak in the first person. From her “confession” we find out that they met when she was thirtyfive and he was twenty-four. She was beautiful and married; had powerful patrons, lovers and friends, and quite a reputation as a poetess. She did not need Flaubert, a young, relatively unknown provincial, but she fell in love with him and for her that was enough. He was a good lover, passionate, 25

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 48. Guignery and Roberts, Conversations with Julian Barnes, 107. 27 Brooks, “Obsessed with the Hermit.” 26

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eager, young, but he was not ready to surrender himself completely to her. He would leave her alone for a few months and travel abroad with his friends. He would talk to her about Kuchuk Hanem, the expensive Egyptian courtesan he had slept with on the Nile, telling her she should not be jealous of this woman who made love for money and felt nothing for him. He would meet Louise in a hotel occasionally, but would not allow her to come to his family house in Croisset and meet his mother. She was not even allowed to write letters to him directly, but via his friend Maxime Du Camp. While she was aware of his genius and supported him even if she found some of his literary efforts weak, he would constantly criticise her writing, accusing her of being too romantic, too gushing, and advising her to imitate not only his literary style but also his reclusive way of life. Afraid to commit to her, he started pulling away. For a while she pursued him and made embarrassing scenes, which he found too much to handle. This finally led to their separation after eight years of on-again off-again relationship. In the end, Louise said that the world would always be on Flaubert’s side, and that she would constantly be seen as a woman who wanted to marry the great novelist and, in that way, ruin his literary career. To conclude, despite the fact that in reality we never get an opportunity to listen to Louise Colet’s side of the story, the version that Barnes offers, although fictional, can be considered real and true. The relationship between Art (fiction) and Life also appears as one of the questions in the chapter called “Examination Paper.” Here Braithwaite wonders which of these two concepts could be considered truer, and gives a few examples for students to discuss. In one of them, taken from a letter Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet, the novelist says that in the woods near Touques he came across some cigar butts and some bits of pâté, probably the remnants of a picnic. The surprising fact was that he had described exactly that in Novembre eleven years ago. The novelist’s conclusion is that “everything you invent is true,” and that his “poor Bovary is without a doubt suffering and weeping even now in twenty villages of France.”28 Similarly, a closed cab was first used by Flaubert in real life to avoid detection and seduction by Louise Colet, then by his fictitious character Léon for the seduction of Emma Bovary and, within a year of the publication of Madame Bovary, closed cabs known as Bovarys could be hired for sexual purposes in Hamburg.29 This serves to prove that life on many occasions imitates art.

28 29

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 172. Ibid.

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In addition, Braithwaite describes two more situations in which art in a way triumphs over life. Flaubert was not able to cry when his sister Caroline was dying, but some fictional characters and scenes made him overflow with feelings. The same happened with his love for Mme Schlesinger, which was not serious unless he was writing to her: Only when I was writing to her, with that capacity I possess for producing feelings within myself by means of the pen, did I take my subject seriously […] Many things which leave me cold when I see or hear about them none the less move me to enthusiasm or irritation or pain if I talk about them myself or—particularly—if I write about them.30

Barnes also believes that art is truer than life, which can be seen from the answer he gave when he was asked about the difference between his two professions—journalism and fiction. He first defined literature as “the best way of telling the truth; […] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts,”31 and then explained why he chose fiction although he had already been a very successful essayist and journalist: I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction. […] when you are writing journalism your task is to simplify the world and render it comprehensible in one reading; whereas when you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world, to say things that are not as straightforward as might be understood from reading my journalism and to produce something that you hope will reveal further layers of truth on a second reading.32

Braithwaite versus Barnes. Similarities Since Geoffrey Braithwaite is the first-person narrator,33 protagonist and fictional author of this novel, there is always the danger of mixing him up with Julian Barnes, the real author. That Barnes himself was aware of this tendency can be seen from his short story “Knowing French,” which consists of a series of letters he allegedly received during the mid-1980s 30

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 172. Guignery and Roberts, Conversations with Julian Barnes, 64. 32 Ibid., 65. 33 Gérard Genette uses the term “heterodiegetic” for a narrator who is outside of the story. If a narrator is a character in the story, Genette refers to him/her as “homodiegetic.” If a homodiegetic narrator is also the protagonist of the story, Genette uses the term “autodiegetic.” 31

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from Sylvia, an old woman from a retirement home. Having read Flaubert’s Parrot, she writes him a letter, chastising him for changing his identity for the sake of the story: “Now why did you say you were a doctor in your sixties when you obviously can’t be more than forty? Come now!”34 Although they differ in age, profession and their life story, Braithwaite and Barnes share the most important thing—their love of France and everything French, especially Flaubert. The reasons why Braithwaite admires Flaubert are quite clear from the novel, while Barnes gives his in the interview with McGrath: Obviously, he’s the writer whose words I most carefully tend to weigh, who I think has spoken the most truth about writing. And it’s odd to have a foreign genius for whom you feel a direct love. […] He’s obviously a tricky bastard in some ways, but I find when I’m reading his letters I just want to go and make him a cup of hot chocolate, light his cigarette.35

While Braithwaite went to France as a soldier during the Second World War and then revisited it with his late wife, the “French connection” in Barnes’s case begins with his parents, who were both French teachers and from 1959 spent their summer holidays driving through various regions of provincial France. In 1966-1967 Barnes taught English at a Catholic school in Rennes and was initiated into the Francophone popular culture by listening to singers such as Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens.36 In addition to that, Barnes read French first at school and then at Magdalen College in Oxford. In an interview with Guignery he said that he was given Madame Bovary to read by an English master when he was about fifteen, and was disappointed because he thought it was going to be an erotic novel. After that, he did a paper on Flaubert at university and continued to read him. He had always wanted to do something about Flaubert, but did not want it to be a biography or any sort of literary criticism. This is why he decided it should be a novel.37

34

Quoted in Ryan Roberts, “Inventing a Way to the Truth: Life and Fiction in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot,” in Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, eds. Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs (London and New York: Continuum, 2011): 31-32. 35 Guignery and Roberts, Conversations with Julian Barnes, 15. 36 Vanessa Guignery, “‘A Preference for things Gallic’: Julian Barnes and the French Connection,” in Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, eds. Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs (London and New York: Continuum, 2011): 38. 37 Guignery and Roberts, Conversations with Julian Barnes, 102.

