Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant's Fiction 9780773568358

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
1 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective: The Early Years
2 Inside and Outside the Frame: Characters in Search of an Audience (1959–1964)
3 Tyranny of Form: Adjusting Proportions in the Stories of the Early 1960S
4 Portraiture and Landscapes of "Life at Point Zero": A Decade of Remembering and Exorcizing and Remembering (1963–1972)
5 Coloration of Monochromatic Moments (1968–1978)
6 Mapping Panoramic Landscapes: Idyll, Farce, Parody
7 Towards an Illumination of Gallant's Late Fiction
Notes
Works Cited
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
V

Citation preview

Learning to Look A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant's Fiction

In Learning to Look Lesley Clement traces the evolution of Mavis Gallant's visually evocative style through five decades of her short fictional works. From her earliest explorations of displacement and the disparity between perception and reality through her later explorations of memory and history to her more recent explorations of the role of culture in a contemporary world where commercialism and madness threaten to extinguish the potential for illumination and enlightenment, Gallant envisages and renders her fictional world with techniques analogous to those of visual artists. Clement shows us that Gallant's fiction of the 19405 and 19505 exhibits a keen interest in perspective and proportion achieved through concentration on line, her fiction of the 19605 and early 19705 reveals a heightened interest in composition achieved through a focus on framing, proportion, and form or shape, and her fiction after the mid 19705 demonstrates the full realization of her art through attention to colour and light. Gallant increasingly explores the boundaries between visible and invisible worlds as the lines, shapes, and colours suggested by her allusions, analogies, and structures give her fiction the perspective, proportion, density, and fluidity that illuminate the printed page and challenge us as readers. Alert to visual cues in Gallant's fiction we acquire a heightened perception of the manifold richness of worlds and lives that might otherwise have been relegated to the unseen and unsung. LESLEY D. CLEMENT is an instructor of English in the Division of Arts at Medicine Hat College, Alberta.

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Learning to Look A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant's Fiction LESLEY D. CLEMENT

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

McGill-Queen's University Press 2000 ISBN 0-7735-2041-4 (cloth) Legal deposit second quarter 2000 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Clement, Lesley D. (Lesley Diana), 1951Learning to look : a visual response to Mavis Gallant's fiction Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-2041-4 (bnd) i. Gallant, Mavis, 1922- - Criticism and interpretation. i. Title. Ps85i3.A593z62 2000 c8i3'.54 099-901356-4 PR9199.3.G26z62 2OOO

Typeset in Palatine 10/12 by Caractera inc., Quebec City Material included in chapters i and 2 was published previously in Canadian Literature 129 (Summer 1991), English Studies in Canada 18, no. 3 (September 1992), and American Review of Canadian Studies 24, no. i (Spring 1994). The author gratefully acknowledges the permission of the editors of these journals to publish this material in modified form. The author also thanks Mavis Gallant for permission to quote from her unpublished material housed in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii 1 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective: The Early Years 3 2 Inside and Outside the Frame: Characters in Search of an Audience (1959-1964) 34 3 Tyranny of Form: Adjusting Proportions in the Stories of the Early 1960S 73 4 Portraiture and Landscapes of "Life at Point Zero": A Decade of Remembering and Exorcizing and Remembering (1963-1972) 107 5 Coloration of Monochromatic Moments (1968-1978) 150 6 Mapping Panoramic Landscapes: Idyll, Farce, Parody 188 7 Towards an Illumination of Gallant's Late Fiction 230 Notes 249 Works Cited 281 Index 289

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Preface and Acknowledgments Nothing reveals the state of mind of a class and a society quite so much as what it chooses to hang on the wall. The Hebert Museum is interesting not so much for a way of art but for a way of looking at life.1

Mavis Gallant reveals her fascination with the visual arts throughout her fictional and non-fictional writings. Gallant's observation concerning the Hebert Museum could be revised and refocused: nothing reveals the state of Gallant's mind quite so much as the visual art to which she alludes. These allusions are interesting not so much for a way of art, not so much as ends in themselves, but for revealing Gallant's way of looking at life. As revealing as the allusions are the techniques through which Gallant engages the reader in her way of looking at life. To read her fiction responsively - that is, affectively and effectively, achieving the aesthetic response that Wolfgang Iser defines as "the fulfillment of that which has been prestructured by the language of the text"2 - we must be alert to visual cues. "All representation," E.H. Gombrich says of pictorial art, "relies to some extent on what we have called 'guided projection.'"3 As many of the characters in Gallant's stories are given opportunities for learning to look,4 so too readers of Gallant may respond to signals in her texts that guide us to develop a visualizing process as we read her fiction. In an interview with Gallant, Geoff Hancock, remarking on the visual quality of her stories, conjectured that she "might [have] liked to have been a painter at one time." Gallant replied that she often imagines how she would respond to a scene were she re-creating it on canvas.5 Her fiction usually springs from the "envisioned," from a glimpse that she catches, recalls, or imagines of a person or a small group of people. "It consists of a fixed image, like a slide or (closer

viii Preface and Acknowledgments

still) a freeze frame, showing characters in a simple situation/' Gallant writes. "The quick arrival and departure of the silent image can be likened to the first moments of a play, before anything is said. The difference is that the characters in the frame are not seen, but envisioned, and do not have to speak to be explained."6 Their behaviour, reactions, and interactions prompt her imagination to work on the arrested moment, the static tableau, which she captures and then frees through the simultaneously progressive and recursive nature of language: "Whole scenes then follow, complete in themselves but like disconnected parts of a film. I do not deliberately invent any of this: It occurs."7 On a number of occasions Gallant has confessed to interviewers that had her circumstances and talents been different, her inclination might have led her instead to capture these scenes on canvas. In a 1981 CBC Radio interview, for example, she spoke with Stuart McLean: "I don't think you can learn to become a writer ... You learn because there is a way of life involved, but a talent ... talent exists ... inclination for one thing rather than another exists. I would have loved to paint, but I have absolutely no talent for it at all. I love music, but I'm not musical." Like an artist approaching a canvas, but through words and narrative structures, Gallant begins with lines that take shape as perspective, proportion, framing, and foreground and background are adjusted; then pigments are mixed, colours applied, and the desired chromatic and light effects achieved. In this study I trace Gallant's development as a writer, a development marked by an increasingly complex and sophisticated use of techniques analogous to those of visual artists. Like any student of art, she was not content just to practise line drawings to acquire perspective and proportion, then later to master shape and composition, and finally to perfect colouring and lighting effects. Examples from Gallant's earliest fiction demonstrate her simultaneous interest in all these elements, yet there is an observable chronology in her writing career. Her fiction exhibits a keen interest in perspective and proportion achieved through concentration on line in the apprenticeship years of the 19405 and 19505; a heightened interest in composition achieved through a focus on framing, proportion, and form or shape follows in the 19605 and early 19705; and finally, she fully realizes her art through attention to colour and light in the stories from the mid-1970s onwards. These formal concerns neither dictated nor fashioned Gallant's evolution as a writer. On the contrary, her canon is distinguished by variations on several themes: displacement, perception and conception, fixation on form, the role of the past, memory and history, life at point zero, the transformative effect

ix Preface and Acknowledgments

of imagination, the place of culture in contemporary society. Because unique formal concerns arise with each new challenge that her "way of looking at life" presents, Gallant comes to each story with fresh eyes, sharpened drawing pencil, and reconfigured palette. After a brief examination of the articles that Gallant wrote describing the changes that the Quebec art scene was undergoing in the 19405, chapter i of this study discusses the development of Gallant's style and themes in the 19405 and 19505, concentrating on her experimentation with cubist and surrealist techniques that through structure, perspective, and metaphor create an increasingly kinetic medium for characters and readers alike. One of the distinctions traditionally made between literary and visual arts, a distinction most notably articulated in Lessing's Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), is that the literary arts represent "a visible progressive action, the various parts of which follow one another in time," and that the visual arts represent "a visible stationary action, the development of whose various parts takes place in space."8 Kernel to this distinction, Lessing contended, are the tools that each art form employs: "If it be true that painting employs wholly different signs or means of imitation from poetry, - the one using forms and colors in space, the other articulate sounds in time, - and if signs must unquestionably stand in convenient relation with the thing signified, then signs arranged side by side can represent only objects existing side by side ... while consecutive signs can express only objects which succeed each other ... in time."9 Through this century, however, writers and critics both have increasingly strained against the static boundaries prescribed by this distinction between the arts. James Heffernan notes that "the point first systematically developed by Lessing - that painting is fundamentally spatial and literature fundamentally temporal ... has come under recent attack in ways that have provoked significant debate."10 A pioneer voice in this "significant debate" is that of Joseph Frank, who, in "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," demonstrated that "the evolution of form in modern poetry and, more particularly, in the novel ... as exemplified by such writers as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, is moving in the direction of spatial form ... All these writers ideally intend the reader to apprehend their work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence."11 More recently, Wendy Steiner, a leading theorist on the relationship between literature and painting, has appealed to modern narratology and linguistics: "The view of narrative (and language) as a mere sequence is not tenable in light of recent theory. It is the mistake of

x Preface and Acknowledgments

the proponents of 'spatial form/ who identify the novel and narrativity with pure temporal sequence and then are surprised to find other forms of cohesion in the twentieth-century novel (and elsewhere). Virtually every narratologist finds narrative dependent on both its sequential and its configurational qualities."12 In chapter i of this study I propose to demonstrate that Gallant was, at the earliest stages of her writing career, mounting just such a challenge to the boundaries erected between the sister arts by embracing both spatial and temporal elements in her fiction. Chapter 2 focuses on Gallant's fiction at the end of the 19505 and beginning of the 19605 as characters break out of their frames of subjectivity and are forced to confront and test perceived images of self and others against received images. As personal dramas, particularly those told in first person/ are forced into the public domain, characters become more aware of the existence of a receptive audience both inside and outside the text and the concomitant scrutiny against which they must immure themselves. Chapter 3 explores the elements of proportion and form and the ways in which Gallant prevents flatness in her fiction of the early 19603, as background and the past threaten to absorb the personal and present. These two chapters discuss further challenges that Gallant issues to traditional distinctions made between the visual and literary arts: that the former depend on "natural" (that is, representational) signs to convey content, the latter upon "arbitrary" or "conventional" (that is, linguistic) signs.13 This distinction has meant that until recently the visual arts were deemed essentially perceptual, the literary arts essentially conceptual. David Summers explains: Conceptual art is the opposite of perceptual art, and thus is a psychological way of distinguishing art that is not imitative from art that is. Conceptual images are made, so the argument goes, not by looking to things perceived but by looking to some inner image, a memory image, or an image formed by the mind itself from many experiences ... perception is the means by which the outside world is taken in, and conception is the means by which it is taken to be the mind's own. Perceiving makes possible the mind's conceiving. On such a view, concepts are closer to words, and if they are images they are images "before the mind's eye" rather than before our physical eyes in space and time ... The distinction between perceptual and conceptual also harbors something like the difference between natural and conventional signs.14

Gallant's fiction bridges the sister arts by conjecturing not only that "perceiving makes possible the mind's conceiving" but also that conceiving regulates and shapes the eye's perceiving. "Painting is an

xi Preface and Acknowledgments

activity," Gombrich writes, "and the artist will therefore tend to see what he paints rather than to paint what he sees."15 Gallant's fiction increasingly explores the boundaries between visible and invisible worlds. "Fiction, like painting," says Gallant in her introduction to Home Truths, "consists entirely of more than meets the eye; otherwise it is not worth a second's consideration."16 Chapter 4 of this study examines a group of stories leading up to the publication of The Pegnitz Junction in 1973 that mark the culmination of Gallant's thematic interest in alienation and the consequent formal representations of disfigurement: those spectral human forms and landscapes that develop when survivors, often without a remembered context and often threatened by visibility and exposure, exist at point zero, haunted by memories that they have suppressed or a past that has been suppressed for them. In chapter 5 I have selected for analysis stories published between 1968 and 1978, including the Linnet Muir series, that illustrate the transformative agency of imagination and invention on lives haunted, quite literally, by monochromatic memories and dreams of the past. Within this group of stories is to be observed Gallant's enhanced yet subdued metaphorical colouring of lives informed but not controlled by the black and white and sepia tints of memory and dreams. Chapter 6 focuses on several panoramic canvases - including "The Moslem Wife," "Baum, Gabriel, 1935~( )," "Speck's Idea," and the Magdalena quartet - that are shot through with the colours that Gallant's idyllic, humorous, and parodic treatment brings to them. Adhering closely to contemporary scenes and themes, many of the stories in Overhead in a Balloon do not hold out much promise for the visionary potential of art, and consequently parody this metaphoric conception of the illuminative function and significance of art. Chapter 7 examines stories in Overhead in a Balloon, Across the Bridge, and several other recent stories that alter this perception by capturing the plurality of life in all its configurations of lines, shades of colour, and nuances of light - even when these lights have been virtually extinguished in the world around. Thus Gallant simultaneously re-creates and parodies and celebrates her world, rendering it visible, with the perspective, density, shading, coloration, and occasionally the illumination that do not simply reflect and double but rather refract and multiply the original. Tribute must be paid to those who have tilled the ground before me. Many insightful articles are cited in the text. The work of Janice Kulyk Keefer in Reading Mavis Gallant (1989), who through her series of essays explores the themes of womanhood, childhood, and history while addressing the challenges with which Gallant's readers are constantly confronted, and of Neil Besner in The Light of Imagination:

xii Preface and Acknowledgments

Mavis Gallant's Fiction (1988), who examines the evolution of Gallant's fiction with reference to the themes of history, memory, and imagination and the growing reflexiveness of Gallant's narrators, inspired me to pursue this study of the remarkable visual quality of Gallant's style. Thanks to Joan Chard for providing me with the solitude of her University of Alberta office one spring and summer, where the seeds for this project were sown. Thanks to Neil Besner and the Ottawa Clements, whose continued interest in this project helped warm the seeds to life. Thanks to Medicine Hat College, which generously provided me with research funds and a sabbatical leave to nurture these plants to fruition. And from beginning to end there has been the support of friends and family too numerous to list: Jack, Julian, Alexandra, and all those who must remain unmentioned, without your confidence and love, this book would be nothing but dormant seeds.

Learning to Look

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i Acquiring a Sense of Perspective: The Early Years

Linnet Muir perhaps speaks for Mavis Gallant when, in "In Youth Is Pleasure/' she visits her "father's painter chum" and, detecting "the smell of a personal myth," admits, "I was humble because I was on a private, personal terrain of vocation that made me shy even of the dead."1 Gallant's earliest exposure to the visual arts can be traced to experiences during her formative years in the 19205. Born Mavis Young in 1922, Gallant spent her first eight years on Montreal's Sherbrooke Street across from McGill University and only several blocks from Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts, then called the Art Association of Montreal, which had moved to its present site in 1912. L'Ecole des Beaux Arts, founded as a free-tuition art college several months before Gallant was born, was further east on Sherbrooke, a street that became a favourite subject for artists to paint. Young Mavis was placed at age four in a strict French convent school on Sherbrooke Street East, a somewhat unusual situation given her extreme youth and her English Protestant parentage. Because this and other schools she later attended were boarding-schools, Gallant may actually have spent very little time in her parents' home; nevertheless, her frequent references, in interviews and in many stories focusing on children, to parties and gatherings of young adults suggest that some of the contacts she had with artists during the 19405 originated with her parents' circle of friends in the 19205, and that she was thus initiated into the art scene of Montreal at a very early age. Probably the greatest influence on Gallant during her youth was her father. Gallant often mentions her father in interviews, but her

4 Learning to Look

most revealing statement came in a 1981 interview with Carole Corbeil when, discussing the journals she kept as a young woman, she remarked that the "main fear, the terrible fear that haunts the journals is that perhaps I don't have talent. I had the vocation, I knew that, but I was afraid that I didn't have the talent to back it up. My father, you see, painted, and, well, I say this with affection, he had no talent - he painted like a provincial, minor late-impressionist. He did however have an incredible sense of vocation. I was afraid that I'd inherited this sense of vocation without the gift."2 In "Between Zero and One," Linnet voices similar misgivings: "I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift. He had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy. I had no assurance I was not the same."3 From 1929 to 1932 the Young family lived outside Montreal in Chateauguay, an "intense period" of her life, Gallant told Helen Hutchinson in a 1984 W5 program that took Gallant back to the places of her youth. Her childhood ended abruptly when she was ten, Gallant revealed to Hutchinson, when she "had to be an adult very much on [her] own": in 1932 her father died, and her mother later remarried. Gallant continued her sporadic education through a number of schools, apparently seventeen in all, first that convent school in Montreal and then boarding-schools in Ontario and high school in New York, from which she graduated in 1940. Gallant, now eighteen, returned to Montreal, approaching for a job the art editor of the Montreal Standard, Philip Surrey. She did not immediately receive a job but instead took Surrey at his word that she should come back when she was twenty-one. After a number of clerical jobs and work in Ottawa for the National Film Board cutting negatives, Gallant began writing for the Standard and settled in Montreal, outfitting her "first independent apartment" and hanging "pictures, bought inch by inch from Montreal painters."4 The years from 1944 to 1950, when Gallant began to write and publish fiction while working as a journalist, were also a period when Quebec artists, breaking the stranglehold that Paris's academies and Ontario's Group of Seven had exercised over Canada's art scene, were discovering the force of art as an essential medium for a unique culture. Gallant began to produce articles for Harper's Bazaar and the Montreal Standard describing the cultural milieu of Montreal during the 19405 and revealing her fascination with the local art scene, particularly with the changes that Quebec art was undergoing.

5 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

Gallant never embraced the aesthetic principles espoused and practised by the various factions that became prominent during this period; however, even in the short stories she wrote during her apprenticeship years, her exposure to painterly forms and techniques is evident in the evolution of a visually powerful and evocative style. In the stories written or drafted during the 19405 Gallant was already nurturing her readers' responsiveness by occasionally opening up, but leaving unexplored, angles of perception - what Wolfgang Iser refers to as "gaps of indeterminacy" or "structured blanks" that "stimulate the process of ideation to be performed by the reader on terms set by the text."5 Gallant's early fiction reveals her experimentation with techniques borrowed from cubist, surrealist, and kinetic art, and a consequent fragmentation, distortion, and mobility as her stories break from the frames in which she was inclined to place her characters and to enclose her readers' perspectives. By the time she published her first novel, Green Water, Green Sky, in 1959, Gallant had successfully broken the frame in her continued use of techniques from the visual arts that, through structure, perspective, and metaphor, create a kinetic medium for characters and readers. The stories that Gallant wrote and published in the intervening years, during the 19505, are particularly good guides for readers learning to "see" and so read her fiction responsively. M O N T R E A L O F T H E 19408

In a 1988 interview with Linda Leith, Gallant conveys the vibrancy of the Montreal life she knew during the 19405 when she was establishing herself, first as a journalist and then as a writer of fiction: "Montreal was a city in transition. All the old conservative dead weight was still there, and of course French Canada was still locked, but there were elements breaking out, and that was what was so exciting. I'm thinking of the painters particularly, and in a city that size you tend to all know one another, the bohemia."6 As a journalist Gallant usually chose subjects on which to report, rather than having them assigned to her.7 Although she covered diverse subjects for her Montreal Standard articles, Gallant gravitated towards those cultural stories involving current topics and issues from the visual arts. Short pieces include sketches of local personalities such as Eldon Grier, who held fresco painting classes at the Art Association; Mary Filer, a nurse who gained celebrity in the city with her annual painting of Nativity scenes on the windows of the Neurological Institute; and Dr George Hall, a collector of early Canadian art.8 Some of Gallant's

6 Learning to Look

feature stories for the Standard Magazine are of broader interest: for example, "Art Hoaxes that Baffle the Highbrow Critics" (23 July 1949) and "Art for the Family Pocketbook" (6 Nov. 1948). The articles that best reveal Gallant's insight into the changes that Quebec art of the 19405 was undergoing are a Harper's Bazaar article, "Above the Crowd in French Canada" (July 1946), and two Standard Magazine articles, "An Art Curator and His Critics" (12 June 1948) and "Success Story of a Canadian Artist" (29 Apr. 1950). In the first of these three articles Gallant demonstrates a close acquaintance with the local aft scene in her selection of the new painters Robert La Palme, Jacques de Tonnancour, and Paul-Emile Borduas, and the lately discovered "primitive" Marie Bouchard, as worthy of note. Moreover, her description of Alfred Pellan's influence in freeing "his pupils of their inhibitions about color, form and subject matter" (128) anticipates the recognition art historians now give to Pellan as an important catalyst for the radical transformations that Quebec and Canadian art underwent. Pellan returned to Montreal in 1940 from fourteen years in Paris, where he had been exposed to the cubism of Leger, Picasso, and Miro and the surrealism of Ernst and the later Picasso and Miro. With his appointment, in June 1943, to a position at Montreal's Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Quebec artists experienced a wider exposure to the techniques and forms of earlier European movements than they had yet received. The invigorating controversies that ensued from the formation of two Montreal groups - the Prisme d'Yeux that emerged around Pellan and the more stridently radical Automatistes around Borduas - and the publication of their manifestos in February and August of 1948 provided a fertile environment for the young Mavis Gallant. These controversies were also the background for the problems that Robert Tyler Davis, director of the Art Association, had with the annual spring show, problems that Gallant describes in "An Art Curator and His Critics." In terms of her own art, however, Gallant never committed herself to the aspects of surrealism and abstract expressionism that Borduas's Automatistes introduced into Canadian art; Pellan's Prisme d'Yeux group is much closer in spirit to the direction Gallant's art would take. This is particularly evident in her adherence to representationalism, even when she incorporates surrealistic elements, and in her insistence that, as an artist, she should not be expected to establish any theoretical or ideological alliances.9 The third article mentioned above, a feature story on Goodridge Roberts, indicates that while Gallant probably knew members of the Automatistes only by reputation, she knew some of the Prisme d'Yeux group and its allies through friendship. She was acquainted

7 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

with Philip Surrey, art editor of the Montreal Standard, from whom she originally obtained her job; as well, an editorial note entitled "Between Ourselves," which precedes this article, states that Gallant had known Roberts since she was nineteen years old (2) - for eight or nine years, therefore. Gallant's two-page article on Roberts is an intimate portrait of his childhood, early training and career as an artist, and present lifestyle. That she knew well not only Roberts but also his paintings is further demonstrated when, in her introduction to The War Brides (1978), Gallant tells an anecdote of travelling, as a reporter, on a train in New Brunswick, interviewing war brides on their reaction to the new land.10 Gallant confesses: "Nearly every aspect of the Canadian landscape struck me as moving and poetic then, for reasons that were historical or literary or had something to do with Canadian painting and which were at a remove from the land itself: a field was not a field - it was a Goodridge Roberts. I foolishly expected a reaction tuned to mine."11 APPRENTICESHIP STORIES OF THE 19408: B R E A K I N G THE FRAME

During the years that Gallant was reporting for the Standard, and by the time she left for Europe in the fall of 1950, she had four stories published in Montreal magazines: "Good Morning and Goodbye" and "Three Brick Walls" in Patrick Anderson's Preview (Dec. 1944); "A Wonderful Country" in the Standard Magazine (14 Dec. 1946); and "The Flowers of Spring" in Northern Review (June-July 1950). Gallant also drafted several other stories during this apprenticeship stage of her writing career, one even earlier, that would later be published in the New Yorker. In her introduction to Home Truths Gallant indicates that "Thank You for the Lovely Tea" (9 June 1956) was originally written when she was eighteen, and "Jorinda and Jorindel" (19 Sept. 1959) and "Up North" (21 Nov. 1959) during the 19405 (xix). The greater sophistication of structure, perspective, and metaphor of these latter stories suggests that the revisions for the New Yorker must have been extensive.12 Gallant's framing of the stories written or first drafted during this period resembles the early modernist tendency to enclose characters in a suspended or caught moment. Wendy Steiner comments on the pervasive influence of trends in the visual arts on literature at the beginning of the twentieth century: "Modernism introduced profound changes into the visual arts ... Writers confronted with the breathtaking iconoclasm of cubism and abstractionism learned a corresponding disrespect for the givens of their art - the temporality of

8 Learning to Look

its subject and medium, the conventional unity of its point of view, and its battery of realist norms."13 Gallant too experimented with techniques borrowed from cubist, surrealist, and kinetic art to attain fragmentation, distortion, and mobility, qualities more characteristic of Joyce in Dubliners and Eliot in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" than of Chekhov and Mansfield, two writers Gallant has acknowledged reading "enormously" when she was young.14 Gallant's early stories already provide evidence of other elements borrowed from the visual arts - colour, light and dark, line, composition, and, ultimately, fluidity - elements that, through structure, perspective, and metaphor, would find full expression in Green Water, Green Sky and eventually become a trademark of Gallant's style. Her two Preview stories, the first she published, form a diptych. "Good Morning and Goodbye" narrates the final hours of a young Jewish German refugee, Paul, with his adoptive Canadian family, the Trennans. "Three Brick Walls" focuses on Paul's first hours in the city as he undergoes a new experience: freedom. These stories anticipate a predominant theme in Gallant's canon, the displaced person, Paul being displaced in terms of language, nationality, culture, and stage of life, as he is poised on the brink of adulthood. Most pertinently, this diptych also illustrates that, although fragmenting her stories as modernist writers before her had done, Gallant already possessed those pictorial and concrete qualities of style that would eventually enable her to escape the frames and two-dimensional planes of the early modernist mode. That the first story is very much a story locked in a temporal frame is immediately suggested by the title, these two greetings - "good morning" and "goodbye" - marking the beginning and the end of Paul's contact with the Trennans on this final day with them. But the pattern of Paul's life extends beyond the Trennan's, theirs having grown around him after he "fumblingly" fit into their life. Because Paul is about to leave, his life stands in what Gallant refers to as "the vacuum that lies between the patterns in a life."15 The first two sentences of the story, describing a scene as perceived by Paul, convey a sense of his displacement. Paul opens his eyes, remembers that the day is the occasion of an end and a beginning, and turns his head to view a scene outside of himself: "the sun and the green leaves at the window, and the transparent shadow of one leaf above another." This static picture, given depth because of the shadows, reinforces the sense developed later that Paul's life with the Trennans is but a pattern superimposed on the pattern his life took before he arrived in Canada. The next sentence briefly shatters the static image as it becomes kinetic: "The trees moved in the wind and the shadow

9 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

moved to the edge of the leaf and back again." Paul's life, about to change, is a broken pattern awaiting the formation of a new one. The second paragraph continues to focus on "the leaves and the crooked pieces of blue between them" (i) outside the window, and so to reflect the situation in which Paul currently finds himself. By fitting into a pattern of life in this new country, he has suffered a fragmentation of his sense of self. Colours as well as shapes and framing devices compose this picture: green has blue in it but is a distinct colour, just as the new Paul in a new land has emerged from this shadowy blue past. Paul relies on images because the language that the Trennans speak is foreign to him. Unable to communicate his ideas, moods, and desires through words and phrases, he attempts on one occasion "to share and explain a great burden which was so overwhelmingly his own" by showing them the image of the large red "J" stamped on each page of his passport. Paul strives to communicate this burden, groping but not finding the English words to do so. While the Trennan family articulates "every headache, each anger, every reaction," analysing them by breaking them down "into words and phrases and exclamations" (i), Paul has no way to break down his feelings and moods and thus to control them. So the large red "J" dominates Paul's life despite his assumption of a new name in a new land. The Trennan family thinks that what Paul is feeling is shame (2), but he actually wishes to convey how this red "J" circumscribes and controls his life. The Trennans are able to interlock the various patterns in their life into a continuous pattern, but for Paul the pattern of life with the Trennans is sliced from the new, unknown pattern, quite literally, by the train that runs "in front of them, loudly and dustily" (3). The first part of Paul's story leaves this young man in a vacuum, the space between the patterns, as he experiences a sensation of freedom on the journey to the city. In "Three Brick Walls" Paul's story resumes on his first evening in the city. That Paul will not find freedom but simply replace one imprisoning pattern for another is immediately established by the parallelism between the opening scenes of the two stories. The sunlight and transparent shadows of the leaves have been replaced by more concrete, hard-edged images: "his room faced a brick wall. There was a narrow street between the window and the wall, and a lamp post, and a small twisted tree." Paul has not yet fit into the pattern of this cramped brown and green room. Against the rectangular and rectilinear shapes of the furniture and striped seersucker bedspread, the key lies "slantwise" on the bureau: he is still unaware that it belongs to him and might be used to fit into the pattern.16

io Learning to Look

Feeling "absolutely completely unrestrained and free," Paul takes the key from the bureau and leaves the greens and browns of his room to enter "a grey evening in a grey city." His room is on a street "no longer than one block, and bounded on three sides by brick/' where there are no children, Paul himself having been propelled into adulthood. He has become one of the Prufrockian citizens of the modern world, one of those "people who poked repetitive keys into the doorways and climbed the stairs inside ... those who have nothing of themselves outside lying around loose." Paul has already begun to sink into the street's pattern, gaining a sense of security from "the anonymity of the street" and discovering that "the three brick walls stood for shelter" (4). But because he is still in that vacuum, that point of freedom between two patterns, Paul ventures out of the imprisoning walls through the block's one open side. On the street beyond there is no pattern but rather a chaos of sounds and lights. Pyramids of apples and oranges, coloured signs and posters, bombard him in their unpatterned and unstructured randomness. Entering a lunch-room, Paul walks down a long tunnellike stretch where he orders an unwanted sandwich and cup of tea from a grotesque figure behind the counter. This surrealistic, nightmarish scene continues after Paul leaves the lunch-room, when he ponders the vulnerability of a brightly lit ticket office that is open to converging crowds from all sides. Paul, growing alarmed, even fearful, as he realizes his own vulnerability to the contact he so wants to avoid, escapes to his room, where he bends his arms, leans on the shutters, and trembles "with a sweet loneliness which required no people." From the safety of the frame - the walls protect him from the city, the ledge of his window from the street itself - he can become part of, but not be forced to make contact with, the "mass of people, a safe mass, without form" (6). This is the freedom he has sought. Believing himself to be free, he has learned to use one of those "repetitive keys" for immuring himself in a dull but safe cell. He has aligned himself with Eliot's "lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows,"17 these windows framing their languid subjects and thus enclosing them in both space and time. These traces of fragmentation, distortion, and mobility, observed in the two early Preview stories, increasingly resemble techniques used in cubist paintings that stretch the two-dimensional spatial frame, creating a greater sense of the third dimension, depth, and even of the fourth, time. It is particularly with regard to perspective and the effects of perspective on structure that "Thank You for the Lovely Tea" and Gallant's first New Yorker story, "Madeline's Birthday" (i Sept. 1951), seem the creation of a more seasoned writer, one

ii Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

who has gained a more confident sense of her own unique style, than do the Preview stories and the Northern Review story, "The Flowers of Spring." In the latter three Gallant adheres so steadily and consistently to the modernist ideal of a self-effacing narrative perspective that, despite the attempt to achieve an illusion of third and fourth dimensions through painterly metaphors and the diptych structure of the Preview stories, the overall effect is flat. One of the qualities of Gallant's style, however, that will become a trademark and that can be noted as early as "Thank You for the Lovely Tea" and "Madeline's Birthday" is the sense of plurality she achieves by exposing her characters in their given situations from a number of different angles. As Gallant remarked to Michel Fabre, "The events and characters in fiction are like works of art in a museum. You see them from different angles, you move round and around. You don't stand at the same place."18 Gallant is specifically referring to the narrator, the transmitter, in this passage, but the "you" could as aptly refer to the audience, the receiver. Gallant retains such a tenacious grip on perspective that the narrative voice unobtrusively but unwaveringly guides the reader in and around and through these events and characters as they are perceived from different angles; nevertheless, in her most satisfying because most challenging stories, a few angles - a few gaps of indeterminacy always remain, revealed but unexplored, for the curious reader to view alone after the tour has drawn to a close. Thus, although she later experimented with alternative voices, Gallant arrived at a characteristic element of her style early in her writing career. Her rare use of first-person perspective sometimes results in what Janice Keefer calls "a curious awkwardness," not in the writer's transmitting but in the reader's receiving of a story: "One's reading of these texts is vexed by a question that points to the unpersuasiveness of Gallant's choice of narrative mode: why is this person telling us his or her story in the first place?"19 Shifting firstperson perspective seems appropriate in Gallant's Standard Magazine story "A Wonderful Country" largely because, as with the more mature Linnet Muir stories, we see the incipient writer of fiction beginning to emerge.20 The narrator, a junior assistant in a real estate office whose responsibility it is to find accommodation for refugees, is acquiring one of the qualities that, according to Gallant, is necessary to the development of a writer: the ability to empathize, and thus to achieve an authorial perspective that is one neither of distance nor of complete identification.21 The arid, flat scene of "A Wonderful Country" - a brick duplex fronted by a yellow lawn on a street "still and flat, edged with telephone poles"22 - would seem suitable for

12 Learning to Look

Gallant's characteristic third-person detachment. Gallant instead filters the story through a narrator who finds herself unable to maintain the professional distance she desires. She reluctantly draws closer to the couple whose home she is in charge of renting, and her attitude towards the couple's suburban lifestyle becomes less patronizing than it was at first. The narrator's professional distance also breaks down as she views the Hungarian refugee from a variety of vantage-points, including that of the suburban couple, who see him as "foreign and ridiculous," an attitude that counters, without negating, her earlier wish that she had made a greater effort to know him and so attained a harmony of scene that was lacking (8). With the merging of detached third-person narration and shifting perspectives in "Thank You for the Lovely Tea," a characteristic element of Gallant's style is first achieved: a controlling voice that rarely comments but simply records the fragmented perspectives, in this case five, that her voice comprises. Of least importance to this story is the perspective of the new headmistress, who knows little more of her school's pupils than what the files tell her. While ostensibly broad-minded and open to change, she maintains professional distance by adhering to protocol when dealing with the pupils and receiving guests connected with the girls' lives outside the school's structure;23 thus, the headmistress never becomes more involved than a detached, even voyeuristic, observer. The story itself is composed of the perspectives of and on four figures: the three pupils - Ruth Cook, May Watson, and Helen McDonnell - and the mistress of Ruth's divorced father, Mrs Holland, who takes the girls to tea. Mrs Holland has not had the discipline of a school such as theirs, so knows little of perspective and proportion, two lessons the girls have been practising earlier this day. Consequently, Mrs Holland can never appear more than "smart but smudged, as if paint had spilled over the outline of a drawing" (3). Helen, like Mrs Holland by nature a victim (15), has found a place in the school's structure very different from her "rowdy, halfliterate family" (11), but any threat of change shifts the perspective, making her nebulous position in the composition vulnerable. Her successful withstanding of May's goads at tea, however, signals that she has learned and now subscribes to those lessons on perspective and proportion. Like Paul of the Preview stories, who finds his freedom in the prison of his room, Helen's "dearest wish was to wear this uniform as long as she could, to stay on at the school forever, to melt, with no intervening gap, from the students' dining hall to the staff sitting room" (12).

13 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

May, Mrs Holland observes, appears "quite strung up about something, but held in by training, by discipline" (14). This outing to the tearoom has brought back the image of her twin sister, from whom she has been parted so that they may develop separate identities. The image is resurrected first by May's own reflection in the car's window (9) and then by memories at the tearoom, where she and her sister have come on special occasions (11). When this undisciplined image from the past superimposes itself on her own emerging self image, May loses her disciplined sense of perspective and proportion and attempts to make Helen lose hers. She still remains slightly vertiginous after returning to the school at the end of the day's outing. In contrast, Ruth is simply left wondering "if she would ever care enough about anyone to make all the mistakes those around her had made during the rainy-day tea with Mrs Holland" (16). Throughout the day Ruth demonstrates the composure needed to maintain a sense of structure: when the art teacher points out that the horizon line is too low in her picture, Ruth adjusts the size and position of the flowerpots to attain perspective and proportion (3-4), just as later she keeps herself and the situation in check so as not to become a victim of the "mental and emotional spirals" that Mrs Holland intuits just before May baits Helen (15). As Mrs Holland recedes from the picture at the story's end, Ruth, like Paul, is framed by an upstairs window, shut off from any contacts that would disrupt the perspective and proportion of the structured composition. "Thank You for the Lovely Tea," itself a well-composed picture harmonizing the different perspectives of the five characters on one another and the day's events, contains slight chinks permitting another perspective - that of the reader - which the steady uniplanar perspective of "Good Morning and Goodbye," "Three Brick Walls," and "The Flowers of Spring," and the reflexive readjustments of perspective in "A Wonderful Country," discourage. In "Thank You for the Lovely Tea" and many stories to follow, Gallant provides the reader with the kind of vantage points that Iser, speaking generally, describes as "a bundle of multiple viewpoints, the center of which is continuously shifted," permitting "new gaps to arise in the text," and also as "a cutting - montage - or segmenting technique," permitting "relatively great freedom with respect to the concatenation of their [the stories'] textual patterns with one another in the reading process."24 The narrative voice of "Thank You for the Lovely Tea" embraces the various perspectives of the characters' interactions as the scene shifts from the enclosed structures of the well-regulated school, Mrs Holland's car, and the "oval tearoom newly done up

14 Learning to Look

with chrome and onyx" (13) back to the school, and thus guides the reader through space and time and keeps tight control over any interstices or diversions from the main route. Meanwhile, however, the reader is developing a certain agility in comprehending the "mental and emotional spirals" of all the characters. This agility becomes essential to the reading process when the seemingly neat pairing of the characters as vulnerable or strong, victim or victor, begins to break down, and when seemingly distinct outlines begin to blur, particularly when the characters take on identities outside the context of the depicted structures: the girls' home environments, Mrs Holland's relations with Ruth's father and with Ruth herself. Ruth and Helen remain enclosed within the tightly structured composition, which the rules of perspective and proportion govern, and so outside the chaotic emotional experiences they spurn; May and Mrs Holland, because they attempt to be both inside and outside the composition, find themselves in a shifting, uncertain terrain; but the reader, guided by the story's controlling voice in and around and out of the composition, moves freely within the recesses exposed but unexplored. Several parallels can be drawn here. The first is between Gallant's narrators and Brechtian observers. Ronald Hatch notes the comparison: "Gallant never intrudes as narrator to break the illusion that the story is an objective record. Her notion of demystification has more in common with the style of Continental writers, and in particular Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdung devices ... Brecht did not want his audience either to lose themselves in the reality behind the proscenium arch, or to remain completely detached, alienated. His audiences were meant to enjoy the alternative reality, but also to find it unfamiliar - unsettling - so that they might return, changed, to their daily lives."25 This "alienation" becomes even more marked - and even more necessary - in later Gallant stories when memory and history emerge as dominant themes and create a distancing similar to that Martin Esslin describes in Brecht: "the spectator in Brecht's theatre must be made to rise to thoughtful contemplation, must be led to detached critical reflection on the play and its meaning. For only a detached spectator could appreciate the distance between the historical characters, determined by the social relations of their time on the one hand and contemporary man on the other. Even the familiar, argued Brecht, would yield its message only when seen with new eyes, as though it were something never noticed before."26 A parallel can also be drawn between Gallant's experimentation with fragmented perspective and the cubist experimentation earlier in the century that so influenced Quebec painters of the 19405. Cubists

15 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

rejected perspective in its traditional sense of attempting to attain realism through three-dimensional optical effects. Their enclosing (although not always harmonizing) of fragmented forms within the whole composition, and the potential for viewers to bring their own perspectives, particularly when familiar objects are the source of fragmentation (although again this does not necessarily result in harmony or completion), indicate that the cubists exploited perspective to achieve new effects.27 Wendy Steiner argues that cubism is similar to other modernist developments in that "there are few 'pictures of the perceiver' inside the work to model a proper emotional or moral response. In fact, emotional, historical, and dramatic content was largely eliminated, so that the perceiver ... is limited to a formal response. But this response was the product of the work's educating the viewer in the arbitrariness of the laws of perspective, chiaroscuro, and the rest of the Renaissance norms. A rather intense technical communication was the aim of these thematic restrictions."28 Like Alfred Pellan and the Prisme d'Yeux group,29 and unlike Paul-Emile Borduas and the Automatistes, Gallant never committed herself to the surrealistic elements that transformed the cubism of the Automatistes from a figurative to an abstract form of art. Gallant's own writing process, which she has on several occasions described as involving many stages of revision,30 contrasts with the automatic spontaneity attempted by many surrealists, including Borduas's aptly named followers. Moreover, Gallant's suspicion of dreams and dream analysis and her ultimate rejection of them as a worthwhile subject of art31 again disassociate her from the surrealists. "Jorinda and Jorindel" goes beyond the distortions of "Three Brick Walls" in incorporating surrealistic elements into the text. But, as in the more complex "Thank You for the Lovely Tea," Gallant requires a perspective from the reader, in this case one that entails the reader's recognition of her rejection of purportedly archetypal symbols from dream, fairy-tale, Jungian psychology, and fantasy literature, symbols that promise escape but bring only entrapment. The linked elements of dream and fairy-tale form a frame for "Jorinda and Jorindel," which begins with the drunken exclamation of a house guest, "I've got it!" (that is, she has learned a Charleston dance step), merging with Irmgard's dream of the witch who has captured Jorinda and is attempting to capture Jorindel and change him into a bird. The dishevelled hair of Irmgard and Mrs Bloodworth, the guest,32 associates both of them with the witch from the Brothers Grimm's "Jorinde and Joringel," who first paralyses anyone coming near her castle and then, if the visitor is a fair maiden, changes her into a bird, puts her into a basket, and adds the victim

16 Learning to Look

to her collection.33 The reader immediately questions whether the young Irmgard is an archetypal naif with the imaginative capacity to break the frame of confining reality. Is Irmgard perhaps both jailer witch and jailed Jorinda? Because two images frequently deemed archetypal symbols of potential spiritual awareness and rebirth - water and mirror - are integrated into the text, this irony is reinforced. To make room for the more worldly Bradley, Irmgard has thrice denied the "innocent" Freddy a place in her life, the second denial eliciting the vertiginous sensation of coasting downhill on her bicycle and losing control (23). She now attempts to recall Freddy, but he insists that if their friendship is to be renewed, it must be on his terms, and so he invites Irmgard to swim at a public beach, forbidden to Irmgard because reputedly polluted. While this may allude to Jung's water, "the commonest symbol for the unconscious," "spirit that has become unconscious," particularly that water reached through descent - "earthy and tangible ... the fluid of the instinct-driven body, blood and the flowing of blood" - Irmgard's "descent into the depths" is not followed by the expected ascent.34 Just as the witch paralyses Jorindel and prevents the transformed Jorinda from flying away by putting her in a basket, so the water in which Irmgard swims is not a Jungian "mirror of the water" into which she descends and "risks a confrontation" by exposing her real self.35 Instead, witnessing Freddy's nakedness, Irmgard escapes by claiming miserably that her mother wants her home (26). The mirror is not provided by the water but rather by her "stockbroker" cousin Bradley (21, 24) and, after he leaves, by her mother (25, 27). Even with the reintroduction of the dream at the end of the story and the allusion to Lewis Carroll's fantasy Alice in Wonderland, the irony continues. Irmgard may dream that Freddy - or is it Bradley or herself? she is not sure - has been snatched by a sinister force from the woods, but the commonplace reality of the situation is clear: Freddy has been sent back to the orphan asylum in Montreal, and Bradley has returned to his family in Boston. As Irmgard recalls her dream of the night before and attempts to understand and explain it, her mother becomes Carroll's Queen of Hearts, with her love of rules, especially at croquet, by vetoing dreams at breakfast (28). Unlike Alice, who confronts symbolic characters and situations in surrealistic dreamscapes reached through, first, descent into the underworld after falling down the rabbit-hole and crossing a sea of tears, and, later, entrance into a world behind the looking-glass, Irmgard looks not to the unconscious, not to the spirit or imagination, but to the rules of an adult world to fix her place. Although the child

17 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

Irmgard is not as crusted over with social conventions and skills as the adolescent Ruth Cook, neither girl has the potential for imaginative excursions into an unconscious or spiritual terrain. From "I've got it" to the polluted beach to "no dreams at breakfast," Irmgard's experience is not that of the private world of surrealistic fantasies but rather that of the public world of ordinary reality. Likewise, the reader's experience of a third and fourth dimension is attained not through any textual descent and confrontation with archetypal symbols from the unconscious but rather through a discovery of the ironic integration of surrealistic elements into the story. From the essentially two-dimensional Preview stories to the threeand four-dimensional "Thank You for the Lovely Tea" and "Jorinda and Jorindel," these dimensions being attained primarily through the reader's perspective that attempts to pierce the surrealist distortions and to harmonize or complete the cubist fragmentation, Gallant's apprenticeship stories create the impression of compositions straining to break free from their frames. In "Up North" Gallant's first sustained achievement of the fourth dimension through kinetic effects other than those attained through reader response is evident. Gallant's successful integration of formal kinetic effects into this and later stories is markedly unlike the optical tricks and dabbling in mixed media to which avant-garde artists - visual and literary - have resorted throughout the century. In 1920 there was Naum Gabo's vibrating wire, what he called Kinetic Construction; this was succeeded by various experiments with lights, motors, suspended structures (mobiles), and symbolic and optical games to create movement or the illusion of movement. Among literary artists similar strategies have been employed: visual symbols and illustrations, varied typescript and colour of print, and pages left unbound for each reader to shuffle at will. Apart from the Russian constructivists of the 19205, the most radical experimentation with kinetic effects in both modern visual and postmodern literary art has been undertaken by French and American practitioners and their followers. Until recently, concern with kinetic effects had no revolutionary effect on Canadian art, perhaps because of the dominant strain of what Paul Duval (1974) has termed "High Realism." With kinetic art, Cyril Barrett argues, the artwork itself need not move since the kinetic effects "can be produced by the spectator moving in front of the work or by the spectator handling and manipulating the work"; nevertheless, kinetic art involves not simply the representation of movement but a concern "with movement itself, with movement as an integral part of the work."36 With her creation of a sense of movement in these early stories, as with her incorporation of all visual and concrete elements into her

i8 Learning to Look

narratives, Gallant eschews avant-garde tactics, instead exploiting the possibilities within the written word. As the Prisme d'Yeux group's manifestos insisted on pure painting, so too Gallant adheres to pure language. W.J. Keith forcefully declares this fidelity to her chosen medium: "Unlike some of her more conspicuous but perhaps less talented contemporaries, Gallant has never lost faith in the adequacy, the power, and even the glory of language. Art may well be defined as a cry that communicates in silence; it may succeed occasionally in presenting voices lost in snow; and Gallant is supreme because she has shown us, again and again, how it happens."37 Gallant has always had faith that language can embrace both the sequence or chain of narrative and the "natural network ... [or] pure configuration" of painting.38 In "Up North" Gallant again makes use of cubist fragmentation, as the perspective shifts between Dennis and Roy McLaughlin, and of surrealist distortion, in Dennis's vision of little men. The whole composition is set in motion when the characters experience what will become another feature of Gallant's style - the disorientation created through travel, particularly by train. Two of the previous stories prepare for this motif. At the end of "Good Morning and Goodbye" Paul is left revelling in the sense of freedom he experiences on the train, a "vacuum that lies between the patterns in a life" (2). In "Thank You for the Lovely Tea" Ruth Cook, fearful of such a vacuum and the freedom it bodes, immediately transforms the car, which carries the group from the structure of the school to the structure of the department store's elevator and tearoom, into another imprisoning structure. She does so first by intimidating Mrs Holland and then by dismissing the doubts and fears Mrs Holland has had about a trip to California taken in this car with Ruth's father, thus trivializing the trip and the "elderly" couple's relationship (8-10). It is, however, in the window of this moving car, and later in the moving elevator, that May recalls her twin sister, a memory that incites her cruelty to Helen and results in her own suffering for this cruelty. Those who are more able to protect themselves - Paul, Ruth, Helen, and potentially Irmgard - remain static, framed in windows or posing by their reflectors. Those who are prone to being victims - Mrs Holland, May, and Dennis - are unable to find solace within a static structure or pattern because they are vulnerable to the haunting of ghosts, memories of unreconciled or inexplicable experiences from their past. Dennis's ghosts acquire not just a private but a historical dimension. Unlike Irmgard, whose potential ghost emerges during the course of the narrative, which is therefore told in the present tense, Dennis's

19 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

own past fades into and is absorbed by the present: "When they woke up in the train, their bed was black with soot and there was soot in his Mum's blondie hair. They were miles north of Montreal, which had, already, sunk beneath his remembrance." This brief, bleak picture, clearly from the perspective of the young boy himself, is followed by Dennis's description of the ghosts: "You know what I sor? ... Well, the train must of stopped, see, and some little men with bundles on their backs got on. Other men was holding lanterns. They were all little. They were all talking French."39 While his mother accuses him of fantasy - "You and your bloody elves" - Dennis has a clear vision of his ghosts: "They was people." And it is towards one of these ghosts, Dennis's father, a "mythical, towering, half-remembered figure," that "they were now travelling to join up north" (50). As the train lumbers northward, Dennis's disorientation develops. The soot and the dark spin a thread back to an England of factories and air raids, but then, stopped at a station, Dennis observes "a swamp with bristling black rushes, red as ink," and an "autumn sunrise; cold, red," which are "so strange to him, so singular, that he could not have said an hour later which feature of the scene was in the foreground or to the left or right" (51). From this point the northward travel is accompanied by the cold brightening of the day. At first Dennis is able to see his own face and those of his mother and McLaughlin, "remote and bodiless," reflected in the train window. Like a cubist or surrealist composition of transparent overlaid images, Dennis observes, behind these reflected faces, the light from the train windows falling "in pale' squares on the upturned vanishing faces and on the little trees" outside the train. But as they pass "into an unchanging landscape of swamp and bracken and stunted trees," and as the lights inside the train are extinguished, Dennis loses the image of himself and those around him (51-2). The sense of Dennis's disorientation is reinforced by the story's structure when, on several occasions, the scene is shown not from Dennis's perspective but from that of another passenger, Roy McLaughlin. At first he dismisses mother and son with his reductive "Limey bride" and "Pest" (50), but he begins to have difficulties fixing his image of Dennis when he wonders if the father has Indian blood (52-3), and then when he realizes that Dennis's ghosts belong to an unwritten history of which the young boy could have no knowledge: ghosts of the unemployed sent up north from the cities to get them off relief during the depression years (54). Both Dennis and McLaughlin are thrown into vertigo as they reach a junction where they must change trains. McLaughlin has made himself vulnerable by feeling responsibility and compassion (54). It

2O Learning to Look

is, however, with Dennis's fear and determination not to leave the train that "Up North" ends. For Dennis, the journey by train, which began with images connecting him to the past, has propelled him into new uncharted experiences. "You'll be seeing plenty of everything now," says McLaughlin in the closing sentence of the story (55). From the description given of this land and its people, the reader fills in the bleak and even brutalizing nature of these experiences. Whereas when the reader takes leave of Ruth Cook and the German refugee, Paul, they are framed by the structure of a window, and of Irmgard when she is standing by her mother's chair, seeking to be reflected "in the picture her mother returns" (27), Dennis - to an even greater degree than May - is left in a state of vertigo, "clinging to the train, to air; to anything," and screaming, "I never saw anything!" (55) Although it is the responsive reader who brings Dennis's vertigo to an end for him, the story's binary fragmentation of perspective and its fixing of Dennis within his own surrealistic historical vision lead the reader to one conclusion: his "anything" is a nothing that will ultimately cancel out his humanity. The starkness of the style and tenor of the only insights given Dennis's mother would seem to confirm this reading: "It's not proper country ... It's bare"; "It's the train whistle. It's so sad. It gets him down" (54). Dennis's future seerns all the more terrifying because, like the red "J" that circumscribes Paul's life, Dennis's little men allude to a history as yet unwritten and hence reduced to a vertiginous, surrealistic, fragmented image, which does not yet harmoniously cohere with any charted reality. The binary perspective of "Up North" may seem to limit the plurality of interpretative possibilities and, therefore, may appear less open and fluid than those stories that, beginning with "Thank You for the Lovely Tea," embrace a number of perspectives and invite others from the reader. But this perspective reinforces other visual techniques integrated into the story: when the train has stopped, the characters experience vertigo; the sharply defined light and dark demarcating inside and outside the train have, by journey's end, been inverted and diffused; the few colours - the red and then blue of the sky - have been expunged: "It was quite day now; their faces were plain and clear, as if drawn without shading on white paper" (54). Iser suggests that "with a literary text we can only picture things which are not there; the written part of the text gives us the knowledge, but it is the unwritten part that gives us the opportunity to picture things; indeed without the elements of indeterminacy, the gaps in the text, we should not be able to use our imagination."40 Gallant locks many of her apprenticeship stories in the frame of a

21 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

fixed perspective or suspended moment, with characters paralysed through cowardice and inertia into inaction and non-being; nevertheless, her experimentation with painterly techniques and forms creates fragmentation, distortion, and mobility, and thus stories that strain to break the frames enclosing them. In these stories Gallant hones those formal qualities that provide visual signals for readers to compose into pictures with colour and light and shading, shape and texture and fluidity. The fiction Gallant was writing by the time she left Montreal for Europe in 1950 exhibits those formal kinetic properties, produced through structure, perspective, and metaphor, that mark the breaking free of her style from frames that could well have enervated her art. STORIES OF THE 19508: LEARNING TO LOOK

At a static moment in "The Picnic," one of the first stories Gallant wrote after arriving in France in 195O,41 a photographic image is developed of a harmonious scene in which the grande dame of a "typical" French town is surrounded by five attentive American children.42 This is a precisely rendered composition, similar to those that the camera will capture throughout the day to serve as visual evidence in an American magazine that the picnic is "a symbol of unity between two nations" (106); nevertheless, this photographic image is like Carol's edited image of Paris described at the end of another story from the 19505, "The Other Paris" (11 Apr. 1953), "a coherent picture, accurate but untrue."43 Desiring images of consistency, coherence, and harmony, so that this picnic will become a significant symbol, participants and observers trust the seen and dismiss the unseen - those tensions and failures that Paula Marshall, wife of the Major organizing this picnic, intuits will lead to "fresh misunderstandings and further scandals." Responsive readers of this story receive Paula's "sudden prophetic vision of the day ahead" (120-1) as conveying greater truth than those accurate snapshots that will be used for morale and propaganda. But how are we, as readers, to respond to Gallant's fiction and not be, as so many of her characters are, lulled, paralysed, or even victimized by falsifying images? Most contemporary theorists of photography would disagree with Iser's contention that the static photographic image simply reproduces an existing object and thus excludes observers of the reproduced image from a composition they passively see but do not actively create; most would see the photographic image functioning as Iser describes the literary image: while

22 Learning to Look

governed by the schemata of the text, the literary image requires a reader to assemble these schemata, and therefore to constitute the multiple meanings of the text.44 In much modern and postmodern fiction the multiplication of gaps "is intimately connected to the ever greater precision of representation," and the gaps arising "out of the overprecision of representation cause the reader to become more and more disoriented."45 Even in Gallant's earliest fiction, however, the disorientation, which may result from the high degree of indeterminacy created by an almost overwhelming number of precisely defined images, is tempered by the controlling perspective that embraces all the other perspectives recorded in the course of the narrative. While Gallant's characters often experience extreme disorientation, occasionally even vertigo, because they are unable to fix an image of self within any context or environment, Gallant's readers rarely experience more disorientation than that stimulated by the fluctuating or mercurial effect produced as the focus shifts from one perspective to another, leaving hollow gaps to be bridged. Responsive readers of Gallant may not be able to compose static pictures in which all parts are structured into a harmonious and coherent whole. They can, however, assemble the details in the stories, which Gallant herself has delineated using elements analogous to the visual arts, into open compositions permitting a plurality of interpretative perspectives. In stories from the 19505 such as "One Morning in June" (7 June 1952), "Poor Franzi" (Oct. 1954), "About Geneva" (June 1955), "Going Ashore" (18 Dec. 1954), and "Autumn Day" (29 Oct. 1955), Gallant offers responsive readers some initial insights into viewing her stories as multidimensional compositions. If read simply in terms of the first two of the four textual perspectives that Iser identifies as prestructuring aesthetic response - character and plot-line (the other two being narrator and reader)46 Gallant's "One Morning in June" and "Poor Franzi" are static and hence closed pictures. Characters remain suspended within a framed, two-dimensional plane, even though characters have opportunities equal to those of readers to develop faculties of perception and response that open into a third dimension, depth, and a fourth, movement. In each of these stories the progress of a relationship between two central characters rests upon their ability to shatter the flat surface, although, as is so often the case in Gallant's early fiction, "The Other Paris" being the most notable example, the shattering of this surface may mean discontinuance of the relationship. Characters therefore opt consciously or unconsciously to remain secure within a frame rather than risk challenging the deceiving images that keep the frame in place. As the central characters attempt to observe each

23 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

other, both "One Morning in June" and "Poor Franzi" develop this internal structure of perception. Like the concentric circles of an op art painting that achieve an illusion of depth and movement, the textual perspectives created from the perceptions of the couples are encircled by the perceptions of observers or potential observers in the text. If, in turn, these concentric circles radiated out through first the narrator's perspective and then a multitude of readers' perspectives, the resulting composition, as with an op art painting, would be an illusive tour de force and remain very much a closed structure. Gallant has always eschewed such gimmicks, trusting to the potential of language to create texts eliciting visual responses that open up a range of interpretative possibilities. In "One Morning in June" the situation, which rests with the presently "paralyzed ... tremulous movement of friendship"47 between two young Americans, Barbara and Mike, staying in Menton, a resort town in the south of France, is traced along the parallel lines of their two perspectives. Not only are the lines parallel, but the segments devoted to each perspective are roughly proportionate. These structural features underscore the eventual inability of either character to achieve a multidimensional composition with oblique and therefore converging lines and with proportions adjusted to attain a sense of foreground and background. Although the situation in "Poor Franzi" is presented from a more distanced vantage-point but within a more specifically defined political context, it is developed similarly and reinforced by the myopia of Elizabeth and the disturbingly unfocused gaze of Franzi,48 an uncaring and potentially cruel opportunist whose callous attitude towards others may be attributed to the displacement he and his family have undergone during the fluctuations of Austria's political situation. Since readers cannot look to the characters themselves for paradigms of perception, they must bridge the gaps in these two stories to assemble what and why these characters fail to see. The failures of Mike, in "One Morning in June," are of particular interest because he is just finishing a year in France, which his parents have financed to allow him to discover and test his talents as an artist. Mike's self-absorption, as he dwells on his own imperfections and envies what he falsely perceives others to possess, is largely responsible for hindering his piercing through surface appearances. But the controlling perspective of the narrator constantly invites readers to break the flat plane, in which these characters seem content to remain becalmed: the narrator spirals into the past to provide historical dimensions of the characters and their environment, while leaving the characters suspended in the present. Mike, we learn in

24 Learning to Look

one of these spirals, has spent an unproductive winter since he has yet to develop the mechanics of perspective and proportion, colour and shading. His paintings are "flat, empty, and the color of cement," and although at first he blames the sunless Paris winter, he later sees that "its gray contained every shade in a beam of light, but this effect he was unable to reproduce."49 Menton proves a better source of inspiration for him than Paris because, with its soft colours, it can be more easily rendered into the kind of pictures that will appeal to his parents, eagerly awaiting his "winter's harvest" (178). Like the artist who has taught him in Paris and advised him to come to Menton, remembered "as a paradise of lemon ice and sunshine," Mike creates images that are accurate but untrue. Ignoring the "shelled, battered, and shabby" Menton that Barbara's aunt perceives, Mike paints "with the speed and method of Barbara's aunt producing a pair of Argyle socks" and renders "with fidelity the blue of the sea, the pink and white of the crumbling villas, and the red of the geraniums," as "flushed and accurate as a Technicolor still" (179-80). While he applies paint to canvas, Barbara produces her own "Technicolor still," snapping a picture to place alongside all her other "Souvenirs de France" - an "image of Mike looking rapt and destined, his eyes secretively shadowed, high above the sea" (182). This scene excellently demonstrates Iser's discussion of the kinetic effect created by gaps of indeterminacy during the reading process: "Thus every moment of reading is a dialectic of protension and retention, conveying a future horizon yet to be occupied, along with a past (and continually fading) horizon already filled; the wandering viewpoint carves its passage through both at the same time and leaves them to merge together in its wake."50 Reading retrospectively, we recognize that Barbara has simply reproduced an image of her preconceived image of Mike and art in general. Just as Mike has preconceived images of Barbara with reference to her financial and social status, Barbara views Mike as gaining independence and purpose through his calling as an artist. But Mike, like Paul in "Good Morning and Goodbye," is in "the vacuum that lies between the patterns in a life"; in fact, this whole year seems a vacuum as Mike awaits someone to propel him into a new pattern (178, 182). This reading is tempered by the protensive nature of the reading process in that Barbara again forgets to wind her film (182). Perhaps she has, after all, accidentally caught a true image - Mike suspended in a vacuum between two photographic images - although not an exact one. Or perhaps her photograph will reflect the third dimension, created by superimposed images, which neither she nor Mike can perceive.

