LITERATURE

AND THE WRITER

Rodopi Perspectives on Modern Literature

Edited by
David Bevan
 LITERATURE
AND THE WRITER

Edited by
Michael J. Meyer

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2004

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
" I S 0 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence".

ISBN : 90-420-1653-1 (Bound)

@Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004
Printed in The Netherlands
 CONTENTS

Introduction vii

Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium”: The Conundra of Writing

and Editing Watt 1
Mark Byron

Decapitation, Castration and Creativity in Elena Garro’s

Andamos huyendo Lola [We Are Fleeing Lola] 19
Marketta Laurila

Unauthoring the Text 43

Laura Kathleen Reeck

The Novel Construction of the Writer: Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic

Authors in The Golden Notebook 59
Marjorie Worthington

Memory, Memoir, and Fictions in the Autobiographics of Kim Chernin 79

Connie Griffin

Stephen King’s Writers: The Critical Politics of Literary Quality

in Misery and The Dark Half 97
Michael J. Meyer

Whose Story Is It?: Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies and the Voice
of Self-Invention 119
Mary Catanzaro

“Only Half Here”: Don DeLillo’s Image of the Writer in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction 135
David Clippinger
vi Contents

The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig: Faulkner’s Disdain for
the Reader 155
Gene C. Fant, Jr.

Woolf and Welty, Readers and Writers, Writing and Unwriting 175
Reine Dugas Bouton

Writing the Writer: The Question of Authorship in the Novels of 191

Martin Amis
Magdalena Ma
czyńska

Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing: “Realities that arise from

the craft itself ” 209
Lawrence Stanley

A Narrative of Ethical Proportions: History, Memory, and

Writing in Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions 227
Laurie Edson

About the Authors 243

 INTRODUCTION

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

In the above excerpt from On Writing, Stephen King suggests that there are
certain qualities that define competent writers and that such traits are not only
recognizable but are emotionally powerful, moving readers to admire the
craftsmanship of such wordsmiths, as well as to wish they could emulate them
and produce similar prose masterpieces.
When this current volume was first conceived, my initial idea was that the
essays would shed light on several dimensions of the authorial craft. It would
examine not only writers’ choice of vocabulary, but also their deliberate selec-
tion of grammatical constructions and word order and their seamless weaving
together of plots and imagery. It would also draw attention to how the writing
process impacts the development of characters and the formulation of thematic
strands in fiction.
Given these rather limited expectations, the wide variety of proposals sur-
prised me. They included studies of classic American texts by Faulkner and
Hemingway, autobiographical re-invention of self in the works of Samuel Beckett
and the importance of so-called “literary” quality to the writers depicted in
Stephen King’s The Dark Half and Misery. An analysis of the writer/narrators
in Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions represents developing nations while a
study of the French authors Djaídani and Smaíl depicts how a writer’s ethnicity/
minority status affects both his personal philosophy and his writing technique. In
addition, some essays examine whether the fictional authorial characters created
by writers are self-referential while still others dissect autobiographical non-fiction
to determine how an author perceives the composing process.
Besides the variety of authors represented, what was most impressive about
the proposals was the wide range of subject matter discussed. Since the call for
viii Introduction
papers allowed for very creative and individualistic approaches, popular fic-
tion as well as modern classics were represented; traditional writers were
examined, and contrasts were established with those who preferred to follow
experimental trends. Modernists were set against postmodernists, absurdists
vs. realists, minority ethnicities vs. majority cultures, and dominant genders
appeared in contrast to subordinated ones.
The range of essays submitted demonstrated clearly the complexities of the
writing process evident not only in different genres but in different time frames
and in varied cultural milieus as well. Clearly, the writing profession provides
an unending dilemma that deserves to be explored in more depth: we need to
determine how authorial voices confuse while simultaneously elucidating their
audience, how texts are constructed by authors and yet deconstructed by the
very words they choose to include, how silence functions as inaudible yet audi-
ble discourse; and how authorial self-concept shapes not only itself but is also
echoed in the fictional characters/writers who appear in the texts.
As readers examine the essays in this collection, they will see that some
essayists predict a dire future for the art of writing while still others suggest
that some writers harbor disdain for an uneducated and unreceptive reading
public. This latter argument suggests that the failure of the written word to
communicate is due not to the failure of the composition itself but rather to the
deficiencies in its audience, individuals who can no longer decipher messages
because the complexities of the text bewilder and confound them rather than
challenge them to move toward understanding. However, it is my belief that,
quite to the contrary, none of the essays presented here will confound readers
and that the authors have carefully considered their audience and avoided not
only literary jargon but also convoluted and wordy prose constructions.
A final aspect of this volume is its analysis of how a variety of cultural, eco-
nomic, and personal factors influence the writing process. Some studies docu-
ment how individuals such as Paul Cezanne and Virginia Woolf had a significant
impact on the writing styles of Ernest Hemingway and Eudora Welty. Other stud-
ies focus on how dominant cultures create uneasy silence and develop repressed
authors who are reluctant to speak out for fear of retribution or ridicule. Still oth-
ers discuss commercialization of the art in Don DeLillo and Martin Amis.
As King notes, the goal of all writers should be to “write what you like and
then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal
knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex and work” (161). Moreover,
and most importantly, King reminds his audience that frequent reading creates
an ease and intimacy with the process of writing and provides a growing
knowledge of “what has been done and what hasn”t, what is trite and what is
fresh, what works and what lies there dying (or dead) on the page.” (150)
Certainly, the authors under consideration in this volume have followed
King’s dictums. Consequently, the authors/personas in their works seem keenly
 Introduction ix

aware that the more well-read they are, the less likely it is that they will make
fools of themselves with their pens or their word processors. May those who
read these essays similarly benefit from work designed to help them examine
the complexities of setting words on paper to express the most intimate personal
thoughts and feelings about life.
Michael J. Meyer
DePaul University 2004
This page intentionally left blank
 BECKETT’S “TENTH RATE XENIUM”: THE
CONUNDRA OF WRITING AND EDITING WATT

MARK BYRON

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

some of these features, and will demonstrate how they vigorously question
the very notions of authorship, narrating, and editing, and the status of the
completed or completable literary object.

I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of
knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always
adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that
my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking
away, in subtracting rather than adding.
—Samuel Beckett to James Knowlson, 27 October 19891

Samuel Beckett’s aesthetics of impoverishment developed over a long lifetime

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

1
Qtd. in Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London:
Bloomsbury, 1996), 352.
 Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium” 3

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

The immediate circumstances of the text’s composition, though complex, need to

be stated briefly here. Beckett had moved permanently to Paris in 1938, follow-
ing years of restless movement between Dublin, London, Germany, and Paris. In

2
Qtd. in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (1978; London: Vintage,
1990), 386–387.
3
“Dante … Bruno. Vico … Joyce,” in Samuel Beckett, et al., Our Exagmination
Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929; London: Faber,
1972), 14.
4 Mark Byron

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

13
Knowlson, 396.
14
Samuel Beckett, Watt (1953; New York: Grove, 1959), 238. All subsequent quota-
tions are taken from this edition unless otherwise indicated and are incorporated in the text.
 Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium” 7

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

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

15
Thomas J. Cousineau, “Watt: Language as Interdiction and Consolation,” in The
Beckett Studies Reader, ed. S. E. Gontarski (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1993), 64.
16
Cousineau, 71.
 Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium” 9

point in the text the reader does not yet know that Sam may be telling the story,
but the first-person narrator is evident:

But he assured me at the time, when he began to spin his yarn, that he would tell
all, and then again, some years later, when he had spun his yarn, that he had told
all. And as I believed him then and then again, so I continued to believe him, long
after the yarn was spun, and Watt gone. (125)

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

From this it will perhaps be suspected:

that the inversion affected, not the order of the
sentences, but that of the words only;
that the inversion was imperfect;
that ellipse was frequent;
that euphony was a preoccupation;
that spontaneity was perhaps not absent;
that there was perhaps more than a reversal of
discourse;
that the thought was perhaps inverted. (164)
10 Mark Byron

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

17
Hugh Culik, “The Place of Watt in Beckett’s Development,” Modern Fiction
Studies 29.1 (1983): 67.
 Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium” 11

In sum, these spatial irregularities all contribute to the text’s faultlines.

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

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

III

Several features of the text estrange the story from its simple telling: the struc-
ture of the narrative, its division between the reportage of Watt’s words and the
mediation of Sam’s notes, the presence of a seemingly independent narrator,
and the strong presence of at least one editor. Yet the text of Watt is suspended
in a way anterior to all of these matters. Watt signals in its structures a profound
questioning of its status as a literary work and as a novel. In this way, it embod-
ies a radically different kind of text than previously imagined. Watt is often
placed within a prose tradition that seeks to unsettle literary conventions by
means of the text’s appearance. (Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Finnegans Wake
are other texts within this tradition.) Yet this text functions at a more basic level;
it actually situates itself anterior to the idea of the novel as a stable text assem-
blage. Watt is a suspension of literary assumptions, and is a considered appraisal
of the question embedded in its own title: what is the text to be, and thus, to do?
That question may be considered, if not answered, by digging beneath the text’s
architecture, and by considering the way its archive may inform the text mate-
rial and the process of reading.
 Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium” 13

Beckett’s manuscript notebooks and the typescript contain large portions of

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

the narrative remains unfinished from the respective viewpoints of Sam, the
narrator, and the editorial persona. But whether or not the novel is seen to be
finished as a text will determine what kind of production it is understood to be.
Critics have expressed deep ambivalence towards the Addenda and the appar-
ent stalling of the narrative toward the novel’s end. Instead of transposing an ill-
fitting scheme of aesthetic completion (or of fragmentary innovation) onto the
material, it may be better understood by allowing its archive the role indicated
by the published text and particularly the Addenda. The text material, includ-
ing the manuscripts and typescript, are part of a text process, an assemblage
towards the realization of the text by author, reader, and critic.
Several Addenda fragments, particularly those concerned with portraiture,
point to a submerged meditation on composition and authorship. Knott’s music
room—with its piano, bust of Buxtehude, and ravanastron that “hung, on the
wall, like a plover” (71)—initially served as the Quin family’s dining room in
Beckett’s manuscripts. Portraits of Quin’s father and mother (Alexander, and
Leda, née Swan) occupy the dining room walls, and vestiges of these dynastic
monuments are present in the Addenda. The reader is informed, cryptically,
that Quin pater is painted by “Art Conn O’Connery, called Black Velvet
O’Connery, a product of the great Chinnery-Slattery tradition” (247): a “tradi-
tion” of two exiled Irish painters with little aesthetic common ground. The por-
trait itself survives as the “second painting in Erskine’s room,” graphically
described later in the Addenda, featuring (save for the sheet of music placed on his
lap) a naked and remarkably dirty man at the piano, striking a chord (250–251).
In the manuscripts, the painting has the bust of Buxtehude resting on its face
beneath the piano, beside which is the ravanastron and its bow. This irreverent
joke is absent from the published text, or more accurately, is submerged in it.
The manuscript episode of Alexander Quin’s portrait is important as an
emblem of this archiving process: the ekphrasis of the painting is separated in
time and context from Knott’s piano in Watt, but the manuscript combines
themes of written composition (Alexander Quin’s treatise on the ravanastron),
musicianship, and painting.
Quin mater—“her married life one long drawsheet” (247)—is painted by
Matthew David McGilligan, the “Master of the Leopardstown Half-Lengths”
(247). Matthew McGilligan is the subject of a lengthy, baroque episode in the
manuscripts. The episode contains an early draft of Dum Spiro’s ecclesiastical
question posed in Part I of Watt. McGilligan’s dissertation, the “Mus Eventratus
McGilligani,” also foreshadows Ernest Louit’s dissertation in Part III of Watt.
The manuscript episode constitutes a portrait of the indigent artist, who, seeking
spiritual succor in the Catholic Church, is transported into a state of aesthetic
illumination when exposed to the magnificence of Rome. McGilligan is roused
into sensual appreciation of art when he discovers a painting by “Gerald of the
Nights” in the Galleria Doria Pamphili, depicting a girl in her nightdress catching
 Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium” 15

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

The appearance of the music in the Addenda is itself tortuous, some editions
(Olympia, Grove and Italian) presenting the complete sentence of introduction
with the music; others (Calder, Swedish and Spanish) retaining the sentence but omit-
ting the music; yet others (Minuit and German) omitting both; and the Norwegian
translation retaining both but “correcting” mistakes of key and time-signature.20

18
The lyrics are simply the wording of 52.285714 (i.e. fifty-two and two-
sevenths), the number of weeks in a leap year to six decimal places. This calculation is
significant with regard to the manuscript episode from which it derives—a debate over
literary merit between the narrator and Arsene, enumerating the number of weeks avail-
able for a literary text to make the best-seller list during a leap year.
19
Knowlson, 43–44; Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1970), 349.
20
Chris Ackerley, “Fatigue and Disgust: The Addenda to Watt,” Samuel Beckett
Today/Aujourd’hui 2 (1993): 186.
16 Mark Byron

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

21
Ackerley, 180.
 Beckett’s “Tenth Rate Xenium” 17

its author, to the conditions of its composition and transmission, or to its audience.
The condition of displacement that suffuses the narrative (and its composition)
presents a foundational challenge to its text status. This can be realized in a
reading process that is able to identify the radical challenge to the possibility of
literary production.
These interrogations of text status and unity address questions of literary
authority of foremost concern to the critical appraisal of modernism. As Michael
Groden asks:

Is the author always engaged in the “creative process” or only up to a point, after
that point becoming more a revizer or editor? Are we concerned with an isolated
human being who conceives and writes a work, or the social being who, willingly
or reluctantly, collaborates with others (manuscript editor, copyeditor, printers,
proofreaders) to achieve a public text? Can an author, or any of these individuals,
be seen as an autonomous, unified subject isolated from other forces (social, eco-
nomic, historical, psychological)?22

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

Conclusion

If it is possible or desirable to consider Watt an “experimental” or “proto-

postmodern” novel, it embodies much more than an exploration of now-settled
prose conventions. It indicates, through oblique reference and in its patterns of
construction, the notion of a looming, unruly archive, in which multiple narrative
choices were made available, alternative plot structures were explored and
abandoned, and where narrators and characters appeared in earlier manifesta-
tions. This formal breakthrough in Watt is evident upon each page: its history
as an unresolved set of fictional, imaginary, and real manuscripts. The struc-
tures of contingency, fragmentation, and the non sequitur are not evidence of
authorial or narrative equivocation, but are eminently suitable choices for a
work composed in conditions of extreme duress and published following a pre-
carious life in manuscript. The novel’s structures are the means by which this

22
Michael Groden, “Contemporary Textual and Literary Theory,” in George
Bornstein, ed., Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation (Ann Arbor: U
of Michigan P, 1991), 264.
18 Mark Byron

textual history is scrupulously recorded. This essay has attempted to document

some of these features and to demonstrate how they vigorously question
notions of authorship, narrating, and editing, and the status of the completed or
completable literary object.
But what about the quotation contained in the title of this essay, Beckett’s
“tenth rate xenium”? This exotic word functions an emblem of contingent
interplay between stages of the text’s composition, and of the various narrative
and editorial personae attempting to give it coherent shape. The word appears
towards the end of Part II, as Watt meditates on the phenomenon of Knott’s
abode:

Yes, nothing changed, in Mr Knott’s establishment, because nothing remained, and

nothing came or went, because all was a coming and a going.
Watt seemed highly pleased with this tenth rate xenia. Spoken as he spoke it, back
to front, it had a certain air, it is true. (131–132)

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

MARKETTA LAURILA

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

In Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism, Debra

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

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

moved on to Spain, where her Mexican passport was confiscated, and finally
settled in France.2
These events had a profound affect on Garro’s literary career, her attitude
toward authorship, and the creation of the writer/artist protagonists of the
works published after a thirteen year hiatus. Garro initially, however, remained
silent in response to personal and political persecution, to misrepresentations
of her words and actions, to the limitations of her broken health and to the
demands of single parenting. Castillo admonishes,

As a political strategy, however, to embrace silence is clearly of limited value.

Silence alone cannot provide an adequate basis for either a theory of literature or
concrete political action. Eventually, the woman must break silence and write,
negotiating the tricky domains of the said and the unsaid, the words written down,
as Lispector would have it, smudging the page, and the words left, for whatever
reason, between the lines (42).

Following a similar imperative, Garro again wrote and published; she wrote
of loneliness, loss, fear and persecution while denouncing the silencing of the
female authorial voice and the sado-masochistic underpinnings of male–female
relationships. Garro’s protagonists, as the author herself, suffer the negative con-
sequences of female authorship and other creative activity. In these novels, Garro
implicitly denounces the hypocrisy of the Latin American leftist intellectual who
takes upon himself the social, political and economic privileges of the previous
aristocratic elite and who represses the female narrative voice even as he
claims to express alternate (more real) realities than those of official discourse.
While Garro’s protagonists decry male control of authorship, and their own
forced silence, they reclaim their own right to author-ity as they create a differ-
ent reality, a magical reality of their own making or a new meaning for the reality
created by male writers.3
To address the problems confronting the female author/creative artist, Garro
creates an alternate discourse characterized by omission, marginal perspectives,
ambiguity, displacement and troping. Through this discourse, Garro and her
protagonists appropriate silence as they appear to submit to injunctions to
silence, with respect to their narrative voice, while at the same time telling the

2
I am indebted to Michèle Muncy for this information and other biographical
data on Elena Garro. See the interview with Elena Garro and the chronology that
Muncy derived from several conversations with the writer. Michèle Muncy, “The
Author Speaks …” in A Different Reality: Studies on the Work of Elena Garro, edited by
Anita K. Stoll (Lewisburg, London and Toronto: Bucknell University Press, 1990).
3
The collection of critical essays on Garro edited by Anita K. Stoll appropriately
bears the title, A Different Reality: Studies on the Work of Elena Garro (Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 1990).
 Decapitation, Castration and Creativity 21

story of the silencing of the female writer. Garro’s protagonists, who represent
her authorial persona, repeatedly encounter verbal, written or symbolic injunc-
tions to silence, are often coerced into silence, and, in some cases, are permanently
silenced through murder. The reader must assume an active role in decoding
Garro’s silent discourse, reading between the lines to uncover the textual basis
of the violence against the female protagonists and their apparently unmoti-
vated passivity. Delia Galván and Michele Muncy have discussed the passivity
of Garro’s female protagonists and the different tone of the narratives of
Garro’s literary production following the hiatus.4 Galván states that the tender-
ness, joy and charm that characterized Garro’s earlier period are scarce in her
later works and suggests that the passivity of the female protagonists is mad-
dening to male critics unable or unwilling to read the silence in the texts.5 The
playfulness associated with creativity in Garro’s earlier work gives way to a
sense of fear of and ambivalence toward authorship in these later narratives. In
addition, Garro’s use of ambiguous endings, characteristic of her alternate dis-
course, leaves the reader to wonder about the real fate of the protagonist-authors,
who may have escaped, may have been murdered, or have committed suicide.
The tragic or near tragic destiny of all of the protagonists emphasize the dan-
ger of creativity and explain the protagonists’ understandable ambivalence in
the face of these consequences.
In Andamos huyendo Lola [We Are Fleeing Lola],6 Garro examines the
process of writing and the consequences of authorship for the female writer
and other marginalized groups. By means of her discourse of silence, she nar-
ratively represents the silence to which Lelinca is condemned while at the same
time obliquely describing the terror this female writer-protagonist experiences
as a result of her attempt to usurp the (male) authorial voice. The majority of
the stories in this collection document the flight of Lelincaa and her daughter

4
Delia Galván, “Las heroínas de Elena Garro,” La Palabra y el Hombre: Revista
de la Universidad Veracruzana 65 (1988): 144–153. See note 1 for citation for Muncy’s
article. A fifteen year period of silence characterizes Garro’s literary production. While
some critics divide Garro’s work into two periods (1958–1964 and 1979 onward), oth-
ers such as Rhina Toruño-Castañeda, believe that Garro never stopped writing although
she did stop publishing. Toruño-Casteñeda explains that Garro was not able to publish
because of censorship from two centers of power: the government (because of her
alleged participation in a plot against the government and her outspoken support for the
peasants) and her ex-husband Octavio Paz and his group of supporters. Rhina Toruño-
Castañeda, “Protesta contra la opresión: categories medulares en la obra narrativa y
dramática de Elena Garro,” Deslinde: Revista de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la
UANL 11, no. 35–36 (1992): 93–95.
5
Muncy, 148.
6
Elena Garro, Andamos huyendo Lola, (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1980). All sub-
sequent references in the text are to this edition. Page numbers are given in parentheses.
All translations are my own since there is no published translation.
22 Marketta Laurila

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

7
The same four protagonists are the central characters in these five stories that
will be analyzed in detail in this study. In support of the main premise of this study, ref-
erences will be made to the other stories in which they play a marginal role or are
absent.
 Decapitation, Castration and Creativity 23

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

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

8
Elena Garro, Los recuerdos del porvenir (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1986). Elena
Garro, Recollection of Things to Come (Austin: The Texas University Press, 1986). This
is one of the few works by Garro translated into English. Unfortunately, it has been out
of print since 1995.
 Decapitation, Castration and Creativity 25

also another mother–daughter pair (Aube and Karin, respectively), to live in

ever greater fear of unknown malevolent forces. Mr. Soffer’s safe-haven turns
into hell as mistrust characterizes the relationships between the inhabitants,
who are uncertain of each other’s loyalties, and as several inhabitants become
victims of violence.
Lelinca and Lucía appear to be the main target of strangers who stalk the
building and inquire about the two women. One of these, a strange man who
poses as a representative of a fashion house, pretends he wants to launch Karin’s
modeling career. When he comments to Lelinca that he understands she is an
expert in fashion, she appropriates his metaphor and comes dangerously close to
expressing, rather than keeping silent, why he and others are persecuting her:
—Me gusta la moda “Gatsby”. ¡Es increíble la fuerza que puede tener un
escritor!-contestó ella.
El hombre pareció contrariado. ¿Un escritor? ¿Qué quería decir aquella
mujer? El no estaba allí para hablar de escritores … sino de modas.
—¿Quién era el presidente de los Estados Unidos cuando se escribió El Gran
Gatsby?—preguntó la señora Lelinca.
—No lo recuerdo, señora—contestó el hombre con aire molesto.
—¡No se preocupe! Nadie lo recuerda, pero todos recordamos
a “Gatsby.”—afirmó ella.

Aube y Karin se miraron sorprendidas. Después, una sospecha oscureció sus

frentes claras y observaron al visitante que se revolvía incómodo en la silla de
mimbre: iba demasiado bien peinado y sus maneras eran rebuscadas. El nombre de
Scott Fitzgerald sonaba muy extraño frente a aquel hombre de mirada vidriosa. No
sabían porque aquel diálogo era peligroso y escuchaban hipnotizadas (82).

[I like the “Gatsby” style. It’s incredible the power that a writer can have!—she
answered. He seemed annoyed. A writer? What did that women mean? He was not
there to talk about writers … but rather fashions.
—Who was the president of the United States when The Great Gatsby was
written?—Miss Lelinca asked.
—I don’t remember, Madame—answered the man in an irritated way.
—Don’t worry, none of us do. But we all remember “Gatsby.”— She affirmed.

Aube and Karin looked at each other surprised. Then a dark shadow of suspicion
covered their clear foreheads and they observed the visitor who was squirming
uncomfortably in the wicker chair: his hair was too well combed and his manners
were affected. Scott Fitzgerald’s name sounded strange in front of that man with
the glassy look. They did not know why that dialogue was dangerous, and they lis-
tened hypnotized.]

The dialogue juxtaposes two forms of power by comparing the president

and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As Lelinca demonstrates, the writer’s influence is more
powerful and continues beyond that of the political figure, powerful as he may
26 Marketta Laurila

be. In Lelinca’s oblique, silent discourse, fashion functions as a metaphor to

“hide” or replace the power of the creative text. Fashion suggests both a creator
and a public to whom the fashion appeals (over whom it has power). When the
man states that Lelinca is an expert in fashion, he reveals her crime and the reason
she is persecuted so relentlessly: she is an expert writer and, therefore, poten-
tially powerful. Moreover, she does not have the right to authorship, which is
reserved for those who are officially authorized by virtue of gender, race and
politics. Lelinca, Lola and Petrouska are denied the right to authorship because
of their marginalized status: Lelinca because of her gender, Lola because of her
aesthetic rather than functional art, and Petrouska because of his politics. Of
course, the latter two are doubly marginalized because they are also cats, whose
skewed discourse challenges the dominant one. Writing for them is transgres-
sion, and, therefore, they suffer severe consequences for this subversive act.
Aube and Karin, although unable to decipher the conversation, realize, how-
ever, that it is dangerous just as they perceive that the man is far removed from
the likes of Fitzgerald. It is dangerous because Lelinca, in her status as “public,”
does not have the right to words, to creating “fashion.” While waiting to get a
visa to remain in the United States, Lelinca observes the following: “Era un
lugar oficial para ‘Servir al Público.’ ‘El Público’ está mudo, carece del derecho
de la palabra” (84). [ It was an official place to “Serve the Public.” The “Public”
was mute, since it did not have the right to words.] The “public” is separated from
and placed in a powerless position in relation to the incorporeal “they” who
occupy the official place and serve/dominate/speak for the silenced public. The
absent “they” appears more predominately in the selection “Las cabezas bien
pensantes” [Heads Who Think Well] and will be discussed in more detail later.
While Lelinca complains that the unidentified “they” have all the power and the
glory and can buy assassins and witnesses, paradoxically she and other writers/
artists are obviously so influential and threatening that “they” feel compelled
to silence this “public” (83).
Further clues appear in a discussion in which Aube suggests that Lelinca is
keeping a secret that would explain why the latter is stalked and threatened.
Lelinca silently confirms Aube’s suspicions:

“Era verdad que guardaba un secreto que por lo demás, era público. Se preguntó si
Aube ignoraba la acusación que pesaba sobre ella de la cual nunca se libraría por
carecer de poder político y guardó silencio frente a su amiga que había salvado la
vida de su hija. Sintió una gran pena e inclinó la cabeza. ¡La habían marcado!
Recordó aquella novela leída en su adolescencia y que le pareció completamente
irreal: La letra escarlata. También ella llevaba un signo infame marcado en la
frente” (81, emphasis added).

[It was true that she had a secret which otherwise was public. She wondered
whether Aube knew about the accusation that weighed over her and from which
 Decapitation, Castration and Creativity 27

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

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

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

Lelinca’s double crime, female authorship and the creation of purely aesthetic
texts, is both secret and public. While she never tells her secret story, which is
“hidden” in the novel within the discourse of silence, it becomes public as
Garro’s novel circulates along with The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby,
Paradise Lost and the other (male) narratives that Lelinca remembers and with
which she compares her experience.
At the end of the story, Lelinca, Lucía and the two cats disappear and are
presumed dead because they were seen being spirited away in a limousine by
apparently hostile parties. Nevertheless, Mr. Soffer eventually receives two let-
ters, one signed “Sus dos amigas L. L.” [Your two friends, L. L.] and one that
follows and contains a check; he keeps both letters a secret from the other res-
idents. The two letters-signs correspond to the two letters-missives, but it is the
presence of the missive with the letters L L rather than the content, which is not
revealed to the reader, that is the message. The secret letter-missive and the
“public” (communal) letters-signs tell the story of their survival and escape from
those who would deny (and even murder) Lelinca and Lucía’s creative identities.
Garro relies on metonymy, metaphor and synecdoche in her silent dis-
course. While these tropes are not in and of themselves characteristic of strictly
marginalized discourse, they function in the text as such. By means of troping,
Garro hides the message of the text behind the literal meanings of words. In
like manner, Lelinca, her authorial persona in the text, appears to remain silent
while addressing the central issue of her persecution in the discussion contain-
ing the “fashion” metaphor discussed previously. Another example appears in
“La corona de Fredegunda” [Fredegunda’s Crown], in which gems and words
are associated through metonymy. In this story Lelinca, Lucía, Lola and
Petrouchka are in Spain, where they continue to suffer deprivation and fear at
the hands of “representatives” of Lelinca and Lucía’s country. The “represen-
tatives” are stationed in both a bookstore and in the consulate, where they keep
track of the two women’s activities. The metonymical use of consulate and
bookstore, where “representatives” are vigilant, suggests that Lelinca is guilty of
both political and creative wrongdoing, actions which have brought about her
current predicament. She is unable to find work or publish the translations
on which she is economically dependent because of the influence of an uniden-
tified “clan” of which she had previously been a member (156). Lelinca’s
inability to “work”/publish as well as her previous membership in the same
“clan” that now persecutes her reflect Garro’s own inability to publish in
the same publishing houses that had previously accepted her work and the
political problems that led to her exile from the Mexican literary elite and from
the country.
Another explicit example of the connection between Garro’s experience as
a writer and that of her writer-protagonist involves the issue of a politically cor-
rect form of literature or art that was introduced in the previous discussion on
 Decapitation, Castration and Creativity 29

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

13
Rhina Toruño points out in her book (Rhina Toruña, Tiempo, destino y opresión
en la obra de Elena Garro [Lewiston: Mellon University Press, 1996]) that Garro says
she used the name Augusto for Mariana’s husband in Testimonios sobre Mariana so that
there would be an allusion to Octavio Paz. Augusto refers to Augusto Octavio and,
hence, to Octavio Paz. In this reference, in Andamos, to the husband as César, one is
similarly led to Augusto César to Augusto Octavio to Octavio Paz. See footnote 3
regarding Octavio Paz.
30 Marketta Laurila

who is Lelinca herself. She hopes that “he” has died because only then will
Lucía be saved.
The identification between Lelinca and Fredegunda and between her hus-
band and the Roman Caesar generates the dichotomies César-Lelinca, Caesar-
Fredegunda, Romans-Visigoths, conqueror-conquered, which extends to include
“he”-Lucía. The latter reveals that the dialectic of domination, played out in the
story on the historical and creative level, will extend to the daughter, and future
generations of female writers; and the impersonal “he” that replaces “César”
reflects a continuing cycle of oppression by nameless males. It is because of
Fredegunda’s, Lelinca’s, and Lucía’s use of the crown/gems/words that they
must be silenced, “murdered,” to maintain androcentric hegemony over writing.
Additionally, the “gems” contrary to the functional ink, mentioned in the “Las
cabezas bien pensantes,” represent an art/literary form that is purely aesthetic
rather than politically engaged.
While Diego and Lelinca work with the gem-words, Lucía, Lola and
Petrouchka, left alone in the room, concentrate on dreaming/imagining to
escape the ugly, threatening reality of the inn.