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When it comes to the plot of the novel, the most significant connection between Braithwaite and Barnes is the mystery of the two parrots. At the beginning of the novel Braithwaite visits two museums dedicated to Flaubert: the Hôtel-Dieu in Rouen and the pavilion in Croisset. What he discovers on this occasion is that each of the museums contains a brightgreen, perky-eyed parrot allegedly borrowed by Flaubert from the Museum of Natural History in Rouen to serve as inspiration for Loulou, the parrot in his story Un Coeur simple (A Simple Heart). The question which of the two parrots is the real one serves as the starting point of his investigation into Flaubert’s life, in which he speaks about Flaubert’s family and friends, his love affairs, the real animals in his life and those in his fiction, his dislike of trains and “progress” in general, his dedication to language and style, his unfinished works and unrealised plans, his deteriorating health and premature death. What happened to Braithwaite in the novel had actually happened to Barnes in real life. In his interview with Guignery he tells the story about how the idea for this novel came up to him. Barnes had been commissioned to write a book about French writers’ houses. In September 1981 he found himself in Rouen, Flaubert’s hometown, looking at the exhibits at the Hôtel-Dieu, among them a bright-green perky-eyed parrot, and then in the village called Croisset, where he discovered another similar parrot at the Flaubert pavilion. This time he was even allowed to take off the glass case and photograph the parrot, which struck him as less authentic than the other because it seemed benign. While Barnes was looking for somewhere to photograph it, the sun came out and slanted across the display cabinet. He took two photos and, as he picked up the parrot to replace it, the sun went in. Since this was a cloudy and rainy morning, he interpreted this appearance of the sun as a benign intervention by Flaubert, indicating that this one was the true parrot.38 Another factual similarity between the protagonist and its author is their connection with real life characters: two English scholars, Enid Starkie and Christopher Ricks, and Monsieur Lucien Andrieu, secretary of the Société des amis de Flaubert. In the novel Braithwaite says he was present at the lectures of both these scholars, who talked about the significance of factual mistakes in literature. Dr Enid Starkie, Reader Emeritus in French Literature at the University of Oxford, Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, and Flaubert’s most exhaustive British biographer, accused Flaubert of being so careless of his characters’ appearance that on three different occasions he gave Emma Bovary’s eyes 38

Guignery and Roberts, Conversations with Julian Barnes, 102-104.

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three different colours: brown, deep black and blue.39 Braithwaite gets angry with Dr Starkie for attacking his precious Flaubert and caring about such trivialities, but he has his revenge when he discovers that she made a mistake when choosing a photograph of Flaubert as frontispiece to her first volume dedicated to the famous novelist. It turned out that the man in the photograph was not Flaubert but his friend Louis Bouilhet.40 Furthermore, upon rereading Madame Bovary, Braithwaite finds out that Flaubert did not make a mistake about the colour of Emma Bovary’s eyes: they were actually brown but they would appear different depending on the light. This clearly showed that Dr Enid Starkie did not do her job well, especially because she failed to find a passage in Maxime du Camp’s biography of Flaubert, in which he says that the woman on whom Emma Bovary was based had very unusual eyes: “her eyes, of uncertain colour, green, grey, or blue, according to the light, had a pleading expression, which never left them.”41 The other academic whose lecture Braithwaite attended is Professor Christopher Ricks from Cambridge University. Braithwaite did not feel any animosity towards him since he did not make the mistake of mentioning Flaubert in his lecture titled “Mistakes in Literature and Whether They Matter.” As a matter of fact, he found his performance shiny as well as useful and thought-provoking.42 Although we can only determine that there is a chance that Barnes himself attended Dr Starkie’s lecture (according to Moseley, as a student of modern languages at Oxford he was more likely to have heard it than his fictional narrator),43 we positively know that he attended Ricks’s lecture at the Cheltenham Literary Festival because he wrote an account of it, very similar to Braithwaite’s, for The New Statesman in October 1976. The reason why he references this historical event in his novel and provides very similar details is, concludes Roberts, to establish the fictional scene as “true”: Barnes creates this “true” scenario in which his fictional world and narrator exist and, as a result, helps to establish Braithwaite’s “value” and credibility. Braithwaite bridges the line between these worlds, adding an

39

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 74. Ibid., 79. 41 Ibid., 81. 42 Ibid., 76. 43 Merritt Moseley, Understanding Julian Barnes (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 1997): 83. 40

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additional dimension to the novel’s underlying theme of the connections between life and fiction.44

The similar goal is accomplished with the introduction of M. Lucien Andrieu into the story. In the novel Braithwaite returns to France, revisits the two museums and meets M. Andrieu at his home. The old secretary tells him the history of the museums and, when Braithwaite finally concludes that the museum in Croisset must have the right parrot since they were founded first and had the first choice, M. Andrieu says that neither parrot has to be the right one. He first explains that since Flaubert was an artist, a writer of imagination, he could have changed the appearance of the parrot, which means that the parrot he had borrowed does not have to look like the one in his story. The other explanation is connected with the fact that stuffed parrots change with time: they get the moth, they fall apart, and this might have happened to the original parrot. In addition, the Museum of Natural History possessed around fifty of these parrots and since they were popular in the twenties and thirties, many of them were sold, so the one that Flaubert had borrowed could be in somebody’s home. After this illuminating and confusing conversation Braithwaite goes to the Museum of Natural History, where he finds only three Amazonian parrots and concludes that one of them could be the right one.45 Again, Braithwaite’s experience is actually Barnes’s. In the interview with Guignery, Barnes reveals that M. Andrieu really existed and was secretary of the Société des amis de Flaubert and the person who solved the problem of the parrots, as far as it was soluble, both for him and for Braithwaite.46 Barnes went to Rouen about a year after his original trip and visited the Museum of Natural History. He made an entry in his notebook in which he described the booking-out system used in this institution and expressed his belief that he had managed to discover the true identity of the parrot: It’s quite clear from my notebook, from these notes which I made nineteen years ago, that I thought that I had solved it: but re-reading my notes, I can’t understand what they’re saying!—which seems to me completely appropriate, since just as there is no solution in the book, there is not even a solution in my notebook that is lucid any more.47

44

Roberts, “Inventing a Way,” 28-29. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 188-190. 46 Guignery and Roberts, Conversations with Julian Barnes, 107. 47 Ibid., 113. 45

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Braithwaite and Barnes also share some attitudes towards literature, literary criticism and Flaubert. We have already mentioned Barnes’s belief that literature can be truer than life, which is also expressed by Braithwaite in the part where he admits that he understands Flaubert better than he understood his own wife Ellen: Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives that they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.48

Barnes also shares Braithwaite’s skepticism about man’s ability to present the past in an appropriate and truthful way: Either you only write the history for which there is evidence, or, if you try to write more than that, if you try to write a more complete history, then you have to fictionalise or imagine. And so, to that extent, history, if it attempts to be more than a description of documents, a description of artefacts, has to be a sort of literary genre.49

Moreover, he also has some reservations about the genre of biography: I have very mixed feelings about biography, partly because I am so wary of its certainties. A biography makes too much sense of a life, it seems to me. Biographies in a way ought to be more boring. Biographies make people’s lives more interesting than they probably were.50