25 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

Retrospectively, we realize the significance of the surrealistic description of the snapshots Barbara has mounted in her album: "ghostly buildings floated on the surface of the Seine, and the steps of the Sacre-Cceur, transparent, encumbered the grass at Versailles" (175). In terms of character and plot-line, however, this "future horizon" is never "occupied." Barbara may achieve an illusion of depth through her double exposures that Mike never achieves in his paintings, but it is the reader who truly experiences the third and fourth dimensions that Iser describes being created "in the time-flow of the reading process" as "past and future continually converge in the present moment, and the synthetizing operations of the wandering viewpoint enable the text to pass through the reader's mind as an ever-expanding network of connections."51 Because Mike and Barbara, and Elizabeth and Franzi, are at the centre, within the frame, they are unable to attain the distance necessary to develop a multidimensional composition through perspective, proportion, and gradations of colour and light. They resemble that kind of reader that Iser identifies as least responsive because most "committed" to pre-established attitudes and perspectives.52 Conversely, argues Iser, responsive readers experience the text as "a living event" through "the emergence of a third dimension, which comes into being through the reader's continual oscillation between involvement and observation."53 Gallant's readers are thus guided to reject as models those characters who are so self-absorbed that their readings of characters and situations break down into a series of "glances" rather than becoming a meaningful and productive visualizing process gained through disinterested participation.54 But the onlookers, or potential onlookers, in Gallant's stories are as incapable as the central characters of viewing the scene from multiple perspectives: for instance, the "fat man taking his dog for a run" and the aunt in "One Morning in June" (180,188-9), anc ^ tne family of Americans, the Wrights, and their English companion, Miss Mewling, in "Poor Franzi." All are as myopic as Elizabeth in viewing "the landscape that none of them knew": "Behind the solid peaks were softer shapes, shifting and elusive: she could not have said if they were clouds or mountains. But then, she thought, no one can, unless they have better eyes than mine, and know the country very well" (68; cf "One Morning in June," 187-8). In each story the "better eyes" must be those of readers who, guided by the narrator through time and space, attain, if not "ringside seats,"55 then fluid vantage-points where involvement and observation, identification and detachment, past and future, may converge. In each story, therefore, we are guided to create a composition with

26 Learning to Look

colour and shading, perspective and proportion. In "About Geneva/' however, a third dimension, depth, is prestructured not simply through the textual perspectives of narrator and reader, as in "One Morning in June" and "Poor Franzi," but as well through those of character and plot-line. If in "One Morning in June" readers are granted a perspective from several rows behind the "ringside seats," and in "Poor Franzi" from the front-row balcony, then in "About Geneva" the readers' perspective, as the story opens, is from the rear benches. In the background is Granny, framed by the door of her Nice apartment, looking "small, lonely, and patient"; in the foreground, implied rather than described, is the taxi bringing Ursula and Colin back from the airport after a two-week visit in Geneva with their father and his new lover, and the children's mother.56 This tableau shifts to another in the sitting-room as the observer is ushered slightly closer, but our perspective, as in "One Morning in June" and "Poor Franzi," remains that of an outsider looking in; unlike these stories, however, a figure is clearly distinguished from the field as the story focuses in on one main character - the unnamed mother. The other family members gain interest because they provide signals for the mother as she attempts to read the relationships within the Geneva composition and, through this reading, to build a narrative of "why her husband had left her" (198). The mother makes it all the more imperative to read from the visual signals because she has warned Granny to utter "no direct questions, no remarks" (192). So the situation rests with the mother's striving to compose not simply a harmonious picture in which all details cohere but a multifaceted one that can reveal to her the unseen reasons for her husband's conduct, a composition, therefore, with both depth and movement. Ursula, who has come back with the opening line of a play she has begun to write in Geneva, provides the image that might transport the mother into the past where explanations are to be found - "The Grand Duke enters and sees Tatiana all in gold" - particularly because of Tatiana's associations with the father's lover (194-5). For Ursula, Tatiana merely provides an exotic diversion from the drab Nice environment and her own dowdy image. The mother realizes, "Everything about the trip, in the end, would crystallize around Tatiana and the Grand Duke," but because Ursula has for the moment taken over the role of Tatiana, as the dramatic present tense of the image confirms, there is nothing this potentially revealing image can tell her about the past (195-6). And by fictionalizing her Geneva experience and thus "remov[ing] herself from the ranks of reliable witnesses" (197), Ursula cannot provide her mother with the image she now needs.

27 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

Seven-year-old Colin's image of Geneva is more useful for what it does not picture than for what it does. Because Ursula's image is so personal and immediate, it pictures too much, and the mother cannot use it to assemble a narrative of why her husband has left her. As with the literary text, "we can only picture things which are not there; the written part of the text gives us the knowledge, but it is the unwritten part that gives us the opportunity to picture things."57 '"I fed the swans/ Colin suddenly shouted." Having articulated the image, Colin closes what had been an open, fluid image: "the image became static: a gray sky, a gray lake, and a swan wonderfully turning upside down with the black rubber feet showing above the water. His father was not in the picture at all; neither was she. But Geneva was fixed for the rest of his life: gray, lake, swan." Geneva now being fixed, and therefore drained of imaginative potential, Colin begins to "invent" a new story of being sick on the plane (196-7). Because the mother cannot use Ursula's Tatiana, it is Colin's image - without colour, perspective, or proportion - that becomes the catalyst, not for a multifaceted narrative attaining its temporal element through the fourth dimension, movement, but simply for a three-dimensional composition attaining depth through the overlaying of images. Granny dismisses the children's images because she already has a remembered image that blocks reception and hence perception of any other: "white water birds, a parasol, a boat heaped with colored cushions" (192). Superimposing the exotic colours from Granny's image (reinforced by the golden Tatiana) on to Colin's image of feeding the swans, the mother creates a composition that reflects, if not an exact image of Geneva, a truthful image that incorporates her response: "She saw sunshine, a blue lake, and the boats Granny had described, heaped with colored cushions. She saw her husband and someone else (probably in white, she thought, ridiculously bouffant, the origin of Tatiana) ... Colin seemed to carry the story of the visit with him, and she felt the faintest stirrings of envy, the resentfulness of the spectator, the loved one left behind" (197). Envy and resentment bring her too close and, paradoxically, relegate her to a position of observer on the rear benches. She has progressed beyond the perspectives of Mike and Barbara, and Elizabeth and Franzi, in escaping the framed, two-dimensional plane by composing a three-dimensional picture that synthesizes the family members' various images of Geneva. Now, however, the feelings of envy and resentment paralyse her at the crossroads, perceiving but unable to partake of the "wandering viewpoint" that, Iser argues, actuates the potentially kinetic elements of the reading process by setting

28 Learning to Look

observer and observed in motion.58 And so, the story concludes, "nothing had come back from the trip but her own feelings of longing and envy, the longing and envy she felt at night, seeing, at a crossroad or over a bridge, the lighted windows of a train sweep by" (198). Geneva must remain for the mother forever unvisited, in Iser's sense a "fading horizon," but with no new horizon to take its place and therefore no story to tell. But for twelve-year-old Emma Ellenger, the central figure in "Going Ashore," as one port of call fades on the receding horizon, on an emerging horizon looms a new destination. Unlike her mother, who is "happy, or at least not always imhappy, in a limited area of the ship - the bar, the beauty salon, and her own cabin" - because within these confines able to avoid her past failures and dismal future prospects, all of which signify her fading beauty, Emma has no fear of being "adrift on an ocean whose immenseness [her mother] could not begin to grasp."59 Emma is given room to manoeuvre as she develops the skills of seeing that will enable her to survive once the ship has put them on shore permanently. With the focus on Emma rather than on the mother, "Going Ashore" is the first of Gallant's stories to achieve multiple dimensions through all its textual perspectives - those of reader, narrator, character, and plot-line. The protensive and retrospective narrative line of "Going Ashore," which traces Emma's hopes and reservations that this cruise will produce the miracle to form a meaningful mother-daughter relationship, provides a sense of continuity between the ports of call and the past, present, and future time-frames. Originally, Emma "caught" this feeling of an impending miracle from her otherwise worldweary mother, but she has also caught her mother's Prufrockian despair, as when, in response to her mother's asking why they have come on this voyage, Emma's voice echoes the voice in Eliot's poem that conveys a sense of the futility of language to break barriers and communicate: "I don't know. I don't know why we came at all" (778).6° But Emma is to her mother as this voice is to Prufrock: "Answers and explanations belonged to another language, one she had still to acquire" (79). The fluid composition Emma achieves, as the images of Tangier and Gibraltar converge, will help her to acquire this language. As the story opens, the concrete, accurate image of Tangier, "humped and yellowish, speckled with houses, under a wintry sky," has begun to meld with the-hazy, invented image of "North Africa [as] an imaginary place, half desert, half jungle," the blended image being circumscribed from the vantage-point of the porthole (79-80). In Tangier itself this image is almost submerged by the real thing (83). In clinging first to the image of Eddy within her Tangier composition,

29 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

then to the tiger she purchases, Emma never succumbs to her mother's flat, totally introspective perspective. Freed from her porthole perspective, she has not felt compelled to don those reflective sunglasses that her mother uses to narrow her vision (85) or to deflect distorted images she wishes to ignore (86), and without which she experiences incapacitating vulnerability (93). For Emma the real Tangier is a disappointment, but her imaginative responsiveness enables her to retain her original sense of anticipation as they rush downhill, to where the launch waits to take them back to the ship, and the day spins itself "out in reverse" (93), like a film being rewound. For Emma's unresponsive mother Tangier has, mercifully, disappeared forever, but for Emma what had been a protensive view of Tangier, a future horizon, has moved through the present to become a retrospective view, a memory, and so seems "different again, exotic and remote, with the ring of lights around the shore, the city night sounds drifting over the harbor." Emma is not oblivious of the inaccuracy of this image, recognizing that "the cafe, the clock in the square, the shop where they had bought the bracelet, had nothing to do with the Tangier she had imagined or this present view from the ship" (99), just as she ultimately responds to the chipped, fake tiger not as a magical talisman capable of granting wishes, nor as a source of despair and cynicism once its real nature is exposed, but simply as something "she had loved ... for an afternoon" (102). The tiger, her symbol of Africa, will not be forgotten but will be an image on a receding horizon as she embraces the past and the future that make up the dynamic present moment: "Africa was over, this was something else. The cabin grew steadily lighter ... She could see the gulls swooping and soaring, and something on the horizon - a shape, a rock, a whole continent untouched and unexplored. A tide of newness came in with the salty air: she thought of new land, new dresses, clean, untouched, unworn. A new life. She knelt, patient, holding the curtain, waiting to see the approach to shore" (103). In her imaginative responsiveness and openness to life, which enable her to conjoin inner and outer perspectives and prevent selfabsorption, and in her resilience in the face of disappointment, which deters the extremes of cynicism and sentimentality and enables her to embrace life's flux, young Emma Ellenger stands out as a character with "better eyes" than those of most characters who people Gallant's early fiction. But can this imagination, openness, and resilience withstand the transition from cruise ship to shore, from youthfulness to maturity, from an ahistorical to a historical milieu? Are Gallant's characters able to retain the perceptiveness, even the clairvoyance, of their childhood in a world in which their developing social attitudes

3O Learning to Look

confront not a tabula rasa but a slate intricately etched with historical significance? Gallant's stories of the 19505 repeatedly explore these questions, and statistically, those characters who suffer from myopia, tunnel vision, eyestrain, or blindness outnumber those with healthy eyes and good-to-excellent vision. Another story very much concerned with seeing and not seeing, for example, is "The Moabitess" (2 Nov. 1957), set in a shabby French pension off-season and highlighting the pathetic figure of Miss Horeham, who, having nursed her father for many years, is now left practically destitute. Like Emma's mother, but without the aid of reflective sunglasses, Miss Horeham has developed "a small, particular field of vision, as if her eye were eternally pressed to a knothole."61 She uses this perspective to escape such surrealistic scenes as the argument between Mr Wynn and Mr Oxley by narrowing her focus to one image: that of herself transformed into the exotic Biblical Ruth, adorned with treasures from her trunk, mostly discards that departing residents have given her. "The Other Paris," "The Picnic," "A Day Like Any Other" (7 Nov. 1953), "Senor Pinedo" (9 Jan. 1954), "Bernadette" (12 Jan. 1957), and "The Old Place" (Spring 1958), like much of Gallant's later fiction, all foreground the personal narratives of the characters within a broader historical background than that of these other early stories, with the exception of "Poor Franzi"; nevertheless, they are all equally concerned with exploring the characters' inability to see clearly. This purblindness usually arises from the blocking of unwanted images by sentimentalized, picturesque, or exotic images that can be assembled into recognizable and harmonious compositions. In "Senor Pinedo," set in Franco's Madrid, the first-person narrator visually renders the silence following horror in a surrealistic description of the courtyard in which a young boy has been crushed by an elevator: with its "harsh division of light and shadow," as in the arena of a bullring, the sunlit faces become "white and expressionless, with that curious Oriental blankness that sometimes envelops the whole arena during moments of greatest emotion."62 The surrealism of this scene is reproduced at the end in the inability of the narrator, as an outsider, to read the silence of Senor Pinedo's audience listening to this civil servant espouse "the truth and good faith of the movement to which he had devoted his life": "as I could not see his listeners' faces, I could not have said whether the silence was owing to respect, delight, apathy, or a sudden fury of some other emotion so great that only silence could contain it" (216). Another characteristic Gallant motif - memory - is integrated into the visualizing component of the reading process explored in "The Old Place." Dennis and Charlotte, the adult children of memory-obsessed parents, reject their parents'

31 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

history, composed for Dennis's mother of remembered images from an idyllic Dutchess County garden, and for Charlotte's father of those from horrific Nazi concentration camps, as "a cult of images, not of feelings."63 Photographs are simply "squares of silence" (80), and Dennis and Charlotte prefer squares of their own creation colourless, shadeless, flat lifestyles in which no associations, no fixed and fixating images, will emerge to demand allegiance. None of these characters successfully learns to look, all opting instead for two-dimensional perspectives. In Gallant's stories of the 19505, however, there is one adult character who may serve as a paradigm for readers learning to look - the first-person narrator of "Autumn Day," Cecilia Rowe. Depicting the three-month period following her reunion with her husband in Salzburg, where he has been posted with the Army of Occupation, Cecilia becomes the focus of a story tracing her transition from immaturity to maturity, from an introverted two-dimensional perspective to an extroverted multidimensional perspective, and hence from impercipience to percipience. The narrative of Cissy's transition is played out against the background of an Austrian populace in transition, a period of reflection and rebuilding. As Cissy clings to her girlish attire and mannerisms, Herr Enrich, the owner of the farmhouse where Cissy and her husband board, clings to a time before the war when he took in a different calibre of boarders.64 The greatest gap of indeterminacy opened up in this story is that between Cissy's three-month transition period and the rendering of these three months into a narrative eight years later. The mature Cecilia looks back with understanding, not cynicism, at the naive selfconsciousness of her nineteen-year-old self, a product of an ideology disseminated through glossy magazines, romance novels, and Hollywood movies. From this perspective she traces the changes Cissy underwent to turn "poses into real feelings," essential to establish a "real" marriage (33). These changes correspond to the changes that occur as Cissy's "Herbsttag," a melancholic and sentimental composition, is transformed into "Autumn Day," a narrative that incorporates grotesque, even frightening elements. Images of a frozen yellow and brown bird (41-2), the flashing gold teeth of a paranoid boarder (42-4), and the rouged and then blushing cheeks of a woman accused by Cissy's friend of an affair (45) filter through the flat grey shadows of the composition in garish, surrealistic splashes of colour. As these images are then played out in reverse (49-51), the two-dimensional plane is shattered, and a multifaceted, chromatic narrative emerges. After being forced for the first time to see herself not at the centre of the composition but "as if I had been a spectator all along" (49),

32 Learning to Look

and then witnessing a revealing image of her husband in the mirror (51), Cecilia traces the modulations of acceptance, desperation, and fortitude through which Cissy passes as she crosses from poses to real feelings, from girlhood to womanhood, from impercipience to percipience. Even Cecilia's summation, focused entirely on the personal narrative, with the historical dimension recalled only through the allusion to an invisible frontier, captures the sense that fluctuation, not sequence, best describes the direction of her life (52-3). Cecilia has delivered her reading of the "too much" that happened during these three months at the Salzburg farmhouse. But what of the eight years that have followed? The immediacy of the restrained desperation of Cecilia's closing words - "But we're not safe yet, I thought, looking at my husband - this stranger, mute, helpless, fumbling, enclosed ... But we'll be all right. Take my word for it. We'll be all right" (53) - leaves these eight years a truly indeterminate gap and "Autumn Day" a truly open, multifaceted composition. At most it can be said that Cecilia develops into a character with "better eyes" than those characters in Gallant's early fiction who insist on closing gaps with images that cohere into a harmonious composition reflecting the prevailing ideology. Demanding an accurate picture, one that conforms to a familiar ideology, many of the characters in Gallant's earliest fiction narrow or restrict the focus of their perspective so that a harmonious composition emerges, in which all images cohere. These characters resemble those readers of Joyce's Ulysses whom Iser describes as "annoyed by all these gaps, which arise in fact through the overprecision of presentation," an annoyance that Iser views as "a confession ... that we prefer to be pinned down by texts, forgoing our own judgment" and that "we obviously expect literature to present us with a world that has been cleared of contradictions."65 Gallant's readers can learn to look at her fiction with eyes that permit kinetic, multidimensional compositions to emerge from the gaps between the vividly etched images her stories provide. Although these images do not always cohere and may, therefore, create unsettling reading experiences because of their mercurial effects, the most rewarding of Gallant's stories reveal an artistry that generates aesthetic responses dependent on a close reading through a vivid visualizing of her texts. Gallant's experimentation is consistent with trends in modernist pictorial art that, Wendy Steiner observes, challenge "the logic of the Albertian model, in which a picture was to represent the view of a perceiver at a fixed distance from the scene viewed, [and] demanded that that perception be atemporal, a single moment of vision." With

33 Acquiring a Sense of Perspective

shifting and fluid perspectives, Steiner continues, comes fragmentation, the "breaking up of the picture plane."66 Cecilia Rowe establishes a perspective of eight years that permits her to revisit her emergence from girlhood to womanhood yet keeps this perspective fluid to explore the transition in terms of past, present, and "future and the constant "wavering" (52) through these dimensions; so too readers of Gallant, although approaching her fiction from the perspective of their own dispositions, cannot remain passively gazing from one fixed position. Having moved "round and around"67 through multiple textual perspectives, and having necessarily participated in the protensive and retrospective flux of the reading process, we can read the unseen through the seen, the seen through the unseen, as we experience that which lies inside the spatial frame, tempered by the flux of narrative, colliding with that which resides outside the frame.

2 Inside and Outside the Frame: Characters in Search of an Audience (1959-1964)

By the late 19505 Gallant's adaptation in language of the techniques of the visual artist had become essential to her depiction of the multiplicity and fluidity of subjective and objective, perceived and received truths. In the earliest stories and in various ways in the stories of the next four decades, Gallant's main thematic interests arise from the confrontation of an imagined world, which her characters create to protect themselves from the jagged edges of raw reality, with this raw reality itself, which constantly intrudes on the imagined world. Gallant delights in exposing the romantic and idealized images of the imagined against the harsh and prosaic light of reality as her characters experience it. Seeing no escape, the characters in her earliest stories usually retreat to the often sentimental but reassuring safety of their imagined world, blocking off access to or awareness of experienced reality, slicing the continuity between perceived and received truths, and denying the plurality of these truths. Gallant captures them in a suspended moment as they enclose or frame themselves within their own limited frame of reference. Green Water, Green Sky, published in 1959, is a pivotal work in Gallant's canon. The medium of the novel allows Gallant to manipulate and readers to respond to characters in a less enclosed, more open and fluid space than the short story, with few exceptions, had yet provided. Joseph Frank, explaining what he means by "the spatialization of form in a novel," asserts that "the novel, with its larger unit of meaning, can preserve coherent sequence within the unit of meaning" while simultaneously suspending the time-flow of the narrative to

35 Inside and Outside the Frame

profile - and so permit the reader to foreground - "the interplay of relationships within the immobilized time-area. These relationships are juxtaposed independently of the progress of the narrative, and the full significance of the scene is given only by the reflexive relations among the units of meaning."1 Frank thus articulates the challenges that novel readers confront when manoeuvring between the conflicting pulls of spatial relationships and narrative and linguistic sequence. Jeffrey Smitten contends that with Frank's essay "linguistic and structural considerations are finally connected to the reader's perception. The reader plays a crucial role throughout Frank's discussion because Frank attributes to him the key to spatial form - reflexive reference." Even though questions remain - "Where does reflexive reference reside? In the work? Or is it something perceived or created by the reader? Frank speaks of it both ways"2 - Smitten's own attempts to define "spatial form" indicate that he concurs with such inclusive and inconclusive duality: "'spatial form' includes not only objective features of narrative structure but also subjective processes of aesthetic perception. These processes may be stimulated by narrative technique or they may exist even prior to technique ... In its fullest significance, then, 'spatial form' embraces both a set of narrative techniques and the reading process itself."3 For Gallant, the spatialization of form in the novel allows her to break the frame so that her characters may test the truth of perceived images of self and others against received images. The characters cannot retreat: they must adapt to the multiplicity of these truths or be overcome by the inconsistencies and paradoxes that such plurality produces. But the space is more open and fluid also in the sense that the personal dramas played out by the characters are brought into the public domain, where they become susceptible to scrutiny in much the same way that modern art often attempts to break down barriers by blurring boundaries between the observer and observed, inside and outside the frame. "In twentieth-century art," Wendy Steiner concludes, "process and self-reference invade every aspect of painting, so that the fixing of time, viewer, and represented object becomes a curiosity of the past."4 Most noteworthy in the first-person narratives Gallant published in the early 19605, immediately following the publication of Green Water, Green Sky, is the way in which an audience becomes more particularly defined as a significant part of this public domain. Often conveyed through mirror and window images, perspective remains of interest to Gallant but begins to be connected to proportion as the characters, themselves often observers, become increasingly aware of being observed, watched, scrutinized. But who are the watchers?

36

Learning to Look

With few exceptions this question may be answered exclusively in terms of focal points within the frame of the story. In several stories, however, layers are added as the observer is identified with the reader. All these elements increase the density of Gallant's stories, which, while collapsing inside and outside, never flatten the contours. The reader's task thus becomes less one of bridging gaps, in Iser's sense, and more one of penetrating layers of her thickly textured compositions. GREEN WATER, GREEN SKY: STRUCTURE, PATTERN, AND

GYRE

The six characters of Green Water, Green Sky naturally group themselves into three pairs according to how these characters perceive themselves in their relationships to the external world: Doris Fischer and Bob Harris maintain a structured perception; Wishart and Bonnie McCarthy fit into a patterned perception; George Fairlie and Florence are caught in a gyral perception. Of particular importance among the external relationships Gallant explores in this short novel are the two concentric circles that form around self: the family, and the cities of Cannes and Paris, which are the main settings of the novel. By exploiting and adapting the techniques of the visual artist, Gallant confronts and tests the multiplicity and plurality of the perceived and received truths experienced by her six characters. Bob Harris, the husband of the central character, Florence, and Doris Fischer, a visiting American living in the same apartment house as the Harrises, harmoniously compose images of self and other into linear constructs that are uncomplicated by obtrusive colours or shading; their structures are fluid and able to withstand tension and change. Bob and Doris are "alike," but not "matched," because their structures run on two parallel planes, planes that cannot meet.5 A structured, cheerful individual, Bob has been able to integrate private and public images of self into one frame because, like Doris, he lacks a historical sense and hence can build a linear structure that takes himself as its origin and focus (33-6, 46). Unlike Doris, an ascetic who favours "blond-wood exports from sanitary Sweden" and unobstructed light (42, 45), Bob is something of a hedonist and reveals a complacent satisfaction with his harmonizing of commercial and aesthetic values. The contrast between Bob and Doris emerges clearly when they observe a modern painting Bob has purchased. Doris, while relieved to be viewing a modern painting because she dislikes the past, sees it in a stereotypical way: puerilely composed and exorbitantly priced. Bob perfectly

37 Inside and Outside the Frame

understands the meaning of the painting for him: "a rising investment that, at the same time, gave him aesthetic pleasure; that was the way to wrap up life, to get the best of everything"^). In his profession - he runs the French side of his father's American-based wine-importing firm - he integrates a third element with those of money and pleasure: family. Bob has cultivated a tightly structured but less ascetic image of self than Doris because, although relations and friends are the "breath of life for him," they are all "of the same quality": "he did not distinguish between the random and the intense" (no). There can be no colour, no shade, within Bob's frame; everything and everyone are clearly defined in terms of black and white, dark and light. With the advent of Flor into his life, Bob must test the truth of the colourless, shadeless images that fit so well into his structured world.6 He perceives Cannes, where he and Flor have met, as a shadowless, black and white composition: Manet's The Balcony, with its starkly lit figures in the foreground on the balcony and the mysteriously dark interior of the room in the background, corresponds with Bob's perception. Two years later, Bob and Flor, now married, are living in Bob's white, well-lit world of Paris (33-5). As Flor, advancing towards a mental breakdown, closes herself in her darkened room, Bob judges this "shutting-out of light" to be "wicked ... the nature of sin" (36); however, Bob sought this very darkness through Flor when he first saw her in the dark Cannes cafe, and she "looked up and before becoming aware that a man was watching her let him see on her drowned face everything he was prepared to pursue passion, discipline, darkness" (37). Bob's perception does not permit light and dark to blend as they might through the filter of a curtain; instead, they are blocked into bars or slats, structured evenly as light passes through shutters (65-8, 109-11). Bob seeks passion, but his journey into darkness will be safe, controlled through the discipline exacted by money and family. For Bob, such discipline comes through ownership. He creates his own structured composition into which all elements fit neatly, this structure in turn fitting just as neatly into the structured world in which he lives. His original conception of the ideal woman to fit into this structure is "of some minor Germanic princess" who wears the silk and pearls provided by her family as she waits with "patient supplication until a husband can be found" (105) to whom the deed of ownership can be passed. His ideal woman is transplanted into the twentieth century from the Biedermeier tradition.7 But because Flor cannot have children, she does not fit this image of domesticity; so Bob tailors the image, and she becomes instead the more "luminous"

38 Learning to Look

sexual object of the Impressionists, whose beauty "made her an object as cherished as anything he might buy" and "increased his sense of possession and love." Two years later Bob thinks she has "destroyed this beauty, joyfully, willfully, as if to force him to value her on other terms" (37-8), and sees her loose hair on the pillow and the shuttered windows as "a parody of Cannes" (65). Flor no longer has the tamed, coy seductiveness of a Renoir nude or bather;8 she is as sordid as Manet's vacuous Olympia on a crumpled, yellow sheet.9 Bob's structured composition is challenged not only by the shade and colour that coexist with the light and dark and the black and white but also by the oblique lines that counter his parallel-linear view of life. Bob thinks that if Flor is not on the same plane as he is, moving in the same parallel line, she must be on a different plane, moving in a different line (36-7). There is, however, a third option: perhaps they are on the same plane, but their lines are oblique; given enough space, oblique lines on the same plane will eventually cross, but each has its own autonomous existence and direction. At a critical point in the novel, as the "faint summer light" creeps "in between the slats of the shutters" of their room, their lines almost cross. Flor sees for a moment that whatever usually protects Bob (money and charm) has left him: "he seemed pitiable and without confidence." During this moment Bob has remembered "what it was to be sick with love," and his usual structured perception of their relationship as superimposed lines becomes vertiginous. As he experiences the vertigo that characterizes Flor's existence, he even thinks he tastes the salt of the sea that is closing in on the drowning Flor. Flor, meanwhile, experiences a moment of calm from her usual turmoil. But Bob does not accept the challenge of the nauseating momentum of this vertiginous gyre and sets their lines back in their now separate planes by having them "resume their new roles: the tiresome wife, the patient husband" (65-8). This scene is carefully structured in blocks, with the alternating viewpoints running in a parallel - and then for a moment in an oblique - direction, to reinforce content. The moment passes: dark and light are restored to their chequered places, lines to their separate planes. The harmony of Bob's structured composition has been preserved. Bob has been given the moment to pursue the passion and darkness - or, to borrow Prufrock's words, "to force the moment to its crisis" - but fear of the dangers of the vertiginous gyre sends him scurrying back to the discipline of the orderly structure. Prufrock's "would it have been worth it, after all"10 is a question that both Flor and Bob go on to ask themselves (69).

39 Inside and Outside the Frame

Flor's mother, Bonnie McCarthy, and Wishart, Bonnie's summer friend, are as much survivors as Bob and Doris, all understanding and conforming to the requirements of modern life. Whereas Bob's and Doris's perspectives are firmly fixed and enclosed within a structured frame of here and now (although fluid within this frame), Bonnie has the appearance of waiting for "some elegant paradise" beyond the frame, and Wishart, in her presence, reflects the same "air of waiting" (93-4). Wishart later comes to think that Bonnie's "air of expectancy" is false and that she has been waiting for something within the frame, not beyond it (113). Despite the multiplicity of self-images that Wishart and Bonnie project, what emerges is a clear image of a past self that gives a pattern to what might otherwise be a chaotic array of fragmented images - of colours, light and shade, lines, and shapes - in their lives. Wishart is the only character to remain outside the Paris scenes and family circle. Cannes is his natural milieu because he can enact the many roles he has perfected in its ever-changing tableaux. Wishart is an artiste (even his name is contrived) who might be unmasked should he posture too long in one place or allow any member of his audience too close an examination of his mask. Wishart's main role, however, is not to be observed but to observe, and most of the third section of the novel is devoted to his perception of the Bonnie-Flor-Bob composition. "Dreams of chaos were Wishart's meat," and his dream of the sinking ferryboat, presented immediately after the dream that has sent Flor into an asylum, might seem to forecast another victim of the storm. But from this "deplorable confusion" Wishart strides, a survivor who has remained unscathed by remaining detached (86-7). A pattern emerges from what might have been a chaotic series of tableaux because of Wishart's steady perspective, which constantly enlarges to take in the whole scene. After Wishart has been in Cannes several weeks, with his masks constantly slipping, images of raw reality threaten to displace those artistic images that compose themselves into a harmonious tableau: Bonnie as peach-coloured hostess; Flor as Venus; Bob as worshipping victim; Wishart himself as English gentleman sought after by the hostesses of Europe. Whereas Bob's moment of crisis is marked by the vertigo of the parallel lines holding his structured view together, Wishart's is marked by the garishly bright colours contained in his patterned composition. Glaring realities jostle with clear tones in "this new landscape" and undermine the harmony of the old pattern. Wishart now composes himself, wades out into the cluttered

40 Learning to Look

sea, again becomes the detached observer and reporter of this absurd and chaotic world, and returns to shore, inspired to assume a new mask in a new tableau (122-3). Outside the frame of this and all his tableaux lies an image that, although it controls and is the very raison d'etre of the tableaux, must never intrude on the tableau itself: the image of himself as a dirty slum child clinging to the dress of his servant sister, Glad. Bonnie's perspective too is fixed on an image from the past, outside the frame of present reality, that enables her to impose a pattern on the "petty disorder" (25), the untidiness of her life (28). Whereas Wishart dares not expose this image for fear of being exposed, Bonnie clutches the image of herself "in her wedding dress, authentically innocent, with a wreath of miniature roses straight across her brow" (22). What looms nastily, threatening to obscure this image now well in the background, is the image of herself involved in "a surpassingly silly affair," which has created a "fragmented, unreconciled" conception of herself (23) by severing the continuity of past and present. To establish a sense of continuity in her life, Bonnie, like Wishart, has created a number of masks, all softened by filtered or shaded light (2, 38, 125) and complemented by different coloured voices - blue, violet, green, coral (38, 46), nothing harsh or garish which tie past and present frames together by suggesting what Venus Bonnie might have become had her life not been ruined. The first section of the novel to be devoted entirely to Bonnie reveals her sitting before a triptych: a three-panelled mirror, no panel ever reflecting a violated Bonnie, although such an image occasionally threatens to take form (21-3). The centre panel is devoted to the "authentically innocent" Bonnie, whom she seeks "to duplicate every time she look[s] in the glass" (22) and for whom the present Bonnie is in mourning.11 The triptych is Bonnie's work of art, but surrounding it, outside the frames, is the chaos of life, the clutter of Bonnie's dressing-table, which, while being an "oblique stab" at Bob's desire for structure (25), is a clutter that has meaning and pattern for Bonnie. Among this clutter, mostly pictures representing the disorder of Flor's and Bonnie's lives, "two small likenesses" are isolated to one side "in curious juxtaposition." The significance of the "monster" Bob, clad in his tartan bathing costume and outfitted in underwater fishing gear (234), is clear enough: after all, Bonnie has entrusted one of her images - that of self-sacrificing mother, protecting her drowning daughter (49) - to Flor's new protector, Bob (68-9). The other likeness is that of "a tinted image of St Teresa of the Infant Jesus," the "Little Flower," a saint having "little function in Bonnie's life, except to act

41 Inside and Outside the Frame

as a timid anchor to Bonnie's ballooning notion of the infinite" (234). This image of Teresa of Lisieux (1873-97, canonized 1925), the most popular saint in the twentieth century, who had constantly to fight depression and the threat of nervous breakdown,12 must surely be associated with Florence, whose name suggests not only one of the greatest cities of art but also its Latin root, flora. Bonnie seeks to retain an image of an unblemished self both in the panels of her triptych-mirror and, with more serious consequences, in the image she projects on to her daughter. Through an inviolate Flor, Bonnie may connect past and present and absolve herself from the guilt of the infidelity that has caused a fragmented conception of self as well as the breakdown of her marriage and the impending breakdown of her daughter, who was exposed to her infidelity and then forced to live a wandering life. Flor becomes a projection of Bonnie's desire to be une belle dame sans merci, a sensual yet spiritual Venus (95, 105-6), a muse for a Burne-Jones or a Rossetti.13 Bonnie too must test this image, and her first critical moment comes as she transfers ownership of the image of Flor to Bob. Her main concern is whether there will be a place for herself in this new pattern, for if she is not in the composition, within the frame, she sees nothing at all, as her reaction to Bob's modern painting well illustrates (43). Lines, colours, and shapes are secondary to her perspective - that is, to how she perceives her own place in a new tableau. The real test comes at Cannes through a dream in which she envisages Flor as a monster-mermaid with "an ugly fish tail, like a carp's" (121-2). The image of herself, which she has kept alive through Venus Flor, risks violation: "She was perplexed by the truth that had bothered her all her life, that there was no distance between time and events. Everything raced to a point beyond her reach and sight. Everyone slid out of her grasp" (124). That evening Flor comes to Bonnie's room, and although Bonnie still fears that she is to lose her image of innocence, she is given a reprieve. Stroking Flor's hair, she thinks, "My mermaid, my prize. The carp had vanished from the dream, leaving an iridescent Flor. No one was good enough for Florence. That was the meaning of the dream. 'Your hair is so stiff ... it's full of salt'" (129). Unlike Bob, who actually tastes the salt, Bonnie remains outside the frame of suffering: for the moment the pattern holds, although it will be retested as Flor slips further away from her (for example, 47-8). But by adjusting her perspective, Bonnie can always rework the composition to accommodate any new figures or changes in the tableau. With an image of her past self firmly fixed, a pattern emerges from and expands with the chaos of life.

42 Learning to Look

Flor has had so many images projected upon her, without ever being given the opportunity to develop any authentic image of self, that colours, lights, lines, and shapes, which for her husband form an enclosed structure and for her mother an expanding pattern, become a circle that ultimately develops into a destructive gyre. As she loses any grip on reality, Flor tells Doris, "I'm a Victorian heroine" (72); she is not, however, the Victorian heroine of the Biedermeier, Impressionist, or Pre-Raphaelite traditions. She sees herself as "the sick redhead; the dying, quivering fox" (67).14 In some respects Flor resembles Munch's The Sick Child (1885), with her orange-red hair loose on the pillow, this orange-red being reflected in the table that juts in from the left foreground and the glass that seems to float in the right foreground, all these splashes of orange-red attempting to emerge from the overwhelming dark greens of the picture. Munch's painting departs from the usual pathos of the dying child in so many lesser Victorian paintings to offer a still life of pain. But the pain comes through the rounded shoulders of the mother, not the serene, brightly lit face of the dying girl, whose gaze is cast beyond the mother. This cannot be Flor, whose habitual "waking look" is one of horror (44). No, The Sick Child, despite the extreme suffering conveyed, is not the final image of Flor that the novel projects; rather, Flor is the shorn, contorted head of Munch's The Scream (1893), caught in a swirling world of lights, colours, lines, and shapes that do not compose themselves into any recognizable image for Flor. Bonnie thinks, "That was how you became, living with Flor. Impossible, illogical pictures leaped upward in the mind and remained fixed, shining with more brilliance and clarity than the obvious facts" (40-1). Flor has no particular moment of crisis when she tests her perception; she is constantly testing perceived against received truths. Contrary to what Bob thinks, the world into which Flor yearns to escape is not a dark world devoid of light but rather a shadowed one in which light and dark coexist. Whereas two years previously Bob sought darkness through the mysterious Flor, Flor sought light through the structured Bob. One night in Cannes, Flor woke up in the dark, and a bar of light from a car's lights swept across the ceiling and walls of the room. Flor perceived this as a beacon of concrete happiness. She saw that her own family "had been powerless as a charm" against suffering and believed that, lacking her own "emotional country, it might be possible to consider another person one's home" (111-12). She accepted the imperfection of her lover, but two years later, as Flor's trust in Bob's ability to provide light and focus in her life has been betrayed, she seeks relief in the shaded, grey world of dreams. "Light and dark [are] outside the scope of her

43 Inside and Outside the Frame

fears" (65); only "dreams experienced in the gray terrain between oblivion and life" (30) can provide her with the calm she now seeks. Within the chaotic world of bright lights and colours in which she finds herself, Flor can neither define nor place herself. Thus she attempts to assert her existence in "wide-skirted dresses in brilliant tones" - corals and reds (27). The two colours that are consistently associated with Flor are the complementary colours of green and red: green eyes, red hair. Significantly, these colours are what identify her as a McCarthy (151-2) and distinguish her from her mother's blueeyed, pale family, the Fairlies (15-16, 139-40), to whom Flor aspires with her insistence that she is anaemic (60, 67). While giving Flor a unique beauty, which Bob sees as luminous and Bonnie as alluring, red and green, being complementary, are ultimately destructive: when mixed, these pigments cancel one another out, leaving a grey tone or black. Meanwhile, red is Flor's assurance that the ruin is incomplete, as when she imagines Paris as having perished and the red geranium as "the only color on the gray street" (79-80). And the only image, among all those imposed on her, that Flor can grasp of herself is of a little red fox. In the dream marking her final slipping into insanity, the red fox departs in the green sea. Flor finds the "right direction" as she turns away from this red image, which, having merged with the green sea, must now be a grey-black speck, and grasps at yet another image of light. Riding her pony through a tunnel of green trees, she attains the light and perfection that mother and husband have demanded. In her dream, however, neither Bonnie nor Bob greets her but rather her father, a figure beyond the vanishing point formed by the parallel lines in the frame of here and now (84-5). This is the "image of torment, nostalgia, and unbearable pain" (55) that she has kept enclosed, suppressed, for so many years. The image of the fox is associated with the vertigo that Flor experiences in her attempt to make parallel lines appear as they should in a structured and framed world: tapering until they meet at the horizon. Both the fox and vertiginous lines are symbols of the "torment" that Flor began to experience when she was twelve (30), consequent on her exposure to her mother's infidelity and her father's rejection of them both (10) and coincident with her arrested sexual development (114). Like Touchstone from As You Like It, who speaks the words quoted in the novel's epigraph, Flor is seeking "a better place" outside the frame. By fourteen, she is striving to break "the circle of life closing in ... the family, the mother, the husband to come" (143), and so destroys the necklace of glass beads. Flor is caught in the centre, and her breaking of the necklace sets the scene in spinning motion: "the air was full of pigeons and bells and the movement of

44 Learning to Look

Flor breaking something because she wanted something broken" (19). Ten years later, at Cannes, the circle has become an underground tunnel in which she is enclosed and watched over by such insect enemies as Wishart (120-1). Nor does her marriage to Bob provide "a better place," a home for her. In Paris her movements are circumscribed within a "familiar triangle" (33). Only in her empty apartment, as she desperately seeks a dream world, can she broaden the tunnel and reach the triangle's vertex, "a funnel" (82). But the vertex becomes a vortex, and as Flor attempts to escape the circle, tunnel, and triangle, these shapes gyrate so rapidly that they form a whirlpool or whirlwind and suck her into the eye of the storm. Because Flor is inside the imprisoning frames, but with no sense of self, she can gain no perspective, and her field of vision gradually foreshortens as the shoreline narrows and the sea encroaches (28). Only the neutral grey world can stop the chaotic gyration of colours, lights, lines, and shapes that tosses her about like an alien piece of flotsam. Flor's image of the world is like Bob's modern painting, in which Flor sees no structure, no pattern, only exploding, floating forms, "absolute proof that the universe was disintegrating and that it was vain and foolish to cry for help" (43). She has become Munch's silent scream as the sea sweeps over her. There is no "better place," but as for Shakespeare's Timon, only an "everlasting mansion / Upon the beached verge of the salt flood; / Who once a day with his embossed froth / The turbulent surge shall cover,"15 a quotation partially uttered by Flor during her aimless wanderings through Paris (28). All the characters except Flor attain a perspective enabling them to accommodate received truths to perceived truths and thus to survive the "turbulent surge" of the gyration of these truths. Through the narration of Flor's cousin, George Fairlie, in the fourth section, which takes place several weeks after Flor's breakdown, the victim and survivors of the storm are portrayed. Bob and Bonnie, as they make their journey through the Paris night, are fixing an image of the new Flor into their structured or patterned frame: that of a tamed Flor, gentle and affectionate, feeding her husband little pieces of bread from her tray (136). This image George finds to be "a swampy horror on which his mind refusefs] to alight" (142): he retains the image of the old, rebellious Flor, petulantly breaking her necklace, glass beads scattering, pigeons eddying, bells ringing. But George, because he has a sense of self gained through a sense of family and place (8, 20, 139-40, 151-2), has his own perspective and therefore does not become a victim of the storm. He, like the survivors, finds structure and pattern in the world, but unlike them he sees life inside and outside the frame; he sees life whole. His is the eye of the truly

45 Inside and Outside the Frame

kinetic artist through which, insists Naum Gabo in an interview, the fourth dimension - time - can genuinely, not just optically, be introduced.16 George does not simply adjust his focus or shift his position to attain an optical illusion of having accommodated new images. He actually sees through eyes other than his own. Although, like Flor, he receives a multitude of exploding, fragmented images, unlike Flor, who is caught in the centre with no focus, he does not become a victim but a transmitter of the plurality of the images within the whole picture. Thus his narrative attains mobility as he becomes the glass bead that he no longer needs, receiving and transmitting colours, light, lines, and shapes, which, while gyrating, do so in the fashion of a kaleidoscope rather than a tornado. The first section of the novel, set in Venice, focuses on the day when George, as a child of seven, moves from a simple two-dimensional, through a reflective three-dimensional, to a kinetic and kaleidoscopic multidimensional view of life. At first, the Grand Canal is a flat, green, "hardly moving layer of morning muck." His parents' faces are flat and expressionless; George has thus far been unable to read "betrayal" under their composed masks. The static, stagnating scene is broken only when they are "churning across to the Lido" in an open boat (i). Once on the beach, everything returns to its twodimensional plane, although the memory of Bonnie has a sense of depth through the optical illusion of concentric circles: "She sat under a series of disks, in dwindling perspective; first an enormous beach umbrella, all in stripes, then her own faded parasol, then a neutralcolored straw hat" (2). The rest of the scene, even filtered through his memory, remains flat: Flor "sitting straight in the center of a round shadow"; the sea "so flat, so still, so thick with warmth you might have walked on it" (4). What propels George from this flat, two-dimensional perspective to a reflective three-dimensional one is the image of Flor "angry, and enjoying herself, all at once" as she breaks the encircling necklace of glass beads. The bead that George retrieves becomes "a powerful charm; a piece of a day" (5). In itself the bead cannot produce a kinetic image; it is simply a three-dimensional object, each dimension dependent on the other. But already, in Proustian fashion/7 the image of the bead is expanding, gaining a fourth dimension, because contained within it are not simply the images of green water, green sky, two two-dimensional images gaining a third dimension through reflection, but the associative value of all the images. Flor's eyes, as she looks at him, are "green as water, bright with dislike." His memory too adds a facet as he recalls "the heavy green water closing out the sky and the weight of clouds" on the day he fell into his

46 Learning to Look

grandmother Fairlie's pond (6). The images contained in this memory are placed over the images contained in the memory of Flor's green eyes looking at him with hate, and all are set in motion as he looks into the bead, "glass over glass," "water under sky" (7, 19). The associations gained through experience and memory have developed the bead into a multidimensional image. Ten years later, after an encounter in New York with the recently married Flor, George loses his talisman; however, his memory of Flor is so firmly implanted that it needs no objective verification, and he is able to travel "through a hole in time" to be with Flor (142-3). Because of this firmly fixed memory, George successfully undergoes the nightmare journey through Paris, guided by Bonnie and then Bob, confronting the "swampy horror" of the truth of the new, shorn Flor (142). He resembles the White Rabbit (139) in the illusionary world beyond the looking-glass. Most importantly, George is responsible for preserving the image of the old Flor, which fails to harmonize with this new image. At some points in the journey George's equilibrium is threatened as he experiences the same sensations as Flor (52, 138). His most precarious moment occurs when he becomes "physically aware of the absence of Flor." Like Flor several months earlier, George now loses "hold of the real situation" and observes the trio of which he is part from the outside (145). But for George this is merely a temporary sensation because he has a clear idea of who he is. George defies anyone to impose false images on him; thus he resists Bonnie's attempt to absolve her guilt by reversing his history with Flor's. Flooded by the plurality of truths, George realizes that if he still had the bead, he would rid himself of it (147-8). At the height of the onslaught he hears Bob voicing a desire for a simple, structured life and Bonnie insisting that Flor was afemmefatale. "The Seine was moving faster; the reflection of bridges cracked and shook" (150). The composition does not explode even though George knows that, "when the three separated that night, Flor would be lost. Their conversation and their thoughts were the last of the old Flor. If she was cured, she would be different" (152). As George crosses back over the bridge, he has "an authentic hallucination." Flor is not the ideal object of the Biedermeier, Impressionist, or Pre-Raphaelite traditions. George is a citizen of the twentieth century, and his final image of Flor is kinetic: "He saw Aunt Bonnie and Flor and the girl on the Quai Anatole France as one person. She was a changeable figure, now menacing, now dear; a minute later behaving like a queen in exile, plaintive and haughty, eccentric by birth, unaware, or not caring, that the others were laughing behind their hands" (154).

47 Inside and Outside the Frame

Has this mutability been forecast at the beginning of the night's journey by the "funny light over the Louvre, as if beams of warm, theatrical color were being played from somewhere behind" (132)? The old Flor, no longer fixed as a framed object of art in a gallery of old paintings, is no longer a spectacle at whom strangers daily stare. The image of the wild Flor has secured its place in a collective image of all displaced and suffering souls of whom Munch's scream has taken possession.18 Meanwhile, the new Flor, a broken Flor, sits in an asylum feeding her husband pieces of bread from her tray. Gone is the reflective green image. It no longer suffices. The "last blaze of day" fades. "Nothing remained except a vanishing saffron cloud" (132). FIRST-PERSON NARRATIONS! WATCHING AND WAITING AND WEIGHING

Whereas in "Autumn Day" the narrator, Cecilia Rowe, stands out in bold relief as she tells her story against an Austrian background, in the first-person narratives published in the early sixties - "Rose" (17 Dec. 1960), "When We Were Nearly Young" (15 Oct. 1960), "The Cost of Living" (3 Mar. 1962), and "Its Image on the Mirror" (1964) inside and outside, foreground and background, begin to close up. In the latter two stories, as the watcher becomes the watched, the existence of an audience outside the frame begins to take shape until, in some stories in The Pegnitz Junction and Home Truths, these watchers assume menacing stances. Barthes, in "Right in the Eyes," warns: "by dint of gazing, one forgets one can be gazed at oneself. Or again, in the verb 'to gaze/ the frontiers of active and passive are uncertain."19 When the reader is distinctly identified as watching the narrator - or as watching the narrator being watched - perspectives shift, and with them the planes and proportions of the composition. Our focus shifts to and fro between observed and observer, and with each shift we weigh and attempt to establish a balance between the two. The narrator's very consciousness of being watched may lead us to suspect the narrator's perception and perceptiveness, and hence the whole process is fluid. The narratives are transformed from the artificiality of soliloquies, musings to some unidentified audience, into dramatic monologues, whereby masks and poses are assumed, consciously or unconsciously, in the telling. In Gallant's first-person narratives, although there is a collapsing of inside and outside, thickness rather than flatness results because of the various planes attained. Visual artists have achieved similar effects through windows, mirrors, and

48 Learning to Look

innovative perspectives, which add planes and reproportion their pictures. As one example among many, the observer of Jean-Paul Lemieux's three-quarter-length portrait of his wife Madeleine, Fine Days (c. 1937),20 views a landscape over the shoulder of the sitter who is in profile, a perspective that raises a number of questions: What is foreground and what is background in this picture? What is the relationship between the sitter and the landscape she is observing? Who is watching the sitter? Similar questions are raised in our readings of Gallant's first-person narratives. "Rose" may be linked with "Jorinda and Jorindel" through common characters: Irmgard, who becomes the narrator of "Rose," and her nurse, Germaine, "notorious for making legends last."21 Describing a mysterious, emotionally wrought scene between her cousin Rose and her grandmother, a scene foreign to what Irmgard knows or understands of this cold, hard woman, Irmgard reflects: "It has the true quality of a hallucination, because I take no part. I can see them, but they cannot see me" (35). As the story unfolds, we see that the whole of childhood has become a hallucination for the emotionally deprived Irmgard. "Rose" is Irmgard's quest to answer the question with which she begins - "Childhood recollected is often hallucination; who is to blame?" (34) - and the numerous questions that follow. With only the "simple-minded" (37) Germaine to listen and respond, Irmgard's questions find no audience (other than ourselves) to appreciate the urgency of inquiry and no answers to establish a balance between inside and outside in her life. Irmgard identifies the hallucination first with the exotic and pampered Rose, whose appearance, attire, parentage, and upbringing make her a potential subject for a story; in contrast, Irmgard appears plain, and even her mother finds her circumstances boring (36). Yet this story, despite its title, is of the more ordinary Irmgard, for it is she who, while probing this hallucinatory memory, finds embedded another memory, that of the Germany of her ancestors. Irmgard's grandmother has delivered Irmgard a Germany "hard and thin, shadeless and plain, thin and cold: a landscape illuminated with a cold lemon sun, without warmth or irregular clouds." All this, articulated in "the German tongue," Irmgard was expected to understand, but instead it becomes "a heavy brown veil" (35). Later, but before the Christmas with Rose, there intervenes another memory on the "day the veil melted," and she sees "a woman in long skirts walking to and fro, talking, explaining. Suddenly she stops and throws a glance into a mirror. She peeps into a mirror, and what she sees - her own face - will always be as important to her as anything she has to say. I knew instantly what grown women were like and

49 Inside and Outside the Frame

how I would be one day. Voila les grandes. The veil must have reappeared; I remember nothing else." Closing the memory with a French rather than a German phrase highlights how totally alien this memory is to Irmgard. Immediately after recalling this scene of her grandmother, Irmgard articulates doubts about her connection to the grandmother and Rose and about her memories in a series of questions that convey an unsettling inversion of inside and outside (36). Mystery, richness, darkness, intuition lie outside, beyond reach; manners, rules, judgment, common sense have been so internalized that no balance, no middle ground, can be achieved. At the end of the story, because inside and outside cannot merge or blend, one must erase the other, an erasure captured in the image of the coloured chalk drawings with which the nuns, despite their black and white habits, have decorated the blackboard (34, 37). Whereas "Jorinda and Jorindel" permits only a detached ironic insight into the development of Irmgard's psyche, the first-person narration of "Rose" grants our inside view of how Irmgard's psyche struggles towards the obliteration of one side of the inside-outside dichotomy for a flat, comprehensible picture: "Chalk and dust hang suspended in the air; the air clears, and we are in a world of black and white again, black and white of nuns' habits, of leafless trees and snow, of white chalk on the practical board" (37). Who is to blame? Does Rose even exist? Early in the story Irmgard concedes that any knowledge of the existence of her Boston cousin is intuitive and that "the piecing together of facts overheard, overcharges the mind" (34). And, finally, who is there to listen to and answer Irmgard's questions? As a child, Irmgard has only Germaine to answer her questions, but as an adult writing, she returns to seek a new audience - the readers of "Rose" - to replace that audience long ago turned to dust and absorbed by the black and white world of memory (36). As eerie as the voids created in "Rose" and, several years later, in "Virus X," stories in which characters write to or ask questions of someone not there, is the inscribed but phantom audience of "When We Were Nearly Young." Neil Besner refers to this as "arguably one of the flattest of Gallant's stories" because, despite the reflectiveness and reflexiveness of the closing paragraph, "a first-person narrator remembers without commenting on the shaping force of memory," and hence the story remains "at the transcriptive, documentary edge of Gallant's fictional world."22 Again, however, as with earlier firstperson narrations, the perspective is appropriate. Here it first highlights and then provides an ironic commentary on the apparent

50 Learning to Look

collapsing of inside and outside. The narrator awaits the thing that will transform her life - money - but this waiting rather than what is being awaited becomes the very essence of her life, as it has for the four Spaniards rooming in the Madrid pension during Franco's regime.23 The flatness that Besner notes comes instead from the story's being addressed to a phantom audience. When the narrator addresses this audience directly - "I would like to tell a story about Filar, but nobody will believe it" - seeds for later stories are sown. She, Puss, and Jean (the narrators of "The Cost of Living" and "Its Image on the Mirror," respectively) ostensibly tell stories about someone else, but in so doing reveal their own stories. And who is this "nobody"? The narrator goes on to describe Filar posing in the Museo Romantica, which she thinks, or pretends to think, is her home, but more attention is given to the narrator herself, posing and seeking assurance that she is in the right century (65). In the end, the collapsing of inside and outside proves false because, despite the temporary merging of herself in this world, the narrator is different. She confesses that she has chosen Madrid deliberately, as part of a plan to "set" her currently "ill-defined" character against a distinctly foreign background so as to discover an "outline" of herself (68). What ultimately defines and foregrounds the narrator is her opportunity to escape from the lassitude into which she temporarily merges. Once circumstances, the "imponderables," change, her faith in free will is renewed (67, 70) and, with it, her energy and assertiveness to escape. Thus Madrid forever remains "a city ... as strange as anything I might have invented" (68). Even her diary entries are like frozen moments in time (67). Facts, not reflection on these facts, are all she can tolerate. Her diaries merely record squares and monuments, not the people themselves (71). Reflectiveness only comes through time. The nine intervening years mould fact into fiction, report into art, but as we look over her shoulder as she looks back on a foreign landscape, it remains foreign. Inside and outside, watcher and watched, exist in entirely different planes.24 With their progression towards an awareness of a world defined in historical and political terms and outside the frame of self, "The Cost of Living" and "Its Image on the Mirror" join Gallant's other multilayered stories of the early 19605. Granted, in "The Cost of Living" the sense of Parisian post-war malaise, as with Gallant's stories of the 19505, may seem overshadowed by the dramas played out in the hotel where two Australian sisters, Puss (Patricia, the narrator) and Louise, and two French "artistes," Patrick and Sylvie, reside. Similarly, wartime Montreal of "Its Image on the Mirror" may seem a mere backdrop for the tableaux Jean Price creates as she traces her

5i Inside and Outside the Frame

relationship with family members, particularly with her sister, Isobel. Gallant's comments during a 1969 CBC Television interview with Fletcher Markle might encourage a purely psychological reading of these two stories: she indicated that she had begun writing "Its Image on the Mirror" in 1956 but put it aside, later trying "the same idea in a shorter form ... in another way"; this idea is based on "the same relationship between sisters, one attempting to enter into the life of another. The theme of both is domination." Both stories are, however, explorations of "domination" in another sense as well: the domination and potential obliteration of content of significance and meaning - by form. "In another way," therefore, may indicate not only the bohemian/conventional dichotomy in the pairing of the sisters but also the narrators' differing "ways" of seeing. Puss reads character and scenes through voices that often clash with or even contradict the visual images her sister provides, whereas Jean, at least at the beginning, projects images but gives them verbal signification through the voice of her mother. Both narrators seize upon disembodied voices and static portraits, which they then cobble into collages, mosaics, and tableaux that fail to attain the movement of a story. Wendy Steiner contends that one of the most important conditions contributing to narrativity in the visual arts is that "the subject be embedded in at least a minimally realistic setting."25 Both narrators must discover a context for the disembodied voices and static images so that they attain a sense of narrativity rather than float in some atemporal, ahistorical realm.26 Midway through her narrative Puss says of Patrick, whom she believes to be her sister's lover, "I have often tried to imagine how he must have seemed to Louise. I doubt if she could have told you. From the beginning they stood too close; his face was like a painting in which there are three eyes and a double profile. No matter how far she backed off, later on, she never made sense of him. Let me tell what I remember." Puss, "having ceased to think of a face," now describes Patrick's voice but reveals little because she lacks any background to provide a context for it. He "seldom gestured,"27 and after Puss has recommended the "Irish misery" of Yeats rather than the more cosmic misery of Beckett in Endgame and Waiting for Godot with which to practise his English, Patrick "stop[s] declaiming" and assumes a "casual" tone (i/z).28 With no broader context into which to fit Patrick, Puss depends on what Louise has seen to describe what she herself sees. Puss admits that, for her, Patrick is a disembodied voice. Although she "can see a spiral of orange peel, a water glass with air bubbles on the side of the glass," she "cannot see him. There was the bluish smoke of his

52 Learning to Look

caporal cigarettes, and the shape of Louise, like something seen against the light ... None of it is sharp" (175-6). Whereas Louise stations herself so close to her subjects that she fails to see the whole for the details, Puss stations herself so far away that all her subjects are reduced to shapes silhouetted against a flattened (not merely collapsed) surface. When Louise is given a context for Patrick - a rejected visa application to the United States, tubercular lungs, a family home in the Dordogne - she responds with "sudden silence" (167). Both sisters lack a background on which to foreground Patrick - a stage name in any case - and thus fail to see him in a balanced, contoured way. Without this background, he is reduced to an empty, meaningless shape or form, a voice behind a wall for Puss (189), "three eyes and a double profile" for Louise. Nor does Puss portray herself in any Paris environment, despite having lived in Paris for six years as a foreigner without a work permit. She never describes herself at "that filthy gallery" (170) or in the homes of her music students, places where she goes every day to earn her living. Although it is to her sister's interest in music that she applies the word "useful" (158), music and art seem nothing more to her than a means to an end - survival. Music is particularly vulnerable to being stripped of content and reduced to forms, to mere abstractions reproduced mechanically.29 Appropriately, after Puss has confessed her inability to see Patrick clearly, she proceeds to describe a scene when she "saw Patrick and Sylvie together ... that was plain, and clear, and well remembered." She has discovered Patrick and Sylvie arguing like children, with Louise sitting "before the window, reading a novel, taking no notice of her brawling pair." As Puss recalls the young Collie Tate, to whom Louise was married for a brief time before he was killed in Malaya, a totally unrelated "story rushed to my lips without reason. Berlioz and Marie Pleyel seemed to me living people, and the facts contemporary gossip" (176). When forms are empty because lacking a context, they are easily invaded and penetrated by other discrete forms. The actors and their roles, the cast without a background, have become so confused that Puss arbitrarily switches faces and countries and centuries, just as the dead Collie Tate is confused with Patrick (184, 189), Puss's illness with Patrick's (172), Louise's goodness with Sylvie's (183), Puss's conventional appearance and attire with Louise's (159, 164, 176). In Puss's reading of Louise's failure to remember Collie, she sees Louise seeking lost love and lost youth through the forms of Patrick and Sylvie. Louise fails to see either Patrick or Sylvie, but her failure results from a kind of blindness different from Puss's, a consequence of proximity, not distance.