… los tres amaban soñar con ángeles de alas de oro que algún día los llevarían a
un prado azul sembrado de margaritas blancas. El prado celeste era ondulante e
inmenso, más grande que todos los mares juntos, incluyendo al Mar Rojo y al Mar
Negro, que en ese prado aparecían como una ampola y un pequeño cuervo. Juntos
los tres, añoraban el instante en que un diminuto personaje inesperadamente bello,
les hiciera un signo con algún reflejo, les tendiera su mano, perfecta como un
nardo y los hiciera cruzar el dintel de la Gran Puerta de Oro … ¡La Gran Puerta de
Oro no era la puerta de ningún hostal o fonda! La Gran Puerta de Oro no estaba
hecha para que las cruzaran los fonderos (142).

[… the three loved to dream about angels with wings of gold who would one day
take them to a blue field sown with white daisies. The celestial field was undulat-
ing and immense, larger than all the oceans together, including the Red Sea and the
Black Sea, which looked like a poppy and a little crow in this field. Together the
three longed for the moment in which the diminutive and surprisingly beautiful
character would give a them a sign with some kind of reflection, would reach out
her hand, perfect as a spikenard and would have them cross the lintel of the Great
Gates of Gold … The Great Gates of Gold were not the gates to any inn or board-
ing house! The Great Gates of Gold were not made so that innkeepers could pass
through them.]

In the celestial field of their imagination, poetry transforms reality (the seas
into poppy and crow) and opens the Golden Gates that lead to a place free from
hunger and fear. The language in this passage as well as the figure of the
“diminuto personaje” [diminutive character] and later the “Dame de Licorne”
call to mind the character of Rubén Darío’s “El velo de la Reina Mab” [“The
 Decapitation, Castration and Creativity 31

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

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

interprets the synecdoche and the story-essay as an expression of Garro’s

monarchistic loyalties, in this essay the synecdoche is identified with male
hegemony over creative activity. Lelinca’s use of the modified “las cabezas
bien pensantes” [heads who think well], rather than the unmodified “las
cabezas pensantes,” suggests a counterpart — “cabezas mal pensantes” [heads
who think poorly]. Since Minerva, the goddess of art, and Marie Antoinette are
juxtaposed to the “cabezas bien pensantes,” it follows that they represent the
implied “cabezas mal pensantes.”
Interestingly, Marie Antoinette and Minerva are decapitated; and the latter’s
head is encased in glass to protect society from her unhealthy influence. With
the introduction of the decapitated Minerva (whose head is kept at a safe dis-
tance from society) and Marie Antoinette, the double synecdoche (heads who
think well and heads who think badly), is inverted to form a new synecdoche,
decapitated body. The male heads are properly equipped to think, gaze, create
and control. Women who usurp the role for which men are specifically
equipped, are, as Minerva and Marie Antoinette, decapitated; in effect they are
castrated because they have no right to the male head/penis. Lelinca and her
entourage are in effect fleeing the fate of Minerva. Lelinca has found a way to
flee, to avoid castration/decapitation/silencing, through her oblique, marginal
discourse characterized by metaphor, synecdoche, displacement and alternate
perspectives.
In her discussion of the Rights of Man, Lelinca further reveals the gender
bias that explains why she is persecuted. She tells Lola: “La dificultad reside
en que para gozar de los Derechos hay que ser Hombre. Y ser Hombre es algo
así como ser Diputado por lo menos y como no eres Diputado, Lola no tienes
ningún derecho” (170). [The problem is that in order to enjoy the Rights, one
must be a Man. And to be a Man is something like being a Legislator, at least,
and since you are not a Legislator, Lola, you have no rights.] Here Lelinca
interprets “man” as referring only to the male gender rather than to all humans
and, thereby, the male gender of the “cabezas.” She further claims that all men
govern and that only men have rights. It logically follows that women are
governed and have no rights, including to the right to an authorial voice.
However, Lelinca’s conclusion is based on false premises. The first three parts of
the syllogism lead logically to the conclusion that Lola is not a man, not to the
conclusion that she has no rights. Furthermore, Lola is not a member of
“mankind” (male or female) because she is a cat. Lelinca’s use of the false
syllogism reveals the false underpinnings of male hegemony in politics and
creative expression.
The double synecdoche in turn slips into a double metaphor that equates
head with gaze and gaze with penis, leading to the conclusion that only men
have the right to gaze, the right to subjectivity and authority. Lelinca establishes
the link between “cabezas” and penis when she explains the point of view of
 Decapitation, Castration and Creativity 33

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

one day asked in writing for the Death Decree for butterflies.] The butterflies
are punished for stealing pollen and ruining the economy, the gazelles for
fomenting popular prejudice (“el Mal del Ojo” or evil eye), and the storks for
attempting to bring babies. All three, grammatically feminine in Spanish, have
usurped the role of the penis: pollinating, engendering, and gazing. Lelinca
associates the ink of creativity with “we”: Lola, Lelinca herself, and other
female or marginalized male artists, since she uses the masculine “nosotros”
that refers to a “we” comprised of both males and females. Lelinca, however,
is doubly marginalized as writer by virtue of her gender and of her purely
aesthetic writing. Similarly, discredited, by virtue of her cat species and her
aesthetic art, Lola is kicked and tortured mercilessly by men at whom she
gazes because she has taken on the active role of the one who gazes rather than
that of the object of another’s gaze.
Lelinca continues the translations on which she depends to support herself,
Lucía and the two cats; however, the publication of her (forbidden) creative
work is obstructed by unknown, clearly male, powers that extend throughout
Canada, the United States and Spain. Her crime is deemed so serious as to war-
rant punishment by death. Lelinca explains to the Lola at the end of this selec-
tion: “Claro que no sabemos de quién huimos, Lola, ni por qué huimos, pero
en este tiempo de los Derechos del Hombre y de los Decretos es necesario
huiry huir sin tregua, Lola, lo sabes …” (174). [Of course we don’t know from
whom we’re fleeing, Lola, nor why, but during these times of the Rights of Man
and the Decrees it is necessary to flee and flee without respite, Lola, you
know … ] And in this narrative, Lelinca, Lucía, Lola and Petrouchka continue
to flee those who would silence them. Of this silence, Lelinca says, “… ese
silencio, Lola, que sólo conocen las Minervas, las Reinas y las Personas
Marginadas” [this silence, Lola, that only Minervas, Queens and Marginalized
People know] (173) Here Garro clearly, although metaphorically, identifies
the three major issues relating to writing that appear throughout the stories
in the collection: the silencing, censoring, and discrediting of writers based
on an aesthetic that is not politically compromised (Minervas), on female
gender (Queens), and on other factors that contribute to marginalization
(Marginalized People). The latter includes race, class (peasants), political and
religious beliefs (Catholic, monarchistic, communist), and even, metaphori-
cally, species (cat).
“Debo olvidar …” [“I Must Forget”] and “Las cuatro moscas” [ “The Four
Flies”] are companion pieces that resemble Chinese boxes, with the latter story
fitting inside the former to ostensibly clarify Lelinca and company’s fate.
“Debo olvidar …” is the diary of a male narrator who includes Lelinca’s diary
in the middle of his own. The interrelationship between different texts within
and between the stories suggests that interpretation is closely linked to issues
of intertextuality. Garro further develops this notion in Reencuentro de personajes
 Decapitation, Castration and Creativity 35

[Reencounter of Characters], in which characters created by Evelyn Waugh

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

16
Elena Garro, Reencuentro de personajes (México: Editorial Grijalbo, 1982).
The topic of intertextuality in Reencuentro de personajes is examined in detail in:
Marketta Laurila, “Elena Garro’s Reencuentro de personajes: The Female Writer and
Androcentric Texts,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 27, (1993), 171–186.
36 Marketta Laurila

toward the protagonists’ alternate voice. While in “Andamos huyendo Lola,”

Lelinca’s letter from Canada lets Mr. Soffer know that she, Lucía and the cats
have survived, this story implies that they have not.
This story and its companion story mimic the genre of the murder mystery
that recounts the metaphorical murder, silencing, of “true” artists. In “Debo
olvidar …” Lelinca’s diary bears witness to a night filled with the sounds of a
person being dragged and beaten, followed by the clanging of buckets and
mops used to clean the hallway. The next morning Lelinca sees buckets with
red water and bloody rags and finds that the innkeepers have “condemned” a
room by placing a board across the door (196). She also discovers that a curtain
placed at the end of the corridor hides a series of “condemned”/sealed/hidden
rooms. The use of “condemned” to describe both the sealed rooms and Lelinca
(condemned by the invisible tribunal) suggests a metaphorical link between
“condemn” and “silence” indicating that several other “artistic” inhabitants,
perhaps with their companion cat/muse, have been silenced to preserve the
legitimacy of the false artists. The reader is led to the conclusion that Lelinca
and the narrator have also become victims, but, regardless of the fate of the
writers, the diaries continue to threaten the hegemony of the dominant voice,
just as Minerva continues to influence creative artists although she is sealed in
the glass case to prevent contagion in “Las cabezas bien pensantes”.
Lelinca provides a clue to the role played by malevolent innkeepers by
means of further intertextual references. She affirms: “‘Cervantes era un
genio’ me dije al recordar a Repa y al ventero”(190). [“Cervantes was a
genius” I told myself while thinking of Repa and the Innkeeper.] This reference
to innkeepers in Cervantes’ work invites a comparison between Don Quijote
and Lelinca. Both discover that as they create their own texts/lives, they are
objects of another’s text with false representations of them and their actions.
While Don Quijote finally heeds the voice of “reason” and reality, and thereby
succumbs to his own death when he gives up his dreams/text, Lelinca, Lucía,
and the cats hold on to illusion, reaffirming their authorship. While the endings
of the stories individually and as a whole are ambiguous, leaving the reader to
suspect that perhaps Lelinca, Lucía and the cats were murdered by the
innkeeper, the inversion of Don Quijote’s experience suggests that the endings
are also inverted, and the four survive. The magic of the creative text prevails
against the murderous designs or censorship of the innkeeper, the guardian of
(male) reason and logic.
Just as Garro appropriates Cervantes’ text to provide clues to the protago-
nists’ fate, she uses the the format of framing story of El Conde Lucanor (pub-
lished in 1335) in “Las cuatro moscas” [The Four Flies]. In doing so, she
revises rather than continues the tradition of male canonical texts. In this story,
Garro narrates what happens to Lelinca and company during the last day and
night documented in Lelinca’s diary and, therefore, fits chronologically within
 Decapitation, Castration and Creativity 37

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

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

17
Ana Bundgard, “La semiótica de la culpa,” in Sin falsos espejos, edited by
Aralia López Gónzalez (México: Colegio de México, 1995), 140.
 Decapitation, Castration and Creativity 39

punishment for rebelling by taking up the pen-penis. Castillo, referring to A

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

as creativity.18 Lelinca attributes greater legitimacy to the Indians’ discourse

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

18
In her discussion of “La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas,” Doris Meyer discusses the
relationship between the Indian servant and the mistress, which resembles Lelinca’s
relationship with Tefa: “Both servant and mistress are marginated females who seek
each other’s support in spite of their unequal status” (155). She also points out that
Garro focuses on “the protective enclosure of the kitchen, not only physically but
psychologically.” Doris Meyer, “Alienation and Escape in Elena Garro’s Semana de
colores,” Hispanic Review 55, no. 2 (1987): 153–164.
 Decapitation, Castration and Creativity 41

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

19
This story has parallels with Garro’s own life. The color and playfulness of
Garro’s earlier work have given way to somber stories of persecution in Andamos
huyendo Lola and the Garro’s subsequent narratives. Interestingly, the collection of sto-
ries from the first period is entitled Semana de colores [Week of Colors]. The protago-
nists of the title story are Lelinca and her sisters Eva and Elena as children.
This page intentionally left blank
 UNAUTHORING THE TEXT

LAURA KATHLEEN REECK

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

Artist-apprentice novels, or Künstlerromane, are novels in which the main

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

delinquency’s downward spiral. As they engage the writing process, these

underground author-characters invest the text with commentary on life at the
fringes of French society.

1. Becoming/Unbecoming and Authoring/Unauthoring

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

1
Said, 5.
 Unauthoring the Text 45

Smaïl the movement of becoming/unbecoming as it is reflected through the

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

2. Boumkoeur

Rachid Djaïdani’s author-character introduces himself to the reader as an

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

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

Yaz sets out to address a number of social issues in a testimonial, all the
while reserving the right to embellish his writing for his readers’ pleasure;
he will include “une part pour le rêve” [something to dream about] (16). When
he sits down to start writing, he wonders where he should begin: “Le racisme?
La violence? La politique?” (16). The author-character positions his testimony
over and against the simplistic and sensationalistic reporting of the news
media. If outsiders (members of the mainstream) can make money on the stories
and films that they make about the life in the subsidized housing projects, why
shouldn’t he? The money that he will make on his testimony about the social
fragility of his neighborhood will not only provide Yaz with some money, but it
will also be a call for change.

C’est toutes ces aventures que je vais raconter, pour me faire des tunes à gogo, pour
que ça change. Comme c’est toujours les mecs de l’extérieur qui prennent
l’oseille, en racontant des histoires, ou en faisant des films, moi aussi j’ai la haine, ma
cité va craquer et ce n’est pas sur un air de raï que je ferai mon état des lieux. (18)
I’m going to write about all of these adventures, to make myself a bunch of money,
to call for change. Since it’s always guys from the outside who come in and make
all the cash by telling stories or by making a film, then me too … I’m pissed off,
the project I live in is going to explode and I won’t describe the damage humming
a raï tune.

Here Yaz references the outsiders (the news media) who have characteristically
documented life in the projects. He refuses this mode of representation, sug-
gesting how it is artificial, situated, and careful to perpetuate all stereotypes
and clichés. He proposes that insiders represent the inside, and he will be the
first to undertake such an initiative.
But while the author-character intends to communicate a social message,
he does not want to fly any banners. This comes across metaphorically when he
describes the way that he is dressed: “Me voici déjà dans ma paire de pompes
dont je tairai la marque, il n’y a pas de sponsoring dans mon histoire” [Here
I am in my tennis shoes whose brand name I’m going to hide, there is no spon-
soring in my story] (30). The character rebuffs sponsorship, posing as an anti-
institutional rebel unwilling to become a representative or a spokesperson.
Moreover, the statement foreshadows the loose authority the author will keep
over his text; it hints at the unauthoring that Yaz will later enact—the author
will ultimately not sponsor his own text.
To nourish his writing project, Yaz claims that he will get ideas for his story
line from the housing projects and their inhabitants; his authorship is already
far from unified and singular (authoritative) since the author-character intends
to steal ideas from his surroundings (“pirater” [lift] (38), “plagier” [plagiarize]
(40)). Yaz does not see himself as an author per se, but rather as a witness.
 Unauthoring the Text 47

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

Yaz describes the mirror as the thing they look through to see the other person:
“Grézi, occupé à faire sa belle, me tourne toujours le dos, enfin, sans vraiment
me le tourner. Le reflet de glace lui a scotché d’autres yeux” [Grézi, making him-
self beautiful, still has his back to me without really having turned it. The reflec-
tion in the mirror has given him another set of eyes] (44). The two characters see
each other by way of a reflection in the mirror—in fact, they are united through
the mirror image. Within the walls of the underground cellar, the Beur characters
begin to look at each other, and more importantly at their individual selves.
It is noteworthy that the mirror serves as a metaphor for Yaz’s maturation
process throughout Boumkoeur. He has entered the mirror stage, or “ l’aventure
originelle par où l’homme fait pour la première fois l’expérience qu’il se voit,
se réfléchit et se conçoit autre qu’il n’est—dimension essentielle de l’humain,
qui structure toute sa vie fantasmatique” [the unique adventure wherein the
individual has the first experience of seeing himself, reflecting back to him-
self, and seeing himself other than how he is—an essential dimension to
the individual, which structures the whole of his symbolic order].3 Entering the
mirror stage takes Yaz to writing. Appropriately, Yaz marks the moment he will
begin writing by breaking his reflection in the mirror. Put otherwise, a prise de
conscience and a prise de parole go hand in hand: to construct a new self-
image, Yaz must destroy its precedent. Shortly after entering into his pact with
Grézi, the nascent author briefly returns to his family’s apartment to get a writ-
ing utensil and dictionary. On his way out, he catches a glimpse of himself in a
mirror. He lashes out, throwing the dictionary at his reflection:

Con je suis. Le dico que je tiens vient d’être projeté à trois cents à l’heure contre
le miroir qui me fixe … Il fallait bien me défouler un jour sur ce reflet de moi qui
m’a toujours ridiculisé. Le dictionnaire s’est retrouvé en confettis. (56)
I’m an idiot. I just threw the dictionary 200 miles per hour against the mirror star-
ing back at me. One day I was bound to lash out at my reflection that has always
made me look ridiculous. The dictionary wound up in shreds.

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

3
Jacques Lacan, 94.
 Unauthoring the Text 49

prank gone awry. Suddenly, the roles shift: initially Yaz was looking for a new
beginning and a way out of petty delinquency; now Grézi is looking for a new
start as a rehabilitated member of society. What Grézi and Yaz ultimately
reflect back to each other is the desire to reinvent self, which they find through
their rush toward narrative activity. Writing unites them around a common
cause and serves as the self-reflective medium through which they come closer
to self and closer to each other. They have entered into the mirror stage
together, reflecting self back to the other. Their development is simultaneous,
visceral, and intersubjective—they are two parts of the same ensemble.
The reader learns of Grézi’s self-reflection and self-writing in a long con-
fessional letter, figured as text within the novel, that he dictates to a cellmate.
For the last thirty pages, Grézi takes over as narrator, and Yaz becomes the pris-
oner’s privileged interlocutor and reader. For the inmate Grézi, learning to write
amounts to a journey within: “Plus que me punir, la prison m’a fait réfléchir sur
mon avenir” [More than punishing me, prison has made me think about my
future] (151). Grézi makes the interior nature of his quest clear in his poetic
first sentence, noting again in rhyme: “C’est pas du Molière mais au moins
c’est sincère” [It’s not Molière, but at least it’s sincere] (151). “Punir/réfléchir/
avenir” [“to punish,” “to reflect,” “the future”] form an interior rhyming trip-
tych that is semantically significant: punishment brings him to reflection,
which will bring him to a new vision for his future.
According to Grézi’s letter, when he landed in prison, he entered into a new
self-reflective phase that occurred as he came to writing. In an effort to feel his
existence, he recounts that he inscribed his initials into the prison walls, along-
side those of past prisoners. Each time he changed cells, Grézi wrote himself
into the walls. But as he inserted himself into the social world of the prison and
into the delinquent genealogy on the prison walls, Grézi claims that he began
to think about himself more seriously. He decides that his re-entry into the real
world and real time will mark a new beginning:

La chance qu’a un prisonnier, c’est qu’à la sortie il est ressuscité, une autre vie
commence pour lui s’il se donne la hargne de la saisir, sans quoi il ne sera qu’un
pensionnaire de la maison carcérale, un récidiviste. (155)
What a prisoner has going for him is that when he gets out, he is brought back to life,
a new life begins for him, if he takes the time to think about it. Without this realiza-
tion, he will never be more than a boarder in the prison system, a repeat offender.

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

write to me, and in my stairwell I attentively read what he wrote] (158). In sep-
arate but equal spaces, the “cages” to which Yaz makes reference, Grézi has
become the author and Yaz the reader. As he concludes his narration, the author-
character reveals that he finally “sees” Grézi, although not in a face à face.
Rather the narrator sees Grézi within the confines of his own identification
process: “D’un trait même pas saccadé, mon imaginaire l’a revu” [Without the
least hesitation, my imagination saw him again] (158). Within the realm of
“l’imaginaire,” the topos of identity formation, the characters have fused, find-
ing each other and themselves. When Yaz and Grézi finally get themselves in
sight, they have already seen the other: they emerge as complementary parts of
the same consciousness. The narrative pact into which they enter stands at the
confluence of past and present, a temporal juncture out of which stems the
affirmation of their new beginning, motivated through writing.
It is significant that Yaz never completes his book project despite the fact
that Grézi sends his testimony from prison to keep up his end of the pact. In a
surprising move, the author-character sets fire to the pages that would have
constituted the material for his writing project, sending Boumkoeur’s conclu-
sion up in smoke and ending his narration with a tautology: “Paf!! Rouge/Fin”
[Paf!!/Red/End] (159). By burning the pages from Grézi, Yaz unauthors his
project once and for all. In fact, he author-character’s authority has been far
from authoritative from the moment he undertook his writing project; instead
of closing the text off, Yaz turns writing outward to unconventional forms of
transmission (conjoined witnessing: Grézi as the eyes and Yaz as the ears) and
extra-authorial textuality (graffiti, rap music, and the anecdotes of the disen-
franchised). By setting fire to his writing, the Beur author-character throws
doubt on the very possibility of representing, of using words to fix meaning.
He reduces what was to be a social testimonial to ashes, suggesting that he can-
not represent—for his reality escapes representation. Ultimately, Yaz opts out
of his self-assigned role of witness and defers to the reader:

Le journal prospectus sur lequel mon cul est posé flambe et m’offre des éclats qui me
laisseront conclure. Les histoires de quartier du best of de la mémoire de Grézi par-
tent en fumée. Je ne vous les balancerai pas. Faites l’effort de nous rendre visite. (158)
The paper under my ass goes up in flames and offers me the sparks with which to
conclude. The Best of Grézi’s Remembered Stories goes up in smoke. I’m not
going to hand them over to you. Make an effort to visit us.

The author-character hands over his authorial intention and indicates that any-
thing he may have intended to communicate in his testimonial can best be
apprehended if the reader come to the projects for a first-hand perspective.
Instead of viewing Yaz’s final act as self-destructive to the character, it
is important to consider that the author-character has reached a new level of
 Unauthoring the Text 51

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

3. Vivre me tue and Casa, la casa

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

4
Paul Smaïl [Jacques-Alain Léger]. Vivre me tue, 12; hereafter referenced in the
text as Vivre. The English-language translation [Smile. Translated by Simon Pleasance,
Fonza Woods, and Janine Dupont (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 4], hereafter refer-
enced in the text as Smile, follows the original French in the text.
52 Laura Kathleen Reeck

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

5
Paul Smaïl [Jacques-Alain Léger]. Casa, la casa (Paris: Balland, 1998), 41;
hereafter referenced in the text as Casa. The English translations of this text are my
own. All further citations are from the original text with the English translation pro-
vided by the author of this essay.
6
A good deal of controversy has risen concerning the author Paul Smaïl. As ques-
tions regarding the pseudonym under which he admitted to writing intensified, the author
indicated in written interviews that he was indeed who he claimed to be—a child born
in France to Moroccan immigrants. More recent information confirms that Smaïl is a
known French author by the name of Jacques-Alain Léger who has used pseudonyms in
the past. Perhaps one way of understanding the impact of the author Paul Smaïl’s ges-
ture is to consider Barthes’s allowance for the return of the author to the text (after he
has already announced the death of the author). In The Rustle of Language (Translated
by Richard Howard. [New York: Hill and Wang, 1986], 61–62) Barthes writes that “it
is not that the Author cannot ‘return’ in the Text, in his text, but he does so, one might
say, as a guest … his inscription is no longer privileged, paternal, alethic, but ludic: he
becomes, one can say, a paper author; his life is no longer the origins of his fables, but
a fable concurrent with his life; there is a reversion of the work upon life (and no longer
the contrary).” This reverse fictionalization process would certainly appear to illumi-
nate the case of Smaïl/Jacques-Alain Léger.
 Unauthoring the Text 53

he declares to a potential employer on the other end of the telephone line. He

does not say that his name is Smaïl, but rather that one can call him that. Much
later in his story, he will allude briefly and flippantly to his pseudonym: “Smaïl
est un pseudo et tu ne leur diras rien” [Smaïl is a pseudo and you won’t tell
them] (Casa 42).
This gesture of the author-character Paul Smaïl finds illumination in
Abdelkébir Khatibi’s reflections on the pseudonym. The Moroccan thinker
reflects on his own use of the pseudonym, and queries:

Qu’est-ce que’une signature pseudonymique? Ce jeu de division masquée de soi et

de permutation nominale, ouvre-t-il à la réalisation anagrammatique d’un désir?
Pourquoi accentuer l’illisibilité de soi à soi, voiler ainsi la transparence sociale de
son identité?”
What is a pseudonymic signature? Does this game of the masked division of self
and of nominal permutation open onto the fulfillment of the desire to be someone
else? Why draw attention to the undecipherable nature of self to self? Why hide the
social transparency of one’s identity? 7

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

7
Khatibi, 40.
8
Edouard Glissant (in Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing [Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1997], 190) sums up the important action of opacity in
his discussion of difference. He suggests that we should agree that we all have wells of
opacity by our very nature. We should “agree not merely to the right to difference but,
carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an
autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity.”
54 Laura Kathleen Reeck

integrity, thereby assuming the role of what Mirelle Rosello has called the
“reluctant witness” whose intention is to decline the stereotype.9 Cognizant of
how minorities get brought back into the system after reaching fame and fortune,
the author-character elects to remain silent, and in so doing, he unauthors his text
in the strictest sense of the word—there will henceforth be no author with whom
to identify the text. After the success of his first book, Vivre me tue, he imagines
the onslaught of incoming calls for public appearances and participation on liter-
ary talk shows. More than his authorship, the media would use him to promote
the stereotypes about the Beurs already at work in dominant French culture:

Tu seras le beur à la mode, le beur de service, le beur médiatique, le beur pour la

télé, le beur thème d’émission, le beur sujet de société, le beur invité à Vingt heures …
Le beur bien intégré ou le beur révolté, au choix, si possible les deux à la fois: le
beur qui coupe la parole au ministre mais le beur qui a lu Proust!” (Casa 42–43).
You’ll be the Beur fashion statement, the token Beur, the mediatized Beur, the
Beur for the television, the talk show Beur, the Beur society piece, the Beur invited
to the news hour … The well-integrated Beur or the rebellious Beur, one or the
other, both at the same time if at all possible: the Beur who interrupts politicians,
but who has read Proust!

The author-character senses that the media will take advantage of his budding
persona: he will become the assimilated Beur, fashionable for the moment and
for all purposes. Or better yet, he could be the rebellious Beur who is surrepti-
tiously integrated as such. Wouldn’t integration be complete if all dissidents
were brought back into the mainstream? The author-character strictly opposes
recuperation and prefers to assume an unpredictable and somewhat intractable
guise to stardom. He, like Yaz, will not fly any banners, nor participate in any
one political platform.
Highly attuned to literary reception, an interest already in place when he wrote
a thesis in comparative literature entitled “Herman Melville en France: traduc-
tions, éditions et fortune critique …” (Vivre 74), the author-character pinpoints

9
In the strictest sense, declining a stereotype means standing at a distance from
something one does not believe, and rejecting the role of the “reluctant witness”—this
is a form of refusal. Meanwhile Mirelle Rosello (in Declining the Stereotype [Hanover
and London: University Press of New England, 1998], 11) emphasizes how declining a
stereotype also occurs through subversive forms of participation that come from within:
“In practice, this type of declining encompasses ironic repetitions, carefully framed quo-
tations, distortions and puns, linguistic alterations, double entendres, and self-deprecating
humor. Declining a stereotype is a way of depriving it of its harmful potential by
highlighting its very nature.” The characters Yaz and Paul Smaïl pose as reluctant wit-
nesses who challenge circulating stereotypes about the Beurs, particularly the way that
the media portrays them. But also, more surreptitiously, they act within the stereotype,
through the linguistic strategies mentioned by Rosello that punctuate their self-narration.
 Unauthoring the Text 55

a larger concern, the equivocal canonization process. The canon, as the meet-
ing point of literature and social institutions and mores, represents a form of
authoritative consensus. Suspicious of all forms of authority, the author-
character sees the canon and the dominant reading strategies that feed into it
as fertile ground for critical inquiry. Contrary to promoting a single, authen-
ticated version the author-character prefers readings according to which com-
peting, but equally authentic, versions of the same story can co-exist. His exposé
to his dying brother on their family name (Smaïl), itself based on a textual
explication of a story shared by the three monotheistic religions, sheds light
on the adjustment he wishes to impose on unique readings. “ ‘Les Arabes
vivront sous la tente, la descendance d’Ismaël …’ Abraham l’a voulu: le peuple
d’Ismaël sera le peuple nomade … Les Smaïl!” (Vivre 172). [“ ‘The Arabs will
live in tents, the heirs of Ismaël …’Abraham wished it so: the people of Ismaël
will be a nomadic people … The Smaïls!” (Smile 138)], explains the character
who situates himself as a wanderer, a nomad, like his ancestors issued from
Abraham and Hagar’s line.
Here Smaïl places himself within a line that splits off from the Judeo-
Christian canon. By inserting himself in the (nomadic) line of Abraham/Hagar/
Ismaël, he occupies the margins of the Abraham/Sarah/Isaac line. The Beur
character thus re-historizes a story common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,
but turns his own interpretation toward the Islamic one that is easily over-
looked by the participants in the other genealogies. His is the “illegitimate,”
“bastardized” version of a twofold story that has been reduced to one authori-
tative version. He does not hesitate to identify with the alternative interpreta-
tion of the shared story of Abraham’s lineage by aligning himself as the
progenitor of the ostracized, enslaved servant-woman. In so doing, he attenu-
ates the authoritative reading and poses as an author-rebel who will not shy
away from undoing the logic of the dominant reading.10
The emerging author takes aim at reading strategies that participate in the
normalizing principles behind canons. In both Vivre me tue and Casa, la casa
the canonization process at large gets examined through the microcosmic
world of the bookstore. When Paul begins work in a small bookstore, the store-
owner views his presence a cultural privilege for the bookstore: “Je suis très
heureuse qu’un Maghrébin se joigne à nous. C’est pour notre librairie une
ouverture sur le monde … (Vivre 83). [“I’m so pleased somebody from North
Africa is joining us. For our bookstore this means an opening out to the world”

10
Barthes’s definition of “multiple writing” (in Rustle of Language, 68) implies
multiple readings: “In multiple writing, in effect, everything is to disentangled, but
nothing deciphered …”. The death of the author assumes the birth of the reader as the
text’s privileged interlocutor. Just as meaning is not fixed, interpretation is not fixed in
multiple writing. Instead the reader is left to construct and take meaning from the text.
56 Laura Kathleen Reeck

(Smile 62)]. But Paul quickly sees through the artificial goodwill of the store-
owner, likening her tone to that of a colonizer’s wife. To prove his literary back-
ground, the owner puts her new recruit through potential requests by customers,
asking him if he knows the author and where to find the book. He passes the
test with great ease, but the procedure exposes the storeowner’s lack of confidence
in him. On another occasion, he is further disappointed when the storeowner
automatically assumes that he is an avid reader of the Maghrebi classics, such
as Le passé simple by Driss Chraïbi and Le pain nu by Mohamed Choukri.
Finally, when l’Abbesse offers Paul the cover to La malédiction by Rachid
Mimouni, the Beur character launchess into a violent tirade:

… les ratons ne devraient lire que des bouquins de ratons, selon vous? Proust, c’est
seulement pour des pédés, alors? Et Melville aussi? Et Virginia Woolf, pour les
gousses? Et les Bretons, alors, il faut qu’ils lisent Chateaubriand? Les Russes,
Tolstoï? Mais pas Dickens, hein, Dickens c’est pour les Anglais! Il était anglais
Dickens. Un raton ne peut pas lire Dickens! C’est ça que vous voulez, hein?
Chacun chez soi? (Vivre 93)
A-rabs should only read books by A-rabs, is that what you think? Then Proust is for
faggots, is that right? And Melville too? And Virginia Woolf ’s just for dykes? And
what about Bretons? They should just read Chateaubriand? Russians, Tolstoy? But
not Dickens, huh, Dickens is for the English! He was English, Dickens! A raghead
can’t read Dickens! Is that what you want then? To each his own? (Smile 71)

Smaïl makes the claim for common ground as well as the end to strict filial
lines and genealogies. His own case problematizes the strict delineations that his
employer attempts to draw between national literatures. An exploded canon,
one that is universal and open to influence and mutual exchange, appeals to the
Smaïl character. By doing away with classification according to the nationality,
ethnicity, language, and the sexual orientation of the author, the author-character
suggests that texts can be traded across all of these lines.
Not only does the reception of texts extend beyond narrow groupings, but
writing itself depends upon interchange and sharing. Through a series of bor-
rowings from authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Melville, Rimbaud, and
Stendhal, the character Paul Smaïl positions himself over and against literary
antecedents, formulating a writing philosophy predicated on re-writing and
intertextuality. Put otherwise, the author-character’s invention of himself as an
author binds itself to reinvention. The Beur character calls himself an author for
the first time when he realizes that he has rehabilitated a classic by Shakespeare.
Thanks to a schoolteacher, the Beur character learned about reading and inter-
pretation at a young age. During one session at Monsieur Hamel’s house, the
schoolboy was particularly sensitive to a passage in the Merchant of Venice
where Shylock cries out: “ ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? … If you poison us,
do we not die? … And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’ ” (Vivre 105).
 Unauthoring the Text 57

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

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

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

4. Conclusion

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

MARJORIE WORTHINGTON

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

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

1
Originally published: Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1962).
60 Marjorie Worthington

restore an identity she feels she has lost results in the partial and fleeting con-
struction of a fragmented subjectivity inflected by language. For although Anna’s
writing constructs a written version of herself, it simultaneously and inevitably
severs the connection between the writer and the written, evoking the splitting
of the written subject from the writing subject. In this sense, the act of writing
is simultaneously the means by which Anna might create a work of art and the
means by which her subjectivity becomes split, possibly rendering her unable
to create. This paradox lies at the heart of The Golden Notebook, and one of its
central concerns becomes whether agentic authorship is available to a frag-
mented and diffused subject such as Anna. The fragmented and diffused struc-
ture of The Golden Notebook mirrors the subjectivity of its protagonist, and
provides an answer in the affirmative; the complicated yet artful structure of
the novel demonstrates that the very process that catalyzes the disintegration of
a self, also enables the creation of an author.
The action of The Golden Notebook largely involves Anna attempting to
recapture the power of her writing and a coherent sense of her life and self. The
diffusion that Anna feels and which she describes as being a common phe-
nomenon in those around her, is reflected in the structural makeup of the novel
itself, in that it aptly demonstrates—is even performative of—the fragmented
consciousness so often touted as a primary modernist or postmodern charac-
teristic. The structure is indeed complex and requires a bit of description. The
Golden Notebook both opens and closes with sections of a frame novel, osten-
sibly written by Anna and entitled Free Women. Three other sections of Free
Women are also interspersed throughout the novel. In between chapters of the
frame novel are sections from Anna’s many writing notebooks or journals.
Each notebook is a different color, and each is written in different handwriting,
as though someone different had written each one. The black one is reserved
for the story of and reflections about Anna’s experiences living in Africa. The
red notebook is designated for the record of Anna’s membership in the British
Communist Party. A yellow notebook contains a novel-in-progress entitled The
Shadow of the Third, whose characters resemble those in the other notebooks
and in Free Women, but have different names. For example, Anna is called Ella
in the yellow notebook. The fourth notebook is blue and is a more traditional
journal, with entries set off by dates beginning with January 7, 1950. These sec-
tions (or fragments) of notebooks and novels follow a distinct but somewhat
confusing pattern: A chapter of Free Women, followed by one section each of
the black notebook, the red notebook, the yellow notebook and the blue note-
book. This sequence appears four times and is then followed by a section of a
brand new notebook—the golden notebook—which is then followed by a final
section, the final chapter of Free Women.
Anna has turned to writing in several different notebooks in a desperate
effort to maintain order in her increasingly chaotic mind. She hopes that if she
 Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors 61

can demarcate boundaries between the disparate elements of her subjectivity,

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

2
Gayle Greene reflects the critical consensus about the connection between
Anna’s writing and her life when she says, “Anna’s search for literary form is thus the
correlative of her efforts to shape her own life at a time when conventional forms have
lost their meaning.” Gayle Greene, “Women and Men in Doris Lessing’s Golden
Notebook: Divided Selves,” in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic
Interpretation, eds. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane and Madelon Sprengnether
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 1985), 286.
3
Doris Lessing. The Golden Notebook (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 345.
4
See Suzette Henke, “Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook: A Paradox of Postmodern
Play,” in Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, ed. Lisa Rado
(New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994), 159–187. Also of interest are Molly Hite,
“Subverting the Ideology of Coherence: The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated
City,” in Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival, eds. Cora Kaplan and Ellen Cronan
Rose (Athens, OH: Ohio U P, 1988), 61–70, and Magali Cornier Michael, “Woolf ’s
Between the Acts and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: From Modern to Postmodern
Subjectivity,” in Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold, eds. Ruth Saxton and Jean
Tobin (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 39–56.
62 Marjorie Worthington

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

I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It’s full of nostalgia, every word
loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being “objective.”
Nostalgia for what? I don’t know. Because I’d rather die than have to live through

5
Lessing, 63.
6
Lessing, 63.
7
Lessing, 63.
8
Lessing, 64.
9
Lessing, 61.
 Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors 63

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

Apparently, as Anna is beginning to realize, it is not quite so easy to “switch

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

10
Lessing, 153.
11
Lessing, 227–28.
12
Lessing, 228.
13
Giuliana Mutti, among others, has made this point, arguing that Anna’s writings
“support the function of art as the most viable means of transforming chaos into order.”
Giuliana Mutti, “Female Roles and the Function of Art in The Golden Notebook,”
Massachusetts Studies in English 3 (1972): 80. See also: Betsy Draine, “Nostalgia and
Irony: The Postmodern Order of The Golden Notebook,” Modern Fiction Studies 26
(1980): 31–48.
14
Lessing, 61.
15
Lessing, 61 (emphasis Lessing’s).
64 Marjorie Worthington

apt example of such fragmentary fiction. The result of such fiction, to Anna, is
a kind of crisis of language and literature that reflects a crisis of the contempo-
rary mind.
To illustrate her point, Anna provides the example of a story she had read
while working as an editor for a Communist Party publication. At first, she
thought the story a parody, and it was not until she had read it entirely that she
realized it was meant to be serious:

[W]hat seemed to me important was that it could be read as parody, irony or seri-
ously. It seems to me this fact is another expression of the fragmentation of every-
thing, the painful disintegration of something that is linked with what I feel to be true
about language, the thinning of language against the density of our experience.16

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

16
Lessing, 302.
17
Lessing, 300.
Claire Sprague suggests that the widespread interchange of names in this novel
represents a very deliberate sort of play. One connection she neglects to make, however,
is between the initials of Finnegan’s Wake and Anna’s two novels Frontiers of War and
Free Women. Claire Sprague, “ ‘Anna, Anna, I Am Anna’: The Annas of Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook,” in The Anna Book: Searching for Anna in Literary History, ed.
Mickey Pearlman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 151–58.
 Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors 65

learn to cope with, or master, a sense of loss of that original pre-linguistic

unity.18 Thus, Anna replays that Oedipal drama of emergence into the Symbolic
by using writing as a means of attempting to master the sense of loss of a uni-
tary identity. To accomplish this written mastery, she writes about and thereby
attempts to construct a frame of meaning around the events of her life. In the
process, she constructs written charactorial versions of herself in her different
notebooks. Significantly, then, the idea of mastering her loss through writing
coincides with the attempt to reconstruct the identity Anna feels she has lost.
Through writing, Anna struggles to explain or even create her own subjectivity,
constructing a frame of writing which might possibly contain her increasingly
fragmented and chaotic self. However, Anna’s many different colored note-
books only add to the buzz of cacophonic voices. Each additional written word
becomes part of Anna’s experience, becomes part of the material that requires
explanation, and the written frame of meaning itself comes to require a frame.
Throughout most of the novel, Anna yearns to construct the ultimate frame—
“The Golden Notebook”—that could represent the truth of her self and her
experience in their entirety. However, instead of serving as manifestations of a
coherent written identity that has the power thereby to reunify the fragmented
identity of the fictional author, Anna’s written charactorial alter-egos are just
that: alter egos, or others to Anna, the writing subject. And, indeed, Lacanian
theory posits that it is the linguistic interaction between the subject and the
other that brings the subject into being, albeit a subject which is constantly
shifting and changing with each encounter with the other.19 In this sense, the
relationship between subject and other changes as the language or writing used
to negotiate between them develops. As Anna attempts to construct a written
frame of meaning around herself—a frame that would represent a coherent,
unchanging identity—what emerges instead is a written frame which shifts
continually with each new word.
Anna’s attempt to construct a written frame around her subjectivity is mir-
rored by the structure of The Golden Notebook. Not only does Anna attempt to

18
According to Brooks, this sense of loss arises from the Oedipal drama, from the
emergence of the subject into the Symbolic precipitated by the realization of the self as
a discrete entity, separate and alone in the world. It is from this early loss of unity that
emerges the traditional narrative structures of departure and return: “If repetition is
mastery … and if mastery is an assertion of control over what man [sic] must in fact
submit to—choice, we might say, of an imposed end—we have already a suggestive
comment on the grammar of plot.” Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot,” in Literature
and Psychoanalysis, eds. Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips (New York: Columbia
U P, 1983), 286.
19
Colette Soler, “The Symbolic Order,” in Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s
Return to Freud, eds. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus (Albany: State U
of New York P, 1996), 42–43.
66 Marjorie Worthington

contain her subjectivity by creating a written frame around it, but the novel
itself is structured as a series of frames within frames in an attempt to preserve
the integrity of the novel itself—to preserve the novel’s unity or “subjectivity.”
Scholars have often criticized this novel for being too chaotic, even “careless” 20
because of its overly intricate and multi-layered structure. Indeed, at times, the
internal stories contained in the notebooks threaten to overwhelm the frame
narrative and become the primary narrative focus; in other words, the story
within the frame threatens to fragment the novel, to shatter its narrative unity.
In order to maintain the integrity of traditional novelistic structure, the “pri-
mary” story must reemerge and recoup its authority as the dominant narrative
within the novel, just as Anna the character must learn to assert her, albeit frag-
mented, subjectivity. In this way, the structure of The Golden Notebook must
face the same threats to its cogency and coherence that Anna must face to her
selfhood. The novel, then, is performative of the issues of subjectivity that it
depicts. And, just as Anna learns eventually to write despite the fact that com-
plete unity and fixed identity are impossible, the novelistic structure, in the
face of its fragmentation, ultimately provides satisfying novelistic closure.
In the essay on the novel that is often published as its preface, Doris Lessing
writes that The Golden Notebook was designed to include both a novel and the
material that went into the making of that novel:

To put the short novel Free Women as a summary and condensation of all that mass
of material, was to say something about the conventional novel, another way of
describing the dissatisfaction of a writer when something is finished: “How little
I have managed to say of the truth, how little I have caught of all that complexity;
how can this small neat thing be true when what I experienced was so rough and
apparently formless and unshaped.” 21

Lessing’s comments provide one possible mode of reading The Golden

Notebook: the novel Free Women represents the small neatly ordered text that

20
Much of the older criticism of this novel tends to dismiss its complicated narra-
tive structure as being mistake-ridden rather than intentional. For example, Mary Cohen
argued in 1977 that in the final sections of the novel, “Lessing is careless, and the novel
becomes confusing, apparently without good reason,” whereas Irving Howe, who admired
the novel for its “seriousness,” conflated characters in the novel Free Women with the
eponymous characters in the notebooks, even though plot events differ widely enough
from one to the other to make such a reading difficult to sustain. Mary Cohen, “ ‘Out of
the chaos, a new kind of strength’: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook,” in The Authority
of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, eds. Arlyn and Lee Edwards (Amherst,
MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1977), 192. Irving Howe, “Neither Compromise nor
Happiness,” in Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, eds. Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger
(Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1986), 181.
21
Lessing, xiv.
 Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors 67

emerges from the morass of unordered experience documented in the note-

books. However, to view Free Women as the small kernel of writing distilled
from the pure and formless experience of the notebooks is to ignore the fact
that the notebooks themselves are also written narratives, and therefore by
their very nature ordered and shaped by the same consciousness that ostensibly
wrote Free Women.
In addition to representing Anna’s attempt to convey a sense of the density
of rough and formless experience, Anna’s notebooks also chronicle her strug-
gle against what she senses is her disintegrating subjectivity. Anna’s ultimate
goal is to maintain through writing the sense of coherent, unified selfhood
amidst her increasing fears that it will be lost or further diffused. In her note-
books, then, Anna constructs and attempts to organize a series of written personae
or parts of her “self ” in an effort to depict the “real” or “true” Anna, much as
she tries to depict the reality or truth of the events in her life. She says: “Every
evening I sat on the music-stool and wrote down my day, and it was as if I,
Anna, were nailing Anna to the page. Every day I shaped Anna … and felt as if
I had saved that day from chaos.” 22
The imagery here depicts Anna both as something to be fixed or nailed
down and as something shifting or flexible enough to be shaped; she seems,
then, to be wavering between defining her “self ” as a fixed identity or as a sub-
ject construct. Because Anna so closely connects her self to her writing, the per-
ceived breakdown of the power of language threatens the cogency of that self:

It occurs to me that what is happening is a breakdown of me, Anna, and this is how
I am becoming aware of it. For words are form, and if I am at a pitch where shape,
form, expression are nothing, then I am nothing, for it has become clear to me,
reading the notebooks, that I remain Anna because of a certain kind of intelligence.
This intelligence is dissolving and I am very frightened.23

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

22
Lessing, 476.
23
Lessing, 476–77.
68 Marjorie Worthington

Anna’s double role as both a mother to her daughter and as mistress to her mar-
ried lover, Michael: “He prefers Janet to have left for school before he wakes.
And I prefer it, because it divides me. The two personalities—Janet’s mother,
Michael’s mistress, are happier separated.” 24
Indeed, Anna feels most comfortable being able to keep the many different
selves or aspects of herself separate, which is why she has four different note-
books which are meant to create and maintain boundaries between four differ-
ent elements of her life. Not only does Anna recognize on some level the extent
to which writing precipitates the othering of the subject to itself, but, by main-
taining distinct boundaries between her many notebooks, Anna attempts to
keep all her “others” separate. The notebooks help her define herself and to
impose a kind of order upon the events in her life, so much so, in fact, that they
begin to represent to her the totality of her subjectivity. In response to the ques-
tion, “Who am I, Anna?” she envisions:

her room, long, white subdued, with the coloured notebooks on the trestle table.
She saw herself, Anna, seated on the music-stool, writing, writing; making an
entry in one book, then ruling it off, or crossing it out; she saw the pages patterned
with different kinds of writing; divided, bracketed, broken.25

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

24
Lessing, 336.
25
Lessing, 389.
26
Lessing, 367.
 Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors 69

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

27
Lessing, 449.
28
Lessing, 459.
29
See: Ellen Morgan, “Alienation of the Woman Writer in The Golden Notebook,”
Contemporary Literature 14 (1973): 471–80.
70 Marjorie Worthington

completely and concretely framing a subject in writing, or of using writing to

maintain a fixed identity, and a novel whose structure mirrors the fragmented sub-
jectivity of its writer.30 Once she is put into writing, Ella becomes her own entirely
different character and cannot be the written representation of a one “true” Anna.
Indeed, it becomes clear that none of the different representations of “Anna”
can stand as the “true” Anna. The Anna in the novel Free Women is quite dif-
ferent from the Annas of the many notebooks. Interestingly, even the different
Annas in the different notebooks or journals are not identical to one another.
Anna’s husband and Janet’s father in the black notebook is named Willi, but
when Anna refers to her ex-husband in the blue notebook, she calls him Max.
Through this deliberate play with names, along with the very different person-
alities exhibited by the Annas in the different notebooks, the novel suggests
that despite all Anna’s efforts, it is not possible through writing to depict or
construct one coherent subjectivity. Indeed, the proliferation of fragmented
characters and framed narratives lead to the conclusion that there is no “one
true Anna,” that such a figure would be impossible. Instead, the novel’s entire
structure and content imply that Anna is a combination of all the many personae
she creates each time she attempts to write. As mentioned earlier, Anna attempts
to maintain a unified sense of self by controlling the fragmentation of her sub-
jectivity by fragmenting her writing. In other words, she holds herself together
by trying, increasingly unsuccessfully, to keep the different parts of her life
separate. Paradoxically, however, at the same time that her writing seems to have
the power to hold Anna together, it also splinters her subjectivity into incom-
plete shards of written persona. While writing gives Anna a waning sense of
control over a coherent written subjectivity, it simultaneously others her from
that written subjectivity, splitting it into multiple pieces.
It is despite, or perhaps because of, her increasing sense of fragmentation
and dissolution that Anna insists upon strictly policing the boundaries of her
different notebooks. Her friend Molly’s son Tommy asks her: “Why the four
notebooks? What would happen if you had one big book without all those divi-
sions and brackets and special writing?” Anna replies: “I’ve told you, chaos.” 31
Throughout the novel, Anna is adamant that the information and personae in
the different notebooks be kept separate, that the integrity of the system she has
devised be maintained. Each journal represents a particular written frame of
meaning. By sequestering different parts of her life in different journals, Anna

30
See Joanne Craig, “The Golden Notebook: The Novelist as Heroine,” University
of Windsor Review 10: 1 (1974): 55–66. Also see: Henke, Hite, “Subverting the Ideology
of Coherence,” Michael, and Claire Sprague, “Doubles Talk in The Golden Notebook,” in
Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, eds. Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger (Boston:
G.K. Hall & Co., 1986), 45–60.
31
Lessing, 274.
 Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors 71

believes that she can confine through writing her complex and difficult emo-
tions and experiences. She hopes that the written frames of the journals will
allow her to determine a fixed and stable meaning for the fragments of her life,
and she takes special care not to violate these self-imposed boundaries. For
example, when Anna begins to reminisce about her psychotherapy sessions in
the yellow notebook which has been reserved for discussions about her writing,
Anna makes a note to herself: “This sort of comment belongs to the blue note-
book. I must keep them separate.” 32 However, as evidenced by the previous
quotation, this artificial order becomes increasingly difficult—even impossible—
to preserve. What Anna fears is precisely what begins to happen: the bound-
aries of the imposed frame narratives begin to blur and shift, as with each new
entry, a new frame must be delineated, a new overall meaning imposed. It
becomes increasingly difficult for Anna to sustain the constant framing and
reframing effort.
Furthermore, Anna does not always want to sustain it; at times she wishes
she could piece all her fragments together into a unified whole. She often
dreams about such elusive unity, the whole of her subjectivity, within one
frame, indivisible. For example, in one wonderful dream:

I stood in a blue mist of space while the globe turned, wearing shades of red for the
communist countries, and a patchwork of colours for the rest of the world. Africa
was black. … The colours are melting and flowing into each other, indescribably
beautiful so that the world becomes whole, all one beautiful glittering colour …
This is a moment of almost unbearable happiness, the happiness seems to swell up,
so that everything suddenly bursts, explodes. … The world had gone, and there was
chaos. I was alone in chaos.33

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

32
Lessing, 537.
33
Lessing, 298–99.
34
Lessing, 299.
72 Marjorie Worthington

As her experiment with controlled written fragmentation begins to fail and

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

35
Lessing, 607.
36
Molly Hite, “(En)Gendering Metafiction: Doris Lessing’s Rehearsals for The
Golden Notebook,” Modern Fiction Studies 34, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 487.
37
Lessing, 619.
 Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors 73

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

38
Lessing, 633.
39
Lessing, 637.
40
Lessing, 637.
41
“Taking a job” would signify for Anna her failure to live according to the philo-
sophical principle of the “free woman.” Until now, she has been living off of the royal-
ties from Frontiers of War, but, as those are diminishing, her choice was either to write
again or to “take a job.” Taking a job would signal a defeat for Anna, as it would indi-
cate that she has given up writing.
42
For example, Giuliana Mutti argues that by the end of the novel, “Anna plans to
enter the tidy, non-existent world which she and Doris have just manufactured.” Mutti, 83.
74 Marjorie Worthington

definitive or even “real,” particularly in a novel that so overtly questions the

possibilities of writing to depict reality. Claire Sprague represents contemporary
critical arguments about The Golden Notebook when she posits that the novel
suggests its own “alternate-discrepant endings” that “suggest continuing process,
contradiction, irony, uncertainty—anything but clear, unambiguous unity.” 43
To discuss these possible alternative endings, however, it is necessary to return
to the golden notebook section of the novel, for although the novel begins and
ends with sections of the Free Women novella, the novel itself is called The
Golden Notebook, and it is in that notebook that Anna’s climatic breakdown
and rebuilding occurs.
In the golden notebook, once Anna has come to the conclusion that writing
or words will never enable her to set down the objective truth or the unified
subjectivity that she desires, Saul enters the room and exhorts Anna to begin
writing again, saying, “Anna, you’re going to really crack up unless you do.” 44
Saul recognizes how necessary writing is to Anna, if not in helping her con-
struct herself as a singular subject, at least in helping her construct the many
subjectivities of which she is comprised. Also, he tells Anna that she is part of
a “team” of writers for whom she must keep writing:

“There are a few of us around in the world, we rely on each other even though we
don’t know each other’s names. … We’re a team, we’re the ones who haven’t given
in, who’ll go on fighting. I tell you, Anna, sometimes I pick up a book and I say:
Well, so you’ve written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won’t have to
write it.” 45

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

43
Claire Sprague, “Doubles Talk in The Golden Notebook,” 45.
44
Lessing, 639.
45
Lessing, 642.
46
Lessing, ix.
47
Lessing, 639.
 Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors 75

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

48
Lessing, 173.
49
Beth A. Boehm has argued a reader of this novel would be “mocked by Lessing
for her attempts to find a coherent, unified, ontologically stable ‘author.’ ” I agree in part,
but argue that not only can a reader find an author in Anna, but that the novel itself con-
structs her as such. However, although she is, by the end of the novel, an author, Anna is
by no means coherent, unified or ontologically stable. Beth A. Boehm, “Reeducating
Readers: Creating New Expectations for The Golden Notebook,” Narrative 5, no. 1
(January 1997): 95.
76 Marjorie Worthington

create a kind of unity or a frame of written meaning—a narrative. So, whereas

Claire Sprague sees “alternate-discrepant endings,” perhaps there is only one:
Anna completes her novel Free Women, which depicts a character named Anna
who gives up writing. Anna the writer constructs a character who no longer
writes. Thus, by the end of The Golden Notebook, Anna has, through her writ-
ing, forged herself into a successful writer who writes about the failure to write.
In this sense, the novel mirrors a dream Anna has in the middle of the novel:

I dreamed I held a kind of casket in my hands, and inside it was something very pre-
cious. I was walking up a long room, like an art gallery. … There was a small crowd
of people waiting at the end of the hall. … They were waiting for me to hand them the
casket. … I opened the box and forced them to look. But instead of a beautiful thing,
which I thought would be there, there was a mass of fragments, and pieces. Not a
whole thing, broken into fragments, but bits and pieces from everywhere, all over the
world. … This, looking at the mass of ugly fragments, was so painful that I couldn’t
look, and I shut the box. … At last I looked and I saw that there was something in the
box. It was a small green crocodile with a winking sardonic snout. I thought it was
the image of a crocodile, made of jade, or emeralds, then I saw it was alive.50

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

50
Lessing, 252–53.
51
Patrocinio Schweickart, “Reading a Wordless Statement: The Structure of Doris
Lessing’s The Golden Notebook,” Modern Fiction Studies 31: 2 (Summer 1985): 267.
52
Joanne S. Frye, Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in
Contemporary Experience (Ann Arbor, U Michigan P, 1986), 179. See also: Henke.
53
Judith Roof argues that traditional narrative structure demands an ending in
which something is produced: “As ideology, this pattern of [narrative’s] joinder to prod-
uct also accounts for the countless analogies to child/product—knowledge, mastery,
victory, another narrative, identity, and even death—that occupy the satisfying end of
the story.” Judith Roof, Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia
U P, 1996), xvii.
 Symbiotic Texts, Parasitic Authors 77

and fragmentation, serving as a frame of tenuous, never complete meaning that

brings the text and its subject to life.
So, although Anna is not able to become a coherent whole, the novel Free
Women and indeed, even The Golden Notebook have been able to do so. As nar-
ratives, they do have a coherence and wholeness that, although illusory perhaps,
is the inherent nature of narrative. Ultimately, however, Anna emerges as a
fragmented subject who can create, although she does not create the unified
and organized novel of traditional fiction. Rather, she constructs the chaotic yet
powerful novel that is The Golden Notebook. In other words, while Anna may
not be able to construct an identity through writing, she is most certainly able
to craft and structure a novel. Anna demonstrates that, despite critical claims
that the author is dead, one need not be a self in order to be an author. What
Anna learns, and what is the ultimate lesson of this novel is that fragmented
subjectivity is still subjectivity, and a fragmented novel is still a novel. Anna is
a self, even if she is not the kind of self she wants to be, and she is an author
even if she is not the kind of author she dreams of being.
Furthermore, within the chaos and disorder of this selfhood and this novel,
there emerges, in the end, a kind of order. The novel actually does adhere to the
dictates of traditional narrative: there is a climax and a productive ending. And
that productive ending is that Anna emerges from her crisis once again able and
ready to write: the novel produces its author. And Anna, by writing and shap-
ing both the narrative that is Free Women as well as the chaotic narrative that is
The Golden Notebook, creates a powerful work of art: the author produces her
novel. Thus, The Golden Notebook is a striking chronicle of the symbiotic rela-
tionship between authors and their texts, as the novel actually creates the con-
sciousness capable of writing it. If Anna can continue writing despite this
fragmentation, continue writing, even though writing cannot achieve what she
wants it to, this is the victory. Anna decides not to give up or surrender to nihilism,
but to continue attempting to find meaning, to find truth, even if it is only the truth
inherent in the fruitless search for truth. In this sense, The Golden Notebook, rep-
resents the victory of form (or at least the attempt at form) over chaos, and the per-
sistence of authorship in the face of contemporary fragmentation.

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

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

CONNIE GRIFFIN

In an impressive body of work that crosses fiction and nonfiction, Kim

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

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

1
Kim Chernin, The Flame Bearers (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 88.
80 Connie Griffin

responds to both questions, while providing reflexive insight into the process
she undergoes when writing.
In Reinventing Eve, a nonfictional narrative subtitled “modern woman in
search of herself,” Chernin draws on images of a garden “gone wild” to describe
a self who wants to break out of its allotted cultural and literary plot but fears
the consequences.

I began to admit that I had been drawn out of my house by a wish to disinvent myself
as patriarchal female, to give myself back to the nature that was in me, grow profusely,
overstep my bounds, step out of the confined plot to which I had been assigned, and
finally admit, in the most radical possible way, that I as a woman did not exist.2

Although disinvention of the culturally constructed woman is her desire,

Chernin’s narrator fears that such a deconstruction will leave her “[s]elfless in the
most severe sense of the word. A woman with no self, facing the female void.” 3
If she follows desire and leaves the domesticated garden, if she “step(s) out of the
confined plot to which [she] has been assigned,” she may cease to exist.
In acknowledging the various plots by which she has been cultivated—the
cultural plot creating specific gender roles, the literary plot setting forth a tra-
dition in which she does not fit, the Judeo-Christian plot subordinating woman
to man—Chernin comes to terms with her dismay that she has been con-
structed in an image that does not represent her deepest sense of self. Chernin
faces a frightening conundrum: dissolution of her sense of selfhood. Having
come to a personal crisis and feeling confined by cultural definitions of her
identity, Chernin chooses to break out anyway.
Setting her narrative in relation to and yet outside of the modernist literary
canon and its assumed representativeness, Chernin wonders who she would be
if she negated cultural assumptions about “the nature of [herself] as a woman” 4
Comparing her situation as a woman with T. S. Eliot’s claim that he and his fel-
low poets are “the hollow men … headpiece filled with straw,” she argues that
for women the situation is even worse, because:

[t]his straw with which we had been stuffed wasn’t even our straw. Woman, keep-
ing to her place in patriarchal culture, was nothing more than an accumulated ter-
ror, a blind fear of what we might become if we dared, just once, create ourselves.5

2
Kim Chernin, Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself (New York:
Harper and Row, 1987), 15.
3
Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 15.
4
In their introduction to De/Colonizing the Subject, Sidonie Smith and Julia
Watson argue that women who position themselves as autobiographical subjects find
themselves in the position of facing previously constructed paradigms of theme and
structure within which they do not “fit.”
5
Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 15–16.
 Memory, Memoir, and Fictions 81

A number of things are going on in Chernin’s reference to Eliot, but the sig-
nificant issue is that, while Chernin may fear “breaking out” of those cultural
“places” to which she has been relegated by cultural pressure and norms, her
greater sense of hollowness derives from the simultaneity of her desire for self-
creation and her realization that the “straw” to which Eliot refers is not the stuff
from which she can create a self. It is not the dying of a long-standing literary
tradition and its myths, so lamented by Eliot and other modernists, to which
Chernin is referring; it is the inheritance of a tradition that is not of her mak-
ing, that does not speak her experience; it is the inheritance of a tradition on
which she could not draw even if it were vitally alive.
Like numerous feminist writers in the latter half of the twentieth century,6
Chernin suggests that while women’s modern (and postmodern) literary sensibil-
ities may share with men a sense of hollowness, such hollowness is differentiated
from men’s in that it does not derive from either the “anxiety of influence”
expressed by male modernists, nor from the futility of self-representation to which
postmodernists tend to fall prey. Ultimately, the hollowness to which Chernin is
referring is her sense of being “[s]elfless in the most severe sense of the word,” a
selflessness that derives from her rejection of the discursive plots of contemporary
Western culture.7 Chernin states unequivocally that she is not seeking guidance
from “Holy Writ or any mediated authority,” but must “claim the authority of [her]
own experience, to trust the wisdom of [her] own body.” She must write “a story
about a woman who creates the world from her own substance.” 8
Admitting that she had no idea that she “was looking for an embodied
image of female potential” when she went out on her walks, Chernin neverthe-
less had begun to lose her “fear of the wildness called up in [herself] by wild,
uncultivated places.” 9 Asking herself how she could imagine “that there was
hidden knowledge, old memory, another possibility of being female,” Chernin
sets out toward “the hidden,” toward the “old.” 10 It is an active choice requir-
ing solitude, loneliness, and a stripping away of distractions. Describing this
process as cyclical and involving various states of mind, Chernin asserts:

All change is like this. It circles around, snakes back on itself, finds detours, leads
us a merry chase, starts us out it seems all over again from where we were in the
first place. And then suddenly, when we least expect it, something opens a door,
discovers a threshold, shoves us across.11

6
See, for example, Gayle Greene, Molly Hite, Janice Morgan and Colette T. Hall,
Elaine Showalter, Sidonie Smith, Leslie Wahl Rabine, and Shari Benstock.
7
Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 15.
8
Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 19–20.
9
Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 20.
10
Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 16.
11
Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 16.
82 Connie Griffin

Background

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

12
Kim Chernin, In My Mother’s House: A Daughter’s Story (HarperPerennial-
HarperCollins, 1994), 55.
13
Annis V. Pratt, “Spinning Among Fields: Jung, Frye, Levi-Strauss and Feminist
Archetypal Theory,” in Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-visions of
Jungian Thought, ed. Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht (Knoxville:
U Tennessee P, 1985), 95–96. Pratt argues that “[w]hether or not they derive from some
golden age of women in our atual past, the archetypes we find in our literature represent
 Memory, Memoir, and Fictions 83

Dividing Reinventing Eve into four sections: “Initiation,” “Descent,”

“Underworld,” and “Disobedience,” Chernin’s narrative protagonist immerses
herself in what poststructuralists refer to as the “master narratives” of the West,
including Freud, Jung, the Hebrew bible, even as she calls into question notions
of a legitimate literary canon. Entering into and revising the ancient, mythic
journeys of Western literature, Chernin searches for “some kind of forgotten
code or buried script underlying the normative plots which women authors in a
patriarchal culture internalize.” 14 Like Adrienne Rich’s diver in “Diving into
the Wreck,” Chernin is seeking models, mentors, and myths by which to live as
a contemporary woman.15
Thus, entering into self-representational narratives of emotional and psy-
chological states of renewal, Chernin’s text enacts a descent into an “Under-
world” of regeneration. Drawing on the same imagery of descent that she will
later use in A Different Kind of Listening, Chernin journeys down into a cave-
like space in the earth via a spiral staircase that drops beneath her desk. The
journey is not only spatial (down, into the earth), but also historical (back in
time), as well as psychological (to a state of being she might have experienced
as an infant).