They often agree on the matter of literary critics. In the novel Braithwaite says that he hates critics, but not for the normal reasons: that they’re failed creators (they usually aren’t; they may be failed critics, but that’s another matter); or that they are by nature carping, jealous and vain (they usually aren’t; if anything, they might better be accused of overgenerosity, of upgrading the second-rate so that their own fine discriminations thereby appear the rarer).51

He attacks Dr. Enid Starkie because of her pettiness and superficiality in reading and researching Madame Bovary; he accuses her and other 48

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 168. Guignery and Roberts, Conversations with Julian Barnes, 53. 50 Ibid., 53-54. 51 Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 74. 49

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critics of getting too close to authors and forgetting the fact that they are just people and are allowed to make mistakes;52 he calls contemporary critics pompous because they reclassify all novels, plays and poems as texts but are too blind to see that Flaubert thought the same a century ago;53 he refers to an Italian who wrote that the critic secretly wanted to kill the writer; and he personally believes that many critics would like to be dictators of literature.54 He even pretends to be one of them and lists ten different kinds of novels that he would ban permanently or temporarily.55 Similarly, in the chapter called “The Case Against,” he defends Flaubert from common accusations of critics, such as that he hated humanity and democracy; was not interested in politics; did not believe in progress; was unpatriotic, a pessimist, a Sadist; believed in Beauty and was obsessed with style.56 When it comes to Barnes, he does not have such a bad opinion of critics, but he still finds them too arrogant, especially because they tend to forget that writers are more important than them: You do often feel when you read academic criticism, […] or when you hear academics talking about their books, that they forget that theirs is a secondary activity. They forget that however important a critic is, a firstrate critic is always less important, and less interesting, than a second-rate writer. Their job is, firstly, to explain, but secondly to celebrate rather than diminish.57

Differences Braithwaite is different from Barnes in various ways. By examining earlier drafts of the novel, Roberts finds some evidence that Barnes tried to distance himself from Braithwaite during the process of writing. The most obvious example is the fact that in the earliest draft Braithwaite reveals that he published some novels back in the fifties. In the third draft, Braithwaite says that he wrote a couple of books, whereas in the final version Braithwaite admits only to thinking about writing books, having some ideas and making some notes, but his job and family duties kept him

52

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 76. Ibid., 88. 54 Ibid., 97-98. 55 Ibid., 98-100. 56 Ibid., 129-136. 57 Guignery and Roberts, Conversations with Barnes, 13-14. 53

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busy.58 Similarly, in some early drafts, talking about mistakes in literature, Barnes made a reference to his previous novel Metroland, which he later changed into Madame Bovary.59 Differences also exist in their characters. In the interview with Guignery, Barnes said that the moment he realised that the mystery of Flaubert’s parrot could be turned into a story was the one when he came up with the character of his narrator: as soon as I had the sort of person who, in my stead, would be able to write passionately about these two parrots—so, someone rather pedantic, rather obsessed, ready to draw the fullest meanings out of the smallest coincidence or ambiguity—I began to have Geoffrey Braithwaite with me.60

In comparison to Barnes, Braithwaite seems to be more passive, more absent from his own life, more indifferent to it, which might be one of the causes of his marital unhappiness. He also appears more frightened of life, more involved in his hobbies, more obsessed with his favourite author, and more protective of him. Of course, the greatest “factual” difference between Braithwaite and Barnes is their family life, which is finally revealed to us in the chapter titled “Pure Story,” where it becomes quite clear that Braithwaite’s obsession with Flaubert is actually his way of dealing with his wife’s adultery and death. Since Barnes at that time and for many years after was happily married to literary agent Pat Kavanagh, their family life could not be more dissimilar. There are also some differences when it comes to their attitudes to literature. Braithwaite defends Flaubert’s opinion that an author should live in isolation in order to create good books, whereas Barnes thinks that the contact with the world is necessary, but what matters is the extent of it: But art comes out of life: how can the artist continue to exist without a constant re-immersion in the normality of living? There’s a question of how far you plunge. Flaubert said that an artist should wade into life as into the sea but only up to the belly button. Others swim so far out that they forget their primary intention of being artists. Self-evidently, being a writer involves spending a lot of time on your own, and being a novelist demands longer periods of isolation than does being a poet or a playwright. The

58

Roberts, “Inventing a Way,” 33-34. Ibid., 34. 60 Guignery and Roberts, Conversations with Julian Barnes, 104. 59

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creative to-and-fro of the collaborative arts has to happen internally for a novelist.61

In addition, Braithwaite’s attitudes to literature are more inconsistent than Barnes’s. He attacks Dr. Enid Starkie for insisting on the true colour of Emma Bovary’s eyes, although he does the same in his search for the true parrot. Similarly, he accuses M. Ledoux of spreading false rumours about Flaubert’s affair with Juliet Herbert, although he is too ready to believe Ed Winterton when he claims the same, despite the fact that Braithwaite has never seen the letters confirming it. Moreover, unlike Flaubert, who insisted on being absent from his own work, Braithwaite seems unable to talk about anything without giving hints concerning his private life.62 What we can conclude from this part is that Barnes gives Braithwaite some of his personal characteristics and opinions in order to make him believable as a character, but, at the same time, they differ sufficiently for the reader not to make the mistake of mixing them up.

Narration in Flaubert’s Parrot. Braithwaite as a Narrator Since Braithwaite goes beyond narrating what he observes, he cannot be seen as a typical first-person narrator. According to Bradford, he “causes us to reconsider what the role of a first-person narrator involves.”63 As a narrator, Braithwaite is rather unusual because he does very little narrating in the sense of telling a story: There is the small and inconclusive story about his researches into the whereabouts of Flaubert’s parrot; there is the larger matter of Flaubert’s life, his significance, but the way this appears here is hardly a narrative, and what Braithwaite does with it is hardly telling a story; there is, finally, the story of himself, his wife, and his marriage, which comes out in fugitive asides and hints until, finally, in a chapter called “Pure Story,” he gives us its outline, though even here much remains vague or ambiguous.64

61

Guignery and Roberts, Conversations with Julian Barnes, 80. We can see these inconsistencies as a device the author uses to mock his unreliable narrator. Since this is based on irony, it only works if readers are aware of the fact that Braithwaite is being ridiculed for his own blindness. 63 Richard Bradford, The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 48. 64 Moseley, Understanding Julian Barnes, 74. 62

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For many critics, he is a typical postmodern narrator. First, “since he exposes the constraints upon his research and comments on his own choices as he goes along,”65 he could be considered a self-conscious narrator. However, since this is not a typical novel, he cannot be a typical self-conscious narrator who shatters any illusion that he or she is telling something that has actually happened by revealing to the reader that the narration is a work of fictional art, or by flaunting the discrepancies between its patent fictionality and the reality it seems to represent.66