53 Inside and Outside the Frame

These confused mirrorings and substitutions are the culmination of a series of unconnected portraits that fail to reconcile the seen with the heard, the image with the voice, and are left suspended with no background and no significance. The opening picture, which Puss returns to on several occasions throughout the story, like the earlier portraits of Patrick, has been delivered through Louise: "Louise, my sister, talked to Sylvie Laval for the first time on the stairs of our hotel on a winter afternoon. At five o'clock the skylight over the stairway and the blank, black windows on each of the landings were pitch dark - dark with the season, dark with the cold, dark with the dark air of cities. The only light on the street was the blue neon sign of a snack bar. My sister had been in Paris six months, but she still could say, 'What a funny French word that is, Puss - snack'" (157). The word "snack" stands out as an aberration with no etymology and no indigenous consonant blends (sn and ck) in French.30 When a word, like a voice or an image, has no context, it lacks significance. It may stand out in bold relief, silhouetted, but is reduced to an empty shape with no substance. Recalling this scene, Puss adds several features, but again background is notably lacking. This void is filled by the incongruous presence of a boy's bicycle brought from Australia on which Louise has dreamed of exploring Paris. What is "plain" to Puss's eye is that all is poised for Sylvie to take advantage of her sister (161). Puss reduces Louise's background to the circumstances that have led to her sister's becoming a vulnerable "minor heiress" (171) and potential victim of Sylvie, a mere greedy opportunist. The final description of Louise's meeting of Sylvie is as frozen as the opening, and only now is it revealed that, as with the earlier "three eyes and a double profile" of Patrick, Puss has never seen this picture herself and has only reproduced against a flattened Paris backdrop what Louise has seen (168-70). For Louise, fixed on details and with a perspective from below, Sylvie, with her enlarged gestures, is too big to fit in any frame; therefore, much is unseen, and she fails to grasp the whole picture (for example, 173-5). When Louise is provided with details that do not fit - that Sylvie has relatives from whom she could seek support or that she has unregistered men in her room for whom the landlord must pay a fine - Louise tries to change the details to make Sylvie respectable (185-6). For the more distanced Puss, the "winter light" (168) merely touches Sylvie, failing to give highlights and contours; she remains as much "a blurred impression of mangled hair and shining eyes" (162) as she has ever been. Later, when Puss gives us her own picture of Sylvie, it is a portrait of a narcissistic opportunist seeking complicity with Puss (180). Any

54 Learning to Look

vitality Puss attributes to Sylvie comes through her voice expressing a desire for money (169, 187). Sylvie's vitality, like Patrick's smoothness, is a wall - or an expanse of water (183, 188, 189) - rather than a window through which Puss can see. Sylvie takes her place with the other "winter ghosts" that Puss is bequeathed after they have all left the hotel (191). Louise has always been fixed as "a winter figure in the museum room" (168); Patrick too comes to belong "to winter, and museums" (190). Puss is the only one to watch and witness Patrick leave; he does not "disappear" but is simply never seen by them again (183). There are no advances, only retreats. "The beginning had already rushed into the past and frozen there, as if, from the first afternoon, each had been thinking. This is how it will be remembered" (171). Before rounding off Louise's picture of Sylvie, Puss interjects with an earlier memory of Sylvie characterized by "a quality of strength that had nothing in common with the forced liveliness of Parisian girls, whose energy seemed to me as thin and strung up as their voices." Sylvie's "scrambling up or down a few steps, and shoving a foot back into a lost ballerina shoe" evokes this description from Puss: "Passing her, as she hung over the banister calling to someone below, you saw the tensed muscle of an arm or leg, the young neck, the impertinent head. Someone ought to have drawn her - but someone has: Sylvie was the coarse and grubby Degas dancer, the girl with the shoulder thrown back and the insolent chin. For two pins, or fewer, that girl staring out of flat canvas would stick out her tongue or spit in your face. Sylvie had the voice you imagine belonging to the picture, a voice that was common, low-pitched, but terribly penetrating" (162-3). Puss later "knew" that Sylvie "came from the southwest of France; I think that some of her people were Basques," but her reduction of this background simply to "peasant" (162) leaves the canvas as flat as in the Degas portrait. Nor does Puss say "I saw" or "spit in my face." She is too distanced for such intimacy. "You" observes the fragmented body parts so characteristic of Degas's dancers and "you" witnesses Sylvie's insolence; nevertheless, despite Puss's projection of her reductive reaction on to our reading of Sylvie in the final sentence above, it is obviously Puss herself who focuses on Sylvie's promiscuity. Carol Armstrong, in her study of Degas, argues that the "state of deshabille" - "His dancers are ... preoccupied, consistently involved with shoe ties and shoulder straps. Constantly correcting articles of dress that have come undone, perpetually irritated with their clothing, they repeatedly call attention to a thematics of dressing and undressing" - and "the bare backs, chests, arms and legs, expanses of calf,

55 Inside and Outside the Frame

glimpses of cleavage, and exposed shoulder blades (serving as the reverse image of breasts)" insinuate Degas's connection of the dancers with the world of prostitution.31 Puss makes similar insinuations but attempts to channel them through us. With a description such as Puss gives of Sylvie, fluid movement between audience, the watcher, and subject, the watched, should occur as the two switch places, particularly in this case since the "you," the watcher, is being stared at, spurned, and penetrated by a voice. Similarly, in a typical Degas painting of the dance, "the suggestion [is] that you, the viewer, are there - at the edge, in that artificially illuminated twilight,"32 but closer analysis of the painting's "perspectival construction" reveals an "uprooting of that perspective and the exclusion of that vanishing point ... [which] constitute the negation of the legible connection between body, gaze, and space, the elision and reversal of containing world and contained bodies, the problematization of the bodily basis of seeing and picturing, and a fundamental disturbance of the space of the viewersubject, of the power to dominate arrogated to vision, and of the viewer's claim that to see was to be able to know, to measure, distinguish, and judge, and to read."33 In Puss's story all the watching occurs on discrete planes that fail to cohere into an integrated, contoured whole because all the characters dismiss or ignore background. Sylvie and Patrick, as watchers, are Puss's stereotypical French. They may see her in "quarter-profile of cheek, ear, and throat" but never in "full-face" when "the head snapped to, and you saw the lines of duty from nose to mouth" (159). Puss finds a description of Louise that Sylvie has written as "part of a cast of characters around whom Sylvie evidently meant to construct a film," in which she compares Louise to the Bronte sisters, flattened into one figure: "the English lady who wore her hair parted in front and lived to a great old age after writing many moral novels and also Wuthering Heights" (160). This static picture, these words, like so many of the other frozen snapshots and portraits, fail to provide the background that a film or panoramic picture can. After all the characters have themselves faded into the past and become figures like those in a sepia portrait, Puss sorts through the evidence she has assembled - stolen glimpses into the rooms and lives of the cast, words and erasures and edited columns from purloined letters and diaries and forgotten ledgers and remembered conversations - but she never assumes the right distance or angle to achieve any sense of balance or contour. "The Cost of Living" becomes a collage of what other people have seen and heard, delivered through the amorphous voice of Puss. Like the word "bonheur," with which the

56 Learning to Look

story closes, "the meaning depends on the sense of things." With no clear background the word "means what you think it does" - it is arbitrary and "ambiguous" (193). Although Puss goes through a period of being "dream-haunted" (188), ultimately she is left with nothing but "winter ghosts." As in "Rose" and "When We Were Nearly Young/' the narrator, alone, converses with a phantom reader. For Puss, the words of the title, "cost" and "living," are restricted to expenditure and profit. Neither Puss nor Louise achieves a balance between "Necessary" and "Unnecessary" (168) in her relationships because neither is able to find a plane on which to weigh seen and unseen, surface and texture, foreground and background, figure and field. The agile reader, however, reading Puss through her reading of her "winter ghosts," wending a path through the forward and backward movement of the narrative, can experience and appreciate the resonance of the doubled and redoubled meanings of the words "cost" and "living," misunderstood or ignored by Puss, and so not pay the "price" of Puss's flattened canvases. EXHUMATION OF PERSONAL, AND PUBLIC MEMORIES

FAMILY,

In many respects "Its Image on the Mirror" begins where "The Cost of Living" ends: with winter ghosts frozen in fixed tableaux, the price paid for having lived years with and among those who suffer from "fear of the open heart."34 But whereas Puss lacks self-knowledge about her inability to see and read the life around her and cannot change because she is so frozen into the limitations of her character and the choices she has made, Jean Price imparts a story of herself in her relationships with family and environment that, in its telling, gives her glimpses of her own life that can make a difference. In contrast with Puss, who is condemned to live isolated, with only ghostly forms and disembodied voices, the memories of those she has frozen out of her life, Jean has an expanded family structure into which she can fit by assuming the conventional forms of daughter, sister, wife, mother. Early in the telling of her story, in the first of the seven sections, Jean records an awareness, reached as her sister, Isobel, seems about to escape through marriage to a "dashing doctor" and a move to Venezuela (71), of the emptiness of these restrictive forms within the structure: "It seemed to me I had waited years for life to begin and that the false start of after-war was all there had been to wait for. The shape of life was pressed on stones in the form of ferns and snails, immutable. Yesterday, tomorrow: stones had

57 Inside and Outside the Frame

picked up the pattern and there was nothing I could change. Isobel had broken a stone" (63). Both war and marriage - public and personal events that once promised change within the structures of society and family - have failed to better the world or their lives and have simply perpetuated old ways and meaningless forms: "Autumn was spring, a false promise, in the old days. The first metallic morning reminded us that everything could change, and with this false beautiful expectation we were tricked into winter" (113). When Isobel leaves, long before Jean's articulation of these growing doubts about the forms her life has taken, Jean is left totally bereft (64). Why is Jean now, many years later, motivated to tell her story and that of her family and society? What prompts her to inscribe this narrative, one that does not simply chart but itself inspires Jean's growing awareness that she can change and so prevent her "shape" from being fossilized with those of family and community members who have gone before and will come after? The story builds on a series of crises, but few of the difficulties lead to actual change. Grief, reduced to words and gestures that are blank, meaningless forms, fails to mitigate loss (61, 65-6, 117-18). Only when clearing out the family home does Jean begin to realize that she must somehow alter her reductive, silencing "censor's eye" if she is to realize her own voice and thus exorcize the ghosts in her life, widen both her personal and public perspective, and attain the balance needed to see humour in life by accepting weakness in herself and others (85-6). Much later, Jean's memories gain clarity and just proportions as she attains a broader historical perspective against which she can foreground her own and her family's character: "The seed of our characters came from another continent. Like the imported daisies and dandelions, it was larger than the parent plant. Flowering in us was the dark bloom of the Old Country - the mistrust of pity, the contempt for weakness, the fear of the open heart." She then recalls the most contracted picture of all: her own image in the mirror, more particularly "a spider's web of lines tak[ing] form at the corner of my eyes." She remembers how she leaned her head against the mirror and, at some point then or later, saw "the indelible web" to be indicative not just of her aging but also of her angst in Montreal during the late years of the war, waiting fulfilment of the promised changes that peace and returned husbands were to bring (88-9). Modifying her way of seeing - finding a juncture between outside and inside, public and personal, vastness and minuteness - Jean

58 Learning to Look

discovers her own voice. For much of the story she proudly, even smugly, describes herself "reproducing" her mother's "flat voice," "the flat Allenton laugh," and muted gestures (65, 96). Because Jean has "been brought up not to say what [she] thought" (107), she begins her story by reproducing visual images based on what she has heard, but she hesitates to explicate or interpret these images for fear that they will seem more fantasy than truth. Counteracting Jean's self-satisfaction is a more compelling need: a yearning to communicate with her sister. Through a meaningful dialogue with Isobel, Jean believes she can catch more than mere glimpses of love and adventure, of a life different from her own, that she imagines Isobel to enjoy. By telling her story, Jean comes to realize that, unlike her husband, Tom (68, 79), she desires not simply to pass on family traits and biases, gestures and voices, through the generations. For Jean's mother, with her flat voice, flat laugh, and flat mind, all of which Jean by twenty has reproduced, there is a world outside Allenton where love and adventure - "all life" (64) - occur. This life is, however, on some inaccessible plane beyond the reach of ordinary people; moreover, it is on a plane that ordinary people spurn, opting instead for respectability (84, 98). Remembering and writing lead Jean to recognize that there can be no certainty in memories but that the process of exhumation is itself essential: "I am the only person who can tell the truth about anything now, because I am, in a sense, the survivor" (141). Remembering and writing unleash elements of "all life": buried family secrets and mysteries, or what Heather Murray interprets as "the uncanny," "the return of the repressed," that which exists beneath the surfaces of even the most ordinary of families.35 Throughout her telling of her story, Jean often seems on the verge of exposing a lurid secret about herself or family members. Certainly some private matters, some ghosts, are made public - her father's beatings of Frank (81-2); Isobel's love affair with Alec, pregnancy and abortion (ironically, it is Jean who is "swollen" with the secret of the affair [90]); Jean's pragmatic attitude to procuring herself a husband, and Jean's mother's complicity in this (69, 101-3); cryptic references to the disappearance and death of Isobel's cat Julie and the drowning of a sailing companion (94,101-2,114) - but Jean's text seems only to have begun to reveal the truth. Looking back on the Labour Day weekend, Jean says enigmatically: "I would never have sought revenge for myself, for the past, but I had it now through my children, who would never be mistaken for anything except themselves" (77). Although the revenge seems to be nothing more than exposing her sister's failure at love (91), the

59 Inside and Outside the Frame

motivation for doing so now is anything but clear. If Jean's text is not revenge sought for herself, she has perhaps sought it for her children, the post-war generation. With this generation, attempts have been made to break down barriers and frontiers (93). But are these liberal sentiments also empty gestures? And in collapsing inside and outside, has difference been devalued? Has the sense of mystery in difference, in other, been lost? Has Jean simply passed on to her children a denial of the world of imagination (84)? Or is Jean attempting to pass on a view of life stripped of false idealism or repressed mystery or unattainable fantasy, a view accessible to those who see clearly? In her interview with Markle, Gallant remarks: "Love mirrors. I have a book about them. Not so much looking at oneself as, oh, the whole philosophy of mirrors, the image, the thing going on and on, the eternal thing." This story explores the transformation of "its image on the mirror" to "our images in the mirror" as Jean's text discovers the juncture between inside and outside and thus acquires the depth of re-created forms, not just the linearity of reproduced forms. As Jean begins her story, she feels doomed to pursue her sister "into infinity" (85), trying to reach her as a survivor would the dead through a medium. She feels doomed to carry on forever a "deranged dialogue" (133). To break this chain and communicate something meaningful, Jean, in the epigraph from Yeats's "The Shadowy Water," addresses her reader as a "Fellow-wanderer," and then expresses the desire to "mix ourselves into a dream / Not in its image on the mirror!" (55). The image must not be simply on the surface of the mirror but embedded within memories and dreams.36 First, life must be looked at clearly, stripped of platitudes and false promises. Then Jean - and her audience - may enter the world of memory and dream, a fragmenting of what is, has been, and will be. Fragmented as it is - remembered glimpses and phrases - "Its Image on the Mirror" becomes the thwarted, even forbidden conversation with her sister. Only through this dialogue, both welcomed and feared, Jean believes, will she discover unrealized corners of her own self (67). Only through this dialogue will she speak not just to those who have gone before - now ghosts in her life, idealized forms of sisterhood, motherhood, and humankind, which intrude and overwhelm as she pieces together her story and history - but to the survivors - an ordinary sister, husband, and children: "my audience of small, intent faces" (85). Like Linnet Muir, in "Varieties of Exile," although "one's impulse was always to write to the dead"37 - to explain, to justify - ultimately a discourse that aspires beyond the confessional will address the living. "Its Image on the Mirror" may

60 Learning to Look

be the long-awaited conversation with the dead, but the audience the "we" - embraces a wide range of survivors. The crises, or potential crises, reveal themselves through isolated snapshots and tableaux that only in the final section attain the flow of a moving picture with a story to tell, as layers of background landscapes resonate with multiple possibilities. Each snapshot or tableau, struggling to attain an appropriate perspective to establish balance and just proportions, reveals the evolution of Jean's voice. In the opening section of the story Jean revisits the first tableau, this of a fairly recent scene. The seeing and hence writing process are still static. Jean ricochets from present to past to present in disjointed blocks of material as she ricochets from memory as artwork to memory as remembered scene to broad historical statement. And while there are intimations that more exists beneath the surface than meets the eye, the "gesticulating" and "pointing" and "indicating" are at a primitive stage of development (57-8). They are like the "purely adverbial terms" of the traditional writer that, Barthes argues, "describe nothing: linguistically they are of a gestural order and have no more density than a cybernetic message" and create only an illusion that they have "any power of suggestion or representation."38 Jean has not acquired the language to articulate the juncture of then and now. The voice is a reproduction of her mother's, "flat and calm and certain I was right" (125); already, however, this voice is undermined by her realization that she cannot look at this scene through her mother because, Jean tells us, Mrs Duncan has sold the house to a religious order as "a gesture of total renunciation." Jean intuits that her mother's facile dismissal of memories and the past on to the rubbish heap of those things unseen will not be her own way of seeing and that such dismissal results only in ghosts that refuse to be so easily dismissed. At this point in her recalling of past events, "its" image, the image of a ghost that "watched me watching myself in the glass," is both foreground and background, watcher and watched, but connected only tangentially with the watching image of Jean herself as she equates the ghost with those lost, the dead Frank and departed Isobel (60). Until she situates herself at the juncture of living and dead, herself a kind of medium, she cannot achieve just proportions. Nor has Jean the language to explore the juncture of inside and outside, subject and object. The various figures, or groups of figures, float in unrelated planes. Although Jean is seated beside her mother, she seems to be looking through the car's front window with her mother in the foreground, "the overflow of the moving" behind her, the father keeping guard over the family inheritance yet further

61 Inside and Outside the Frame

behind, then the moving-van driver, and finally the French Canadian children in an uneven line (57-8). Suddenly the whole scene reverses, and as "the faces of the unknown children, like ours, are turned to the house," they all see the same thing - past, present, and future collapsed: "On the west lawn, where the copper beech has shed a few leaves, a tall priest in black points. We can see, through the trunk of the tree gone transparent, the statue of St Therese of Lisieux that will stand in its place very soon" (58). The reader joins in watching the collapsing of time through the collective eyes of adults end children, English and French, family and strangers. The second part of this first section moves into a blunt denial of the existence of the scene and of the possibility that Jean has reproduced this tableau from remarks made by her mother. Again Jean ricochets between stating what she has and has not seen. She concedes that she has created a tableau from what she has been told, yet also, groping towards her own voice, that "I do not have to see to remember the murmuring seminarists and their pale tormented faces" (58). Already the seemingly neat, planed tableau of the opening scene is crowded with seen and unseen, past and present and future, those who are watching and those who are watched. As yet, however, it cannot "tell a story," as in the crowded religious paintings, despite the parallels we might be tempted to make between religious figures mentioned in the opening scene - Judas, Daniel, the Prodigal and his father (57-8) - and the figures in the Allenton tableau. The canvas is too crowded and lacks foreground and background: the picture looks both outward and inward; it seems to move forward and then backward. Later in the first section the crowded canvas becomes a kaleidoscope of faces: those of Alec, Davy, and Tom, all men from Isobel's life; Jean's own is "face down" in the sand (64). Because Jean's horizons have widened - first in Montreal and then as a married woman with her own family - she makes some of the mental leaps of which her "bemused" mother is incapable when confronted with experience beyond what she has seen (61). When Jean returns to the opening tableau later in the first section, she speaks of her own desire to break with empty forms, empty words and gestures, that have been passed down to her. Jean wants to touch her mother in a meaningful way; Jean wants her mother to see through Jean's eyes, rather than Jean always seeing through her mother's eyes (66). Jean is unable to act on her impulse; nevertheless, this insight into an essential difference between survivor and ghost, between herself and her mother, means that she begins to see the scene differently from her mother as the older woman leaves the house and town

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"where she had spent her life" (65; emphasis mine). On the trip to Montreal, as Jean observes her parents' "dramatic" silence and staring, and her mother putting her hand over her father's, she senses that the gestures and words of leaving - meaningless blanks - have swung the opposite way: to a public display of pain (69). Now, as Jean recollects these past sentiments from a safe position in the present, and as she conveys them to her "audience" - sister, children, husband she may seem so entrenched in conventional forms that her desire is for her children to be air-brushed reproductions of herself, each an "image on the mirror" but an image from which all flaws and protuberances have been erased to reflect perfected forms of self. That the first section ends with her mother's speculation that her perfect daughter, Isobel, would "never have brought me to live here" might reinforce such a reading. But the interjection of Jean's "the old madwoman" to describe her mother voicing this speculation39 also suggests that Jean has seen "images in the mirror"; she has seen that the reverse side of repression is madness; she senses that only by confronting repressed feelings - part of "all life" - can the empty poses and meaningless gestures be eradicated. In section i, seen and unseen, past-present-future, object and subject, repressed ghosts and conventional gestures, foreground and background, jostle each other for equal space on the crowded screen on to which Jean's narrative is projected; in contrast, section 2 is scaled down, the world contracted to immediate family at the Duncan family cottage on Labour Day weekend in 1955. In place of the medieval religious tableau that opens section i, another kind of religious painting dominates section 2: the Holy Family of High Renaissance art.40 Jean replicates such traditional portraiture, with adults composed in a triangular adoration formation while children idle innocently in the wings; however, the "harmony" cannot last, and the "pretty picture" is interrupted by "a crash and a roar: the Shostakovich Fifth" that Poppy plays. The crash reminds Jean and reader that as pretty as the picture may be, it is simply that - a false idealization of family fellowship and childhood innocence. Too much has been eliminated. What stands now between the two circles, one of adults and the other of children, is Poppy Duncan, Frank's daughter, "neither child nor grownup." Ironically, Poppy, whose "name is unfortunate," challenges the conventional symbol of remembrance even though she is the only child to bear the Duncan name. She is the rebel with her orange lipstick and "hideous wig" of dyed "rusty-orange" hair: "She is unlike any of us" (73-5). Jean stretches her canvas to embrace Poppy because Poppy, so placeable, makes the pattern whole. Jean's contentment, which

63 Inside and Outside the Frame

imposes harmonious compositions on disparate elements, is shattered not by the crash of Poppy's music nor by garish tones but by a shift in perspective as Jean's "gaze" falls on another family grouping whose members cannot be appropriated and framed so facilely as that of the adolescent Poppy: that of her sister "with her husband and her two monkey-babies" (75). Another static tableau emerges to replace the original Holy Family scene as Jean tries to adjust forms and figures that resist cohesion: "From the lawn, against the luminous yellow haze on the lake, she looked thin and sallow and all of a color with her saffron dress. As for her sons, curly-haired, eyes too liquid, eyebrows too dark, they might have been adopted. She and her family were isolated and lost." No chink opens through which Jean, with her "blue denim skirt ... white cotton shirt, and tennis shoes" (76) and her preconceived image of Isobel in "romantic Caracas ... a paradise of coral islands" (64), can enter; background and foreground have closed up in a luminosity of yellow haze, sallow complexion, and saffron dress. This tableau is superseded by yet another in which Jean sees herself as she wants Isobel's family grouping to see her (76). Jean cannot sustain this picture for long as they form their own family portrait, enclosed in a frame - their own conventions, gestures, and laughter - from which she is excluded. This exclusion costs her a final opportunity to rend the frame of self and converse with her sister but secures for her the sense of safety that closure brings: "the world contracted. Left behind, the rest of us were a family again" (77). Even the family grouping is contracting. Earlier, Jean's oldest son, Jamie, who has been apportioned his share of the Duncan-Price biases, has refused "a moment of complicity" that would align his and his mother's stares and so exclude his uncle (71-3). When Alfredo, an outsider, seeks the company of another outsider, Poppy, Jean records her "view of their two heads. Poppy's was rusty-orange and slightly larger than his" (73). These family groupings and pairings are too contracted. Jean has grown beyond the Duncan-Price proviso not to "complicate a simple situation" (80), but she must still eliminate frames that so clearly demarcate inside from outside. From the crowded tableau of section i and the contracted composition of section 2, section 3 fans out through present and past, seen and unseen, survivors and ghosts, collective and personal memory. Much of section 3 is given over to capturing the nightmarish quality of the period of waiting in Montreal and the emptiness felt as promises proved hollow. Always there was the fear that, if family relationships failed, there was no chance for other relationships. Jean recognizes that this period of waiting was a time when she could

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have made changes in her life. She has felt a link between herself and refugees waiting for the war to end so they can resume life, but ultimately their worlds were too different. Thus her attempted dialogue, although glossed in hierophantic language, was another empty gesture: "Into this social vacuum (I shall not go) I make conversation" (96). Here in a city full of women waiting, Jean could have found other sisters with whom to strike up a meaningful dialogue. But these other women, the Almas and Monas, had their own obsessions, and thus "conversation turned on the thoughts of idle or unloved women" (108), never stretching beyond their immediate daily concerns. Jean resorted to silent, imagined conversations with her "invisible mother" back in Allenton (97, 127). Their various obsessions prevented all those "cast up by the war" (117) from finding balance; likewise, Jean's obsession - finding a chink to enter her sister's life - overshadowed all else. Only now as she looks back from her present standpoint and forward through the perspective of history, only in the telling, is equilibrium attained: "I warmed my hands at [Isobel's] life. I cherished any reason for visiting her apartment, staring at the Matisse drawing torn from a magazine and pinned to the wall, seeing the envelopes of letters, the harsh wartime paper of letters from overseas, the ends of cigarettes she had smoked with a stranger, the four yellow tulips drooping in a milk bottle on the window sill" (92). The reference to a Matisse drawing, itself out of context - a magazine reproduction pinned to a wall - reminds us of the tyranny of form without content, a theme making itself felt in a more political way in the Pegnitz Junction and Home Truths stories of the early 19605. Similarly, the empty envelopes, burned-out cigarettes, and the four yellow tulips, which become unaccountably associated with the smell of gardenias, Isobel, and death (105), are forms that insinuate the hollowness of promises during this period of waiting. One other picture featured in this third section is a "lavish" portrait of Isobel by the sisters' mutual friend Suzanne Moreau, a picture "curiously decorated, trailing feathers and loops of colored stones" and therefore reminiscent of the arabesque decorativeness of Matisse's portraits, such as his series of drawings of women with plumed hats. Yet when Jean goes on to describe "the face in the picture [as] ugly and sharp ... a bird; Suzanne has called it Tersonnage aux Plumes'" (95), the portrait is more suggestive of Expressionist painters' portraiture, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's series of Berlin Strassenszene (1913-15), primarily featuring women with plumed hats, the best known perhaps being FunfFrauen aufder Strasse (i9i3).41 Wolf-Dieter Dube, describing the women in this painting, observes

65 Inside and Outside the Frame

that they "appear in black, yellow and green, like fantastic birds in artificial light. The composition is drawn out vertically, the picture surface filled to the very top edge, the foreground and background bound together in a relationship full of tension. The mechanics of the arrangement are deliberately emphasized; colours and forms interlock, engaging each other within the structure like feathers. Yet every individual line is elegant and discrete; the individual form, the hieroglyph, emerges in isolation from the overall form."42 Section 3 closes with Jean's unsuccessful attempts to lock this fantastic image of Isobel into the background of Montreal in any visually artistic way: "The face is evasive, turned away. She has nothing to say. She will not speak to me out of her death, or out of my dreams ... She walked toward me out of the dark once ... The city was silent and abandoned; nothing moved" (97). Again, there can be no communication in dreams or in memory because Isobel is mere form, a manifestation of Jean's "idea about love," so as Isobel "emerged out of the dark" with Alec, they "took form as a couple" (98). The sharpened features of Suzanne's portrait have been replaced by rounded contours reminiscent of human figures depicted by Montreal painters such as Lyman, Surrey, and even Lemieux. The moulded shapes are as devoid of meaning as the decorative plumes: "Our breath hung between us in white clouds and there was something marble and monumental about the group we formed in our winter clothes on the white street." Rather than seeing them as the empty silhouettes they are, Jean instead clings to the conviction that "they were such a solid being that I would be invisible beside them. They were the lighted window; I was the watcher on the street" (99). Section 4 marks the beginning of a much more tentative voice from Jean as she becomes increasingly conscious of the "misleading impressions" that her narrative may be eliciting (100-1). As her certainty, the absoluteness of her mother's tone, gives way to ambivalence and ambiguity, she glides between past and present. When Jean speaks of the war years in Montreal, she speaks of the "Sargasso" of their shapeless domestic lives (108). With such formlessness in their own lives, the images of the preceding section, with its emphasis on forms and gestures - yellow tulips in a milk bottle on a window sill, an exotic bird-woman, a monumental couple emerging from the dark - are given a context. Such a flat and lifeless existence that these women have in an equally flat and lifeless Montreal landscape compels them to grasp any form or colour that seems to have substance, only to learn that it too is hollow. In this section Jean also speaks of depression - her own and Alma's - and of Alma's attempted suicide in 1952, all caused by their sinking into the morass

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of a world with no absolutes, no forms (109-10, 112). The shapelessness of death is an extension of the shapelessness of life. In the fifth section Jean seeks to understand death as experienced by survivors and to give it a shape, a body, to inhabit. The empty platitudes and rituals surrounding death fail to suffice during the carnage of war so far removed from their daily lives. With the victims living and dying in landscapes that the survivors cannot picture, the deaths seem as unreal as the war itself. They are like Suzanne's husband, who, when he "vanished from her life," was forgotten "because she could not imagine where he was": "her mind's eye could not reach the real place we had seen as a makebelieve country in films. She could not see the barracks of a prison camp because she had already seen them, gray and white, with film stars suffering and escaping and looking like no one she knew. Surely there was a true landscape - gray, flat, spotted with gray trees and gray wooden houses, where foreign people with gray faces walked in the rain?" (128). Nor has Jean the means - even years later - to confront Frank's death: "Although I speak now of his death, his death did not occur. What happened was that he was never seen again. He disappeared, like Suzanne's husband, in an unfamiliar landscape, under cinema rain, and we never saw him again" (129). Wherever Jean looked were traces of the Empire, of Montreal locked in a time-warp; however, the inherited gestures and words seemed to Jean as real as the stones, pediments, and Victorian gargoyles (115-16). In retrospect, she comes to see that all are anachronisms, empty forms that no longer suffice or serve any purpose, platitudes that have prevented the survivors from truly confronting death and loss. The only images of Frank's death with which she is left are those that hold false promise - "When Frank was killed, the days were drawing out by two minutes in twenty-four hours, and the sky was blue as a plate" (117) - and so the only way she can exorcize his ghost is by blunt statement, made at the end of the sixth section, as no picture holds true: "On Monday he went to the station alone. We did not say goodbye, and I never saw him again" (146). The reality of grief and loss for her family, and particularly for her father, is captured, at the beginning of section 6, in the black glass of the Duncan's sun porch (130-1). No amount of posing or repression can mask the genuine emotions. This tableau contrasts with the opening tableau because the view is simultaneously from outside and inside and because no pretentious signalling of signification is needed. The images and their reflections speak for themselves. The neighbours' prying eyes and gossip cannot negate the grief that Mr Duncan feels. Its image on the mirror has become images in the

67 Inside and Outside the Frame

mirror; the ghost of Frank, for Jean, has been exorcized in this remembering (131). Thus the penultimate section of Jean's story is given over to remembering Frank when he was alive, particularly in his final days in Allenton and Montreal. These newly resurrected images have the contours, substance, and fluidity that previous images of life in Montreal failed to achieve. Associated with Frank's visit to his sisters in Montreal are the esprit and esprit de corps that Jean feels with Suzanne Moreau. Suzanne, "white-skinned, black haired," stands out in bold relief against the grey Montreal background. She "crashed through life," rippling the surface of the usually quiet Montreal streets (141), and brought Montreal to life for Jean: "I remember walking away from her studio down a curved, foggy street, while flower-shaped lamps came out of the fog, and the cobbles of the street shone as if they had risen from the sea; I held the little parcel of whatever it was she had given me - stockings, or a rolled-up sketch - and I remember thinking, Now, this is the happiest moment of my life, I shall never be happier than now" (143). This happiness contrasts with that other sense of harmony and consequent contentment on Labour Day weekend (75). Earlier memories are convention-bound, but now Jean has reached a point in the dredging of memories that simple pattern, pretty pictures, and monumental contours cannot satisfy, and an awareness that they are, at best, transient. In miniature, this transformation can be traced in a series of images that, in the third section, are meaningless forms but here begin to take on proportioned contours and a meaning and life of their own: "I remember now why Tom said [Isobel] smelled of gardenias. There were four long yellow tulips in a milk bottle on the windowsill; they threw their shadows on the bare floor, in a rectangle of pure winter sun" (135). The smell of gardenias, the yellow tulips, the red counterpane, and the oblong of light (136,139) are the remains of this last day with Frank, a day in which they blend as siblings, with their shared past, similarities and differences, and awareness but tolerance of each other's eccentricities and shortcomings. It does not signify that conversations are desultory and fragmented (136). The memories as images with significant associations are what matters. When they attend Suzanne's party that evening and Jean laments that it was a pity she "could not see [Frank] for the first time," as others see him, she knows that this is impossible. He is more than the "grave, friendly smile" that those just meeting him see: he is also son, brother, husband, and father (145). Jean has a context replete with multiple associations in which to place Frank, unlike those at Suzanne's party, "where everyone represented something other than

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himself, [and] Frank in his uniform was simply heroic" (143). Chameleon Frank has picked up this tendency and thus reduces all the abstract paintings he views to a single idea. Instead of questioning Suzanne's intention, "he thought that everything looked like something. It was the first abstract art he had seen, except in magazines ... He saw a fish in a bowl with flowers behind the bowl" (144). Where no content is apparent, but in a society where form is assumed to have meaning, form is filled with whatever content comes to hand, again a theme that this story has in common with Gallant's more political stories of the mid-1960s. The end of section 6 revisits the end of section 5, but with a difference. In the fifth section, as the sisters leave Montreal on the day that news of Frank's death has reached them, Jean describes Isobel's image in "the blackened windows of the train" as a "boned face ... like a dramatic photograph" (129), flat and histrionic. In the sixth section Jean observes that "we saw another lighted train pass with such speed that we might have been standing still. The drawn-out sweeping whistle rushed by the windows. It was the Boston train, which had seemed to me on winter nights before I married the sound of hope and escape. Afterwards it was the sound of nostalgia, as if there were a journey I had once made and now remembered" (146-7). This is the moment towards which the journey of telling has been tending through all the loops, returns, and inertia. Inside and outside, private and public, foreground and background, near and far, seen and unseen, stasis and movement, attain an equilibrium at the moment that the future and the past cross at a present juncture, only to separate and become the past "now remembered." The collapsing of all these planes means that Jean, in the final section, has some success in balancing image and word, visual and written, so that the resulting tableaux yield their own stories. At first, she freezes a moment in her family's history, during the three-day period of mourning for Frank, but the result is neither flat nor static: "One night I saw, or thought I saw, or may have dreamed, that my father sat on the stairs weeping. Our mother stood a few steps below him so that their faces were nearly level ... Everything in that scene, which I must have dreamed, spoke of the terror of pity" (147). The "truth about times like these" (118), then, can be caught in this image of "the terror of pity," whatever the source of the image - eye, mind's eye, dream, or memory. Such images tell a story that embraces both public and private landscapes. The "mistrust of pity" brought over as a "dark bloom" from the Old Country has found full flowering during these war years and manifested itself in "the terror of pity." Likewise, "the contempt for weakness" and "the fear of the open

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heart" (89) have equally distorted - even perverse -manifestations. This picture of "the terror of pity," given and received, rounds out Jean's portraits of both her mother and father. It gives contours to the image of "our father in his wretchedness" reflected on the blackened window, with which the previous section began (131). It also gives further insights into Jean's mother and the conviction that has grown within Jean, through the course of telling her story, that her mother will not be the one to yield any answers. The writing process itself has inspired the empathy Jean needs to exhume personal, family, and public memories. The focus of the final section, a scene with Isobel, is framed by references to a letter Jean was writing to her husband. At the time, Tom was "a legendary husband, in a place I assumed must exist" (147). If Tom was "legendary," Jean was cloned and cast as faithful Penelope in a wartime Montreal frieze: "The ambition of eight chattering stenographers at the far end of the room was to become like me: each of them wanted to marry a brave boy, live for a few days and nights with him - every day and night the last - and then write letters to him for ever and ever" (113). But if life is to be lived and not merely endured, then such fantasies must be eliminated to make way for more truthful living and rendering of life. And, for Jean, this can only be accomplished - the beginning must be made - by confronting the fantasies she has of her sister, as her sister stenographers have had of Jean. Through the filter of memory, rather than sheer fantasy, Jean now gives as truthful a picture as she can and dismantles previous portraits of Isobel: "Isobel propped her elbow on the iron bedstead and dropped her head on her hand. It was a romantic pose - knees bent, one hand palm upward on her lap. She resembled the tired figures named 'Hope' and 'Waiting' on colored postcards of the First World War ... for a moment I saw why Suzanne had called Isobel lavish. Personnage aux Plumes. A golden bird. How foolish all of that was ... Looking back and down from reality, I can correct the story about plumes ... she was not lavish, and not golden, and not a bird. Those are fancies" (148). Further dismantling reveals that Isobel was not part of an allegorical tableau representative of "Hope" and "Waiting." Time and memory give Jean the opportunity to be a Brechtian observer that immersion in the experience itself failed to offer. Proximity blocked this opportunity at the time, and Jean paid the price for participation in her sister's life when Isobel sought Jean's involvement, confiding that she was pregnant, and Jean "stopped being the stranger on the dark street," "moved into the bright rooms" of Isobel's life, and closed the window (149). Isobel has

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attempted to close out the world - not just the snow and cold, but family and war and death and waiting - when she first entered (147); Jean too closed out the draughts that insisted on making themselves felt as she climbed over and within a new set of walls to give Isobel the "whole attention" that she demanded (152). From the vantage-point of twenty years hence, Jean has an honest desire to get the picture and proportions right, even if that means negating everything she has previously associated with Isobel and her lovers: love, light, and life. Jean now sees that for Isobel her lovers were an escape from life, a wall to block out the light, a closing in, not an opening outward (151), equally as her own marriage to Tom has been, thus hardly heroic or monumental. At the time Jean was too close to gain anything from this conversation with her sister, sought and craved for so long, and so once again ricocheted between "a fantasy that we were sisters, therefore confidants, therefore friends" and raw reality: "Fear, despair: despair is too loud for the quiet night. Remove the word, leave Isobel with cheek on hand, eyes gone yellow in the light of the lamp." Jean has swung between fantasy - reading too much into the scene - to "plain and simple" (152) - reading nothing into the scene. But the "truth about these days" private and public - rests somewhere in between. Jean was too close to what had happened to write about it to Tom. She knew "it would be Isobel delivered, Isobel destroyed," reduced to something quite ordinary, that a blunt, direct retelling would produce, failing because all mystery would be eradicated. Instead, Jean decided that the story "would always be there to tell. I might never tell it, but there is something in waiting for the final word" (154). The final word embraces survivors both as subject and audience: "We had slipped into our winter as trustingly as every night we fell asleep. We woke from dreams of love remembered, a house recovered and lost, a climate imagined, a journey never made; we woke dreaming our mothers had died in childbirth ... We would waken thinking the earth must stop, now, so that we could be shed from it like snow. I knew, that night, we would not be shed, but would remain, because that was the way it was. We would survive, and waking - because there was no help for it - forget our dreams and return to life" (155). The dreams, forgotten in the return to life, have been resurrected in a visualizing and writing that exorcize the remembered image on the mirror; these dreams, having exhumed and resuscitated lost experiences, remain as images in the mirror. Jean will now return to life, but having experienced "all life," life in its lived linearity and textualized breadth and fluidity, she writes her lines of the dialogue with

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a new sense of balance and proportion, with eyes scaled, with her own voice, not that of her mother. But is there a response, inside or outside the frame of the text? Does anyone even hear? Or is Jean like the first-person narrators who have preceded her - Cissy, Irmgard, the visitor to Madrid, Puss - whose dialogues take place on a plane that never connects with any other? Although not delivered to anyone in particular, Jean's text is not written into a void. Hers is not an idealized audience: it is not composed of ideas of husband or mother or sister or children or reader. She contents herself with an "audience of small, intent faces" - the "we" of this final passage - faces of the survivors of "false promises" that social institutions foster. Perhaps this is the most that any writer who situates herself between depictions of brash reality and rosy illusions can aspire to attain. Jerome Klinkowitz, tracing trends in contemporary fiction since Joseph Frank's publication of The Widening Gyre in 1963, argues that "replacing the illusion of narrative with the self-conscious artifice of compositional order ... is all that has been needed to end time's tyranny over space." He concedes that because this "new fiction disavows historical time entirely, depending upon no reference whatsoever to the temporal world," it is prone to a different kind of tyranny: "Whether Real or Ideal, the result is the same - for in terms of representation ... eternal is no less tyrannizing than temporal ... An idea, which is just as dependent upon temporal representation as any action, becomes the point of art."43 Klinowitz cites Barthes's critique of "later New Novelists, primarily Michel Butor, [who] extend the range of fiction toward pure spatiality ... Plot, that servant of time, recedes under the weight of spatially described objects, which are energized not by their enforced movement on the page, but by their actualization in the reader's mind as it breaks the code of composition" - Writing Degree Zero, as Barthes termed it.44 Frank, in "The Spatial Form in Modern Literature" and in his essay that responds to Ortega's 1925 book The Dehumanization of Art, anticipated the progression from tyranny of space to tyranny of idea and form in visual and literary arts: "modern art, by shifting attention away from the 'reality' expressed in art, has inverted this natural relation between idea and thing. The artist no longer focuses on reality, surreptitiously using his ideas as a controlling framework, but rather turns back and displaces the artistic center of gravity to a direct expression of his ideas."45 Frank speculates on the political implications of Ortega's concern with the dehumanization of art when he notes the ahistorical, atemporal priorities and "biological values" of Ortega's time46 that would feed into Fascism, implications that Gallant explores in

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her portraiture and landscapes depicting "life at point zero." Always working in tandem with the political for Gallant are the psychological implications of the dehumanization of art. In "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," Frank concludes: "Ever since the Renaissance, modern man has cultivated both the objective visual imagination (the ability to portray space) and the objective historical imagination (the ability to apprehend chronological time); both have now been abandoned."47 Steiner concurs: "Narrative is repetition with a difference; exact repetition is design ... Without the subject's modification by context - which might be a fundamental way of characterizing realism - one is thrown back onto the very opposite of narrative - the two-dimensional picture plane as a nonreferential design world."48 Gallant's narratives of the 19505 and 19605, multidimensional compositions that illuminate referential fields both inside and outside the frame, retain the humanity of art by defying the tyranny of form and thus avoiding the ultimate obliteration of space by time and of time by space.

3 Tyranny of Form: Adjusting Proportions in the Stories of the Early 19605

In her apprenticeship stories of the 19405 and 19505 Gallant experimented primarily with perspective and only rarely with proportion; in the stories of the early 19605 that followed the publication of Green Water, Green Sky1 her writing demonstrates a keener attention to proportion as related to both theme and form. Like so many of the characters in the stories prior to Green Water, Green Sky, most in these later stories see themselves foregrounded as the central figures in a composition's field. But as Gallant's stories assume greater historical density and significance, the gap between inside and outside, private and public, personal and political, foreground and background, figure and field, and, increasingly, present and past, collapses. This heightened sense of background marks the major development from the stories preceding to those following Green Water, Green Sky, a shift often noted by critics tracing the evolution of Gallant's art. Ronald Hatch, for example, comments that "all her writing works towards unification - the individual no longer seen as observer, standing alone, but as part of all he observes."2 Aptly coinciding with the closing of the gap between foreground and background is a diminution of the helical or spiralling movement in Gallant's fiction. The much discussed "helical patterning of memory"3 in Gallant's fiction typically creates a countermovement to "the sustained tick of a watch," the linearity of a forward-moving plot to which Gallant refers in her 1982 essay "What Is Style?"4 These loops into the past invariably comprise individual and collective memories, the latter being the foundation of the sense of history

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evoked in Gallant's fiction. While contributing to the depth of Gallant's stories - Woodcock's phrase "a fiction of enhanced reality"5 is appropriate here - these loops potentially threaten the stories' linear momentum. Much of the critical discussion of this characteristic shape - or resistance to shape - of a Gallant story originated with Gallant's comment to Hancock that, for her, "a story usually begins ... with people seen in a situation, like that. (Locks fingers together.) The knot either relaxes or becomes locked in another way ... The situation has a beginning and as much ending as any situation has in life. The story builds around its centre, rather like a snail." Hancock then elaborated, remarking on the "spiral to" Gallant's stories, "not a straight linear sense until recently." Gallant responded that her editor at the New Yorker for twenty-five years, William Maxwell, "wrote to me after ten years to say, 'You've finally stopped going around and around.'" Picking up the topic slightly later, Hancock prompted Gallant with this summary of their conversation: "We've talked about the narrative through line. As we just said, it has a tendency to work in circles, it eddies about. You obviously don't hold the traditional view of the short story, that it rises and falls, has a dramatic resolution or a plot." Gallant clarified so that there could be no misunderstanding: "Well, I don't think the story should be a fragment. A short story is not just something snatched out of a larger fiction, or something you don't know what to do with, that you turn into a story because it's not good for anything else. That's the French view and I don't agree with it at all."6 For Gallant, therefore narratives must have a beginning and end that cohere with the shape of the whole, not simply the "onset" and "termination" of annals and chronicles.7 In her 1985 essay on Marguerite Yourcenar entitled "Limpid Pessimist," Gallant voices reservations about the use of "the trumpedup cinematic design of lives briefly linked by some casual token" in A Coin in Nine Hands, here "a coin slipped from stranger to stranger in a handful of change" (although Gallant concedes that "the ronde set in motion by Mme Yourcenar is political and moral" rather than arbitrary and theatrical).8 Somewhere between the sense that nothing connects - foreground and background, present and past - and its obverse, that everything must be made to connect into a rigid shape or form, is the terrain that Gallant traverses. Always distrustful of the rigidity and ultimate closure of form or design,9 Gallant nevertheless recognizes that fiction is reduced to a certain "mad" randomness - as she observed in literature such as Giinter Grass's From the Diary of a Snail10 - if episodes, images, and characters fail to connect in some meaningful way.

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Significantly, during the early years of the 19605 Gallant was contemplating the first stories that would eventually compose The Pegnitz Junction. Comparing herself to the heroine of "Virus X," also written and published at this time/1 Gallant remarked to Hancock that she had avoided visiting Germany until the early 19605, when she "began going there, with a purpose. The colonial wars of the fifties and sixties proved that civilization was no barrier anywhere." The Pegnitz Junction is, Gallant claims, "not a book about Fascism, but a book about where Fascism came from ... I finally answered my own question. Not the historical causes of Fascism - just its small possibilities in people."12 During the 19405 in Quebec, Gallant witnessed first-hand the movement towards non-representational art in which an emphasis on form is disproportionate to content, in which content is even reduced to form. This movement had occurred much earlier in Europe - at the turn of the century - and had already moved through the Expressionist art favoured in Germany for the first two decades of the century, but was then virtually eliminated in Germany as the National Socialist party built upon late-nineteenth-century tendencies to create monumental art that purported to be representational in an attempt to misrepresent form as content. Berthold Hinz contends that "the new genre painting" approved by the Third Reich had "the task of proclaiming essential truths and making blind prophecies" and that once objects had been transformed into art, they "could no longer be what they were. They became masks of the proclaimed substance, masks that made up the face of the National Socialist system." Thus, the Third Reich's purpose ultimately was "to eliminate not only the realistic principle in art but also human consciousness about reality. Once an extreme distortion of the objective world had become 'reality/ the subjective world underwent a similar extreme distortion that made the perception of reality impossible."13 This was not an aberration from but rather congruity with German tradition because much German art exhibits a distrust of realism, whether this distrust is manifested in idealization or abstraction. Art historian and curator Wolf-Dieter Dube, discussing "how difficult if not impossible it is for a German to produce 'pure' art," argues: "The harmonious equilibrium of form and content, ideally achieved in a 'pure' picture, is all too easily upset by the weight of philosophical concepts, by idealism or Romanticism. This fundamental trait of the German character was to be the mainspring of Expressionism, too; but here the expression was to determine the form, and no longer be obliged to appear in the guise of nymphs, heroes and allegories. The process whereby the colours and forms themselves became the

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repositories of the pictorial idea was carried to its logical conclusion in abstract art."14 The art of the Third Reich, as Hatch observes, manifests the extreme "conservatism of the mind that endeavours to resolve the confusion of everyday life by imposing a doctrine that gives total and unbreakable shape to all relationships"; these forms in themselves become abstractions, divorced from what they were originally intended to reflect.15 The characteristics of Third Reich art that Hinz, Dube, and Hatch describe can be detected in tendencies of modern art, both visual and literary, albeit in a less extreme form. Joseph Frank, discussing Proust, Pound, Eliot, and Joyce, concludes: "Just as the dimension of depth has vanished from the sphere of visual creation, so the dimension of historical depth has vanished from the content of the major works of modern literature. Past and present are apprehended spatially, locked in a timeless unity that ... eliminates any feeling of sequence by the very act of juxtaposition."16 Frank's recognition of the element of reader perception in modern art - "spatial-form narratives place a greater burden on the reader's synthesizing power than do more conventional temporal narratives," as Jeffrey Smitten observes - suggests that narratives are invariably grounded in a particularized context. "Frank's assumption about reader perception," Smitten contends, "parallels the far more detailed discussions of such aestheticians and critics as Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser. Both of these theorists argue that words, sentences, and larger units in narrative acquire full meaning only when connected to their surrounding contexts. No element in written discourse is understood in isolation."17 Gallant's visual rendering of perspective and, more particularly, of proportion in stories of the early 19605 reveals her widening political and psychological interests as they relate to such aesthetic concerns. Gallant's stories of the 19403 and 19505 foreground personal narrative, although stories such as "Poor Franzi," "The Old Place," "Bernadette," "Autumn Day," and "Up North" do so within a welldefined social or political background. There are certainly stories published in the early 19605 in which, as in most of her earlier stories, background remains background, stories such as "A Question of Disposal" (published as "Two Questions," 10 June 1961), "Crossing France" (Dec. i96o-Jan. 1961), "The Hunter's Waking Thoughts" (29 Sept. 1962), "Paola and Renata" (Jan. 1965), and "The Circus" (20 June 1964). In these stories background is simply as the young boy in the last story, an aspiring painter, imagines the Catalan villagers, "perched on narrow benches high up and well behind the rest. Their faces in the weak, unsteady light were daubs of ivory paint."18

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This description is reminiscent of the Expressionist painting Bareback Rider (1912) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, which radiates in a circular motion from the centre of the ring such that, unless viewers situate themselves across from and within the circle of onlookers, the background of white streaks seems totally cut off by the action in the foreground. Rarely in Gallant's stories are human figures reduced to blurred daubs as they are in this description from her journalistic account of the 1968 student uprisings: "Hairy discussion groups sitting on the floor. In the large amphitheatre, packed to the very ceiling, the light (dim, brownish, as in East Berlin, for instance, but this must be the normal Sorbonne level) produces Goya faces - little blobs of paint in dimness."19 In most of the stories of the early 19605 background begins to emerge and assert itself, until in the stories of The Pegnitz Junction it threatens to absorb entirely the personal narratives. With little or no foregrounding of characters or objects against a background, the stories risk a certain flatness. Seven stories best represent Gallant's earliest explorations of proportion and her avoidance of flatness despite a collapsing of inside and outside: "Sunday Afternoon," "An Unmarried Man's Summer," and "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street," which directly address proportion through characters who see themselves front and centre; "Careless Talk" and "Orphans' Progress," in which foreground and background merge as characters see themselves or are seen as background material; and "Virus X" and "Bonaventure," with characters who block knowledge of the connection between themselves and their background. Failure to see - in the sense of both perception and conception only exacerbates the characters' displacement in time and space. Linda Nochlin, discussing "the patriarchal discourse of power over women [that] masks itself in the veil of the natural - indeed, of the logical," warns "that symbolic power is invisible and can be exercised only with the complicity of those who fail to recognize either that they submit to it or that they exercise it... Foucault has reflected that power is tolerable 'only on the condition that it mask a considerable part of itself.'"20 In stories published in the 19605 and early 19703 Gallant makes visible the consequences of the invisibility of symbolic power. Working in a verbal medium, Gallant may yet be likened to those artists whom Nochlin identifies as engaged in "breaking the circuits, splitting apart those processes of harmonizing coherence ... by fishing in those invisible streams of power and working to demystify the discourses of visual imagery"21 that serve to victimize both men and women.

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PROPORTION, DEHUM ANIZATION, AND "THE O R I G I N OF THE W O R M " In contrast with a story such as "The Other Paris," which opens with Odile and Carol deciding what Carol will wear for her wedding, "Sunday Afternoon" (24 Nov. 1962), also set in Paris, identifies the scene, both time and place, in political terms:22 "On a wet February afternoon in the eighth winter of the Algerian war, two young Algerians sat at the window table of a cafe behind Montparnasse station. Between them, facing the quiet street, was a European girl."23 Postwar Paris has developed into "two Parises," observes John Ardagh in The New France: A Society in Transition 1945-1977, that "co-exist: the unpleasant modern town of practical daily life, and the strong, secret personality of a city whose insidious beauty and vitality still manage to survive the odds against them and even to renew themselves." Parisians themselves, Ardagh continues, are losing faith in the city's "old uniqueness and lustre" and seeing its other side: "One explanation is political: Paris, far more than the provinces, bore the brunt of the upheavals and humiliations of the war and post-war years, from Nazi parades on the Champs-Elysees to the last sickening months of the Algerian crisis in 1962, with terrorist bomb-attacks and armed police raids all over the city."24 To the post-war malaise that characterizes many of the European settings of Gallant's stories of the 19503, including Paris of "The Other Paris" and Green Water, Green Sky, is now added the impact of groups of displaced people who are changing the face of Europe: immigrants from North Africa, many having left their homeland as a consequence of those "colonial wars of the fifties and sixties [that] proved that civilization was no barrier anywhere." After an opening paragraph focused entirely on the three people in the cafe across the street, the narrator announces that Veronica Baines's sole occupation much of this Sunday afternoon has been watching this scene. Behind her, Jim and Ahmed have talked politics since lunch (205), as they have every Sunday that winter (212). Because both Jim and Veronica are waiting for life to begin, faith in the future overshadows any experience of their life together in the present. The clear marker or measurer of time here, at the present moment, is the political situation, but Jim's confidence in his potentially great future, his real life back in America, for which he is now preparing, and Veronica's in her potentially great personality, a transformation that she believes a miracle will initiate (209-10), eclipse these markers for them.

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In "Sunday Afternoon" and several other stories of this period, a feature takes shape that will become increasingly important, even threatening, as the stories' political implications expand. The watchers who figure in the background of previous stories now take their place among the rest of the cast.25 These watchers no longer sit apart on beaches (like Wishart and Barbara's aunt) or at cafe tables (like the American and English women in "Poor Franzi" and "Going Ashore") but attempt to come to the foreground or centre of the picture, creating throughout the next decade denser and denser textures in Gallant's prose style. This effect is often achieved as the watcher becomes the watched, or, in the more political stories, as the surveyors undergo surveillance. As before, the reading of Gallant's stories becomes more challenging as another neat pairing collapses. After Veronica leaves the window from which she has been watching (spying on?) the two Algerians and the European girl in the cafe across the street, she wants "to say something about the scene to the two men in the room behind her. Surely it meant something - the Algerian boys and the ignorant girl?" (204) In creating another dimension, Veronica's internalization of the parallel between the scene observed and her own situation differentiates this story from "Up North," in which Roy, not the young boy, makes connections between the overlaid scenes inside and outside the window.26 Barthes observes, "all art which has only two dimensions, that of the work and that of the spectator, can create only a platitude, since it is no more than the capture of a shopwindow spectacle by a paintervoyeur. Depth is born only at the moment the spectacle itself slowly turns its shadow toward man and begins to look at him."27 Veronica has "taught herself to say" that she is not interested in theories "for fear of being invaded by something other than a dream. But she was not certain what she meant, and not sure that it was true." On this particular Sunday afternoon, watching and reading the signs, being watched and reading these signs, bring the "theory" closer to invading the dream. She may seem immune because the men's talk of politics is "a wall. It shut out young girls and girlish questions." Because Veronica "never knew just where [Ahmed] drew his own personal line" and what might offend him as "a racial question," she does not ask him if he must obey the same curfew as "the nameless and faceless North Africans" she saw selling flowers and labouring in road work gangs (205). Although Ahmed is Tunisian, not Algerian, and the son of a wealthy and fashionable doctor in Tunis, he claims "there was no difference between one North African and another, between Ahmed talking of sacrifice and the nameless

8o Learning to Look

flower seller whose existence was a sacrifice" (208). Yet the main perhaps the only - hardship Ahmed shares with these North Africans is the consciousness of surveillance: the curfew applies to all North Africans, who must carry identity papers to show the police (214). Jim has implicated himself in their causes by hiding money for them; however, he seems oblivious of this complicity as he turns on the lights in the apartment, causing the "brief afternoon" to become, "abruptly, a winter night. The window was a black mirror. [Veronica] saw how the room must appear to anyone watching from across the street. But no one peeped at them" (205). Veronica's "personal line," until this particular Sunday, has been clearly drawn between herself and the political situation because the latter seems so remote to her. A nineteen-year-old girl, homeless, friendless, with only a pretty face to recommend her, she still clings to the dream "to be a great something, and she want[s] to begin" (209). But how is she to begin? This is the conundrum she intuits on this particular Sunday afternoon. She has already reduced her opportunities after stealing from a photographer who has employed her in "a tidying-up sort of job, and not modeling, as she had hoped" (208). A mere glass window separates her from being the watcher and the watched.28 At the beginning of the story she pushes "back the curtain with one shoulder, a hand flat on the pane" (204), a gesture repeated later in a more desperate way with both hands after she has undergone a humiliating surveillance and rejection (213). Veronica has new dreams - "a garden filled with gardenias and a striped umbrella ... a south she had not yet seen" - and needs to name the old one before discarding it as easily as she has the recording of the Bach concerto played "until it was nothing more than a mosquito to the ear" (205-6). Several images within this composition of Veronica trapped in Jim's apartment on this Sunday afternoon remind us of her conundrum. She attempts "to read contentment or regret" in the picture of Princess Paola on the front page of a Sunday paper. The private lives of all public personalities are open books, threatened by "anonymous letters" and confidences gone astray. Veronica is no Princess Paola; she is simply a girl who has drifted into homelessness and exploitation through her impoverished sensibility and circumstances, and thus merely a shadow, something she fails to acknowledge when she catches sight of herself "in the looking glass over the sink: curlers, bathrobe - what a sight! Behind her was the music, the gas heater roaring away, and the drone of the men's talk" (206). She still sees herself in the foreground and all the rest as background, and is therefore puzzled by the dismissal she has received after serving lunch so

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the men can get on with their conversation. Having successfully followed Jim's instructions and assembled the puzzling four-part coffee pot, she awaits the "important moment" when she will invert the pot to release the hot water, but she misses it because she is dreaming of shoes bought with the stolen money that would miraculously make her "new" and significant (207-8). Most importantly, Veronica has missed an opportunity to invert the picture and so fit her sense of self in just proportions to the other figures on the canvas. This inversion is temporarily achieved in a scene near the end of the story. The scene's structure reinforces the sense of proportion that these characters so lack. It begins with a paragraph describing Ahmed's observation of Veronica moving "like a young snake; like a swan," his noting "the rents in the dressing gown when she lifted her arms" in "a bored, frantic gesture," and his thinking he can give her more than Jim can. The next paragraph shifts to Jim watching Ahmed watch Veronica and wondering how he would feel if Ahmed fell in love with her. The third paragraph gives equal time to Ahmed deciding Veronica is "not worth a quarrel with his friend," to Jim "too active in his private debate to notice Ahmed's interest withdrawn," and to Veronica, who has observed the interest and withdrawal of interest, feeling both "Ahmed's look and its meaning ... She turned to the window, with her back to the room. Suffering miserably, humiliated, she pressed her hands on the glass. The men had forgotten her. They laughed, as if Ahmed's near betrayal had made them closer friends ... She saw the movement in the black glass" (213). The window is a wall, not a threshold, for Veronica. In a desperate bid to get back in the picture, she attempts to read her future in relation to these two men through a new way of doing horoscopes, but the method proves too complicated (214). She talks of moving to the Riviera, where she might sell magazine subscriptions (215); however, like the Algerians and the girl in the cafe, and unlike Jim and Ahmed with their money and connections, Veronica is unable to get inside the circumstances that mould and control her life, and thus her entrapment in continued petty theft and virtual prostitution seems destined. In contrast with the younger Jim and Veronica, who fail to grasp the present because they are so focused on what the future holds, Walter Henderson, of "An Unmarried Man's Summer" (12 Oct. 1963), lives very much in and for the present, creating tableaux in which he holds centre-stage. Unlike his counterpart in Green Water, Green Sky, Wishart, who assumes masks and roles to avoid memories of his past self, Walter's poses mask his fears of the future. Walter does not have the inflated sense of self or potential of Jim and Veronica because he

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has a clearer perception of the limited possibilities offered by the "winter society" of the French Riviera into which he is condemned to fit.29 Nevertheless, he too lacks proportion because positioning himself at the centre demands an ingrained attitude of superiority. The entire first paragraph of "Sunday Afternoon" is devoted to describing a background, which Veronica then considers several times through the story, attempting to find parallels with her own situation. Despite her moment of humiliation, Veronica lacks the humility to acquire a balanced view of herself in her environment. Conversely, in "An Unmarried Man's Summer" Walter's place within the opening panoramic description is diminished with references to winter and summer, age and youth, so that his later sense of centrality is all the more ironic: "All winter long he drives his sporty little Singer over empty roads, on his way to parties at Beaulieu, or Roquebrune, or Cap Ferrat. From the sea he and his car must look like a drawing of insects: a firefly and a flea. He drives gaily, as if it were summer" (218). His gaiety links Walter with the firefly, the car with the flea, a linkage the sentence's syntax reinforces; proportions between man and car are clearly skewed. We are primed for the irony of the final sentence of the first paragraph, which has introduced the members of Walter's household - Angelo, Mme Rossi, and William of Orange: "As Walter describes his household, he is the victim of servants and pet animals, he is chief player in an endless imbroglio of intrigue, swindle, cuckoldry - all of it funny, of course; haven't we laughed at Moliere?" (219) Until his sister, Eve, arrives and uncovers elements of his character, emotions, and experience that upset the balance of his tableaux, Walter's mode of perception remains unchallenged: "A mosaic picture of Walter's life early in the summer of his forty-fifth year would have shown him dead center ... The figures make a balanced and nearly perfect design, supported by a frieze of pallida iris in mauve, purple, and white." Despite the delicate tones of this tableau - with the house, Les Anemones, "in the background, the stucco facade with yellow shutters, three brick steps, and Venetian door" (220) not far beneath the surface lurks Walter's main fear, the "disgusting prospect" of being, in fifteen years' time, the "permanent guest" of the old women he now entertains with his stories, attending to their infirmities and whims. Nor could Walter, had he so chosen, have afforded the luxury of a wife: "In spite of the total appearance of the mosaic, he has to live very carefully indeed, never wanting anything beyond the moment" (221). Unless he dies before sixty, "leaving the iris as a mauve-and-white memorial" (222), loneliness and even

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homelessness, the ultimate displacement, are the shadows sullying the pastel surfaces of these facades. All this description rests very much at a personal level, despite Walter's clearly defined social and economic background. Like "Sunday Afternoon," however, this story has political implications, although not as overtly defined. In her interview with Hancock, Gallant remarks that Walter's situation was one she "had observed. The ambiguous master-servant relationship was common at one time on the Riviera."30 George Woodcock refers to Walter as one of a group of characters who are "remnants of a decaying imperial order, at once predators and victims," and to the story as "the life portrait not only of an individual but also of a whole doomed caste of Englishmen."31 References in the story to Walter's summer reading of Kipling and "the bound albums of Chums," which he has "committed to memory years before" and therefore "reads, but does not quite know what he is reading" (222), connect Walter to the last of the imperial gentlemen. Walter later gives Mary, his niece, a copy of Kim, and, despite his protestations that he cannot see Kim as he once saw him, the text's annotations and the ensuing conversation further the connection (241). Earlier a snapshot of the family settled on the terrace captures them "sprawling, much at ease, like an old-fashioned Chums picture of colonials" (226). The picture is anachronistic, but the sentiments of racial and national superiority that underpin such a picture persist. Walter dismisses his brother-in-law as "a Punch squire, blunt, ignorant, Anglo-Irish" (223). Eve's treatment of Angelo would suggest an egalitarian attitude, but Walter reckons that she and her husband have left South Africa for reasons other than the humanitarian motives Eve claims (224, 228). Finally, throughout the Riviera are "relics of the Italian occupation of the coast," including Mrs Wiggott, whose "third husband was a high-up Fascist, close to Mussolini" (223). Walter's sense of centrality and consequent sense of superiority and inability to establish a just proportion between himself and his background ultimately dehumanize perpetrators and victims alike. Until young Johnny Osborn, Walter's nephew, treats Angelo as a fellow human being, "Walter had always considered Angelo someone partly unreal, part of his personal mosaic" (225-6). Even at his most pathetic, as a child begging, Angelo is merely a figure in a mosaic that Walter creates so he may assume the central role of benefactor: "Once, Angelo had been a figure on the wall of a baroque church; from the wall he came toward Walter, with his hand out, cupped for coins. The church had been intended from its beginnings

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to blister and crack, to set off black hair, appraising black eyes" (226). He had once adjusted his tableau to let in the figure of Angelo; now Mary strikes him as having artistic potential: "The angle of her head lent her expression something thoughtful and sad; it was almost an exaggerated posture of wistfulness." For a brief moment, Walter thinks that perhaps he could be a benevolent figure in her life and provide her with ballet lessons: "The mosaic expanded; there was room for another figure, surely? Yes - but to have a daughter one needed a wife. That brought everything down to normal size again." Normal perhaps for Walter, as he then goes on to smile to himself, "thinking how grateful he was that clods like Frank Osborn could cause enchanting girls to appear, all for the enjoyment of vicarious fathers. It was a new idea, one he would discuss next winter with Mrs Wiggott. He could develop it into a story. It would keep the old dears laughing for weeks" (229). Walter's self-centred and superior way of seeing himself in relation to the world may produce works of art, the achievements of civilization, but they do so at the expense of fellowship and human emotions. Lest the reader be quick to judge and condemn, to assume a position of centrality and superiority, the depiction of Walter is carefully modulated. The first warning has come at the end of the first paragraph, quoted earlier - "all of it funny, of course; haven't we laughed at Moliere?" Here the narrator directly addresses the reader, an unusual stance in Gallant's fiction. The reader is cued to recall this direct appeal at the end of the story after the Osborns have left. To restore proportion - and perhaps as amends to Angelo for depriving him of a family, which the Osborns have offered to become to him (or is it perhaps as punishment for Angelo's having entertained such sentiments?) - Walter has invited Angelo's mother to visit. She and "a covey of cousins" are about to take their places in one of Walter's newly created tableaux, in which Angelo will behave, as Walter says to Mrs Wiggott and as she iterates, "as we do" (245). The "we" refers specifically to Walter and his winter circle of friends but by implication extends to all of us who through a sense of centrality and superiority - whether through aesthetic distancing or other means - so alienate and reduce fellow human beings to objects of derision.32 Walter fails to adjust proportions by admitting any emotional gesture that would upset the balance of his picture. His final words to Mrs Wiggott are of the uncomplaining sacrifices he has made that summer and of the ugly box of a house in which he is condemned to live with "not an anemone on the place. Nothing but a lot of iris, and I put those in myself" (245).

