Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Burns 9 May 1994
Response to The Passsion
1. Fantasies
Characters fantasize about power and happiness. They fantasize about childhood and porridge,
hot bread and French fields. People fantasize about innocence. “I wish I were a holy man so I
could jump in the fire and burn my sins away” (7). “At night I dream of dandelions” (9). Also,
people connect fantasy with romance. “Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between
equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life”
(13). People fantasize about military victory. “Other stories concerned a balloon landing, a man
firing cannon, and a plan to blow up the House of Parliament.…If Bonaparte had asked us to
strap on wings and fly to St James Palace, we would have set off as confidently as a child lets
loose a kite” (21). People fantasize about sexy activities in abstract terms. “Here, without
women, with only our imagination and a handful of whore…” (27). Henri fantasizes about
words. “Words like passion and extasy, we learn them but they stay flat on the page” (155).
Henri also fantasizes about Villanelle, but he doesn’t realize it. “I am in love with her, not a
fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making” (157)
2. The opening quote from Medea.
Henri and Villanelle are lost: Henri in Venice, the army, and his male body; Villanelle in the
stories of Henri. Henri has problems setting up the idea of otherness. He wants everything to
be part of his story, his ego. He is therefore paranoid and schizophrenic. “Her. A person who is
not me” (158), he finally realizes. It takes a whole novel (at least) for him to draw ego
boundaries. He speaks earlier of “my first upsurge of self” (68) when he meets Villanelle and
moves away from Napoleon, in whom he was absorbed.
3. Narrative. Trust me.
Henri seems worried that since he serves as the primary and initial narrator in the novel, he is
subject to mistrust. Perhaps his faith in his own narrative abilities is weak enough that listeners
and readers have no good reason to trust him. Napoleon trusted him and he had never given the
Emperor reason not to (88), but the reader cannot have a record or a memory of Henri’s
honorable behavior or trustworthiness. A realworld audience cannot experience Henri, so he is
left battling the divide between his audience and himself. His refrain “I’m telling stories, trust
me” (5) suggests both a naïveté and a slight fear that his audience will not see the value of his
stories and, by extension, the value of himself.