Because the novel was written as Braithwaite’s confession, it lacks the props of story and characters to be discussed with readers and narratees. For Braithwaite, who is a fictitious character and narrator, his wife Ellen, another fictitious character, is as real as Flaubert. Second, Braithwaite can also pass as an intrusive narrator, who is usually defined as the “one who not only reports, but also comments on and evaluates personal views about human life in general.”67 As a matter of fact, the whole novel seems to be a series of Braithwaite’s opinions and comments. Braithwaite is not so talkative when it comes to his personal life. He only gives some basic information about himself such as his profession, age, nationality, military past, family status, the colour of his eyes, and preference for whiskey and old films. He also mentions that he is honest and reliable, that he has never killed a patient, that people trust him, that he is good with the dying, that he has never got too drunk, has never written prescriptions for imaginary patients, never made advances to women in his surgery, and that he has not killed his wife.68 He is even more mysterious about his family life and we have to wait almost till the end of the novel to find out something more about his wife Ellen and their relationship. He finds that part of his life rather difficult to talk about and that is why he keeps postponing it till the very end when he openly admits: Three stories contend within me. One about Flaubert, one about Ellen, one about myself. My own is the simplest of the three—it hardly amounts to more than a convincing proof of my existence—and yet I find it the hardest to begin. My wife’s is more complicated, and more urgent; yet I resist that too. […] But by the time I tell you her story I want you to be prepared: 65

Guignery, Fiction of Julian Barnes, 47. M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. (Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle, 1999), 235. 67 Ibid., 232. 68 Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 97. 66

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that’s to say, I want you to have had enough of books, and parrots, and lost letters, and bears, and the opinions of Dr Enid Starkie, and even the opinions of Dr Geoffrey Braithwaite. Books are not life, however much we might prefer it if they were. Ellen’s is a true story; perhaps it is even the reason why I am telling you Flaubert’s story instead.69

This would make him, in David Leon Higdon’s words, a reluctant narrator, who is reliable in strict terms, indeed often quite learned and perceptive, but who has seen, experienced or caused something so traumatic that he must approach the telling of it through indirections, masks and substitutions.70

The term that Braithwaite uses in the novel is a hesitant narrator and he claims to be one, explaining it with the fact that he is English. He even provides a definition of such a narrator: “a contemporary narrator hesitates, claims uncertainty, misunderstands, plays games and falls into error.”71 The main rhetorical figure Braithwaite and his hesitant colleagues use is aposiopesis, “a sudden break in writing which suggests unwillingness or inability to proceed,”72 which can be found in the following sentences: “I never thought my wife was perfect. I loved her, but I never deceived myself. I remember […] But I’ll keep that for another time”73 or “My wife […] Not now, not now.”74 Similarly, Braithwaite can also be seen as an unreliable narrator, “whose perception, interpretation, and evaluation of the matters he or she narrates do not coincide with the opinions and norms implied by the author, which the author expects the alert reader to share.”75 Pragmatic indications of unreliability are “frequent occurrences of speaker-oriented and addressee-oriented expressions,” whereas syntactic indications are usually considered to be “incomplete sentences, exclamations, interjections,

69

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 85-86. Quoted in Guignery, Fiction of Julian Barnes, 47. 71 Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 89. 72 Guignery, Fiction of Julian Barnes, 47. 73 Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 76. 74 Ibid., 105. 75 Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms, 235. 70

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hesitations, and unmotivated repetition.”76 When it comes to plausible reasons for a narrator’s unreliability, they usually include: psychological states, such as grief or denial; incapacities, such as a low IQ or incomplete grasp of the language, senility, or extreme youth; simple obtuseness or limited information; dishonesty or some other kind of motivation to spin a story in a misleading way.77

Braithwaite’s unreliability is less visible when he talks about Flaubert,78 but once he starts telling his life story, it becomes quite evident. He never lies about anything, but his unreliability comes from his decision to omit some personal information, or from his inability to understand the situations from his own life, or from his tendency to delude himself. As we already know, he defers the crucial information about his wife almost till the end of the story. Yet, he scatters all over the novel some less significant clues about her such as that her eyes were greeny-blue,79 that she accompanied him to France once and that the strap of a new pair of sandals had rubbed up a blister on her heel,80 or that she was not sensible.81 This method of withholding significant information about Ellen makes readers wonder about her and creates the feeling that something is definitely wrong in their relationship. What contributes more to this sense of confusion is Braithwaite’s own confusion about his wife’s life story. This is clearly seen from the fact that he starts it several times and seems unable to settle only on one version: I’ll start again. She was a much-loved only child. She was a much-loved only wife. She was loved, if that’s the word, by what I suppose I must agree to call her lovers, though I’m sure the word over-dignifies some of them. I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn’t love me; we were unhappy; I miss her. Perhaps she was sick of being loved. […] Was she loved too much? Most people can’t be loved too much, but perhaps Ellen

76

Ansgar F. Nünning, “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, eds. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005): 103-04. 77 Suzanne Keen, Narrative Form (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003): 43. 78 Braithwaite’s contradictory attitudes discussed in the previous chapter can be considered an indicator of his unreliability. 79 Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 78. 80 Ibid., 84. 81 Ibid., 102.

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could. Or perhaps her concept of love was simply different: why do we always assume it’s the same for everyone else?82

He is equally perplexed about her decision to kill herself. He asks numerous questions, but gives almost no answers. Actually, instead of answers, he offers more quotations from Flaubert, which proves that even in this most personal chapter, he uses Flaubert as a way to escape from his own life. Another thing that makes Braithwaite unreliable is the fact that he has a great capacity for deluding himself. This refers especially to the belief that his wife is better than Emma Bovary, another adulteress, because she is always nice to him and a good wife. He refuses to see that the things which make her better than Emma are still bad enough: What it’s hard to convey is how untouched by it all she was. She wasn’t corrupted; her spirit didn’t coarsen; she never ran up bills. Sometimes she stayed away a little longer than seemed right; the length of her shopping trips often yielded suspiciously few purchases (she wasn’t that discriminating); those few days in town to catch up on the theatres occurred more often than I would have liked. But she was honourable: she only ever lied to me about her secret life. About that she lied impulsively, recklessly, almost embarrassingly; but about everything else she told me the truth.83

His willingness to continue deluding himself and avoid facing the truth is also seen in his refusal to listen to other people’s warnings and advice, which once again confirms his determination to stay absent from his own life and isolate himself from society. This also corresponds with the fact that he never speaks to Ellen about her secret life, which is the reason why he has to hypothesise and fictionalise in the end. Besides, since his narration is not linear, and since he still keeps some crucial information to himself, we cannot be sure what actually happened to Ellen. It seems that she got depressed, attempted suicide, failed and, consequently, ended up in hospital on life support. Her doctors probably concluded that she could not come out of coma and decided that she needed to be switched off, which was done by Braithwaite, who thought she would have preferred it. What is interesting is the fact that in spite of Braithwaite’s unreliable narration, we still manage to find out the truth, at least one version of it. But this kind of narration usually works like that: while the author and the reader understand one another, the joke is always on the narrator. 82 83

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 162. Ibid., 164.