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Despite all the scrutinizing, despite the brief revolution of feelings and disrupted proportions (239), and despite Walter's having been "pushed into seeing himself through their eyes," nothing changes: "He preferred his own images, his own creations," where he is central (237). The shift from present to past tense when "the expected revolution" (223-4) materializes, and the continuance of past tense even after the barbarous hordes have left and the winter crowd has returned (245), clearly indicate that in the "every day living" of a Walter Henderson, although himself an anachronism, Gallant has found "the origin of the worm - the worm that had destroyed the structure" and a confirmation "that civilization was no barrier anywhere" against fascistic attitudes.33 In "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street" (14 Dec. 1963), published in the New Yorker two months after "An Unmarried Man's Summer," Gallant explores the fate of another character who, like Walter, is unable to dislodge himself from a centralist, superior attitude. Peter Frazier too is at the end of a line, a family line descending from "the granite Presbyterian immigrants from Scotland" and dominating the social, economic, and political scene of central Canada for several generations, until all that remains are "the rinds of income, of notions, and the memories of ideas rather than ideas intact."34 Memories of past glories haunt the Peter Fraziers of the world. But there is another, more private memory that the story's structure accentuates. The story begins and ends with Peter and his wife, Sheilah, living as guests of Peter's sister, as they have for seventeen weeks since returning to Toronto, and remembering the past nine years in Paris, Geneva, Ceylon, and Hong Kong. As they remember, they recite "the names of people as if they were magic" (246); one name - that of Agnes Brusen - Peter cannot share with his wife because it is Agnes who has given him the memory of "the ice wagon going down the street" (246, 272-3). "Sunday Afternoon," then, explores the inability of two characters to adjust proportions because they are so centred on what the future holds for them; "An Unmarried Man's Summer" explores Walter's inability to adjust proportions because he is so focused on his central position in present tableaux; "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street" explores Peter's inability to adjust proportions because he is so concentrated on the memory of who and what his family were. This last story adds further layers to the density of the portrayal because it spirals into the past to embrace both dreams of the future and realities of the present. The winter in Paris, "moist and delicate; so fragile that they daren't speak of it now," is representative of the first stage of

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Peter and Sheilah's journey: "They spent their money lived in the future, and were never as happy again" (249). Their next posting, Geneva, is a place that Peter sees as "exile" for his social faux pas, "a season of meditation and remorse" (250). Again, Peter lives as if Geneva is simply a transit stop - "It was a mysterious period of exile, and he had to wait for signs, or signals, to know when he was free to leave" (251) - but after a spring and early summer of social activity, the reality strikes: "Now Peter began firing letters to anyone who had ever known his late father. He was living in a mild yellow autumn. Why does he remember the streets of the city dark, and the windows everywhere black with rain? ... Their window was not a real window but a square on a well of cement" (252). He is in a city where the name "Frazier" means absolutely nothing and where windows fail to reflect anything but the bleak background: "they were becoming in fact something they had only appeared to be until now - the shabby civil servant and his brood" (253). Such a conclusion is based on Peter's conviction that he is being closely watched, closely scrutinized. But who is the observer? In the frame of the story, the Frazier children are the watchers: "The peacock parents are watched by wrens"; "They know they are being judged for the first time" (247). Their daughters have taken over a role that Peter earlier assigned to Agnes Brusen. When Agnes, of Norwegian descent, arrives in Geneva from a small Saskatchewan town to become Peter's boss, he thinks that she has been sent to spy on him (256, 258-9). He modifies this impression when he intuits that the "conspiracy was deeper" and that Agnes "might have been dispatched by ghosts": "She was the true heir of the men from Scotland; she was at the start. She had been sent to tell him, 'You can begin, but not begin again.'" Peter is given the opportunity to fit his current situation into a broader historical perspective. He senses the allegory but dismisses Agnes as the insignificant one and resumes his personal conspiracy theory (257). The journeys to and from the Burleighs' masquerade party offer Peter several opportunities to dislodge his centralist, superior attitude. (Journeys are something that Jim, Veronica, and Walter are never afforded.) Ironically, the Fraziers do not wear costumes: "They might not be recognized. Like many of the guests they expected to meet at the party, they had been disgraced, forgotten, and rehabilitated. They would be anxious to see one another as they were" (262). During the first snowstorm of the year, in a rented car with a (British) right-hand drive, Peter must constantly ask Sheilah if he can make turns and if the streets are one-way (262-3). Sheilah, who depends upon her model's face and figure to fit in - she grew up in the slums

87 Tyranny of Form

of London, "rat poor" (252) - is more at home at this party than Peter. Again Peter detects this when, "after he mislaid his audience," he finds Sheilah in a perfectly composed, "private and enclosed" tableau conversing with a man who will arrange their future (264). The ambiance of this party is best captured in the costumes the Burleighs have chosen: Mike is an Impressionist painter because his wife, Madge, wishes to appear as his creation, Manet's seductive "'Lola de Valence/ which everyone mistook as Carmen" (263). Thus Peter, clearly himself, readily takes up his hostess's command to "stop thinking about yourself, for once" and escort an equally misfit Agnes (dressed as a tramp) home: "He may not want to go in that particular direction, but at least he is going somewhere" (265). Outside, in the snow, having "forgotten where the hired car was parked, or what it looked like," and having left the key with Sheilah, he follows Agnes, who appears to know their destination (266). Touched by her vulnerability, Peter is humbled enough to lick snow from her hands after helping her up from a stumble. "They stood on the edge of a broad avenue. The wrong turning now could lead them anywhere." Agnes then gives him the gift of her childhood memory of getting up in the morning before all the other family members to see the ice wagon going down the street (267), and later, in her apartment, of physical contact: "He saw her back and her profile and his own face in the mirror over the fireplace. He thought, This is how disasters happen. He saw floods of sea water moving with perfect punitive justice over reclaimed land; he saw lava covering vineyards and overtaking dogs and stragglers. A bridge over an abyss snapped in two and the long express train, suddenly V-shaped, floated like snow" (268). In such a broad panoramic sweep of images - a surrealistic apocalyptic image that could drown a fourth-generation central Canadian Frazier - Peter is lost and resorts to his original assessment of Agnes as "poor quality really" (269). Despite this, they are able to talk as equals when they next meet because he is aware that Agnes has seen Peter stripped of his social facades: "Now she sees me, he thought. She had never looked at him after the first day. (He has since tried to put a name to the look on her face; but how can he, now, after so many voyages, after Ceylon, and Hong Kong, and Sheilah's nearly leaving him, and all their difficulties ...) She sees me now, he thought. What does she see?" (270) She sees Peter as a person who has wasted many opportunities of education, upbringing, family, friends, contacts. Her background has been so different; she has had to get up early in the morning and follow the ice wagon out of town to see herself as central in any scene: "it's you, you, once in your life alone in the universe. You

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think you know everything that can happen ... Nothing is ever like that again" (271). Agnes's articulation of her memory in second rather than first person, as in the recollection of the image earlier (267), reinforces the transposition of images between Agnes and Peter that occurs elsewhere in the story (255, 265, 266, 273). For Peter Frazier, it is too late to discover a new image or new direction. Only the revolution that he - as Walter Henderson - ponders would bring down the entire social structure based on hierarchical distinctions and allow for a totally new beginning. As he recalls Agnes's humiliation and thinks of "her drowning face at the party," his only emotion is fear for himself: "The story was still unfinished. It had to come to a climax, something threatening to him. But there was no climax. They talked that day" (271). The narrator, unlike Peter, achieves an equalizing stance and regains just proportions by refusing to take a God-like perspective: "But what were they talking about that day, so quietly, such old friends? They talked about dying, about being ambitious, about being religious, about different kinds of love. What did she see when she looked at him? ... They were both Canadians, so they had this much together - the knowledge of the little you dare admit. Death, near-death, the best thing, the wrong thing God knows what they were telling each other" (272). The story ends with Peter appropriating Agnes's image and considering a future, made for the Agneses of the world, as his future: "There is nothing he doesn't know. He could keep the morning, if he wanted to, but what can Peter do with the start of a summer day?" (273) At the beginning of the story, before this spiralling into the past, Peter takes his cues and direction from Sheilah, "no drowner," as they "think that the years are not behind them but hazy and marvelous and still to be lived" (248). Nothing has changed. "When, on Sunday mornings, Sheilah and Peter talk about those times, they take on the glamor of something still to come." Although "Agnes is the only secret Peter has from his wife, the only puzzle he pieces together without her help" (272), the pieces never cohere because the piece with self is too large to fit: "Everything works out, somehow or other. Let Agnes have the start of the day. Let Agnes think it was invented for her. Who wants to be alone in the universe? No, begin at the beginning: Peter lost Agnes. Agnes says to herself somewhere, Peter is lost" (273). Peter and Sheilah may be "back where they started" (246), but they have come full circle, and any beginning is an end. Agnes and Peter are not agnatic; they are of very different clans. The Agneses, the meek, the lambs, have the beginning. There can be no beginning, no middle, only an end, for the Peter Fraziers.

89 Tyranny of Form THE MERGING OF F O R E G R O U N D AND BACKGROUND

In each of the three stories discussed in the previous section, Gallant's third-person narrator singles out individual characters who, through some form of egoism, view themselves magnified against the background. "Careless Talk" (28 Sept. 1963) and "Orphans' Progress" (3 Apr. 1965)35 contrast with these stories because they explore a relationship - between two friends and two sisters, respectively - no one character emerging as more significant than the other. "Careless Talk" well illustrates Hatch's concluding remarks in his review of In Transit that "the arrangement of stories also allows us to watch Gallant as she extends the mastery of her craft: moving from external observation to internalized renderings of intersubjectivity, these stories reveal the personality displacements endemic to our so-called civilized behavior."36 These two stories and "Virus X" also differ from previous stories in the emphasis given to the theme of language. This theme is apparent as early as Gallant's first two stories, the 1944 Preview stories, but never dominant. In the three stories just discussed, for example, all characters are placed in a foreign milieu, but language is never identified as a factor in the displacement they experience. (Granted, Walter Henderson and Peter Frazier reside in English communities on foreign soil.) Yet, as Gallant argues in the introduction to Home Truths, in which "Orphans' Progress" is anthologized, "one needs a strong, complete language, fully understood, to anchor one's understanding" (xvii), and thus "the first years of schooling are indelible. They provide our center of gravity, our initial view of the world, the seed of our sense of culture. A deeper culture is contained in memory ... [Memory] can ... be destroyed; and it is inseparable from language" (xv). This anchoring is what the Collier sisters, Cathie and Mildred, fail to achieve in "Orphans' Progress." As they are wrenched from one family member to another, one culture to another, one language to another, the children are denied any continuity in their lives because they are forbidden, through belittlement or punishment, to remember or articulate what has gone before. Consequently, they are deprived of any language to anchor an understanding of themselves, their background, or their relationship to this background. There is no "progress" here as the continuous flow of the narrative through each of the four time-sequences would suggest. Both girls are alienated from roots, memories, and a language, the soil needed for "progress," healthy growth, and clear and balanced seeing.

go Learning to Look

"Careless Talk" is also divided into four sections - in this case clearly marked - that interweave the theme of language with the theme of proportion dominant in Gallant's fiction of the early 19605. The first section provides the background of an unbalanced friendship that has developed between two women. Having no female or English neighbours makes Iris, a Cockney woman married to Marcel Drouin, a French farmer, and living in the rural area of Burgundy, vulnerable in her relationship with Mary Olcott, a much more worldly Irish woman who spends her summers near the Drouin farm. "Their language - English - drew them together. So did their condition in a world they believed intended for men." Both are foreigners, but whereas Mary is confident, assertive, with a good command of the French language, Iris is shy, compliant, and speaks French as if "her mouth was full of iron filings; that was how it sounded and felt."37 From the moment "their eyes met, as women's seldom do at a first encounter," Iris risks exposure of her hidden self to re-establish some kind of balance in her life: "Mary gave her something she missed to the point of illness: a language that made sense." Iris talks "about time, and how time changed your view, like a turn in the road. She talkfs] about money; surely money was freedom? She talk[s] about women's lives. Women's lives could be bent like wire in the hands of men," the latter being a topic to which Mary would respond with enthusiasm (124-5). Ironically, Mary's - rather than any man's - violation of Iris is what "Careless Talk" reveals during this third summer of their friendship. The story's second section looks at a particular day in this summer. After three years Mary is as much a mystery to Iris as is Mary's background, even the pink house "in sight of Iris's bedroom" with "the shaded windows and the west lawn, with the rose garden still asleep." Mary, whose "pleasure [is] collecting confidences" and whose talent is "for taming people," has gained entry and seen into the innermost recesses of Iris's mind: "She hunted the cautious person whose sudden unguarded word or gesture gave a secret away ... She played simultaneous chess games, ten at a time" (126). As Mary, from their first meeting, attempts to discover what lies beneath Iris's "wizened dowdiness," the process becomes a violation, "like more and more gauze curtains going up," a penetration that tames while allying her more closely with Iris, until they are "an island, an English fortress, here in hostile France" (127). When Mary invites Iris to tea with some city friends, Iris begins to suspect that she has been wrong in trusting Mary's discretion because Mary fails to understand the subtleties of Iris's situation and sacrifices. Instead, Mary dismisses Iris as a weak woman to whom such things happen:

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"[Mary] was the rock on which weaker natures broke. She saw their hopes and failings turned back like waves. Hard, lucid, tirelessly inquisitive, her eyes looked beyond Iris, measuring Iris." Iris refuses to carry on the conversation because it seems a betrayal of Marcel and the love of her children (129). Ultimately these feelings will provide Iris with the ballast she needs to escape Mary's rapacious hold. The story now shifts to Mary's city friends, Mademoiselle and a Dominican priest, who are as voracious as Mary in collecting confidences, the former through gossip, the latter through confessions and outright spying in his capacity as psychologist. Their sense of selfimportance pervades the scene. As they lunch and chat, the young Dominican's "mind was elsewhere - not far: on himself" (131). Mademoiselle has stopped to collect gossip before she arrives as Mary's guest. There can be no "careless talk" among equals in this rivalry of talking and listening; nor can there be perfect harmony, despite Mary's attempts to orchestrate background and characters alike (133). Mary once described to Iris her first impressions of the Drouins, Iris in the background. Coming in from the Drouin courtyard lit with starlight, she saw them as "evil and wicked, as if you were hiding a bag of gold or a corpse," set against a background of "the bare petrol lamp on the table," scenes and characters from Jacques Becker's 1943 film Goupi-Mains Rouges.38 "Suddenly there you were, an honest London sparrow chirping away" (124). Mary has changed the backdrop but, even after three summers of talk, envisages Iris similarly. In the final section Iris with her two children provides an artistic climax to Mary's entertainment: "The Drouin babies were like putti and a local sight, outdoing the oak tree, said to be a thousand years old, near the village. The sun had come out, as Mary expected. They sat on the west lawn ... The brown, green, blue and pink of medieval miniatures were perfectly proportioned here, although the blue of the real sky was on top instead of the rose of heaven - Mary pointed this out" (134-5). Her French visitors fail to appreciate the proportions achieved through such coloration because "the west lawn was a wretched room without a ceiling. The autumn sun was cold. They would have appreciated the rose garden just as well framed by curtains and cut up in squares" (135). The proportions of the scene have already been marred by the presence of the local cure ploughing, a man obliged to supplement his income. But it is not simply her rose garden that Mary wants appreciated as background: it is "Iris's curious marriage: how lost the London girl was here, how her father-inlaw bullied her. She had told it as an interesting story, but now the story had substance, because Iris was here" (137). Iris refuses to be reduced to landscape, particularly because, like Mademoiselle's

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"Tolstoy fantasy country ... a soft-focus grassy place where young girls wearing exquisite frocks played croquet," it has "nothing to do with the real world" (134). Although Iris is never quite able to grasp what disturbs her, what makes her "uneasy," "unsteady" - she thinks it has to do with Mary's lack of class awareness, her liberalism (137) - she is able to regain her sense of proportion and return to her world of babies and attendance on her husband. The closure of Iris's face as she leaves, the sense of betrayal, so disturbs Mary that Mary reveals to Mademoiselle her dislike of "men in skirts," and Mademoiselle reveals to Mary, "with the unpredictable jumps of the aged," that as children she and her sisters were taught that looking in mirrors was unworthy (139-40). Perhaps never looking at herself, Mademoiselle has made it her business to probe the lives of others; this is unlike Iris, who simply has no time to look at herself or to gossip (126), and unlike Mary, who "must often look in the mirror. The perfectly smooth and glossy hair required staring - concentrated staring" (140). Whereas Mary's staring at Iris has penetrated the surface and seen what lies just below, Mary's self-scrutiny seems to have revealed nothing; therefore, she is no further at the end in realizing that this friendship is one that is unlikely to survive the unequal weighting she would like to give herself within it. Even though the story closes with Mary's confidence that she can "get the chess game moving again" (140), Iris with her babies, husband, and courage seems unlikely ever to play opposite Mary again. Mary's life will have to find ballast elsewhere. EN R O U T E TO PEGNITZ

J JUNCTION

This period of Gallant's writing culminates in the publication of two multi-layered stories in the New Yorker, "Virus X" (30 Jan. 1965) and "Bonaventure" (30 July 1966), the latter completed over a year earlier on 17 May 1965. Gallant herself links "Bonaventure" with "Virus X," a linkage highlighted by their tandem placement in the "Canadians Abroad" section of Home Truths, even though the chronology is reversed and "Bonaventure" is placed before "Virus X." Gallant writes that these two stories have "nothing apparent in common" but "are linked in my mind. The idea for both emerged at about the same time, and both took a very long time to write. They are the most intensely Canadian of any of my stories."39 Despite this "intensely Canadian" quality that Gallant ascribes to the two stories in retrospect, they are more apparently linked because of the early exploration of German themes en route to the publication of the specifically German stories, most of which are collected in The Pegnitz Junction.

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"Virus X" focuses on the self-consciously middle-class Lottie Benz, a sociology student researching the ethnic fabric of Alsace. Intellectually, Lottie is very much a product of the theories of her adviser, Dr Keller. Lottie tells a young woman she knows from high school, Vera Rodna, who has been exiled from their home town of Winnipeg and now roams from one European city to another, "My thesis is about the integration of minority groups without a loss of ethnic characteristics." Giving Vera examples of Poles who paint Easter eggs generation after generation, and discreetly avoiding mention of Vera's Ukrainian background, Lottie asks her, "Now do you see?" In the middle of this patronizing lecture Lottie has reprimanded Vera: "Don't stare just on purpose; I do find it unpleasant." Well might Vera stare - in disbelief. "Do you even know what a minority is?" Vera asks Lottie. Lottie's "I ought to"4° refers to her university studies, not her family's heritage; ironically, Lottie has buried deep within her psyche her own ethnicity, her German background, for which the Benz family was ostracized during the war (179). As Lottie moves from Paris to Colmar to Strasbourg, she takes a number of excursions that challenge and disturb her eyesight, obscured by middle-class conventionality, untested theories of integration, and, finally, a blockage of personal and collective memory. In the end Lottie achieves what she came to France for, but only in an ironic, even regressive sense: "She intended to profit from this winter of opportunities ... but in no sense did she desire to change or begin a new life" (175). On Christmas Day, Lottie and Vera visit the Alsatian countryside around Kaysersberg, an excursion that is a paradigm for the development of Lottie's vision through her three months of travelling in France. Already the day looks foreboding as Lottie has picked up the only gift she would receive that day: a "harsh-looking tract" written in German, espousing a separatist group's dreams and discrediting Lottie's thesis (194). Lottie and Vera merely pass through Kaysersberg and so ignore its history: "Kaysersberg might have been chewed by rats. The passage of armies seven years ago still littered the streets. They walked away from here and over fields toward another town Vera said would be better. The sun was warm on Lottie's back, and her mother's Persian-lamb coat was a suit of armor" (195). Armoured with attitudes of materialism, respectability, and superiority, Lottie has failed to read Europeans or their environment perceptively since her arrival in Paris earlier that month. Paris and Parisians seem unfashionable, dull, flat, lacking depth or substance: "Even a word like 'hotel' was subject to suspicion, since it was attached to a black facade in no way distinguished from the rest of

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the street" (173). With her focus on the one familiar and hence "right" object - the inverted holly - Lottie discerns neither texture nor meaning. "That day, which was Tuesday, December 9,1952, was laid on with a light brush. The street had been cut out of charcoalcolored paper with extremely fine scissors" (174). The neutrality of this passage and the metaphors drawn from the visual arts might suggest that the narrator, rather than Lottie, is describing this Paris street, but when we learn that Lottie is keeping notes for future letters to Dr Keller and her fiance, Kevin (175), the precise dating and flatness of the scene indicate that these are her own observations. Unlike Braque, Picasso, and Matisse late in his career, who often achieved texture and depth in their colourful papier colles creations, Lottie lacks a sense of proportion and the artist's eye. At this point Lottie herself, with a wide, polka-dot skirt made by her mother from a Vogue pattern and her mother's ankle-length Persian-lamb coat, fills the picture as she has filled the backseat of the taxi (173). Despite her obtrusive presence, the hotel's porter ignores her struggles with her bag by keeping his eyes fixed to the frosted glass of the door. To Lottie, from the street, "his eye appeared as part of the pattern of lilies etched on the glass." His indifference parallels that of the receptionist "with frizzy red hair" (Lottie's observation, surely), who for Lottie personifies France and who, in turn, collapses Lottie into the category of foreigner, caring not whether she is American or Canadian (174). Confidence in her conventional attitudes and theoretical stance prompts Lottie to perform the same optical tricks as the porter. These optical tricks are alluded to in the paradigmatic excursion to Kaysersberg. Having left the town, as recorded above, our travellers walk the country lanes: "Beside the narrow road, vines tied to sticks seemed to be sliding uphill. It was a trick of the eye. Another illusion was the way the mountains moved: they rose and collapsed, softlooking, green, purple, charcoal, deserting Lottie when she turned her head. All at once a vineyard fell away" (195). Sliding uphill, rising and falling, are the historical fluctuations and realities of France that, with Vera as tour guide, will challenge Lottie's flattened perspective and lack of proportion. In section i, for example, Vera and Lottie catch the Lyon noon express to Fontainebleau to visit Katherine Mansfield's grave. At first Lottie is "crushed against a window, looking at the backs of towns," but after Melun, "trees such as she had never seen before, and dense with ivy, met and glided apart in the winter light ... The ivy shone and suddenly darkened, as if a shutter had been swung to" (181). She now sees in the darkened image her own ivygreen, transparent reflection, and the hypochondriacal Lottie is

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reminded of her need to be pampered because of her weak lungs (182). The enclosed and collapsed background to Mansfield's grave, which they now visit, forecasts its failure to signify anything for Lottie: "At the end of a walled lane the walled graveyard was a box. The sky (the sun was covered up now) was the lid" (185). Lottie, although disturbed by her inability to feel anything and the consequent visitor status to which she is relegated, is offended by Vera's theatrical gestures, totally disproportionate to the scene. She takes nothing from this experience nor from the epigraph on Mansfield's grave from Henry iv, Part i, which counsels the need to take risks, however disproportionate, to achieve safety (185). Before leaving Paris, Lottie has another experience from which she might learn, but again her provincialism intrudes: she attends an Ibsen revival with acquaintances she met on the plane to France. The lack of proportion disturbs Lottie, and her lack of proportion blocks opportunity: "Baited by the public, the actors seemed to Lottie too intimate, too involved. She lost the thread of the story and became self-conscious, as though she were on the stage" (187). In section 2, Lottie spends Christmas in Colmar, and she and Vera again take several excursions that climax in the paradigmatic Christmas Day journey to Kaysersberg and a revelation with depth and meaning for Lottie: "All at once a vineyard fell away, and there for one minute, spread before her, was the plain of the Rhine, strung with glistening villages, and a church steeple here and there poking through the mist" (195). Several days before the Kaysersberg excursion, Lottie underwent "a wearing journey from Paris, with a change of trains at Strasbourg," to Colmar, "a city in a plain as flat as home," which she "understood ... to be her destination" (189). On the evening of her arrival in Colmar, Lottie permitted Vera to "link an arm through hers and guide her out of the hotel into a light-blue evening. The shape of what seemed to be a street of very old houses was outlined in colored lights" (188-9). The string of villages glistening in the plain of the Rhine, some German, some French, and the street of these old houses outlined in coloured lights, again some German, some French, are reminiscent of the "superior civilization" that Linnet Muir, in "In Youth Is Pleasure," constructs from memories of Montreal that take shape during a period of exile: "In that drowned world, Sherbrooke Street seemed to be glittering and white."41 Lottie has yet to establish just proportions between the blocked memories of Germany and the signs of Germany she is experiencing all around her in this part of France that has seen the vicissitudes of German and French occupation. While passing through Strasbourg, Lottie has sought out the cathedral.

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She justifies this excursion to herself because she thinks it proof for her thesis, hardly daring to admit that images and voices from her repressed past are beginning to surface: "When the first words of German crossed her lips, she thought they would remain, engraven, to condemn her ... The cathedral seemed to right itself before her frosty, chalky, pink and trembling in the snowy air. A brown swift river divided that part of the city from the station. True Christmas was praised in shopwindows ... A gingerbread angel with painted paper face and paper wings cried of home - not of Winnipeg but of a vestigial ceremony, never mentioned as German, never confirmed as Canadian" (189). All these details add layer upon layer to the narrative. Between the reportorial notes that Lottie keeps of her travels are layers of buried memories, personal and collective. She sees not a sickly Lottie in the mirror but a healthy face at home in this background. The layers of introspection that build up through this and the following section recall Lottie's first night in Paris. Inserted into an inventory distinguishing her belongings from the hotel's is the neutral observation that in her hotel room "there were any number of mirrors ... evenly shaded with dust, and velvet curtains that she accepted as luxurious," an observation immediately followed by this internal probing: "Wondering why she was noticing so much, checking herself lest she become introspective or moody, she remembered that this was the first time she had ever been anywhere alone" (175). The visit to Strasbourg Cathedral on her way to Colmar is the first and last excursion Lottie takes on her own, yet she now seems more capable of thinking for herself. As she walks with Vera "beside a black gelatinous canal in which stood, upside down, a row of crooked houses," she questions her own intelligence, and "out of the protective dark she [speaks] to upside-down houses" of her "good memory" and her inexperience working on her own. "Out of the protective dark" also come the repressed memories of herself as Lottchen, her mother's pampering, and her father's being prevented from becoming principal of his school when, after 1939, his career was blocked (190-1). These fragments of family history begin to give depth to Lottie's perception of the landscape. On the morning of Christmas Eve day, Vera drags Lottie - "cold, stunned, already weary - into streets where pale lamps flickered and aboard a bus filled with pale people asleep. They rolled into dark hills, which, as the day lightened, became blotter green. Lottie was not yet accustomed to steep hills and valleys; she wanted them to be more beautiful than they were. Desolate" (191). At Munster, Lottie, for the first time, concentrates on the view - "smoke and blue in a hollow. Above the town a blue gap

97 Tyranny of Form

broke open the metal sky" - and, returning downhill, walks more easily in her "comic overshoes" than Vera in her Italian, heeled shoes (192). Missing the bus back to Colmar, they have a three-hour wait that parallels the skirting of the German border that Lottie will undergo for the next several months: this trip to Munster, the Christmas Day excursion to Kaysersberg and Riquewihr, an excursion to the Maginot Line, and, in section 3, the waiting in Strasbourg for something to happen. Thus the paradigmatic excursion to Kaysersberg concludes: "Across the river were dark clouds or dark hills. She could not see where they joined the horizon or where they rose from the plain. So this was the place she loathed and craved, and never mentioned. It was the place where her mother and father had been born, and which they seemed unable to imagine, forgive, or describe" (195). Lottie must, for psychological reasons, cross the border between France and Germany, just as Vera, for political reasons, must renew the stamp on her passport within three months. Lottie, however, "wished she were looking at a picture and not a real place. She wished she were a child and could pretend it was a picture. I'll never go there!' she said" (196). After Kaysersberg, as Vera and Lottie walk to Riquewihr, Vera confronts a past - her Ukrainian past and "mother's folklore" - that Lottie's theory has failed to explain. All that Lottie recalls at this point is that she has not sent a Christmas cable to Kevin, which, given the time difference, "scarcely dawn" in Winnipeg, she could still dispatch (196-7). Nevertheless, Lottie is primed for an initiation and so stays with Vera for another day in Colmar. In the morning they see a movie that Lottie judges exasperating, perhaps because of its sentimentality, perhaps because she is beginning to understand its language far too well: Das Herz Einer Frau: Ich Suche Eine Mutti, "an incredibly sad story about a laundress and her little boy."42 In the afternoon they visit the Maginot Line, and Lottie, "frantic with being where she did not want to be," exclaims, "No wonder they lost the war." Vera asks her, "Why do you think one piece is all of everything?" (197) Her middle-class sensibility and Dr Keller's theories have caused Lottie to flatten all she thinks, feels, or sees into one uniform plane. With these now suspect, Lottie is able to move inward through the layers that, like a mountainous terrain, have blocked memories of the past. In section 3, Lottie has moved to Strasbourg, and although not yet having crossed the river to the "dark clouds or dark hills" that are Germany, she has achieved a more realistic and proportioned picture through newly scaled eyes: "She could see the spire of the cathedral, encased in scaffolding, rosy and buoyed up on plain air. Chimes and

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bells evenly punctuated her days and nights. Every night, at a dark foggy hour, she heard strange tunes - tunes that seemed to be trying to escape from between two close parallel lines. The sound came from a shack full of Arabs, across from the hotel, on the bank of a canal. In the next room but one, Lottie had a neighbor, a man who typed. The empty room between them was a sounding box" (198). Her true thoughts and feelings emerge in mental letters she composes to Kevin (199). Unlike her flat reportings that fail to disturb her complacent middle-class attitudes and securely held theories, these compositions reveal fissures in both. Lottie, who has suffered so many imagined ailments, now comes down with the fever accompanying Virus X, "an epidemic of grippe that was sweeping through Europe" (206), and so fails to "know where imagination begins and a dream leaves off" (204). As in her earlier glimpse of Germany, she cannot perceive where horizon meets plain; the images, however, are no longer contracted and flattened but rather expanded and swollen. In response to a request from the typist-poet down the hall for an image of a Canadian city, Lottie's psyche yields images of Quebec City. As "the idea of a city she had not seen obscurefs] her memory," Lottie loses her voice and is unable to judge the height of her bed (202-3). At times it is as if Lottie and the old man not only share a view from their hotel windows but also a perspective; it is as if she sees through his aged poet's eyes and penetrates the stones of Strasbourg Cathedral: "At dawn they could see the pink spire briefly red. Inside the cathedral, Death struck the hours in Dr Keller's clock." Lottie is "dislocated, perhaps forever, like the clock." With these memories and dislocations, her health improves (204). Although it may seem that Lottie is becoming more like Vera, pawning trinkets, leaving her passport for collateral, drinking kiimmel, she still sees herself on the side of old United Empire Loyalist families, and of Kevin, with his Anglo-Saxon heritage. She is, after all, on a Royal Society scholarship. She is, in fact, simply "walking on a treadmill," going nowhere; however, there will be moments of potential initiation before the backward course takes its inevitable toll. After experiencing a sensation of being a disjointed wooden toy, Lottie is suddenly better and walks "with Vera in the cold, snowy night ... She thought, but did not say, that it was the most beautiful night she had ever seen. She admired, in silence, the lamps in the brown canals and in the icy branches above ... The important thing was feeling free, and never being alone" (207-8). Lottie is not like Vera, who takes the risks of transient relationships; instead, Lottie must make choices. Being alone cannot coincide

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with feeling free. Germany must be a place either loathed or craved, not both. Lottie seems to understand and accept this as she waits below the cathedral when Vera, climbing to the top of the spire, proclaims herself "mystically moved." "Walking in Vera's shadow, Lottie thought, I should never have seen her after that trip to Fontainebleau." Perceiving her relationship with Vera clearly, Lottie comes to see herself in just proportion to her background: "The days were lighter and longer. The rivers and canals became bottle green, and the delicate trees beside them were detached from fog"; and, in the cafes, "there was in the air, with the smell of beer and fresh coffee, a substance made up of old conversations. The windows were black and streaked with melted snow. Each rivulet reflected the neon inside." Again Vera proposes to go to Germany, and that evening the sounds of Strasbourg are strident and harsh (209). Weeks pass and Lottie is finally forced off the treadmill with the arrival of Kevin. His conventional, conservative presence strikes Lottie, but she thinks that "one day, she would become accustomed to Kevin ... stop seeing him, as she had nearly grown used to mountains" (211). She is anxious to show Kevin "the view, like a Flemish painting," from her window, but, looking around, all he takes in is the seedy disarray of her room (212). Lottie is fully aware of what she will be returning to with Kevin and, clear-eyed, chooses silence over revelation, marriage over friendship (213). She also foregoes any possible friendship with Vera when, in response to Kevin's "Ukrainian," she decides "that was Vera's labyrinth. Lottie was on her way out" (214). Marriage to Kevin will eliminate the final vestige of her German background; she will never be "Benz" again. (Kevin's surname is never given, only that he is "probably Irish, but, being Protestant, he counted as English" [207].) Kevin now takes over as tour guide from Vera, so there will be no initiation for Lottie when Germany is finally reached: "In a totally gray village nothing stirred. Beyond it, on the dirty, icy highway by some railway tracks, they came upon a knot of orphans and a clergyman. The two groups passed each other without a glance ... The sky was low and looked unwashed. On the horizon the dark blue mountains were so near now that Lottie saw where they rose from the plain. 'Appenweier' - that was the name of the place. It was like those mysterious childhood railway journeys that begin and end in darkness" (214). Kevin marches them to the bombed railway station, on to a train, and back to France: "If that was Germany, there was nothing to wait for, expect, or return to. She had not crossed a frontier but come up to another limit" (215). Thus Lottie's final inventory is not of what she is taking away from her studies in Europe but of what she leaves behind.

ioo Learning to Look Eerily, the story's final composition is written to no one. Lottie cannot confide in Kevin; Vera has left. Where there has been flatness, then expansiveness, there is now merely fog and obscurity: "Last night, just at the end of the night, the sky and the air were white as milk. Snow had fallen and a thick low fog lay in the streets and on the water, filling every crack between the houses. The cathedral bells were iron and muffled in snow." Such meditations will soon be gone forever: "There was no sense to what she was doing. She would never do it again. That was the first of many changes" (216). Gone are the theories of Dr Keller; gone are the memories that have haunted her. Gone too are the opportunities to share in the theatrical gestures of a Vera and to see through a poet's eyes. With all hills and mountains levelled, with only the plains before her, Lottie chooses the snow and fog with more clear-sighted eyes than any character met thus far in Gallant's canon. Like Lottie Benz, Douglas Ramsay of "Bonaventure" is on a year's scholarship, Ramsay's providing an opportunity to further his music studies in piano and composition in Berlin. Like the self-satisfied Lottie, Ramsay has no desire to change. His talent, he thinks, ensures the formation of a detached self and independent life.43 When "Bonaventure" opens, Ramsay, after a winter in Berlin, has accepted the invitation of Katharine, widow of composer and conductor Adrien Moser, to spend the summer at a chalet outside Montreux. Ramsay is to be the "spiritual heir" of the great master (142), a role he grudgingly assumes for a short while but ultimately rejects. Throughout the few weeks that Ramsay strives to adjust Moser's mantle to fit, he peels away layers of the external world and discards them so that all that remains is his own ego. This is captured well in the image from his dream, on the night before his stealthy, early morning escape from the chalet, "that everyone was skeletal, while he had got enormously fat" (168). Layer by layer, Ramsay strips away the world outside his own mind - the world of nature, memories, history, tradition - to ensure that he will not be enslaved to anyone or anything; by extension, he will never father anyone or anything. When he returns to Berlin he sits "with his back to the window and [does] not know or care what the weather [is] like outside" (172). More critically than Lottie, Ramsay flattens and diminishes life outside self. The story's elliptical structure, at the extreme end of Gallant's tendency to develop helical patterns, and its opaque style reinforce her early fascination with motifs that figure largely in her journey to Pegnitz Junction.44 Katharine challenges Ramsay with her concept of art inspired by and reflecting the natural world; she advocates a reversion to a

ioi Tyranny of Form

premodernist tradition of music whereby the composer, having communed with "the wind in the trees and the larks/' converts them into musical notation. Ramsay argues that Moser's music was "unnatural," "intellectual," "sophisticated," inspired by models within the tradition, not the subject-matter itself (151-2). Here the student and the composer's widow, an "untalented" American woman (140), debate an issue that plagued the National Socialists in their "war against Modernism," "provid[ing] the Nazis with their most intractable problem," as Erik Levi, in "Music and National Socialism," explains: "On the surface, the regime was implacably opposed to most of the developments in music which took place during the twentieth century and harboured a strong desire to rekindle the flames of national romanticism. Yet their approach to the issues was muddled and often contradictory."45 Adrien Moser, Katharine reminds Ramsay on several occasions, was Swiss - not German - but there are indications that Moser's sympathies might well have been with the elitist policies of Fascism. For example, Nanette Stein, whose "pretty ... so Swiss" playing of the Prokofieff Second has greatly appealed to Moser (158), and who consequently becomes a family retainer even after his death, reveals that she has had to deny her Jewish and national heritage and claim that she was from Ascona because of Moser's xenophobia and antisemitism (161). Moser's attitudes are reminiscent of those of the National Socialists who fueled their campaign to purify German music "by the total elimination of all alien influences."46 The chalet and its pavilion, where Ramsay sleeps to soak up the great man's ambiance, provide merely the trappings of a man's last years living on the legacy of his name and reputation, of a man "in exile" (145), a man so diminished that "his intellect dissolved, his mind was like water, his powers centered only on the things to eat he was forbidden to have" (160). Among these spectral remains wanders Ramsay, with legs so long that they hang off the end of the old man's bed and cramp up in the Mini-Minor as the widow takes him on excursions to amuse him (146, 150, 163). Among these spectral remains looms Ramsay's ego, so large that he would never take anything away. All around Ramsay are signs of his own insignificance and mortality; however, he denies their existence as if his own mind can stop and freeze time. Ultimately the greatest threat comes from the various forms or ideas that Ramsay imposes on these external elements, so that only his own disjointed, fragmented, and contextless sense of self remains. The primitive mountainous terrain, with the chalet, ponderous, looming like a watchful beast, prompts Ramsay to invoke a conception

1O2 Learning to Look

of the natural world as a Darwinian world of predators, struggle for survival, and survival of the fittest. As he approaches the chalet from the station on his arrival, he concludes that the landscape has "no other reason to command his gaze" than its having "belonged to Adrien Moser," but despite Ramsay's denial of the value of the natural world, it still imposes itself on him (136-7). On his first night in the pavilion, for example, "a large moth brushed against his face" and "its touch was pure horror": "The moth was paper-white until it blundered against the pillow, and then he saw it was cream. Indigo eyes were painted upon its wings." Panic-stricken, Ramsay sprays the moth with poison, and as in Virginia Woolf 's "Death of the Moth," the witness is subjected to the tenacity of the will to live. In this "poisoned room" with all the "incidental casualties - gnats, midges, spiders, flies" - of the moth's battle, Ramsay confronts his own physical fragility and mortality (146). Later, collecting spring water from "an evil grotto," he is horrified by the threat of the diseases and ailments that each pailful of the water contains; what presents him with the greatest threat, however, is Katharine herself (153). Katharine has "wakened something ... she later intended to curb" (163). When Ramsay first arrives at the chalet his idea of woman, of this woman who has been the great master's wife and comfort in his dying days, embraces that of nurturing mother and healing nurse, but he almost falls victim to the temptress in Katharine: "He had given her soft hair streaked with white, and humorous, intelligent eyes. His idea of a great man's wife was very near a good hospital nurse ... Her eyes were green, uptilted. The straight parting in her hair was coquetry, to show how perfectly proportioned was her face. The only flaws he had seen were the shape of her nose ... and the too straight body, which was a column for the fine head" (i43-4).47 Given the age difference - and given his initial "idea of a great man's wife" - Ramsay resists the temptation Katharine represents. He has a greater challenge when his appetites are whetted by her fourteen-year-old daughter, Anne, but having transformed Katharine into a kind of statue, he will do the same with the daughter. During one of the excursions on which Katharine has taken him to assuage the appetites she thinks she has aroused, to view an exhibition of French sculpture and painting, Ramsay becomes the target of surveillance by the cook's young son. Ramsay has deposed this boy literally dethroned him from his place at table, where he once "sat on a cushion, an atlas, and a history of nineteenth-century painting" - and expropriated the servitude and adoration of the women in the household from him (141). Now "Ramsay found himself sitting and looking at the headless statue of an adolescent girl. He looked at the

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small breasts, slightly down-pointed. The hips were wider than the chest, the legs columns. A piece of bronze, he told himself. No one had ever been like that. He put Anne's head on the bronze neck, and presently was conscious of being watched" (164). Perhaps Ramsay is more an heir to Moser's attitudes than he is willing to admit, Moser with his fondness for young girls. Peggy Boon, Anne's friend and the object of Moser's attentions, is "too plump" with her "new breasts [that] she was flattening at night with a silk scarf" (142). It was, Annie Richardson argues in "The Nazification of Women in Art," "the slim 'architectural' female body" that became for the National Socialists "a suitable choice as a representative public form of art, whose athletic body and pose of readiness-foraction could easily be viewed as the female equivalent to male heroism, and could dilute and give contemporary form to the female figure 'called' as if by God."48 In most features the statue at which Ramsay gazes parallels the racially approved body type of Nordic women that Richardson describes: "she has small breasts without prominent nipples, a flat stomach and long legs. She does not have broad hips or narrow shoulders in an absolute sense; there is no feminine or masculine 'form of humanity.'"49 Even the headless state of the statue now under Ramsay's gaze corresponds to "verbal and visual images of dismemberment" that Richardson observes in the renderings of the body in art and illustrations of Nordic beauty during the Third Reich. The headless condition allows the viewer to fix his own face (and head) to images in such a "clear display of Nordic features in women's bodies ... essential for the 'right' choice of a (racially pure) spouse, on which the fitness of future generations depends."50 The fragmentation of the body thus begins to assume decidedly political overtones in Gallant's fiction. Earlier, when Ramsay has touched the sleeping Anne, "he knew what he could be capable of, provided she loathed him, or was frightened of him. Better fear than hate." She has experienced neither emotion, however, as she, unmoving, watches him "between her lashes," "cold and excited, her heart like a machine under his hand, and Ramsay the vivisectionist" (162-3). Ramsay is left only to gaze - he "might as well have been invisible" - but not to act as the group at the chalet begins "disintegrating": "Ramsay could observe all he liked now, for there was no one to catch him at it. Even the old man's phantom had vanished" (166). Ramsay is faced with the prospect of being left alone with Katharine, herself a watcher, a reader of letters. Before anyone can "uncrumple" (156) anything more about him or his life, he makes his escape, turning his back on the chalet's "carved inscription," a reminder "that

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death waits for life," and on the chalet itself "like a bison, like a bear" as it "watched him slip and slide down the path" with "lunatic joy at his deliverance" (168). Ramsay has already uncrumpled to Katharine his immediate past in Berlin and has betrayed Sabine by turning her into an anecdote (150). His choice of Sabine as a lover and of Berlin as a place to reside and study marks Ramsay's first attempts to eradicate the past by collapsing time. Life so collapsed and reduced - whether the "dark and soft" ruins of Montreal with his parents or of Berlin with Sabine - is characterized by bricks and dust and ashes, all that remains of the dead (137-8). No amount of collapsing, however, can entirely reduce life to point zero. Images of the atrocities of the Nazis, buried among the brick, dust, and ashes, insist on surfacing with allusions to a stopped clock (139), a Yiddish goodbye (150-1), and deaths at a railway station (170). Ramsay, pampered child, the raison d'etre of his parents' marriage, an idea, not an individual in his own right, is incapable of caring. If the stopped clock of Sabine refers to the moment her parents died at the railway station, time began for Ramsay when his parents reunited at Bonaventure, the dusty station in Montreal, painted "the dark dry red that deflates the soul" and with wooden galleries at either end, the paint "scrofulous and diseased." His father returned to Montreal in an exchange of "sick, wounded, and tubercular" prisoners of war: "In the slow-motion film of someone else's memory, Ramsay saw his father there, home, alive, yes, but in a sense never seen or heard of again." Ramsay's mother, in telling her husband that "she hated sick people" and that "he would be an invalid all his life," in one stroke invalidated him as husband, man, and human being. She conceded to take him back, from pity she said, from a sense of "justice, the power of love," her husband claimed. How can Ramsay now verify this story? "Bonaventure Station was destroyed before Ramsay could see it. Most of the buildings his father and mother looked at when they were deciding his existence or nonexistence stand only on old postcards and in their account of that day" (148-9). He cannot verify - or negate - only constantly seek to annul it. And so Ramsay, attempting to leave the outside world and live entirely for and through self, makes his escape to the "ice-cold room with a linoleum floor" in a pension in Montreux (168). The cold, almost skeletal style of this section, recording items in the immediate surroundings, contrasts with earlier sections of the story in which memories and history and sounds of nature and voices of the other house guests weave through Ramsay's text. Ramsay now has only the objects in the room with which to share space in the world. There are no engravings of the punishment of Judas (137) or caricatures of

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the new rich (144): "A small Buddha, the only ornament in the room, sat on the chest of drawers. Ramsay picked him up, but no matter how he tried he could not catch Buddha's eye." Ramsay has not been absorbed into the world but, he believes, has himself absorbed the world. The other guests have no physical presence but can be identified by "the soft silent crunching, like silkworms feeding, that came from the dining room" (168). With no women to mother or nurse or tempt him, with no excursions to view nineteenth-century art and sculpture, he can again experience "signs of life and work. He found one of the signs in a drawer, left by the Professor Doctor [who stayed in the room before Ramsay] - a drawing of a naked and faceless woman wearing a pearl necklace." And with no "slow-motion film of someone else's memory," and no memories of his own - Berlin and Montreal, Sabine and his parents virtually forgotten - he can attend a film and watch "a pretty German girl mixed up with some man who looked like a toad" (169). He occasionally thinks of Katharine, that she will seek and find him, as she has done before with Moser (169-70). The only memory of his parents is of their respect for his independence, but he focuses instead on his dependence on nurses and resentment of this dependence (170). He retains a memory of Sabine's plea for tenderness, but merely as a prelude to his gratitude that his room in Berlin will be empty when he returns. His world is reduced to a blank screen: "In the pension dining room, television accompanied their supper. Chairs were arranged so that everyone faced in the same direction ... Everyone looked at the empty, glowing screen, across which sticks and marbles moved, ran together, parted. Faces were lifted, for the set was high on a corner shelf" (170-1). In "Bonaventure" there begins to emerge a feature that will become dominant in Gallant's stories of the late 19605 and early 19705: depiction of life at point zero. With Lottie denials of memory and history manifest themselves in only slight disjointedness and minor illness. The consequences for Ramsay are more serious, even life-threatening, for his psyche and his potential as a musician. Has Ramsay joined the Western world in its idolatry of the empty screen? Denying any world beyond self, Ramsay is left with only the reflection of his own mediocrity and egotism. His dying father has "found himself in possession of a total life" by loving a woman and fathering a child (135). Ramsay loves no one. Ramsay will father no one. Ramsay will be mourned by no one. Proportions remain radically skewed. Pegnitz Junction and point zero have been reached. The stories examined in this chapter provide illustrations not simply of what Iser defines as "the gaps, the fundamental asymmetry

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between text and reader, that give rise to communication in the reading process"51 but also, and more pertinently, of "vacancies" that arise as perspectives shift and as foreground and background elements vacillate, advancing and receding over multiple referential fields.52 "A referential field," Iser has established, "is always formed when there are at least two positions related to and influencing one another."53 Readers of Gallant's stories of the early 19605 are challenged to manoeuvre through multiple referential fields by witnessing the dismantling of frames separating inside and outside, by joining watchers who are themselves watched, and by adjusting proportions to avoid either patronizing or idolatrous positioning. In contrast, the characters station themselves so as to fix their perspective in a rigidly defined plane, often prostrate before empty forms and structures that are nothing more than a magnified reflection of self. Characters such as Peter Frazier, Lottie Benz, and Douglas Ramsay seem to seek avoidance of the "appraisal" that Sartre believes will relegate them to the position of "slaves," losing their freedom "which is the very condition of [their] being" to the perception of self by other, a danger that Sartre thinks is "not an accident but the permanent structure of [their] being-for-others."54 This "structure" arises, Sartre maintains, because "we cannot perceive the world and at the same time apprehend a look fastened upon us; it must be either one or the other ... The look which the eyes manifest ... is a pure reference to myself ... it is that I am vulnerable, that I have a body which can be hurt, that I occupy a place and that I can not in any case escape from the space in which I am without defense - in short, that I am seen."55 From Veronica Baines to Douglas Ramsay, Gallant's characters attempt to maintain a fixed position as spectator before the keyhole so as not to be spectacle behind it. As point zero is reached, planes collide; the ground is levelled; visibility and scrutiny can no longer be avoided.

4 Portraiture and Landscapes of "Life at Point Zero": A Decade of Remembering and Exorcizing and Remembering (1963-1972)

Now, imagine being twenty-two, being the intensely left-wing political romantic I was, passionately anti-fascist, having believed that a new kind of civilization was going to grow out of the ruins of the war - out of victory over fascism - and having to write the explanation of something I did not myself understand ... What I wrote and thought at twenty-two I think and believe now. I-\vrote, then, that the victims, the survivors that is, would probably not be able to tell us anything, except for the description of life at point zero. If we wanted to find out how and why this happened it was the Germans we had to question. There was hardly a culture or a civilization I would have placed as high as the German. But what the pictures said was that neither culture nor civilization nor art nor Christianity had been a retaining wall. Why not? What had happened? ... How could a nation like that one drop to zero so quickly and easily?1

Avoiding her research on the ethnic features of Alsace, Lottie Benz of "Virus X" takes a series of excursions: to the Louvre to view the Mono. Lisa,2 Katherine Mansfield's grave near Fontainebleau, the Alsatian countryside, the Maginot Line, Strasbourg Cathedral with its astronomical clock, a new prefab building for the opening of the European Assembly in Strasbourg (199). It is curious that given this penchant for visiting French tourist destinations, and given at least some interest in art - she invites Kevin to her room to "see the view, like a Flemish painting" (212) - Lottie fails to visit the most famous attraction of Colmar: Matthias Griinewald's Isenheim altarpiece,

io8 Learning to Look housed and displayed since the mid-nineteenth century "in a dismantled state" in the city's Musee d'Unterlinden.3 This omission is especially curious given Lottie's associations of Colmar with home (189). Despite its being in a museum rather than a church and dismantled rather than constructed as an altarpiece, and despite its sometimes gruesome subject-matter, the Isenheim altarpiece could offer the resistant Lottie the "profit" she seeks. There are two possible explanations for Lottie's avoidance of the potentially inspirational altarpiece. The first is her refusal to confront fragments of her German heritage, memories that surface when Lottie passes through Strasbourg and visits the cathedral. The second could very well be the disquieting elements of some panels, with their emphasis on disease, bodily pain, and distortion. Although Lottie occasionally describes disturbing images - the fragmentation of the porter's face at the hotel in Paris (174), the vertiginous vineyards sliding uphill (195), or the skull of General Montcalm, preserved as a relic by the Ursuline nuns (202-3) - her own aches and pains monopolize the canvas. On her first excursion from Colmar, that to Munster, as Lottie undergoes a three-hour wait after missing the bus back to Colmar, she wishes "she were religious" so as to "take her mind off such things as ... her own health" (192). Lottie is not yet primed for the therapeutic purpose of this altarpiece, originally built as panels for the main altar of the monastic church at Isenheim belonging to the Antonite order, dedicated to hospital work. Andree Hayum outlines, and then goes on to explain in the first chapter of The Isenheim Altarpiece: God's Medicine and the Painter's Vision, "the hospital context" of the altarpiece, the wings of which in its "closed state ... represent Saints Sebastian and Anthony," both associated with the plague: "Together they establish the themes of dire illness and miraculous healing as central to the meaning of the altarpiece at Isenheim" (17, 20). Lottie thus forfeits an opportunity for spiritual, psychological, and perhaps even miraculous physical healing that the Isenheim altarpiece was originally intended to offer. With the burning fever and consequent hallucinations, Virus X, which Lottie contracts while in Strasbourg, resembles, in mild form, the symptoms of the epidemic dubbed Saint Anthony's Fire, which may very well be the disease that has gruesomely ravaged some figures depicted in the Isenheim altarpiece (Hayum, 20-3). Just as the patients institutionalized at the monastery were brought before the altarpiece as part of the routine of the healing process (Hayum, 28-9), so Lottie beholds the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral, "rosy and buoyed up on plain air" (198). The patients at Isenheim were encouraged to identify with "the graphic representation of the diseased

109 Portraiture and Landscapes

state in the form of a demon," a "monster" that is "both gruesome and helpless," and whose face combines "deformity and pathos." This, "the most human-looking of the demons," is found on the bottom frame and therefore "would have been at the viewer's eye level as he approached the altar" (Hayum, 29-30). Similarly, sharing the view of the cathedral with the old man, Lottie feels empathy with him as he confronts his dislocation and mortality; consequently, her health improves (204). Only now does the cathedral begin to signify more to Lottie than a place where "both Catholic and Protestant services were held inside," this conjunction being "an important element of her thesis" (189). The Isenheim altarpiece is, as Hayum argues in her second chapter, very much "a Catholic Monument," despite the "Protestant iconoclasm" of the sixteenth century, which led to the removal of much of the religious art in nearby churches, including those of Strasbourg and Basel (56-7). The Isenheim altarpiece was "geared toward an experience of communion rather than of private contemplation": "Both in terms of sheer scale - we are confronted by a world seemingly able to encompass our own bodily size - and as a container of radiant light and color, these panels combine to elicit immediate and intense response, and ... they present certain tenets of Catholic doctrine as processes to be sensed directly by the worshiper" (Hayum, 87). This response is elicited primarily through "Grunewald's exquisitely skillful use of gesture" - for example, meaningful groupings and overlayerings (since the altarpiece has depth as well as linearity), and gestures that range from subtle to blatant. "If we look at lohn the Baptist's elongated forefinger pointing up at Christ's body in the closed state of the altarpiece, we know we are in a world that reveals by showing rather than by telling its stories" (Hayum, 75).4 Throughout her narrative, however, Lottie distrusts and resists such dramatic gestures. Finally, by failing to visit the Isenheim altarpiece, even in its dismantled state, Lottie also loses the opportunity to advance that "a composite viewing of its successive openings" stimulates (Hayum, 6). Lottie, disjointed, on a treadmill (207), fails to do so principally because of her final rejection and ultimate denial of her German heritage that the Isenheim altarpiece signifies. In the decades immediately prior to the First World War the altarpiece had "gained prominence by its ability to straddle the sensitive ideological axis marked by modernism, on the one hand, and nationalism, on the other" (Hayum, 125). The latter signification was confirmed when, after the war, "a defeated Germany clung in possessive attachment to this artistic treasure, so that France had to press for its restitution." After

no

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it was returned in 1919 to Colmar from Munich's Alte Pinakothek, where it had been housed during the war, the Germans "felt deprived of what had come to represent to them the quintessence of German civilization" (Hayum, 140-1). During the 19305 the National Socialists were more ambivalent a "befuddled relationship to the painter" is Hayum's verdict (146) about the altarpiece's significance as a national monument for several reasons. For one, the altarpiece was acknowledged to be a source of inspiration for many modernist painters - German Expressionists and others - whose art the National Socialists would judge and condemn as "degenerate." Even by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century "painters like Beckmann, Nolde, Marc, and Kirchner had already gone far in establishing a distinctive vocabulary of form. Distorting the shapes of nature and transfiguring the natural world through the emotional and associative use of color, they moved toward abstraction while at the same time they aimed to encompass more charged, even religious iconographies" (Hayum, 125). In the Isenheim altarpiece they found "a heroic precedent for their own aspirations" and "empathized with its excruciatingly felt and ecstatically transcendent religiosity, its poignant distortions of form, and its intense shifts in light and color" (Hayum, 127). Artists and art historians during the 19303 were unsuccessful in their attempts to have Expressionism accepted as "representative of contemporary Germany's 'indigenous Nordic' art. The defenders of these artists, basing their case on German art of the Gothic period, declared the ecstatic element and the tendency toward 'destruction of form' to be truly Germanic artistic impulses that were now being revived in Expressionism."5 Nor were the National Socialists willing to embrace Griinewald and his greatest masterpiece as emblems of German identity. As an icon (Hayum, 70, 116-17)tne Isenheim altarpiece might very well rival the objects of veneration that the National Socialists sanctioned, since the desired effects of the Isenheim altarpiece and of the authorized art of the Third Reich were the same - through witnessing the monumental, a viewer achieved an uneasy balance of empathy and reverence - but the veneration was directed towards very different ends. "The wonder of ascension, the shock of death, the inspiration of revelation, the immanence of suffering: these are conveyed as experiences ... and in the nature of presence itself" for worshippers witnessing the Isenheim altarpiece (Hayum, 88). Art of the Third Reich aimed to elicit the same response as that of the pageant: "Perspective or distance, which should be the result of reflection, was the last thing the benumbed spectator at this pageant could gain. Instead, he was encouraged to identify with a

in Portraiture and Landscapes concept of German greatness projected in mystical and aesthetic terms, a concept that made any kind of distance on individual and collective history, indeed, any kind of aloofness at all, impossible" (Hinz, 5). On 11 November 1936 Hitler's minister of propaganda issued the "Decree concerning Art Criticism" that "forbade art as a means of public discussion and communication; art was made instead into an aid to contemplation, empathy, and spiritual edification"; art was simply another "tool of social engineering" (Hinz, 36-7). In the genre painting favoured by the National Socialists, "the loss of contact with reality" ultimately resulted in attempts "to transcend immanence and reach the absolute" (Hinz, 108-9). To achieve these ends, the National Socialists banned any art that they judged to be either unfinished or problematic in the sense of provocative (Hinz, 9, 37-8, 51, 61), and they sanctioned and commissioned art deemed beautiful, harmonious, orderly, whole and wholesome. Nowhere is this more evident than in the response of Leni Riefenstahl, star and director of pro-Nazi and Nazi films, to a question from an interviewer from Cahiers du Cinema whether "a certain idea of form" that dominates Triumph of the Will and Olympia is "peculiarly German": "I can simply say that I feel spontaneously attracted by everything that is beautiful. Yes: beauty, harmony. And perhaps this care for composition, this aspiration to form is in effect something very German ... Whatever is purely realistic, slice-of-life, which is average, quotidian, doesn't interest me ... I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living. I seek harmony."6 Given these criteria and rival ends, it is a wonder that the Isenheim altarpiece, dismantled and displayed once again in the secular setting of the museum in Colmar, and depicting haunting, disturbing scenes of disease and suffering, was simply ignored by the National Socialists. From this discussion of the Isenheim altarpiece - whether valued for its therapeutic and healing potential, its religious inspirational value, or its empathetic representation of disease and suffering, or viewed as a nationalistic emblem, prototype for Expressionist intensity, precursor to modernist art, or rival object of veneration for National Socialists three interrelated elements of composition emerge as particularly relevant to the next group of Gallant stories: context, wholeness or completion, and distortion. In representative stories leading up to the publication of The Pegnitz Junction in 1973, Gallant's thematic and formal concerns now fully embrace these matters. It is, appropriately, with reference to architecture that Gallant has written most extensively and emphatically on the need for art to be considered in context, although she touches upon this theme in

112 Learning to Look

"What Is Style?" (Sept. 1982) when she remarks that "content, meaning, intention and form must make up a whole, and must above all have a reason to be."7 In "Paris: The Taste of a New Age" (April 1981) Gallant criticizes current architectural endeavours for this very failure to create buildings appropriate to current "urban requirements."8 Her criticism extends equally to the "unholy mess at Les Halles" and the Beaubourg Centre and to reactionary creations "built in a void," whether housing or chapels (169-74). The nostalgia and pretension that characterize Paris's new buildings of the late 19705 and early 19805 resemble the conscious efforts during the 19305 of the German fascists to "reactivate those artists who had been left behind by the development of modern art but who were still active after 1933 and who seized the opportunity to move into the vacuum once modern art had been liquidated" (Hinz, 15). This "called for a rewriting of history; and the entire National Socialist ideology did in fact ... revolve around anchoring the present in the past, dehistoricized as the National Socialist conception of the past may have been" (Hinz, 2). This was partially accomplished by highlighting the aesthetic and cultural value rather than the utilitarian (Hinz, xii-xiii, 36-8). Gallant never advocates a reversal of these values in either her fiction or non-fiction; however, there is a definite sense in both that a reason for being is imperative in any consideration of art: art must function within a particular and particularized context. Because "the National Socialists wanted an art that did not reveal alienation but disguised it" (Hinz, 53), they endorsed only art that exhibited wholeness, health, and conventional beauty; conversely, because a consistent theme throughout Gallant's fiction is displacement and the consequent alienation that displacement engenders, her formal and thematic interests have often entailed exploration of process and formation rather than the assumption that all art has the polish of a completed product at the end of an assembly line. The art policies dictated by the National Socialists "rejected the experimental character of much modern art. They rejected the aesthetics of the sketch, the non finito, the capturing of fleeting, mobile thoughts, the mere effect" (Hinz, 61). Thus they favoured genre painting, which "is almost entirely static ... Genre painting could be understood as an articulation of total immanence in that it focuses exclusively on what already exists and has been achieved; it is not capable of opening new vistas" (Hinz, 72). Gallant's heightened interest in the theme of alienation and her consequent formal and thematic exploration of process mean that her structures and images increasingly encourage the mobility and kineticism discussed in earlier chapters. With

113 Portraiture and Landscapes mobility comes a certain enigmatic and distorted quality of both background and foreground, context and subject, field and figure, as these collapse into one another. Nightmare journeys and disproportionate and distorted maps, disfigured bodies and X-rays and illness now dominate the landscapes and portraits of Gallant's fiction. The stories of the mid- to late 19605, those preceding the publication of A Fairly Good Time in 1970 and The Pegnitz Junction in 1973, reveal Gallant's continued concern with form and proportion. This interest now assumes a more sinister edge as Gallant explores the reciprocal relationship between art and its subject and how this relationship is affected, even profaned, by a gaze unless that gaze is transformed into a "glance," as described by Karen Kleinfelder. Although Gallant's texts do not provide illustrations as radical as the later works of Picasso that Kleinfelder discusses, her distinction between the gaze and the glance is instructive here: The gaze, so suited for autopsy, treats the corpus more as a corpse than a vital organism; to become responsive to the dynamic pulses of process, the viewer ... must exercise the glance. When focus shifts from product to process, we no longer can gain perspective by fixing our gaze on a vanishing point embedded in the fictive depths of the imagery; the vanishing point is instead perpetually projected forward, perhaps in the next image, or the next image after that. Since the vanishing point is always elsewhere, there can be no pausing in the viewing process. Perspective becomes a lateral projection rather than a perpendicular penetration. This shift in the axis orients a shift in the access; paradoxically, the viewer cannot remain at a distance from the process as long as the final product remains distanced from view. The lack of an overt narrative order turns the search for a resolution of image polarities and compositional tensions into a covert operation in which the viewer becomes as enmeshed in the structural network as the canvas that continually comes between artist and model.9 With the exception of the first-person narratives anthologized in The Pegnitz Junction, the most representative stories from this period are those told from Gallant's characteristic third-person perspective, which embraces interior monologues of one or more characters.10 This perspective permits an exploration of the dynamics between characters and their environment with reference to human bodies, physical landscapes, and narrative forms; Gallant's experimentation comes to fruition in the German stories, most of which are collected in The Pegnitz Junction.