It was an imagistic consciousness, around which external reality seemed to float,

present but not attended to, while I drifted in a sea of half awareness, bathed in half
impressions, vivid imagery, and strong bodily sensations, all of them presided over
by hovering female shapes or fragments.16

Cultivating a state of what Romain Rolland has described as “oceanic con-

sciousness,” a limitless, unbounded state, which, according to Rolland, was not
the result of a belief system, but rather strong, subjective impressions, Chernin
finds a way back to an archaic state of infantile consciousness in order to
explore its qualities. Freud drew on Rolland’s insights when, in Civilization
and Its Discontents, he associated the oceanic feeling with the first relationship
between mother and child, linking the infant’s sense of merged identity with the
mother to that of an unbounded relationship to the universe and located the
“fons et origo” of religious feeling in a state of infantile consciousness experi-
enced at the mother’s breast.17 Chernin notes that Freud later rejected Rolland’s

vital psychological possibilities. The feminist archeteypal critic seeks to elucidate these
feminine counterstructures, to show how gender norms affect tone, attitude, imagery,
characterization, and plotting, to trace the counterstructures through the total work of an
author and then throughout the field of women’s literature as a whole.”
14
Pratt, “Spinning,” 95.
15
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 22.
16
Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 86.
17
Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 88–91.
84 Connie Griffin

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

Fragments: Past and Present

Constructing a narrative persona who is actually a series of selves, a self who

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

18
Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 91.
19
Chernin, Reinventing Eve, 87. Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht note
in their introduction to Feminist Archetypal Theory that Jung’s followers came to see
archetypes as having their origin in a transcendent and religious realm, therefore
unchanging. The concept of archetypes, however, have been in the process of redefini-
tion. Eric Neumann, in Art and the Creative Unconscious describes archetypes as
changing and changeable “according to the time, the place, and the psychological con-
stellation of the individual in whom they are manifested.” And James Hall argues that
“the trigger for the archetype to manifest itself is also experience,” for example, while
“there is no inherited image of the mother … there is a universal tendency to form an
image of the mother from the experience of the child” (in Lauter and Rupprecht, 9–11).
20
Kim Chernin, A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow
(New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 10.
21
Chernin, Listening, xiii–xiv.
 Memory, Memoir, and Fictions 85

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

22
Chernin, Listening, xx.
23
Chernin, Listening, 13.
24
Chernin, Listening, 13.
25
Chernin, Listening, 84.
86 Connie Griffin

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

Home, Another Country

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

26
Chernin, Listening, 84–85.
 Memory, Memoir, and Fictions 87

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

I sometimes think she stacked them maliciously, hoping I’d have trouble sorting
things out. … I’m sure her memories do not mean well by me. There’s a trap here
somewhere, some trick lying in wait, someone who lives at the edge is likely to
have arresting, impossible memories.31

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

Chernin’s wariness in approaching history through memory also derives

from hindsight: the present self (“I”) would like to rescue the past self (“she”);
thus, through revision past outcomes could be changed. In revising past
actions, Chernin’s narrator hopes, not only to change the story, but to change
the self. Chernin’s self-reflexive narrative would like to reign in the feisty char-
acter from her past, save her from destruction, so that:

… if it were possible to end here, I would have done all a biographer could do on
behalf of an unruly subject whose story will soon turn another corner, bringing her
back to everything she has come up here to avoid. If I could set the mountain in a
ring of fire, making it hard to leave or enter, that is what I would do to keep Kim
Chernin from the kind of love she is calling down on herself.32

And yet, even though Chernin’s stated task is the shaping of story from
memory’s reservoir, she suggests that there are underlying plots that will have
their way with the story under construction; there are cultural, literary, and per-
sonal scripts that shape, not only the writing of the story but the very memory
of the experience about which she is writing. The unconscious shaping of self
to match the culturally conventional script becomes dangerous for the very
reason that it is unconscious; therefore, its construction becomes naturalized.
Because of this, in the first version of the story, Chernin cannot save her hero-
ine from the story’s ostensibly “inevitable” unfolding. Because,

of course the soldier is going to arrive … knowing by heart some entire passages
from a twilight song of love and death … he will walk through fire, pledge eternal
love, go down off the mountain, betray her. Nothing I can do, that’s how it will go,
in keeping with some inevitable twist in the way things get told, there seems to be
no other way to register it. The same laws govern the shape of opera, saga, epic, old
tale, weaver’s fancy, memory, I guess.33

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

32
Chernin, Crossing, 143.
33
Chernin, Crossing, 143.
 Memory, Memoir, and Fictions 89

has ever figured out how to read it. Memory is not for amateurs. I’ve made it
my life’s work.” 34
Having lost its thread of continuity, Chernin is not sure how to end the story;
what she remembers is romantic love and tragic loss. But, she doesn’t quite
trust this conventional ending. Comparing memory to a house set on fire, nar-
rative reconstruction is likened to a process of searching for precious things
after the fire. Chernin writes:

Someone has gone through these memories setting whole scenes on fire. … I have
shards, fragments, incriminating ashen possibilities. To remember has become a
game of make as make can.35

Concerned that the memories have been reconstructed to give the illusion of
coherence, or even worse, that they are a “false stage, a protective contrivance,”
Chernin opens the revealing letters that “make a mockery of her life’s work.”
The letters reveal that the “burned” parts of the story, the scenes that were set on
fire, were those of Kim Chernin’s love and passion for a woman while living on
the kibbutz in Israel.36

Kim Chernin should have had a chance before her death. She should have told her
own version. I, who came after, would have preferred to know sooner what I found
out when I read Kim Chernin’s letters. If someone else finds a new voice hard to
get used to this late in the story, imagine how I felt when the letters turned up
twenty years after I thought Kim Chernin had shut up for good.37

Here Chernin explicitly addresses the literary devices of voice, audience,

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

34
Chernin, Crossing, 166.
35
Chernin, Crossing, 190.
36
Chernin, Crossing, 191.
37
Chernin, Crossing, 209.
90 Connie Griffin

The Return of the Repressed

The “forgotten” story is one of two women’s passion for one another and their
attempts to live out their love in the midst of a small, close-knit community,
where “homosexual relationships” are one of the forbidden rules, agreed to in
writing before being admitted to the kibbutz. This story, like the first, is a story
of love and loss, of violence and betrayal. But, unlike the first story, which is
propelled along in a culturally over-determined process, replete with its own
romantic conventions, the forgotten story is framed by those forces that are set
against its unfolding. It is a story that requires crossing over the borders of that
which is culturally forbidden, of crossing those forces that are set against such
stories taking their place in history, indeed those internalized forces that resist
its being remembered.
The “shards” and “fragments” to which Chernin turns to reconstruct her
time in Israel and her love of a woman take the form of a series of letters from
Kim Chernin to her “Beloved”; there are no letters in response. But, there were
telephone calls, recordings of her lover’s voice that the letters describe as a
“disembodied voice that has already grown shrill from repeating itself …” 38

I play the tape to the end. I wind it back. I start over. … I play the tape back, punch
it to silence, listen to your voice echo along the stone walls. I can make you speak
at top speed, as if you were desperate to say everything before I turn you off. I can
slow you down to a drone, as if every word had to be wrung out of you. You say I
was careless, I was selfish, I overcame your resistance, you talk as if I were a magi-
cian, practicing spells.39

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

38
Chernin, Crossing, 214.
39
Chernin, Crossing, 214, 220.
 Memory, Memoir, and Fictions 91

she has consistently described as the exploration of memory and selfhood, but
they have reintroduced an old self that, if re-integrated into her present identity
will construct a new subjectivity.40 And who might that be? It is a frightening
prospect.

I have read Kim Chernin’s letters slowly. … I began to suspect she had written
them to me. She would have wanted to cast herself forward, she must have known
she was coming to an end, with those letters she hoped to anchor herself in me. If
I had read fast, staying up all night, unable to put them down until I had finished,
Kim Chernin would have made her way back. Yes, back. Of course, back. I must
have known she would not stay dead forever.41

In order to maintain distance from her earlier self, the narrator works with the
letters “only in the morning, searching out contradictions, gaps, inconsistencies
in the story.” 42 In other words, in maintaining a critical distance, the narrator
resists the emergence of the ghost self and its merging with her present self.
The conclusion to Crossing the Border moves into an allegorical weaving
across boundaries of nationhood, of selfhood, and of fact and fiction; it creates
parallels between the stories being told in this text and Israel as Jewish home-
land, between emotional boundaries and a “security road” that was being built
when she lived on the kibbutz. The conclusion mirrors the beginning of Crossing
the Border when the young Kim Chernin links her sense of homelessness with
her identity as a Jew, passionately defending Israel as the Jewish homeland, cit-
ing “the battles recorded by Josephus, when the Romans conquered Jerusalem in
the year 70.” 43 The narrator tells friends assembled there “how the Jewish ten-
dency to repeat stories was solely responsible for the Jewish return to Eretz
Israel,” and argues that “that is how we must understand Israel, as testimony to
the sheer narrative bravado of bending history to the story’s will.” 44

Soon, she [Kim Chernin] will cobble together a resemblance between our domes-
tic strife and the blood struggle for the homeland. I can just see her with her map
of the interior, erasing the security zones. … I sit sternly, clipping, posting, assem-
bling, recording. Much has been lost; the memory of the land in its blood struggles
has fragmented. The claims are driven back to a sharp cut of antiquity, exclusive,
absolute, irresolvable on either side. I would say neither can have the land without
the other, if both cannot possess it, it cannot be home to either. Always, the other,
across the border.45

40
Chernin, Crossing, 277.
41
Chernin, Crossing, 279.
42
Chernin, Crossing, 279.
43
Chernin, Crossing, 21.
44
Chernin, Crossing, 22.
45
Chernin, Crossing, 318.
92 Connie Griffin

In this scene of the present-day writer at work at her desk, Chernin illus-
trates optional constructions of the story of her homeland; as such, history is in
the process of being reconstructed, from memory which takes shape in frag-
ments and bits. History has fractured and shifted, depending upon point of
view and historical positionality. Memory is not to be trusted, yet history is
constructed through memory. Here the stories merge, conflating the individual
and the communal, the personal and the political, the story and the historical.
And this merging takes shape from the position and perspective of the split
self, foreshadowing a re-emerging of the former self and its merging with the
narrating subject.

I do not weep. … Now that my work on Kim Chernin has come to an end, I have
been sent on to other restorations. If she thinks there is a way to live out the pas-
sionate destiny of the romantic dreamer, now, in this place, if she imagines I am
terrified by her outrage, her weeping, her clenched fists because she is pounding
the work table where my papers have been spread out, so be it. … If Kim Chernin
wants to cry let it be for the lost family romance with her own people. If Kim
Chernin cannot make memory of this, why should I any longer fear Kim Chernin?
Do you hear? Why should I any longer fear Kim Chernin?46

This is yet another story being woven into the primary stories of Kim
Chernin’s going to Israel to find herself, of falling in love with a soldier, of
falling in love with a woman. This story seems to break through the other sto-
ries, fragmented and impressionistic; it suggests the author’s task is not merely
with memory, but includes an older narrator’s relationship with a younger
aspect of self. Like the insertion of the forgotten story, it is a different kind of
romance, therefore, a different kind of loss. Chernin is suggesting that the
younger self must give up her ideals of her homeland and her people because
they are based on idealized memory. Chernin is suggesting that the younger self
cannot work with complex Jewish identity, but sees the right to a Jewish “home-
land” in absolute terms, does not recognize the need for a “security zone,” a zone
that resonates politically, geographically, and psychologically. The narrator, on
the other hand, needs a “security zone,” needs some distance between reason and
raw emotion, between passionate feeling and action, between telling and story.

Welcome her back? … My youth self still coming of age with her uproar and dis-
order? Okay, welcome her back. My perpetual waif, still coming of age at every
age with her uproar and disorder. … Share my house with her. … She will not have
changed. … Have I really missed her these twenty years, my wandering spirit who
should have been trampled out in the name of maturity?

46
Chernin, Crossing, 318–319.
 Memory, Memoir, and Fictions 93

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

Repressed for twenty years, the former self is seeking to rejoin the current
self, thus creating a new subjectivity. Melding the passionate with the rational,
the youthful with the mature, the chaotic with the ordered, Chernin crosses the
most dangerous border, her own subconscious “security zone” set up between
that which is repressed and that which is remembered.
And so the book ends, not with her work on Kim Chernin having been com-
pleted, but with the integration of disparate selves that had been split off from
one another. This ghost self, relegated to the background, dismissed as dead,
repressed as too frightening to remember, when welcomed back brings with it
what has been pushed out of the frame of reference. Slipping into the shadows,
A Different Kind of Listening creates a narrative space through which the dis-
parate selves may be in dialogue rather than cut off from one another.
And so we return to the analytic couch where the narrator is speaking of the
“ghostly self,” where she is welcoming back her “secret-sharer,” and coming to
terms with her bisexual identity, stating:

From the moment the exuberant, would-be whole-self emerged, there would never
again be a wholesale shattering. This self, although it is fated to undergo further
disintegrations, has a firm hold on the world. Therefore, it is different from any
self-configuration that has emerged before.48

With this new self-configuration, multi-dimensional but not so fragile as to

shatter and scatter into disparate parts, Chernin can begin to ask questions cen-
tral to postmodern concepts of the self. For example, is the self really like
Lyotard’s onion, endlessly layered until one arrives at nothingness? Is it like the
helix of modern science, so that no matter how deeply one descends, one will
encounter “the same pattern … the same thematic structure” only deeper
within the self’s interior?49 The subject can be described only by analogy, by
rhetorical devices that provide correlatives to the experience of journeying into
the inner recesses of the self. Chernin’s adept ability to draw on metaphorical

47
Chernin, Crossing, 319, 324–325.
48
Chernin, Listening, 105–106, 110.
49
Chernin, Listening, 112.
94 Connie Griffin

mappings of subjectivity is demonstrated in Reinventing Eve, Crossing the

Border, and A Different Kind of Listening, all of which are textual journeys that
weave exterior landscapes as they delve into the subjective psyche by drawing
on memory, altered states, and psychoanalysis. In each narrative Chernin con-
fronts her life-long fear of psychic fragmentation:

If you came apart, what would happen to the parts? Would they float off into space,
lacking the specific gravity of their integrity? Would they yearn for one another. …
Would the body’s intelligence have survived in each part, so that each part might
then hastily seek a strategy for reintegration?50

In this image of a fractured self, consciousness is its own body; Chernin’s

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

50
Chernin, Listening, 118.
51
Michael Talbot. The Holographic Universe (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 33.
52
Talbot, Holographic, 47.
53
Talbot, Holographic, 48.
54
Chernin, Listening, 119.
55
Chernin, Listening, 120.
 Memory, Memoir, and Fictions 95

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

Annealment

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

56
Chernin, Listening, 126.
57
Chernin, Listening, 126.
58
Chernin, Listening, 213.
59
I am indebted to Leigh Gilmore for the use of the term, Autobiographics. For an
excellent analysis of the instability of nonfiction and the cultural politics of self-
representational writing, see Gilmore’s Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s
Self-Representation.
96 Connie Griffin

prefers to plumb her own “underworld.” 60 It is not necessarily Freudian mod-

els to which Chernin takes exception; it is the universalization of those models.
“I have no argument with Freud’s truths when they stick to Freud. As for myself,
I have never seen why his truths should be binding for me,” she writes.61
Asserting that Freud selected Oedipus “from among a thousand mythical faces
because Oedipus had in common with Freud an abiding love for his mother, a
bitter quarrel with his father,” Chernin refuses other people’s versions of her
subjectivity.62 “When other people have tried to translate me into Freud, I resis-
ted. This has made for a stormy, irregular psychoanalytic experience, but why
should I blame Freud for that? I have my own underworld, as useful to me as
Freud’s proved to be for him.” 63

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

60
Chernin, Listening, 214–215.
61
Chernin, Listening, 43.
62
Chernin, Listening, 214–215.
63
Chernin, Listening, 209.
 STEPHEN KING’S WRITERS:
THE CRITICAL POLITICS OF LITERARY QUALITY
IN MISERY AND THE DARK HALF

MICHAEL J. MEYER

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

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

romance, as an inferior pursuit and the province of hack writers or write-alikes.

In order to redeem these areas of interest, King writes intensely in their
defense, attempting to elevate their reputation by associating writers of
“quality” with the field. For example, he argues in “The Horror Writer and
The Ten Bears”:

Horror isn’t a hack market now and never was. The genre is one of the most deli-
cate known to man, and it must be handled with great care and more than a little
love. Some of the greatest authors of all time have tried their hand at things that go
bump in the night, including Shakespeare, Chaucer, Hawthorne, Poe, Henry
James, William Faulkner and a score of others. (13)

Unfortunately, King has reluctantly acknowledged that his critical reputa-

tion has not reached these heights; indeed in a preface to “The Sun Dog” in
Four Past Midnight he states: “I am no one’s National Book Award or Pulitzer
Prize winner” (608). Elsewhere, he has admitted, “I am not a great artist, but
I’ve always felt impelled to write” (Night Shift, xiii). However, despite his
protests to the contrary, readers can sense that King is offended by the sugges-
tion that he has never written anything serious. He seems to take it as a personal
insult that despite his adroit manipulation of plot and his skillful development
of character, he remains, in the eyes of most critics, merely a writer of popular
fiction, an author whose books may be evaluated on a level with those pro-
duced by Sidney Sheldon, Robert Ludlum, Victoria Holt, Rosemary Rogers
and Danielle Steele, composers of what King himself labels pulp-fiction and
whom he has dismissed as “write-alikes” (The Dark Half 67). Perhaps, as
novelist Michele Shung suggested in The New Republic, “the grisly nature
of [his] subject matter [has led] some critics to underestimate his literary
talents” (150).
In an interview published in Playboy in 1983, King rails against critics who
“ghettoize horror and fantasy and instantly relegate them beyond the pale of
so-called serious literature” (Bare Bones, 52). He argues that such criticisms
assume “that all popular literature must also, by definition, be bad literature.
These criticisms are not really against bad writing; they are against an entire
type of writing” (53). Thus King’s chore is primarily a struggle to overcome
what Leslie Fiedler has defined as “the notorious reputation of macabre fic-
tion,” its tendency to be labeled as “disreputable schlock, frivolous make-
believe, vulgar and gross, and a regrettable regression from the straight path of
literary progress” (The Kingdom of Fear, 57). Clearly uncomfortable with
being labeled as an individual whose preoccupation with horror automatically
results in inferior prose, King has not only revealed his frustration in inter-
views and in his non-fiction book Danse Macabre but also has surprisingly
included it as a major factor in several of his major novels, including Misery
 Critical Politics of Literary Quality 99

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

plateau of Art” (17). Such paradoxical statements prefigure King’s distressing

struggle with literary politics in these novels. He seems particularly confused
about critical decrees that certain genres are by nature less valuable. Although
horror director Clive Barker claims that from the beginning King “has never
apologized or been ashamed to be a horror writer,” (Kingdom of Fear 64) his
discussions in these novels certainly lead readers to an opposite conclusion.
For example, Misery, published in 1987, introduces readers to Paul Sheldon,
a writer who wrestles with the question of whether the quality of his work is up
to par by the establishment’s standards of excellence. Described on page six of
the novel as an author who wrote “novels of two kinds, good ones and best sell-
ers,” Sheldon is best known for a series of romance novels featuring the char-
acter, Misery Chastain. However, the author has recently killed off this most
bankable of heroines in an attempt to break away from stereotypical plots and
devices; to his delight he has completed a contemporary, realistic book entitled
Fast Cars that he feels is “a cinch for next year’s American Book Award”
(Misery, 14), an honor no “Misery” novel could ever attain. When Sheldon is
seriously injured in an auto wreck, however, his new manuscript is appropri-
ated by his rescuer, a fanatic fan named Annie Wilkes.
Annie, a desperate follower of the Misery series, is unimpressed by the
author’s new and more literary achievement. She complains, “It’s hard to fol-
low. It keeps jumping back and forth in time.” (Misery, 19), almost sounding
like King’s own critics who have at times deplored his fragmented style and his
tendency to present episodes out of time sequence. In addition, Annie disap-
proves of the fact that Sheldon’s new title is all “technique and that the subject
dictates the form” (19). Moreover, she is disgusted by the fact that Fast Cars’
hero, Tony Bonasaro, is uninteresting and frequently uses profanity. She
announces that the book lacks nobility and that she finds it offensive and
unreal when compared to the “Misery” series (20). In a defensive posture,
Sheldon calls his approach a trick of the trade, one that gives evidence of the
complexity of his creation, a factor usually not identified with plot-centered
and chronologically ordered works of the mystery and romance genre.
Fast Cars, on the other hand, is Sheldon’s major attempt to write “better,”
to move away from popular fiction, works produced for and influenced by
audience approval. He confesses

They wanted Misery, Misery, Misery. Each time he had taken a year or two off to
write one of the other novels—what he thought of as his “serious” work with what
was first certainty and then hope and finally a species of grim desperation. … The
message was always the same: It wasn’t what I expected ... Please go back to
Misery. I want to know what Misery is doing. He could write a modern Under The
Volcano, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Sound and the Fury; it wouldn’t matter.
They would still want Misery, Misery, Misery (Misery, 25).
 Critical Politics of Literary Quality 101

Despite his determination to avoid publishing another harlequin romance,

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

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

Similarly, Sheldon is unhappy with his stereotypical heroine and her melo-
dramatic life. He perceives himself as a stronger and more competent individ-
ual when he composes Fast Cars, a novel whose hero is far different from the
effete males who populate his romantic sagas. He seeks a new and more virile
character through his writing, and Geoffrey and Ian from his Misery novels are
hardly comparable to Tony Bonasaro of Fast Cars. In the same manner,
Beaumont, when writing as Stark, also discovers a different, more powerful
individual within himself, since his alter-ego has both inner courage and out-
ward physical strength combined with convincing cleverness and determina-
tion. When Stark is in charge, Beaumont even finds himself undergoing physical
changes while composing, such as writing with a Berol Black pencil instead of a
typewriter, consuming large amounts of alcohol and smoking cigars. As his
wife describes him in his Stark mode, she says:
He’d become distant. Not cold, not even cool, just distant. He was less interested in
going out, in seeing people … he’d feel headachy and unrested, but if he’d been
having bad dreams, he couldn’t remember what they were (190).
 Critical Politics of Literary Quality 103

Another Dark Half character also notes the change. “He is two men,” Sheriff
Allen Pangborn says, “he has always been two men. That’s what any man or
woman who makes believe for a living must be. The one who exists in the nor-
mal world … and the one who creates worlds. They are two. Always at least
two” (346).1 Yet despite attaining a more powerful physical self-image through
his fiction, Beaumont admits that he has primarily continued to write “pulp”
because it pays. Following the lead of Alexis Machine, all Beaumont seeks is
“my money. I want my money” (The Dark Half 25).
Unlike Sheldon, Beaumont seems initially satisfied with his “betrayal” of
his so-called art. As Beaumont says: “I enjoyed him [Stark] for a long time …
and, hell, the guy was making money. I called it my f—you money. I’m as vul-
nerable to the siren song of money as anyone else” (28). Although King in the
introductory note to Different Seasons specifically denies his own attraction to
money as a motive for writing, his continued creation of monetary motives for
his authorial characters suggests that perhaps both texts contain a subtle exam-
ination (perhaps apologetic) of King’s own attraction to repetitious plotlines,
violence and horrific detail as selling points for his talent.
Through the plots of both Misery and The Dark Half, King poses the
ambiguous question faced by all writers: whether their concern for the symbi-
otic relationship with their reading public is great enough to overcome their
fear of catering to inferior quality in order to attain a measure of reader accept-
ance and financial success. Consequently, the authorial figures must continu-
ally submit themselves to vigorous self-analysis in order to justify their literary
existence. Such examinations, while grueling, provide an opportunity to exam-
ine the guilt feelings writers occasionally experience from not striving for aes-
thetic heights but rather being satisfied with the approval of the masses. In
terms of their reactions to such self-examination, Sheldon and Beaumont are as
different as two sides of a coin. Surprisingly, however, they make the same
discoveries.
As Sheldon is forced to enter a composing stage of yet another “Misery”
novel, he is surprised to discover that “the pride in his work, the worth of the
work itself ” (Misery, 26) begins to overcome his objections to writing yet
another book in the series. He becomes more liberal about his criteria for suc-
cess, seeing value in story-telling no matter what its subject matter. Contrarily,
although the Stark alter-ego prospers through three more novels, Thad’s threat-
ened exposure as Stark creates a negative reaction about being associated with
and writing “pulp.” The publicity may cause sales of his classic work to plum-
met. To avoid blackmail and certain exposure, Thad decides to create a media

1
Amy Rainey, the wife of the writer/protagonist in “Secret Window” describes a
similar reaction to her husband. “He was two men,” she says. “He was himself and he
became a character he created (395).
104 Michael J. Meyer

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

2
Morton Rainey, the protagonist of “Secret Window, Secret Garden” has a similar
inferiority complex about his work, referring to it as “sort of trash” (279). Rainey also
has little respect for his profession, seeing it as a type of elegantly played con game and
stating that most writers “were so full of shit they squeaked” (281).
 Critical Politics of Literary Quality 105

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

that the increasing dismissal of his work in the critical press as that of a “popular
writer”—one step, a small one—above that of hack, had hurt him quite badly. It
didn’t jibe with his self-image as a Serious Writer who was only churning out these
shitty romances in order to subsidize his Real Work (263).

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

awakens him to the fact that writing is a mystical and magical event rather than
a stilted craft. By the end of the novel, he is no longer distressed about com-
posing what others have labeled inferior prose. He is sure that he can even be
proud of a creation that literary critics will degrade and scorn because he finds
it pleasing and his audience is satisfied. He almost echoes King’s words in
Bare Bones where he says: “I think as far as any judgment goes, the only thing
that matters is what I think of it” (59).
The same cannot be said of Thad Beaumont, who symbolizes the other
category: writing as business. His literary output reveals little self-struggle about
writing as an art. For him, writing has become more exasperation than deep
pleasure, more duty than a labor of love.3 Although he has attained a critical
acknowledgment of significance, he finds such recognition empty and worth-
less. Beaumont definitely is portrayed as less motivated by a love of his job than
Sheldon is. For example, King reveals that his writing technique involves a jour-
nal about “the events in his own life that interested, amused and frightened him,”
but that the entries are “mostly passionless, as if a part of him was standing
aside and reporting on his life with its own divorced and disinterested eye” (75).
This passage is almost a confession that Beaumont as writer no longer has con-
cern for his stories. Instead Thad sees the pseudonymous George Stark as a way
to gain instant profit from his craft; Stark is a powerful alchemist who is able to
transform “straw into gold. Tigers into butter. Books into best sellers” (230).
Slowly but surely, Beaumont comes to accept that it is Stark’s “crazed nonsense
that paid the bills Thad’s own work could not pay” (238). He says of his work:

Thaddeus Beaumont has written two books hardly anybody has read. The second,
published eleven years ago, didn’t even review very well. The infinitesimal advances
he got didn’t earn out. … Stark, on the other hand, makes money by the fistful.
They’re discreet fistfuls, but the books still earn four times what I make teaching
each year (112).