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Narratee We have already established that the most common pragmatic indicators of a narrator’s unreliability are addressee-oriented expressions. In most cases we assume that the person being addressed is the reader, but there are also situations in which this person becomes a concrete narratee, even a character, whose function is primarily to serve as mediator between the narrator and the reader(s), or rather between the author and the reader(s).84 Since Flaubert’s Parrot is written as a confession, from the very beginning, there is a feeling that Braithwaite is talking to someone. At first, he does not address anyone directly, not even “the reader,” but in the chapter titled “Cross Channel,” the narratee becomes a very specific character—probably a male passenger on the ferry across the channel. Braithwaite first tells him about the sky and the view north,85 then asks questions such as “would you read on?”86 or “Isn’t it perfectly fair?,”87 after which he informs him that he has fetched himself another whisky: “I hope you don’t mind. Just getting braced to tell you about […] what? about whom?”88 The fact that he has to have another drink in order to say this shows that he is embarrassed and finds telling his story difficult and stressful. He also suggests that this person expects something from him,89 and after speaking about various topics, from Flaubert’s dictionary to the types of narrators,90 he finishes this “conversation”91 in the following way: Listen, I hope you won’t think this rude, but I really must take a turn on deck; it’s becoming quite stuffy in the bar here. Why don’t we meet on the boat back instead? The two o’clock ferry, Thursday? I'm sure I’ll feel more like it then. All right? What? No, you can’t come on deck with me. For God’s sake. Besides, I’m going to the lavatory first. I can’t have you following me in there, peering round from the next stall. I apologise; I didn’t mean that. Two o’clock, in the bar, as the ferry sails? Oh, and one last word. The cheese shop in the Grande Rue: don’t 84

Gerald Prince, “Introduction to the Study of the Narratee,” in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980): 21. 85 Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 83. 86 Ibid., 84. 87 Ibid., 85. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 86. 90 Ibid., 86-89. 91 Since the narratee never talks back, this conversation resembles a dramatic monologue.

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miss it. I think the name’s Leroux. I suggest you get a Brillat-Savarin. You won’t get a good one in England unless you bring it back yourself. They’re kept too cold, or they have chemicals injected into them to delay the ripening, or something. That is, if you like cheese…92

At the end of the chapter, Braithwaite says goodbye to the mysterious narratee, reminding him once more about the cheese.93 After this, a kind of narratee shows up in the chapter “The Case Against,” in which Braithwaite defends Flaubert from fifteen different accusations brought upon him by somebody he refers to as “you.” This might be a single person, maybe a critic, or people in general, or critics in general, or anybody else. Then the narratee disappears again, only to reappear in the chapter “Louise Colet’s Version,” where he takes the form of a passerby, or a male acquaintance of Louise Colet, whom she encounters in the street and asks to listen to her story. Although most of the time it appears as if Braithwaite is talking to the reader, the specific narratee-character in the seventh chapter makes us wonder who Braithwaite is really talking to. However, the identity of his narratee(s) will remain unresolved, together with many other mysteries of this novel. Despite the fact that its general conclusion is that truth is not always attainable and that our knowledge of things is uncertain, its final message seems to be that we should never stop searching for them. Unlike his wife Ellen, who, realising the futility of life, decides to kill herself, Braithwaite still continues his search. In the end, his obsession with Flaubert does not only help him to deal with his problems—it also saves his life.

Works Cited Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle, 1999. Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. London: Vintage Books, 2009. Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Brooks, Peter. “Obsessed with the Hermit of Croisset.” The New York Times, 1985. Accessed December 20, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/10/books/-obsessed-with-the-hermitof-croisset.html.

92 93

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 90. Ibid., 105.

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Childs, Peter. Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction since 1970. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. Guignery, Vanessa. “‘A Preference for things Gallic’: Julian Barnes and the French Connection.” In Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs, 37-50. London and New York: Continuum, 2011. —. The Fiction of Julian Barnes. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. Guignery, Vanessa and Ryan Roberts, eds. Conversations with Julian Barnes. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. Keen, Suzanne. Narrative Form. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. Mikics, David. A New Handbook of Literary Terms. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Julian Barnes. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 1997. Nünning, Ansgar F. “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches.” In A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, 89-107. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Prince, Gerald. “Introduction to the Study of the Narratee.” In ReaderResponse Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, edited by Jane P. Tompkins, 7-25. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Roberts, Ryan. “Inventing a Way to the Truth: Life and Fiction in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot.” In Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs, 24-36. London and New York: Continuum, 2011.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Janko ANDRIJAŠEVIû (b. 1971) graduated from the English Department of the Faculty of Philosophy in Niksic in 1995. He got his M.A. degree at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade in 2000. In 2005 he defended his doctoral dissertation on eclectic religion in Aldous Huxley’s prose at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Novi Sad. Since 1995 he has been employed at the Faculty of Philosophy in Niksic. His research interests include: literature and psychology, psychology of religion, medical humanities. Mirjana DANIýIû (1974) gained her BA, MA and PhD degrees from the University of Belgrade, where she has been employed at the English Department since 2002 and where she is currently teaching Translation Studies. The focus of her work and publications is on African American fiction, as well as cultural studies, translation studies and EFL testing. She is the Literary Section Editor of Philologia (ISSN: 1451-5342), the professional, scientific journal for the study of language, literature and culture. She’s a co-author of several books on EFL testing and a co-editor of several conference proceedings. Aleksandra IZGARJAN is an associate professor, University of Novi Sad. She teaches courses in American Literature and American studies at the English Department. She has recently participated in the following projects: “Comparative Studies of Serbian and Foreign Literatures and Cultures” and “Serbian and Foreign Literature and Culture in Contact and Discontact”. She has published two books and more than thirty articles in the field of literature and gender studies. She was a guest lecturer at New York University, Howard University and University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, USA and participated in postgraduate programs at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA and Democracy and Diversity program in Krakow, Poland. She is the president of the Serbian Association for Anglo-American Studies and vice-president of the Association for American Studies in South East Europe.