114 Learning to Look FRAGMENTATION AND OF HUMAN FORMS AND

DISTORTION PHYSICAL

LANDSCAPES

Two early stories demonstrating Gallant's parallel treatment of human forms and physical landscapes, both of which when fragmented and distorted serve as political statement, are anthologized in In Transit: "The Statues Taken Down" (9 Oct. 1965) and "Questions and Answers" (28 May 1966)." Formal and social concerns relating to perspective, proportion, framing, and form examined in the previous chapters are still very much in evidence here, but they assume a new urgency and broader applicability as human forms and physical landscapes pale, wither or distend, and disintegrate, and as total erasure threatens. "The Statues Taken Down" begins as George Crawley, a poet, "turn[s] his two younger children loose day after day in the PalaisRoyal gardens" in an effort to amuse them.12 This particular summer, the third in Paris that his daughter, Dorothy, can remember, is crucial for her as she attempts to define her emergent womanhood and to understand how this womanhood revises and rescripts relations with her parents. As Dorothy struggles to see these relations in proportion, even the children's "playgrounds" conspire to skew the picture and distort the body. Dorothy protects herself from the cold with extra layers of clothes, but her brother, Hal, walks tortoiselike, "with his head pulled down, as if the act of shortening his neck would keep him warm." When at last the "legendary trees, round as sponges, covered with little green lettuce leaves" brave the elements, they are still vulnerable: "A frost, said Hal, would finish them off" (163-4). Although Dorothy remembers, from previous visits, "a wilderness of leaves" that demarcates "true summer," she confuses different varieties of European trees. Forms, proportions, and colours are distorted as Dorothy weighs legend and memory against the real thing: "Dust blew up in their faces when they entered the closed park of the Palais-Royal. It was smaller than the space retained in their minds. It would continue to shrink; perhaps they would come back grown and find it the size of a drying sheet. A red chestnut tree, as they approached it, became pink; from underneath, the flowers were pink as floss. They trod on fallen petals, which from a distance were again red" (164). This detailed description of the Palais-Royal park with its spectral "legendary trees" underscores more significant distinctions that Dorothy will attempt to make at this transition in her life. Just as size, colour, and shape are essential for distinguishing different types of

ii5 Portraiture and Landscapes

trees, so they are for defining herself as a woman. Her father reduces people to forms or ideas where such distinctions are eradicated. With his children it is "convenient for him to imagine they were close and inviolate" and that they have a "kind of secret language or code" that excludes him as an adult and thus justifies his failure to speak to them as individuals (161). He prefers to see them not as active children, with their own unique needs and desires, but as passive forms: "He looked from one face to the other and was looking not at his own children but at images of Victorian children in repose ... They were Victorian in expression, in watchful calm" (162). Similarly, women are of a type. Crawley describes to Hal and Dorothy his first meeting with their mother: "She looked like the Holbein portrait of Lady Parker, with that sweet mouth and almost lashless blue eyes, and the hair parted in the centre, and a flat coif around the back of the head" (161).13 That Holbein, so skilled at individualizing his men, blurs the distinctive features of female models in his drawings and paintings is reinforced later when Dorothy recalls this allusion as "Lady Someone in a picture" (168) and, later, "Lady Something in a Holbein" (170). By contrast, the children attempt to distinguish form from the real thing. To begin, there is the remembered form of their father, filled in only with their mother's label, measured against the physical reality. With his "nose broken like a boxer's, and a head of thick, curly grey hair," he fails to correspond with "their last memory of him, which was three years old, or their mother's description, which was not physical but only that he was a poet." Nor does he "resemble his pictures," seeming "heavier, softer" (162), obviously more substantial, contoured, and enigmatic than these pictures reveal. As her brother attempts to solve "an egg puzzle of polished wood that came apart and could not be put together," so Dorothy tries to see and understand herself, father, and mother in various configurations until she solves the puzzle. Being literal-minded, she demands something other than the illusive forms that she remembers or inherits. Dorothy tackles her father's poetry to clarify the relationships between the parts and solve the mystery. Whereas the closed garden of the Palais-Royal has sufficed as background to read "a greenbacked pornographic novel she had found on the bathroom window sill," it is too small for reading her father's poems, so she moves to the Tuileries. One of her father's poems that attracts her is about "a swallow in a narrow street, skimming too low, migrating, [and] caught in a net." Her father has been "heedless or unknowing enough to say, That was your mother'" (165); Dorothy understands "that" to refer to the swallow. On the day that she attempts to crack the code of this poem, Dorothy has "abandoned" her brother at a

n6 Learning to Look

cinema where a "Festival du Vampire" was being held (166). As with the trees, Dorothy has no context in which to perceive the imagery of her father's poem: "If Dorothy had seen swallows, she had not recognized them; she could not imagine a street so narrow that a net would reach across it, or a bird too clumsy to fly up and away ... Her mother was not a bird that waddled or went off in some foolish direction" (165-6). At this point, Dorothy cannot accept the idea of her mother as helpless, passive victim, caught in a net not of her own making, but only one other image is available to her. In the earlier description of her mother, when Crawley compares her to the Holbein portrait, he also includes several details that fail to fit. Dorothy's parents met in a hospital where her mother was a nurse. Crawley has described her "very efficiently and almost patiently ... [drawing] quite a lot of blood from [his] arm," and later, after he impulsively declared his love and asked her to marry him, she "smiled, and measured the blood she had taken against the light, but still did not speak" (161-2). The mother is much like the blatantly idealized and latently sensual women preferred by the approved artists of the Third Reich. Susan Sontag concludes that "Fascist aesthetics ... endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude," to exploit the "relations of domination and enslavement," and that in depictions of the human form, "Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A Utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a 'spiritual' force, for the benefit of the community. The erotic (that is, women) is always present as a temptation, with the most admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse."14 In portraiture, women "became objects of male fantasy that was given free rein in voyeurism": "The iconography of woman in the Third Reich expressed itself in a visualization, created by men and for men, of their sanctioned sexual domination. The image of woman presented in painting, literature, and film degraded her and relegated her to a permanent position of servitude."15 Dorothy has already begun to develop the coquettish gestures of a siren alluded to in Crawley's descriptions. Assigned the responsibility of caring for Hal, she instead uses him for target practice (164). Now she has abandoned him to vampires. The reductive image of woman as passive victim, as Dorothy interprets the swallow, or as active victimizer, as implied in her father's other descriptions, assumes threatening proportions as she awaits enlightenment in the Tuileries: "Hours later she was shocked - drawn awake, in a sense -

117 Portraiture and Landscapes

by a darkening across the sky, as if black wool were being combed out in great streaks ... She looked at lovers again, and then at entwined statues. (Hal was seeing the vampire festival the third time through, eating chocolate in the dark to give him energy so that he could bear his emotions.) The intimation of danger here, in the park, the sudden rush of the clouds, made her think sentimentally of her father, alone and possibly lonely" (166). Although her father's poems have explained "nothing she wanted to know, either about her sudden fear or her sudden cruelty," she is ready to take her place in her father's gallery of women, despite feeling herself "inferior and unworthy of the poet's past" (167). Fearful of the statues and idle men watching her "from benches and chairs and from behind trees" in the park, she lacks courage and feels that she too has been abandoned: "The lovers, the children, the mothers, the grandmothers had disappeared, leaving the entwined and emotional statues and these silent men. It was as though animals had crept out of their cages and were afraid to do more than stare" (166-7). These entwined statues are clearly linked to the women in her father's life: "The names evoked, for his daughter, their large breasts and abundant hair, their repeated pregnancies and their chain-smoking. They had been photographed when the camera was askew or the light bleak, when their hair was lank after rain, when their babies half slipped off their corduroy laps like parcels on a bus ... She was from a thinner generation, a generation of stick figures. Figures from his time seemed twice the size of life." At this point the narrative records George's concern over "the statues taken down." Understandably George prefers the "wild and romantic" statues of Coustou, Coysevox, and Van Cleve to the cold monumentality of Maillol's figures replacing them (168), even though Maillol shared his predilection for seeking the ideal female form and seizing and encasing it in stone, wood, or bronze.16 George too has appropriated and reduced women in the image of the swallow caught in a net, the reference to the Holbein portrait, and the description of the vampirish nurse. George's disparagement of the Maillols can be viewed from another angle when, in the next paragraph, Dorothy and reader meet Natasha, the "girl" in whose "sunless, high-ceilinged place that smelled like a pet shop" they have been spending the summer (163). Natasha fails to conform to type. Her diminutive form likens her more to the stick-like girl, Dorothy: "Her arms were thin as a starved child's. Her black sweater and checked skirt, her black stockings and pixie shoes made her seem a child from an institution. She had invented her own uniform ... Pencilled brows arched, clownlike, on

n8 Learning to Look

a high, bald brow." Despite creating her own geography, she is a Lilliputian in a landscape that threatens to engulf her: "She had somehow found a puddle to walk in - around her shoes water collected. Elf-sized lakes were created, and then, because of the inclination of the ancient floor, a pair of rivers" (168). Natasha has come to tell them that a lodger, who "in some complicated way, had come with the flat" (163), has been hospitalized after shooting himself in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice. The lodger has been the main spectral form haunting this story. He has been brought out of Russia by Natasha, and with no function and no context in which to manifest himself, all material things threaten his very being. Crawley, with his selective seeing, ignores the lodger and his personal belongings. For the children, the lodger appears "a failed adult" and, therefore, "only a pale eye, a hostile and melancholy nose glimpsed when he opened his door an inch or two." He is likened to an alien substance, a weed: "had he been, say, a dandelion clock, the girl's summer skirt could have brushed off his head and she would never have noticed the harm" (163). The elements threaten erosion or amputation - even extinction; Natasha and the lodger may be washed away in flood waters, snuffed out by material substances, or blown away in the wind. But what is responsible for this withering of the human forms of the spectral, fragmented lodger, the diminutive Natasha, and the sticklike girls of Dorothy's generation? To Natasha's observation that two forces have affected the lodger's childhood, Crawley responds, "His mother and father, like everyone." Natasha corrects him, giving a political rather than psychological explanation: "'No, George. Hitler and Stalin.' Then she said, staring, 'Oh, these are the nurse's children/ and George stared, too, as if children, unless legends, with warm, wild and legendary mothers, confounded him" (169). Behind the forms and stares, political and psychological forces have created the ghosts and stick-like figures of the twentieth century. Claude Gandelman describes "the phantasm of the anorexic body," a feature common to all forms of German expressionism - film, painting, literature - as a phantasm that "projects the vision of a linear, filiform body, a human body as thin as thread or wire."17 Discussing the gestures, particularly but not exclusively evident in film, that compel the viewer in one direction, to one end, Gandelman contrasts German with Russian films: "German expressionist movies seem to be characterized by the omnipresence of winding paths or corridors that compel the eye to follow them. In this they diverge from Soviet cinema, which is based instead on cuts and montage, the real flesh or skin of celluloid film; cutting and pasting are procedures that deal

ii9 Portraiture and Landscapes

with epidermic operations."18 To the political dimensions of the landscapes are added the psychological and physical effects on those subjected to gazing that Gallant highlights in this story. The consequence is diminution to the point of non-existence. Even though Natasha does not conform to Crawley's usual form of woman, she has fit into the same pattern of female relationships with him: "He blurred the story in the telling, having perhaps forgotten much of it. Dorothy knew one thing - the swallow had rushed away from him. That put her outside the legend and outside his generation, in a way" (169). The swallow, originally Dorothy's mother, could here be either Dorothy or Natasha, as could the feminine pronoun in the next sentence. Despite these physical differences, the women are made to conform to the legend, and despite Dorothy's confusion at the end of the story, as she sorts through the fragments of information she has (170), it seems inevitable that Dorothy will follow the lead of these women as madonna, guilt-ridden siren, and anorexic waif. In Gallant's next published story, "Questions and Answers," Amalia Moraru sorts through fragments to make sense of her friendship with a fellow Rumanian emigree, Marie, who has financed the relocation of Amalia and her husband, Dino, from Bucharest to Paris sixteen years ago. Amalia's chief confidante is another Rumanian emigree, a fortune teller, Madame Gisele, whom Amalia has been consulting for two years, ever since Marie came to Paris. There is still "not a complete story"19 because Amalia is reticent about disclosing details from the past, her failure to bring Marie out of Rumania earlier, and her mixed emotions of the present now that Marie has arrived but refuses to lodge with Amalia and her husband. Again human portraits and landscapes become distorted, reflecting the political and social upheaval of these displaced people. The bodily disfigurements and distortions in this story are of a very different sort from the emaciated and fragmented Russian emigres of the former story. Dino's work may be unpleasant - as a glovemaker his hands have "a queer smell" (183) - but Marie's occupation, in combination with the cold weather accompanying a late spring, has taken its toll from head to foot: "She is a corsetiere, and kneels to fat women all day. Her legs, her knees, her wrists, her fingers are bloated - she looks like a carving in stone" (176). Marie's foundations, those swollen legs, are her most prominent deformity. Amalia connects Marie's deformity with heart or circulatory ailments, but she is more concerned that people stare at the foreignlooking Marie. (Ironically, Amalia prides herself in not looking French, but her pressed collar and hair "coiled and railed in by pins"

12O Learning to Look

mark her out.) Madame Gisele attributes Marie's swollen legs to overwork rather than any intrinsic malady (174). Marie's disfigurements expose her as a foreigner, and with her "ruined smile" - her "teeth are like leaves in winter now" - and bloated body as she "waddles to the flower market" (175), she becomes a potential target for persecution. "Rumanians notoriously are marked by delusions of eminence and persecution/' the story begins. "Like all expatriates in Paris, they are concerned with the reactions of total strangers" and read menace in every stare (173). Marie is free of such delusions, and thus the threat of persecution is exacerbated by her failure to understand the gravity of her precarious situation and to take precautions. Last autumn Marie was detained by police for questioning about those documents that define her existence - passport, residency permit, work permit - but after being released, she strolls through Paris's flower market, spends the last of her money on coffee and cakes, and wanders aimlessly and carefree until the desire to wish on the new moon strikes her (185-6). Marie remains optimistic because she has faith in a future different from her past and present: she believes that her application to emigrate to United States will prove successful despite much evidence to the contrary. Fourteen months ago Marie received a letter saying "You are not legible," a letter itself illegible. Marie takes the part as a whole: if one word is wrong, "the whole letter might be wrong." Amalia, conversely, cannot see any hope in the parts because the whole is so overwhelmingly dismal. When Marie is told at the consulate that her application has been refused, Amalia reads defeat, deflation - "Marie seems unable to support something just then - perhaps the weight of her own clothes" - and makes an inventory of all the details that cumulatively have conspired to obstruct Marie (181-2). Earlier in the story, but chronologically later than her detention at the local police station (an April evening), Marie is again revealed making a wish, but this time the wish seems more a plea for a "reading" of what the future holds. Marie now walks "in slow march time" with "legs [as] thick as boots. Crossing the street she suddenly stands still and begins to watch the sky. You would think her mind was drifting if you could see her, choosing to block traffic at the worst moment of the day staring at the new moon and the planet Venus. She is making a wish. Amalia, who lives on the same square, has seen her doing it. Marie stares as if the sky were a reflecting sheet; perhaps what Marie sees against blue Venus is the streaky movement20 of cars behind her, and the shadow of her own head" (176). The layering of perspectives in this passage and the constant collapsing of time into

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present tense are revealing. Ostensibly the story is third person: an outside observer addressing an outside audience. Yet the insistence on the instability of Marie's mind reads like many of Amalia's descriptions of similar scenes to Madame Gisele as Amalia offers them up to her for interpretation. There is also the constant sense of being watched and surveyed. Have the threat of surveillance and the disappointment of plans and wishes begun to wear Marie down despite her substantial presence? Will the fabric of her mind be the first to wear thin? Marie is so inflated with vacuous optimism that a colossal explosion and collapse seem imminent. Until the arrival of Marie in Paris, Amalia has been able to immure herself against poverty, oppression, vulnerability, and alienation. Marie has signified for her "irrecoverable time" (178), lost youth, failing health, and degenerating body. Fourteen years in Rumania have already so maimed Marie that when she arrived and "lumbered toward them, out of the past," Amalia and Dino,"waiting all night for the past," failed to recognize her, "a ridiculous stranger who had no one to love but them" (177). When Amalia first learned that Amalia would be joining them in Paris, she attempted to disguise the ravages of time: "Peering into Madame Gisele's magic hand mirror again to see what she can see, Amalia does not recognize her own face. Two years ago, when she knew that Marie would be coming to Paris, Amalia dyed her greying hair. Later, she saw her reflection in the glass covering an old photograph of Marie (the photograph taken to Madame Gisele for mystical guesswork) and she saw two faces and believed them to be both her own. What am I now, she wondered. I am the one I left and the other one I became. Marie is still herself ... Now Amalia knows she was mistaken; Marie is also two" (176-7). This story focuses not only on what they were and are but also on what they can become. The late spring, with its potential to suffocate, contributes to a sense of malaise: "Some mornings the air is so white and still you might expect a fall of snow, and at night the air expands, as it does in December" (175). Marie, in her advanced state of degeneration, is a visible reminder of the expatriates' isolation and ultimate defencelessness: "Who will look after her during the long, last illness every emigre dreads?" (178) This, then, is, at least in part, what Marie represents for Amalia. Marie's body is subjected to further scrutiny and indignities. Content not merely to provide Madame Gisele with photographs, Amalia provides her confidante with "Marie's new X-rays - the ones she's had taken for the Americans" (174). Fellow emigres and civic employees alike probe Marie's innermost being, strip away the surface in a kind of dermatological denuding. Then, having declared Marie not

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to be "legible"/"eligible," they write and ask "for centimetre-bycentimetre enlargements of the pictures of her lungs" (182). This probing, like the questions Amalia asks Madame Gisele, exposes more about herself than about Marie: "I don't think you are telling me about a real person ... For all I know, she is just someone you've invented, or it's another way of talking about yourself." Marie is very real - "Marie kill herself? You would have to smother Marie; put the whole map of Paris over her face and hold it tight" (187) - but she is irrepressible because of the various forms she takes. Amalia's displacement has anaesthetized fellow feeling. Amalia lacks compassion towards Marie as a human being because Marie represents aspects of herself and her life. Marie is irrepressible because - among other manifestations - she represents not only the shame that Dino and Amalia feel for their negligence of her (187) but also their fear that Marie's disintegration will expose them as visible subjects for interrogation (179-80). In addition to fears for the future, guilt for past actions, and shame of present sentiments, Marie represents another quality for Amalia: loss of freedom in a patriarchal society. Their paths have been very different: Amalia has remained married to Dino, connected through worry, even after the yellow has worn off the gold locket, his first gift to her (183-4); Amalia, mistress to a wealthy man, was surrounded by white and gold, but the books "turned out to be not Balzac at all but a concealed bar," and only a "pastel drawing of a naked girl on a diving board" was original (183). Now they stand together, chopping vegetables for the evening soup, and Amalia wonders "if she and Marie looked the same, with their hands misshapen and twisted and the false meekness of their bent heads. Living had bent them, Amalia would begin to say, and emigration, and being women, and oh, she supposed, the war" (182). Ironically, the dream destination, Paris, has been the great leveller for these emigres: racial, social, cultural distinctions fail to provide them with a year's residency visa instead of the three-month visitor permit (186), to cut out the bureaucracy of obtaining a work permit, or to make them more "legible" or "eligible" for immigration to the United States. At the heart of the monster that Amalia has created is her own inability to accept this state of affairs (188). Ultimately, then, this is a story about the colossus that twisted emotions and attitudes shape. Marie represents their lost past, painful present, and futile future. The bloated Marie, the Marie who is repository of their fears, guilt, shame, jealousy, and elitism, is a monster of their own creation so colossal that it threatens to suffocate all in its path.

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By the time Gallant published "In the Tunnel" (18 Sept. 1971), some five to six years after the stories just discussed, three German stories had already been published in the New Yorker - "One Aspect of a Rainy Day" (14 Apr. 1962), "Willi" (5 Jan. 1963), and "A Report" (3 Dec. 1966) - as had three other German stories that would later be anthologized in The Pegnitz Junction: "Ernst in Civilian Clothes" (16 Nov. 1963), "An Autobiography" (i Feb. 1964), and "The Old Friends" (30 Aug. 1969). Shortly after publishing "In the Tunnel/' the New Yorker published the remaining Pegnitz Junction stories - "O Lasting Peace" (8 Jan. 1972), "An Alien Flower" (7 Oct. 1972), and "The Pegnitz Junction" (1973) - and the German story that missed the anthology's publication deadline, "The Latehomecomer" (8 July 1974). While characters in her German stories and in stories anthologized in In Transit, such as Tom Waterford of "Vacances Pax" (16 July 1966) and Olivia of "Good Deed" (22 Feb. 1969), exhibit fascistic tendencies, Roy Cooper displays the most extreme fascistic attitudes of all Gallant's creations, and "In the Tunnel" exposes most fully and clearly the effects on body and soul of such attitudes. Roy Cooper, who now idles away his summers on the French Riviera and winters in Marbella or Kenya, was once a prison inspector in an Asian colony of Britain. Unlike the feckless and essentially innocuous Walter Henderson of "An Unmarried Man's Summer," Roy is, as Sarah Holmes, his current prey, eventually concludes, "cruel, lunatic, Fascist."21 The Reeves, who are like surrogate parents to Roy, and in whose guest house, The Tunnel, he has invited Sarah to spend the rest of her holiday, abet him in his predatory activities. The surnames "Cooper" and "Reeve," as Neil Besner observes, are "appropriate sign[s] for their function[s],"22 functions that have become anachronistic. "Cooper" not only denotes maker or mender of casks but also, in a colloquial sense, keeping prisoners in the "coop." Meg Reeve tells Sarah, "He misses that job of his ... He tried to give a lot of natives a sense of right and wrong, and then some Socialist let them vote" (99). Roy (suggestive of "roi") appropriates the anachronistic position of "reeve" when he upgrades his former occupation, to impress Meg Reeve's niece, to magistrate (98). This niece, with the doubly truncated name "Lisbet," fits well into the group with her training to "see straight through" people, so that in her personnel job she can weed out the asthmatics at interview stage and save her firm thousands of pounds every year (89). Roy and Lisbet have a certain kinship: "They were alike, with fortunes established in piracy. He liked executions; she broke people before they had a chance to break themselves" (98).

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The colossally obese Meg and absurdly thin Tim Reeve are caricatures of British expatriates attempting to preserve remnants of the British Empire on their small plot of foreign soil. Meg taunts Sarah with "what Tim has in his veins" that all Sarah's "transatlantic money" could not purchase (93). Roy and Lisbet assure Sarah that both husband and wife are "the real thing" (94). With their stodgy and unhealthy "fry-ups," canine "boys" pampered with "chockie bits/' references to Roy looking "like a bloody dago" (80-2), abhorrence of Socialists and Britain's Labour Party (78-9), confinement to their bit of property because of Tim's fear that every time the car's ignition was turned on "the car's lifeblood was seeping away" through the battery (83), and refusal even to look at the Mediterranean (84), they go beyond Gallant's typical creation of pathetic figures to become menacing grotesques. The confidence that they have in their foreign and anachronistic life makes them all the more ominous; they are loose cannons lacking a context or purpose. To Sarah, "in a heightened moment of telepathy/' Tim "had already ceased to be. He was not Mr Reeve, Roy's friend and landlord, but an ectoplasmic impression of somebody like him, leaning forward, lips slightly parted" (81). Even when the body disappears, the form persists. The Reeves may be absurd grotesques, but Roy is a sinister predator. In his summer whites and with his polite, old-fashioned ways he could pass for one of the local policemen. Yet when he first accosts Sarah, he confesses to knowing where she is staying and to following her for days in an attempt to talk to her (74-5). Only when she is ready to leave Roy does Sarah imagine him "prowling the bars and beaches, wearing worn immaculate whites, looking for a new, unblemished story ... She saw him out in the open, in her remembered primrose light, before he was trapped in the tunnel again and had to play at death" (101). His playing at death refers to Roy's strategy for getting rid of Sarah - not speaking, not eating - when she herself is no longer "a new, unblemished story." Hanging laundry, Sarah has injured her ankle, and her swollen deformity bares Roy's full nastiness, his attitude that "nothing must ever go wrong. An accident is degrading for the victim" (97-8). Marital relationships, parental relationships, domesticity, youth, bastion for a British elitist and colonial lifestyle - all the characters are prone to "inventing fidelities" (86) to give shape and meaning to their idle lifestyles on foreign soil. One invention that clearly aligns this coterie with fascism is the emphasis on health. Tim Reeve, Roy claims, is never ill, a boast that both Tim and Meg confirm (88-9). Meg too seems a healthy specimen of her race, but Sarah has been unaware one day, ignoring Meg on the bus so as to appear a member

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of the local peasantry, that Meg, in her "floral cotton that compressed her figure and gave her a stylized dolphin shape" (87), has just received treatment for "a small malignant thing." Only Sarah notices the blemish, and then only as she is about to leave - "Something's bitten you. Look. Something poisonous" - but the observation comes too late to draw together the two women (103). "In the Tunnel" is the first story in the second section of Home Truths, "Canadians Abroad." Although Roy's sinister perversity and the Reeves's grotesque eccentricity help to define the background, ultimately this story is that of Sarah Holmes and her opportunity to observe the limitations of her own attitudes and the failure of the liberal thinking of the late 19605. Like Lottie Benz, Sarah has been pursuing a course of studies in the social sciences (72). She hopes to discover and assume a disguise that would provide her with the same objectivity and distance that permitted Roy to "measure the exercise yard to see if it was up to standard," oversee hangings (99), and stalk and prey upon young girls in the bars and beaches of Nice. Sarah's awareness of the flaws in her ambitions begins to emerge during an excursion with Roy and Lisbet to a small church with frescos of the Last Judgment. Roy and Lisbet are "embarrassed by Christ" and "glance with some consternation at the life of Jesus spread around for anyone to see." Instead, "they went straight to Judas, who was more reassuring. Hanged, disembowelled, his stomach and liver exposed to ravens, Judas gave up his soul. His soul was a small naked creature. Perceiving Satan, the creature held out its arms" (97). This may seem a strange magnet for Roy, who is so finicky about cleanliness, tidiness, and cruelty to mosquitoes (88, 91). His attraction acquires a context when, later during this excursion, he tells Lisbet of hangings he has seen. In the same "soft voice" he uses to woo Sarah, he philosophizes, "Don't you think some people are better out of the way? ... Flawed people, born rotten" (98). Given shape or form, whether through art or institutionalized justice, cruelty and violence can be tolerated, even witnessed and condoned. Neither Roy nor Lisbet responds to or appreciates the painting's obvious religious messages of redemption and salvation, temptation and betrayal. Sarah too is attracted by the Judas fresco and steals a reproduction postcard to take away with her. This postcard, rather than "an out-of-print Matisse poster intended for Professor Downcast" (77), which she has brought with her to The Tunnel but burns when she leaves, is Sarah's memento of her relationship with Roy. Sarah understands that she has become "a disgusting object because of a cracked ankle ... and because she had led an expedition to look at Jesus" (100). But no one has looked at Jesus, only at Judas.

ia6 Learning to Look

At critical times in her relationship with Roy, such as the "The 111Fated Excursion" (95) to view the Last Judgment frescos, Sarah "felt overtaken by her father's humor, not her own" (97). Humour allows Sarah to achieve a balance, some sense of proportion in her life, but as a kind of defence mechanism in situations where the odds seem against her. During this "Ill-Fated Excursion" Sarah has dreamt that "she was engaged in an endless and heated discussion with some person who was in the wrong," but after awaking and hearing Roy woo Lisbet with soft words of the right to exterminate people "in the wrong," Sarah empathizes with the victims: "She was not Sarah now but a prisoner impaled on a foreign language, seeing bright, light, foreign eyes offering something nobody wanted - death" (98). Sarah, as Jean Price in "Its Image on the Mirror," must develop her own language and way of seeing. More successfully than Jean, she finds the humour - not at the expense of others but directed at herself to achieve a more proportioned view. The concluding paragraph, as in many Gallant stories, is shot through with multiple possibilities. Far from the abandoned chapel and the complete story of the Last Judgment, the reproduction postcard of Judas suggests "an image that might have followed her from the nursery. It was someone's photo, a family likeness, that could bear no taint of pain or disaster" (105). This image is likely of her mother, who was betrayed by death and who has deprived Sarah of a mother's presence in her life. Sarah refuses to be victim to death or men. Refusing the victim role, has Sarah become the predator? Will Sarah's acceptance of herself locked into the prison of her own fixed character as "a natural amoureuse," speaking "in a true voice" and "visible from all directions" (72), give her a confidence and ease to become the betrayer? The humorous inscription penned on the back of the postcard - given a new context, a new direction (105-6) - suggests that Sarah Holmes has brought an awareness "home" from France and her experiences that she will be able to adapt, transform, and bring to fruition. Will future canvases be littered with impaled victims? Again, the only certainties at the end of this story are the failure of political ideologies and the persistence of the human spirit: "Even if she always ended up sitting outside a gate somewhere, was she any the worse for it?" (101). "IT I S A W A Y O F L I V I N G , NOT Q U I T E A L I F E "

"Willi," the first of four stories featuring German prisoners of war interned in France, hinges on a scene essential for seeing and reading

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all Gallant's German stories. Subsisting on a meagre living in Paris for the now almost eighteen years after the war, Willi has turned to drilling students appearing in films about the Occupation. Willi has found work on one of these films for his friend Ernst, who avoided starving at the end of the war by joining the French Legion. Now that the wars are over, Ernst awaits approval of his application for a pension, which will happen only "on the right day with every document assembled in the file." Because he has "no income, no fixed domicile, and no trade," Ernst is ineligible for a residence permit.23 With his brown hair and slight build, Ernst is "not a German military figure," but Willi claims that his friend had been a German officer, and Ernst is assigned the role of an ss officer arresting a Jewish couple (29-30). Every time Ernst attempts to push the Jewish professor, he apologizes: "Willi understands: Ernst has too much respect for the professor. Ernst wouldn't hurt a fly. Somebody must have hurt a fly once, or they wouldn't keep on making these movies. But it wasn't Willi or Ernst." Willi eventually reminds Ernst of his long-awaited pension, subject to the whims of government bureaucracy, and with this context to motivate him, "Ernst gives the professor such a push that the poor man falls against his wife" and drops the bread he has been carrying on the dirty pavement. The director approves the realism of the scene, although "the star of the film, the French Resistance heroine, thinks it was overdone" (30). Clearly art is here imitating art, creating, reinforcing, and perpetuating its own mythologies, borrowing from a contemporary context of injustice to make the past appear convincing. Since the apprenticeship stories of the 19405 and 19505, Gallant's fiction has been developing in this direction, but now, with the historical and political context accentuated, the implications are disturbing. Speaking of "The Latehomecomer," Gallant explains to Hancock: "Try to put yourself in the place of an adolescent who had sworn personal allegiance to Hitler. The German drama, the drama of that generation, was of inner displacement. You can't tear up your personality and begin again, any more than you can tear up the history of your country ... To wrench your life and beliefs in a new direction you have to be a saint or a schizophrenic."24 With their "cornflower blue" eyes and fair complexions, the Willis were the backbone of Hitler's Jugend. This Willi, unlike Ernst, still clings to "the old days ... in his puberty - health was glory and he was taught something decent about girls." Just as he is frustrated in his film work, "trying to work a squad of silly kids into some sort of organized endeavor" (29), Willi seeks a manifestation of the "pure and good" in women: "it is always the same girl, the one they told him once he was going to have to defend" (30). None manifests

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herself as "the girl he had expected/' and so Willi joins the living dead, waiting for the impossible: "He has waited so long he must be certain; he has waited too long to afford a mistake" (31). At this point Willi's inner displacement results in a rather pathetic but essentially harmless idealist dreaming of an orderly and harmonious world. If, however, a later story, "A Report," is considered, the consequences are seen to be much more serious. In this story, a Willi (there are enough similarities to conclude that he is the same Willi featured in the earlier story) is a mutual friend of Monnerot and Monnerot's wife. Willi supplies Monnerot with items for his collection of Nazi memorabilia, manufacturing these items himself when they are unavailable. Monnerot's wife has commissioned Willi to follow her husband and report on his current affair: "Willi seems to her the very bastion of common sense. He may be ready to sacrifice his principles, but no one can say what his principles are. He does not appear venal. He is extremely discreet, and no trouble to women."25 The same cannot be said of Monnerot. He takes as his mistress an eighteen-year-old girl who has just fled from a French family, for whom she works as "au pair cook, housemaid, laundress and governess" (208), when they taunt her for being responsible for Nazi atrocities. "Bobbie moved in as one more incarnation of M Monnerot's sister. The arrangement lasted less than two months. Fraulein Bauer was frightened by M Monnerot - no one knows why" (210). Willi knows of Monnerot's "arrangements" and holds his silence. Willi, "a translator, entrusted with difficult and often secret texts" (205), sees and hears but refuses to speak or act. Bewildered by the refusal of the parts to cohere or of life to march in orderly fashion to the beat of some drum, he keeps faith in a concept of civilization that, he was taught, is worth more than the life of any one part. In "Ernst in Civilian Clothes" Gallant casts a wider net as the alienation and inner displacement of both Willi and Ernst are contextualized in a setting that is a microcosm of modern civilization, itself victimizer and victim. Willi exists in his own private little world, shuffling from job to job, dreaming of pure and healthy blue-eyed country girls, clipping items from the newspapers as "evidence" about the last war and pasting them in scrapbooks: "The photographs, the films, the documents, the witnesses, and the survivors could have been invented or dreamed. Willi searches the plain blue sky of his childhood and looks for a stain of the evil he has been told was there. He cannot see it. The sky is without spot."26 After the war, Ernst opted for the Foreign Legion and "left Willi with his bugs, his potato peelings, his diseased feet, his shorn head." Together again in

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Willi's apartment in Paris, "they have come only a short distance from their camp in 1945 ... It is a way of living, not quite a life" (141). While Willi clings to a past vision and ideal, Ernst wants to get on with his life by eradicating the past, revisiting point zero, and beginning again; he thus suffers a far more severe inner displacement than Willi. His "way of living" seems sinister in its certain futility and potential for violence. Watching Willi paste evidence in his scrapbook and listening to him ask what was wrong with what they were taught, Ernst "seems old and sly. He looks like a corrupted old woman ... He knows that there are no limits to folly and pain except fatigue and the failing of imagination. He has always known more than Willi, but he can be of no help to him, because of his own lifesaving powers of forgetfulness" (143). Ernst's forgetfulness cannot provide him with the anaesthetic needed to edit his dreams, dreams that transport him back to the days before he donned a uniform at age seven, when, in a flooded cellar, he is being summoned to "save someone who calls 'MuttiY" and forward to the moment of his own death and last judgment (144). Awaiting his return to Germany - the fatherland - on this last afternoon in Paris, Ernst must resurrect and rescue this someone who calls "Mutti." Whereas Willi cannot see the evil because still so indoctrinated with the ideal, Ernst has buried a sense of innocence and goodness so deeply that ghosts and shadows dominate the canvas of his mind and dreams. With no clearly defined enemy, the world outside Willi's apartment becomes Ernst's battlefield. As the story opens, Ernst has just opened a window in Willi's apartment and observes the unchanging, unmoving sky, "a thick winter blanket, white and gray ... The black cobbles down in the courtyard give up a design of wet light." Time passes, marked only by "more light behind the windows now, and the curtains becoming] glassy and clear. The life behind them is implicit in its privacy. Forms are poised at stove and table, before mirrors, insolently unconcerned with Ernst." The residents "on this court in the rue de Lille in Paris do not care if he peers at them, and he, in turn, may never be openly watched," but Ernst takes precautions, remaining in the darkened apartment: "He feels so conspicuous in his new civilian clothes, idling the whole day, that it would not astonish him if some civic-minded and diligent informer had already been in touch with the police" (131-2). The gaze is no longer simply one that constitutes and affirms his subjectivity, the gaze that Sartre and Lacan contemplate and that Norman Denzin describes as having the potential to "embarrass, humiliate, humble and shame" and that, when fitting with the other's gaze, "can destroy or recreate one another"; this gaze has moved beyond the Sartrean or Lacanian

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gaze to the "negatively empowered" look of Foucault, "politically inscribed in the structures of surveillance."27 Ernst exhibits a mentality that Denzin refers to as "reflexive paranoia/' a consequence of "the belief that those in power always lie and distort the truth": "The paranoid gaze is everywhere, the voyeur is gazed upon, nobody can be trusted. And the truth is always socially re-constructed, events reformatted to fit a master narrative telling of what really happened on this date, in this place, to this person."28 Against these watchful eyes, Ernst exercises his own defensive surveillance mechanisms. As the ghosts behind the curtains move out on to the streets, the scene becomes nightmarish, surrealistic. Ernst observes a mother and her son returning "safely, once again, from their afternoon stroll in the Jardin des Tuileries." He knows the specifics of their walk because he followed them four days ago: "When the boy and his mother reached the object of their outing - the old man, the chestnuts, the frozen pond - they turned around and came away, between the black, stripped trees and the cold statues Ernst thinks of as trees. Mercury is a tree; the Rape of Deidamia is another tree" (136). In this coldest winter since 1880, with no food fit to eat, classical works of art are eerie reminders of another era and civilization with different idols and beliefs. Now in their aloof and smooth monumentality, these statues fail to represent a world around them or to communicate to the citizens of the modern world. The National Socialists approved art modelled on these classical forms, banning Expressionist art as degenerate. But it is the "brave old maniac of a woman with a cotton scarf on her head," defying the law by feeding the birds (136), who could very well have been the subject for an Expressionist artist and who belongs to this time and this place. During his excursion, Ernst's inner displacement had been a reflection of and reflected by the chaos of Roman emperors, dormant gardens, railway stations, churches, bridges, art galleries, traffic lights, vehicles, government workers, and policemen surrounding him (136-7). These indicators of culture and civilization are unable to protect him or provide him with a safe haven from the natural elements or from the pandemonium that the civilized world has created because they are themselves the source of his discomfiture. His paltry surveillance mechanisms are ineffective and potentially dangerous. For Ernst this "walk came to nothing" (136) and only reinforces his sense of the emptiness of these forms of civilization he has been told he fought for whether in German Nazi or French Legionnaire uniform. And so he adopts Mainz as his birthplace, a city that he passed through on "one of the long, inexplicable halts on the mysterious voyage" from Germany to France as a prison of war: Mainz, where

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nothing remains; Mainz, which is "the Apocalypse." Mainz becomes for the Austrian-born Ernst both a shared and personal point zero: "Only his mother, if she is still living, and still cares, could make the essential corrections ... Ernst is either thirty-four or thirty-six. He pledged his loyalty to official papers years ago - to officers, to the Legion, to stamped and formally attested facts. It is an attested fact that he was born in Mainz" (134). "What is Ernst, if his papers mean nothing?" (133) His "life-saving powers of forgetfulness" (143) are impotent and fail him as he seeks this mother who holds the key to the time and place of his birth. With her whiteness and thinness that suggest her spectral nature, both as living Parisian mother and possibly dead Austrian mother, the woman he follows to the park with her son points to the failure of his imagination to obliterate the ghosts that lurk in the interstices of his mind. This particular late afternoon, on the day he is to leave France for his fatherland, the woman, returning from her walk, "stands in cold light from an open window," her handbag "bulging with cancelled passports," and calls, "in the thin voice of this city, the high plucked wire of a voice that belittles the universe," to invite her friend, "the hag, who, with a tablecloth around her head, is hanging out the window, to stop by and share the television later on. At half past seven there will be a program called L'Homme du xxe Siede" (137-8). Again, the thin voice breaks, and the ghost becomes a raging fiend when, later in the evening, she turns on the child, chasing, catching, and beating him. Throughout the ordeal the "caught child" appeals to someone, anyone, "for help, and calls 'Maman.' His true mother will surely arrive and take him away from his mother transformed. Who else can he appeal to?" No one: "It is no one's concern" (139). Silence, obedience, complicity - these are what Ernst, the soldier, has learned and what he shares with the taciturn population of the twentieth century. Now that he is out of uniform, in civilian clothes, what is left to obey? Willi obeys the director of films that invent history; Ernst too obeys the image-makers of the moment. He is on his way "to Stuttgart, where useful Willi has a brother-in-law in the building trade" (133), an opportunity that Willi, with his faith in the healing powers of privation, has rejected (140-1): "When Ernst believes an idea suitable for the moment, it becomes true. He has many troubles, and if you believe one-tenth of anything he tells you, he will say you are decent" (142). The "you" here draws the reader into a collusive relation with those who skew history to fit into a prefabricated form. Later, Ernst, reading an article in Willi's scrapbook in which an eminent author claims that the training of young Nazis "had lowered the barrier between wolves and men" and that

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the "young Werewolves were animals/' grins "without knowing he has shown his teeth. If he were seen at this moment, an element of folklore would begin to seep through Europe, where history becomes folklore in a generation" (145). Ernst pledges allegiance to a glossy tourism-poster version of Germany, one that cannot persecute, prosecute, or execute (146-7): "He looks at the railway posters with which Willi has decorated the room, and in a resolution that must bear a date (January 28, 1963) he decides, My Country. A new patriotism, drained from the Legion, flows over a field of daffodils, the casino at Baden-Baden, a gingerbread house, part of the harbor at Hamburg, and a couple of sea gulls" (133). Will Ernst with his "warm tears, his good health, and his poor memory," which have so far kept him afloat (132), be able to join the family described in "Willi" as being "happy as seals" (29)? Succumbing to sleep, Ernst, with the "no" of the conscious mind, wipes the slate clean of all loyalties other than those chosen for the moment and assumes the fetal position. But his dreams refuse to take the journey back to point zero and instead reunite him with his younger self in the flooded cellar as he tries to rescue "another victim in the cellar, calling 'Mutti'" (147). Ernst's memory may be short - he may suffer from the "decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse"29 but the one voice he cannot eradicate is his own: "Ernst, on his feet, stiff with the cold of a forgotten dream, makes a new decision. Everyone is lying; he will invent his own truth. Is it important if one-tenth of a lie is true? Is there a horror in a memory if it was only a dream?" (147) With his ill-fitting clothes provided by Willi, his camouflaged military boots, which make him seem anchored, his falsified documents (132), and a new allegiance to his own face in the mirror (147), the only assurance is that Ernst, like Willi, has joined the living dead. Nothing has changed from the opening scene, nor will his journey to Stuttgart change anything. Ernst thinks he is taking a journey forward, but the circle is complete. Earlier, a description of Willi provides a parallel with the peasants in Breughel's Kermess: "His thick hands described circles to the music from the radio, and his thick legs kicked sideways and forward. Ernst saw the soles of Willi's shoes and his flying unmilitary hair, and his round face red with laughter" (139). Ernst too has entered a picture: "He looks shabby and unemployed, like the pictures of men in German street crowds before the Hitler time" (135). Ernst, "the eternally defeated" (144), has joined the ranks of demobilized and disfranchised men, like those profiled in Peter Brook's King Lear, black-and-white, shuffling, some silent, some shouting, but no one knowing "what anyone thought, or what the silence contained."30

133 Portraiture and Landscapes SPECTRAL PORTRAITS AND LANDSCAPES! CIVILIAN SURVIVORS IN ju Z JU JUNCTION THE PEGNITZZ

In The Pegnitz Junction are the four short stories that best expose damage to body, mind, and soul of civilian survivors, victims of attitudes manifest in the policies and practices of the Third Reich: "An Autobiography," "The Old Friends," "O Lasting Peace," and "An Alien Flower." Another work in this anthology, the novella "The Pegnitz Junction" (1973), takes distorted and fragmented images of human forms and physical landscapes to the furthest extreme of surrealistic dispersion and spectral existence.31 The two-part "An Autobiography," the earliest of this group of stories, is similar to another 1964 story, "Its Image on the Mirror," both making effective use of first-person narration through a survivor addressing survivors and both revealing as much through what is unseen as through what is seen. But they are pivotal works for different reasons. In Gallant's stories of the 19505 and early 19605 the elements of colour, perspective, and proportion serve to underscore limitations of the characters' vision and horizons through metaphor and structure; now, however, in stories of the mid- and late 19605 these limitations, working in conjunction with social and political circumstances, exact bodily harm, paralleled by wounded landscapes, and furnish early examples of the spectral forms that emerge when life is lived at point zero for a prolonged time. "An Autobiography" and "Bonaventure," which Gallant completed writing within two years of one another,32 are both set outside Montreux in the Alpine landscape of Switzerland: the chalet in which Douglas Ramsay is staying is only a "short train journey" from Montreux;33 Erika, the narrator of "An Autobiography," lives and teaches "in a village half a day's journey by train from Montreux."34 Gallant's subtle and effective use of Alpine scenery in both these stories of the early 19605 contrasts with a story from a decade earlier that uses similar mountain scenery, "A Day Like Any Other" (7 Nov. 1953). In this story the American Mrs Kennedy has isolated her two young daughters from "the world and its coarsening effects" - that is, from any physical harm, moral quandaries, or cultural vulgarities - in the high hills of the Schwarzwald. As the story opens the daughters, "unblemished," blond "Renoir" doll-children are at breakfast as the fog finally lifts "in one piece, like a curtain," and they are able to glimpse the first "promised view of mountains," to this point simply "a watery blur": "Down below, on a flat green plain, were villages no bigger than the children's cereal plates. Some

134 Learning to Look of the villages were in Germany and some were over in France their governess, Frau Stengel, had explained about the frontier, with many a glum allusion - but from here the toy houses and steeples looked all alike; there was no hedge, no fence, no mysterious cleft in the earth to set them apart, although, staring hard, one could see something, a winding line, as thin as a hair. That was the Rhine."35 No one ever does stare hard enough to gain a clearer insight, and it is primarily through the Czech governess's sentimental references to the landscape as "Hitler's mountains" (218) that any political dimensions are introduced into the story.36 Mrs Kennedy does not see that the fog has lifted and feels "just as hemmed in and baffled as usual" by her own personal problems (222). Meanwhile, the children loll in the warm fog of the governess's room and her stories, predictable and sentimental in text and expected response (226-7). Only at the end of the day - a day that has exposed them to "vulgarities" of pregnancy, death, desertion, guilt - when Mrs Kennedy finds her children curled together sleeping "like two question marks," does she think that they were "not like little Renoirs, not like little dolls, but like rather ordinary children" (239). Her response is predictable as she yearns to "gather her children up ... and carry them off to a higher mountain, an emptier hotel, where nothing and no one could interfere, or fill their minds with the kind of thought she feared and detested," but she contents herself because the girls are still young, and each day can still be "like the lights one saw in the valley at night, starry, indistinguishable one from the other" (240). Unlike this earlier story, both "Bonaventure" and "An Autobiography" integrate elements of their mountain landscapes, but they do so to quite different thematic ends. Whereas in "Bonaventure" the untamed chalet, meadows, and stream act as natural complements to the ruins of the urban scenes in Berlin and Montreal, in "An Autobiography" the Alpine landscape directly contributes to the story's psychological and political dimensions. The choice of Alpine scenery in "An Autobiography" is particularly noteworthy because of the popularity of mountain films before and during the Hitler years. Siegfried Kracauer, in From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, identifies the origins of these films with the director Dr Arnold Fanck, "a geologist infatuated with mountain climbing," whose "zeal for spreading the gospel of proud peaks and perilous ascents" is found in both silent and sound movies of the 19205 and 1930s.37 Kracauer concludes: "The surge of pro-Nazi tendencies during the pre-Hitler period could not better be confirmed than by the increase and specific evolution of the mountain films," of which Fanck was "the uncontested father."38 A leading actor in

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Fanck's mountain films, Leni Riefenstahl, directed several mountain films before directing Triumph of the Will, the movie of the staged 1934 National Socialists' Party Congress, and Olympia, the movie of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Sontag argues that Fanck's mountain films harbour "proto-Nazi sentiments" - "Mountain climbing in Fanck's films was a visually irresistible metaphor for unlimited aspiration toward the high mystic goal, both beautiful and terrifying, which was later to become concrete in Fuhrer-worship" - sentiments that Riefenstahl, subject of Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism," takes to a political extreme. This is evident as early as the first movie Riefenstahl directed (and also starred in), The Blue Light. Here Sontag notes Riefenstahl's "allegorizing the dark themes of longing, purity, and death that Fanck had treated rather scoutishly. As usual, the mountain is represented as both supremely beautiful and dangerous, that majestic force which invites the ultimate affirmation of and escape from the self - into the brotherhood of courage and into death."39 "An Autobiography" is about duty and self-preservation, which Erika, the narrator, comes to realize are not as clearly demarcated as her father has taught her. Her father, a professor of medieval German and amateur botanist, "did not care for contemporary history and took no notice of passing events." In 1937, when Erika was nine, he took up a university post and moved his family from Munich to Debrecen, Hungary, where "on a Protestant islet, he was higher and stonier and more Lutheran than anyone else, or thought so."4° He was himself "a non-believer" - with conviction - and led Erika's mother "into the desert" of non-belief "but without conviction" (105). Erika has inherited her father's penchant for categorizing and labelling and his confidence that one's duty is logical and reasonable and that the correct path and direction are transparent: "'Your duty is always before you, plain as that,' my father had said, pointing with his walking stick to some vista or tree or cloud. I do not know what he was pointing at - something in his mind" (121). For Erika, the line between point A and point B will not prove as straight as her father's gesture would seem to indicate. This recollection of her father, Erica's final one, is inserted during the recording of the memory of one of the two times that Erika left Switzerland after her arrival at age seventeen in Lausanne, where she was given safe haven at the end of the war by family friends her mother having "died of tuberculosis, not daring to speak of God" (105), her father, despite political indifference, having been shot by a Russian soldier. After eleven years in Lausanne, Erika was tempted to go "out to the wilderness" by Peter, "the first person to whom [she] had ever spoken spontaneously and without reserve." She

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accompanied Peter to a German city on the Rhine where Peter thought he might be admitted to a special university for refugees. In her "autobiography" Erika confesses that she was motivated to leave Switzerland not by love or duty but an avoidance of suffering and, therefore, a kind of self-preservation. Years later, even the memory of the consequences of this choice is too painful to elaborate or embellish: "It lasted only a short time, the adventure, and can be briefly and accurately remembered. Quickly, then." The quota at the university was full; they discovered that their hotel was a brothel; they had no money or food. Two decades before, Hitler had channelled deprivation into solidarity, but Erika, even though subjected to public pressure, spurned and fled from any such communal ideal and opted instead for separation and isolation (120-1). Erika's second journey outside Switzerland is another failed attempt at solidarity, a claiming of kin that Erika records in the first section before memories of Peter fill her canvas. At the invitation of her only living relative, her mother's sister, Erika has travelled to Paris. Duty is clear for her aunt, who "was never obliged to choose between duty and self-preservation, or somehow hope the two would coincide": her duty is to disinherit and thus teach Erika a lesson because the niece "resembled [her] father ... She did not say what the lesson would be, but spoke in the name of Life, saying that Life would teach [Erika]" (no). With these two excursions behind her, Erika, now a teacher, has cloistered herself within the concentric circles of her village, midway up a mountain, with the boundaries between outside and inside, high and low, distinctly designated. The story opens: "Season by season our landscape is black on white, or green and blue, or, at the end of summer, olive and brown, with traces of snow on the mountains like scrubbed-out paint. The village is made up of concentric rings: a ring of hotels, a ring of chalets, another of private schools. Through the circles one straight street carries the tearooms and the sawmill and the stuccoed cinema with the minute screen on which they try to show things like Ben-Hur" (101). Erika claims that she only compartmentalizes and labels her students by nationality "at the end of a winter's day when they have worn [her] out" (102); however, this life she has assembled for herself - in which duty is clear and does not conflict with self-preservation, solidarity is a matter of choice, and independence has been achieved - would suggest that her aunt's "Life" has taught her a lesson and that, worn down, she has reached the end of a winter's day. Unlike her father, Erika seems aware of her duty to those around her and makes herself responsible for her students' self-inflicted bruises (102), the well-

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being of fellow lodgers and their children (107-8), and Veronique, a child of four travelling on her own whom Erika meets when returning from her misadventure to claim kin, a point at which she "was extremely sensitive to all forms of injustice" (109). In this Alpine landscape Erika has found her place through selfeffacing duty to her students: "I must learn to become the substance their parents have paid for - a component of scenery, like a tree or a patch of grass" (102). Two things - memory and history - make this impossible, as the "traces of snow on the mountains like scrubbedout paint" in the opening description signify. For Erika's students, the post-war generation, memory and history are meant to coincide, and thus both have been carefully cultivated and weeded: "Everything they see and touch at home is new. Home is built on the top layer of Ur. It is no good excavating; the fragments would be without meaning ... It is easy to put an X over half your life (I am thinking about the parents now) when you have nothing out of the past before your eyes ... There are no dregs, except perhaps a carefully sorted collection of snapshots. You have survived" (103). Erika closes the first section with an anecdote of another kind of editing of memory, that of Veronique, who is travelling from Versailles, where she has been staying with her mother and a baby brother, "whose name she affected not to know - an admirable piece of dignified lying" (111-12). Veronique is to join a companion, Mme Bataille, in the mountains and then tomorrow her father by the sea, the promised tomorrow being several months hence. Already the child has absorbed strategies of self-preservation - "the corruption of memory had set in" - as she declares her independence from family members and concerned strangers (114-15). Despite these precautions - subconscious editing and conscious attempts to eradicate memory and history - scenes of vertigo suggest the latent consequences of repression. On the airplane from Orly to Geneva, with Veronique seated beside her, Erika thinks of her young students, "tossed from home to school, or from one acrobat parent to the other," who have taken longer trips and arrived safely: "I am frightened when I imagine the bright arc through space, the trusting flight without wings. Reflect on that slow drop from the cable car down the side of the mountain into the trees. The trees will not necessarily catch you like a net" (no). The child, unencumbered by memories of betrayal (108), reaches her destination although the line may be curved. High above the sky, over the countryside of France, returning to Switzerland, Erika is weighted by "relics" she has brought from her aunt's home in Paris (112-13). Life in her Alpine valley village is not as secure and ordered as her opening description

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would suggest. While both straight and curved lines may on flat land connect two points and allow travellers to reach their destination, in an Alpine landscape with destinations high above, the lines can pull downwards to the swirling lines below: "Imagine gliding floating down to them! Think of the silence, the turning trees!" (105) Erika's first attempt to conquer her fear of heights and consequent fear of flying has come in 1956, in the German city on the Rhine. Peter has encouraged her to climb with him to the top of the cathedral, as Goethe did to cure himself of vertigo: "I was so sure he would not stand this - but he stood smiling down with no intention of toppling over. Below was the sweet nursery world, nursery-sized, with toy trams and toy people ... he was its lord, at least from up here. My world was my size, and often bigger. I was afraid of the shrunken world as he saw it; he made me unsteady. I left him that day" (123). Now, enclosed in her Alpine village, with a world "my size, and often bigger," Erika clings to one thought: that she will never again risk injury or failure by leaving Switzerland (124). Even here, however, there are dangers, as the Ben-Hur movie squeezed on to the "minute screen" in the opening description reminds us. Peter Dobray unexpectedly intrudes into this world that Erika has made home, Peter to whom Erika has made a present of her family before she left him (123). To accommodate herself to this mountain terrain, Erika has had to diminish herself. She has learned to live on restricted rations and to resist temptations of pastry and petits fours. She confesses to being "a bit sensitive" about her "overdeveloped" calves gained "from years of walking and climbing in low-heeled shoes" and so wears her "tweed skirts longer than the fashion" (103). Her own thin body has become the line between inside and outside. "Parents of pupils always try to make me eat more than I care to, perhaps thinking that I would be less intractable if I were less thin" (118). Erika has so deflated herself into a stick-like figure41 that the external world looms large and perhaps, like the fields beneath the funicular, even beckons for a free-fall jump (105). This is particularly apparent in contrast with Peter, who has inflated his sense of self to deflate the external world. His own remembered history is a mere fragment: "a half Jew from Budapest," he was as a child selected from a column during a forced march out of Budapest, not for execution, as he first expected, but for salvation. On to this tissue of memory he has grafted other people's memories to create a covering, a skin of history he calls his own. Peter has sought other "magic solutions" after Erika (120-2). His wife claims that Peter ruined his stomach from the poor treatment he received

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"in jail after the Budapest uprising" (118). "But he was such a liar," writes Erika. "Also, he was not in Budapest during the uprising of 1956. He was in a city on the Rhine, starving, with me" (122). Peter's thick skin becomes so cumbersome that he is crippled when confronted with life's realities. Like "Poor Franzi" before him, Peter feels duty to nothing or no one other than his own survival and comfort; unlike Franzi, however, we see how deeply embedded the psychological scars have become. Peter, now married to a wealthy woman twenty years his senior, has not toppled over but has emerged from the station of Erika's village "dazed," with inappropriate clothes and shoes. In their black-and-white attire and sunglasses, Peter and his wife are "two pandas" - in Alpine Switzerland (115-16)! If Peter has adjusted the proportions of his world to survive, he has not been so successful with its speed. At lunch, his "performance" is "like the frantic exhibition of a child who has been made uneasy" (118). His wife buys him cars, but he is "too wild to drive" (125). Suspended in a lost adolescence, Peter needs to accelerate the grafting process. Like a child, he wants his playmate herself, not just her memories and history (126). Erika, reminded of her past through the bearer of it, is brought into the storm against which her lines of defence prove powerless: "imagine what it might be to be part of the fantasy; his lies were a whirlwind, and I was at the core, trying to recognize something familiar" (119). She rejects the offer to leave her mountain haven with Peter and his mother-wife, knowing that the decision is not simply one of duty over self-preservation (127-8). Erika understands that the mountains, as in Riefenstahl's films, are "both supremely beautiful and dangerous," and she also senses that if she leaves the straight lines and proportioned colours and space of her village, she will succumb to "that majestic force which invites the ultimate affirmation of and escape from the self." At lunch on the day Peter arrives in the village, he and Erika avoid looking at each other, and Erika fixes her gaze through "an open window, geraniums, the mountains, and the sky" (117). Later, listening to Peter, she thinks she will choke on the lies and looks, "this time with real longing, at the mountain peaks. They seem so near in the clear weather that sometimes innocent foot travellers set off thinking they will be there in threequarters of an hour. The pockets of snow looked as if they could have been scooped up with a coffee spoon" (118-19). Erika recognizes the dangers of a world that seems too small or too large, too close or too far away, and so is attentive to Veronique's feeble efforts at independence on the plane when the child used utensils "the size of gardening tools" to tackle "a plateau of food nearly at shoulder

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level" (112). Erika realizes the mountains are especially treacherous for the ponderous Peter, who has misjudged size and distance and has stepped off and beyond the lines (125). "An Autobiography" closes with three interior scenes that, despite their right proportions, allude to an intrusive past threatening the borders erected between inside and outside. Before Peter leaves, he visits Erika's room, "searching for something"; Erika knows that he "daren't be nostalgic about anything" because he could "never be certain if the memory he was feeling tender about was true" and that, therefore, Peter no longer seeks false memories from her (126). Her memory is of the "quick turn of his head," so out of context in this room with its view "after the long garden ... of the roof of the chalet farther down the slope," but even this quick and limited outward glance is followed by the crash of Erika's bookshelf, containing Wild Flowers of Germany, falling from the wall and shaking the house. With the "perpendicular, windless rain" outside and her room darkening inside, Erika and Peter drink coffee "in cups with Liberte and Patrie and a green-and-white shield of the Vaud on them" (127), reminders that her alleged patriotism and freedom have been gained at a terrible cost to body, mind, and soul. The next scene is of the departure of Peter and his wife in a firstclass carriage on "the little red train that has its start among the hotels and swimming pools along the lake": "I like best the deeprose velvet, with its pattern of brown leaves and ferns, that covers the seats. It wears slowly; in some very worn places the color is light apricot and the palest lemon, and the pattern can scarcely be seen. Somewhere in storage, preserved from dust and the weather, are bales of the same velvet, and when a seat becomes too worn they simply patch it up again." But can the wear inflicted by the past, by history and memory, be so easily camouflaged when the survivor is human? For all Peter's inflation of self, deflation of the external world, and adolescent risk-taking, Erika knows just how vulnerable he is and to what advantage she could use this vulnerability. "At a word of truth he would have stayed, if only to hear the rest" (128). As Erika sits alone in her room in the third scene, she acknowledges that she knows as little of the truth as he and that Peter would have "left such an imprint on this place that after his departure I could not have lived here any more. Or perhaps this time one of us would have stayed forever. These are the indecisions that rot the fabric, if you let them." Erika avoids visibility and the consequent vulnerability to rot and waste that visibility entails, especially during this "season for mountain storms" (128-9).