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

3
Again Rainey provides a parallel by suggesting that his composing has degener-
ated into a mere production of feces that will attract a reader (288).
 Critical Politics of Literary Quality 107

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

4
In “Secret Window” Rainey’s craft is depicted as his lover, continuing this sex-
ual analogy of a writer’s relationship to his work. His wife laments, “She was prettier
than me, smarter than me, more fun than me. How could I compete? (364)
108 Michael J. Meyer

King also uses the image of male sexual dominance to express the power
that a writer wields over his reader. Sheldon makes this discovery as he is
forced to create Misery Returns for Annie Wilkes. He realizes that he has “a cer-
tain passive hold over her,” (230) a hold that he associates with sexual domi-
nance. Sheldon goes on to parallel his reactions to similar heightened emotional
experiences he felt as a reader when a “classic” author created a character or an
event that moved him. Citing such literary works as The World According to
Garp, Oliver Twist, The Forsyte Saga and The Lord of The Flies, Sheldon recalls
the powerful hold produced by writers of classic fiction (231). Such texts have
the ability to cause a variety of physical reactions, a radical reader involvement
that reminds one of and perhaps even rivals the rewards of sexual arousal.
Yet such strong emotional reactions can also be seen from a negative side,
an event that occurs when the creative urge is manipulated or distorted. In
Misery this distortion is identified sexually by the Scheherazade complex as
Sheldon associates himself with the original story teller from The Arabian
Nights, the Sultan’s bride, Scheherazade. Just as this exotic concubine uses sto-
ries to save her own life, Sheldon occupies a similar role as the writer of Misery
Returns, keeping Annie Wilkes interested in his clever plots and so unable to
kill him. Such role playing for personal benefit is also characteristic of
Beaumont, whose main tie to Stark initially involves a monetary factor and
later becomes a gamble for continued existence. Beaumont, like Scheherazade,
must keep telling stories to save his life—to prevent his dark half from destroy-
ing him. King associates this corruption of a more artistic motivation with
prostitution, the selling of sexual favors for a price, and suggests to his
writer/protagonists that they may indeed be taking advantage of their audience,
plying them with words and ideas that lack true value. If writing popular fic-
tion has indeed become a prostitution of talent in order to make money, the sex-
ual imagery invoked previously may no longer be seen as positive. King is also
quick to point out that such prostitution is not restricted to writers of popular
fiction. Authors of “classic” prose have also found it advantageous.
A second image that appears in both books to distinguish writing as art from
writing as business is the portrait of the artist as a powerful God-like creator. In
an interview published in Bare Bones, King describes his writing as “sort of like
a God-like function in a way, and that’s kind of fun. You get to play God. If you’re
writing a book, you point your finger at somebody and say, “You, turkey, you’re
coming with me!” and the character drops dead (114). Here the previously men-
tioned sexual image is enlarged as King and writer/protagonists become deific.
On page thirty-three of Misery, Annie Wilkes presents the metaphor by saying:
A writer is God to people in the story, he made them up just like GOD made us up
and no one can get ahold of God and make him explain, all right, okay … but now
God just happens to have a pair of broken legs and God just happens to be in MY
house eating MY food … and …
 Critical Politics of Literary Quality 109

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

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

By using the metaphor of drugs, writing is seen as a curative, a dosage that

allows the writer to continue to produce words and story despite his concern
about the eventual outcome of his task. King uses Sheldon to illustrate this pos-
itive presentation of writing, depicting his composition process as an essential
element in overcoming his pain. Another therapeutic image is Sheldon’s depic-
tion of the well of dreams an author has inside him (150). This supply can be
relied on for sustenance and healing, and “like a thirsty animal finding a water-
hole at dusk” the author drinks from it, “finding a hole in the paper and
[falling] through it” (150). Sheldon finds the drug of composition especially
valuable in conquering the physical pain he has incurred in the car accident.
 Critical Politics of Literary Quality 111

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

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

In Danse Macabre, King further declares: “Writing [need not] be justified

on the basis of its usefulness; to simply delight the reader is enough, isn’t it?”
(27) On a later page he even argues that, despite an appearance to the contrary,
popular fiction and especially horror stories do have redeeming social merit
“because of their ability to form liaisons between the real and the unreal”
(132). Such fiction is essential to allay fears, to take minds off problems and
“to build little rooms where people can go for a while to get away into make
believe” (Bare Bones, 59).
However, if determining worth appears to be an arbitrary task rather than
objective one, the writer/protagonists in both novels are revealed as conscien-
tiously pursuing it. First of all, they are depicted as totally committed to their
craft; writing is revealed as their life’s blood, essential to continued existence of
both. As has been noted previously, when Sheldon realizes that his life literally
depends on finishing the new Misery novel, he comes to the surprising discov-
ery that for a real artist writing is always a necessity; it is a tool for survival.
Composition gives life to plot and character and simultaneously provides the
composer a way to avoid whatever is upsetting him (Misery 157, 220).
The fact that writing is essential to an artist’s survival is also prominent in
The Dark Half for when Thad announces that George Stark is dead, the fic-
tional entity literally fights for his existence, his right to compose and appear
on the printed page. If he cannot write, he will literally decompose; his super-
natural self will destruct. As Stark realizes that if he doesn’t write, he’ll die,
Thad simultaneously recognizes the inherent power of written words. They
give life, and their absence will end it. Not surprisingly, Thad uses writing to
complete his exorcism of Stark. It is through writing that he discovers what
will destroy his evil twin. Ultimately, the composing process is depicted as a
matter of life and death, both literally in the two plots and symbolically as well.
Both writers also show a deep concern for originality and a fear of borrow-
ing the ideas of others.5 Yet, as King examines these contrasting qualities, nei-
ther is deemed an essential factor in determining a text’s quality. At first,
however, it appears that derivative works will be condemned. Since both the
“Misery” and the “Alexis Machine” novels lack a sense of uniqueness, they are
dismissed as inferior; the reader agrees that Beaumont and Sheldon should kill
off their golden “geese” and move on to other more challenging projects. Since
both authors have become accustomed to reworking old ideas in “stereotypi-
cal” ways, they are bored with the repetition, feeling as if they are merely
retelling the same story with the same characters. Only the details have been

5
This is also a major theme in “Secret Window” since the plot line revolves
around the issue of plagiarism and depicts writer Mort Rainey’s descent into chaotic
fear and madness as he contemplates stealing another author’s story and publishing it
under his own name.
 Critical Politics of Literary Quality 113

modified somewhat in order to please the reader. Yet, surprisingly, they find
that such familiarity does not breed contempt among the public; rather it engen-
ders ease of association, a sense of belonging.
King identifies Annie Wilkes as the essential force who helps Sheldon eval-
uate himself and redefine originality and creativity. Her purity as a reader is
portrayed with admirable innocence of spirit since she is transported by “mis-
ery” fiction. To her, Misery’s life is original and compelling. Conversely, her
own pathetic life ironically seems fictionalized and repetitive. As Annie forces
Sheldon to begin Misery Returns, he comes to a new understanding of his cre-
ative process. He begins to value his work as an expression of his innate talent
to move his readers, to transport them to new and fantastic worlds that seem
real and tangible. Thus Misery exalts the ineffability of creativity rather than
the earthbound contrivances employed by authors. According to Annie, Sheldon’s
fiction is admirable because it incorporates “a wonderful story” (197), not for
any critically praiseworthy traits such as erudite vocabulary, complex themat-
ics, or a unique approach to a previously unexamined topic. A similar observa-
tion might be made about the avid readers of the Stark novels; they are not
asking Beaumont for anything but a repeat performance of a good tale.
Yet borrowing and repetition have continuously been signals of literary fail-
ure, and writers of popular fiction have frequently been accused of these faults.
King himself admits his own fear of rehashing ideas or of being accused of
having little originality. In an interview with Christopher Evans, he says, “One
thing I don’t want to do is write the same book over and over again. I’m very
leery of that” (Bare Bones, 91). Yet a writer’s tendency toward derivativeness
and repetition is not revealed to be totally negative. King helps his readers to
see that authors of classic novels (Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner) have
received high praise for their creativity and originality yet by right of privilege
they also enjoy exemption from the critical injunction against borrowing and
being repetitive. As King points out in Bare Bones:

“if you’re taken seriously as someone whose practicing literature, you’re allowed
to return to what you’ve done before; you’re amplifying previous themes.” The
repeated productions of popular artists, however, result in severe criticism as evi-
dence of lack of talent; “the idea is that your head is so empty, it’s produced an
echo” (96).

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

high quality. He begins by identifying plausibility in the midst of a fictional

construct as the element that makes writing appealing. “The reader should be
able to get through the barrier of print and into the story without too much
effort” (Bare Bones 75). According to Clive Barker, it is precisely this very ele-
ment that accounts for King’s own popularity. “He describes the confrontation
between the real and fantastic elements so believably that the reader’s rational
sensibilities are seldom, if ever, outraged” (Kingdom of Fear 61). But King’s
writer/protagonists are also forced to face head-on the question of relative
value of writerly skills which “entertain” rather than “dissect,” “elucidate,” or
“inform.” If only attaining verisimilitude is important, works which do the for-
mer have been discriminated against and works that do the latter have become
the norm by which “quality” is determined. Both novels seem to question the
validity of requiring writing as art not only to possess believability but also a
“serious” message. On the other hand, writing as business is generously
allowed to be less plausible and may contain both events and characters that are
improbable in a “real” world. Such writers are stereotyped as craftsmen who
are geared more at delight and escape than in confronting serious problems in
society. Yet is this really so?
It is obvious that both Sheldon and Beaumont worry about their characters’
believability, especially their association with the far-fetched and the supernat-
ural. Can Misery actually be transported to a “melodramatic” African setting
without seeming fake, and is Machine’s chilling violence merely titillating
rather than revelatory for purposes of social change? King seems to be asking:
Are Misery and Machine real in any sense of the word? Or does the fact that
their creators have stretched the truth and bent their characters by exposing
them to unusual and abnormal events make them merely implausible fakes and
stereotypes, characters that a reader would expect in “pulp” fiction and which
result in devaluation of their worth?
As a matter of comparison, King assesses the work of Jacqueline Susann
and Harold Robbins in this vein, condemning the chessboard feeling “where
people seem cardboard and you can almost see the hand of the writer moving
from place to place” (Bare Bones 78). Both of King’s writer/protagonists fear
such negative assessments about their own work based on their failure to be
believable.
For example, Sheldon similarly wonders whether his plan for the characters
in Misery Returns does not cross into territory that lucid readers would find
questionable. Especially pondered is whether the Constant Reader would swal-
low “two unrelated women in neighboring townships being buried alive six
months apart as a result of bee-stings” (Misery 139).
Similarly, on page 122 of The Dark Half, Beaumont questions the language
of his characters as inconceivable outside of a book, and, in Chapter Thirteen,
Pt. 2, he is bemused by the fact that individuals in books, at least in Stark’s
 Critical Politics of Literary Quality 115

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

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

In the time since Carrie was published, I’ve written two mainstream novels and
haven’t published either one. I put them away because I’m not sure how they’ll be
taken. I suppose it’s more than a business decision. I like them. I mean shit. I wrote
 Critical Politics of Literary Quality 117

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

But no matter what road King decides to take, his novels about the writing pro-
fession deserve further analysis by critics because they deal with how to
explain the inexplicable, how the human imagination transforms the fantastic
into the real, how it converts auto-biography into fiction and how it merges fic-
tion with fact to create a new reality that ironically is not real at all.
This page intentionally left blank
 WHOSE STORY IS IT?:
SAMUEL BECKETT’S MALONE DIES AND
THE VOICE OF SELF-INVENTION

MARY CATANZARO

Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies probes the relationship between space,

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

In Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, the relationship between writing, objects,

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

space by beginning with Malone confined in a bed and yet is able to escape it
by writing stories of others who exist in an imagined other world.
As death approaches, Malone announces, “While waiting, I shall tell
myself stories” 1 (MD 180). And then he actually writes them, thus justifying
the value he places on his stub of a pencil and the frayed exercise book, and
explaining the ensuing panic when he temporarily misplaces either or both
of them. In addition, when Malone’s character, Macmann, for instance, talks
about being in a certain place and speaking in a particular way, it is Beckett’s
voice, rather than Malone’s, that we hear, off-stage and directing the show. In
this way, Beckett turns Malone’s tale into a dramatic experience in which he
directs Malone to rehearse his “scripts.” Taking cues from Beckett, Malone
loses himself completely in his stories as he weaves in and out of the Sapo,
Macmann, and Moll tales, before ending finally with his death (or rather his
disappearance) in the final episode. Like many writers, the force of his stories,
whose endings he cannot see even as he is telling them, carries Malone away.
He demonstrates the fact that writers hear many voices in their heads, that there
are the voices of the characters and “voice-over” in the narration, and that
sometimes even the setting in time and place seems to speak in a low distinc-
tive murmur. Malone is no exception to this phenomenon.
Many critics, notably James Acheson, have likened Beckett to Malone, and
indeed there are many biographical similarities that one could point to as evi-
dence.2 In addition to those similarities, a more persuasive possibility is that
Beckett the writer invents himself in this work. Malone states, “And yet I write
about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise-book as about him.
It is because it is no longer I, … but another whose life is just beginning” (MD
207–8). As the loved object of Malone’s genius, his tales turn toward a kind of
second-degree biography of his own creator, Samuel Beckett. While others,
such as J. D. O’Hara, have seen a kind of “creator-creature” 3 in Macmann, as
the name suggests, it is through Macmann that the real, true Samuel Beckett

1
All quotations from Malone Dies are from Three Novels by Samuel Beckett:
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1965). Page numbers
are given in the text preceded by the abbreviation MD.
2
See James Acheson’s Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1997). I am grateful for the insights he offers in Chapter 6 (116–132),
where he devotes considerable space analyzing the emotional, physical and artistic sim-
ilarities between Malone and Beckett. Acheson writes, “So close is the resemblance
between Malone and Beckett that at times it is difficult to distinguish between their two
voices—as, for example, when Malone says that his death will mean the end of earlier
Beckett characters” (116).
3
J. D. O’Hara elaborates fully on the notion of the creator-creature duality in
“About Structure in Malone Dies,” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Molloy,
Malone Dies, The Unnamable, ed. J. D. O’Hara (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentiss Hall,
Inc., 1970), 62–70.
 Whose Story Is It? 121

emerges. As a consequence, another unifying motif in Malone Dies is the voice

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

4
Cited in Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London:
Routledge, 1993), 36.
122 Mary Catanzaro

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

5
James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1996). It is well known that Beckett always felt uncomfortable
with fame. Knowlson plays ironically on Beckett’s emotions in choosing the title for his
biography. Hereafter cited in the text as Damned.
6
Beckett first expressed the idea of sin in his essay Proust (New York: Grove, 1931).
He writes, “The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, … the sin of having
been born” (Proust 49). He translates this line from Calderon’s La Vida es Sueno: “The
greatest crime [or sin] of man/Is that he ever was born” (I:ii:111–12), qtd. in Acheson, 227.
 Whose Story Is It? 123

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

7
See Knowlson (esp. 36–47) for an in-depth account of Beckett’s relationship
with his parents, especially his mother. Knowlson remarks early on in his biography that
“May Beckett aimed to mold her children to her own design. But she did not always suc-
ceed, particularly with her younger son … Sam seems to have been an anxiety with her.
All his life. A naughty boy.” (Damned 40).
8
See also Anthony Uhlmann’s “To Have Done with Judgment: Beckett and Deleuze,”
SubStance 81: 25.3 (1996): 110–131. He writes of Malone’s becoming through disap-
pearance: “But Malone suggests he cannot grasp what might constitute this [self], ‘For
I have never seen any sign of any, inside me or outside me’ ” (121).
124 Mary Catanzaro

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

9
Qtd. in O’Hara, 14.
10
After his wife’s death, Beckett confessed in a conversation with Knowlson the
many ambivalent feelings he felt towards her during their long relationship: “So much
regret, so much regret.” (Damned 586).
 Whose Story Is It? 125

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

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

an undercurrent of both a ruthless, personal machinery devoted to the scoffing

at physical love as well as the admission of his hidden incendiary passions.
Beckett is an inverted comic in this novel: a comedian’s pain is buried at the
base of Malone’s jokes, but Beckett’s jokes are buried at the base of his pain.
“Whose pain is whose?” readers might ask. “Nothing is funnier,” Beckett once
told the critic Richard Rosen, “than unhappiness.” 13 This remark reveals a sci-
entist of real anguish.
It is also particularly evident when Malone comments on Macmann’s desires:

For when one has within reach the one and only love requited of a life so mon-
strously prolonged, it is natural one should wish to profit by it, before it is too late,
and refuse to be deterred by feelings of squeamishness excusable in the faint-
hearted, but which true love disdains. (MD 265)

Of course, this is hardly a new idea: in Beckett’s own youth and young adult-
hood the open discussion of sexual matters were, indeed, part of the era’s under-
standing of what constituted taboo subjects. As was the case with so many
twentieth century postwar cultures, the subtle complexity of professional
success or failure also fueled Beckett’s own subversive knack for tucking self-
criticism and psychological insight into stories governed by the constraints of
repression, a repression that can be appreciated only retrospectively.
The fluid, incandescent style of Macmann’s poem unifies art and sensation,
intellect and feeling, physical appeal and aesthetic refinement. Macmann feels
no bashfulness about giving the reader a glimpse into his sexual yearnings.
“Example,” he writes:

Hairy Mac and Sucky Molly

In the ending days and nights
Of unending melancholy
Love it is at last unites” (MD 262).

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

13
Richard Rosen, “When It Hurts to Laugh,” quoted in rev. of Texts For Nothing,
performed at the Susan Stein Shiva Theater, dir. Joseph Chaikin, November 1, 1992.
The New York Times, Arts and Leisure (1 November, 1992), 22.
 Whose Story Is It? 127

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

14
Dina Sherzer, “Samuel Beckett, Linguist and Poetician: A View from The
Unnamable,” SubStance 56:XVII, Number 2 (1988), 89. Hereafter cited in the text as
Sherzer.
128 Mary Catanzaro

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

Performance genealogies draw on the idea of expressive movements as mnemonic

reserves, including patterned movements made and remembered by bodies, resid-
ual movements retained implicitly in images or words (or in the silences between
them), and imaginary movements dreamed in minds not prior to language but con-
stitutive of it.” 15

Although Malone Dies, in its dreamlike way, seems to mimic the move-
ments of a film camera, it also creates effects that would be impossible on cel-
luloid: the evocation of Beckett by Malone, and vice versa, Beckett evoking
Malone, through their intimations of each other by implicit comparisons with
writing and its instrument the pencil. Rather than an individual, Beckett

15
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York:
Columbia UP, 1996), 26. See also Robert Aunger, The Electric Meme: A New Theory on
How We Think (New York: The Free Press, 2002) and Susan Blackmore, “The Power of
Memes” Scientific American (Oct. 2000) 64–73 for recent contributions on the history
of human behavior and mnemonic reserves. Blackmore explores reiterated human
behavior through memes, which she defines “are stories, songs, habits, skills, inven-
tions, and ways of doing things that we copy from person to person by imitation” (65).
 Whose Story Is It? 129

constructs himself as a kind of anonymous male presence, as a fantasy. More

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

The sender is someone who sometimes calls himself a narrator, sometimes a

speaker, sometimes a reciter, and sometimes a voice … The voice addresses him-
self to an anonymous receiver/addressee whose existence is concretized within the
text by phatic utterances, but who remains undecidable and silent. (Sherzer 89)

What this means is that a written sign is proffered in the absence of a

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

a character in the first person, Malone (“in spite of my stories I continue”

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

16
Clemént Rosset, “Of a Real That Has Yet to Come,” SubStance 60: 18.3 (1989),
12. Of the idea of disappearance, Rosset writes that Beckett’s works, “offer an immedi-
ate and flat meaning without the promise of any echo or reflection, a meaning that evap-
orates at the very moment it is revealed …” (14).
 Whose Story Is It? 131

perspective because a higher order irradiates it violently as it tries to express

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

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

17
In this instance, it appears that Foucault is searching for the underlying mean-
ing of memes and gestural behavior, just as Roach and Aunger do. Foucault asks: “What
is unspoken in the world, in our gestures, in the whole enigmatic heraldry of our behav-
iour, our dreams, our sicknesses—does all that speak, and if so in what language and in
obedience to what grammar?” (Order 306).
 Whose Story Is It? 133

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

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

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

DAVID CLIPPINGER

The “brand” has become an increasingly visible and valuable component of

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

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

Andy Warhol

The commodification of American culture is the mainstay of Don DeLillo’s

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

maintained by the publishing industry, but also asserts that the status of the
writer is a byproduct of material relations. DeLillo’s representation of the
writer, in this context, yields an invaluable opportunity to explore the “dissolv-
ability of the artist” in the face of postmodern material relations and to ques-
tion whether the writer and literature, like many aspects of cultural production,
are exposed as empty signs that are imbued with meaning only through linkage
to economic and political power.
Mao II, in brief, follows the final stretch of Bill Gray’s life from his ongo-
ing inability to finish the novel he has been writing over the last two decades to
his foray into hostage negotiations and his anonymous death upon a ferry en
route to Beirut, where he hopes to meet with a terrorist who is holding a Swiss
poet hostage. Gray is clearly the focal point of the novel, yet the narrative
sequence of the novel advances the central critique of how image supercedes
subjectivity within postmodern commodity culture. Before Bill Gray appears,
his commodified image as contained with a New York City bookstore is intro-
duced when Scott Martineau, Gray’s personal assistant, enters the bookstore,
where the books are displayed provocatively

on step terraces and Lucite wall-shelves, books in pyramids and theme displays, …
standing on pedestals and bunched in gothic snuggeries, … and in stacks on the
floor five feet high, arranged in artful fanning patterns.1

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

1
Don DeLillo, Mao II. (New York: Penguin, 1991), 19. All subsequent references
to Mao II will be given in the text with the corresponding page number(s) provided in
parentheses following the citation.
 “Only Half Here” 137

Other readers of Mao II have noted the socio-historical implications of the

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

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

artifacts could always be imitated by men.” 3 Therefore, it is natural that given

technical expertise, a work of art would be reproducible. Benjamin adds that
with the reproduction, a work of art runs the risk of diminishment: “that which
withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” 4
While the “authenticity” of the work of art grants the space for its reproducibil-
ity, its “aura,” which is the true mark of its artistic “authenticity,” is sacrificed
in the process of reproduction. As Benjamin observes,

To an ever great degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art
designed for reproducibility … [and] the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases
to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed.5

The work of art, via the excessive proliferation of copies, ceases to signify an
“aura” of authenticity. DeLillo touches upon this issue in an interview when
he remarks that “when the images are identical to each other, consumerism
and the mass production of art in their most explicit form take over.” 6 The work
of art becomes susceptible to the force of what Baudrillard refers to as the
“simulacrum”—a sign in which the referent has been subsumed by the prolif-
eration of copies, that in the signifying process of “exchanging for what is real,
but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit [that itself becomes] without
references or circumference.” 7
For Baudrillard, signs are intended only for consumption, and, moreover,

Consumption is the virtual totality of all objects and messages presently consti-
tuted in a more or less coherent discourse. Consumption, in so far as it is mean-
ingful, is a systematic act of manipulation of signs.8

Those signs are mass-produced, and to fuse Baudrillard’s socio-economic cri-

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

3
Walter Benjamin. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans., Harry Zohn.
(New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 218.
4
Benjamin, 221.
5
Benjamin, 224.
6
Maria Nadotti. “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Salgamundi 100 (Fall 1993): 97.
7
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 11.
8
Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings. Mark Poster, ed. (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1988), 22.
9
Benjamin, 234.
 “Only Half Here” 139

image and marketability in his emphasis upon the specular element within
mass consumption:

As the indispensable packaging for things produced as they are now produced, as
a general gloss on the rationality of the system, and as the advanced economic sec-
tor directly responsible for the manufacture of an ever-growing mass of image-
objects, the spectacle is the chief product of present-day society.10

If the “spectacle” of the image—its production, marketing, and consump-

tion—is the defining characteristic of post-modern capitalism, then “images,
styles, and representations are not the promotional accessories to economic
product,” as Steven Connor observes in regards to postmodern culture; rather
“[t]hey are the products themselves.” 11 The “aura” is specularized and fetishized
and is secondary (and one might argue, ancillary) to the image that is created
and reproduced.
Mao II, against this socio-economic theoretical backdrop, not only presents
how the “aura” of an artwork has been reproduced, the novel also dramatizes
the degree to which the producer of the artwork is duplicated, marketed, and
consumed—all of which “empties” the author of signification and imposes
upon the writer the simulacrum of subjectivity. In this respect, DeLillo mod-
ernizes Benjamin’s famous critique by exploring how Bill Gray is prey to con-
sumption and simulation as well as the extent to which the writer is subjected
to three distinct yet overlapping layers of economic commodification and
specularization: the political manipulation of terrorism, the economic sphere
of publishing and marketing, and the visual domain of photography and
iconography. In this context, Mao II raises the question of the value of the artist
in contemporary society, and as the novel asserts, that value is no longer con-
ceived in literary terms but can be calculated only with socio-economic param-
eters wherein “literary” value is handily exchanged for political cache.
The most blatant example of the effacement of the literary value occurs in
relation to the terrorist organizations and the kidnapping of Jean-Claude
Julien, the Swiss poet, by Abu Rashid, leader of the neo-Maoist group in
Beirut. Throughout the novel, the spheres of literary and political value overlap
in significant ways, and the kidnapping of the Swiss poet signifies this point of
intersection in a rather dramatic fashion. Moreover, the connections between
writers and terrorists and the realms that they inhabit are not only demonstrated
through thematic parallels and shared ideational motifs, the parallels are a

10
Guy Debord. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans., Donald Nicholson-Smith.
(New York: Zone Books, 1994.), 16.
11
Quoted in Mark Osteen. “Children of Godard and Coco-Cola: Cinema and
Consumerism in Don DeLillo’s Early Fiction.” Contemporary Literature. 37.3 (Fall
1996): 439–470 [proquest].
140 David Clippinger

recurring topic of dialogue for various characters. As she is winding along dirt
roads to arrive at Bill Gray’s house, Brita Nilsson, the photographer, remarks
that she feels “as if I am being taken to see some terrorist chief at this secret
retreat in the mountains” (27). Later in the novel, she is driven to meet and pho-
tograph Rashid, which suggests a structural and ideational parallel. Further,
Gray himself remarks that

[t]here’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become
famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. … Years ago I
used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now
bomb-makers and gunman have taken that territory. They make raids on human
consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated. (41)

The failure of the novelist, according to Gray, materializes as a loss of power

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

12
Jeffrey Karnicky. “Wallpaper Mao: Don DeLillo, Andy Warhol, and Seriality.”
Critique 42.4 (Summer 2001): 339–356 [proquest].
 “Only Half Here” 141

Unlike Underworld where he appears at a masked ball wearing a photo of

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

“studio-equipped house in the mountains … [that is] almost inaccessible to

anyone who doesn’t have a detailed map.” 13; while Gray lives in a “secret
retreat in the mountains” accessed only by dirt roads (27). Wunderlick rumi-
nates upon fame and argues that “the famous man is compelled, eventually, to
commit suicide” 14; similarly, Gray’s fame may be the force behind the disap-
pearance of this life and is the root of his suicide. Bucky’s life is largely
reduced to his recordings which are referred to throughout the novel as “prod-
uct”; likewise Gray’s only vital signs are two “lean novels.” And the disappear-
ance of both Wunderlick and Gray contribute to the proliferation of the
“currency” of their “aura.” As the CEO of Transparanoia, the conglomerate
that owns the rights to Wunderlick’s music, remarks,

Your power is growing, Bucky. The more time you spend in isolation, the more
demands are made on the various media to communicate some relevant words and
pictures. We make demands on you not because we’re media leeches of whatever
media but frankly because proportionate demands are being made on us. People
want words and pictures. They want images. Your power grows. The less you say,
the more you are.15

And as Scott Martineau explains to Brita in language and terms that resonate
strongly with the above passage from Great Jones Street:

Bill is at the height of his fame. Ask me why. Because he hasn’t published in years
and years and years … It’s the years since that made him big. Bill gained celebrity by
doing nothing. … [and he] gets bigger as his distance from the scene deepens. (52)

And finally both Gray and Wunderlick lack agency within the industries
that create and maintain their “auras.” Wunderlick discovers that most of his
world and much of his own subjectivity is owned by a conglomerate named
Transparanoia, which is run by Globke. As Anthony DeCurtis shrewdly notes,

But once Wunderlick retreats to a room on Great Jones Street, having reached his
own limit within the context of the general cultural dissolution, it quickly becomes
clear that the forces that really control events—quite independent of the whims of
pop stars—have not relaxed their grip simply because he has decided to drop out.
What happens is that the void he creates by his withdrawal makes the functioning
of those forces more apparent—and more frightening—to him.16

13
Don DeLillo. Great Jones Street. (New York: Random House, 1973), 23.
14
DeLillo, Great Jones Street, 1.
15
DeLillo, Great Jones Street, 128.
16
Anthony DeCurtis. “The Product.” in Introducing Don DeLillo. Frank
Lentricchia, ed. (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), 135.
 “Only Half Here” 143

Gray, on the other hand, does not exist within quite the same range of total-
itarian control, and Mao II lacks the paranoia that characterizes Great Jones
Street. Yet Gray is, clearly, a product of his publishing firm and is held hostage
to the fame that his publicity has generated—most explicitly via the figure of
Scott Martineau, who is so obsessed by Gray’s novels that he stalks him over a
long period of time, coerces Gray to hire him as his assistant, and now controls
and regiments all facets of Gray’s personal and professional life—even chiding
him to get back to work. Gray is a hostage, and, while it is not the omnipresent
industry that controls his actions, he is subject to the repercussions of his com-
modified image and the industry lurking behind the façade of this image.
The relation of image and product is clearly the core parallel between
Wunderlick and Gray despite the fact that they exist in seemingly disparate
realms of rock music stardom and the literary world. Great Jones Street,
though, bridges these two realms through Eddie Fenig, the struggling writer
who lives above Wunderlick and counsels him about various issues. Fenig’s
discussion of the writing market is particularly insightful for interpreting the
other world in Mao II:

I know the writer’s market like few people know it. The market is a strange thing,
almost a living organism. It changes, it palpitates, it grows, it excretes. It sucks
things in and then spews them up. It’s a living wheel that turns and crackles. The
market accepts and rejects. It loves and kills.17

The question of quality (musical, artistic, and literary) is noticeably absent in

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

17
DeLillo, Great Jones Street, 27.
18
DeLillo, Great Jones Street, 49.
144 David Clippinger

historians and philosophers of the postmodern. But unlike the discourse of

philosophy, Mao II dramatizes the extent of the reduction of self to the market
by demonstrating how Gray’s subjectivity is secondary to his image. More
poignantly, his subjectivity is reduced to his image. His past—his familial
history as well as his real name, Willard Skansey, Jr., and his life—has been
erased by the world that his writing has created.
Thus the manipulation of the image and the subsequent erasure of identity
is shown to be at the heart of the tangled relation of the publishing world (with
its focus upon promotion and marketing) and the political world of the ter-
rorist (with its focus upon political ideology and exploitation of the image of
terror). The overlapping elements of those two realms are presented subtly in
the episode in which Gray visits his publisher, Charlie Everson. During their
conversation, Everson vociferously announces his desire to retain the rights to
Gray’s new book, which then is superimposed upon the discussion of terrorism:
“I want this book, you bastard” (102). The desires of the publishing world and
terrorism, thereby, occupy a shared ideational space, which is heightened fur-
ther when Everson explains that

I’m chairman of a high-minded committee on free expression. We’re mainly aca-

demics and publishing people and we’re just getting started and this is the crazy
part of the whole business. This group takes a hostage simply because he’s there,
he’s available, and he apparently tells them he’s a poet and what is the first thing
they do? They contact us. They have a fellow in Athens who calls our London
office and says, “There’s a writer chained to a wall in a bare room in Beirut. If you
want him back, maybe we can do a deal.” (98)

The “business” of the publishing world with its “statesmen”—academics and

publishing people—finds itself on common ground with the realm of terror-
ists. In addition, through Everson’s economically loaded language—“chair-
man,” “business,” and “deal”—the poet is depicted as a type of merchandise.
Subsequently, the fact that the terrorists would contact an organization affili-
ated with the “business” of the literary world (and its “free expression”) instead
of the government is extremely provocative and suggests that publishing and
terrorism share an implicit understanding (whereas governments and terrorism
do not). Moreover, the only difference between the two is teleological; i.e., both
organizations exploit the image to further their own ends, but whereas the goal
of the publishing world is to generate financial revenue, the “payoff ” for ter-
rorism is to serve a political ideal which is enacted through violence.
Ironically, the terrorist organization, a neo-communist group, is at war, one
would assume, with capitalism, which the publishing world embodies. Never-
theless, by collaborating with publishers, the Maoist group is implicated in the
very form of capitalism that it abhors—namely, the fetishization of the image
 “Only Half Here” 145

and the subsequent exploitation of the individual for “profit.” Instead of merely
exposing the machinations of the neo-communist organization as hypocritical,
however, the novel advances a profound argument that encompasses both com-
munism and capitalism, an argument which is presented through the entwining
of the world of the terrorist and that of the publisher. For example, Everson’s
explanation for his desire for Gray to take part in the release of the hostage,
which is juxtaposed with the tactics of the terrorists, emphasizes how both
groups seek to exploit the image and, by extension, dehumanize the artist.
Everson explains:

I can get any writer I want. But I want Bill Gray. Look, I didn’t tell anyone you
were coming here today. Not even my secretary. Because if I had there’d be a queue
outside that door stretching like a conga line into the distance. There’s an excite-
ment that attaches to your name and it will help us put a mark on this event, force
people to talk about it and think about it and think about it long after the speeches
fade. I want one missing writer to read the work of another. I want the famous nov-
elist to address the suffering of the unknown poet. I want the English-language
writer to read in French and the older man to speak across the night to his young
colleague in letters. Don’t you see how beautifully balanced? (99)

Everson envisions a public relations goldmine via the exploitation of Gray’s

“fame.” The “beautifully balanced” proposal, rife with the potential to charge
Gray’s marketability and give validity to Everson’s “high-minded committee,”
maintains a patronizing and reductive element that might be characterized as
“bourgeois”: “the hostage is being freed at that moment on live television” just
as Gray is reading the yet unnamed (at this point in the novel) and unknown
poet’s work. Consequently, the writing life of the hostage is subsumed by the
cache value of the more famous Gray, and the poet’s suffering (and his subjec-
tivity) are validated only by the “free” Gray.
In short, the Swiss poet/hostage gains freedom only by being absorbed into
the prison of Gray’s fame. Moreover, the image of Julien’s freedom serves only
to validate Everson’s organization and Gray’s power. As envisioned by Everson,
the commodification of the writer—even within the political arena of hostage
negotiations—is natural and acceptable, and speaks to a culture wherein the
control of subjectivity and the lack of agency is missing, even with a commit-
tee dedicated to “free expression.”
The terrorists in the novel, surprisingly, are more open about the mar-
ketability of the writer. For example, Brita asks Rashid, the head of the neo-
Maoist group, about Julien, “We have no foreign sponsors,” Rashid replies.