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Ginger JONES is a Professor of English and coordinator of multicultural activities at Louisiana State University of Alexandria. Jones was a Fulbright scholar in American literature at the University of Montenegro, where she taught African-American literature and American women's literature. She has published book chapters in literary criticism, migration studies, and pedagogy, as well as articles about minority writers and the cultural influence of immigrant women. She resides in central Louisiana. Sandra JOSIPOVIû, PhD, graduated from the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade in 1996. At the Faculty of Philology, she obtained her MA in 2002 with her MA thesis Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) in the Serbian-speaking Region. She has been employed at the Faculty of Philology since 2003. In 2011 she obtained her PhD degree, defending her PhD thesis English Modernism in Serbian Literary Criticism. She had many papers published in Cambridge Scholars Publishing publications. She had her papers published in the journals: Philologia, Romanian Journal of English Studies, etc. She also had her papers published in the proceedings of the international conferences she attended and which took place in Morocco, Austria, Denmark, Montenegro, Serbia. She is an interpreter for the English language and she also translates literary and non-literary texts from the English language into the Serbian language and from the Serbian language into the English language. Marija KRIVOKAPIû teaches 19th- and 20th- century British Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Montenegro, where she also works as a vice-dean for science and international relations. Her publications focus on the work on D. H. Lawrence (Lawrence in Italy, Belgrade 2000; Quest for the Transcendent in D. H. Lawrence’s Prose, Niksic, 2009, as well as a dozen of other short publications), but her recent interest also includes contemporary Native American literature (co-authored with Sanja Runtiü, Suvremena književnost ameriþkih starosjedilaca, Osijek, 2013), and travel writing. Together with Aleksandra Nikþeviü Batriüeviü, she coedited the following Cambridge Scholars Publishing editions: CultureBound Translation and Language in a Global Era, History, Politics, Identity: Reading Literature in a Changing World, Recounting Cultural Encounters, On the Borders of Convention, and The Face of the Other in Anglo-American Literature. She edited and co-edited a series of translations of British, Canadian, South African, and Native American authors. She is the current general editor of linguistics and literature journal Folia linguistica et litteraria. She was a coordinator of an

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international project for the advancement of language studies, SEEPALS 2010-2013, financed by the European Commission. She has enjoyed Fulbright support for research in 2009 and 2015. Gordana KUSTUDIû (b. 1984, Niksic, Montenegro) received her MA Diploma in English Literature from the University of Montenegro in 2011 with the thesis which dealt with the freedom of choice in Huxley’s utopias and dystopias. She works as a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy in Niksic. She is a PhD candidate at the postgraduate doctoral studies in English Literature at the University of Montenegro. In addition, she is the author of several scientific papers, as well as a number of translations in Montenegrin. Armela PANAJOTI started teaching at the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Vlora, Albania soon after her graduation with a Gold Medal (award given to an Albanian student whose grades are all ten – highest Albanian grade). She completed her doctoral thesis on Conrad at the Department of English, University of Tirana, Albania. She is also a member of Joseph Conrad Society (UK). She gave an immense contribution to the foundation of ASSE, the Albanian Society for the Study of English and is at present chair of ASSE, general editor of in esse: English Studies in Albania, the journal the society publishes as well as a member of the Board of ESSE (European Society for the Study of English). For this contribution she was nominated to join the English Association’s Fellowship as a Corresponding Fellow, which she did in February 2011. Ms Panajoti has participated in many international conferences as well as organised several so far in the field of English Studies. Her recent research interests mainly concentrate on cultural studies, especially on matters that explore the relation between language and literature, language and culture. Petar PENDA has a BA in English (University of Priština), MA and PhD in English and American Modernism (University of Banja Luka). He is Associate Professor of English at the University of Banja Luka (Bosnia and Herzegovina), English Department. His main interests include Modernism, contemporary British and American poetry, Medieval English literature, and contemporary theoretical approaches to literary studies. He published a bilingual book of translation Eight Contemporary American Poets (2009), a monograph T. S. Eliot: Poetical and Theoretical Contextualisation (2012), and coedited books Modernisation of Literary and Cultural Studies (2011) and Going Against the Grain (2014). He

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founded a literary journal Philologist and acted as its editor-in-chief for two years. In 2011, he published a chapter on Eliot in Rodopi’s edition T. S. Eliot at 90 (edited by Joe Moffett) and in 2014 he co-authored a book Medieval English Literature. As a Fulbright Scholar, he spent a term at the Columbia University in the City of New York, Department of English and Comparative Literature. Marina RAGACHEWSKAYA is an Associate Professor at the World Literature department at Minsk State Linguistics University, Belarus. She has published widely on D.H. Lawrence, psychoanalytic literary studies and contemporary British writers (around 100 articles in English, Russian and Belarusian). Her recent books are Desire for Love: The Secret Longings of the Human Heart in D. H. Lawrence’s Works (CSP, 2012) and Psychoanalysis in Fiction: David Herbert Lawrence – in Russian (MSLU, 2013). Coming out: New Psychological Forms in the 20th century British Novel (in Russian) (Novoye Znaniye). Dr Ragachewskaya does research into the British novel of the 20th century and studies new forms of psychological representation. Her academic interests include fiction interpretation, psychoanalysis, modernism and postmodernism. Martin ŠTEFL is a PhD student at the Department of Anglophone Literatures & Cultures at Charles University in Prague. His research focuses on philosophical conceptions of place, space and spatiality, and the relationship between ‘physical and psychical spaces’ in modernist literature, aesthetics and philosophy, in particular in the works of D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis. His M.A. thesis on Lawrence was awarded with the ‘Vilém Mathesius Award’ for English literature for the year 2011. Dijana TICA is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Philology, University of Banja Luka (Bosnia-Herzegovina), where she received her MA degree in 2006 (Comical Elements and their Function in Jane Austen’s Novels), and her PhD degree in 2013 (Tragic Heroines in English Nineteenth Century Novels). She is especially interested in English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Shakespeare and English Renaissance Drama. Sonja VITANOVA-STREZOVA is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the Department of English Language and Literature, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. She teaches Victorian, modern and postmodern British fiction within the graduate and postgraduate studies at

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the Department. Vitanova-Strezova has a long list of publications focusing on the areas of her interest: modern and postmodern British fiction, as well as Victorian fiction. Her last publication is a monograph on Ian McEwan’s and Dragi Mihajlovski’s fiction. She is a Corresponding Fellow of the English Association and President of the Macedonian Society for the Study of English in ESSE. Vanja VUKIûEVIû GARIû works as a teaching assistant at the University of Montenegro, Faculty of Philosophy, Department of English language and literature. She obtained her MA degree in English literature from the University of Novi Sad and has recently completed her doctoral studies at the University of Montenegro. The main field of her academic research is the work of James Joyce and modernist poetics, whereas her other interests also include 19th-century English literature, modernist and postmodernist novel, as well as the theory of translation. She has participated in several conferences and published many articles, academic papers and translations of both fiction and non-fiction. Aleksandra ŽEŽELJ KOCIû holds an MA from the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, Serbia, where she is currently a PhD Candidate. Her primary interest is Anglo-American Literature. She has been working as an English Teacher at Philological High School in Belgrade since 2004. She has published a number of papers on diverse literary issues.