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"Riefenstahl's commissioned Nazi films/' Sontag argues, "celebrate the rebirth of the body and of community, mediated through the worship of an irresistible leader," and "follow directly" from the earlier "Alpine fictions, [which] are tales of longing for high places, of the challenge and ordeal of the elemental, the primitive; they are about the vertigo before power, symbolized by the majesty and beauty of mountains."42 "An Autobiography" reverses this line by showing the damage to body and community, and the vertigo not before power but before abnegation of power. Even here in post-war Switzerland the winds can shift, so one must be vigilant (120, 129). In such a climate, straight lines are dangerous: they can propel one straight to earth; they can plumb to the depths of repressed memories. Despite the straight lines of her body, Erika's mind has contours, unexplored crannies, forbidden paths. This is particularly apparent in the first section of "An Autobiography," in which Erika includes two anecdotes about children betrayed and abandoned. When she begins the story of the abandoned twenty-six-month-old child, she has just described one of the two relics from her aunt: the "stiff dark photograph of my mother at her confirmation," clasping her Bible and staring with fright at the camera. Erika breaks off and tries again: "What I wanted to comment on was children - children in Switzerland" (106). Is she perhaps also commenting on a child in Germany whose mother has abandoned her through death? Is this girl child a projection of herself from memories too early to recall? Is there any significance that Peter, who is four years younger than Erika (119), would have been between four and five years old Veronique's age - when Erika (aged nine) moved to Hungary in 1937? In the words of Mme Gisele, the fortune-teller in "Questions and Answers," "For all I know, she is just someone you've invented, or it's another way of talking about yourself."43 Janice Keefer comments: "In a world in which children are orphaned or abandoned before they are old enough to have a sense of self, in that the monuments and records which could identify them have been bombed and burned into thin air, memory is the self's only text. Memory, of course, is notoriously unreliable; we use it to turn our pasts into fictions that console or avenge or absolve us."44 Erika ends the anecdote of one abandoned child and begins the anecdote of another: "I am thinking of Veronique" (109). Veronique can provide Erika with only so much information, and that in fragmented shards: "She talked about herself and her family, in fits and starts, as if unaware of the limits of time" (111). And so too Erika talks of herself and her family "in fits and starts," never achieving a

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straight line and thus despairing of the wasted blank sheet at the end (129). Her "autobiography" may not accomplish the interpretation between generations that her direct address to survivors - her students' parents - would indicate she thinks it will accomplish (103, 109); perhaps, therefore, it needs to be thought of as a warning, as other addresses become (105,107, 109), a warning to all survivors of the dangers of confidence in "lines," boundaries, and frontiers to protect against the lure of high peaks seeming to promise positions of prominence and power. The two stories in The Pegnitz Junction that follow "An Autobiography" chronologically - "The Old Friends" and "O Lasting Peace" - are slighter narratives, but their visual qualities, particularly as they pertain to power, parallel those of "An Autobiography." Erika realizes she could acquire kin and "possess" Peter with a kernel of truth to displace the fantasies and the consequent "fear of the open heart"45 that both suffer. She does not, or perhaps cannot, exploit her strategic position because she is herself in possession of so few relics and memories and because these fail to cohere. Conversely, in "The Old Friends" and "O Lasting Peace," survivors use discord to procure and sustain, rather than deny, a position of power. In three of these four stories of civilian survivors, Gallant manipulates first-person perspective effectively to disclose repressed thoughts and feelings. Similarly, the third-person perspective of "The Old Friends," through orchestrated interior monologues of the two "old friends," reveals and conceals as many of these repressed thoughts and feelings as the first-person narratives. Much of "The Old Friends" is narrated from the perspective of the unnamed police commissioner over whom his friend, Helena, holds such control. Midway through the story, a section shifting from a distanced thirdperson perspective to one looking through the eyes of Helena begins: "His failing, as a friend, is his memory." This section then describes the meeting of these two old friends when Helena saw opportunity in the large cufflinks and large square ring of the man sitting before her on the train: "He was like the economic miracle not yet at its climax of fat. Or he had been obese a long time ago - she saw, around him, the ghost of a padded man."46 At the core of the friendship between these two is the lie in which the police commissioner trusts: that they are not simply "old friends" but "have been friends forever." If "the plot of their friendship" is to survive intact, now that he "has become an old bachelor" and Helena a television celebrity, this fiction must be perpetuated through selective remembering that flattens and circumscribes memory: "He is like any policeman; he knows one meaning for every word. When, sometimes, he seems to

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have transgressed a private rule of hers, it is outside the limits of the words he knows, and he simply cannot see what he has done" (89-90). The story picks up on one of those occasions when "the weather suits" Helena and "she let [her friend] drive her to a garden restaurant on a height of land above Frankfurt." The police commissioner believes the scene is "like being in the mountains" with the pure air, even though they have no view and "are walled in by flowering shrubs" (90-1). Nevertheless, he can invent the world outside the garden through memory - and its editing - as his elliptical style and curious allusion to a cultural and intellectual icon betray: "'But you really should come here at night/ he says; for then the swimming pool in each of the gardens is lighted blue, green, ultramarine. The commissioner flew over in a helicopter once, and it looked ... it was ... it should have been photographed ... or painted ... if it had been painted ... described by Goethe, he cries, it could not have been more ..." (90; ellipses in original). Helena holds the key because she has memories that could bring this aerial view closer to home, into their pretty garden with its clean, pink, embroidered table linen, silver dishes, assortment of sweet delicacies, and champagne cooling in a silver bucket (90-1), by filling these chasms that the police commissioner with his glib lightness leaves gaping. The "ghost of a padded man" is a spectre of his contribution to wartime atrocities. Entertaining her old friend, with recitations of Schiller's "The Glove" in various dialects - Bavarian, Low Berlin, East German, Hessian like his own - Helena breaks off his amusement by saying, "I can do a Yiddish accent from Silesia. I try to imagine my grandmother's voice. I must have heard it before she was killed." With these words, the commissioner feels the vertigo that Helena experiences in a higher, more precariously perched restaurant that "revolves on its hub" and "is too high up; it makes her ill and giddy just to look out the window" (92-3). From the restaurant in which they now sit - on a height, not in the mountains or revolving on its hub high above the city - Helena can draw the lines and decide when they will be crossed (94). "In their conversations there is only one context" (99), the context of here and now, inside the walled and pretty garden, where all prior experience can be forgotten and dismissed as another world, another time, another place.47 Helena's experiences as a child of being "dragged through transit camps on the fringes of Germany" because she is part Jewish can be confined within "her dossier ... stamped on his mind, as if he had seen it, typed and signed, on cheap brownish wartime paper, in a folder tied with ribbon tape." With her life

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so condensed, he can mentally append to her dossier a number of reasons for a "serious mistake" having been made in her case and so absolve himself from responsibility (94). Her experiences have taken place over frontiers, beyond the lines he draws - and beyond what she in her waking mind draws: "Reality was confounded long ago. She even invents her dreams ... Her true dream is of purification, of the river never profaned, from which she wakes astonished - for the real error was not that she was sent away but that she is here, in a garden, alive" (96). Helena has not forgotten when the friendship between herself and the commissioner began because its initiation marks her declaration of humanity and value as a human being. She has not forgotten that on their first meeting he invited her to spend a few days with him at the station hotel in Munich where they could drink beer in the horses' stalls (97). Helena, bartering her own conditions, forces him to find another context in which to place her: "I never thought I should offer you money, Miss Helena. Excuse me. If I should have, then I apologize. You seem ... a woman like you ... so educated, so delicate ... so refined, like a ... Holbein" (98; ellipses in original). The temptress Helena, like her Greek namesake, thus prostitutes her beauty as have other of Gallant's Holbeinesque women - Katharine of "Bonaventure" and the mother of "The Statues Taken Down" who simultaneously enslave and are enslaved. By insisting on money, on being a paid friend, Helena asserts her own humanity through the monetary value she places on it, unlike the women in concentration camps who escaped rape because it was forbidden: "Rape would have meant one was a person ... There wasn't that sort of contact" (95). The commissioner can understand the fact - rape was forbidden - but the subtleties of the why escape him. This impercipience makes the police commissioner a valued friend for Helena, and thus she restores the false harmony in the garden and false balance of their relationship, which have been upset by her mention of a Silesian grandmother from another time and place: "He has come through, without being wounded ... They are here ... in the garden restaurant, with the flowers like colored wool" (99). Attracted by the pungent odours of wine, cakes, and nasturtiums, wasps have earlier threatened to disrupt the intimacy between these two old friends. The commissioner tried to cut a wasp in two with a knife and, failing, captured another under Helena's child's glass: "He is afraid for Helena - imagine a sting on that white skin!" (91) But Helena is capable of inflicting a far more potent sting than is the wasp, which she lets escape. The narrator, of "O Lasting Peace," Hilde, also has grasped the means and reins of power. Her pawns

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are three elderly family members: her mother, Uncle Theo, and Aunt Charlotte. Hilde's father made his escape years ago. Hilde asks, "Why is it that everyone is depressed by hearing the truth?"48 Hilde's puppets are not simply kept depressed by her insistence on truth-telling but are literally reduced, diminished. Now "devalued in her own home" (158), living for the television of the present, Hilde's mother resorts to childish giggles and pouts when a break in routine reminds her of the past. Past deeds and the attempts to conceal them have taken the greatest toll on Uncle Theo: "Nothing of Uncle Theo's is quite the truth or entirely a lie" (154). Although he acts the part of "one more respectable survivor now, a hero of yesterday" (150), Hilde delivers us the truth: her uncle avoided conscription into military service after Stalingrad by stealing his own file during a medical examination; he was later arrested for black-marketeering connections; he rose within the prison system to become a guard. These are the truths of the past, but in the lies of the present he is given status by the general assumption "that he wore the red patch, meaning 'political'" rather than the black denoting anti-social (162-3). Now "so small he is always a surprise," and so bald that he "looks like a child's drawing of two eyes and a smile," Uncle Theo lives in fear of his niece (149). His "best winter pelisse with the seal collar and his seal hat" serve only to dwarf him further (153). Hilde keeps her elderly relatives in thrall by locking them into fixed tableaux that remind them of their pasts: "A lifetime won't be enough to come to the end of their lies and their mysteries. I am the inspector, the governess, the one they tell stories to" (151). Her charges are occasionally recalcitrant, refusing to be intimidated by her. Therefore she is most vexed when Uncle Theo visits her at work on the afternoon before Christmas Day and disrupts the straight queue by engaging a stranger in conversation of his past glories; the stranger, whose traveller's cheque she will refuse to cash because of niggling differences in the signature, "had to stand in profile so they could go on talking. It made an untidy sort of queue. Uncle Theo looked ridiculous. The pelisse swamps him" (154). In the public arena Hilde fails entirely to manipulate the flow of events despite legal battles to have East German refugees - "loud, boorish Saxons, six to a room" - evicted from a neighbouring apartment. She laments that "only two per cent of the readers of our morning paper still consider Hitler 'a great figure'" and concedes that "it is probably best not to try to remember" (152). With her twisted affections, perverse prejudices, and arid inner life, all this truth-telling about others exacts severe damage on Hilde herself. Towards the end of her narrative she pleads with the reader

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to empathize with her: "Now consider my situation: eighteen years with the Civic Tourist and Travel Bureau, passed over for promotion because I am female, surrounded at home by aged children who can't keep their own histories straight. They have no money, no property, no future, no recorded past, nothing but secrets. My parents never explained themselves" (163). Nor has Hilde explained herself. Reaching the end of her narrative, she hastily attempts to do so. She mentions her shortcut home from work through the cemetery, where the previous day she has "had to step off the path" to avoid "lovers standing motionless, like a tree." Her narrative now veers off its straight path and fills in some details about Uncle Theo that she has "forgotten" to mention. Then, almost as an addendum, she tells us what she has been wanting to reveal all along: "One last thing: without my consent, without even asking me, Uncle Theo advertised for a husband for me" (164-5). The first time he advertised, no one replied; eleven years later, one person replied but, after eating his cake, he quickly retreated. As Hilde remembers this retreat, her consequent upbraiding of her family for failing to value her, and her desire to recall the "peasant" she has spurned, she concludes: "I've forgotten why I wanted to mention this" (166). Hilde has joined the ranks of Gallant's other spectral, stick-like characters lost on circuitous bypaths. "An Alien Flower," set in Cologne and spanning several decades after the war, is another story of civilian survivors struggling in their relationships for a position of power, not simply to secure their foothold but ultimately to test and assert their humanness and very existence. The survivors are the narrator (Helga), her husband (Julius), and a refugee from Silesia (Bibi), who begins as household help but, after being found worthy, is admitted into the family as Helga's companion, their daughter's surrogate mother, and, for a short time, Julius's mistress. A second generation is represented by the daughter (Roma) and a man eight years her senior whom Julius selects to be Roma's future husband (Michael). There are no treacherous paths to climb, no mountain cliffs to scale, only the heights of success that can be achieved as undefended footholds are found in the companies that sprang out of war and the security of homes built from the spoils of war. Julius has pledged allegiance to just such a company, Possner, an elite "industry-army."49 The battle images and imperial names suggest that the winners will be those who can adjust sense of individual self to public duty and calling. Julius rises from lieutenant (170) to captain (171) to major (179) to colonel (186) to general (191), with the height of field marshal left to attain (193). But as with the Fascist

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ideal of three to four decades earlier, the individual is reduced to nought as the ideal demands sacrifices of the parts for the whole. Whether the ideal be political, commercial, or sexual domination, and however it is shrouded and packaged, the individual is left with only a spectral facsimile, as Helga realizes when she discovers her husband "seducing someone in the mirror - only it was himself. Julius was watching Julius seducing Julius. I remembered how confident he was when he was in love" (187). With a few notable exceptions "An Alien Flower" lacks the visual properties typical of Gallant's style; this stylistic adjustment is, however, appropriate for a narrator who has built a life from nothing, but a life of which body, mind, and soul are directed solely to reaping material benefits and social status through the possessions, primarily the house, that accompany her husband's ascendency: "Anyone who had ever known me or loved me had been killed in one period of seven weeks" (171). One of the two images to survive the destruction is Helga's "mother running, running out of a burning house with her hair on fire. Her hands and face were like black paper when she died" (182). Now Helga has put her faith in the "divinity" Julius, who has promised "we would not live among ashes forever," even though she recognizes that as "divinity" he "invent[s] convenient fables" and "appearfs] in strange disguises" (173). As Julius takes up with other women, mistresses who are "inferior" and thus easily manipulated, bullied, and dismissed when used up, Helga admits "the truth was that each time had nearly killed me" (175). Helga maintains her silence and outwardly remains loyal to her divinity and his fables because, were she to drive the other women away, she would be alone with Julius and his knowledge that "I know, which means we live in ruins and ashes forever" (176). Helga instead turns to one of Julius's cast-offs, who has found a place with Possner, recognizing that in "Bibi's utter misery" was their common ground and that on this ground some sort of truce could be reached (176-7). The story's title refers to the second image that the narrator exhumes from the ruins of the past. Bibi is the story's most obvious "alien flower." After Bibi has been declared "brilliant. Without any real culture, without ... But brilliant all the same" (169; ellipsis in original), and Julius has recruited her for Possner, Helga unsuccessfully tries to fulfil her "duty to imagine Bibi ten years from now with a Nobel Prize for chemistry": "My textbook of elementary biology in high school explained about the pure and the impure, beginning with plant life. Here was the picture of an upright, splendid, native plant, and next to it the photograph of a spindly thing that never bloomed and that was in some way an alien flower. Bibi's round face, her calm

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eyes, her expression of sweetness and anxiety to please spoke of nothing but peasant sanity; still, she was different; she was 'other'" (173-4). Of the time immediately after the war, Helga writes that unease created "social amnesty" (173) and that "a joint past... lay all around us in heaps of charred stone. The streets still smelled of terror and ashes, particularly after rain. Every stone held down a ghost, or a frozen life, or a dreadful secret" (168). Out of the ashes arose the Possners that put an end to the facade of social amnesty. Helga acquires progressively newer and better houses, the final one "in my name ... Every windowpane belongs to me" (186). By remaining faithful to Julius, by jostling for some foothold in his life, Helga loses the ability to empathize or contextualize beyond the here and now. Her windowpanes look inwards. Whereas Julius can look at Julius looking at Julius, Helga's sense of self is too fragile, too tenuous. She has no one, not even herself, to love her back. She resorts to sickness: malingering after Roma's birth; "allergic to daylight" (179); and, when Bibi is exiled to a university in western Canada, suffering from a calcium deficiency, which causes paralytic seizures each time Julius gives her an order (186). Bibi, Helga's "good white bread" (176), is consumed by the hungry. On the day that Roma was born, Bibi attempted suicide; years later, alone in America, Bibi kills herself with gas. One by one, Helga erases from her life anyone who might confirm her existence through mutual love. Julius, a divinity who "appear[sl in strange disguises," is reduced to a dog in her dreams (182-3); Michael "looked like a terrier too, peering from one large human to the other, wondering who would slip him a morsel of something good" (188). Bibi, like Heidi, the family dog, is eliminated through death. Only Roma survives. Helga may wield the pen to defend herself against her daughter's accusations, and she may have the final word as she absurdly tries to assert her significance to an unresponsive canine Julius (192-3), but Roma determines the tone from the outset: "My daughter ... accused me of having murdered Bibi; of having treated her like a servant; of having been jealous of her brains and her beauty (her beauty?); and, finally, of having driven her out of our house with my capricious demands, my moods, and my coldness." Helga's narrative, meant to dismantle this "pure invention" (167), only confirms Roma's accusations. Helga tells us "that Roma's myths might include misery and sadness, but my myths were bombed, vanished, and whatever remained had to be cleaned and polished and kept bright" (182). Scenes of sadness and misery - remembered rather than obliterated as Helga's have been - impart to Roma her humanity and perhaps even the strength to challenge the Juliuses and

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Michaels, defend her own turf (185), and refuse to have her memories edited. "An alien flower/' Bibi does not survive, but her memory lives on through Roma. After Roma's birth, when Bibi first attempts suicide, Helga says that "in a sense I never saw her again; I mean that this was the last I saw of a certain young, good-hearted Bibi" (177). With the skingraft operations she requires to heal, Bibi takes to insisting on "the harsh side of life" (169). Her cynicism results in loneliness, despair, and self-annihilation. Helga and Julius are survivors in name only because the divinities and myths created out of the ashes of the past consume rather than nourish them. From the self-abnegation of Helga and the egotism of Julius is borne a true survivor, Roma, who uses memory as a context to create, not destroy. Despite her parents' efforts to protect their daughter's innocence - "Our marriage was our house. I said to myself, 'Here we are together in the fortress. The bodies pile up outside. Don't look at them'" (188) - it is Roma who defies life at point zero by remembering and speaking out against infidelity, hypocrisy, and injustice. Only through such honest confrontation will the spectres be exorcized - so as not to be forgotten. "To the modern anorexic hero," Claude Gandelman writes, "the silence of infinite space, which for Pascal meant horror vacui, is a synonym for freedom."50 Roma and other characters in Gallant's fiction from the late 19605 onwards do not simply survive but also withstand the bodily harm consequent on inflation or deflation. Because these characters resist being passively invisible voyeurs, they provide visible vantage-points that actively engage the reader. As sight-lines of viewer and viewed temporarily intersect and define a site outside the text, invisibility is no longer an option. Karen Kleinfelder, discussing Foucault's essay on Las Meninas, concludes that the space "that lies before the picture plane proper" of Velazquez's painting becomes an "overcrowded locus ... an activated center that will not stabilize or fix its identity according to an inverted one-point perspective. Foucault expresses the elusive, oscillating nature of this site eloquently: 'In this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange. No gaze is stable, or rather, in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at a right angle through the canvas, subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to infinity.'"51 In much of Gallant's fiction, fluid perspectives and planes preclude fixed form; now, as her fiction assumes coloration from being grounded in a "precise but neutral place" - the juncture of past and present - freedom is revealed elsewhere than in the lure of invisibility that the abyss extends.

5 Coloration of Monochromatic Moments (1968-1978)

Irina, a character Gallant confesses to feeling a particular kinship with/ longs in the story to which she gives her name (2 Dec. 1974) for the mystery that the indeterminacy of childhood perception permits: "She was homesick for a time when nothing had crystallized ... And yet whatever she saw and thought and attempted was still fluid and vague. The shape of a table against afternoon light still held a mystery, awaited a final explanation. You looked for clarity, she wrote, and the answer you had was paleness, the flat white cast that a snowy sky throws across a room."2 If not design or form, as structural counterpart to meaning or theme,3 what, then, is the ingredient of fiction that for Gallant permits it to take "the measure of a life," to bring "to life a distillation of all weathers, a climate of the mind"?4 What in fiction takes the "measure" of such moments that themselves lack any shape or permanence and are superseded by successive moments, all ultimately transformed into memories that neither assume shape themselves nor impose shape on the original moment? Again with the stories from the end of the 19605 and throughout the 19705, we can turn to visual renderings of these two seemingly contradictory forces - line and helix, chronology and memory - to discover their relationships to one another. The central metaphor associated with the past, memory, and, by extension, the dreams and reveries they produce, all of which are sources of the "helical patterning"5 in Gallant's fiction, is of an old black and white film - perhaps silent, often with flickering, shadowy shapes - run through a malfunctioning projector that produces a series of jerky or

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disconnected frames: "a landscape flickering and flooded with light, like the old silents at the cinema," as the narrator of "Wing's Chips" (17 Apr. 1954) says of her father's memory of England.6 In the German stories of The Pegnitz Junction and In Transit the filmic allusions usually underscore the characters' unsuccessful efforts to forget.7 For characters such as Ernst, Bibi, Helga, and Bobbie, suffering the abrasions of their inner displacements, the spectral memories are like "the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express,"8 silent, monochromatic, yet overexposed, and thus always threatening to emerge from the recessive and shadowy world in which they lurk. For those not as deeply scarred - Ramsay and Lottie, for example - memories have the potential to be turned into a constructive source of healing, but they, too, fail to see the coloration that memories - individual and collective - could give to their lives.9 They repudiate the polychromatic shading that could create a juncture between the screens of past and present in their lives and, while not imposing absolute shape, could bring significance to the whole.10 Without this coloration, Lottie and Ramsay return to the grey worlds of conventional Winnipeg and ashy Berlin respectively. In stories spanning the decade 1968 to 1978, including those from the Linnet Muir series, those haunted by monochromatic memories and dreams of the past demonstrate a potential for transformation through imagination and fictionalizing. This transformation is coloured by the vivid and varied palette that Gallant brings to each new story. COLORATION OF SHADOW LIVES IN S T O R I E S OF THE LATE 19608

Gallant worked briefly for the National Film Board in Ottawa and was a frequent film critic for the Montreal Standard during the 19405, at which time she expressed reservations about some of the many changes that the movie industry was undergoing. The settings of the 1949 technicolour film of Little Women, for example, she found falsified by their prettiness.11 Her preference for the subtleties of black and white is revealed in her selection of a scene from Silent Dust as worthy of commendation: "The thing that makes this film so outstanding is one scene, in which the blind father of the deserter (Stephen Murray) attempts to reconstruct by touch and sound the movements of the people in his house. The camera enters the world of the blind, a world of darkness, in which the surfaces of a room are imagined in bas-relief, and sounds have a meaning the seeing can never understand."12 In her article entitled "Dreams" Gallant

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observes that dreams "baffle" because they cannot be seen directly but only through the dreamer's memory of "seeing something in sleep ... Most of the time you can't even remember if [dreams] were in color or in black-and-white like a movie."13 Four stories in particular anticipate later Gallant stories that more fully develop the possibility of a contoured, chromatic experience different from but informed by the shadowy world of memories and dreams: "Saturday" (8 June 1968), "Malcolm and Bea" (23 Mar. 1968), "The Wedding Ring" (28 June 1969), and "New Year's Eve" (10 Jan. 1970). "Saturday/' published in 1968 but completed eighteen months earlier on 13 January 1967/4 concerns a French Canadian family whose children have been alienated from any cultural or linguistic roots by the mother's insistence on an English education to free them from Catholicism. The beginning of their story and the origins of this situation can be read in the photographs of a country house and the mother's old convent school that cover one wall of her sleeping quarters, "a Spartan cell."15 The mother, orphaned at age six, was placed in a convent school, where she remained until she left at age eighteen to marry a man thirty-one years her senior (44). Gerard, a son now in late adolescence on whom the first section focuses, has been the most adversely affected by his upbringing: "His uneven health, his moods, his temper, his choked breathing, were signs of starvation ... but not of the body" (32). Leopold, the youngest son, whose ninth birthday occasions the gathering described in the second section, has been the exception and has been educated in his mother tongue at a private secular school. Whereas Gerard "speaks French as if through a muslin curtain, or as if translating from another language, [and] wears himself out struggling for one complete dream," Leopold can "say anything in a French more limpid and accurate than anything they are used to hearing." The child in whom the parents "have chosen to invest [as] their last chance" has been educated above and beyond his family, so that language is not a connecting tissue but a "private language" that he keeps "to himself, polished, personal, a lump of crystalline rock he takes out, examines, looks through, and conceals for another day" (39). Anthologized in the "At Home" section of Home Truths, "Saturday" is an ironic inclusion (as are most the stories in this section) if the story is viewed as the displacement of Gerard despite his living with his family in the city and country of his birth. Gallant writes in the introduction to Home Truths that "Gerard's hatred of English ... is not blind and irrational. Deprived of the all-important first language, he is intellectually maimed. The most his mind can do is to hobble along" (xviii). As the story opens, Gerard has just alighted

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from a bus in unfamiliar territory, Montreal's east end. His efforts are directed to constructing a plot from the situation in which he finds himself and ascertaining its meaning and significance. The "plot" begins when a girl, disturbed by Gerard's glances, has moved to the front of the bus and "left behind a bunch of dark, wet, purple lilac wrapped in wet newspaper" (29). Oblivious of this rejection, he follows her to tell her of the forgotten lilacs. He becomes embarrassed and steps off the bus into a funeral procession for a seemingly wealthy man, who is none the less being buried in a coffin that "was nothing more than pieces of brown carton stapled together in a rough shape" (31). This is not the only absurdist element. The whole scene feels alien, foreign, like a movie set: "A few people, bundled as Russians, scuffled by. A winter haze like a winter evening sifted down through a lattice of iron and steel" (29). Gerard feels himself to be a stranger in a strange land as the "Russian bundles" gesticulate and all he can do is smile. This scene is first identified as a dream, the product of Gerard's disturbed imagination, rather than an actual event16 by the subdued chromatic quality. The wet, purple lilac seems the only "real" image in the black and white shades of the funeral procession and sepia tints of the city: "It was like a cinemateque comedy - the black cars in the whitish fog, the solemn bystanders wiping their noses on their gloves and crossing themselves, and everyone in winter cocoon clothes, with a white bubble of breath. But it was not black and gray, like an old film: it was the color of winter and cities, brown and brick and sand" (30). Later, when the priest encourages Gerard to interpret his "waking dream," both patient-confessor and analyst-priest read the dream as that of a sexually driven adolescent (45-6), but Gerard's aged father has already recognized the dream for what it is: "It was a movie ... Your dream. I saw it, I think, in a movie about an old man. You've dreamed an old man's dream" (36). At the birthday gathering Gerard's father speaks of the loss, rejection, and yearning for life and love that face the elderly (44). Listening to his son and the priest, the old man is overcome by a wintry white atmosphere - white light, furniture, flowers (45) - that again confirms the sterility, loneliness, perhaps even death, forecast by Gerard's dream, despite its sexual impetus. This dream has spun out of a memory of an aborted journey taken at his mother's bidding to break off a relationship with a girl. Caught among the "scaffolding [and] cameras" (37) on the movie set of this "old man's dream," Gerard is unable to complete a dream of a young man's sexual fulfilment. Memory, dream, or movie, this "plot" can have no meaning, no significance, for the still adolescent Gerard. Those fleeting experiences

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that might be contained within a "plot" remain discrete and disconnected moments because they have no larger context in which to find anchor. Gerard simply "wears himself out struggling for one complete dream"; in his dream, the only figure with whom he can connect and empathize is a woman in a wheelchair whose face has "the look of someone who knows about separateness and nightmares and all the vile tricks that the body can play," a figure that invokes an English cultural icon: "Not since the liberation of Elizabeth Barrett" (31). Gerard is too incapacitated to complete his dream, which "made him feel powerless, as if his mind were dying, ill-fed from the soil," and we are left with the image of a diminished adolescent who has no space or source of nourishment to grow into a healthy adult: "He had so much to hate that he seemed to carry in his brain a miniature Gerard, sneering and dark" (33). Gerard survives only by gaining some control through strict discipline and routine (37-8). The story leaves him suspended, but what we have seen of his waking and dreaming mind forecasts a bleak future when he enters any world that his mind has not carefully surveyed and staked out. Caught off guard, as he is when his mother disapproves of pornography she finds in his room, Gerard's preference for the nightmare world of dreams bodes ill for his future (34). Gallant acknowledged to Hancock her difficulty in building a story until "there is a kind of upswing" in the writing process and the story "seems inevitable."17 This upswing is imperative so that the ending, without closing down possibilities with a rigid sense of finality, can grant the reader the satisfaction of predicting the future, the "what next"18 of her characters. Gallant does not see her endings before she begins, but rather the end "occurs on its own ... I see it. I see where it is."19 The fate of Gerard - separate, bewildered, displaced in any world he might try to enter, retreating further and further into a world of dreams, a death-like world of his own invention - is not unlike the fate of many a Gallant character to date. What distinguishes "Saturday" from previous stories is the new element introduced in the final two sections. For father and younger son, the mother's "Hell day" (36) provides an opportunity for communion, something Gerard has not been afforded. The sisters see Leopold's intelligence as a "disease" that "will always show him the limit of a situation and the last point of possibility where people are concerned," but even though Leopold's growth may be arrested, there is potential for healing and health (3940). At the family gathering of fourteen adults and eight children there can be no communion because the whole affair seems a mere pretentious exercise to demonstrate togetherness (41). The scene

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changes, however, in the final moments of the story, after everyone but the father and Leopold has gone separate ways: "The wind suddenly dropped; it was to the old man like a sudden absence of fear. He could dream as well as Gerard. He invented ... Presently they he and the dog - looked down on a village and the two silvery spires of a church. He saw the date over the door: 1885. The hills on the other side of the water were green and black with shadows. He had never seen such a blue and green day. But he was still here, on the street, and had not forgotten it for a second" (47-8). Unlike the muted and barren "brown and brick and sand" of Gerard's "old man's dream," the old man invents a fertile, lush, richly hued "blue and green day" to counter his wife's "Hell's day." Meanwhile, Leopold, standing on the porch, watches his father through the lens of the camera Gerard has given him as a birthday gift: "He seemed to be walking straight into Leopold's camera, magically reduced in size" (48). Earlier, Leopold has made "all the children uneasy by staring at each in turn and deciding none of them worth an inch of film" (40). Nor has he taken a picture of his father kissing his grandchildren, although he has "looked at him briefly through his new camera and said softly to him, and only to him, II n'y a pas assez de lumiere.' Their dark identical eyes reflected each other" (45). Now again Leopold does not capture the moment in film but for a very different reason. "One day he would have the assurance of a real street, a real father, a real afternoon," captured yet fluid in memory, the mind's eye, rather than framed in a snapshot, the camera's eye. Looking through the camera's eye allows him to stop and frame time, but only momentarily. For the old man, time is running short (48), but for Leopold, the foundations of a healthy life have been laid even when all will have departed and he is left to confront himself in isolation. Gallant remarked to Hancock that "once you have put reality through the filter and turned it into that other realm called fiction, the original ingredient ceases to exist. Ceases to exist in memory, that is."20 His sisters are correct to think that Leopold's perspective is one that shows him "the limit of a situation and the last point of possibility where people are concerned," but his awareness of human weakness allows him to recognize and accept his own vulnerability and frailty. "Saturday," Leopold's plot, ends with a brief moment that illuminates and colours - for character and reader - the larger context of his life as "the watch continues to tick where the story stops":21 "'All gone. II n'y a que moi.' Leopold, who never touched anyone, pressed his lips to his father's hand" (48). Ronald Hatch argues that "Malcolm and Bea" exemplifies Gallant's "later sense of character ... one in which people seem to 'float'

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in a pond of historical forces/' in that "the narrative ... never moves ahead, but always inwards and back, the fragmentation capturing the sense of frustration in Malcolm and Bea's relationship" and "leaving Malcolm in a cocoon of memory." Although "plotless," Hatch maintains, this story is not static: "The characters are so numerous and the sub-plots so intricate the forward thrust to the story is replaced by waves of narration."22 In this self-consciously reflexive story, an enigmatic affirmation is reached as the family members, all individuals contained within their discrete frames, are held together in a tenuous cohesiveness. Again, however, colour and light, rather than line or shape, identify the potential for communion. In the first section of the story, from an outside observation point but projected through Malcolm's perspective, Malcolm unsuccessfully seeks appropriate "coloration" to define and justify the continuation of his marriage.23 Next the story shifts to a first-person digression as Malcolm looks to the past to discern the beginning of their relationship in a "plot" of predetermined shape corresponding to some mythic pattern.24 For Malcolm, the plot of their marriage can have "no beginning," only "springs and sources, but miles apart, uncharted," because the day on which he met Bea was not, as it would be for Bea, part of the chronology of their life together (no) but was already being reshaped through memory to coincide with his idea of "domesticity." The vivid coloration of the details Malcolm "remembers" suggests that they are more invention than reality (111-12). Malcolm has been attracted by what he believes to be the vitality of Bea in creating for her widowed father, twin sisters, and infant son a meaningful shape from the "ramshackle way of living" that she must have had as child (108). But Bea's vitality is more destructive than life-giving; she murders what she creates (114). Malcolm can therefore find no starting-point for a plot in this memory because the shape it promised is a lie. The next section of the story returns to third-person perspective as Malcolm attempts to apply the idea of "Pichipoi" to the plot of his family life. He realizes that Pichipoi may have provided other people at another time with a destination to make sense of their lives but is inappropriate here and now (115). Neither defaulted memory nor transposed legend provides Malcolm with an explanation for his marriage. Their marriage has no plot; family events are simply separate frames with no shape or coloration to distinguish their family from any other. At the end Malcolm congratulates himself for getting as far as he has in giving some definition to his family: "I nearly made it, he said to himself. And then what?" The "then what" of this story is simply Malcolm's concession of the ordinariness of the explanation for this

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marriage, that togetherness is preferable to loneliness (119). There can be no "trumped-up cinematic design"25 to explain their marriage: no "dark-green painted house" as beginning (111), no Pichipoi as destination or grande finale. A family simply is - it does not mean - like Bea's bright yellow dress splashed with sunlight and the rainbow of fragmented light created by the rotary sprinkler pivoting on its stem (106, 108). "The Wedding Ring," more a short descriptive sketch than a narrative, is the only entirely impressionistic fictional piece that Gallant has published. With the exception of several of her German stories, this is Gallant's last first-person narration before the Linnet Muir series. The sketch rarely deviates from present tense, although the narrator (the name "Jane" is dropped into dialogue very near the end) is clearly trying to reconstruct a remembered season when she was a young girl, probably slightly older than Irmgard of "Jorinda and Jorindel" and "Rose," and therefore in early adolescence. The cumulative impressions succeed in revealing that something has happened during this season but exactly what - and when, where, or why - will remain tantalizingly opaque. Jane's memories may be inaccurate, but she avoids the flaws of her mother's reminiscences that conform to some preconceived shape or design and that are driven by her "wondering what was going to happen next."26 Jane shapes her memories "in a delirium of happiness" as she and her mother wash their hair in the stream and she "memorize [s] ferns, moss, grass, seedpods," but her memories are like the disembodied "sounds of this blissful moment" or like the soap bubbles that "dance in place, as if rooted, then ... stretch and break" when she "peep[s] at the milky-blue sky" through her eyelashes. From this pool of memories she now draws upon remembered sensations to tell her tale (127). This process does not achieve accurately rendered scenes, but its very tentativeness renounces the falsity of predictable shapes. The season draws to a close; "the tall field grass is grey with cold dew," and the narrator is left with one final image, that of her mother's discarded wedding band, simply described, which speaks for itself, no matter what kind of ordering, interpretation, or coloration is attempted: "Uncut grass. I saw the ring fall into it, but I am told I did not - I was already in Boston ... First it slipped under one of those sharp bluish stones, then a beetle moved it. It left its print on a cushion of moss after the first winter. No one else could have worn it. My mother's hands were small, like mine" (128-9). As with so many of Gallant's memory-haunted stories of this period, "New Year's Eve" is about the "persistence of memory"27 and focuses on how the image of a remembered mother stunts the

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formation of meaningful relationships. This image is the annoying head, the flapping blind, that must be exorcized to allow the haunted to transform their lives from monochromatic static celluloid to polychromatic vital experience. The story is set in the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow during an opera, but the comparison made between Amabel's visit with the Plummers and "a film seen in fragments" (135) is appropriate. Hatch comments on several filmic techniques used as the story shifts from one character to another: "The result is something like a film where the director cuts to different characters, all of whom are doing essentially the same thing." This cutting or montage technique, Hatch continues, provides "a superb example of doubling ... by which Gallant creates her 'dense' world of feeling: just as Amabel is watching an opera that she did not expect and does not understand, so is she observing the marriage acted out by the Colonel and his wife." The reader becomes a spectator of "plots unfold[ing] within plots," but again "plot" as something composed of the unpredictable fluidity of memory and dreams: "The past, therefore, does not influence the present in a single chain of causeeffect relationships; instead, people create extraordinarily complex networks of subplots which embrace and enact the contradictions implicit in their feelings."28 Both Colonel and Mrs Plummer, fixated through memory on a past in which their mothers hold centre-stage, seek to escape their present, shaped by the consequences of past actions, by existing in a neutral, colourless terrain (131-3). Mrs Plummer's days are frittered away with futile dreams of saving enough money playing bridge to leave her husband and of rehearsing a dramatic farewell, which "would spring from her like a separate Frances. Sentences streamed across a swept sky. They were pure, white, unblemished by love or compassion" (136). The whiteness of the emotionless void sought by both husband and wife is finally countered by Mrs Plummer's memory of their daughter Catherine, now dead, after Catherine learned of her father's infidelities, "in the garden, on her knees, [tearing] out the pansy plants she had put in the little crevices between paving stones the day before" (138). While Mrs Plummer is absorbed by this memory, her husband transforms it into another shape, another form. Typically, the Colonel's memory is colourless, emotionless, factual (132), but he now has a vision that permits a reconstruction of the past: "The Colonel ... dreamed that his mother was a reed, or a flower. 'If only you had always been like that!' he cried, in the dream" (139). Meanwhile, Amabel imagines and hopes for some "noble gesture" from the Plummers that might start "the new cycle" for her in which

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she might become the Plummers' surrogate daughter (139), a gesture earlier rendered in a richly hued scene of gift-giving (135). Amabel again imagines that Mrs Plummer, "tall and stormy, in her rustyorange ancient mink, with her square fur bonnet," will arrive at her hotel door bearing mementos, and Amabel will be "loved at last, looking at emeralds" (139). But the colours are too rich, too exotic. Mrs Plummer has warned her: "Most lives are wasted. All are shortchanged. A few are tragic" (135). If there are to be emotions introduced into Amabel's hotel room to offset its neutrality and facelessness (137), they will be less predictable, less dramatic, more ordinary. At the end of the story Amabel seems to have delivered herself over to the colourless and lifeless marriage of this jaded couple, but given the impossibility of all Amabel has imagined, the most that can be hoped for is faith that the coming year will embrace the unexpected, albeit undramatic and perhaps incomprehensible, substitutes that life has to offer. Not as parents and child will a footing be established but simply as three lonely people able to accept and assume the alternate roles that they have been understudying most of their lives (141). Only then will Amabel and the Plummers - as Gerard, Malcolm, and Bea - be able to awake from the dream of driving through foreign streets, obeying meaningless signals, and recalling "nothing except shabby strangers dragging fir trees through the dark" (135-6); only then will they be able to invent "such a blue and green day"29 as has never been seen, understand the needs and weaknesses of oneself and others, and ultimately chance love and affirmation.

"ALL A R O U N D THE ASHY RUIN LILACS B L O S S O M , L E A V E S G L E A M "3° "Gaullist France - the 19605," Gallant observes of "Malcolm and Bea."31 Likewise, she comments in the introduction to Home Truths: "Like every story in this collection, 'Saturday' needs to be read against its own time - the Montreal of about 1960" (xviii). In her 1978 interview with Hancock and again in the introduction to Home Truths (xx-xxii) she talks extensively of her inspiration for the Linnet Muir series set in Montreal of the 19205 and 19405. Immersed in the atmosphere of Paris of the 18905 during her research on Alfred Dreyfus, Gallant had an experience "more a sensation than a picture": "there began to be restored in some underground river of the mind a lost Montreal. An image of Sherbrooke Street, at night, with the soft gaslight and leaf shadows on the sidewalk" (xxii). Gallant describes this "unique, unclassifiable" Montreal as "a handsome city, the most

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attractive imaginable. It's ruined now," as she discovered in visits during 1976 and 1977-32 Even after witnessing these changes, Gallant declares, "an earlier Montreal is intact in my mind" - "When I see the Sherbrooke Street of today I see it without remembering it. When I come back to Paris I remember only that other, older, much handsomer street" - and it is this "other" street in the "other, lost city" that she resurrects in the final section of Home Truths: "The stories are really the reconstruction of a city which no longer exists."33 The first three stories and the final story of the Linnet Muir series - "In Youth Is Pleasure," "Between Zero and One," "Varieties of Exile," and "With a Capital T" - all record, from Linnet's perspective over thirty years later, the young woman's return to Montreal from New York in 1940. Having spent her first ten childhood years in this city, Linnet now confronts Montreal as memory. Linnet's return becomes a "journey into a new life and a dream past" (228). The most powerfully evocative stories in the series are "Voices Lost in Snow" and "The Doctor" because they achieve a contemplative lyricism as Linnet actually enters into and relives the "dream past" of her childhood experiences. Memory endows this black and white world with a daunting monumental quality, but for this journey to move forward into a "new life" rather than solely backward into a "dream past" the past must be filtered through imagination - "reality necessarily transformed"34 - so that its vivid coloration is perceived and experienced. The contemplative lyricism of this "dream past" never becomes mawkish or nostalgic, because Linnet sees and speaks of her younger self with a humorous and lucid understanding of her youthful failings, which she recognizes as still defining her character and attitudes. In "Voices Lost in Snow" and "The Doctor," Linnet the writer achieves a balance between inner and outer, past and present, and all that these dichotomies imply. She also comes to realize that as a writer certain sacrifices are demanded: "All this business of putting life through a sieve and then discarding it was another variety of exile; I knew that even then, but it seemed quite right and perfectly natural" (281). Linnet thus discovers her own distinctive voice, raises that voice, and so prevents it from becoming one of those voices lost in snow. With such a potentially suppressive metaphor at the core, invisibility and visibility and modes of seeing define these challenges and this discovery. These challenges become all the more imperative to surmount because Linnet has witnessed the descent and suffocation of both her parents, Charlotte and Angus Muir. Charlotte, a restless woman who yearns for dramatic experiences and cosmopolitan venues, demands

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highly visible roles (230). Of the several portraits of her mother that Linnet sketches, one emerges as particularly poignant because of the empathy Linnet feels for her mother at that time. In "Voices Lost in Snow" Charlotte, now twenty-seven or twenty-eight, is in exile in the country, partially to care for Linnet, who has "grazed the edge of tuberculosis" (289), but equally to remove her from further scandal. Like a heroine of the Russian novels she consumes, Charlotte becomes a prisoner in an ice palace of her own creation as she reads "one book after another without looking up, without scraping away the frost on the windows." When she does discern an outside world, she merely "glanc[es] around in the drugged way adolescent readers have." Her life is entirely internal; it is her daughter, the writer, who gives her a setting: "The flat white fields beyond her imaginary windows were like the flat white fields she would have observed if only she had looked out. She was myopic; the pupil when she had been reading seemed to be the whole of the eye" (285). Ultimately, the Snow Queen escapes but, in so doing, enters another plot as she responds to "the heart-stopping cry of the steam train at night... the unrivalled summons, the long, urgent, uniquely North American beckoning," a plot that Linnet herself undergoes although "years and desires and destinations apart" (289). Freed, Charlotte once again becomes "unpredictable" with "a serious element of danger" (218). Charlotte's dramatic posturing is thus recognized, exposed, and demythologized in her very act of mythologizing herself. As a writer, Linnet does not succumb to her mother's penchant for rewriting "other people's lives, providing them with suitable and harmonious endings. In her version of events you were supposed to die as you'd lived" (287). Having failed "to alter the form, the outward shape" of her daughter, Charlotte "came to the conclusion there must be something wrong with the clay," loses interest, and simply disappears - becomes invisible - from Linnet's life in a very unassuming way "in the first half of Hitler's war" (218-19). More difficult is Linnet's coming to terms with her father's disappearance through his death when Linnet is ten years old. Linnet's father, like Gallant's own, was a remittance man and dilettante painter who simply drifted through his adult life: "He was seldom present. I don't know where my father spent his waking life: just elsewhere" (285). Like Frank Cairns, a remittance man whom Linnet meets on a train, he is defeated by a past that arrests any life in the present or hope for the future (268-9, 2^1)- Angus seems to be the victim of such daunting memories that he is totally absorbed in self and "barely knew other people had lives" (310). Linnet describes a bookplate (probably stylized, silhouetted black on white) that he has

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designed for her with "the drawing of a stream flowing between grassy banks - his memory of the unhurried movement of England, no reflection of anything known to me in Quebec - bearing a single autumn leaf" and annotated with the lines, "Time, Time which none can bind / While flowing fast leaves love / behind" (300-1). This is the single mention of any specific artistic undertaking by her father. When Linnet visits her "father's painter chum," Stephen Ross-Colby, he dismisses Angus's work as "all small stuff." In contrast, RossColby had "come into his own as an artist by then, selling wash drawings of Canadian war graves, sun-splashed, wisteria-mauve, lime-green, with drifts of blossom across the name of the regiment." Linnet does not object to his fanciful treatment of his subject matter - "His stones weren't stones but mauve bubbles" that "floated off the page" - nor to his dismissal of her father's work; what she does object to is "Ross-Colby's way of turning the dead into thistledown" (230-1). Somewhere between the sentimental mauves and limegreens of thistledown and the black and white monumentality towards which Linnet is tending, she will discover a way of seeing "quite right and perfectly natural" for her. In "Voices Lost in Snow" Linnet succeeds only marginally in asserting herself, making herself visible, to escape the fate of her parents. As the story opens, the darkness of ignored or unanswered questions and unsought attention and commands of authoritative voices "muffled, a hum through snow" - blanket and all but suffocate the child (282). In frustration over not being given the reasonable explanations she demands, and not having the means of articulating her frustration, Linnet reacts petulantly and irrationally. The memory is not her own but one passed down to her, a kind of family legend: "one summer's day I ran screaming around a garden, tore the heads off tulips, and - no, let another voice finish it; the only authentic voices I have belong to the dead: '... then she ate them'" (283). With any "authentic voices" long erased, Linnet's portrait of herself and her father during their routine visits to Montreal are ritualized and conveyed with monolithic stillness and monochromatic coloration: "These Saturdays have turned into one whitish afternoon, a windless snowfall, a steep street. Two persons descend the street, stepping carefully. The child ... gesticulates wildly - there is the flash of a red mitten. I will never overtake this pair. Their voices are lost in snow" (283). The flash of the red mitten is the one image to indicate that this child has a separate and independent existence despite the oppressive adult presence and despite the great distance between then and now. Linked to this picture is Linnet's gradual recognition of the implications of a recurrent dream that, herself being delayed

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by stopped clocks, "someone important had taken a train without me," a dream that could have taken her down the same (possibly suicidal) slope as her father (284). Like the descent on the snowladen street, but without the individualizing flash of red, this dream presents a threat until understood and quelled. Linnet's story now shifts to focus on one particular Saturday visit that she makes with her father to her godmother, Georgie Henderson, who has the potential to become a stepmother figure, a rival of both Charlotte and Linnet for Angus's affections and attention. Georgie has been "explained by my mother as being the natural daughter of Sarah Bernhardt and a stork" in her dramatic posturing. With at least forty-five years between the scene and its depiction, Linnet wishes to avoid reducing Georgie to a metaphor, but memory provides Linnet with "only a shadow, a tracing, with long arms and legs." Like the background of snow on the Montreal street against which Linnet and her father have been silhouetted, Georgie is pictured first in a "surprisingly dramatic pose," leaning against the closed front door (287), and later occupying a white sofa, the twin to the one on which Linnet and her father sit. The adults try to establish a link between Linnet and Georgie by recalling a previous visit when Linnet's "dangling feet had left a smudge of shoe polish" on the white sofa (290). Linnet, as a child, instinctively resorts to her mother's tactics by refusing to acknowledge the existence of Georgie in her family's past and by refusing to admit that her own existence might be defined by a mere black smudge (291). As adult and as writer, Linnet has tried to unbury her godmother from the depths of her memory but has only partially succeeded in giving Georgie substance and density. Yet there is an understanding and honesty here about her feelings and motives that Linnet lacked when, in her twenties, a reporter for a Montreal newspaper, she interviewed this woman from her past. Then it was Linnet who "stood stork-like in the passage, pulling on a boot" (328). She used her sharp powers of observation and turns of phrase as a weapon against this former, but ultimately harmless, even pathetic, rival (326-8). From the perspective of several intervening decades the narrator reverses the roles and concedes that she herself was as much the perpetrator as the victim of ill will: "I see, now, that I was seamless, and as smooth as brass; that I gave her no opening" (329). The portrait of Georgie remains flat and monochromatic, despite the "jaunty blue jacket with a double row of brass buttons, and a pleated skirt" (328), but responsibility rests with this young reporter determined to get the facts straight and to write a "true account" (329): "The duller, the more earnest, the more literal generation I

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stood for seemed to crowd the worn white room, and to darken it further" (327). There are, nevertheless, colours within her childhood memories that can direct Linnet's eyes to a meaningful and worthwhile mode of seeing. In her visit to her godmother's as a child, Linnet emerges with one delicately tinted image that then interweaves with other colours and sensations. She begins to break down barriers between outside and inside when, like the young Simone in de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she literally consumes the external world. "The world became more intimately part of me when it entered through my mouth than through my eyes and my sense of touch," recalls de Beauvoir, describing how she "would stand transfixed before the windows of confectioners' shops ... I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasures they promised me." Reflecting on her ecstasy during parties held by her parents, de Beauvoir concludes, "all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth ... if only the universe we inhabit were completely edible, I used to think, what power we would have over it!"35 Linnet's response is equally sensuous but, at the same time, more dependent on memory and association. She has refused to be identified by the black smudge, and "owing to new slipcovers, real evidence was missing ... Giving me up, my godmother placed a silver dish of mint wafers where I could reach them - white, pink, and green, overlapping" (291). Later, on the snowy Montreal street, this image meshes with another marking a rare gesture of concern from her father. Remembering advice that the doctor has given about Linnet's consumptive condition, he pulls her red wool scarf up over her nose and mouth: "Breathing inside knitted wool was delicious - warm, moist, pungent when one had been sucking on mint candies, as now" (293). This is an image in which outside and inside interlock, whether of her breath caught inside the red wool scarf or of the pungent smell of mints consumed earlier. This reading immediately becomes sinister as her father reaches a decision against pursuing any other life for himself and against resisting the "enemy" disease that had "already mined, colonized" him and was "prepared to destroy what it fed on" (292): "The answer seems to speak out of the lights, the stones, the snow; out of the crucial second when inner and outer forces join, and the environment becomes part of the enemy too" (293). The description of the Montreal streets preceding this scene and following their departure from Georgie's apartment inspires a similarly fluid reading. The snowy streets reflect the "uneven light" emitted

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by the gas lamps whose "soft gradual blooming at dusk made the sky turn a peacock blue that slowly deepened to marine, then indigo ... The reddish brown of the stone houses, the curve and slope of the streets, the constantly changing sky were satisfactory in a way that I now realize must have been aesthetically comfortable. This is what I saw when I read 'city' in a book; I had no means of knowing that 'city' one day would also mean drab, filthy, flat, or that city blocks could turn into dull squares without mystery" (292). Each "city" emerges from a perceived reality. The latter image is like the father's disease - attacking and consuming - and can inspire no creative process; as leveller, destroyer, it lacks depth and colour. Conversely, the former image, filtered through memory and imagination, can provide the "aesthetically comfortable" merging of objective and subjective rendering that is found in certain kinds of literature, certainly in much of Gallant's more lyrical writing of the 19705. It is a fusion that can conjure the picture of the "golden and warm" lights of the Ritz-Carlton that Linnet and her father pass after leaving Georgie's apartment. And, although it may appear to be a fusion that ignores the "night shadows in which no one lurked," the "traces of the icy slides [that] children's feet had made" suggest otherwise. It is a fusion that can likewise accommodate the "starkly terrifying" roar of a hockey mob and of her father stretching "as if trying to keep every bone in his body from touching a nerve; a look of helplessness such as I had never seen on a grown person gripped his face and he said this strange thing: 'Crowds eat me. Noise eats me.' The kind of physical pain that makes one seem rat's prey is summed up in my memory of this" (292-3). "The Doctor" takes Linnet back to her earliest childhood memories and opens opportunities for her to read through, not simply into or out of, visual images produced by memory and artistic creation. She achieves a balance whereby she neither totally consumes nor is consumed by these images. Again, an anecdote from de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter provides instructive parallels, this one about a fictional heroine, Charlotte, in a story young Simone's nurse read to her. This story is of Charlotte finding "a huge egg, almost as big as herself, made of pink sugar ... It was both stomach and cradle, and yet you could eat it." First Charlotte ate nothing else but this sugar egg and became so small that she fell prey to a rat. Then she "stuffed herself so greedily" that she grew into a "monstrous balloonchild." After visiting the doctor, "Charlotte returned to normal size," de Beauvoir concludes, "and I came out of the adventure safe and sound after having been reduced to a foetus and then blown up to matronly dimensions."36

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Although de Beauvoir's childhood was extremely different from Linnet's (and Gallant's), particularly because de Beauvoir was at the heart of a caring and attentive family unit, both exhibit a similar struggle to adjust to an existence outside themselves. While de Beauvoir never records an experience of consuming flowers bit off in frustrated rage, as does Linnet, she completes an anecdote of being unjustly accused of picking her aunt's clematis and of being defended "against the forces of error and injustice" by parents and grandparents with the confession that "there must have been something wrong somewhere: I had fits of rage during which my face turned purple and I would fall to the ground in convulsions." One particular outburst has led an aunt "who wielded a pious pen" to record Simone's behaviour in La Poupee modele, an "improving tale." The improbabilities in this tale transform Simone's "almost religious respect for print," which she shares with her parents, to distrust: "From that day forward I suspected that literature had only very dubious connexions with the truth."37 The differences that develop between de Beauvoir and Linnet (and, again, between de Beauvoir and Gallant) can be explained at least partially by an observation that de Beauvoir makes later: "I have always found reality more rewarding than the mirages of the imagination."38 Such a dichotomy is impossible for Linnet - and for Gallant - because reality, which incorporates the past delivered through memory and its associations, cannot be so easily dissociated from the perception of it. "The Doctor" opens with a description of a mass-reproduced monochromatic print of Sir Luke Fildes's allegorical picture entitled "The Doctor" (1891), which a family friend, Dr Chauchard, has given Linnet: "two full generations were raised with the monochrome promise that existence is insoluble, tragedy static, poverty endearing, and heavenly justice a total mystery" (295). In another context, "incarnated as an oil painting in the Tate Gallery in London, in the company of other Victorian miseries," the picture takes on a different meaning and significance: "Perhaps it was simply a scene from a three-decker novel, even a joke. In museum surroundings - classified, ticketed - The Doctor' conveyed a new instruction: Death is sentimental, art is pretense" (296). Into the images of the painting Linnet, five or six years old, reads herself as the centre of the composition, the only one on whom "light from a tipped lampshade falls" (297). Whereas in "Voices Lost in Snow" the adult narrator seeks to resurrect an image of a child self that threatens to be submerged, succumbing to commands to be unheard and unseen, in "The Doctor" the self-centred child threatens to colour all she sees with a reductive, allegorical reading that she assumes will provide

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the absolute answers she demands. With her child's faith in incantations (one phrase equals one key to unlock one door), she thinks that the unseen can be made visible and readable. The adult narrator, however, knows that "moi" cannot take her everywhere (298). From the three obituaries in the newspapers after Dr Chauchard's death (Linnet, now twenty, had not seen him for eleven years), Linnet learns that she had been granted very limited glimpses into two of Dr Chauchard's landscapes or contexts: that of pious member of an extended family and that of eminent member of the Montreal medical community. The third obituary, which speaks of R.E. Chauchard, poet, essayist, and founding member of "The Arts and Letters Society of Quebec," is "an earthquake, the collapse of the cities we build over the past to cover seams and cracks we cannot account for" (312-13). There is no obituary in these French newspapers of Dr Chauchard in the English-speaking landscape where Linnet best knows him: a familiar figure in the "exclusive" group of social "explorers" to which her parents belonged, "clinging together as a substitute for motion" they so craved with their i92os-style ennui (305-6). Admitting to invention and omission, Linnet reconstructs Dr Chauchard's world in colourful images unlike the monochromatic images that memory usually reproduces. He presents a particular challenge because his world is best described "through its girls and women," girls like Linnet herself but who "came to children's parties dressed in rose velvet and white stockings, too shy to speak." Through his front door with its "gloomy shade" of "Montreal green," through the vestibule doors with their opaque glass, the adult Linnet follows her younger self to describe an interior, "deep blue fading to green," that reflects the man she knew (297-8). The faded formality of these rooms is also captured in the "particularly ugly red" bindings and "gilt titles" of children's books from nineteenth-century France, depicting a world where scolding and unfairness were the norm, which the doctor has given Linnet (300). These "grim red books" are coveted possessions for Linnet, "not reminders but a true fragment of his twilit house" and of "Dr Chauchard himself at the desk of his shadowy room" (301). The coloration makes it clear that Dr Chauchard is very much part of the adult narrator's present vision despite the passage of over four decades: "It is not simply rhetoric to say that I see him still - Fildes profile, white cuff, dark sleeve, writing the new dedication with a pen dipped in a blue inkwell, hand and book within the circle cast by the lamp on his desk" (300). Unlike the black and white scenes at her godmother's, this scene is colourfully rendered because Linnet sees herself so much a part of it - both then and now.

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As an adult Linnet recognizes how many gaps her knowledge and understanding of the doctor leave. She tries reading his diary and equating the cryptic "X, Y, Z" with faces she knew, but to no avail. She revisits and revises her images of members of her parents' social circle (314-15), including a Mrs Erskine, who once rivalled Linnet's mother for the attentions of Dr Chauchard. "With her pale braids, her stately figure, her eyes the color of a stoneware teapot, Mrs Erskine seemed to me like a white statue with features painted on. I had heard my mother praising her beauty, but for a child she was too large, too still" (307). After Dr Chauchard's death Linnet hears a story of Mrs Erskine that has the dramatic quality of the Russian novels that Charlotte - and Linnet (265) - consume, and although riddled with improbabilities and gaps, it has the effect of bringing to life a woman who had simply the monumental quality of memory for Linnet: "In this story about the cloak Mrs Erskine is transmuted from the pale, affected statue I remember and takes on a polychrome life ... on a sharp blue day, when some people were still in a dark classroom writing 'abyssus abyssum invocat' all over their immortal souls, she ... had the sun, the snow, the wrap of fur, the bright sky, the risk" (315). The writer Linnet who emerges from this series of stories reflects Gallant herself, a writer who has learned the value of perspective, proportion, context, composition, and coloration in projecting her vision of a world where multiplicity, depth, and the invisible must be acknowledged. Moreover, it is a vision that can suggest the unseen through the seen. Piecing together what she remembers, what she has seen and heard, what she has imagined and invented and selected, Linnet concludes "The Doctor" with a modified portrait of Dr Chauchard that concedes a life for her sitter beyond what any one person can see or know. This portrait, inspired by the black and white newsprint of the obituary notice and the printed pages of his published work, is the best the adult narrator can achieve, being at some remove from the intuitive childhood capacity for invention (316). The writer's fictional world can bring from childhood the inventive capacity to create "a foreign city called Marigold" out of "a slum" of discarded objects. In both life and art this capacity sustains by punctuating even the greyest and bleakest winter day with vitality and radiance (311). Linnet has returned to Montreal on a bright June morning wearing a "crumpled and soot-flecked" white suit (219-20) that reflects her impulse to be part of this new "curiously empty country" she thinks she is entering (222). With her penchant for making "symbols out of everything" at this time, she has

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discarded her tartan skirt, a gesture of "shedding past time." Naively, she thinks "there could be no journeying backward" (221) and that she will remake the world in her own image (225-6). Only by journeying backward can she give multiple angles, contexts, and arrangements, as well as just proportions and appropriate coloration, to the monolithic memories that threaten to hold her in thrall. At the end of "In Youth Is Pleasure" Linnet has succumbed to monochromatic memories. "Reality, as always, was narrow and dull," she states, when "a narrow stone thing" with bare panes and neon lighting replaces the memory of "a house, whose beauty had brought tears to my sleep" (235-6). This remembered house is on "the dream street, pure white," a Sherbrooke Street "lined with gigantic spreading trees through which light fell like a rain of coins" in a Montreal that "in memory, was a leafy citadel where I knew every tree" (235). At eighteen, when she sees "a crocodile of little girls" emerge from a convent gate - "white-faced, black-clad, eyes cast down" - all she can feel is the paradoxical thankfulness that "time had been on my side, faithfully, and unless you died you were always bound to escape" (236-7). Here memory, for Gallant, is also possibly linked to Philip Surrey, the art editor of the Montreal Standard, who told Gallant to return in three years when, in 1940 at age eighteen, she applied for work with the newspaper. Surrey's 1940 painting entitled The Crocodile (also exhibited as On Sherbrooke Street) depicts a group of convent girls being herded by two hooded nuns, who are in the foreground and with backs to the viewer, through gates into what appears to be a cemetery. The sharp points of the nuns' heels, toes, and hoods, while softened in the brims of the girls' hats, are given a cruel edge as they are reflected by the arrow-shaped bars of the fence. Shadows of these bars ironically ascend from the crosses on gravestones in the yard beyond. The movement of the painting appears to be upwards - most of the sharp objects point upwards - but the eyes of the two girls at the head of the crocodile, the only two who face the viewer, look back to the two nuns in the foreground and form a kind of circular movement. Linnet has rejected much of her early convent training, but whereas Mavis Young became Mavis Gallant through marriage, curiously Linnet Muir became Linnet Blanchard, something Linnet mentions early in "With a Capital T," just after describing how she came to work on the Montreal newspaper the Lantern (317-18). Yet as Linnet over three decades later reflects on her memories of her memories, another Surrey painting captures the interplay of inner and outer: his 1968 "The Red Tuque." Despite the swirls and pools of

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Montreal traffic and car lights reflecting off the snow and threatening to submerge the central figure of the girl, not in whiteness but in fluorescent luminosity, the red tuque, like Linnet's red mitten, emerges and seems to ascend towards the viewer. Meanwhile, as the writer evolves, Linnet gives the first sign that her despair over the bleakness and greyness of winter days will be undercut not only by the lyricism of imagination but also by the lucidity of humour. In "Varieties of Exile" she attempts to compose a letter to the editor to dismantle a "fable" about Canada being recipient of American charity: "I kept rewriting and reshaping it, trying to achieve a balance between crippling irony and a calm review of events. I never posted it, finally, because my grandmother appeared to me in a dream and said that only fools wrote to newspapers" (277). This would be her maternal grandmother, a woman Linnet tells us elsewhere was "a sensible, truthful, pessimistic woman pessimistic in the way women become when they settle for what actually exists" (286), something Linnet will never do. This is particularly apparent in "Between Zero and One," when Linnet has insisted on a place among the men on the other side of the balustrade from the women. Despite the disappointment of the banality of the work, Linnet "was deeply happy. It was one of the periods of inexplicable grace when every day is a new parcel one unwraps, layer on layer of tissue paper covering bits of crystal, scraps of words in a foreign language, pure white stones. I spent my lunch hours writing in notebooks" (248). A celebratory note makes itself felt in the lyricism that colours her excavation and reconstruction of the Montreal of the 19205 and 19405 and the people whose lives she touched. Even early in the series, in "In Youth Is Pleasure," Linnet captures the proud poverty of her old nurse, Olivia Carette, that few people saw: "Her knowledge came out of the clean, swept, orderly poverty that used to be tucked away in the corners of cities ... Nobody took its picture. Anyway, Olivia would not have sat for such a portrait. The fringed green rug she put over her treadle sewing machine was part of a personal fortune" (232-3). In the same story, Linnet finally inscribes an epitaph for her father, one of the "peacetime casualties" that "are lightning bolts out of a sunny sky that strike only one house." Her visual memorial, in its Whitmanesque allusions, avoids the "thistledown" quality of ColbyRoss's gravestones: "All around the ashy ruin lilacs blossom, leaves gleam" (234). This lyricism permeates stories in From the Fifteenth District that coincide with the opening of the doors of childhood invention and imagination in "Voices Lost in Snow" and "The Doctor."