Sometimes we do business the old way, you sell this, you trade that. Always there
are deals in the works. So with hostages like drugs, like weapons, like jewelry, like
a Rolex or a BMW. We sold him to the fundamentalists. (235)
146 David Clippinger

Julien’s status as a commodity—whether it be a generic product (a drug or a

weapon) or a name-brand luxury item (a Rolex or BMW)—is clearly articu-
lated. Of course it should not be overlooked that in this speech Rashid has
committed the same reduction that is at the core of Karl Marx’s critique of cap-
italism. Marx argues in The Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie

has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless inde-
fensible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—
Free Trade. … The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto
honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the
lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.19

In Mao II, the hostage—a poet, no less—is similarly stripped of his humanity,
and his personal worth is reduced to the market value as an exchangeable good
that can be exploited for “profitable” ends. But it is a reduction that typifies
postmodern culture as a whole.
Gray’s position as a writer of “acclaim” is also vulnerable to such reduc-
tions, especially later in the novel when he is regarded as an exchangeable com-
modity for the Julien—since he is more of the caliber of a “Rolex or BMW”
than mere “drugs.” Gray’s dialogue with George Haddad, the liason for the ter-
rorist group, is particularly insightful. Gray asks,

“What happens if I go to Beirut and complete this spiritual union you find so
interesting? Talk to Rashid. Can I expect him to release the hostage? And what will
he want in return?”
“He’ll want you to take the other man’s place.”
“Gain the maximum attention. Then release me at the most advantageous time.”
“Gain the maximum attention. Then probably kill you ten minutes later. Then
photograph your corpse and keep the picture handy for the time when it can be
used most effectively.”
“Doesn’t he think I’m worth more than my photograph?” (164)

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

19
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. (New York:
Penguin, 1967), 82.
 “Only Half Here” 147

The moment of death, in other words, is advantageous to the publisher

since death allows the publisher (and the writer) to lay claim to an “august
tradition” and to the process of canonization. For both the publisher and the ter-
rorist, the “real” death is a marketing bonanza, and the exploitation of the
image is the shared and collected terrain of both the publisher and the terrorist.
Subsequently, Bill Gray as well as Jean-Claude Julien are sites of political and
economic exploitation, consumption, and annihilation—the ultimate signi-
fiers, par excellence, of the tangle of writing and death depicted by Foucault:

The mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his
absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.20

The conception of a writer’s death is the manifestation of “work” wherein an

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

20
Michel Foucault. The Foucault Reader. (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 102–103.
21
Roland Barthes. “From Work to Text” in Textual Strategies. (Ithaca: Cornell U
P, 1979), 79.
148 David Clippinger

In contrast with the image as a pronouncement of Mao’s vitality, the photos

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

I mean what’s the importance of a photograph if you know the writer’s work? I
don’t know. But people still want the image, don’t they? The writer’s face is the
surface of the work. It’s a clue to the mystery inside. (26)

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

22
Adam Begley. “Don DeLillo: Americana, Mao II, and Underworld.” Southwest
Review. 82.4 (1997): 478–505.
23
Eugene Goodheart. “Don DeLillo and the Cinematic Real” in Introducing Don
DeLillo. Frank Lentricchia, ed. (Durham: Duke U P, 1991), 118.
 “Only Half Here” 149

is inextricably linked to his/her product, and the image becomes an acceptable

substitution for the person; as Laura Barrett observes: “Brita’s photographs of
Bill do not reject the man; they replace him.” 24 But in addition to being a sub-
stitute for the person, the images become surrogates for the infinitely deferred
product, the novel that Gray has been unable to complete for years and has
spent his time revising endlessly in a charade that parodies the act of writing.
This play of substitution sheds some light upon Gray’s willingness to be pho-
tographed as well as his motives to becomes involved in the hostage negotia-
tions, which will surely lead to his death.
In effect, Gray’s written life has been reduced to only a slight stream of
words that cannot sustain him. Subsequently, as Richard Levesque points out,
“Language having failed [Gray, he] seeks affirmation in the new visual medium
of the spectacle.” 25 In other words, the power once associated with language
now falls under the jurisdiction of the image. Concomitant with the displace-
ment of power is “the dissolvability of the artist and the exaltation of the pub-
lic figure.” And as Gray observes, “What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The
degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our shapers
of sensibility and thought” (157). Yet the failure on Gray’s part isn’t merely a
failure of language but rather his failure to harness the power over language
which he originally controlled but which now has been appropriated by the
image maker. Unlike Andy Warhol or Chairman Mao, Gray lacks the savvy to
capitalize artistically or politically upon his commodification, and his lack-
luster attempt to transform himself from a writer to a public figure is more an
announcement of his willingness to succumb to the cultural “death of the
author” than a sign of his re-emergence and reinvention as a vital social figure.
Peter Baker locates Gray’s impotence clearly within the domain of the cultural:

If the postmodern culture is one in which novels and their creators are increasingly
commodified (the heightened commodification correlating to a presumably dimin-
ishing public) rather than read and cherished, this may explain Gray’s increasingly
morose view of himself and his writing. Certainly this view provides a motivation
for Gray’s thinking that the only possible remaining step is to try to bridge the gap
between the interiorized experience of novel-writing (and reading) and engaged
action in the public sphere.26

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

The novel also denies the public figure the ability to escape the issue that
haunts and confines Gray: i.e., the marketing of the image and the prisonhouse
of commodified meaning.
Consequently, all of the “famous” figures in the book—Gray, Warhol,
Chairman Mao, and Abu Rashid—are subject to the ebb and flow of their per-
ceived images, and their success within this exchange of visual representation
is largely a response to how effectively the power of the image can be har-
nassed to a specific ideological end. Whereas Warhol understands the aesthetic
and economic implications of the marketability of his image, Abu Rashid fol-
lows in the wake of Mao in his comprehension of the political power latent in
the image and the ability to magnify that power through careful manipulation
and proliferation. Subsequently, when asked by Brita why the young men train-
ing at Rashid’s compound wear hoods over their heads and picture of Rashid on
their shirts, he responds that displaying his photo is like a badge and that it

gives them a vision they will accept and obey. These children need an identity outside
the narrow function of who they are and where they come from. Something com-
pletely outside the helpless forgotten lives of their parents and grandparents. (233)

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

27
Roland Barthes, The Barthes Reader. (New York, Hill and Wang, 1982), 196.
 “Only Half Here” 151

is a rejoinder to the opening of the novel, which is devoted to describing a mass

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

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

28
Maria Nadotti. “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Salgamundi 100 (Fall 1993), 92.
29
Daniel Aaron. “How to Read Don DeLillo” in Introducing Don DeLillo. Frank
Lentricchia, ed. (Durham: Duke U P, 1991) 73.
30
Quoted in Begley 492.
 “Only Half Here” 153

to resist a process wherein his books are substituted for his life. Consequently,
he succumbs to the ultimate erasure of his subjectivity in death. Nevertheless,
DeLillo’s biting novel not only unmasks the vestiges of assimilation that should
be resisted, but it also argues that the most significant battle is the confronta-
tion of those facets of postmodern American culture that have been naturalized
and commodified. Mao II, like many of DeLillo’s novels, is a fight against the
crowds of consumers whose desires, perpetually unfulfilled by the false prom-
ises of products and/or willing to assume an identity bestowed by a leader of
personality, have embraced the simulation of subjectivity encoded in the image
world. It is a fight against a culture that treats art and literature as if it were, like
those who consume it, “only half here.”
This page intentionally left blank
 THE BLIND MAN, THE IDIOT, AND THE PRIG:
FAULKNER’S DISDAIN FOR THE READER1

GENE C. FANT, JR.

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

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

1
I am deeply indebted to Noel Polk, Martina Sciolino, and Victor Taylor for their
assistance in the early stages of this article.
2
In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of Sanctuary (1932), Faulkner
wrote “I had been writing books for about five years, which got published and not bought”
(Rpt. in Sanctuary (New York: Vintage, 1931. Corrected text. Ed. Noel Polk, 1987), 338.
156 Gene C. Fant, Jr.

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

3
At the University of Virginia, a student asked if he wrote with a “particular reader
in mind,” to which Faulkner replied, “No, I don’t. I wrote for years before it occurred to
me that strangers might read the stuff, and I’ve never broken the habit. I still write it
because it worries me so much I’ve got to get rid of it, and so I put in on paper” Faulkner
in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: U
Virginia P, 1959; hereafter abbreviated FIU), 14. By this, he meant that he had to write;
he had no other motive than that basic semi-selfish reason. He insisted elsewhere in that
interview (FIU, 4) that he did not “know what the average reader gets from reading [The
Sound and the Fury].” Faulkner also insisted that he wrote for pleasure, in an effort to
please the reader. I think, though, that he meant for the pleasure of a reader like himself.
See, as an example, Lion in the Garden: “I’m a story-teller. I’m telling a story, intro-
ducing comic and tragic elements as I like. I’m telling a story—to be repeated and
retold. I don’t claim to be truthful. Fiction is fiction—not truth; it’s make-believe. Thus
I stack and lie at times, all for the purposes of the story—to entertain” (Lion in the
Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926–1962, ed. James B. Meriwether and
Michael Millgate (New York: Random House, 1968), 277. See also page 280: “Let [the
writer] remember that a novel is to create pleasure for the reader. The only mistake with
any novel is if it fails to create pleasure. That it is not true is irrelevant: a novel is to be
enjoyed. A book that fails to create enjoyment is not a good one.”
4
Rpt. in Sanctuary, 338.
5
Sanctuary, 338.
6
See Noel Polk’s Editor’s Note in the corrected text edition of Sanctuary for an
overview of the novel’s convoluted publishing process, 335, ff.
 The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig 157

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

7
Judith B. Wittenberg (Faulkner: The Transfiguration of Biography (Lincoln: U
Nebraska P, 1979, 135–36) has asserted a similar symbolism in Pylon, which was writ-
ten at about the same time as Absalom, Absalom!. She believes that the editor Hagood
symbolizes “the impatient reading public,” 137. She views the reporter as being repre-
sentative of the artist.
8
See, for example, his response to a question posed at West Point concerning his
reading habits:
A: I read the books that I knew and loved when I was twenty-one years old.
Q: Can you tell us some of them?
A: Yes, I go back to the people, not the books—but the people. I like Sarah Gamp—
she’s one of my favorite people—and Don Quixote. I read in and out of the Old
Testament every year. Shakespeare—I have a portable Shakespeare I’m never too
far from. … When I was young, I was an omnivorous reader with no judgment, no
discretion—I read everything. As I have gotten along in years, I don’t read with the
same voracity, and I go to the book as you go to spend a few minutes with a friend you
like. I will open the book to a particular chapter or to read about a particular character
in it. Not to read the book but just to spend a little while with a human being that I think
is funny or tragic or anyway interesting.” Faulkner at West Point, ed. Joseph L. Fant and
Robert Ashley (New York: Random House, 1964), 66; 114.
9
Rpt. in Sanctuary, 338
10
John Arthos, “Ritual and Humor in William Faulkner.” Accent 9 (1948): 17–30.
158 Gene C. Fant, Jr.

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

11
Dianne L. Cox, “A Measure of Innocence: Sanctuary’s Temple Drake.”
Mississippi Quarterly (1981): 302.
12
Virginia V. James Hlavsa, Faulkner and the Thoroughly Modern Novel.
(Charlottesville: U Virginia P, 1991), 41.
13
Christopher Norris, What Is Deconstructionism? Berkeley: U California P,
1988), 7.
14
Norris, 8.
15
Robert Dale Parker specifically assigns this postmodernist impulse to Absalom,
Absalom!, referring to the fracturing of the narrative. Absalom, Absalom!: The
Questioning of Fictions. (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 10.
 The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig 159

In Sanctuary, Faulkner deliberately undermines his own text with conflict-

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

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

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

19
Faulkner also undermines the auditory descriptions, separating them from the
visual elements that usually accompany sounds, such that things which are seen are
unheard, and things which are heard are unseen.
20
Sanctuary, 3
21
Sanctuary, 3.
22
Sanctuary’s jails likewise are filled with muddled light. Goodwin’s cell is dimly
lighted by a “narrow slit of a window,” 289. At dawn, “a narrow rosy pencil of sunlight
fell level through the window,” 293. Popeye’s cell has a similar window: “the high small
window, the grated door through which the light fell,” 325. A further description notes
that “[l]ittle daylight ever reached the cell, and a light burned in the corridor all the time,
falling into the cell in a broad pale mosaic, reaching the cot where his feet lay,” 328.
Inside Popeye’s Inferno, there is little light, little sight and little which makes him human.
Sensory deprivation undermines his senses (and those of the reader). Just as he was hidden
behind a screen of brush which filter his view of Benbow in the novel’s opening, Popeye
approaches the end of his fictional life hidden behind a screen of jail-bars which also
alter his view of the outside world.
 The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig 161

With nightfall, the characters become anxious and more aggressive. Darkness
cloaks the desires the men have regarding Temple, and, as the tension rises,
Faulkner injects a masterful increase in the action’s suspense by shifting the
narrative to follow Tommy. In the oppressive darkness outside the house,
Tommy finds the lighted window of the room to which Temple retreats to
spend the night. The narrator relates Tommy’s thoughts: “There was a light in
the window there. Don’t nobody never use in there, he said, stopping, then he
said, That’s where she’ll be stayin, and he went to the window and looked in.” 23
Crouched in the darkness, Tommy watches Temple undress. Temple looks at
her watch, and then she looks directly at Tommy: “With the watch in her hand
she lifted her head and looked directly at him, her eyes calm and empty as two
holes. After a while she looked down at the watch again and returned it to her
stocking.” 24 Tommy continues to be invisible as he stares in the window:
“Then, the coat clutched to her breast, she whirled and looked straight into
Tommy’s eyes and whirled and ran and flung herself upon the chair.” 25 Temple
does not realize that Tommy is watching her because Tommy is invisible due to
the light reflection gradient of the lighted room against the darkened window
glass. The optical illusion flaws her sense of sight. Even through she looks
“directly at him,” her eyes are useless, as “empty as two holes.”
The reader also must temper the interpretation of Tommy’s observations of
Temple and the tension of the night scenes against Tommy’s mental state as
he crouches. He is the group’s low man, uncomfortable with the actions he
believes that Popeye or one of the other men will undertake that night. As he
crouches beneath the window, though, Tommy becomes aroused by the sight of
Temple moving about the room: “From time to time he would feel that acute
surge go over him, like his blood was too hot all of a sudden, dying away into
that warm unhappy feeling that fiddle music gave him.” 26 His state of arousal
heightens his senses and colors his thinking, causing him to be skittish of
noises, especially ones that might indicate Popeye’s presence.
Tommy’s skittishness leads to a second instance of virtual invisibility when
he enters the room with Popeye and Ruby. Ruby cannot see him, though she
can feel him:

Tommy crept into the room, also soundless; she would have been no more aware of
his entrance than of Popeye’s, if it hadn’t been for his eyes. They glowed, breast-
high, with a profound interrogation, then they disappeared and the woman could
then feel him, squatting beside her … she remained motionless beside the door,

23
Sanctuary, 73.
24
Sanctuary, 74.
25
Sanctuary, 74.
26
Sanctuary, 83.
162 Gene C. Fant, Jr.

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

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

27
Sanctuary, 85.
28
Sanctuary, 73.
29
Tommy’s case is a good one, for every time I teach Sanctuary, all of my students
presume that he is African-American. The text, though, indicates that he apparently has
blond hair: “the sun-bleached curls on the back of his head matted with dried blood and
singed with powder,” 117. These readers have made judgments and interpretations
about the text that rely on their own eisegesis of the text rather than close reading of the
narrative. See below concerning the character of Shreve McCannon for further thoughts
on this eisegetical impulse.
30
Throughout the novel, the optical senses may not always be trusted or believed.
Other things are invisible as well; including a secret bird (Sanctuary, 3), invisible auto-
mobiles (5), an invisible highroad (6), an invisible bed (85), and invisible rat feet (87).
Temple is a shadowy ghost (69, 70, 86), Goodwin and Van are a single shadow (76), and
the faces of Popeye’s mother and grandmother both disappear (320 and 323, respec-
tively). Popeye himself even performs an act of illusion with a match: “They removed
the handcuff; Popeye’s hand appeared to flick a small flame out of thin air” (325).
 The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig 163

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

“They’re gone,” she said. “Both of them. Dont you read no papers?”

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

“What papers?” Horace said. “Hello. Hello!”

“They aint here no more, I said,” Miss Reba said. “I dont know nuttin about
them.” 38

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

The reason this was not offered sooner is that its bearing on the case was not made
clear until the testimony of the defendant’s wife which I have just caused to be read
aloud to you gentleman from the record.
You have just heard the testimony of the chemist and the gynecologist—who is,
as you gentlemen know, an authority on the most sacred affairs of that most sacred
thing in life: womanhood—who says that this is no longer a matter for the hang-
man, but for a bonfire of gasoline—.44

38
Sanctuary, 282.
39
Sanctuary, 282.
40
Sanctuary, 4.
41
Sanctuary, 282.
42
Sanctuary, 282.
43
Sanctuary, 298.
44
Sanctuary, 298.
 The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig 165

He appeals to the corn-cob’s expert interpreters: Ruby, a chemist, and, finally,

a gynecologist.
Faulkner’s undermining of sensory experience thus carries over into the
realm of non-sensory evidence, as he allows persons who possess flawed per-
spectives on the objects translate them to the reader. When the time comes for
a verdict to be made, the D. A. continues to appeal to the objects and their inter-
preters: “You have listened to this horrible, this unbelievable, story which this
young girl has told; you have seen the evidence and heard the doctor’s testimony:
I shall no longer subject this ruined, defenseless child to the agony of—.” 45 The
skewed interpretation of the objects’ testimony renders them quite worthless
because it must be filtered through experientially driven human interpreters.
The problem is that all translation is interpretation, and the court experts
undermine the objective truth of the objects with sensory-based interpretation.
It is no wonder that the reader finds the story “unbelievable,” for the reader
“knows” the inaccuracy of Temple’s story, but the reader must also recognize
that the reader’s own understanding of the story’s events has been manipulated
the narrator, just as the evidence presented in the trial has been related by a dis-
trict attorney who has an agenda.
One final image yields a powerful metaphor concerning the reader:
Goodwin’s invalid father, Pap. This man depends totally on Goodwin’s provision:

Benbow watched Goodwin seat the old man in a chair, where he sat obediently
with that tentative and abject eagerness of a man who has but one pleasure left and
whom the world can reach only through one sense, for he was both blind and deaf:
a short man with a bald skull and a round, full-fleshed, rosy face in which his
cataracted eyes looked like two clots of phlegm.46

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

45
Sanctuary, 303.
46
Sanctuary, 12–13.
47
Sanctuary, 48.
48
Sanctuary, 92.
49
Sanctuary, 48.
50
Sanctuary, 92.
166 Gene C. Fant, Jr.

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

51
Sanctuary, 13.
52
Ruppersburg, 19.
53
Sanctuary, 107.
54
Ruppersburg, 19.
 The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig 167

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

55
See his comments at Virginia: “[T]hat’s an obligation that [the writer] assumes
with his vocation, that he’s going to write it in a way that people can understand it. He
doesn’t have to write it in the way that every idiot can understand it—every imbecile
in the third grade can understand it, but he’s got to use a language which is accepted and
in which the words have specific meanings that everybody agrees on,” FIU, 52–53.
56
He was enamored of its technique, he said at the University of Virginia,
FIU, 202.
57
Donald Kartiganer. “The Sound and the Fury and the Dislocation of Form.” Rpt.
in Modern Critical Interpretations of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (New
York: Chelsea House, 188), 23.
58
Maurice Coindreau, “Preface to Le Bruit et la fureur.” Rpt. in Twentieth Century
Interpretations of ‘The Sound and the Fury’. Ed. Michael H. Cowan. (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice Hall, 1968), 31.
59
Edmond Volpe. A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner. New York: Farrar,
Strauss, and Giroux, 1964.
168 Gene C. Fant, Jr.

guides aid the novice reader, but they defy Faulkner’s crafty intent: he wanted
the reader to eschew conventional narrative rules about order. Kartiganer
asserts, “The novel insists on the poverty of created meaning.” 60 Simple read-
ings just do not work with The Sound and the Fury.
The novel’s concluding scene is among Faulkner’s most famous images.
Luster drives Benjy in the family wagon through the courthouse square area
and, in doing so, must proceed around the circle in which the Confederate sol-
dier monument stands. Seeing that the various persons around the square have
focused their eyes on Benjy and himself, Luster decides to show off his wagon-
handling skills by breaking the rules for circling the monument:

“Dar Mr Jason car,” he said, then he spied another group of negroes. “Les show
dem niggers how quality does, Benjy,” he said. “Whut you say?” He looked back.
Ben sat, holding the flower in his fist, his gaze empty and untroubled. Luster hit
Queenie again and swung her to the left at the monument. For an instant Ben sat in
an utter hiatus. Then he bellowed. Bellow on bellow, his voice mounted, with
scarce interval for breath. There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror;
shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound, and Luster’s eyes backrolling for a
white instant. “Gret God,” he said. “Hush! Hush! Gret God!.” 61

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

60
Kartiganer, 37.
61
The Sound and the Fury. Corrected text ed. Noel Polk (New York: Vintage,
1984.), 319–20.
62
Lewis P. Simpson “Sex & History: Origins of Faulkner’s Apocrypha.” The
Maker and the Myth: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1977. Ed. Evans Harrington and
Ann J. Abadie. (Jackson: U Mississippi P, 1978), 65.
 The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig 169

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

63
The equating of the reader’s desire for order and Benjy’s outburst at the Square
was originally an idea Miller expressed in a conversation with me; he has been kind
enough to extend his permission to amplify his idea in this work.
64
Rpt. as the endpiece to Absalom, Absalom! Corrected text ed. Noel Polk (New
York: Vintage, 1986).
65
Faulkner actually calls a segment of the general audience an “idiot” in an answer
to a question at the University of Virginia, FIU, 53.
170 Gene C. Fant, Jr.

Faulkner uses Shreve McCannon to extend further his criticism of the

reader. The novel presents insight into how narrative arises; Robert Dale Parker
states that the novel

powerfully exposes the way that any story is an act of mind. … To finish reading
Absalom, Absalom! can turn the process of thinking about it upside down. … [I]t
is like a detective novel, where new information helps sort the clues from the false
leads, but Absalom also ends with more questioning and less certainty than we
might expect from a detective novel.66

Edwin R. Hunter, following an argument suggested in Cleanth Brooks’ William

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

66
Parker, 11; 125. Parker, in fact, labels the entire novel as metafiction, 10. Joseph
W. Reed, Jr., prefers to call it meta-narrative: “narrative about narrative” Faulkner’s
Narrative. (New Haven: Yale, 1973), 147.
67
Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner, The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven:
Yale, 1963), 311–12.
68
Edwin R. Hunter William Faulkner: Narrative Practice and Prose Style
(Washington: Windhover, 1973), 74.
69
Wittenberg, 154.
70
Rpt. in Gary Lee Stonum “The Sound and the Fury: The Search for a Narrative
Method.” Modern Critical Interpretations: William Faulkner’s ‘The Sound and the
Fury’ (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 42.
 The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig 171

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

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

71
Reed, 174.
72
Reed, 169.
73
Knowing how Faulkner loved to pull at quibbles on character names, I think it
no accident that Shreve’s name is close to “shrive.” “To shrive” is “to hear the confes-
sion of and give absolution to (a penitent),” The American Heritage College Dictionary,
3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 1263.
74
Absalom, Absalom!, 142. See a West Point cadet’s question about Faulkner’s
grandfather and the protracted response for an interesting personal parallel to Shreve’s
question, 108–109.
75
Absalom, Absalom!, 179.
76
Absalom, Absalom!, 181.
77
Absalom, Absalom!, 210.
78
Absalom, Absalom!, 198.
172 Gene C. Fant, Jr.

quick, after having waited forty-five years.” 79 His participation in the narra-
tive, though, is more intense than the “normal” reader’s participation in the
reading process.
In chapter six, Shreve dominates the narrative, restating what he has heard
but adding his own blandishments to Quentin’s tale (such as Rosa’s father mak-
ing “General Lee and Jeff Davis mad”)80 and even making simple errors, such
as calling Rosa “Aunt Rosa.” 81 As Shreve proceeds, Quentin can only answer
with a simple affirmative: “Yes.” 82 When Quentin finally begins to amplify the
events, Shreve halts him to conclude the chapter: “Wait then, … For God’s sake
wait.” 83 At that point, Shreve bursts out, “Jesus, the South is fine, isn’t it. It’s
better than the theatre, isn’t it. It’s better than Ben Hur, isn’t it. No wonder you
have to come away now and then, isn’t it.” 84 Not only does the story fascinate
Shreve, he even suggests other details, such as that Sutpen had a girlfriend
somewhere,85 and invents details outright, such as the drawing room’s appear-
ance.86 Shreve’s assertiveness causes the narrator to pause, observing that

Shreve ceased. That is, for all the two of them, Shreve and Quentin, knew he had
stopped, since for all the two of them knew he had never begun, since it did not
matter (and possibly neither of them conscious of the distinction) which one had
been doing the talking. So that now it was not two but four of them riding the two
horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas eve.87

At the novel’s conclusion, Shreve, unaware of Quentin’s plans to commit

suicide, posits summary judgments about the South. He blends his comments
on the South with his offer to help Quentin warm up, and, as the reader would
expect, he is unintentionally harsh:

Jesus, if I was going to have to spend nine months in this climate, I would sure hate
to have come from the South. Maybe I wouldn’t come from the South anyway, even
if I could stay there. Wait. Listen. I’m not trying to be funny, smart. I just want to
understand it if I can and I don’t know how to say it better. Because it’s something

79
Absalom, Absalom!, 214. See Parker, 134–152, for a cogent discussion of the
epistemological problems related to the novel’s narrative layers.
80
Absalom, Absalom!,144.
81
Absalom, Absalom!,143.
82
Absalom, Absalom!, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150.
83
Absalom, Absalom!, 175.
84
Absalom, Absalom!, 176.
85
Absalom, Absalom!, 177.
86
Absalom, Absalom!, 268.
87
Absalom, Absalom!, 267. This conflation occurs again on page 276.
 The Blind Man, the Idiot, and the Prig 173

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

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

88
Absalom, Absalom!, 289.
89
Absalom, Absalom!, 289.
90
Absalom, Absalom!, 176. The spectacles also appear on page 177.
91
Absalom, Absalom!, 176.
92
Absalom, Absalom!, 177.
93
Absalom, Absalom!, 303.
94
Absalom, Absalom!, 303.
174 Gene C. Fant, Jr.