INDEX

A Abel, 98 Adam, 98 Ahokas, Pirjo, 192, 195, 206 Alighieri, Dante, 80 Allende, Isabel, 201 Alvarez, Julia, 192, 193, 198201, 203 Ambrosini, Richard, 16, 17, 1921 Anaya, Rudolfo, 194 Anzaldua, Gloria, 205 Aquinas, Thomas, 97, 100, 101, 104 Aristotle, 106 Asian American, 196 Asquith, Lady Cynthia, 28 Aurora, 151 Austen, Jane, 178, 257 autobiographical fiction, 8, 193, 196-201, 203

Bergland, Betty, 199, 206 Berman, Roland, 129, 130, 136 Bhabha, Homi, 195, 204, 206 Bible, the, 4, 94, 106, 164 Bloomsday, 83, 84 Book of Genesis, the, 225 Booker Prize, 9, 221 Bouilhet, Louis, 232, 240 Bradbury, Malcolm, 130, 137 Brooks, Peter, 230, 231, 235, 251 Bruneau, Jean, 235 Buddhism, Buddhist, 161 Budgen, Frank, 81 Burns, Robert 28 Butler, Octavia, 195, 202 Byron, George Gordon, 28

C B Babylon, 106 Baker, Carlos, 126, 136, 137 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 121, 180 Barnes, Julian, 230-252 Flaubert’s Parrot, 230, 232238, 240-252 Barthes, Roland, 4, 83, 90, 96 Bass, Eben, 22, 23 Bataille, George, 103 Bennett, Andrew, 4, 93-99, 102, 103, 105 Benson, Jackson J., 134, 136

Camus, Albert, 220 Carroll, Lewis, 105 Castillo, Anna, 195, 196, 207 Catholic Church, 4, 93, 94, 102-104, 107 Cézanne, Paul, 131, 137 Childs, Peter, 231, 238, 252 Christ, 94, 106, 155 CIA, 201 Cinquecento, 37 Cisneros, Sandra, 192, 193, 198, 203, 205, 208 close reading, 125, 128, 138

Narrative Being Vs. Narrating Being

259

Coetzee, J. M., 9, 219-29 Disgrace, 9, 219-221, 228 The Life and Times of Michael K, 221 Waiting for the Barbarians, 221 Collings, Ernest, 29 Communism, 183 Conrad, Joseph, 12, 14-21, 23, 31, 43, 52, 79, 255 Lord Jim, 1, 12-14, 16, 22, 23 Crusoe, Robinson, 48

F

D

G

Danticat, Edwidge, 192-6, 198, 202, 203, 206, 207 Darwin, Charles, 94 de la Mare, Walter, 28, 31 Deleuze, Gilles, 220, 223, 224, 226, 228 Derrida, 4, 70, 96, 105 deterritorialization, 225 Dojþinoviü, Biljana, 135, 137 Dostoievski, 35 Duckworth Press, 30 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 194, 207

Galsworthy, John, 31 Garnett, Edward, 27-31, 33-6 Genette, Gerard, 7, 170-76, 237, 252 Geok Lim, Shirley, 192 Gergen, Kenneth J., 56, 60, 61, 64, 71 Gergen, Mary M., 56, 60, 61, 64, 71 Gilmore, Leigh, 197, 199, 206, 207 Gjurgjan, Ljiljana, 96, 97, 107 Goya, 44 Great Flood, the, 98 Grmelová, Anna, 57, 58, 64, 71 Guattari, Felix, 219, 220, 223-8 Guignery, Vanessa, 231, 233, 235, 237-9, 241-7, 252 Gunn Allen, Paula, 195, 196, 207 Gurko, Leo, 122, 132, 137

E Eagleton, Terry, 118, 119 Eakin, John Paul, 205, 207 Eisenhower, president, 183 Eliot, George, 49 Eliot, Thomas Sterns, 75, 79, 91, 255, 256 Ellmann, Richard, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 87, 91 Eros, 88, 222, 223, 225 Eve, 134

Fall, the, 98, 226 Fantina, Richard, 126, 127, 135, 137 Fenton, James, 231 Fielder, Leslie, 135 Flaubert, Gustave, 232-51 Fleischmann, Martha, 81 focalization, 7, 170-75 Foucault, M., 223, 228 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 55, 93, 94, 121, 132, 138, 219, 224

H Hall, Collette T., 197, 207 Hamlet, 79 Hardy, Thomas, 49, 53, 56 Heideggerian, Martin, 55 Heinemann, William, 28, 31, 40, 53, 63, 71

260 Hemingway, Ernest, 5, 5, 12, 24, 121-39 “Cat in the Rain,” 132 “Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog,” 125 “Up in Michigan,” 126 “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen,” 133 “Hills Like White Elephants,” 132, 133 “Out of Season,” 127, 128 “The Sea-Change,” 124 A Farewell to Arms, 124, 131, 133, 134, 137-9 A Moveable Feast, 130, 131, 137 Across the River and Into the Trees, 134, 138 In Our Time, 127 The Snows of Kilimanjaro, 126 Three Stories and Ten Poems, 126 The Sun Also Rises, 122-4, 137 To Have and Have Not, 128, 129, 137 Hinduism, 162, 163 Hispanic American, 193 historiographic metafiction, 8, 193, 200-203, 230 Ho Chi Minh, 183 Hollywood, 151, 153, 163, 167, 214 Homer, 40 Hopkins, 250, 79, 252 Hueffer, Ford Madox, 28, 29 Hutcheon, Linda, 200, 201, 207, 230, 252 Huxley, Aldous, 141-67, 253, 255 After Many a Summer, 6, 151, 152, 155, 156, 161, 163, 165, 167 Antic Hay, 151, 152 Brave New World, 141, 143 Crome Yellow, 151, 152 Eyeless in Gaza, 154

Index Island, 6, 140-2, 144, 146, 147, 149 Those Barren Leaves, 151 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 153

I Ibañez, Beatriz P., 131, 137 Isolde, 98

J James, Henry, 37, 135, 136 Jen, Gish, 192, 203 Jesuit, Johnson, Edgar, 152, Johnson, president, 183 Jones, Gayle, 194 jouissance, 222 Joyce, James, 36, 73-91, 93-108, 257 “A Painful Case,” 77 “Grace,” 100 “The Dead,” 86 “The Sisters,” 86 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 3-5, 74-6, 86, 88, 89, 91, 96, 100, 102, 103, 107, 108 Dubliners, 3, 4, 77, 80, 86, 89, 91, 95, 100, 101, 108 Exiles, 77, 80 Finnegans Wake, 3-5, 76, 82, 86, 94, 98, 100-102, 105, 106, 107 Stephen Hero, 74, 75, 77, 79, 91 Ulysses, 3, 4, 73, 75-7, 79, 80, 82, 83, 86, 89, 90, 91, 94, 99, 100, 102-5, 108 Joyce, Lucia, 82 Joyce, Nora, 82, 83, 87, 89 Joyce, Stanislaus, 75, 78, 91, 93, 101, 108