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GALLANT'S EXPANDED PALETTE IN FROM THE FIFTEENTH DISTRICT Several critics, tracing the evolution of Gallant's fiction, identify a new element beginning to make itself felt in the stories of the early and mid-1970s. In works such as "Irina," "The Moslem Wife," and the Linnet Muir series, critics observe a "more hopeful attitude" (Grant) in the transformative potential of the individual, an attitude contained in situations of exile turned to advantage (Hatch), with characters who are aware of and explore the possibilities of revelatory moments (Besner), "rare moments of delight and wonder in things that appear beautiful, guiltless, complete ... like slivers of paradise, piercing the grim borders of everyday experience" (Keefer).39 Again, the visual properties of Gallant's fiction signal these changes most effectively. The coloration of Malcolm and Bea's marriage and the blues and greens of the old man's invented day at the end of "Saturday" assume an intensity and import amid the grey, black and white, and brown tones of Gallant's world to mark characters' emergence from this monochromatic world to one more brightly hued. We have seen in an earlier chapter how Gallant's travellers, particularly her artist figures, have had to adapt their eye to the greys of the northern European world, an adaptation that Gallant herself underwent when first moving to Paris in the 19505: "Years ago, when I moved from the stark light of the south of France to Jean Ferrandi, I brought with me the furniture and colors of a different climate, and it was as though I had let loose a flock of macaws in a dovecote. Everything bright looked garish. It was by responding, gradually, to a far more muted sky that I began to fit into Paris, like a piece in a puzzle."40 The greys of Paris are like those found in old photographs, Gallant writes: "The Paris winter sky reflects wet sidewalks, or seems to, gray on gray. A photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, 'A Snapshot, Paris/ 1913, has it, exactly. There is a print of the photograph in the Musee d'Orsay. When you leave the museum and walk up Rue de Bellechasse, you are still in the picture."41 Yet into Paris's monochromatic greys are threaded colours - blues and greens, reds and pinks: "The morning sky is whitish-blue, a Sisley color, and the clouds have an iridescent shine. The whole sky seems to be moving along toward the outer suburbs, where Paris taxi drivers live and grow parsley and tomatoes and large pink roses. The afternoon weather may be gray, but different in texture and tone - thin and silky, Pissarro's gray ... It is still winter, but near the end."42

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Gallant expands her palette in the stories of the early 19705, and thus her fictional world becomes increasingly polychromatic. One likely inspiration for Gallant is the cinema. Although Hollywood had been using technicolour and technologies that produced sharper colour images and progressively better co-ordination of sound and picture since 1929, many European directors through the 19505 and 19605 continued to use a black and white medium, either to meet lower production costs or to create desired artistic effects. Gallant's numerous references to film clearly indicate that she is an avid and perceptive filmgoer; in particular, she was an early advocate of the new German cinema that established an international reputation in the mid-1970s. Hancock records that Gallant has seen and enjoys discussing contemporary German films, especially those directed by Herzog and Fassbinder.43 The first of the new German directors to produce a colour film was Schlondorff in his A Degree of Murder, released in 1967-44 Fassbinder's first colour film dates from December 1969, after which he, as other directors, still occasionally shot in black and white.45 After the mid-1970s only very rarely did a director, European or American, choose the dated medium of black and white, a noteworthy exception being Schindler's List (1993), which reserves colour for the unsettling appearances of the child in a russet red coat and for the contemporary footage of pilgrimages to Schindler's grave at the film's end. More common is Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants (1987), which uses isolated splashes of brilliant red against the subdued and muted colours that characterize the rest of the film. Gallant too imparts the mood and atmosphere of the past or fading worlds she re-creates in From the Fifteenth District46 by suggesting the black and white and sepia tones of memory and dreams and, where appropriate, adding subdued colour and light with an occasional brilliant pigment to establish continuity with the lived present, however tenuous this continuity may sometimes seem. Hatch has identified "Irina" (2 Dec. 1974) and Besner "The Moslem Wife" (23 Aug. 1976) as transition stories in Gallant's canon,47 but no critic has considered how the splendid visual qualities of "His Mother" (13 Aug. 1973) anticipate the changes that characterize stories of the later 19705. "His Mother" is, to begin, a faded grey film of a shadow life; it is, then, shaded with pastel and, eventually, more brightly hued tones; it returns, at the end, to this grey world but with a new sense of all the shades this greyness contains. The unnamed mother of the story's title exists within a circle of emigres' mothers who ritually gather at Budapest's Vorosmarty Cafe (which, in their time warp, they insist on calling by its former French name, Gerbeaud) to talk about their departed children and, often, never-seen

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grandchildren. The story's focus is the "grand duchess" of this circle, who gains her status because her son's place of exile (Glasgow) is city as opposed to town, European as opposed to North or South American, and because she regularly receives "a new letter to show, which was another symbol of one's station." But "her trump credentials were in plain sight."48 These are the gifts and money he sends her that bring grace and subdued colour to her life: earrings, scarves, soft grey gloves, pastel sweaters, a white blouse, a blue kimono (214, 215, 224). Varying attitudes mark the different periods in Budapest's turbulent history of the twentieth century. What holds constant, however, is a quality that Lilla Milassin, born in Budapest and a student of art history, identifies as uniting Budapesters of all times, "a paradoxical combination of fatalism and activism," best exemplified by "reports from World War n that suggest that some coffeehouses stayed open for business while hand-to-hand combat was going on in the next street."49 "His Mother" captures this "paradoxical combination of fatalism and activism," which manifests itself in a thin tightrope between despair and hope, in the story's coloration and filmic allusions. "His mother had come of age in a war and then seemed to live a long grayness like a spun-out November." With these opening words, the mother's shadowy life, while articulated, barely emerges from the black and white print of the page. Reading a book on photography, her son has developed a means to ignore his mother, whose presence and chatter he finds irksome, and refuses to grant what she silently requests: concern for her well-being, recognition of her existence (213). He is simply part of the greyness of his mother's existence, but a burdensome, oppressive greyness because a reminder of larger controlling and uncontrollable forces, "history, his stony watery world." His mother invents a childhood of lightness and sparkle, when "people had floated like golden dust; whole streets of people buoyed up by optimism, a feeling for life," to counter her grey life and the darkness of these forces (214). "His Mother," while interweaving a sense of the past, only once (in the dream at the end) spins backward to capture a specific past moment. The text's resistance to such "helical patterning of memory"50 underscores the abrupt changes Hungarian society underwent after the Second World War, with the Communist takeover. Although the monarchy had been brought to an end in 1918, Budapest clung to the graces, manners, and ideals of an earlier era for several more decades, right through the interwar period; Budapesters lived in a nineteenth-century world until political and economic forces of the 19505 forced them into the twentieth century.51 As Marton Radkai

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observes in the conclusion to his sketch of Budapest, "City of Contradictions," it is only in the 19905 that "Budapest has emerged from its own museum."52 For women like the mother of Gallant's tale, therefore, the late 19605 and early 19705 initiated a period in which attitudes were adjusted, however moderate the adjustment might ultimately prove to be. Her son's emigration gives his mother an opportunity to create a new image and life for herself, but because she clings to the "golden dust" of a world that exists in memory only, her life is as insubstantial - as colourless and formless - as before, simply a further spinning out of the long grey November that has always defined her life. "Grand Duchess" because of the attentiveness of her now-absent son, she presides over her court, the pastel world of Gerbeaud's. Apart from this life, his mother begins to develop something of an independent life. She takes in boarders, housing them in her son's old room. Initially, she refuses to remove anything from her son's room, preserving it as a shrine, but gradually she permits her son's departure to become visible to the mind's eye: "She could see him, she dreamed of him often, but her dreams and memories were like films with the sound track removed" (216). And so her son takes his place in the grey silent film of her memory. As tenants come and go after a forestry student's three-year tenure, these include "a future art historian," "the neurasthenic widow of a poet," several young librarians - none of these preservers or mourners of words and pictures from the past seems able to liberate her from her grey November, to nurture the seeds the forestry student planted. Given the political, social, and economic changes Hungary is undergoing, the dark burden of her home life becomes even more sharply distinguished from the world at Gerbeaud's when her current tenants arrive, an old man and his pregnant granddaughter, who "almost to the end of her term worked long hours in a plasma laboratory ... These people reckoned differently, and on their terms she was, if not at the foot of the ladder, then dangerously to one side of it" (216-17). Surrounded by their poverty, living in such close quarters, his mother does not succumb; she learns to endure. The mother has been given an injection of new life, even if in the colourless form of plasma.53 First, she learns to distrust the "golden dust" of her memories - mere fool's gold: "she began to drift away from an idea she had held about her age and time. Where, exactly, was the youth she recalled as happy? What had been its shape, its color? All that golden dust had not belonged to her - it had been part of her mother. It was her mother who had floated like thistledown, smiled, lived with three servants on call, stood with a false charming gaucherie, an arm

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behind her, an elbow grasped" (217). The mother has thus been in a time warp, with life imitating art. If the mother has come of age in the Second World War, she was likely born in the early or mid-i92os, and her mother at the turn of the century. The lifestyle and attitude that created women with time to learn to stand like one of Degas's coy, chaste dancers or a Pre-Raphaelite goddess had been erased in most European centres at least a generation before. Challenging the romantic image of her past and her youth, his mother begins to understand the changing time and the differences it must be making on a son she has not seen for years: "she parted without pain from a soft, troubled memory, from an old gray film about porters wheeling steamer trunks, white fur wraps, bunches of violets, champagne. It was gone: it had never been. She and her son were both mistaken, and yet they had never been closer" (218). The mother has passed through her stages of nostalgia just when her son seems to have begun reminiscing "about fictitious apple or poppy-seed cakes" (218). For her, the "old gray film" of a youth that never existed is supplanted by the reality of her world of here and now, while her dreams and memories of her son, "like films with the sound track removed" and like the warped records she keeps for so long, are replaced by telephone conversations and coloured photographs. Significantly, after the telephone is installed, the mother discards the last of her son's records (216-17). She now hears his disembodied voice, even if she cannot visit him, and receives coloured snapshots, one in particular that she can neither comprehend nor accept: "What did it mean, what was its secret expression? She looked for the invisible ink that might describe her son as a husband and father. He was twenty-eight, he had a mustache, he worked in his own home as a common laborer" (218). Although dislodging shadowy memories, this new image cannot be accommodated or reconciled with the remembered image. She intuits enough from the unposed snapshot to reciprocate with her own photograph, which, as posed and composed as it may be to conceal, reveals what she has become in his absence. She sits in this "fiercely lighted portrait ... with a volume of Impressionist reproductions opened on her lap" (219). Is this a picture her son will show his wife and parentsin-law, they who have been pictured on their modern-looking furniture, she on her divan in the only part of her apartment she can now call her own? She ponders this portrait of her son in profile with his long hair that "straggled in brown mouse-tails over the collar of the lamentable pullover" and "half of a new and abundant mustache" (218). In contrast, her profile allows her to display the remnants of the family jewels, the string of garnets, and "a framed parchment

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that proved her mother's family had been ennobled" (as had a whole town) (219) as she clings to the dignity of a way of life that had passed before her own time. The last scene, which makes up approximately half the story, reveals a similar honesty in dishonesty, revelation in concealment. The mother is writing to her son as she has done almost every morning for years. She attempts to maintain a sunny light patter in the "long back-slanting hand she had once been told was the hand of a liar. Upside down the letter looked like a shower of rain." She does not include the "morbid, unchecked" thoughts that she has in her dreams, the grime on the windows, "the insignificant sadness of a lifetime," or memories of silent mornings "when talking to him had been like lifting a stone." While the old man and his granddaughter eat and quarrel "endlessly," she sits "wearing her blue, clean, now elderly kimono" and writes of "the kitchen with the winter sun on the sparkling window" (219). Set against the quiet muted suffering of this aging woman is the overt dramatic suffering of her tenants: "Here was their folklore, their richness; how many persons have lost their families on a bus and survived to describe the holocaust?" They are preparing to attend a funeral, and this prompts their confused memories of the day when the rest of their family members died en route to another funeral (222). The absurd, disjointed conversation between the old man and his granddaughter corresponds to the grotesqueries of the portrait they present. As he works on a crossword puzzle using a magnifying glass, he utters seemingly irrelevant insults about his granddaughter's lack of culture, for which her education cannot compensate: "Being deaf, he travelled alone in his memories and sometimes came out with just anything. His mind plodded back and forth" (220). Unlike the grandfather, the emigre's mother does see and hear, although she does not always understand and so is given to imposing her own meaning on events. Despite her resolution to keep the reality of her lonely and impoverished life out of her correspondence with her son, "it all went into the letter" (221). As the grandfather talks of former days and their living in a place healthy to raise children, "perhaps speaking of a quarter fading like the edge of a watercolor into gray apartment blocks," he becomes frightened and confused trying to remember details of the day of the accident and whether he uttered "my mother" or "my children" as the carnage surrounded him (222-3). The emigre's mother incorporates this disorientation into her script, reminding us of her own transposing of generations. Into the "rainstorm" of this letter something new enters: "Her letter had veered off and resembled her thoughts at night." The

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muted tones of her Gerbeaud's existence and the funereal tones of her tenants' existence are replaced by the garish tones of surrealistic dreams induced by a drug she has been taking for insomnia: "During the sleep she was allowed exact and colored dreams in which she was a young girl again and men long dead came to visit. They sat amiably discussing their deaths" (223).54 Having confronted the coloration of her past life through the imaginative collapsing of time and of the realm of the living and the dead - a twilight world in which are embedded lived memories of loss, suffering, grief, love, courage, survival - she now confronts the truth of her present life. "His mother" comes to recognize her tenuous kinship with "a camouflaged stranger" she no longer knows, whose life she can never understand: "He was between the dead and the living" (223). Accurately placing him in this twilight world of memories and the dreams they induce, she now responds honestly to his demands to fill in his memories of Budapest with details that his memory has eradicated. She talks of the landmarks of the Old City as they exist now as she writes. When she drifts back to describe her circle at Gerbeaud's, her clear-sightedness sharpens the picture into a poignant one of honest loss that undercuts any cynicism or sentimentality: "I hope that I am not in your dreams, she said, because dreams are populated by the silent and the dead, and I still speak, I am alive. I wear a hat with a brim and soft gray gloves ... Will you still know me? I was your mother" (224). His mother comes of age as she asserts her existence to this son, himself now a victim of a displacement as acutely captured as hers, despite his unseen presence in this story. Has he, as she, found substitutes for that "quality" once deemed so important (213)? Has he inherited the "paradoxical combination of fatalism and activism" that gives her the strength to endure with such grace and dignity? Snapshots that might reveal, although insinuated, remain unseen. For Barbara, of "The Remission" (13 Aug. 1979), "in the new southern light everything looked to her brilliant and moist, like color straight from a paintbox."55 Set on the Ligurian coast during Mussolini's rise to power, "The Four Seasons" (16 June 1975) is one of three stories in From the Fifteenth District (with "The Moslem Wife" and "The Remission") that make use of the radiant colours of southern landscapes to blend the private and public dimensions of the characters' lives. As the title suggests, the story's time-frame is chronologically linear: "The Four Seasons" traces the changes in the lives of the Unwin family and their English, American, and Italian neighbours in 1939-40 as Britain and then Italy enter into war. Diverging from this chronology only in the final section, the story suggests the

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past that has fed into these four seasons, the future that will spin out, and the "measure" of each season itself, its substance and weight and density. The story follows the Unwins' twelve-year-old servant, Carmela, the story's focus and increasingly its point of view, from the time she leaves her home just after Easter to work for the Unwins, charged with cooking, cleaning, and minding their twin daughters, until she is forced to return home when the Unwins leave the country for their homeland, England, a year later. The five sections track the chronology from spring through to spring as Carmela learns to survive in this English colony: "Her real life was beginning now, and she never doubted its meaning. Among the powerful and the strange she would be mute and watchful. She would swim like a little fish, and learn to breathe under water."56 Carmela brings with her from her home in the hills the native knowledge (endorsed by scripture) that "Every flower has its season" (5) and "Every creature has its moment" (13). Carmela's education is an initiation - a discernment of the colour and shape, lines and movement, of each season in cyclical nature - required to survive the contingencies exacted by the fading world of the English expatriate colony seeking warm climate and cheap domestic labour, by the fascistic sentiments upheld by many members of this colony, and by the harbingers of the pending war. Against the static closure of the English colony and the relentless movement towards war during these turbulent times - suggested by mechanical linearity, spectral shapes, and monochromatic tones - is set the fluid play of iridescent colour and light, signifying the joie de vivre and will to live that give even the weakest and most vulnerable the strength to survive exploitation, betrayal, and injustice. The story's opening description of the school that Carmela attended for six years, details of which are now lodged in her memory, is paradigmatic of the way in which the story will use allegorical suggestiveness to embrace past and future to "measure" the essence of the present moment. The school, the detached ironic narrator tells us, "was founded by Dr Barnes, a foreigner who had no better use for his money ... A sepia picture of the founder reading a book hung near a likeness of Mussolini. The two frames were identical, which showed the importance of Dr Barnes - at least in Castel Vittorio. Over their heads the King rode horseback, wearing all his medals. To one side, somewhat adrift on the same wall, was the Sacred Heart." By so carefully detailing the positions of these pictures to suggest their intended importance to their beholders (the children of the school), the narrator "composes" the hierarchy and shifting influence of state, church, and foreign intervention. When Carmela leaves

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her hill village to live on the coast, all is sifted and levelled in her memory as "she forgot all the history and geography she'd learned, but she remembered the men in their brown frames, and Jesus with His heart on fire" (3). For Carmela the frame of reference is gone, but the images remain; political turbulence as yet lies outside her perception and concern. The members of the English colony have not Carmela's youth and innocence to excuse their disregard of the signs of pending war. Most, in fact, misread these signs as changes to their advantage and thus are content with things as they are. In August, for example, the Unwins leave Carmela in charge of the twins in an apartment in the hills away from the unhealthy summer climate of the coast because the twins have rickets (and, secondarily, Carmela is the size of a nine-year-old). Mrs Unwin, espousing "faith in the Movement" and in the goodwill between British and Italians, leaves instructions with Carmela to teach the children the English alphabet, including the W "somewhere near the end" (14). Because Carmela is uncertain where to place the W, she teaches the twins Italian songs instead (17). What Carmela does in all innocence, the English colony does in selfimposed blindness. Earlier in this section, the near-sighted but genuinely well-intentioned Mr Unwin misreads the situation between Carmela and a boy who has come to the kitchen door, a beggar, Carmela claims, rather than admitting he is her young brother who has run away from the stonemason to whom he has been apprenticed. Mr Unwin takes the opportunity to lecture the young Italians on the benefits of "modern Italy," where no one needs beg unless idle parents send their children to do so: "The child remained silent, and soon Mr Unwin found himself holding a hand he did not know what to do with. He read its lines, caked with dirt and marked clearly in an M-shape of blackness" (10). The inversion of M is clearly W, but the near-sighted Mr Unwin ignores the warning. Other espousals of support for Mussolini's regime are given a more sinister context. In the first section Mrs Unwin sings the dictator's praises as she stabs white roses, peace offerings from the Marchesa next door, "onto something cruel and spiked" (6). When war breaks out in the autumn, Miss Barnes (heir to Dr Barnes) warns the new clergyman not to meddle with the church clock that has always run slow and not to "become involved with anything. We are a flock in need of a shepherd; nothing more" (21). And even after the Jewish deportations begin in the winter - "Sometimes little groups of foreign-born Jews were rounded up and sent across to France, where the French sent them back again, like the Marchesa's shuttlecocks" - the English expatriates continue to express disbelief that

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Mussolini knows what is transpiring. Moreover, while "proud that this had not taken place in their country - at least not since the Middle Ages/' they have reservations about "all these good people" finding asylum in "their country/' England (26-7). Only at the end of section 4 does the action lurch forward and pull the blinders off those remnants of the English colony who have so far turned a blind eye to the steady march towards war. Late in May, Mrs Unwin, engaged in a lawsuit against her neighbour, the American Marchesa who has long ago fled to safer political shores, wins her case to have the branches removed from the poisonous datura overhanging the Unwins' garden. The local man sent to do the job will not be deterred: not content just to lop off the offensive branches, he prepares to fell the whole tree. The games of blind-man's buff and shuttlecock have been warm-ups for the real match. Now "a warship sent playful searchlights over the hills and the town"; "the shore was lit as if with strings of yellow lanterns," and "a convoy of army lorries moved like crabs on the floor of the sea" (28). Despite the static closure of the life depicted, events have been developing that now propel the action forward. With one exception, any movement or allusion to movement has been of return or shuttle in a confined space. Everything resembles the description of the Unwins' position in the English colony, trapped between two strata of society: between "two layers of English, like sea shelves ... the Unwins floated, bumping against the one or the other as social currents flung them upward or let them sink" (18). The one exception is Carmela's sea dream, which intuits the changing political climate but forecasts her adapting, just as she has to the seasonal changes. When Carmela moves to the Unwins' in the spring, she is made anxious by the ghost of Mrs Unwin's relative who has died in the room in which Carmela is now put and by a dream in which "she heard great waves knock against the foundations of the town. She dreamed of being engulfed, of seeking refuge on rooftops. Within the dream her death seemed inevitable" (8). By June "Carmela's phantoms were stilled. The softness of that June lulled them," and "the sea was a silken cushion. White sails floated - feathers" (9). Later, in July, the heat of summer and oppressive housework replace these dreams, the daily realities themselves seeming "like a long dream" (12). In August the dream returns on her first night in the holiday apartment, but awaking, she witnesses "a white ladder of slatted light that she took to be the light of morning" filtering through the closed shutters and, then, in the world beyond the shutters, "a track of moon over the village as on the sea, and one pale street lamp, and a cat curled up on the road." The ordinariness of these details

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supplant the dream: "She had the true feeling that she was in a real place. She did not dream the sea dream again" (15). This feeling initiates a day of happiness for Carmela, marked by the unprecedented event of the Unwins greeting Carmela "as if she were one of their own ... Oh, such happiness! Never before, never again ... In the late afternoon a mist came down so thick and low that Carmela, who had never seen anything like it before, thought it must be the smoke of trees on fire" (15). The sea dream recedes as the war it has forecast comes closer to being a reality. Carmela has a similar vertiginous sensation - this of "rocking shadows" - as that experienced in her sea dream when Douglas, Mrs Unwin's son from a previous marriage, pays Carmela unwanted and disturbing attention. He is, to her, "as mysterious as his mother had once seemed" (16), and the disturbing inexplicability bears resemblance to the dream of aggression. In September, at the beginning of section 3, Carmela, returning to the Unwins' home by the sea, "slipped back to a life she was sure of," and the only image that the sea throws up is of hers and the children's "six feet underwater like sea creatures," just as for the English colony "war was somewhere, but not in Italy," and things "much more important than a war" (17) were occurring. Throughout the autumn, Carmela with her tears of homesickness is simply part of the pattern in the Unwins' carpet (22-3), but winter finds her "trembl[ing] with cold and with fear. She was afraid of the war and of the ghost of the uncle, which, encouraged by early darkness, could be seen in the garden again ... She looked at a faraway sea, lighted by a sun twice as far off as it had ever been before" (24). Carmela's sea dream and images of the sea give density to the linear movement of this story and plait the three main strands of the story - the political world, Carmela's initiation, and the changing seasons - into a variegated braid. Nevertheless, the variegations themselves are most important for illuminating and colouring the development towards that final moment when Carmela's memory of the detained and exiled Dr Chaffee has, as Woodcock writes, "tragic intimations she appears to sense."57 The "method and content" of all the stories in From the Fifteen District, including "The Four Seasons," Woodcock observes, reveal that the relationship of past and present through memory is "as much spatial as chronological" and that Gallant's "imagination ... rejects the beginnings and ends that are necessities in linear fiction ... we are made aware of the past that has brought us to this particular eddy in time, and we even have an inkling of how the future might flow on out of the eddy."58 Section 3 opens with this pertinent description, partially quoted in the previous paragraph: "In September she slipped back to a life she was sure

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of. She had taken its color. The sea was greener than anything except Mrs Unwin's emerald, bluer than her sapphire, more transparent than blue, white, transparent glass. Wading with a twin at each hand, she saw their six feet underwater like sea creatures. The sun became as white as a stone; something stung in its heat, like fine, hard, invisible rain. War was somewhere, but not in Italy" (17). "She had taken its color": Carmela has not, chameleon-like, assumed its colour but rather sensed and adapted to its contingencies, an experience in vision rather than an exercise in calculation. The blues and greens of the sea, felt, experienced, lived, contrast with other colour combinations in "The Four Seasons" that are ugly or sinister. As would be expected, the Unwins are generally associated with an arid whiteness or, in the case of Mrs Unwin, who suffers "fierce headaches caused by pollen, sunshine, and strong perfumes," with that darkness she seeks as escape. They live "on top of a bald hill" and eke out a living from the black and white print of their small press and mimeograph machine (4). More unusual are the ways in which black and brown are added to or put in combination with "color straight from a paintbox." Ominous coloration is introduced into the holiday idyll of section 2: "The sky held one small creamy cloud. At eye level were lacy grasses and, behind them, blueblack mountains." Again, hovering in the background is the threat of war, but as Carmela is uncertain where to place the W in the English alphabet, so these "blue-black mountains" are outside her ken (17). In October, after war has begun but before winter has arrived, Mrs Unwin has "invented a rule" that the twins must bathe in the "brown seaweed-laden waves breaking far inshore" until the fifteenth of the month, and Carmela feels "pity for their blue, chattering lips" as they suffer this "torment" on the "windy and alien" beach (22). The brown seaweed and damage inflicted by the elements are reminiscent of Douglas's prospective fiancee, Miss Hermione, with her "reddish sunburn": "She unpacked a flimsy embroidery pattern and a large canvas and began stabbing at it with a flat needle ... Carmela did not care for the colors, which were dark greens and browns" (16). Slightly later, early in the autumn, when Miss Barnes and her "bolshie" friend Miss Lewis ("bolshie" only in the context of the fascistic attitudes prevalent in Italy and the English colony) honour Mrs Unwin with a visit, Miss Lewis disapproves of Mrs Unwin's high-handed treatment of Carmela. The excitement of the visit has brought "a mottled brick-and-white" (18) colour to her face, which now darkens and blends into a uniform flush: "Mrs Unwin's face, no longer mottled, had gone the solid shade the English call Egyptian

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red. Carmela saw the room through Mrs Unwin's eyes: it seemed to move and crawl, with its copper bowl [holding dahlias from the Marchesa] ... and stained wallpaper [wine-red with 'peony-shaped stains of paler dampmold']. All these dead things seemed to be on the move, because of the way Miss Lewis had spoken to Mrs Unwin" (19, 7). This intimate gathering is interrupted by the arrival of Horace Dunn, the new clergyman, "a young man with a complexion as changeable as Mrs Unwin's" (19). The young man, unlike Carmela, fails to catch the drift of the conversation of these self-satisfied people and naively proposes changes. Then Miss Barnes finally whips his blindfold off with her advice about non-intervention, advice with which Mrs Unwin, "white-and-brick-mottled,"59 concurs (21). These ugly and sinister images have in common a darkening or sullying, through the addition of browns or blacks, of the original pure colours "straight from a paintbox." A rainbow of pristine colours offsets these dull or dark tones. There is "the pale-blue awning of a cafe so splendid that Carmela felt bound to look the other way. She caught, like her flash of the sea ... colored ices in silver dishes" (4). In the final section, she eats her way into heaven (34) when Mr Unwin and Horace Dunn treat her before bidding farewell: "When an ice was brought and set before her she was afraid to eat it. First, it was too beautiful - pistachio, vanilla, tangerine, three colors in a long-stemmed silver dish that sat in turn upon a lace napkin and a glass plate" (31). These colourful scoops of ice cream so daintily presented are the intimations of heaven in the black and white landscape of police interrogations and war. Although her work for the Unwins has been arduous, and she will suffer a crooked spine from carrying the heavy, lazy twins, she has found joy in such small delights as brushing their "yellow hair" (7), a luxury she has not been afforded with her own young brother, whose "blond hair was dark with sweat and dirt." As Carmela settles into her new home with the Unwins and the phantom is stilled and the sea dream ebbs for the season, as spring blends into summer, her mornings are "tender - first pink, then pearl, then blue" (9). The unpretentious apartment in the hills - half of a house "painted a soft brown ... [with] red curtains on brass rings" (13) - underscores the simple joys of unadorned nature and contrasts with the coastal "walled villas, and a clinic with a windbreak of cypress trees and ochre walls and black licorice balconies" (4). Most importantly, there are the "white, green, lavish, sweet-smelling" plants in the Marchesa's garden, where, Mrs Unwin jeeringly insinuates, the Marchesa has time "to stroll out in pink chiffon" (6). Not long after Christmas, in the dark of winter, after the Marchesa and many others in the expatriate community have fled,

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frightened by the threat of war, her garden is at its peak, blooming "in waves of narcissi, anemones, irises, daffodils; then came the great white daisies and the mimosa; and then all the geraniums that had not been uprooted with the rosebushes flowered at once - white, salmon-pink, scarlet, peppermint-striped. The tide of color continued to run as long as the rains lasted. After that the flowers died off and the garden became a desert." Alongside this deluge of colour, Mrs Unwin "blossomed like the next-door garden," but her blossoming is of a poor quality and short-lived, as is indicated by the pareddown syntax contrasting with the earlier rush and flow describing the garden's flowers: "The climate was right for her just now: no pollen. Darkness. Not too much sun. Long cold evenings" (25). The most telling colours in this story are reserved for mementoes and memories. When Carmela leaves the service of the Unwins with wages in arrears, she does not consider taking any of the valuable jewels - "a sapphire set in diamonds and a loose emerald" - that the ostensibly poor Mrs Unwin has displayed to her the previous spring in a dubious gesture of openness and trust (7). Oversight and fear, rather than loyalty and scruples, cause Carmela to leave the jewels behind (30). Strangely, Carmela's keepsakes, like the sepia portrait of Dr Barnes, unattractive embroidery colours chosen by Miss Hermione, repellent brick flush of Mrs Unwin, and ochre walls of the shore buildings, have the brown tones of age and aging: the amber bottle Dr Chaffee gives her containing iron pills "remained among her belongings for many years, and had the rank of a personal possession" (12), and a green hair-ribbon Miss Hermione left behind she also keeps for years (17). Another of her "keepsakes" is the memory of Horace Dunn's smile when she stares at him as he questions the priorities of his predecessor, Edward Stonehouse: "The smile fixed his face in her memory for all time. It was not to her an attractive face - it was too fair-skinned for a man's; it had color that came and ebbed too easily" (21). Dunn's colouring has been said to be as changeable as Mrs Unwin's, but it is never referred to as "brick," and his smile is unlike her "death grin," her "twitchy grimace," produced "with her upper lip drawn back" (18-19). Dunn's smile is not of that "quality" observed by Linnet Muir in "With a Capital T," whereby "some smiles are instruments of repression."60 Mrs Unwin's smile is of this sort, but Dunn's smile, marking a certain understanding with Carmela, comes immediately after his blindfold has been removed and he realizes these people are not playing a game but are serious about their fixedness in their past. Ultimately, it is not the dull grey browns of Reverend Dunn but the mellow warm tones - albeit sombrely tinged - of Dr Chaffee that

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appeal to this young girl, Carmela.61 In the final section she is, with the reader and Reverend Dunn, privy to Mr Unwin's story of his wife's mental instability, which has made his life a living hell and which provides an explanation for her sending venomous letters condemning Dunn to the officials. Eating her ice cream with this unwanted explanation going on in the background, Carmela looks around her and sees things she saw a year ago, but now with greater understanding and less fear (31-3). Today Carmela, her tears forgotten, arrives at her heaven enjoying her dish of multicoloured ices. She will make her way home, even though Mr Unwin leaves her at a bus stop where she will need to wait until late afternoon for a bus that does not go as far as Castel Vittorio. Instead, she turns her back on the coast and walks inland: "Within half an hour she was in a different landscape - isolated, lonely, and densely green." Just as she has forgotten the villages she passed a year ago but remembered other things further back more significant to her, the selective forgetting and levelling memory are already at work: "She did not want to lose the taste of the ices, but all she had kept was the look of them - the pink-orange, the pale green, the white with flecks of vanilla, like pepper ... She remembered the two men and their strange conversation; they were already the far past. A closer memory was the schoolhouse, and Dr Barnes and Mussolini and the King in wooden frames. Mr Unwin weeping at sunrise had never been vivid. He faded first." The more recent images of Mr Unwin and Reverend Dunn are then "lost behind Dr Chaffee in his dark suit stumbling up the hill. He lifted his hand. What she retained, for the present, was one smile, one gesture, one man's calm blessing" (34-5). Carmela herself has been, throughout, clad in "half mourning" grey skirt, black cardigan - for her conscripted father, presumed dead somewhere in Africa across the unfathomable sea (5, 6, 8). Now as she mourns the loss of the family who have exploited her - Mrs Unwin and the children about to embark for England on a coalboat (30) - Dr Chaffee with his "strange dark clothes" (11) lodges in the foreground of her memory, displacing at least for the moment the more brightly hued memories. Carmela's experience has initiated her into adulthood by providing her not only with the tools for survival but also with a memory to deflect her from the opportunism that others exhibit. Carmela, in the "roundabout way" to which Reverend Dunn refers (33), has discovered the "marvel" that exists in human potential rather than, as Mrs Unwin claims in her usual clipped fashion, the prevalence of disappointed expectations: "No escape from it - marriage, childbirth, patriotism, the dark. The same circle baptism, confirmation, prayers for the dead. Or else, silence" (14).

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Carmela has learned to take her "good view[s]" where she can find them. In this life, one does not always have a loaf of French bread whose second end can be broken off to make it symmetrical (8). The wine may be nothing more than "a sediment of red wine, like red dust," that Horace Dunn finds in the bottom of the green bottles left by his predecessor (19). Have the sacraments and their potential for forgiveness, redemption, and community been found "in a roundabout way" (33)? Carmela reaches out and clings to the memory of her last glimpse of Dr Chaffee among "a straggling cluster of refugees" awaiting expulsion from France back to Italy in the game of shuttlecock that no longer has any rules or winners, just losers. She looks at him "with shame and apology" for not having taken the pills he had given her, and he mistakes the look "on her face [as] an expression he wanted ... He was saying 'No' to something. Terrified, she peeped again, and this time he lifted his hand, palm outward, in a curious greeting that was not a salute. He was pushed on. She never saw him again" (26). Dr Chaffee's unsolicited smile, gesture, and blessing remain with a context, as mistaken as it may be, but no logical explanation, simply a memory to cherish and sustain. For Carmela, as for other characters in Gallant's fiction published between 1968 and 1978, memory - shadowy, monochromatic, or palely hued - transports the past, coloured by the imagination, into the present. All the stories of this decade, then, are "a kind of reality necessarily transformed," and colour is the main catalyst. What is it about colour that can "transform" reality into art? In Gallant's fiction of this decade "the reconstruction"62 seems more a shifting or mutation rather than a radical "transformation," a matter of degree rather than kind. Rudolf Arnheim postulates that "shape lets us distinguish an almost infinite number of different individual objects ... We are quite sensitive in distinguishing subtly different shades from one another, but when it comes to identifying a particular color by memory or at some spatial distance from another, our power of discrimination is severely limited."63 Furthermore, although the hue and brightness of colour can be measured "physically by wavelength and luminance," as Arnheim describes in his essay "The Rationalization of Colour," "there is no such objective constancy to the perceptual experience ... Depending on what local association one is looking at, one sees a different color": thus, "color is the most capricious dimension of visual imagery."64 While asserting that "the pulls and pushes regulating color relations occur within the viewer himself," Arnheim concludes: "The dynamic interplay of perceptual forces is not just

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subjectively imposed by the observer upon the patterns he sees, nor does he simply take notice of it intellectually ... those concerted tensions must actually reverberate in the visual experience if the symbolic messages of colors and shapes are to come alive."65 Elsewhere, Arnheim applies his theories on the psychology of art to maps. Because "every visual image worthy of existing is an interpretation of its subject, not a mechanical copy," "what meets the eyes first and foremost when one looks at a visual object, such as a map, are not the measurable phenomena corresponding to wavelengths, dimensions, distances, and the geometry of shapes, but the expressive qualities borne by the stimulus data."66 With her palette carrying a full range of pigments and her sense of perspective, proportion, shape, and framing well honed, Gallant now selects to map her increasingly parodic vision of a panoramic, multihued world on spacious canvases.

6 Mapping Panoramic Landscapes: Idyll, Farce, Parody

Reading a Gallant story of the mid- and late 19705 is like the dawning of one of those days during "the periods of inexplicable grace" that Linnet Muir compares to unwrapping new parcels, "layer on layer of tissue paper covering bits of crystal, scraps of words in a foreign language, pure white stones."1 Stories such as "The Moslem Wife" (23 Aug. 1976) and "Baum, Gabriel, 1935~()" (12 Feb. 1979) are large canvases shot through with the colour and light that Gallant's idyllic, humorous, and intermittently parodic treatment brings to them. To Michel Fabre in 1988 Gallant acknowledged that she "findfs] it hard to read anything where there is no humour" and suggested that the short satirical and parodic pieces about French culture and politics that she published in the New Yorker in the early 19805 laid the groundwork for writing "stories about Paris - real stories, not satirical pieces. Perhaps one form led to another."2 In Overhead in a Balloon, while idyllic passages still occasionally colour the canvas, Gallant's skilful wordplay complements her inclination to see in "every situation ... an element of farce"; nevertheless, her emphatic "Exactly!" in response to Barbara Gabriel's observation that her "cartoon imagination [has been] at work" requires qualification.3 The cartoon form dictates that the essence of character and situation be reduced to a few strokes and word balloons or captions. Master cartoonists suggest as much by that unsaid and unseen as by that said and seen. In this sense, then, Gallant is a master of her art, and her concise style is most appropriate for her "cartoon imagination." But the principle that human nature and experience be crystallized by a few deft lines and

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characteristic verbal tags is inimical to Gallant's belief or practice. From imagination to creation is a process of transforming stick figures and shapes into portraits whereby lines, shapes, and colours achieve the compositional effects of perspective, proportion, and light to break the restrictive frames and balloons of cartoons. Gallant undertook her first sustained treatment of contemporary Paris, where she had lived for almost thirty years, in the stories of the late 19705 and early 19805 published in Overhead in a Balloon. In this anthology her rendering of Paris society and culture is closer to the art of the cartographer than that of the cartoonist. Like a cartographer, Gallant confronts what Rudolf Arnheim refers to as "the problem of generalization ... an image of reduced size is not obtained simply by leaving out details. Artists as well as cartographers realize that they face the more positive task of creating a new pattern, which serves as an equivalent rather than a mere impoverishment of the natural shape to be represented ... The reduction in size provides the mapmaker with a degree of freedom, which he can use to make his visual images more readable by simplifying them."4 Because Gallant's gaze in these later stories is direct, not filtered through layers of memory as are many of her stories featuring locales other than Paris (primarily Montreal and the Mediterranean), her humour tends to be more acerbic and trenchant, less gentle and indulgent, than in From the fifteenth District, the Linnet Muir series of Home Truths, and some stories of her 1993 collection, Across the Bridge. The exceptions to the incisive tone of Overhead in a Balloon are the stories that form the 1983 Magdalena quartet: "A Recollection" (22 Aug.), "Rue de Lille" (19 Sept.), "The Colonel's Child" (10 Oct.), and "Lena" (31 Oct.). Unlike Edouard of this 1983 quartet, Sandor Speck and Walter Obermauer, from the paired stories "Speck's Idea" (19 Nov. 1979) and "Overhead in a Balloon" (2 July 1984), live very much in and for the present moment, concerned only with how it will affect future prospects, unconcerned with the past, either their own individual memories or the collective memories that constitute history. They ignore institutions - legal, political, religious, cultural - that are reminders that the present has ties to the past and that these institutions once served a purpose greater than expropriation for personal material gain or social-climbing. Yet tied inextricably to society's institutions, all are like the civil servant of "Grippes and Poche": "In the language of his generation, Poche was a fully structured individual."5 Characters live reduced and structured lives in a reduced and structured world that Gallant parodies throughout Overhead in a Balloon. Very much a product of the late 19705 and the 19805, these

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stories parody a world whose structure is achieved through a levelling of differences to compel individuals to fly in one line, formation, and direction and in balloons of the same pale colour.

CONVERGENCE OF IDYLL AND FARCE: "THE M O S L E M W I F E " AND " B A U M , G A B R I E L , i935-( )" "The Moslem Wife" is the most panoramic of all Gallant's stories in both time and space, despite a fixed focus on Netta Asher and on the property owned by her family for generations, the Hotel Prince Albert and Albion, situated on the French stretch of the Ligurian coast. The nine sections highlight a number of significant "moments" that provide a "measure" of the life6 of Netta, her family's hotel, and the fading imperial order that the hotel represents. Chiefly concerned with the vicissitudes of public and private life over a thirteen-year period, beginning with Netta's marriage to her first cousin, Jack Ross, in 1932, until late in 1945, when Jack returns from America, where he been living for five years, the story provides further glimpses into the past and future and into cultures that brush the lives of those, such as Netta, who rarely leave home. Again, as in "The Four Seasons," the chronology is carefully established, but, as Besner writes in The Light of Imagination (this title is drawn from the end of "The Moslem Wife"), "in place of a conventional plot, Gallant stretches a fabric of recurring detail over the framework of [Jack and Netta's] relationship, knitting up these details in a pattern of opposed images of light and darkness, sunlight and shadow."7 Because the canvas of "The Moslem Wife" is so expansive, taking the "measure" of the lives is all the more challenging. The gauntlet is thrown down in the opening paragraphs by Netta's father. The year is 1920; the place is the business room of the family hotel. Here we witness, with eleven-year-old Netta, the renewal of the hotel's lease: "One hundred years should at least see her through the prime of life, said Mr Asher, only half jokingly, for of course he thought his seed was immortal." We have already had a gloss of what Mr Asher, with his typical assuredness, means by life: "The dead of that recent war, the doomed nonsense of the Russian Bolsheviks had finally knocked sense into European heads. What people wanted now was to get on with life ... its commercial business." As certain as Mr Asher is about the gauge for measuring life - numbers, columns, bottom lines, profits and losses - the text suggests alternative standards and criteria. Toasting the signing of the lease, the French lawyer, Mr Asher, and Netta understand that the papers "concerned her for life," yet

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that "life" might not be what Mr Asher calculates: "The date on the bottle was 1909, for the year of her birth. Netta bravely pronounced the wine delicious, but her father said she would know much better vintages before she was through."8 "The Moslem Wife" begins with Mr Asher's announcement "that there would never be a man-made catastrophe in Europe again" (36), but by the end of the story, late in 1945, his assertion has been proved false, as has his confidence in a commercial life tied to a white elephant, the Hotel Prince Albert and Albion. Mr Asher and his daughter dismiss any cultural life as outside their domain (40, 45); ironically, this outmoded imperial commercialism provides a foundation for the dilettante life of many members of the English colony, including Jack, who "had studied music once, and still thought that an important life, a musical life, was there in the middle distance. One summer, just to see if he could, he translated pages of St John Perse, which were as blank as the garage wall to Netta, in any tongue" (38). Both these forms of life, commercial and artistic, relics in 1920, will be defunct by 1945. What, then, will the present and future hold? What, if not commercial success or cultured sensibility, will provide a gauge for measuring life? Although "The Moslem Wife" moves chronologically, the forward line is punctuated and expanded by idyll, inversion, parody, epistle, repetition, and reflexiveness that make the metre-stick an unreliable gauge. The motivation for Netta's final decision to accept Jack back into her life after his five-year absence derives from an accumulation of all she has seen and felt in her life, not in a numerical sense, not the outcome of tallying figures and weighing profit against loss. Netta, until her isolation during the war, has been prone to classification and labelling, an heir to Gallant's characters of the late 19505 and early 19605, and has lived very much in a black and white world where numbers can be kept in straight columns and used to tabulate an exact and incontrovertible solution. At the story's end, polychromatic images are superimposed in, not just on, the mirror. As in "The Four Seasons," black and white and brown images are played off against pure and vivid hues, darkness against light, but two related aspects differentiate these two stories and indicate the greater complexity and subtlety of "The Moslem Wife": the use of mirrors in various settings and contexts, and the association of brown with a parody of the idyllic world in which Netta thinks private and public, inside and outside, can be kept distinct and separate. The Hotel Prince Albert and Albion, named for Queen Victoria's consort (a parallel to Jack's position to Netta in the hotel ownership), with its white trim and white awnings, might suggest an absence of

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colour and the spectral presence of the past. The summer flowers, the green shutters, "the blue cardroom, and red-walled bar" bestow splashes of colour on the canvas, but the dominant effect of this "deep ochre" establishment is of an old photograph turning yellow and brown with age. The belles-de-nuit, which "glowed pink, lemon, white," are at their prime during summer nights when few witness their radiance. The green shutters, white awnings, and "black iron balconies as lacquered and shiny as Chinese boxes" close out the light and heat of day. The shutters need regular refurbishment; they are "taken off their hinges and scraped and made spruce green again for next year's sun to fade." Guests congregate for meals in "the white dining room, where Victorian mirrors gave back glossy walls and blown curtains and nineteenth-century views of the Ligurian coast, the work of an Asher great-uncle." These paintings, reflections of the hotel's environs, need to be "relentlessly washed," and "the looking glasses resilvered," to preserve this fading world (37-8). Because the Ashers and Rosses "had been innkeepers along this coast for a century" (39), the hotel is "a natural life" (37) for Netta. As the name "Asher" suggests, where once there was life, now there is burnt-out residue. When she marries, only her eyes reveal a spark of life, a pilot-light that perhaps Jack can ignite: "She did have the dry, burned-out look of someone turned inward. Her dark eyes glowed out of a thin face. She had the shape of a girl of fourteen" (41). The blue gaze and seeming bellicosity of the child Jack, so unlike anything in her own life, first attract Netta when she is about four, he about two. At their meeting Netta is attired by a "perfect" mother in "boots, stockings, a longsleeved frock, and a white sun hat"; Jack is in a state of "undress" with drooping shorts "like a prizefighter." Netta, standing with "her hands behind her back," in a pose reminiscent of those women trained into such positions to which "His Mother" alludes, examines this new creature and tries to read what she sees: "Her eyes were on Jack. She could not read yet, though she could sift and classify attitudes ... For the first time she was conscious of the beauty of another child. He was ... imprisoned in a portable-fence arrangement in which he moved tirelessly, crabwise, hanging on a barrier he could easily have climbed. He was as fair as his Irish mother and sunburned a deep brown. His blue gaze was not a baby's - it was too challenging ... She walked around his prison, staring, and the blue-eyed fighter stared back" (40). Twenty years later Netta draws Jack into her life rather than being drawn into his. Netta, an indifferent reader (of books and of character), takes for granted that Jack "felt as she did about light, dark, death, and love" (39). Business and pleasure are reserved for discrete

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seasons (38), as is "her exploration of feeling ... part of an unlimited capacity she seemed to have for passionate behavior, so at odds with her appearance, which had been dry and sardonic even in childhood" (42). This "exploration of feeling" is the black that complements the white of Netta's commercial world: "Outside their fenced area of private jokes and private love was a landscape too open, too light-drenched, for serious talk" (44). Separating public from private, head from heart, outside from inside, Netta, through marriage to Jack, has simply put into a holding pattern the monochromatic world of the outmoded Hotel Prince Albert and Albion. Her father has been right about the consequences of a marriage to a first cousin - "a parched arrangement, intolerable without a flow of golden guineas and fresh blood" (41) - although for the wrong reasons. Through marriage Netta becomes only marginally more outwardlooking, in that her perspective embraces Jack, not simply herself. The multiple mirrors in their bedroom may create the effect of a wider vista and deeper penetration into life, but these are as much an illusion as Netta's perception of Jack as a twin (39): "The room was deeply mirrored; when the shutters were closed on hot afternoons a play of light became as green as a forest on the walls, and as blue as seawater in the glass. A quality of suspension, of disbelief in gravity, now belonged to Netta. She became tidy, silent, less introspective, as watchful and as reflective as her bedroom mirrors ... She was intensely, almost unnaturally happy" (43). At this point the aptly named Dr Blackley refers to Netta as "the little Moslem wife": "possibly it was plain to anyone with eyes that Jack, without meaning a bit of harm by it, had a way with women. Those he attracted were a puzzling lot, to Netta. She had already catalogued them," one group being "tough, sunburned, clad in dark colors - who made Netta think in the vocabulary of horoscopes ... Her color - black" (43-4). The bright white awnings, like Netta's ashen white complexion, shroud a dark inner world of passion - and ultimately they also harbour and nurture racism, betrayal, and death. The black-and-white imagery is given another dimension when, in the second section (47-53), the five-year idyll ends and black and white are inverted as the outside world encroaches on life at the Hotel Prince Albert and Albion. This section opens with mention of three new arrivals to the hotel, "some maharaja trade - three little sisters with ebony curls," who are "to learn French, tennis, and swimming" but will also receive a lesson in prejudice. They come "smiling down the marble staircase, carrying new tennis racquets, wearing blue linen skirts and navy blazers," but their conservative Western attire - as "angelic in blue" as some may see them - cannot

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disguise what Mrs Blackley deems to be their unsuitability to have lessons at the English Lawn Tennis Club: "They can't go on the courts except in white. It is a private club. Entirely white" (47-8). Five years into their marriage and Jack's blue eyes, while attracting other women, have not brought Netta out from behind the fence; she is "still burned-out, still ardent, in a manner of speaking still fourteen" (48). The arrival of Jack's mother provides Netta with the excuse to let Jack fill his life with social engagements while she fills hers with numbers and accounts. One evening Netta leaves her business room to join Jack in a visit to neighbouring Roquebrune, the only action in the first eight sections of the story that is set outside the hotel grounds. Both surname and Christian name of their host at Roquebrune, Iris Cordier, are deceptive: cordier is French for "ropemaker," but as Netta has been unable to "net" Jack, Iris will be unable to "rope" him in. Iris, again from the French, is not only the flower but also "rainbow," iriser meaning "to make iridescent." Iris is not French, despite her pretensions to be a devoted French daughter to parents who for years have "haunted the Riviera." The iridescence her name denotes is as deceptive as her pretensions to loyalty and Frenchness. In fact "she reminded Netta of a blond penguin" with her "dully pale" complexion (49-50). Jack, unaware of the absurdity of the Roquebrune group, "looked on, blue-eyed, interested, smiling at everything new" (51). The Roquebrune group, whose dominant colour is brown, is to the Hotel Prince Albert and Albion what Eric Wilkinson is to Alec Webb in "The Remission," a parody of a way of life taking its final gasps of air.9 Both stories thus provide a stylistic link with the parodies interwoven in "The Pegnitz Junction" (1973) and those that will dominate Gallant's next group of stories, anthologized in Overhead in a Balloon. The brown tones of Mrs Unwin's brick complexion and Miss Hermione's embroidery silks in "The Four Seasons," which connote a sullying of pure colours and which are linked with sepia portraits and wilting and dried flowers, in "The Moslem Wife" take on a parodic function that undercuts the idyll of the first section and furthers the inversion at the beginning of the second. Attention is first drawn to the brown tones when "Iris's amber bracelets rattled as she pushed and pulled everyone through introductions" (51), bracelets surely connected to Netta's memory of "a desperate adolescent Iris with middle-aged parents clamped like handcuffs on her life" (50). "Roque," French for castle or rook in the game of chess - here brown, rather than the usual black and white - forecasts Jack's eventual move from flirtation to infidelity in the "simultaneous chess" he enjoys playing (44).