In reading Faulkner’s interviews concerning his works, especially those in

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

95
FIU, 79.
 WOOLF AND WELTY, READERS AND WRITERS,
WRITING AND UNWRITING

REINE DUGAS BOUTON

Reflecting and departing from Virginia Woolf’s story, “An Unwritten

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

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

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

readers may see more clearly what effect other writers like Virginia Woolf have
had on her writing. Woolf ’s style and subjects surface in much of Welty’s fic-
tion. Two stories often neglected by readers and critics alike, “The Key” and
“An Unwritten Novel,” reveal several specific parallels between Welty and
Woolf as writers. Because Welty may not have been conscious of Woolf ’s influ-
ence, her reasons for writing fiction that frequently reflects Woolf’s remain
unknown. Perhaps Woolf’s words resonated so strongly inside of Welty, that
they fortuitously found their way into her story. It is more likely, though, that
while Welty was a beginning writer when she composed “The Key,” she per-
ceived Woolf ’s attempt to demystify the writing process in “An Unwritten
Novel” and attempted to use Woolf ’s story as a springboard to explore the
notions of narrative, writing, and storytelling.
The rich connection between Woolf’s and Welty’s fiction has been made by
other critics. Welty scholar, Noel Polk, first suggests the conflation of “The
Key,” “An Unwritten Novel,” and another story by Woolf, “A Mark on the Wall,”
noting that Woolf’s and Welty’s narrators appeared to have similar methods.
Additionally, in her book, Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf: Gender, Genre, and
Influence, Suzann Harrison argues that “Welty’s reading and rereading of one
particular author contributed to the writer she has become,” and that since she
was an avid reader of Woolf’s works, Welty uses many of the same symbols,
character types, and narrative techniques (142). While Harrison illustrates the
confluence of themes and “shared concerns” in both writers’ major works, as in
To the Lighthouse and The Optimist’s Daughter (109), she does not note that the
“The Key” resonates even more uncannily with elements of “An Unwritten
Novel,” especially in its narrative strategy and technique. In fact, the stories
begin so closely the same that readers may confuse one for the other.
The first similarity is that Welty uses a narrator/observer in “The Key” who
creates a story about people in a train station, a subtle parallel to Woolf ’s set-
ting of a train in “Unwritten Novel.” A further parallel is found in the fact that
Welty’s story also revolves around reading the story of one’s lives based on an
individual’s appearance or gestures, just as does Woolf ’s. In fact, Welty incor-
porates and repeats so many words and concepts that originate from Woolf ’s
story that one can almost read “The Key” as a word by word homage. Welty
mimics many of Woolf’s words and phrases verbatim: hope, reproach, awk-
ward, conceal, knowledge, Niagara, mysterious, happiness, symbol, secret, ret-
icence, and communication. In both tone and content, the beginnings of each
story seem much too alike to be mere coincidence. Clearly, Welty borrows
heavily from the beginning of “An Unwritten Novel” to expand upon as well as
diverge from Woolf’s notions of writers and readers.
Woolf and Welty place their narrators in the position of observers who watch
people in a train or train station, choose those who interest them the most—a
deaf mute couple for Welty and a solitary woman for Woolf—and begin to
 Writing and Unwriting 177

formulate stories about them. The similarities go beyond narrator to include

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

Mirroring Woolf’s passion for her subjects, her narrator interacts with them,
talking to them as though they can hear her. After drifting off on a tangent about
another subject she has invented a story for—James Moggridge—she writes,
“[Yes, Minnie; I know you’ve twitched, but one moment—James Moggridge]”
(UN 113). Though Minnie (not even her name) cannot hear the narrator, to the
narrator, the created identity exists. Woolf’s use of brackets around her narra-
tor’s direct address to Minnie depicts the narrator’s awareness of her own depar-
ture from the main narrative. Earlier, she questions her subject, Minnie: “Have
I read you right?” (UN 111). Not only does she wish to know if she has gotten
Minnie’s story right, but the narrator’s choice of words also reveals that her sub-
jects are symbols which she interprets. She reads the physical details in front of
her and offers her interpretation to her readers, but, at the same time, expresses
concern for the potential inaccuracy of her conclusions.
This concern manifests itself in Woolf’s tentative lack of confidence in her
own skills. At times, the narrator both forgets her train of thought and questions
the narrative choices she makes. In fact, Pamela Caughie notes that “none of
Woolf’s fictional artists is confident, skillful, successful, or even very pro-
ductive” (371). While Caughie may be correct, in “An Unwritten Novel,” the
narrator’s seeming lack of skill may be an affectation. Perhaps she allows
her questions to interrupt the narrative. Indeed, the questions most storytellers
might ask themselves in the prewriting stage make their way into Woolf’s fin-
ished product. As she sits in the train, speculating on how Minnie might explore
the bedroom at Hilda’s house, the narrator breaks in momentarily to observe the
real woman, her subject, sitting across from her and says, “(Let me peep across
at her opposite; she’s asleep or pretending it; so what would she think about sit-
ting at the window at three o’clock in the afternoon? Health, money, bills, her
God?)” (UN 109). By allowing the audience a glimpse into her creative process,
the narrator offers the reader a glimpse of her own brainstorming process as she
tries to find another detail to embellish. Once the narrator lights on the idea of
God, she’s off again: “Yes, sitting on the very edge of the chair looking over the
roofs of Eastbourne, Minnie Marsh prays to God. … but what God does she see?
Who’s the God of Minnie Marsh … the God of three o’clock in the afternoon?”
(UN 109). As she discovers a potential detail, she shifts from reality to fiction
as she continues on, parentheses-less and bracket-less, right back into the plot
line of Minnie in Eastbourne. Any writer or storyteller will recognize such ques-
tioning, fumbling, and doubt as crucial part of the creative process. However,
Woolf, through her narrator, unabashedly includes the mental work as part of
the story. In doing so, she reveals that the act of storytelling is more complex
than the end result, the words readers find on the page.
By commenting on her own narrative and revealing the writing process in
this way, Woolf’s narrator informs readers without challenging them to interpret
on their own; in other words, she decodes or unwrites her own story. However,
 Writing and Unwriting 179

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

Woolf’s narrator chooses not to tell the story of Minnie’s crime; rather she cre-
ates the crime to explain her subject’s actions—why she rubs the window and
why she twitches. She gives Minnie a back story. She notes a sign—Minnie’s
twitch—then interprets it for us, and her interpretation becomes a story in itself.
Like any good storyteller, the narrator in “An Unwritten Novel” uses the
signs in front of her as plot points for her story. At the start of the story, she
holds The Times, using it as camouflage and a detail to embellish. The narrator
glances down at The Times “for manner’s sake” (UN 106) and later incorporates
it into the narrative: “The Times was no protection against such sorrow as hers”
(UN 106). By turning signs into symbols through her interpretation, the narra-
tor again comments on the writing process. While she interjects her interpreta-
tions as well as asides into the narrative, she, for the most part, maintains the
illusion of telling a story. The narrator moves the story along in not quite a lin-
ear manner, but forward nevertheless; even when she breaks character in an
uncharacteristic manner, she tenaciously clings to her narrative, dragging her-
self back when she strays and reassuring herself when she doubts her choices.
Only “Minnie’s” words or any proof which belies the narrator’s story will
convince the narrator of the truth. At the climax of the narrator’s story, the nar-
rator writes, “Unless I’m much mistaken, the pulse’s quickened, the moment’s
coming, the threads are racing, Niagara’s ahead. Here’s the crisis!” (UN
114–115). The narrator associates Niagara Falls (which is also mentioned in
Welty’s “The Key”) as the symbol representing crisis and Minnie’s confronta-
tion of it. However, her thoughts and narrative are interrupted, for they have
reached Eastbourne. The woman destroys the narrator’s fiction by saying, ‘ “He
said he’d meet me … Oh, there he is! That’s my son.’ ” (UN 115). Doggedly, the
narrator denies the truth, thinking, “Well, but I’m confounded … Surely
Minnie, you know better! A strange young man” (UN 115). Finally, she
acknowledges the truth—her illusion, spoiled, her story, undone: “What do I
know? That’s not Minnie. There never was Moggridge. Who am I? Life’s bare
as bone” (UN 115). Rather than ignore or suppress the information the woman
supplies her with, the final detail—the son—a detail that exposes the truth,
Woolf’s narrator includes it as part of the narrative, showing the audience her
craft from start to finish. Thus, Woolf dispels her own illusion, and only the
narrator and her method are exposed.
By contrast, Welty’s narrator in “The Key” is not so open, and, while her
story is one primarily about writing too, she presents only the end result—the
final narrative—tenaciously maintaining the illusion of Albert’s and Ellie’s
story. Welty offers the finished product of the storyteller’s craft by using a
narrator of insidiously emotionless expression. Unlike Woolf’s narrator, this
narrator remains reserved as she creates the story of Albert and Ellie and,
furthermore, does not share with the audience her uncertainties regarding the
narration of the incident. The narrator does not break character and, by doing
 Writing and Unwriting 181

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

they must, in effect, un-write the narrative of Albert and Ellie to discover the
narrator’s meaning. While Woolf ’s narrator unwrites her story for readers,
Welty’s does not. Welty will not illuminate the story for readers—they must do
so themselves.
Thus, Welty intentionally obscures her narrator to redirect the focus of
reader’s attention from the narrator to the Morgans. She does not want readers
to know her narrator intimately, complete with his or her shortcomings; her
narrator must be only a voice and nothing more, no reflection of Welty, no
identifiable character. Welty has said that, “the finest story writers seem to be
in one sense obstructionists. As if they held back their own best interests. … if
we look for the source of the deepest pleasure we receive from a writer, how
often do we not find that it seems to be connected with this very obstruction”
(Welty “Looking” 90). In this way, Welty’s narrator differs from Woolf’s; the
narrator in “The Key”—with the exception of very subtle indications—suc-
ceeds in obscuring his or her own identity by withholding any details that
would give readers insight into his or her personality or intent.
While Welty may have had a different intent than Woolf, their characters
behave in much the same manner. Welty’s narrator, like Woolf’s narrator,
observes those around her, searching for a subject to iterpret but unwilling to
reveal the problematic struggles of being a writer. In a train station, rather than
on a train, Welty’s narrator chooses a couple whom she later discovers are deaf
mutes—the ideal people to inscribe a tale upon since they cannot tell—in
conventional terms—their own story. If we assume that Welty read and mod-
eled her own story after “An Unwritten Novel,” it is interesting to note that she
chose a train station rather than a moving train in which to situate her story. If,
as Hafley claims, Woolf’s narrator’s shift “from novelistic imaginings to the
hard kernel of reality is paralleled by the movement of the train which carries
the observer and the observed” (Hafley 57), then Welty’s choice of a static
location, the train station, depicts a lack of movement or revelation by the nar-
rator. Welty’s narrator presents only “novelistic imaginings” without ever offer-
ing readers a reality that might break her illusion. She ends her story with
Albert’s conflict unresolved: “His trembling hand … touched the pocket where
the key was lying, waiting. Would he ever remember that elusive thing about it
or be sure what it might really be a symbol of ?” (K 37). Unlike Woolf’s narra-
tor who finally discovers the truth about her subject, Welty’s narrator does not
allow Albert to discover the key’s meaning and does not supply it for readers.
To further complicate the story, Welty presents another symbol which will
remain unexplained: the mysterious red-haired man supplies Ellie with a
second key. Offering selective interpretation for some symbols and none for
others, the narrator compels readers to make their own meaning.
Thus it is clear that Woolf’s and Welty’s narrators engage readers in different
ways. While Woolf’s narrator includes us in the creative process by revealing
 Writing and Unwriting 183

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

and hands” (31). Just as the narrator inscribes Albert’s character with wonder,
he or she also inscribes on the reader the illusion of the Morgans’ drama.
Welty scatters many symbols throughout “The Key” and makes the word
“symbol” part of her narrative, just as Woolf does. Indeed, the first line of “An
Unwritten Novel” alerts readers to note the symbols along the way: “such an
expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one’s eyes slide above
the paper’s edge to the poor woman’s face—insignificant without that look,
almost a symbol of human destiny with it” (UN 106). In a line that might have
come from “The Key,” Woolf makes the woman’s face a symbol that she will
interpret; from that face that is “almost a symbol,” Woolf will form a fiction
and make the face and its expressions, symbols upon which she will inscribe.
Likewise, Welty determines that a key—the dropped key—will be the symbol
around which her narrative will form.
Welty’s deliberate use of symbols in “The Key” contradicts what she
believes should occur in fiction: a subtle weaving in of symbols, a whisper of
a suggestion, an intimation. Uncharacteristically, Welty magnifies the impor-
tance of the symbol of the key(s) and depicts her characters obsessing about the
keys’ meanings as well. In “Words into Fiction,” Welty states that symbols:

Symbols for the sake of symbols are counterfeit, and were they all stamped on the
page in red they couldn’t any more quickly give themselves away. … However alive
they are, they should never call for an emphasis greater than the emotional reality
they serve in their moment, to illuminate.
Most symbols that a fiction writer uses, however carefully, today are apt to be as
swiftly spotted by his reader as the smoke signals that once crossed our plains from
Indian to Indian. Using symbols and—still worse—finding symbols is such a
habit. It follows that too little comes to be suggested, and this, as can never be
affirmed often enough, is the purpose of every word that goes into a piece of fic-
tion. The imagination has to be involved, and more—ignited. … For symbols can
only grow to be the same when the same experiences on which fiction is based are
more and more partaken by us all (my emphasis Welty “Words” 139).

Welty emphasizes the key by stamping it in red, assuming that it will be spotted
as a “smoke signal” by readers; furthermore, Welty allows the narrator, through
his or her narrative, to portray other characters attempting to interpret the sym-
bol. Thus, readers’ imaginations are not “involved” or “ignited” and, if they do
not look beyond the surface narrative of Albert and Ellie—the only element
which has become illuminated for them is the narrator’s interest in symbols and
meaning rather than their own understanding of the symbols in the story.
“The Key,” then, is hardly about Albert and Ellie’s trip to Niagara Falls, and
instead about Welty’s relationship with the reader, a relationship denoted by the
narrator’s relationship with his or her characters. The narrative the storyteller
forms for Albert and Ellie parallels the narrative veil between writer and
 Writing and Unwriting 185

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

Readers must also decode the red-haired man, another obscure symbol in
Welty’s story. More than just a character, the red-haired man plays an active
role in forming the narrative. Like Welty and the narrator, the red-haired man
is an observer in the drama unfolding at the train station, who watches and
forms opinions about his subjects. If the narrator represents the “voice” of the
writer, the red-haired man may represent the ‘will’ of the writer; collectively,
the narrator and the red-haired man form a complete writer, one who can both
speak and interact with characters on the page. While the narrator speaks the
words that become the narrative, the red-haired man is the one who judiciously—
physically within the context of the story—places the key in the character’s
view. Since Welty herself cannot drop a real key onto the pages of her story, a
character must do it for her. Thus, the red-haired man acts on her—not the
narrator’s—behalf.
When the red-haired man drops the first key, he becomes involved in
Albert’s initial excitement and later angst over this newfound treasure. A story
unfolds based on this symbol that the red-haired man has inserted into the story.
The Morgans communicate through sign language, and the narrator and the red-
haired man assume that they discuss the key; the red-haired man looks on, hop-
ing their story will be revealed. In this way, the red-haired man again epitomizes
the writer. While one part of the writer—the narrator—wants to obscure, the
other part—the red-haired man—wants to reveal. The narrator acts as though he
or she wants to reveal this story about Albert and Ellie by including symbols for
interpretation and imagery about illumination, but in reality, he or she only
obscures meaning by offering no concrete truths. The red-haired man, on the
other hand, exhibits reticence to communicate (K 30), but reveals more than the
narrator; he reveals the difficulty of creating a narrative.
Unlike the son in Woolf’s tale who helps readers unwrite the story, the red-
haired man in “The Key” only succeeds in confusing readers. Exhibiting an
empathy the narrator lacks, the red-haired man attempts to help the Morgans
with what he sees as their dilemma—their missed train, their dashed hopes—
by supplying another symbol which might solve the mystery or give them hap-
piness: he “took a second key from his pocket, and in one direct motion placed
it in Ellie’s red palm” (K 37). Then, without waiting to “see any more,” he
“went out abruptly into the night. He stood still for a moment and reached for
a cigarette. As he held the match close. … You could see that he despised and
saw the uselessness of the thing he had done” (K 37). Intentionally supplying
another symbol into an already mysterious narrative, the red-haired man hopes
to aid Albert and Ellie; however, his attempt may be misguided because of his
own lack of understanding.
Whether the red-haired man sees his gesture as useless—a second key
could never replace the happiness the couple might have found in Niagara Falls
because a second key would not have the same meaning to Ellie as it had to
 Writing and Unwriting 187

Albert—remains unknown. Neither he nor the narrator nor Welty ever explain
his behavior. However, if the red-haired man represents the writer, then he may
despise his gesture of supplying the second key because it is a clear manipula-
tion of events. Writers manipulate characters, dialogue, and symbols in a nec-
essary, but controlling, element of writing fiction because such manipulation
interferes with the truth of the story, the simple telling of one’s observations.
Welty, however, reveals the despicable and covert side of this manipulation that
art takes from life. As Welty calls the incorporation of obvious symbols for
the sake of symbols, “counterfeit,” she shows in the red-haired man’s gesture
the uselessness of such actions by writers. The red-haired man reveals much
of what the narrator hopes to obscure by his action. While the narrator tries
to obscure the process of storytelling by focusing readers’ attention on the
Morgans, the red-haired man depicts the intent of the writer. At first appearing
like a peripheral character in the story, the red-haired man manipulates the
characters’ story and offers a limited insight into the narrative process.
Welty clearly designates the narrator—as well as the red-haired man—in
the role of writer, but the writer she shows is a challenging one. If this is what
writers do, according to Welty’s narrator, then they essentially trick readers,
and they make it difficult for them to discover the heart of the story. Thus,
Welty urges her readers to work hard to find meaning and ultimately, to under-
stand the craft of writing; the meaning of this story and the craft of writing,
then, are inextricably linked for Welty. By allowing the reader little insight into
the narrator other than what’s on the page—the narrative—Welty asks for
complete trust. She expects readers to accept the narrator’s story despite or,
perhaps, because of the narrator’s inability to read sign language. Welty hopes
to attain communication between herself and her readers when, and only when,
they have put their total trust in the narrator and succumbed to, become
immersed in, the Morgans’ story. Welty says:

Communication through fiction frequently happens, I believe, in ways that are

small—a word is not too small; that are unannounced; that are less direct than we
might first suppose on seeing how important they are. It isn’t communication hap-
pening when you as the reader follow or predict the novel’s plot or agree with, or
anticipate, or could even quote the characters; when you hail the symbols; even
when its whole landscape and climate have picked you up and transported you
where it happens. But communication is going on, regardless of all the rest, when
you believe the writer. (Welty “Words” 140)

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

need in everyone to connect with each other; furthermore, in showing Albert’s

and Ellie’s frustration with their inability to communicate, the narrator hopes
to connect with her own audience’s need to be heard and understood.
In their quest for communication, both Welty and Woolf seek to explain the
craft of writing and storytelling, and at the same time, cultivate more sophisti-
cated readers. Welty built on Woolf’s ideas, gave tribute to them, and expanded
them. Both writers, by creating narratives about narratives, draw the reader
into the writing process as a means of enhancing the writing and reading expe-
rience. However, readers have no simple task before them when delving into
Welty’s fiction. Welty, it seems, challenged readers in a more complex manner
than Woolf, who was more direct with her readers. Welty seemed to want read-
ers to work through her fiction, to treat it like a journey: “as readers we too
proceed by the author’s arbitrary direction to his one-time-only destination: a
journey rather strange, hardly in a straight line, altogether personal” (Welty
“Words” 138). The metaphor of the journey, then, found in “The Key” and “An
Unwritten Novel,” illustrates how some readers, like Albert and Ellie, never
make their journey and, thus, don’t achieve understanding while others, like
Woolf’s Minnie Marsh who move forward on the train to her destination, reach
a conclusion after many narrative twists and turns, one that is conclusive and
real, no matter the costs to the narrator/writer.
Welty’s personal reticence and obscurity, however, does not interfere with
the effect of her fiction on readers. Above all, she wanted, as a writer, not as
Eudora Welty, to form a connection with her readers through her fiction. She
said, “that the two concepts, writer’s and reader’s, may differ, since all of us dif-
fer, is neither so strange nor so important as the vital fact that a connection has
been made between them” (Welty “Words” 144). Authorial distance restrained
Welty from enabling readers to become too close to her but not from engaging
with her fiction. By withholding details about the narrator in “The Key,” Welty
maintains her anonymity, urges readers to work harder to decode the symbols
and make meaning, in the end, hoping that her story does “the greatest thing
that fiction does; it may move you” (Welty “Words” 144).
Woolf, who forms a more personal connection with her readers, hopes that
they will, in turn, supply energy to the writing process. The reader’s unbridled
openness to the experience of fiction was, for Woolf, similar to Welty’s view of
the journey—as important to Woolf as the work itself: “if you open your mind
as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness
from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence
of a human being unlike any other” (Woolf “How Should” 235). For Woolf, a
reader’s openness enables him or her to understand the writer and her on a per-
sonal level; the more private Welty was not as willing to share herself with her
audience.Welty may challenge readers so that she as a writer is challenged, a
concept—that of better readers make better writers—Woolf asserts in “How
 Writing and Unwriting 189

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

“Before there is meaning, there has to occur some personal act of vision. And it is
this that is continuously projected as the novelist writes, and again as we, each to
ourselves, read” (Welty “Words” 137).

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

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

MAGDALENA MA
CZYŃSKA

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

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

1
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Rutledge, 1999), 10.
192 Magdalena Ma
czyńska

of language and the consequences of such language for contemporary notions

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

2
Peter Stokes, “Martin Amis and the Postmodern Suicide: Tracing the Postnuclear
Narrative at the Fin de Millennium,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38, no.
4 (1997): 300.
3
Amy J. Elias, “Meta-mimesis? The Problem of British Postmodern Realism,” in
British Postmodern Fiction, eds. Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens (Atlanta: Rodopi,
1993), 26.
4
Catherine Bernard, “Dismembering/Remembering Mimesis: Martin Amis,
Graham Swift,” in British Postmodern Fiction, eds. Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens
(Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), 122.
5
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983), 211.
6
Elie A. Edmondson, “Martin Amis Writes Postmodern Man,” Critique: Studies
in Contemporary Fiction 42, no. 2 (2001): 146.
 Writing the Writer 193

examines such aspects of modern-day literary life as the expanding machinery

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

7
Martin Amis, Rachel Papers (New York: Vintage International, 1992), 27.
8
Amis, Rachel Papers, 93.
9
Amis, Rachel Papers, 4.
10
Amis, Rachel Papers, 33.
11
Amis, Rachel Papers, 28.
12
Amis, Rachel Papers, 26.
13
Amis, Rachel Papers, 92.
14
Amis, Rachel Papers, 4.
194 Magdalena Ma
czyńska

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

15
Amis, Rachel Papers, 4.
16
Amis, Rachel Papers, 57.
17
Amis, Rachel Papers, 180.
18
Amis, Rachel Papers, 217.
19
Amis, Rachel Papers, 158.
20
Amis, Rachel Papers, 20.
21
Amis, Rachel Papers, 42.
 Writing the Writer 195

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

22
Amis, Rachel Papers, 157.
23
Amis, Rachel Papers, 62.
24
John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (New York: Methuen, 1985), 10.
25
Amis, Rachel Papers, 215.
26
Haffenden, 10.
27
Martin Amis, Dead Babies (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 16.
196 Magdalena Ma
czyńska

Furthermore, Amis continues to explore the subject of ruthless manipulation

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

28
Amis, Dead Babies, 38.
29
Haffenden, 12.
30
Haffenden, 12.
31
Martin Amis, Other People (New York: Vintage International, 1994), 9.
32
Amis, Other People, 9.
33
Amis, Other People, 34.
34
Amis, Other People, 21.
35
Amis, Other People, 66.
 Writing the Writer 197

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

36
Amis, Other People, 125.
37
Amis, Other People, 106.
38
Haffenden, 18.
39
Brian Finney, “Narrative and Narrated Homicides in Martin Amis’s Other People
and London Fields,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37, no. 1 (1995): 4.
40
Finney, 3.
198 Magdalena Ma
czyńska

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

41
Finney, 5.
42
Amis, Other People, 106.
43
Martin Amis, Money (London: Penguin Books 1985), 330.
44
Amis, Money, 267.
45
Amis, Money, 285.
 Writing the Writer 199

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

46
Haffenden, 11.
47
Amis, Money, 71.
48
McHale, 213.
49
Edmondson, 149.
50
Amis, Money, 247.
200 Magdalena Ma
czyńska

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

51
Amis, Money, 379.
52
Amis, Money, 376.
53
Amis, Money, 375.
54
Amis, Money, 59.
55
Haffenden, 24.
 Writing the Writer 201

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

56
Martin Amis, London Fields (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 1.
57
Amis, London Fields, 13.
58
Amis, London Fields, 43.
59
Amis, London Fields, 101.
60
Amis, London Fields, 43.
61
Amis, London Fields, 39.
62
Amis, London Fields, 1.
63
Amis, London Fields, 59.
202 Magdalena Ma
czyńska

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

64
Amis, London Fields, 100.
65
Amis, London Fields, 78.
66
Amis, London Fields, 452.
67
Finney, 9.
68
Amis, London Fields, 468.
69
Amis, London Fields, 468.
 Writing the Writer 203

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

70
Amis, London Fields, 468.
71
Amis, London Fields, 470.
72
Amis, London Fields, 61.
73
Amis, London Fields, 119.
74
Amis, London Fields, 131.
75
Amis, London Fields, 466.
76
Amis, London Fields, 469.
204 Magdalena Ma
czyńska

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

77
Martin Amis, The Information (London: Flamingo, 1996), 63.
78
Amis, The Information, 312.
79
Amis, The Information, 170.
80
Amis, The Information, 170.
81
Amis, The Information, 324.
82
Amis, The Information, 324.
83
Amis, The Information, 364.
 Writing the Writer 205

facile and politically correct novels, scrupulously cleansed of all potentially

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

84
Amis, The Information, 113.
85
Amis, The Information, 192.
86
Amis, The Information, 20.
87
Amis, The Information, 131.
88
Amis, The Information, 295.
89
Amis, The Information, 185.
206 Magdalena Ma
czyńska

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

90
Joe Moran, “Artists and Verbal Mechanics: Martin Amis’s The Information,”
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 41, no.4 (2000): 310.
91
Moran, 310.
92
Gerald Howard, “Slouching Towards Grubnet: The Author in the Age of
Publicity,” in Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse, ed. Sven Birkerts (St.
Paul, MN: Graywolf, 1996), 20.
93
John Nash, “Fiction may be a Legal Paternity: Martin Amis’s The Information,”
English: The Journal of the English Association 45, no. 183 (1996): 219.
 Writing the Writer 207

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

94
Amis, The Information, 170.
95
Victoria N. Alexander, “Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov,” The
Antioch Review 52, no.4 (1994): 580–90.
This page intentionally left blank
 HEMINGWAY, CÉZANNE, AND WRITING:
“REALITIES THAT ARISE FROM
THE CRAFT ITSELF”

LAWRENCE STANLEY

Ernest Hemingway’s writing, with its stark sense of reportage, hardly seems to
challenge ordinary ways of seeing. Yet his desire to write the way Cézanne
painted not only demanded rethinking the craft of choosing and arranging
words, it also demands a different attention to the written text before the
reader can see the text or story as there. Hemingway, in “On Writing” and in
his personal letters, mulled over the difficulties that the writer faces when
trying to make fiction have the ontological presence of an object. In his col-
lection of short stories, In Our Time, he experimented carefully and method-
ologically with repetition and with syntactical patterns that brought his writing
close to achieving his objectives. While the writing retains a definitive literal
impression, an attentive reading will recognize the linguistic characteristics
which give the writing its unique sense of presence.

And so we have this situation, a settled language because a language is

settled after it does not change any more that is as to words and gram-
mar, and it being written so completely written all the time it inevitably
cannot change much and yet the pressure upon these words to make
them do something that they did not do for those who made that lan-
guage come to exist is a very interesting thing to watch.1

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

1
Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures ([1935] Chicago: U Chicago P, 1969), 9.
210 Lawrence Stanley

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

2
Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories, ed. Philip Young (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972). Referred to hereafter as NAS.
 Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing 211

is about feeling, about “times when you had to write” and times when “you felt …
like you could never write” (NAS 247) and yet somehow eventually you would
write. It is akin to “peristaltic action,” unbidden and not wholly controllable.
When it worked, when you felt as though you could write and you did write and
the writing was good, then you knew it was possible and you always hoped for
those times.
The language of “On Writing,” unlike the more controlled and crafted syn-
tax of “Big Two-Hearted River,” has a raw immediacy akin to Gertrude Stein’s
writing. In this syntax, Adams thinks about how “It was so damn hard to write
well” and how “There were so many tricks” and how such tricks could and
“would all turn into clichés.” He wants then to see the river, not pragmatically as
a fisherman studying its currents and pools and shadows, but as a self-contained
and aesthetic object. And he thinks to himself:

He wanted to paint like Cezanne painted.