Narrative Being Vs. Narrating Being Judas, 94

K Kafka, Franz, 220 Kain, 98 Kennedy, John, 183 Kenner, Hugh, 77, 91 Kermode, Frank, 177 Kincaid, Jamaica, 192, 198, 200, 202 Kingsolver, Barbara, 201, 203, 206 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 192, 194, 197-201, 203-7 Kneževiü, Marija, 37, 41, 48, 52, 84, 91, 211 Köhler, Angelika, 196, 207 Kristeva, Julia, 7, 170, 171, 179, 180, 181

L Lacan, Lacanian, 80, 87, 219, 222, 224, 225, 229 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 192, 206 Lasch, Christopher, 220, 229 Lawrence, David Herbert, 26-59, 61-72, 129, 137, 219, 254, 256 “England, My England!”, 2, 32, 63, 66, 69 “Shadow in the Rose Garden,” 66 “The Blind Man,” 70 “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” 66 “The Man Who Loved Islands,” 65, 66, 68-72 “The Shades of Spring,” 2, 57, 64, 65, 69 “You Touched Me,” 70 Aaron’s Rod, 2, 36, 38-40, 53 England, My England, 55 Kangaroo, 2, 36, 47-53 Trespasser, 29, 31

261

Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious, 61 Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, 219 Sea and Sardinia, 2, 36, 40-45, 52, 53 Sons and Lovers, 28, 30, 32, 33 Studies in Classic American Literature, 56, 62, 63, 71 The Crown, 56, 62 The Lost Girl, 29, 42 The Rainbow, 2, 33, 36 Twilight in Italy, 42, 56, 62 White Peacock, 28 Women in Love, 2, 36, 37 Lawrence, Frieda, 28, 36 Lee, Keg-fan, 204, 207 Levin, Harry, 76, 91 Lowe-Evans, Mary, 93, 95, 96, 99-102, 104, 108 Lucky Luke, 87 Lumumba, Patrice, 201 Lynn, Kenneth, 126, 132, 138

M MacIntyre, Alasdair, 16, 24 magic realism, 8, 193, 194, 203 Mallarme, 79 Mandela, Nelson, 219, 226 Mankiewicz, Herman, 151 Marcus, Mordecai, 12, 13, 23 Marinetti, 35 Marxism, 220 McEwan, Ian, 170-181 Atonement, 7, 170, 171, 173, 175-9, 181 McLeod, Arthur, 28, 30, 32 Mercanton, Jacque, 78, 82, 91 Meredith, 29 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 135 Metafiction, 178, 181, 230 Michelangelo, David, 37 Modernism, 1, 6, 121, 129, 2546

262 Moretti, Franco, 5, 109, 110, 119 Morgan, Janice, 197, 198, 207 Morrison, Toni, 8, 194, 202, 207, 209-18, 224 Beloved, 202, 207, 210, 211, 216-8 Jazz, 210, 211, 217, 218 Paradise,210-2, 215-8 Playing in the Dark, 209, 218 Song of Solomon, 209, 216 Moses, 94 Mukherjee, Bharati, 202, 203 Mullen, Haryette, 203, 208 Müller, Kurt, 12, 24 Multicultural literature, 202 My Lai, the massacre, 183, 183, 191

N Nabokov, Vladimir, 82, 91 narratology, 132, 138, 175 Native American, 45, 195, 196, 254 Naylor, Gloria, 194 New Criticism, 128 Newman, M. E. J., 109, 119 Nietzsche, Nietzschean, 26, 55, 57, 59-62, 70, 71, 97, 220, 227 Nolan, Charles Jr., 125, 128, 138 O O’Brien, Tim, 182-91 Going After Cacciato, 184, 185 The Things They Carried, 1826, 188-91 O’Neill, Tip, 219 Oedipus, Oedipal, 220, 223, 228 omniscient narrator, 13, 175, 176 One Thousand and One Nights, 87

Index oral tradition, 193, 195, 196, 198, 205 Orwell, George, 220 Oster, Judith, 206, 208

P palimpsest, 8, 132, 193 Perkins, Maxwell, 126 Piazza della Signoria, 37 Plato, 106, 179 Pléiade Correspondance, 235 Polanyi, Michael, 99 polilogue, 171 Polyvocality, 193, 200, 205 Popper, Amalia, 81 Postcolonialism, 201, 202, 203 Postmodernism, 197, 199, 200, 206, 207, 216, 226, 230, 252 Preston, Peter, 40, 44, 53 Proust, 79 Psychoanalysis, 55, 61, 71, 98, 220, 256 Public Broadcasting Station (PBS), 183

R Renaissance, 37, 38, 256 Rich, Adrianne, 196 Ricoeur, Paul, 54, 55, 62, 65, 72 Romanticism, 28 Royle, Nicholas, 4, 93-9, 102, 103, 105, 107

S Said, Edward, 26, 27, 51, 53, 79, 85, 88, 89, 92 Sanskrit, 163 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 232 Saturday Westminster Gazette, 29

Narrative Being Vs. Narrating Being Savage, Henry, 34, 35 Scholes, Robert, 75, 88, 91, 92 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1, 12-15, 18, 19, 22, 24, 56 Schorer, Mark, 130 Schwenger, Peter, 130, 134, 138 Shakespeare, William, 78, 79, 90, 256 Shaw, George Bernard, 31 Shelley, Percy, 28 Shivaists, 163 Schlesinger, Elisa, 232, 237 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 194 Simic, Charles, 121 Simon, Sherry, 204, 208 Solipsism, 78, 234 Spanish Civil War, the, 159 St. John, 96 Stendhal, Frederic, 134, 138, 219 Stephens, Robert O., 134, 138 Stiegler, Bernard, 70 Strindberg, 31 Sunday Telegraph, 221 Synge, 31

T Tan, Amy, 192, 193, 198 Tasiü, Vladimir, 87, 92 Taylor, Charles, 54 Tchekhov, 30 Tennyson, Alfred, 6, 151 Thoreau, Henry David, 136 Timmerman, John H., 186, 191 Tithonus, 6, 151, 166 Tolstoi, 35 translingual literature, 202 transpersonalism, 160-63 Travis, Jennifer, 134, 138

Tristan, 98 Truman, president, 183 Turgenev, 35

V Vaishnaivism, 161 Vatican Council, 104 Velasquez, 44 Velimiroviü, Nikolaj, 164, 167 Venus of Melos, 34 Vietnam War, the, 7, 182, 191 Virgil, 42 Virgin Mary, 158, 159

W Walker, Alice, 192, 194, 195, 198, 202, 206, 224 Webb, Donn, 219 Welch, James, 194 Welles, Orson, 151 Wesley, Marilyn, 182, 190, 191 Wilde, Oscar, 42 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 129 Woolf, Virginia, 110-13, 11416, 118-20 Mrs. Dalloway, 5, 109-118, 120 World War II, 172, 173, 183 Worthen, John, 46, 47, 53

Y Yeats, William Butler, 25, 30, 73 yoga, 163

263