Cezanne started with all the tricks. Then he broke the whole thing down and
built the real thing. It was hell to do. … He, Nick, wanted to write about country
so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in painting. You had to do it from
inside yourself. There wasn’t any trick. Nobody had written about country like
that. … You could do it if you would fight it out. If you’d lived right with your eyes.
It was a thing you couldn’t talk about. [NAS 247]

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

objectivity of thereness, he had to break the narrative thread that conflated the
as-if of fiction with the actuality of memoir; only then could he move his writing
as completely as possible into the field of language. On the 15th of August
1924, Hemingway wrote from Paris to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas:

I have finished two long short stories, one of them not much good and finished the
long one I worked on before I went to Spain [“Big Two-Hearted River”] where I’m
trying to do the country like Cezanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes
getting it a little bit.3

A month later he wrote to Edward J. O’Brien:

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

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

3
Carlos Baker, ed., Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters 1917-1961 (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981), 122.
4
David Bromwich has observed: “work, for [Hemingway], has the quality of a
made thing, which he of all others has added to life. The result is seemingly pointless.
Nevertheless, it endures because it is alive with purpose, as life itself is not. So he must
write in order to be released back into his experiences and then go on, without knowing
why he does, until enough traces collect for him to deposit again in the form of writ-
ing.” 4 “Hemingway’s Valor,” Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry (Chicago and
London: U Chicago P, 2001), 207.
 Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing 213

The narrative perspective of “On Writing” never breaks away from the inti-
macy of the writer’s subjectivity. In his edited collection of the Nick Adams sto-
ries, Philip Young placed it four stories after “Big Two-Hearted River” rather than
chronologically, the way the other stories were arranged. That separation intensi-
fies the relative independence of the manuscript (which depends upon a more per-
sonal heuristic of realities arising directly out of experience rather than out of
language) and seems rather in keeping with Hemingway’s clear and deliberate
decision to excise it from the original manuscript. A month after writing to
O’Brien about writing “Big Two-Hearted River,” he wrote to Robert McAlmon:

I have decided that all that mental conversation in the long fishing story is the shit
and have cut it all out. The entire nine pages. … I realized how bad it was and that
shocked me back into the river again. … Just the straight fishing (Letters 133).5

The excursion into Nick Adams’s consciousness violated a thin but distinct
separation that the writer who wanted the writing to be there often scrupu-
lously maintained. More to the point, the excised pages were too explicitly sub-
jective, and the self-consciousness in that narrative was essentially at odds with
the objective sense that Hemingway wanted with there-ness.
Even though the explicit manifestation of thinking about there-ness was
excised from the short story, Hemingway was constantly thinking about it.
More than two decades later, in the late 1950s, as he wrote the manuscript for
A Moveable Feast and recalled his earlier time in Paris of writing and of visiting
the Musée du Luxembourg to study the Impressionist paintings, he noted:

I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple
true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was
trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate
enough to explain it to anyone. Besides, it was a secret.6

The absence of the explanatory is typical of Hemingway’s minimalist wri-

ting, so it is not surprising to find him calling what he was learning “a secret.”
There is, nevertheless, a bit of enigma suggested in “it was a secret” which, unex-
plicated by Hemingway, remains a secret. It was and it is a secret, and one might
imagine, without lapsing into sentimental acceptance of the writer’s words, that

5
Of this excision Joseph Flora writes: “In the cut segment Nick is too cerebral.
Hemingway felt that “talk”—even if presented as memory—could ruin a thing. … He
would do a Cézanne rather than talk about doing one.” He is right, except that the author
himself did occasionally talk about doing; the excision seems to be more about propor-
tion than about talking. Cf. Joseph M. Flora, Hemingway’s Nick Adams (Baton Rouge &
London: Louisiana State U P, 1982), 181.
6
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), 17–18.
214 Lawrence Stanley

the draw of Cézanne—“something”—remained rather mysterious to him, as

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

7
William White, ed., By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1967), 215.
8
Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), 33.
 Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing 215

reality; the elimination of non-essential details—the “sense” of Cézanne.” 9 Such

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

9
Kenneth G. Johnston, “Hemingway and Cézanne: Doing the Country,” American
Literature 56.1 (March 1984), 30.
10
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, tr. Joel Agee ([1952]
New York: Fromm International, 1985).
216 Lawrence Stanley

object, for if one loves an object, “one judges it instead of saying it” (Rilke 50) and
consequently “They’d paint: I love this here; instead of painting: here it is” (Rilke
51). To say a thing and in saying make it here: that is what Rilke the poet sees in
Cézanne the painter, the achievement of the “labor … of an infinitely responsive
conscience … which so incorruptibly reduced a reality to its color content that it
resumed a new existence in a beyond of color, without any previous memories”
(Rilke 65). Certainly, Rilke must have sensed what his own work aspired to in
making realities out of the craft: not love but “an infinitely responsive con-
science.” The connection with Hemingway’s standard—“how conscientious he
is”—is clear; equally important is how Rilke manages the relation between the
subjective and the objective. In Cézanne’s work, “painting is something that
takes place among the colors, and … one has to leave them alone completely,
so that they can settle the matter among themselves” (Rilke 75); in writing,
writers must, similarly, be aware of “something that takes place among” the
words, and they must have the discipline to leave that something alone.
The determination to make the thing, not the art-form but the “here it is,”
demands the audacity to know the physical, bold and unsubtle, without surface
nuance or distance of irony, which force creator and viewer into or onto almost
the same place or point: to realize there the way one realizes how there an
actual thing is.
Explaining to O’Brien that he wants “to see the country all complete all
the time you write,” Hemingway rather enigmatically identifies the multi-
dimensional potential of art and its ability to achieve empirically impossible
ways of seeing. D. H. Lawrence, in his “Introduction to these Paintings,”
argued that Cézanne “wanted to touch the world of substance once more with
the intuitive touch, to be aware of it with the intuitive awareness:”

When he said to his models: “Be an apple! Be an apple!” he was uttering the fore-
word to the fall … of our whole way of consciousness, and the substitution of another
way. If the human being is going to be primarily an apple, as for Cézanne it was, then
you are going to have a new world of men: a world which has very little to say, men
that can sit still and just be physically there, and be truly non-moral. … For the
intuitive apperception of the apple is so tangibly aware of the apple that it is aware
of it all round, not only just of the front. … The true imagination is for ever curv-
ing round to the other side, to the back of presented appearance.11

Intuition and imagination are more the language of Lawrence than of

Hemingway, but Lawrence gets close to unpuzzling “why Cézanne?” The

11
D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed.
Edward D. McDonald (New York: The Viking Press, 1936), 578–579. I am indebted to
Timothy Bewes for this reference.
 Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing 217

artists’ world, perceived by artists in this era (both Hemingway and Lawrence
are writing their observations in the mid- and late-nineteen twenties), is a world
stripped of human commentary into which the object emerges as a three-
dimensional object. In the above paragraph Lawrence claims that if the model
were to “intrude her personality” the artist “would have to paint cliché,” a
thought that resonates with Rilke’s earlier reflections and that has close kinship
with Hemingway’s deletion of the subjective reflections of Nick Adams.
Furthermore, the tangible awareness Lawrence describes runs parallel with
Hemingway’s “what goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.”
To see the conceptual in practice, one has only to watch William Gass
reading Gertrude Stein as

she looked at Cézanne … and as she examined the master’s portrait of his wife, she
realized that the reality of the model had been superceded by the reality of the com-
position. Everything in the painting was related to everything else in the painting, and
to everything else equally (there were no lesser marks or moments), while the relation
of any line or area of color in the painting to anything outside the painting (to a per-
son in this case) was accidental, superfluous, illusory. … the painting was an entity.12

The “entity”—a term correlative to “there”—is the painting as an object, as

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

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

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

13
As Hugh Kenner has clarified, the arts of this era share an impulse for the thing
and for the there, and such art needs “a new grammar, that of juxtaposed shots … and a
new syntax likewise, of event counterpointed with setting, or dialogue with action”
whose “[e]nvironments are simply there” (Homemade World 128, 129): the silent film
with its completely being there, and Cézanne, bold and unsubtle, without the nuances of
the actual. This is not to (de)value but simply to point out what finally is obvious—the
audacity of non-reporting statements whose very bluntness forces creator and viewer
onto almost the same plane of perception wherein they realize there.
14
Stein, Narration, 9.
15
Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning
(Fort Worth, TX: The Texas Christian U P, 1976), 41.
16
Gertrude Stein, Writings and Lectures 1911–1945, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz
(London: Peter Owen, 1967), 130.
 Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing 219

make one know oneself knowing them; and even if the first two claims were
relevant, then the writing could hardly give one the country itself.
The materials of the writer are always diction and syntax, and the choosing
of words and the arranging of them are its craft, so writing that aspires to making
something there must experiment with the materials and must push writing into
the field of language. Diction names things; diction names and in naming estab-
lishes reference points. Repetition, with its calling-to-attention insistence, directs
attention to how a thing is being said and unsettles the reference of settled dis-
course. Words can be repeated but not in the same place and so repetition has
the power to construct a peculiar syntax of space.
A first reading of In Our Time will reveal the obvious: that the stories are
not necessarily chronological and that they are interleaved with fragments of war
memories. The stories are also quite accessible and seem so literal as to warrant
little examination. Less obvious but more pervasive is the writing’s oblique
jazz-like improvisations, wherein solo parts run responsively against traditional
reference points. Nouns insist on literal specificity, but in Hemingway’s prose the
repetitions point two ways, to the overt reference points outside the text and to
the text itself whose “making” constructs its own reference points. “Cat in the
Rain” with its repetitions and its Stein-like narrative achieves the Cézanne-like
impression of thereness that Hemingway set up, in “On Writing” and his
letters, as ideal fiction:

Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument. It was made of
bronze and glistened in the rain. It was raining. The rain dripped from the palm trees.
Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and
slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain.17

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

17
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time ([1930] New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons
1958) 117.
220 Lawrence Stanley

This hardly seems to rival ordinary vision—unless ordinary vision is

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

Hemingway’s mastery … echoing Cézanne … manifests itself in the meticulous

placement and repetition of key words and images to create patterns recognizable
by perceptive readers as, in that instant of realization, they suddenly discover

18
After reading critical reviews of The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway said,
bluntly and simply: “All that symbolism that people say is shit” (Letters 780).
19
Theodore L. Gaillard, Jr., “Hemingway’s Debt to Cézanne: New Perspectives,”
Twentieth Century Literature 45. 1 (Spring 1999), 72.
 Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing 221

dimensions in such characters as the troubled protagonist of “Big Two-Hearted

River” and in symbolic landscapes like those in A Farewell to Arms. [Gaillard 76]

As compelling as this claim is, it collapses perspective and dimension into the
symbolic and consequently avoids the harder question of just how this writing
constructs the immediate of the there. It fails to get at the “something that takes
place among” the words. Since the writer’s materials are language and life,
Hemingway’s longing for the life of the painter is a reminder of the translative
nature of language, its ability to appear as the object that is being written about.
The reader, like the writer, must learn to see the language. The realistic nature
of Hemingway’s writing does seem, quite literally, to be there, and hence it is
difficult to see what Paul Ricoeur has defined as impressionism’s “aesthetic
augmentation of reality,” forms of art that

proceed more and more boldly to the abolition of natural forms for the sake of a
merely constructed range of elementary signs whose combinatory forms will rival
ordinary vision. … it challenges perceptual forms by relating them to non-perceptual
structures.20

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

20
Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 42, 41.
222 Lawrence Stanley

“Big Two-Hearted River,” the last of the stories in the collection, is differ-
ent from “Cat in the Rain” which has a distinctly impressionistic feel and is more
like a single picture within which the fluidity of experience seeks no reference
point outside its own definitive frame. “Big Two-Hearted River” spans several
days, and its narrator-character never stops moving. The story drives forward
with cinematic force as its paragraph-frame sequences each dissolve into the
next. Here too is repetition, but the repetition is stretched over a larger syntactical
space. The dimensions of its there-ness exceed what could ever happen in “Cat in
the Rain.” The syntax is short. The diction is simple and literal and common.
Yet the text gives evidence of the writer crafting patiently and carefully.

He hung unsteadily in the current, then settled to the bottom beside a stone. Nick
reached down his hand to touch him, his arm to the elbow under water. The trout
was steady in the moving stream, resting on the gravel, beside a stone. As Nick’s
fingers touched him, touched his smooth, cool, underwater feeling he was gone,
gone in a shadow across the bottom of the stream. [In Our Time 201]

Here are repetitions—stream, gone, touch, beneath a stone—and repetitions

with variations—touch/touched, under water/underwater, to the bottom/across
the bottom. On a first reading, the repetitions might not be noticed, as if so the
writing achieves the effect Hemingway wanted: to have the language be forgotten.
Yet the repetitions construct a syntactical space as the words function like
pinpoints on a map, and between the repeated words something happens that
subtly modifies the repeated words. And their repetitive insistence affects a
sense of simply being there.

Holding the rod far out toward the uprooted tree and sloshing backward in the cur-
rent, Nick worked the trout, plunging, the rod bending alive, out of the danger of
the weeds into the open river. Holding the rod, pumping alive against the current,
Nick brought the trout in. He rushed, but always came, the spring of the rod yield-
ing to the rushes, sometimes jerking under water, but always bringing him in. The
rod above his head, he led the trout over the net, then lifted. [In Our Time 206]

Here again are repetitions—rod, holding the rod, the trout—and counter-
points—out of/into, toward/backward. The repetitions of words and of grammati-
cal structures, echoing in paragraph after paragraph, have become a pattern
that stretches syntactical space outside the parameters of a single paragraph.

Nick had one good trout. He did not care about getting many trout. Now the stream
was shallow and wide. There were trees along both banks. The trees of the left bank
made short shadows on the current in the forenoon sun. Nick knew there were trout in
each shadow. In the afternoon, after the sun had crossed toward the hills, the trout
would be in the cool shadows on the other side of the stream. [In Our Time 207]
 Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing 223

Again more repetitions—trout, stream, shadows—and variations—banks/

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

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

cultivated and disciplined his aesthetic sensibility. The aesthetic and the beautiful
would thereby not be about sentimental prettiness but would be bold seeing, as
bold as Cézanne seeing, and this seeing would not depend upon memory and nos-
talgia but upon a sensibility challenged by the way others had learned to see the
mobility of reality and simultaneously the immobility of perception. One stud-
ied Cézanne. Then one went outside and experienced the fullness of the raw
and the undifferentiated and the un-chosen, working out a proportional relation
between perception and language. Then one could begin to “make it up.” One
would no longer be trying to reconstitute what is already there.
“I made it all up,” Hemingway wrote to Stein on the 15th of August, 1924, “so
I could see it all.” And there you have it—the Cézanne paradigm, the Lawrence
seeing all around. The writing will be, so it will not be about Hemingway and
his life (despite the barely visible distinction between his nonfiction and his fic-
tion). It will be simply because Hemingway the reporter, the fisherman, the
hunter, had a deep sense of the ordinary-actual and knew that he must see and
that he must trust his eyes. He wrote what he knew and knew from experience.
But he knew too that mere reportage made a thing too timebound and hence
potentially anachronistic—that it would, merely reported, have only the inter-
est of the moment. Realities would have to arise out of the craft of writing, out
of the choosing and arranging of words to create a there-ness, and it is “a very
interesting thing to watch.” 22

“Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk
into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up on to the high
ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake. A pencil lead might break off
in the conical nose of the pencil-sharpener and you would use the small blade of
the penknife to clear it or else sharpen the pencil carefully with the sharp blade
and then slip your arm through sweat-salted leather of your pack strap to lift the
pack again, get the other arm though and feel the weight settle on your back and
feel the pine needles under your moccasins as you started down the lake.
“Then you would hear someone say, ‘Hi, Hem. What are you trying to do? Write
in a café?’ ” (A Moveable Feast 81)

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

22
Stein, Narration, 9.
 Hemingway, Cézanne, and Writing 225

Gaillard, Theodore L. Jr. “Hemingway’s Debt to Cézanne: New Perspectives.” Twentieth

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

LAURIE EDSON

In the opening paragraph of Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s

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

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

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

The critique of the everyday must bring to light this weighty system that clutches
at our heels and which we ended up by accepting as normal through sheer habit.
The critique must identify this familiar system and make it recognizable. …5

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

1
Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (Seattle: Seal Press, 1988), 1.
2
Dangarembga, 1.
3
Dangarembga, 204.
4
Paulin J. Hountondji, “Daily Life in Black Africa: Elements for a Critique,” in
The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness 1947–1987,
ed. V. Y. Mudimbe (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1992), 361.
5
Hountondji, 362.
 History, Memory, and Writing 229

resume her subservient position beside her rich husband Babamukuru as

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

6
See, for instance, Charles Sugnet, “Nervous Conditions: Dangarembga’s Feminist
Reinvention of Fanon,” in The Politics of (M)Othering, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka (New
York: Routledge, 1997), 33–49. See also M. Keith Booker, The African Novel in English
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998).
7
Sue Thomas, “Killing the Hysteric in the Colonized’s House: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s
Nervous Conditions,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27 (1992): 26–36.
8
Dangarembga, 81.
230 Laurie Edson

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

9
Dangarembga, 83.
10
Dangarembga, 84.
11
Dangarembga, 84.
 History, Memory, and Writing 231

me like that, child. … You must respect me. I am your father.” 12 Tambu, rightly
sensing that things will only intensify, has already run to wake up Maiguru who
she hopes will be able to intervene, and they both arrive back on the scene just
in time to hear Babamukuru call his daughter a whore. When Maiguru tries to
speak, the narrator notes that she is silenced immediately. Both females, then,
are forced to remain silent and witness Babamukuru strike Nyasha twice,
knocking her down to her bed. When Babamukuru threatens to “teach her a les-
son” because “I am respected at this mission. I cannot have a daughter who
behaves like a whore,” Maiguru tries meekly to intervene again, but she is
ignored.13 She remains silent while her husband wrestles her daughter to the
ground, punching her head and banging it into the floor. Finally Maiguru and
her son Chido do succeed in holding Babamukuru back, and Nyasha makes her
escape. The narrator notes, however, that when Maiguru later stretches her
arms out to her daughter, “the daughter walked by in a stony denial. Maiguru’s
arms sagged.” 14 The narrator also adds a significant detail about Maiguru
watching while Nyasha received fourteen lashes from Babamukuru, another
indication of Maiguru’s helplessness and silent complicity in her husband’s
actions. To sustain the image of herself as a good and proper African wife,
Maiguru does not dare challenge Babamukuru’s authority.
While one of the subjects Tambu the narrator develops in this section is
Nyasha’s growing detachment from her surroundings (she has already stopped
eating), a second subject at issue is Tambu’s own response. As Babamukuru
condemns Nyasha to whoredom simply because she is female, Tambu the nar-
rator reflects: “[W]hat I didn’t like was the way all the conflicts came back to
this question of femaleness. Femaleness as opposed and inferior to maleness,” 15
but she is unwilling to probe more deeply at this point because she believes that
such thinking would be too dangerous for her:

If I had been more independent in my thinking then, I would have thought the mat-
ter through to a conclusion. But in those days it was easy for me to leave tangled
thoughts knotted, their loose ends hanging. I didn’t want to explore the treacherous
mazes that such thoughts led into. … I became embarrassed with my acquired insi-
pidity, but I did not allow myself to agonise over it, nor did I insist on any imme-
diate conclusions. … I thought there was time to see what would happen, to decide
what needed to be done. I thought I was wise to be preserving my energy, unlike
my cousin, who was burning herself out.16

12
Dangarembga, 113.
13
Dangarembga, 114.
14
Dangarembga, 117.
15
Dangarembga, 116.
16
Dangarembga, 116.
232 Laurie Edson

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

17
Dangarembga, 138.
18
Dangarembga, 138.
19
Dangarembga, 142.
 History, Memory, and Writing 233

Dangarembga creates a narrator who often declares her unwillingness to

analyze too deeply her experiences with her aunt’s and uncle’s family because
she fears that such analytical activity is not safe. Although Tambu as a very
young girl had exhibited strength and determination, even asserting herself
physically against her older brother on the school playground because he stole
the maize she had planted to earn money for her own school fees, when she
comes to the mission with this westernized African family she is acutely aware
that she has changed and become unnerved: “I do not know how I came to be
like that. … [M]y going to the mission was such a drastic change that it unnerved
me. Whatever the case, I had grown very tentative.” 20 Even after the initial
event of Babamukuru’s homecoming from England, the narrator, sensing that
this family is now very different, declares to the reader her hesitations about
thinking too much about how she dislikes what is happening:

These were complex, dangerous thoughts that I was stirring up, not the kind that
you can ponder safely but the kind that become autonomous and malignant if you
let them.… Sensing how unwise it was to think too deeply about these things in
case I manoeuvred myself into a blind alley at the end of which I would have to
confront unconfrontable issues, I busied myself with housework.21

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

20
Dangarembga, 110.
21
Dangarembga, 39.
22
Dangarembga, 163.
234 Laurie Edson

Babamukuru. Tambu narrates that she cannot sleep for nights on end, and yet
she continues to remain silent about her thoughts, growing increasingly frus-
trated with herself for remaining mute and not being able to take a stand:

“There was definitely something wrong with me, otherwise I would have had
something to say for myself. I knew I had not taken a stand on many issues since
coming to the mission, but all along I had been thinking that it was because there
had been no reason to, that when the time came I would be able to do it.” 23

Unable to confront Babamukuru, yet unwilling to attend the wedding, Tambu

becomes increasingly distressed at her own weakness: “My vagueness and my
reverence for my uncle, what he was, what he had achieved, what he represented
and therefore what he wanted, had stunted the growth of my faculty of criti-
cism, sapped the energy that in childhood I had used to define my own posi-
tion. It had happened insidiously. …” 24 Tambu then narrates a horrific scene in
which she is unable to get out of bed the morning of the wedding: one part of
her watches with interest and fascination as the other part of her slips out of her
body and stands near the foot of the bed. She has clearly gone somewhere
where Babamukuru can’t reach her although this experience of disembodiment
is extremely frightening for her. As she gives up caring about Babamukuru’s
threats and anger, she narrates the trauma she experiences with precision:

Babamukuru did not know how I had suffered over the question of that wedding.
He did not know how my mind had raced and spun and ended up splitting into two
disconnected entities that had long, frightening arguments with each other, very
vocally, there in my head, about what ought to be done, the one half maniacally
insisting on going, the other half equally maniacally refusing to consider it.25

Tambu is ultimately punished for having defied Babamukuru’s authority, but

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

23
Dangarembga, 164.
24
Dangarembga, 164.
25
Dangarembga, 167.
 History, Memory, and Writing 235

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

26
Dangarembga, 179.
27
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African
Literature (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986).
28
Dangarembga, 180.
29
Dangarembga, 184.
30
Dangarembga, 197.
236 Laurie Edson

But Dangarembga’s novel does not end here either. Instead, when Tambu
returns to the mission during a vacation, Nyasha has already fallen into mental
illness, vomiting her food and succumbing to fits of anger that she cannot con-
trol. As she rocks her body, she rages with increasing intensity against the com-
bined economic, political, and social forces of colonialism that have made
Africans, including her father, grovel. She jabs fragments of broken mirrors
into her flesh, and her parents quickly take her to a psychiatrist in Salisbury,
who misunderstands her condition. She ultimately gets admitted to a clinic, but
the experience of watching her cousin disintegrate into mental illness has com-
pletely unnerved Tambu, who now fears for her own sanity. Precisely at this
point in the narrative, Tambu returns home to visit her mother, who diagnoses
the problem as “too much Englishness” and advises her daughter to be careful.
It is significant that the narrator returns home at this moment, for Tambu will
ultimately heed her mother’s advice. Tambu’s narrative now focuses with increas-
ing urgency on the necessity of remaining supremely vigilant so that she does
not simply assimilate into the culture of the colonizer and forget her past. As
Dangarembga has said in an interview, “I think this problem of forgetting—
remembering and forgetting—is really important. What is interesting is that
Nyasha as an individual does not have anything to forget: she simply doesn’t
know. She is the one who is worried about it. …” 31 Tambu, on the other hand,
has a very solid background at the homestead and knows exactly where she has
come from, even though she is leaving it.
“The problem is the Englishness,” explains Tambu’s mother, so you just be
careful!” 32 Already aware that her mother is right, the narrator admits think-
ing about her own “creeping feelings of doom” and wonders if she can resist
assimilation:

Was I being careful enough? I wondered. For I was beginning to have a suspicion,
no more than the seed of a suspicion, that I had been too eager to leave the home-
stead and embrace the “Englishness” of the mission; and after that the more con-
centrated “Englishness” of Sacred Heart. The suspicion remained for a few days,
during which time it transformed itself into guilt, and then I had nightmares about
Nhamo and Chido and Nyasha two nights in a row.33

The narrator resolves to be on her guard, no longer impressed with English

affluence or what Sacred Heart represents. She returns to Sacred Heart, certain
of her ability to resist the seduction and not be so “contaminated” that she will

31
Jane Wilkinson, “Tsitsi Dangarembga,” in Talking with African Writers; Interviews
with African Poets, Playwrights, and Novelists, ed. Jane Wilkinson (Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 1992), 191.
32
Dangarembga, 203.
33
Dangarembga, 203.
 History, Memory, and Writing 237

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

34
Dangarembga, 188.
35
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (New York: Orion Press,
1965), 91.
36
Dangarembga, 17.
37
Dangarembga, 19.
238 Laurie Edson

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

38
Dangarembga, 181. As Anthony Chennells has put it, “Babamukuru has author-
ized her to speak and in authorizing her he has freed her as author.” See Chennells,
“Authorizing Women, Women’s Authoring: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,”
in New Writing from Southern Africa; Authors Who Have Become Prominent Since
1980, ed. Emmanuel Ngara (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996), 73.
39
Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter, trans. Modupé Bodé-Thomas (Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 1981), 61–62.
40
Sembène Ousmane, God’s Bits of Wood, tr. Francis Price (Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 1970), 34.
 History, Memory, and Writing 239

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

41
Wilkinson, 191.
42
Supriya Nair, “Melancholic Women: The Intellectual Hysteric(s) in Nervous
Conditions,” Research in African Literatures 26(2) (1995): 138.
43
Wilkinson, 193.
240 Laurie Edson

between resistance and accommodation is sometimes a difficult one to draw;

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

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

44
Sugnet, 40.
45
Donald R. Wehrs, African Feminist Fiction and Indigenous Values (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2001), 127.
 History, Memory, and Writing 241

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

Michael J. Meyer, editor, is completing his sixth and seventh book in this
series. An adjunct professor of English at DePaul University and Northeastern
Illinois, Meyer holds a Ph.D. from Loyola University Chicago and is the author
of Scarecrow’s Hayashi Steinbeck Bibliography, 1982–1996. His essays on
Steinbeck have appeared in several collections and his study of Steinbeck’s use
of the Cain and Abel myth was published by Mellen in 2000. Presently he is
completing work on The Steinbeck Encyclopaedia for Greenwood where he
serves as co-editor of the project.

Reine Dugas Bouton, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Transitional Eng-

lish at Southeastern Louisiana University. In addition to contributing to
Perspectives on Modern Literature: Literature and Music, she has also pub-
lished articles on Eudora Welty in the Arkansas Review and Literatur en
Wissenschaft und Unterricht.

Mark Byron completed his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Cambridge

in 2001, entitled: “Exilic Modernism and Textual Ontogeny: Ezra Pound’s Pisan
Cantos and Samuel Beckett’s Watt.” Since then, he has taught in the Department
of English at the University of Sydney, Australia, and as a Visiting Lecturer in
the Department of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. Recent pub-
lications include essays on sculpture in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, on the
writing of estrangement and exile in Pound’s Cantos, and on ecstatic processes
in Beckett’s Watt.

Mary F. Catanzaro (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 1986) is an

Independent Scholar living in Milwaukee. She has published articles on
Beckett in series collections such as The World of Samuel Beckett, ed. Joseph
H. Smith (Johns Hopkins, 1991), Literature and the Grotesque, ed. Michael J.
Meyer (Amsterdam, 1992), Beckett in the 1990’s, ed. Marius Buning and Lois
Oppenheim (Amsterdam, 1993) and Literature and Music, ed. Michael J.
Meyer (Amsterdam, 2002). In addition, she has contributed essays on Beckett
in scholarly journals, such as Modern Drama, The Journal of Dramatic Theory
and Criticism and Notes on Modern Irish Literature. In addition to her interest
244 About the Authors

in Beckett’s complex development of the couple and the musical texture of the
speaking voice in all his works, she is currently exploring his notions of what
constitutes personal identity. This essay pursues that idea and examines how
Beckett exposes his deepest autobiographical secrets through the characters in
his Trilogy.

David Clippinger is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies

at Penn State University. At present he is working on Authors and Other
Marketing Monstrosities: Representations of Writers in Postmodern American
Culture as well as a book-length study of Benjamin Britten’s appropriation of
stories by Henry James, Herman Melville, and Thomas Mann as a means to
advance an implicit but partially obscured socio-political critique of dominant
sexual mores. His other publications include The Body of This Life: Reading
William Bronk, and Bursts of Light: The Collected Later Poems of William
Bronk. His The Mind’s Landscape, on twentieth-century American poetry, as
well as Accumulating Position: The Selected Letters of William Bronk, are
forthcoming.

Laurie Edson is Professor of Comparative Literature and French and Adjunct

Professor in Women’s Studies at San Diego State University. She is the author
of Reading Relationally: Postmodern Perspectives on Literature and Visual Art
(2000) and Henri Michaux and the Poetics of Movement (1985). She edited
Conjunctions: Verbal-Visual Relations (1996), Contemporary Feminist Writing
in French: A Multicultural Perspective (1993), a special issue of Studies in
Twentieth Century Literature, and Henri Michaux (1986), a special issue of
L’Esprit Createur. She is also the translator (with critical afterword) of Jeanne
Hyvrard’s novel, Mother Death (1988).

Gene C. Fant, Jr. (Ph.D. University of Southern Mississippi) is associate pro-

fessor and chair of the English Department at Union University in Jackson,
TN. In addition to publishing articles in several journals, he received the Daub-
Maher Award for scholarship from the Conference on Christianity and
Literature in 1994. His essays have most recently appeared in Mississippi
Magazine and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Connie Griffin teaches twentieth century American multicultural literature

and cultural studies, as well as creative writing and literary journalism, at
Boston College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, and has published numerous essays, articles, and reviews, including
“Going Naked into the World: Recovery and Representation,” in Pedagogy and
Representations of Violence edited by Wendy S. Hesford and Judith Roof for
Concerns (1999) a publication of the Women’s Caucus for the MLA; “I Will
 About the Authors 245

Not Wear that Coat: Feminism and Postmodernism in Dialogue,” in He Said,

She Says: An RSVP to the Male Text, edited by Sarah Appleton Aguiar and
Mica K. Howe, 2001; and “Ex-Centricities: Multicultural Self-Representation
in Contemporary American Women’s Autobiography,” in Style, Summer 2001.
Her book reviews have included Apples and Oranges: My Journey through
Sexual Identity by Jan Clausen, (Winter 1999), and Lesbian Configurations by
Renee C. Hoogland (Fall 1997) for The Lesbian Review of Books.

Marketta Laurila received the Ph.D. degree from the University of

Wisconsin-Madison in Spanish with a minor in Comparative Literature. She is
an associate professor at the Tennessee Technological University, were she
teaches Spanish language and literature, Business Spanish and Latin American
culture. She has served as director of the minor program in Women and Gender
Studies and now is the Interim chair of the Department of Foreign Languages.
Her publications include “Utopia and Distopia in Elena Garro’s ‘Semana
de colores’ ” (JAISA 6, 1–3, 2001), “Isabel Allende and the Discourse of Exile”
(in Placing Identity in International Women’s Writing, Greenwood Press,
2003), “Elena Garro’s Reencuentro de personajes: The Female Writer and
Androcentric Texts” (Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 27, 1993) She has also
presented conference papers and published articles on Laura Esquivel and
Carlos Fuentes.

Magdalena Maczyńska is a Ph.D. student at the Catholic University

of America. She is currently working on her dissertation dealing with
representations of London in contemporary British fiction. Her publications
include essays on such twentieth century authors as Martin Amis, Philip
Kan Gotanda, David Lodge, Ian McEwan, Wisĺawa Szymborska, and Adam
Zagajewski.

Laura K. Reeck received her Ph.D. from New York University in 2002. She
currently teaches French and Francophone literature at Allegheny College. Her
area of research is post-colonial French literature, and in particular, Beur liter-
ature and film. Her most recent publication, “Self/Representation in Tahar Ben
Jelloun’s Les raisins de la galère,” appears in the CEELAN Review.

Lawrence K. Stanley, Director of Expository Writing, has been teaching at

Brown since 1993. Along with critical reading and writing courses, he teaches
travel writing and literature-oriented writing courses that concentrate on twentieth-
century American fiction and the English Romantics. His current research is
in rhetorical and narrative theory particularly in relation to reading and
writing creative nonfiction. His most recent publication is “Paranarrative and
the Performance of Creative Nonfiction” in Professing Rhetoric (Lawrence
246 About the Authors

Erlbaum, 2002). He holds a doctorate in English Language and Literature from

Oxford University.

Marjorie Worthington earned her doctorate in English from Indiana University

and is Assistant Professor of American Literature at Bradley University. Her
research focuses on meta-narrative, technology and authorship in Twentieth-
Century fiction. She has had articles published in journals such as Studies in
the Novel, Critique, and Twentieth-Century Literature.