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This is a whole new game of life for both Jack and Netta, with entirely new players: "a young American Netta had often seen in her own bar, and a couple named Sandy and Sandra Braunsweg, who turned out to be Anglo-Swiss and twins" (51). Netta proves herself to be "hopelessly un-English" in this all too English crowd and soon finds herself on the fringes as she naively disclaims any loyalty to the past or to "our mothers - the hard waves of their hair, the white lips ... those pale profiles." Meanwhile the female half of the AngloSwiss twins is telling a fascinated Jack about her English forebears and English education at Mitten Todd. She tells Jack a disjointed, elliptical story (reminiscent of the style of the Commissioner in "The Old Friends") of taking her American friend to visit her alma mater and ordering him to wear a yellow necktie for the occasion to harmonize with her yellow and grey Schiaparelli, which in turn harmonizes with the car's interior (52-3). With the arrival of Jack's hypochondriac mother, now truly ill, and, later, of Iris Cordier's invalid father as residents at the hotel, in the third (53-8) and fourth (58-9) sections, which cover the two years immediately before the outbreak of the war, reminders of the brevity and impermanence of life intrude. The hotel has accommodated the dying and witnessed their demise before, but "the dead had never been allowed to corrupt the living": "Death has been swept away, discarded. When the shutters are closed on a room, it is for sleep or for love." Love has been a talisman against death for Netta, as has the commercial life against Jack's "deeply alien music" - and Netta knows "about the difference between darkness and brightness" (389) - but now, with the confusion of colours in her life, Netta is finding the compartmentalizing of love and death, business and culture, more difficult. Netta, discovering her "dotty" Aunt Vera after a faked accident, is confronted with the infirmities of old age: "In her fall she had crushed the plants, the yellow minted giroflees de Nice. Netta thought that she was now, at last, for the first time, inhaling one of the smells of death" (56). Even after Dr Blackley has exposed Vera's accident as staged, the smells linger. "Everyone was deeply changed by this incident," especially Jack, who avoids his mother's eccentricities and taunts of his failure to accomplish anything in his musical life by escaping into literature, which until now has been only a pointless diversion in his life: "Even on the sunniest of afternoons he read by the red-shaded light" (58). Jack prepares to escort Iris to England and to seek some stimulation for himself. The progressively disjointed sentence fragments, lacking subjects and main verbs, do not bode well for his invigoration or revitalization: "Netta thought he needed something: he

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seemed to be exhausted by love, friendship, by being a husband, someone's son, by trying to make a world out of reading and sense out of life. A visit to England to meet some stimulating people, said Iris. To help Iris with her tiresome father during the journey. To visit art galleries and bookshops and go to concerts. To meet people. To talk." The trip is supposed to be only for three or four weeks, but as Netta packs Jack's suitcase, "she was surprised at how neat marriage was, at how many years and feelings could be folded and put under a lid" (59). The idyll has come to an end; harsh reality outside the fence is about to invade. Jack accompanies Iris to England but ends up in the United States with Sandra Braunsweg. America fails to provide Jack with whatever it is he seeks - "He wanted to be almost anything as long as it was impossible, and then only as an act of grace" (41) - although he does bring back the observation that "they wear quite a lot of plaids and tartans" (70), perhaps an allusion to the motley assemblage of Old World customs and manners to which North Americans cling.10 Nor has Sandra, whom Netta nicknames "Chippendale," directed him on any new path other than the arid "brown way" that together her surname and Christian name denote. Iris, who informs Netta of Jack's infidelities, provides Netta with an alternative brown image: "King Charles and a spaniel. Jack wiped his feet on her" (65). Jack had at last escaped his consort role, but then Sandra found her own docile spaniel and entered a new relationship, which Iris labels "Queen Anne and Lady Mary" (71). Jack jokes with Netta about Sandra and Gerald's failure to harmonize: "Yes, well, actually Gerald is his name; he wears nothing but brown. Brown suit, brown tie, brown shoes. I said, 'He can't go to Mitten Todd. He won't match'" (72). The colours do not harmonize, and never will. The fifth section (59-61) suspends time as Netta clings to the past of both her hotel and her marriage. It is June 1939, and although everyone is leaving the south of France, Netta proceeds as usual, ordering new white awnings for the hotel (59-60). Despite her attempt to shore up life as she knows it, this section is pivotal because the end of this life is near. War breaks out; Jack is "caught" in America. Until now, any invitations Netta has received to venture beyond her role as "Moslem Wife" have been foiled by her emphatic "not a hope" (47). Her infidelity is not with Dr Blackley who has been pursuing her with professions of love, but with a young American she has met at the Cordiers. When Jack fails to return, her initial "not a hope" is transformed, "no more than affectionately," to "I'm going to show you a very pretty room" (60). There is a sense of resignation to mediocrity here with the word "pretty." Earlier, trying to measure Sandra

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Braunsweg, Netta cannot see how Jack can respond to Sandra because Netta "had never in her life thought a word like 'pretty/ People were beautiful or they were not. Her happiness had always been great enough to allow for despair" (53). Her new life, Netta thinks, will not admit the extremes of beauty and happiness, ugliness and despair. She tells Dr Blackley a few days after her infidelity with the American, "I've discovered the limit of what you can feel about people ... sex and love have nothing in common" (60). With this confession she finds that she can restrict Jack "as a memory" to familiar terrain - "the tennis courts, the cardroom, the bar" - and that "her dreams [a]re cleansed of him" (61). The war years teach Netta the flip side of beauty and happiness; they teach her about betrayal, deprivation, hunger, loneliness. In the sixth section (61-4) she tries to tell Jack in a letter the "true story" of what has passed in the five years the hotel was occupied by, first, the Italians, and then the Germans. Embedded in this story is another: Vera's making complaints to the authorities about Netta's relationship with an Italian commander billeted at the hotel. Netta discovers that this history and her own story, as recent as they are, are not what anybody wants to hear (62-4). In the letter Netta writes but never sends to Jack she also reveals that the war years have taught her that the world cannot be compartmentalized in black and white squares. She talks of photographs that people had taken of themselves when thin, "as if knowing they would use this intimidating evidence against those loved ones who had missed being starved. Guilt for life" (61). The "thin pictures" of Vera, which Netta now has on her desk while she writes, are as much a fiction as the name "Rossini" under which Vera (again an appropriately ironic name) Ross is buried because Vera, "mama" for the Italians and perhaps even informer for the Germans, was well fed and "died plump" (613). Enemies were not identified by some villainous behaviour or notable deformity. Netta writes to Jack: "I suppose that you already have the fiction of all this. The fiction must be different, oh very different, from Italians sobbing with homesickness in the night. The Germans were not real, they were specially got up for the events of the time ... Only in retreat did they develop faces and I noticed then that some were terrified and many were old." Like Jack in the redshaded light of the bar, reading to escape his mother's taunts and complaints, Netta now retreats to the cellar and reads poetry by candlelight. Only recently, she tells Jack, have "we crept out of our shelled homes, looking like cave dwellers. When you see the hotel again, it will be functioning ... I saw scorpions and heard their rustling like the rustle of death" (63). Netta, a survivor, has the spark to

198 Learning to Look defy the scorpions, to rebuild the hotel and her life, but she will not do so at the expense of memory, as do so many of the survivors in The Pegnitz Junction. The seventh (64-6) and eighth (66-8) sections grant Netta a period of adjustment to post-war life as three people from her past return, each providing her with an opportunity for alternative viewpoints to her own black and white monochromes. She must accommodate these viewpoints into her way of seeing and living and thus accept the paradoxes and inconsistencies of a polychromatic world that they afford. Iris Cordier, the first to return, brings news of Jack and his living with Sandra Braunsweg, who has been posing as "Mrs Ross": "Netta's feelings were of lightness, relief. She would not have to tell Jack about the partisans hanging by the neck in the arches of the Place Massena at Nice" (65). Nor will she need to tell him her story of the young "American she had once taken to such a pretty room" (64). Significantly, Netta is more interested in Jack's music, perhaps linking the irresponsibility of his unfaithful behaviour with his dilettante attitude to music and with the fictionalizing of truth that has already begun. Netta's next visitor is the middle maharaja sister, clad in a "costume, a gray dress buttoned to the neck, [which] gave her the appearance of being in uniform." Despite her bleak attire, the sister has a memory of Netta laughing with Jack on the balcony at night. That one can have a memory "without loving that memory" is no new revelation to Netta; what impresses her is the perverse effect that such memory can have. Netta's visitor claims to be committed to the dubious and vague cause of political prisoners "working under lamentable conditions in tin mines" of the United States, the camps of Germany and Austria being "already the past." History has been forgotten, memory edited, and the future fictionalized to give it purpose and direction. Recognizing a situation that she and Jack would have found amusing, Netta suffers a flash of grief for a way of life now dead, but realizes that this regret is akin to the nostalgic response evoked by the great-uncle's painting, which may have reflected a surface reality but has failed to inspire a response relevant to the changes that the world has undergone. When Netta asks about the sisters' governess, the middle sister says she hopes she is dead: "Neither the vanquished in their flight nor the visitors returning to pick over rubble seemed half so vindictive as a tragic girl who had disliked her governess" (65-6). The sister's intense feeling is a personal response to her own story; it is solely inward-looking and lacks the imagination or empathy that can transform it into anything meaningful in the present or future. It is a bitterness and vindictiveness that can make

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her "tragic" only in the sense that the path it takes will be as much a cul-de-sac as the irresponsibility of Jack's dilettante lifestyle. Dr Blackley, Netta's third visitor, encouraging her to live with him, advises her to let go of the past - "You can't live on memories" - and to divorce Jack. Netta's memory of her relationship with Jack is not something so tangible, and is therefore not the reason she once again rejects Dr Blackley's offer: "What you are talking about is something of which one has no specific memory ... Only of seasons. Places. Rooms. It is as abstract to remember as to read about." Because memory is an abstraction, it acts as a personal and selective filter: "When I see closed shutters I know there are lovers behind them. That is how the memory works" (67). Like the middle sister, but with an awareness she lacks, Netta confesses to the human need for memory to operate at a personal level. What must be noted for a reading of the final section is that the disappearance of the Italian commander once billeted at the hotel is what has been reduced to a memory, whereas the absence of Jack is part of her very being, something very physical, even if her idea of their relationship - love or sex - is an abstract memory: "The absence of Jack was like a cancer which I am sure has taken root, and of which I am bound to die" (68). This reaction to his absence can be traced back to the less malignant physical maladies she suffered before their marriage when they were separated - "unmeshed" - and she "felt forgotten," even "exiled" (41-2). Thus, at the end of the eighth section, when reading of Fascist black-shirt brutes in a book "printed on grayish paper, in warped wartime covers" sent by Dr Blackley, Netta weeps not for the truth of this picture - it is false to all she has seen and known but for "the truth, the truth, the truth" that she can share with no one in her suffering and loneliness (68). The ninth and final section (69-74), ^e in 1945, describes the return of Jack and Netta's decision and indecision as she considers the opportunity for the "freedom" Jack was always offering her in the past and the loss that such "freedom" entails. This section is the only outdoor scene and, except for the excursion to Roquebrune, the only one that takes place away from the hotel. Meeting Jack, who has been slowly making his way south to Nice, Netta sees no signs of past atrocities in the Place Massena: "There was a deep-blue lateafternoon sky and pale sunlight ... The Place was as she had always seen it, like an elegant drawing room with a blue ceiling. It was nearly empty." Netta has seen too much to be deceived by this surface picture, like one of her great-uncle's nineteenth-century paintings. They walk "diagonally" across the square from the bus depot, Netta perhaps attempting to foreshorten her ordeal of the "intense

2oo Learning to Look

revulsion" she feels in Jack's presence. Jack follows her lead: "He did not question his destination, which was no farther than a cafe at the far end of the square" (69). They safely reach the other side, "pausing only when some worn-out Peugeot or an old bicycle, finding no other target, made a swing in their direction" (70). Despite the normalcy, then, all around are signs that they are traversing dangerous terrain. Netta's neck is as exposed and "vulnerable" as those of the maharaja sisters after their heads are "newly cropped" of their black hair by a man whose son at the end of the war is "shot and left along the wall of a cafe on the more or less Italian side of the border" (48, 63-4). Netta is now overwhelmed by a past so close that it can be almost touched and certainly seen by an eye that has been witness to history: "Safely on the pavement, they walked under the arches where partisans had been hanged. It seemed to Netta the bodies had been taken down only a day or so before. Jack, who knew about this way of dying from hearsay, chose a cafe table nearly under a poor lad's bound, dangling feet" (70). As they idly talk of sundry matters, and as Jack sees that Netta is enjoying his story of Sandra and Gerald scripted as Queen Anne and Lady Mary, he jockeys for position by "lightly" remarking on the failure of the "King Charles and his spaniel" relationship because he was "too preoccupied with [Netta] to manage another life" (71). He understands that this is neither a tennis match nor "simultaneous chess" (44) and that he is "playing too close a game, to waste points" denying what has been (70). He has perhaps even come to realize that "love was memory, and he was no good at the memory game; he needed Netta there" (42). What he does not know is that Netta has in his absence acquired, through a recognition of the absurd, an ability for humour and empathy - different from former "jokes [that] were her way of having floods of tears" (54) - that is, at this moment, to his advantage: "she was enjoying a reverie about Jack now, wearing one of those purple sunburns people acquire at golf. She saw him driving an open car, with large soft freckles on his purple skull. She saw his mistress's dog on the front seat and the dog's ears flying like pennants. The revulsion she felt did not lend distance but brought a dreamy reality closer still. He must be thirty-four now, she said to herself. A terrible age for a man who has never imagined thirty-four" (71). This purple sunburn - absurd, even hideous - supersedes the "deep brown" sunburn of the beautiful child she kicked as a child and to whom she gave a "lifelong gift" of "a loss of balance, a sudden lopsided bend of a knee" (40-1). Netta now has a vision that will restore balance by lifting her from these vicissitudes of private and public life and that will allow her

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to embrace rather than ricochet between past and present, ghosts and living, cold freedom and warm loving: "she turned to the cafe behind them and saw the last light of the long afternoon strike the mirror above the bar - a flash in a tunnel; hands juggling with fire. That unexpected play, at a remove, borne indoors, displayed to anyone who could stare without blinking, was a complete story. It was the brightness on the looking glass, the only part of a life, or a love, or a promise, that could never be concealed, changed, or corrupted" (73). This image in the mirror is very different from the story's previous images on the mirror: the Victorian looking-glasses in the dining-room that must be regularly resilvered (38); the multiple mirrors in the bedroom that, while reflecting the play of green and blue light when the shutters are closed on hot afternoons (43), nevertheless, on the moonlit evening after the Roquebrune excursion, give Netta only "a glimpse of herself ... picking up [Jack's] shed clothes" like the Moslem Wife everyone thinks her to be (54), and, after he has left, reveal nothing at all (61). These looking-glasses reflect only what is immediately before them in time and space. The mirror in the cafe is most like the mirror behind the hotel bar that the Italians had used "for target practice. Oddly enough it was not smashed. It is covered with spiderwebs, and the bullet hole is the spider" (61). This mirror has the potential not only to reflect but to refract, fragment, and superimpose images, but now the bar is empty, and the bullet-hole too prominent. In contrast, captured on the cafe's mirror are inside, outside, and middle ground; cafe interior, the Place Massena, sidewalk tables at which Netta and Jack sit under the arches; darkness, light, and shadow; black and white, silvers and greys, colours of all hues and shades. This is a more complex image than the superimposed images on the train window of "Up North" or the sun passing through the lace curtains and superimposing a design on the lace tablecloth and Thomas Bestermann's hands in "The Latehomecomer."11 This "complete story" is like the "blinding sight" that the "grave men" of Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night" seek but cannot grasp, a pursuit that holds them to life and defers any death-wish.12 Netta considers how memory ought to keep her from repeating the past but simultaneously realizes that it could keep her alone, reading by candlelight in the cellar, for the rest of her life. The image in the cafe mirror is "a landscape too open, too light-drenched" (44), an unfenced landscape from which Netta previously retreated, but now the darkness to which she once escaped behind shutters contains more than lovers: "The dark, the ghosts, the candlelight, her tears on the scarred bar - they were real. And still, whether she wanted to see

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it or not, the light of imagination danced all over the square. She did not dare to turn again to the mirror, lest she confuse the two and forget which light was real. A pure white awning on a cross street seemed to her to be of indestructible beauty. The window it sheltered was hollowed with sadness and shadow." Netta is about to embark on a new life with Jack, but this decision is not simply a placebo to satisfy her "powerful adolescent craving" for the simplicity of "true love" and "indestructible beauty" (73). Jack may have a "comfortable imagination" and a memory "too short to let him sulk, no matter what fragment of night had crossed his mind" - in contrast with hers, "a dark, an accurate, a deadly memory" - but he is capable of more serious thoughts and feelings than his placid demeanour and casual way suggest (44-5, 72). Netta opts for Jack's buoyancy, his morning, "the first light on the mirror," yet she still addresses "her ghosts" with a question: "What could I do ... but let my arm be held, my steps be guided?" She allows his memory to stand that "the walk ... back across the Place Massena was the happiest event of his life" because she has "no reliable counter-event to put in its place" (74). Her own canvas, however, is one on which memories converging with history have etched their lines; with Jack as counterpoint in her life these lines will not spin a web to net her but rather a present and future that absorb and contain these lines into a "morning song" that, like the persona of Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill," is sung from adult experience and awareness rather than childhood innocence.13 Netta might well articulate the same paradox with which Linnet Muir concludes "In Youth Is Pleasure": that "time had been on my side, faithfully, and unless you died you were always bound to escape."14 Even when Gallant employs a less extensive palette than in "The Moslem Wife," the minimal coloration is apt and suggestive. "Baum, Gabriel, i935~( )"15 is another narrative of a man trying to find shape, lines (family, politics, career), or pigments that could identify and define his life. Gabriel concedes his ordinariness, even mediocrity, in terms of a metaphor that complements the story's visual analogies: "A woman can always get some practical use from a torn-up life, Gabriel decided. She likes mending and patching it, making sure the edges are straight. She spreads the last shred out and takes its measure ... A man puts on his life ready-made. If it doesn't fit, he will try to exchange it for another."16 Gabriel, with his "dark locks" and "serene brow" (144), lacks resources - inner and outer - to forge new terrain and has settled comfortably into the uniform of "black pullovers, black leather jackets, soft black boots" worn by the patrons of La Meduse, a cafe where during the 19603 and 19705 actors and

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extras were recruited for television. These "dark garments" give a military look to the cafe, but "the leather jackets covered only perpetual worry" (148). For Gabriel, who "seemed to himself enduringly healthy and calm," the sombre monochromatic ambience quells two complaints to which he is prone: erratic breathing and haunting or inhabitation by a "wild child," "a small, invisible version of himself, a Gabriel ... whose claims against life he was forced to meet with whatever thin means time provided, whose scores he had rashly promised to settle before realizing that debt and payment never interlock" (140-1). The story plays straight lines, vertical and horizontal, and blackness off against the openness and colours of several portraits that prove deceptive because inventions of the image- and myth-makers of the modern film industry. While "Gabriel Baum" returns at least partially to the bleakness of Gallant's earlier fiction in that the characters are fixed in a monochromatic celluloid world, made all the more poignant because of Gabriel's heightened awareness of his limited choices, it also anticipates stories of the 19805 in its use of more consistently polychromatic allusions to achieve parodic effects. In the first of the story's five sections, Gabriel, orphaned at age eight with the disappearance of his Jewish parents, becomes aware of family connections as a means of defining and giving direction to his life when he is reunited with his august Uncle August. This wealthy uncle, the older brother of Gabriel's father, with property and a family name to bequeath, "seemed to conceal an obsolete social mystery" with his "pale scrupulous French and English," preFirst World War manners, and old-fashioned and expensively tailored clothes. Gabriel fails to place him "as a tight, unyielding remainder of the European shipwreck" (140). However, Gabriel's frivolous answer ("He was a man of action")17 when his uncle interrogates him about what prevented his father from leaving, and Gabriel's refusal to hunt for the marriage certificate that would prove to his uncle that he is a legitimate branch of the Baum family, reveal his rejection of the outmoded worlds his uncle and father represent (142, 146). Uncle August advises Gabriel "to take a strong, positive line with his life and above all to get out of Paris, which had never amounted to more than an emigre way station. Its moral climate invited apathy and rot" (142). Already, Gabriel has seen in his uncle, in most respects "as different from Gabriel as a tree is from the drawing of one ... something of the old bachelor he too might become" (139). If he is not an "authentic" Baum, who is he? What shall give shape, direction, and colour to his life? When he is described at La Meduse, reading his uncle's letters and sitting "with his back to the

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window, at a table to the right of the door facing the bar/' the diffused colours and light and amorphous atmosphere confirm that he is embraced by Medusa, the woman of his choice: "Glancing up from one of his uncle's letters, he saw the misted window in the mirror behind the bar. In a polluted winter fog neon glowed warmly - the lights of home" (142). In the second section, entitled "Gabriel's Liselotte," Gabriel is tempted from his bachelor existence by one of "a generation of extremely pretty German girls [who] suddenly blossomed in Paris. There would be just that one flowering - that one bright growth." Gabriel is drawn to a past, rather than a present and future - "to a blurred reflection, a face half-recalled" (144) - likely that of his mother with her clockwork bear and singing lessons (141). From this flowering Gabriel picks Liselotte, "pursuing spiritual cleanness through culture." Gabriel, who leaves Montparnasse only when necessary, now crosses north over the Seine "with prim, gloved women, with old men wearing slivers of ribbon to mark this or that war," to join Liselotte in Pare Monceau. As he sits counting "six, seven, eight shades of green around the place in Pare Monceau/' he decides that Liselotte cannot provide the right shade for him. A director to whom Gabriel introduces Liselotte declares "she did not look German. She was one of the brown-eyed Catholic girls from around Speyer." So too Gabriel, who has "promised the child-Gabriel he would never marry a German," finds "in an odd way she did not seem German enough." Liselotte finally gives up waiting for Gabriel and returns to Germany. Standing on the "gray platform" of Gare de FEst, he empathizes with her - "The train was blurred, as if he were looking at it through Liselotte's tears" - but this empathy fails to transform him into a man of action: "For a time her letters were like the trail of a child going ever deeper into the woods. He could not decide whether or not to follow; while he was still deciding, and not deciding, the trail stopped and the path became overgrown behind her" (144-6). This passage, coming at the end of the second section, takes us back to the event at the end of the first section, which in terms of chronology is still in the future: the death of his uncle. When his uncle dies, Gabriel takes it upon himself to invent a Baum memorial, a list of names and dates he imagines inscribed on a marble surface. He ponders what comes beneath the line after the last name because "it left the onlooker feeling that these dates and names were factors awaiting a solution." The open parentheses after his name in the title is surely ironic, any solution being cancelled by the bottom line, as has Liselotte by the overgrown trail. Gabriel considers "writing a zero, but the various Baums plus four others did not add up to

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nothing ... Gabriel, with his feet on the finish line and with uncounted Baums behind him, was a variable quantity" (143). Family line is one of the prefabricated plots that men assume to give their lives direction and meaning. The bottom line of the Baum family memorial has been drawn, and closed to Gabriel are the roles of son, nephew, or father. In the third section, "The Interview," the journalist Briseglace (ice-breaker) presents a tenuous option. Briseglace has one line - the "tame conclusion ... that being poor they were free, and being free they were happy" - and thus Gabriel soon has read and seen through the rhetoric (parodied by Gallant, 148-9), false information, and incorrectly captioned picture accompanying the article about Gabriel as "spokesman for the flotsam of Western Europe" that Briseglace publishes in a left-wing weekly. Briseglace, with his "tie made of some yellow Oriental stuff" and clothes that "looked as if they had been stitched by nuns on a convent sewing machine" is as decidedly conspicuous an anachronism as Uncle August with his early twentieth-century air of culture: Briseglace's "pessimism and his boldness and his belief in the moral advantages of penury all came straight from the Latin Quarter of the nineteenforties. He was the Occupation; he was the Liberation, too. The films that Dieter and Gabriel played in grew like common weeds from the heart of whatever young man he once had been" (147-8). Just as Uncle August has tempted Gabriel with the idea of perpetuating the Baum line through family, then reneged when legitimacy is in doubt, but continues in an avuncular advisory role by suggesting Gabriel secure "a job with some large, benevolent international firm" to ensure a pension in thirty-five years (146), Briseglace seems to Gabriel to hold a clue to the meaning of life: "Perhaps Briseglace had been sent to nudge him in some new direction" (149). The only truths Briseglace imparts to Gabriel are an image of shabby old men and a rumour, which no one believes, "that the Montparnasse railway station was to be torn down and a dark tower built in its place" (147). The horizontal trail has closed behind Liselotte on her eastward-bound train and behind Briseglace with his political line of poverty—>freedom—>happiness. Can there be upward mobility? In the 1985 interview with Barbara Gabriel, Gallant, prompted by her interviewer's observation that in this story "the alienation you write about is material, alert to economic and social transitions in the city," commented on the difference between the media's concern "that the societe de consommation was damaging to the soul" and the "real poverty and unemployment [that] began in the early 'jo's." Gallant remarked how "the tearing down of the Gare Montparnasse" and replacing it with "that huge tower" gave rise to

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dislocation and change. Is this cause for lament? Responding to Barbara Gabriel's suggestion "that even a tragic subject like Gabriel becoming the last of the Baums turns into social commentary and farce," Gallant agrees: "Every situation has an element of farce."18 As Briseglace predicts, the squat Montparnasse station is torn down, and "a dark ugly tower" springs up where it once stood (152). In the final two sections, which explore Gabriel's acting career as a possible "vertical" solution to the equation of the family memorial still contained in his head, the tug between shapelessness and linearity, monochromatic and polychromatic coloration, intensifies the absurdity and farce of this potentially tragic subject. Because Gabriel has "more resources" than his friend Dieter Pohl, a Bavarian the same age as Gabriel, he should have greater opportunities. When the Occupation films that are their bread and butter fall off, Gabriel dons the costumes of Flavius in Julius Caesar, Aston in The Caretaker, and the zoo director in The Bedbug (152). Nevertheless, both men eventually arrive back at La Meduse waiting to be called to another set. Dieter concludes that despite the different directions their "biographies" have taken, they have "ended up in the same place, doing the same work, sitting at the same table" (151). Both are equally locked into roles but for different reasons. Dieter typically plays the part of a soldier in the German army, for which he needs only "two good facial expressions, one for victory and one for defeat. Advancing, he gazed keenly upwards, as if following a hawk to the vanishing point. Sometimes he pressed binoculars to his eyes. Defeat found him staring at his boots" (147). What Dieter's roles lack in variety, they make up for in upward mobility. Like Julius in "An Alien Flower," he has a "staircase" for promotion, a hierarchy to ascend in an "industry-army." When Dieter talks to Gabriel about the quirks of fortune that have brought them to the same table at La Meduse, "he was still only a colonel" but confident he will "have been made a general at least once" by the time "the French [are] bored with entertainment based on the Occupation" (according to his calculations by about 1982) and so will "have saved up enough money to buy a business of some kind in his native town" (151). As part of the occupying army, Dieter is guaranteed to reach the last episode, in which he could "be glimpsed marching off into captivity," whereas "Gabriel, enrolled as a victim, had generally been disposed of in the first" (147). He can move neither forward to the final episode nor upward through the ranks: "Gabriel had no equivalent staircase to climb; who ever has heard of a victim's being promoted? Still, he had acquired a variety of victim experiences ... His demise ... was still needed in order to give a push

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to the old dishonorable plot - told ever more simply now, like a fable - while Dieter's fate was still part of its moral" (150-1). In "The Moslem Wife" Gallant indicates that the failure of an expression of popular culture, the realistic landscape picture of greatuncle Asher, is that it "remained faithful" to the image it reproduced and thus could not "out of sympathetic magic" meet the needs of a new age, a changing time (66). In "Gabriel Baum" Gallant explores the reverse: as an expression of popular culture, the Occupation films of the 19605 and 19705 meet the demands of a changing age but fail to be faithful.19 When interviewed by Briseglace in the 19605, Dieter naively "declared himself happy in a profession that had brought him moral satisfaction and material comfort, and that provided the general public with notions of history" (148), but this assertion of happiness, moral satisfaction, material comfort, and notions of history becomes increasingly suspect in the years that follow. All are like the "chicory drink, the color of boot polish, invented to fight inflation" and served instead of coffee when La Meduse changes hands and is renovated "with rows of booths, automobile seats made of imitation leather, orange glass lampshades, and British First World War recruiting posters plastered on the walls" (152-3). Such changes are difficult to measure. In "Paris: The Taste of a New Age" (1981) Gallant says of the old Montparnasse station "low ... gray ... dirty and rundown ... inefficient" - torn down fourteen years before that "a postcard view of it arouses no immediate recognition. It might as well have been torn down sixty years ago. What people do recall is that the streets around the station were not as shabby and anonymous as they seem now ... the older buildings look dwarfed and absurd. The changes it has attracted (pizza parlors instead of family restaurants) seem to blind the mind's eye. The nature of a neighbourhood has been so fundamentally altered by a single unnecessary structure that collective memory is wiped clean."20 To be revered, the past is falsified. A present built upon a falsified past is "kitsch," a term Gallant reserves to bestow derisively on flagrant misappropriation of the past.21 La Meduse becomes a postcard version, a parody of the original - "a Medusa jellyfish with long eyelashes and a ribbon on its head, smiling out of a tiny screen" (152). The addition of sugar to the chicory drink does not improve its flavour; instead, it is "nauseating" and "twice as expensive as coffee had ever been" (153). The fifth section, "The Surrender," exposes just how costly clinging to a falsified past can be. Dieter's dream of a return to his homeland is endorsed by what John Sandford describes as "that staple of German cinematic sentimentality, the Heimatfilm," which in the 19505

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"raised its picture-postcard head again": "The racist and mystically nationalistic implications it had acquired during the Nazi years were conveniently forgotten, though they were too closely bound up with the genre to be totally eliminated. The world of the Heimatfilm was ordered and unproblematic, a world of happy countryfolk in idyllic surroundings. The classic of the 19505 was Hans Deppe's 'Green is the Heath' ... which inspired countless imitations."22 In the 19703 these films became the target of parody for German directors in a "flurry" of "kritischer Heimatfilm," of which Schlondorff's 1970 film "The Sudden Fortune of the Poor People of Kombach" is an example. In contrast with the "idyllic, trite, and sentimental" Heimatfilm, "presenting idealized portraits of country life," Schlondorff, as other directors of his time, "made use of the popular rural setting to present a radical analysis of the true conditions under which country people - and others - live. As a token of his serious intentions, Schlondorff made the film in black and white."23 Gallant has parodied these idylls before, most notably in the travel-poster Germany to which Ernst plans to return in "Ernst in Civilian Clothes" and in the old men's dreams in "The Latehomecomer": Martin's dream of a return to Franconia where he will regain his youth, mend his right shoulder and arm, relive remembered "hot, leafy summers," and thus transform himself into "a born winner instead of a physically broken tram conductor on the losing side"; and Willy's dream of a pastoral life in a quiet town where, in response to the current demand for beauty, he plans to open a perfume and cosmetics shop and gaze down every morning "on his blue store awnings, over window boxes stuffed with frilled petunias."24 Not only the old men dream of an unattainable Eden. Twenty-one-year-old Thomas Bestermann, the latehomecomer whose first-person narration gives the story its title, while in captivity yearned for his mother and "the lost paradise of [their] poverty" (119) but, on the eve of his return to Berlin in 1950, knows he will marry Willy's daughter, Gisela, not yet three years old: "Her hair was so silky and fine that it reflected the day as a curve of mauve light. She was all light and sheen, and she was the first person - I can even say the first thing - I had ever seen that was unflawed, without shadow. She was as whole and as innocent as a drop of water, and she was without guilt" (127). Thomas thinks that 1950 marks "the beginning of life ... the start of the good half of a rotten century. Everything ugly and corrupt and vicious is behind us" (135). The physical pains he suffers, especially his eyes so sensitive "that it hurt to blink" (137), clearly indicate that the shape, direction, and

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coloration of the latehomecomer's life will not be as neat, direct, and brightly hued as he imagines. Dieter Pohl and Gabriel Baum, six years younger than Thomas Bestermann, have worn uniforms, even the same uniforms as Thomas. And they have the same dreams of a life out of uniform, of the green foliage, yellow sun, blue sky, and white purity of an idyllic country life. In the later story, and with the younger men, the dream is now twice - perhaps even thrice - removed from what in the first place may have been a fabrication and hence takes on a parodic cast not apparent in "The Latehomecomer." Sitting in La Meduse, waiting the call to surrender, Dieter inexplicably "began to talk about ecology. Because of ecology, there was a demand in Bavaria for fresh bread made of authentic flour, salt, water, and yeast. Because of unemployment, there were people willing to return to the old, forgotten trades, at which one earned practically nothing and had to work all night. The fact was that he had finally saved up enough money and had bought a bakery in his native town. He was through with the war, the Occupation, the Liberation, and captivity. He was going home" (158-9). The linear logical thinking ("Because of ... Because of"), unequivocal diction ("the fact"), and shorter and shorter sentences culminating in the statement "He was going home" are undercut by the reality of poor returns for hard work and original investment. When Dieter first talks of "going home," Gabriel is disturbed because, not having found his shade of green in the brown-eyed Liselotte, he is excluded from the dream and will lose the cosy friendship of Dieter. Dieter's announcement "caused the most extraordinary view in Gabriel's view of the park. All the greens in it became one dull color, as if thunderous clouds had gathered low in the sky." But when Dieter tells him that there will always be available a spare room and avuncular role, Gabriel is tempted by the polychromatic appeal of the picture: "The greens emerged again, fresh and bright ... He saw, in a linen press, sheets strewn with lavender ... His breakfast on a white tablecloth, under a lime tree ... Dieter's wife putting her hand on the white coffee pot to see if it was still hot enough for Gabriel. A jug of milk, another of cream." The "child Gabriel," silent for many years but now "revived and outraged and jealous," interjects to put things in perspective by challenging the myth with reminders of the past, "dark glaciers of time," and the realities of the present: "He had never been to the country except to jump out of trains. It was only in films that he had seen mist lifting or paths lost in ferns" (159).

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Two pictures - one static and one moving - counteract and parody this idyllic portrait. The first parody is suggested by the snapshots sent to Dieter by Helga, his cousin and intended bride, who grows tired of waiting for her groom (like Liselotte with Gabriel) and marries an old widower instead. In these snapshots Erna, the groom's granddaughter, is described wearing the same "rimless spectacles" as the bride and groom, wreathes of daisies encircling her head and wrists, and "a long, stiff yellow gown"; her "person" is largely hidden "behind an accordion. The accordion seemed to be falling apart; she had all she could do to keep it together" (157). An equally grotesque but more sustained parody is conveyed through the film in which Dieter and Gabriel are currently acting. "They surrendered all the rest of the afternoon" (159). This sentence, coming as it does immediately after the sentence "It was only in films that he had seen mist lifting or paths lost in ferns," might cause the reader to wonder which surrender has occurred. Clearly, however, they have reached the thirteenth and final episode of the epic television project of the Occupation on which they are working and with which the story ends. Middle-aged Gabriel is no longer the right age to play a victim and so has donned the uniform of the occupying army long awaiting surrender at the Palais du Luxembourg. "A uniform has no age," Dieter has argued (154). "As an officer, doomed to defeat, he would at least be sure of his rank and his role and of being in one piece at the end" (155). And, playing an officer, Gabriel will wear a light plastic helmet and not have the weight and restriction of the helmets of regular recruits assigned "heavy metal, museum pieces; they gave their wearers headaches and left red marks on the brow" (154). Although Dieter sees Gabriel's new role as an advancement and promotion, Gabriel, with no prompting from the child Gabriel, feels otherwise: "Gabriel in his new uniform seemed not just to be looking at himself in a glass but actually to be walking through it. He moved through a liquid mirror, back and forth. With each crossing his breath came a little shorter" (155). The liquid mirror exposes such betrayal to his integrity that he is momentarily disoriented and out of breath from a race too quickly run; nevertheless, Gabriel will, as Dieter has advised, "bridge this stage of his Occupation career by becoming a surrendering officer, seen in the last episode instead of vanishing after the first," and he will do so, with the other officers, in "weightless helmets and comfortable, well-cut uniforms" (154-5). Gabriel adapts to the ready-made uniform, and "on a cool shining June day, [when] they were able to surrender," sitting on the rim of the Delacroix monument in the Luxembourg Gardens during a

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period of "inextricable confusion," the dreamer Dieter, not the more pragmatic Gabriel, confesses to being "disappointed in his men," recalling "how in the sixties there used to be real Frenchmen, real Germans, authentic Jews. The Jews had played deportation the way they had seen it in films, and the Germans had surrendered according to film tradition, too, but there had been this difference: They had at least been doing something their parents had done before them. They had not only the folklore of movies to guide them but ... firsthand accounts. Now, even if one could assemble a true cast of players, they would be trying to imitate their grandfathers. They were at one remove too many" (156-7). Gabriel is not troubled with such betrayal of "authenticity." Well before the surrender, much of his "waking time" was spent "immersed in the present moment," engaged in such pastimes as standing "in peaceful queues in front of those cinemas that still charged no more than eleven francs. Inside, the seats and carpets were moldering slowly" (150). He notices "that he was not seeing Paris as it was but the way it had stayed in his mind; he still saw butchers and grocers and pastry shops, when in reality they had become garages and banks," but he adapts and changes, always securing a seat in La Meduse (152-3). Now, at the surrender, Gabriel finds himself "breathing at a good rhythm - not too shallow, not too fast. An infinity of surrenders had preceded this one, in color and in black-and-white, with music and without. A long trail of application forms and employment questionnaires had led Gabriel here ... Country words ran meanwhile in Gabriel's head. He thought, Dense thickets, lizards and snakes, a thrush's egg, a bee, lichen, wild berries, dark thorny leaves, pale mushrooms." Gabriel persists, but at the end of their long day of surrendering, "Dieter's face was white and tired and perfectly blank" (159-60). Dieter is revived by his drawing of the bakery, made all the more "attractive and warm" from "light shining out of the orange glass lampshade" of La Meduse. This scene is flanked by two realities, outside the present moment and warm glow, that go ignored. First is the "X" in the plan of the large apartment over the bakery that marks Gabriel's room, a cipher that is equally effacing as the "O" Gabriel has considered inscribing under the bottom line of the Baum memorial. Numbers do, after all, rule their lives. The bottom line is collateral, the second reality that only now becomes apparent: "Dieter hadn't actually bought the bakery but had made a down payment and was negotiating for a bank loan." Gabriel returns to his reading; Dieter unfolds his drawing, smooths it flat, makes some adjustments, and gives the story its closing line: "My father

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lived to be ninety" (160-1). Dieter and Gabriel have reached the bottom line; their toes are on the finish line, but the tally is incomplete, the race unfinished. The colours are illusive - the greens of the park and country - and some absurdly so: the yellows of Briseglace's tie and Erna's stiff dress, the red welts left by museum-piece helmets, the orange glow of the lampshades of La Meduse. The avuncular role may never come to pass for Gabriel, but he has accommodated himself to the bachelor role in his home, La Meduse. For this bachelor role Uncle August provided the prototype, Gabriel the replica. Gabriel's father, Uncle August tells his nephew, "during the very hot autumn of nineteen-thirty ... had left the university announcing that he would earn his living writing satirical poetry" (141), a calling that marriage and war thwarted. Like his father, Gabriel is no man of action, but he has made choices and adapted himself to a monochromatic world where he recognizes the illusiveness and even absurdity of colour-tinted dreams. The idealism at the heart of satire may have been appropriate for the hot autumn of 1930; in the cool June almost fifty years later, the futility of farce seems the most appropriate voice. Likewise, the muted shades of Gallant's idylls of the mid- and late 19705, as witnessed in the Linnet Muir stories and most of the stories in From the Fifteenth District, give way to Gallant's voice of the 19805, a voice characterized by humour, parody, and farce. A NOSTALGIC INTERLUDE: THE MAGDALENA QUARTET

With a first-person narrator, Edouard, reflecting on his flawed marriages with Magdalena and Juliette, the tone of "A Recollection," "Rue de Lille," "The Colonel's Child," and "Lena" is primarily wistful, full of regret for missed opportunities, with only the occasional vibrant hue to vary and deepen his pastel world. Edouard endeavours (although not always successfully) to prevent his perspective from becoming too distanced and ballooning into one of arrogance and pomposity. In "Rue de Lille," the story that focuses on the death of his second wife, Juliette, Edouard surveys their life together, "a long, narrow reach of time in the Rue de Lille. It must be the washy, indefinite colorations of blue that carpeted, papered, and covered floors, walls, and furniture and shaded our lamps which cast over that reach the tone of a short season. I am thinking of the patches of distant, neutral blue that appear over Paris in late spring." This blue, Edouard continues, sometimes makes him feel that he "had been consigned to a Protestant Heaven by an arbitrary traffic cop," although

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he "was better suited to a pagan Hell." He has resigned himself to being a placid, practical, unobtrusive member of Juliette's world, someone whom it would be a "folly" to set "against a background of buttercup yellow or apple green."25 In this quartet, about the implicit jockeying for power that develops in relationships, another blue - viewed from neither heaven above nor hell below but from a level earthbound vantage-point - is more threatening to Edouard than Juliette's Protestant blue of material possessions, status, and respectability. This is "a blue eye shadowed with paler blue" (181) of his first wife, Magdalena, Jewish born, a convert to Catholicism, whom Edouard married to protect "when anti-Jewish thoughts and feelings had suddenly hardened into laws" (151). For years Magdalena refused him a divorce; ultimately, Edouard realizes that it is not this power that she held over him that taints his life but his inability to respond to her love. Throughout the quartet he describes her dressed in white with red accessories and accommodated in a "black-red-and-white lacquered apartment" (152-3,181), colours that reflect his ambivalence towards her cosmopolitan air clashing with her purity (156-7). Only at her marriage did she wear "a soft navy-blue dress" (154). When they parted at Marseilles train station several days later, after which time decades pass before they meet again, she is again described in a white suit and hat - "She had taken a suitcase into the filthy toilet and emerged immaculate" - and he remembers the pale blue of her eyes in the "southern morning light" (159). Unable "to pull her across to my side" and fearful that he would "be dragged over to hers" (155), Edouard relegates Magdalena to a landscape of a past life where receding lines can put her beyond the vanishing-point: "The marriage was an incident, gradually being rubbed out in the long perspective I've described. So I saw it" (167). Edouard had come to realize that he could not pull Magdalena to his side when, in full view of German soldiers in front of the Hotel Meurice, she stooped to retrieve a dirty yellow star lying on the pavement (154). "She said she had nothing to hide; absolutely nothing" (157). Nevertheless, Edouard concealed the yellow star for her when their documents were being checked on the southbound train to the Free Zone of France and kept it to show to the children whom he never has: "It shows how far into the future I thought you could safely carry a piece of the past" (160). The final story in the quartet, "Lena," takes place in the present, when Magdalena, eighty years old, is in chronic care at a hospital to the north of Paris. Edouard, now a widower, visits her occasionally, braving the "flat, worrying light" of the Metro suburban line (179)

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and confronting "a monumental example of the art of twenty years ago: a white foot with each toenail painted a different color" that stands in the hospital's lobby (177). Her conversation reminds him of their earliest time together "in her apartment with the big windows and the sweeping view across the Seine. She used to wear white, and sit on a white sofa. There were patches of red in the room - her long fingernails and her lipstick, and the Legion of Honor on some admirer's lapel. She had two small, funny dogs whose eyes glowed red in the dusk" (179). Magdalena's white is now her once golden hair, and the red has been bleached to the "small pink noses" of the Hungarian women who visit her in the hospital (176, 184-5). Only Edouard remains of her many male admirers, himself now with a "red speck" on his lapel, a Legion of Honour received for "cultural enrichment of the media" (185). The yellow has disappeared beyond the horizon where past and present meet; only absurd daubs of red and white and pink remain in the present. Blue endures, connecting past to present to future, but a very different blue from Juliette's cool neutral blue: the "blue eyes shadowed, [of] my poor, mad, true, and only wife," who appeals to Edouard to respond to her love, untainted by inheritance laws and legitimate lineage. Edouard can hold her hand, call her "Lena" as do "the staunch little widows" who visit her, but when "she turns her head and opens her eyes," he cannot give her that for which she finally yearns, a declaration of love: "I glance away then, anywhere - at the clock, out the window. I have put up with everything, but I intend to refuse her last imposition, the encounter with her blue, enduring look of pure love" (187).

"A M A G R I T T E V I S I O N O F F E A R " : OVER PARIS IN GALLANT'S BALLOON In chapters i and 2 we saw Gallant experimenting, in her stories of the 19405 and 19505, and creating fragmentation, distortion, mobility, and hence ironic effects that challenge readers to bridge gaps and penetrate layers of thickly textured compositions. While reviewers and critics have often observed the irony in Gallant's fiction, only Barbara Godard gives a comprehensive examination of the shifts in ironic stance that ultimately lead to Gallant's parodic treatment of subject-matter. Her "characteristic format of colliding edges," Godard argues, is a result of "a preoccupation with the tension between appearance and reality. There is the 'other Paris,' the Paris of legend and cliche, hardened into silence, and the Paris of complex emotional and political realities, lying on the other side of language."26 Godard focuses on the ironic techniques of Gallant's early

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stories. With "her more recent parodies that self-reflexively explore the reader's role in producing the parodic ethos," Godard concedes that "to embark on a study of Gallant as parodist would be another story."27 Readings of later stories become ever more challenging as the stories' layers collapse into one another (as seen in chapters 3 and 4), to such a degree that, by "Speck's Idea" and "Overhead in a Balloon," inside and outside, personal and public, are virtually indistinguishable, a blurring that at least partially explains the characters' inability to find perspective, untangle lines, achieve proportion, discover coloration, and experience illumination in their lives. Art gallery owner Sandor Speck may appear to have the imaginative capacity to let his mind float and thus situate himself between the personal and public, where a sense of perspective and proportion can be achieved and clear viewing attained. Descending from a line "of highly intellectual Central European agnostics and freethinkers," however, the rationalist Speck has "in his bones a mistrust of the bogs and quicksands that lie beyond reality perceived."28 In parodic fashion, the metaphors in "Speck's Idea" suggest that planes begin to intersect and lines generating his mental energy to converge and thus short-circuit after his wife, Henriette, leaves him, and Speck misses the "steadying influence" of her mind, "like a one-way thoroughfare, narrow and flat, maintained in repair ... Unless his thoughts were nailed down by gallery business they tended to glide away to the swamps of imagination, behind which stretched the steamier marshland of metaphysics" (4). Bogs and quicksand, swamps and marshland, are all landscapes that can mire, engulf, and precipitate drowning, yet Speck's mind, if not tethered, threatens to glide - even float - to such landscapes. Speck, like Edouard, is suitably domiciled in the "pagan Hell" of rationalists (163) and so must aspire upwards to reach his earthbound heaven, since this heaven is the commercial landscape of upper-middle-class French Protestants, the "reality perceived" beyond which lies "this spongy territory" of imagination, art, philosophy, metaphysics. "Thin by choice, pale by nature," Speck, a spectral presence, advances into the terrain of artists' widows, "bringing his tactful presence, his subtle approximation of courtship," but never losing "track of his purpose - the prying of paintings out of a dusty studio on terms anesthetizing to the artist's widow and satisfactory to himself" (18-19). To attain the most advantageous position for his foray, Speck maintains a "policy never to fight the current of eccentricity but to float with it." When he concurs with one of these artist's widows, Lydia Cruche, that "We are all held in a mysterious hand," lines again short-circuit: "Generations of Speck freethinkers

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howled from their graves; he affected not to hear them" (31). In a structured world that discourages the density attained through plurality and multiplicity, Speck's aspirations, material and nonmaterial, lift him upwards, pull him downwards, and propel him over level ground in a confused array of intersecting and shortcircuiting lines. These converging lines impede the development of the simple linear plot he seeks in his personal life, collapsed into and subservient to his public image, with no depth created through oblique interwoven subplots: "On a rainy night such as this, the street resembled a set in a French film designed for export, what with the policemen's white rain capes aesthetically gleaming and the lights of the bookstore, the restaurant, and the gallery reflected, quivering, in European-looking puddles. In reality, Speck thought, there was not even hope for a subplot" (5). For Speck the religious mission of Walter, his assistant, is significant only as it can be exploited to serve gallery business (4-5). In the companion story, "Overhead in a Balloon," which takes place several years subsequent to the events of "Speck's Idea," Walter has sought a new religion through friendship with an artist, Aymeric, and then through Aymeric's cousin, Robert, but like Walter's earlier seeking of God through art, his desire to reduce rather than experience the wonder of the unknown leaves him not only discontent but rather dizzy from the "long, dangerous trapeze swoop of friendship [that] had borne him from Aymeric's to Robert's side of the void ... Walter knew that he was too old at thirty-five for those giddy, hopeful swings. One of these days he was going to lose momentum and be left dangling, without a safety net."29 The frequent absurd allusions to upward flights and the paraphernalia required, found only in "Overhead in a Balloon" ("Speck's Idea" offers none), culminate in Robert's balloon flight from Tonnerre: "Swaying in silence, between the clouds and the Burgundy Canal, he had been able to reach a decision" to marry, which inspires Walter with "a crazy idea ... Would Robert get married overhead in a balloon?" (66-7) Walter's ascension in any form is defeated from the moment that Aymeric unfurls his "long banner of a name" (51) when they first meet. Aymeric, Robert, Robert's mother, and his sister, Monique, belong to "the paratroop aristocracy," of which Monique is "a perfect specimen": not "a regiment of grandees about to jump in formation" but "a recognizable upper-class physical type, stumping along on unbreakable legs" (62-3). This family strips off the plastic sheets with which Walter has covered the furniture in his apartment while visiting his parents in Switzerland and leaves them lying "like crumpled parachutes in a corner." And the head of this family, Robert, draws

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lines on Walter's table that rearrange the rooms and exclude Walter (69-71). Disillusion with art, religion, and friendship deflates Walter's balloon; the closed family structure, huddling together to protect their "many square metres of urban space" (61) and to perpetuate their family name, tosses him out of the basket and back on to the known landscape of Speck's gallery. Walter, however, has "no wish to wish to ascend in a balloon" because he has "seen enough balloons in engravings" (66). Hot-air balloons and engravings of these balloons often advertise in large letters across their surface. Art, religion, and politics are all pawns on a commercial chessboard. The engravings described in "Speck's Idea," both religious and political (2, 6), are a means to an end - a commercial end. Like his assistant, therefore, Speck undertakes excursions on much leveller terrain than his muddled flights or descents into imaginative terrain, reality unperceived, suggest. Speck's commercial connection with the arts involves him much more with the seen than the unseen. His area of specialization is "the flattest, palest, farthest ripples of the late-middle-traditional Paris school," a "sensible decision [which] had earned him the admiration given the devoted miniaturist who is no threat to anyone" (17). Just before leaving him, Henriette "had declared that Speck appraising an artist's work made her think of a real-estate loan officer examining Chartres Cathedral for leaks." The narrator, standing back somewhat from Speck, zooms in to parody Speck's thoughts, feelings, and modes of expression: "The great cocottes of history had shown similar prudence ... Cool but efficient - that was the professional ticket ... what if he were to allow passion for painting to set alight his common sense? ... Ablaze with love, he might try to organize raids and rescue parties, dragging pictures out of the dark, leaving sacks of onions instead. He might drop the art trade altogether, as Walter kept intending to do, and turn his talents to cornering the onion market" (29-30). As the gallery owner treats art as a commodity, artists themselves expropriate objects and people: "barges, bridges, cafes at twilight, nudes on striped counterpanes, the artist's mantelpiece with mirror, the artist's street, his staircase, his bed made and rumpled, his stilllife with half-peeled apple, his summer in Mexico, his wife reading a book, his girlfriend naked and dejected on a kitchen chair" (17). Such objectifications, exposed in earlier Gallant stories as "small possibilities in people" that breed Fascism,30 are carried into the patron/ purchaser relationship with the work of art. Like any good salesperson, Speck knows how to transform the banal and mundane into something that seems elevated and monumental: "Visitors came to

ai 8 Learning to Look

the gallery looking for decoration and investment, left it believing Speck had put them on the road to a supreme event" (17). The purchaser plays at some game that appears noble and uplifting, but the reality is simply that a commercial transaction has taken place, with Speck as procurer. In this mercantile atmosphere, any passion for art is artificially stimulated and simulated; any art whose attraction reaches beyond ownership and domination, beyond mass appeal as a commodity, is prostituted. This prostitution is most apparent in Speck's "idea" itself, an idea anchored in his desire to promote his gallery through its annual spring show, but an idea floated as a means of elevating the status of an artist much needed by a society brought low by current trends in art. Gallant gives full rein to her parodic treatment at these moments when the narrator travesties the rhetoric of Paris critics: "For about a year now, Paris critics had been hinting at something missing from the world of art. These hints, poignant and patriotic on the right, neo-nationalist and pugnacious on the Left, wistful but insistent dead Center, were all in essence saying the same thing: The time has come/ The time had come; the hour had struck; the moment was ripe for a revival of reason, sanity, and taste. Surely there was more to art than this sickness, this transatlantic blight? Fresh winds were needed to sweep the museums and galleries" (7-8). Here the horizontal lines of levelling sickness and blight and of cross winds threaten to sever the inflated rhetoric from its moorings. Interwoven throughout the story, in equally parodic fashion, are the notes that Speck keeps: first, notes of his ideas, and then, when he has found an artist, Hubert Cruche, to give substance to his ephemeral idea, the revisions of these original notes. Most humorous are the notes that Speck makes on the structure of the show, which take his imagined patron on a tour through his gallery (7-11). At this point Speck's idea loses all sense of balance and proportion. It is as if the balloon has come unhooked from the guy-lines that should secure it to the basket. The hot air continues to blast as the balloon drifts aimlessly and the basket tumbles to earth. Again, Gallant undercuts vertical movement with horizontal lines. Later the same evening that Speck pens the original notes for the show, he attends a Masonic gathering and sends up a supplication to the Grand Architect of the Universe in his characteristic style of an inventory, a style here parodied in mock-epic fashion: "Whoever and whatever you are, said Speck silently ... remember in my favor that I have never bothered you. I never called your attention to the fake Laurencin, the stolen Magritte, the Bonnard the other gallery was supposed to have insured, the Maurice Denis notebook that

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slipped through my fingers, the Vallotton woodcut that got lost between Paris and Lausanne. All I want ... he needed the tiny, enduring wheel set deep in the clanking, churning machinery of the art trade - the artist himself." Speck's spirits are buoyed up because he has "shed some of his troubles," but the parodic tone continues through the horizontal lines of the inventory and the descending lines, reinforced by the low-hanging, bright moon (14). Outside the lodge Speck listens while Senator Bellefeuille tells a humorous story about attempting to doff his bowler hat in a chivalrous gesture to the beautiful Lydia Cruche by picking it up by its non-existent brim. The references to Magritte, to the bowler hat, and perhaps even to the frustrated Belgian whose work Speck's gallery is currently showing (28) remind us of Magritte's parodic treatment of the idea and perception by placing familiar objects in bizarre surroundings (or bizarre objects in familiar surroundings) or providing name-tags or titles that fail to fit. Speck fails to see the gap between idea and object as we are expected to do in a Magritte painting. Remembering that Senator Bellefeuille owns the Cruche collection, Speck has found his artist: "And yet a small flickering marsh light danced upon the low-lying metaphysical ground he had done so much to avoid. Not only did Cruche overlap to an astonishing degree the painter in the yellow notebook but he was exactly the sort of painter that made the Speck gallery chug along" (16-17). Like all the previous lists, the categorized inventory of the Senator's collection is horizontal, not vertical on the page (15-16). Speck's excitement, despite its animated tone, is of someone sending orders over flat terrain: "'Don't get rid of the Cruches,' said Speck. He felt as if he were on a distant shore, calling across deep cultural waters. 'Don't sell! Hang on! Cruche is coming back!'" (16). Like a tolling bell, Cruche's name fills the empty balloon of his idea: "Cruche, Cruche, Hubert Cruche, sang Speck's heart as he drove homeward. Cruche's hour had just struck, along with Sandor Speck's" (16). None of the bells in this story uplifts; none sends inspiriting tones heavenward. Henriette's departure may have given her a lift, but for Speck her parting epithet, repeated, tolls throughout the story in a decidedly linear fashion: "There had been something brisk and joyous about her going - her hailing of a taxi as though of a friend, her surprised smile as the third 'Fascist!' dissolved in the April night like a double stroke from the belfry of St Clotilde's" (4). Speck's idea is immediately pulled to earth by the artist's widow whom he sets out to tame. To make contact with her, he must send a message over the telephone lines, travelling in a direction foreign

22O Learning to Look

to him to "one of the gritty suburbs east of Paris, on the far side of the Bois de Vincennes - in Speck's view, the wrong direction. The pattern of his life seemed to come unfolded as he dialled. He saw himself stalled in industrial traffic, inhaling pollution, his Bentley pointed toward the seediest mark on the urban compass" (19). This movement is opposed to the direction set in the opening description of Speck's relocation of his galleries to establish himself in a secure and prestigious neighbourhood (i). The Magdalena quartet uses a similar locale and map simply to point the irony of Edouard's moving from his rationalist parents' home in the northern Nineteenth Arrondissement, on the rue de Solitaires (suggesting both isolation and wilderness) near the Place des Fetes, to frequenting Magdalena's white apartment overlooking the Seine on the Quai Voltaire (151-2), to his dark L-shaped apartment on rue de Lille (one block south of Quai Voltaire), where he lives for almost thirty-seven years with Juliette (161-2). In "Speck's Idea," however, lines are actually reproduced on the map of Paris that parody Speck's structured and confined life and world. Roland Barthes, mapping the historical, geographical, and social structures of "the Parisian panorama" that the gaze of the Eiffel Tower witnesses to the north and east, identifies "three zones stacked one after the other, as though along a prone body [the Seine], three functions of human life: at the top, at the foot of Montmartre, pleasure; at the center, around the Opera, materiality, business, commerce; toward the bottom, at the foot of the Pantheon, knowledge, study; then ... two large zones of habitation, one residential, the other blue-collar ... a kind of very old law incites cities to develop toward the west, in the direction of the setting sun; it is on this side that the wealth of the fine neighborhoods proceeds, the east remaining the site of poverty."31 Speck has first moved his gallery from its Right Bank location almost due south, slightly west, ironically a downward line if the map of Paris is imagined pinned to a wall, and ironically, given his right-wing political sentiments (despite his claims of neutrality), a move to the Left Bank and slightly left (or west) of his original location (left, of course, only if one's gaze, as that of the Eiffel Tower Barthes describes, is northeastward). Speck's next move, from the shadow of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre to the Faubourg Saint-Germain "in the parish of St Clotilde, near enough to the church for its bells to give him migraine headaches," is almost due west, again ironically a move to the left of the map when north is the focus. His new street houses both Marxist embassies - albeit "in former ducal mansions" (2) - and a bookstore, Amandine, with "a fixed Right Wing viewpoint" (5). Speck traverses comfortable terrain

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and moves in a familiar direction when he dines with his fellow Mason, Senator Bellefeuille, who "lived on the west side of Paris the clients' side. A social allegory in the shape of a city separated Speck from Lydia Cruche" (33). If this allegory is to be read in a linear fashion of left and right direction, the reader-spectator must face forward, back to the map, and look south. But due south of Speck's gallery in Faubourg Saint-Germain is the Montparnasse Tower, featured in many later Gallant stories but unmentioned here, even though, in "Overhead in a Balloon," Walter lives in the neighbourhood between Boulevard Raspail and the Luxembourg Gardens (53) and even though the tower looms over rue Jean Ferrandi, Gallant's home for many years. Speck's southward movement is southeast to Lydia Cruche's district, in a direction that works at cross-purposes to his preferred northwesterly vertical movement and direction. This journey introduces him to shapes that fail to cohere into a well-proportioned map. From Saskatchewan, Lydia is totally unplaceable for Speck; thus, she has the advantage of keeping in reserve unperceived depths for the commercial match in which she and Speck now engage. Even when Speck sees Saskatchewan on a map, its shape is foreign: "Its austere oblong shape turned his heart to ice. Walter said that it was one of the right-angled territories that so frequently contain oil. Oil seemed to Speck to improve the oblong. He saw a Chirico chessboard sliding off toward a horizon where the lights of derricks twinkled and blinked" (23). Lydia now puts Speck through "the hoops" of "God, and politics, and finally the most dangerous one, which was jealousy" (45), that set his linear, structured world topsy-turvy. When it seems as if she has opted for an exhibition overseen by "a fellowJaphethite" (38), a man from a differently shaped landscape, Signer Vigorelli from Milan, Speck concedes defeat: "He searched her face, as he had often, looking for irony, or playfulness - a gleam of light. There floated between them the cold oblong on the map and the Chirico chessboard moving along to its Arctic destination. Trees dwindled to shrubs and shrubs to moss and moss to nothing. Speck had been defeated by a landscape" (43). Sandor Speck, as both his names suggest, is a mere mote in this landscape above which he has tried to fly his balloon. The guy-lines have not held the basket securely to the balloon because he has had to confront horizontal as well as downward pressures that prevent his balloon from remaining airborne. Like Walter in "Overhead in a Balloon," he is brought firmly to ground and once again, leaving Lydia's in defeat, is forced to traverse unfamiliar terrain after smashing his car: "He left the shelter and stood out in the wet, looking at

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windows of shops, one of which might contain a clock ... The tea set [in the shop window] had been decorated with reproductions of the Pompidou Art Center, which was gradually replacing the Eiffel Tower as a constituent feature of French design. The day's shocks caught up with him: he stared at the milk jug, feeling surprise because it did not tell him the time" (44). John Ardagh describes the Pompidou Centre (or Beaubourg), which opened in January of 1977, as "a multi-storey transparent structure of glass and steel, blazing out into the night, housing a museum of modern art, galleries, restaurants and reading rooms, a public library for a million volumes, and a modern music institute directed by Pierre Boulez. In its way it is attractive, and at least highly original, and will certainly fill a need in the life of this humdrum, commercial part of Paris. The much-debated question is whether its blatant modernism is in keeping with the area."32 Gallant's description in "Paris: The Taste of a New Age" would suggest that, despite some attraction, this centre, designed to be all things to all people,33 is a failure. Being in the Pompidou Centre, she writes, is "like being in a factory; in a refinery; in the airport at Roissy. On those long gray expanses one waits to hear a flight called. To some, it was a delayed, nostalgic tribute to the 19605, already obsolete by the time it opened, in 1977." She continues in this vein, describing how it attracts only tourists and "people who have nowhere else to go. They come in from the concrete ring. The new rapid underground trains bring them to the heart of the city in fifteen minutes. They seldom see anything more; Paris is Beaubourg ... They come out of a world entirely remote to Parisians. It could be a foreign film, a place from another decade." She concludes: "An art center has not attracted art or artists. It draws tourists, to whom it is a Parisian freak; a flow of restless, rootless young; speculators."34 In contrast to the alien and alienating Beaubourg, the Eiffel Tower, Barthes argues, unites inside and outside, passive and active, emptiness and fullness, seeing and being seen - "Like man himself, who is the only one not to know his own glance, the Tower is the only blind point of the total optical system of which it is the center and Paris the circumference" - and thus exists as a "concrete abstraction ... a corpus of intelligent forms."35 Compared with other Paris landmarks such as the imposing Arc de Triomphe, the dazzling Sacre Cceur perched high on a hill above Montmartre, or the soaring Eiffel Tower, built for the World's Fair of 1889 to celebrate the technology of the nineteenth century, the Pompidou Centre (although multistoreyed) seems squat and low.36 Built ostensibly for cultural purposes but located in a predominantly commercial area and bordering

223 Mapping Panoramic Landscapes

the renovated Les Halles area on the north side of the Seine, which until 1968 was the huge central food market, the Pompidou Centre has, somewhat predictably, failed to serve its cultural purpose other than as Gallant describes. A much more genuine monument is the commercial Montparnasse Tower to the south of the river overlooking and now overshadowing the district that during the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth was a centre for artists and writers. Gallant thus enlists Paris landmarks to direct their size, shape, location, and context to parodic ends. Staring at the milk jug with the images of the Pompidou Centre, Speck finds nothing that can gauge the time or give him a sense of what has gone wrong. At this point Lydia joins him and concedes to Speck rights on the show because, like a first lover, he has rights over the landscape he has broken and tamed. Speck first plays the coy, jilted lover who will have to pay unwanted and unrequited expenses, but then, having the vantage-point of the step of the bus, he looks down at her and curtly completes negotiations with "Very well... As we were" in an attempt to untangle guy-lines, reproportion landscape, and redirect his journey. Lydia turns her attention to the tea set in the window, "perhaps wondering if the ban on graven images could possibly extend to this. Speck had often meant to ask her about the Mickey Mouse napkins" with which she had served him cake on his first visit. By treating art and loyalty as commodities - Lydia seems capable only of a commercial response - she demonstrates the iconoclasm endorsed by her religion and thus seeks to destroy that which she fails to understand or appreciate. As Speck realizes the damage she has inflicted on his idea, he levels the playing-field so that both understand each other by shouting at her, "Fascist! Fascist! Fascist!" Leaving this eastern district of Paris and its "dark shopping center with its windows shining for no one ... a Magritte vision of fear" (45), Speck feels the landscape has been cleared to his advantage. On a new, flattened ground, they can work in the linear, structured, closed commercial terrain he prefers: "All that remained to them was the patch of landscape they held in common - a domain reserved for the winning, collecting, and sharing out of profits, a territory where believer and skeptic, dupe and embezzler, the loving and the faithless could walk hand in hand" (46). This reductive image of Paris contrasts sharply with the Paris Barthes describes symbolized by the Eiffel Tower, which even when "reduced to that simple line whose sole mythic function is to join, as the poet says, base and summit, or again, earth and heaven" yet is allembracing: "This pure - virtually empty - sign - is ineluctable, because it means everything"; "Thus the Tower-as-object furnishes its observer,

224 Learning to Look

provided he insinuates himself into it, a whole series of paradoxes, the delectable contraction of an appearance and of its contrary reality."37 What remains in "Speck's Idea" is an inversion of the Edenic image of two opposites, male and female, walking together in a landscape where innocence has been lost but knowledge gained through initiation to difference; instead, the commercial landscape is a "patch" where distinctions have been eradicated by the strongest and fittest. Another inversion follows, of heaven and hell, but an inversion conveyed primarily through colour and light rather than line and shape: "He opened his eyes and saw rain clouds over Paris glowing with light - the urban aurora. It seemed to Speck that he was entering a better weather zone, leaving behind the gray, indefinite mist in which the souls of discarded lovers are said to wander. He welcomed this new and brassy radiation. He saw himself at the center of a shadeless drawing, hero of a sort of cartoon strip, subduing Lydia, taming Henriette ... In the cleared land of Speck's future, a yellow notebook fluttered and lay open at a new page" (46-7). Form - the idea, the shape - has virtually obliterated content. Cruche (French for pitcher) is simply a crucible or a beaker in which metals are melted down and mixed to form an alloy, an inferior or debased admixture. The milk jug at which Speck stares holds a clue to the levelling and homogenizing tendencies of his times. The variegated grey of Paris, which in "One Morning in June" Gallant describes as "containing] every shade in a beam of light,"38 that grey which for Speck connotes weakness and timidity, is now behind him as he welcomes his dawn, "the urban aurora," "this new and brassy radiation" to the north. Slang for both money and high-ranking (especially military) officials, "brass" is open to multiple readings; most significant for a visual reading, brass is a yellow alloy of copper and zinc. The drawing complete, colours - primary, secondary, and inferior admixtures - are added to the canvas to complement the parodic effects of line and shape. Yellow, the main colour in "Speck's Idea" and associated with the pages of the notebook where Speck jots down and revises his idea, is adulterated with the addition of brown tones: the autumn leaves of the chestnut trees, which blow from the church square of St Clotilde's to Speck's gallery door and remind him that autumn is "a season bad for art" (2), and "the yellowing pamphlets" in Amandine's window display.39 Connected with Church and State, the yellowbrown shades, along with "the second-hand books ... and the overpriced cartoons," give the tone of something "old-fashioned rather than dangerous, though [Speck] knew that the slogan crowning [Amandine's] arrangement, 'Europe for Europeans,' echoed from a

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dark political valley" (6). Other impurities added to yellow parallel the contortions that Speck must undergo when his idea requires the co-operation of Lydia Cruche to be realized. The red-gold of Lydia's hair, the quintessence of the idea of artist's wife passed from Bellefeuille to Speck (15), is now ash-grey and either pinned up (22) or covered with a brown velvet turban. On the occasion of Lydia's wearing this turban, the parodic effects are reinforced by her interruption of Speck arguing with Walter over keeping a gift of a red and blue carpet, which Walter is vacuuming to make all one colour and, consequently, tolerable to Speck (37). Red is not Speck's preferred colour, associated as it is with damnation and the political left. Blue, particularly the royal blue that the Amandine bookstore is painted, is "a conservative color he found reassuring" (2). Faubourg SaintGermain has not proved as secure as Speck hoped: Chassepoule "seemed to spend most of his time wiping blood off the collected speeches of Mussolini," yet Speck still thinks that "the commerce of art is without bias" (5), that it can be as "neutral" as the stripe running "through the pattern of mottled reds and blues" on Walter's carpet (37). Red, blue, and yellow - the primary colours - like pure metals, none survives untarnished when mixed; the secondary colour or alloy is always inferior. The one reference to orange, the complementary colour to blue, occurs when Speck wants to purchase a Bible to mark passages to counter Lydia's Japhethite arguments against art but cannot find a traditional black Bible and must settle for an English translation with an orange dust-jacket. His Bible reading, which "consisted of the assurance of downing one's enemies, dashing them against stones, seeing their children reduced to beggary and their wives to despair" (33), serves to raise his spirits for the match ahead. The two references to green, the complement of red, although slight, are connected in a suggestive way: ever since Henriette's review of "a book that described how refined sugar taken into one's system turned into a fog of hideous green," her caution, "'A Marxist Considers Sweets/ unreeled in Speck's mind if he was confronted with a cookie" or any other sugar-laden confection (18); yet he plies his artists' widows with not only the sweets they crave but also flowers, and so presents Lydia with "a spray of pale-green orchids imported from Brazil" to replace the roses he sent that died immediately (23). The third secondary colour, complementary to yellow, is not mentioned in "Speck's Idea." Despite Walter's contention that the carpet "will look better when it's all one color," the blues and reds simply do not mix to form purple and, instead, produce a "neutral" stripe (37). Because red and blue are primary colours on the colour wheel,

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they should, like vertical and horizontal, or warp and weft, have a juncture. Instead, in the current political climate, red and blue behave like left and right: they are diametrically opposed and thus unable to meet and blend. Purple is a colour that Gallant uses elsewhere for parodic effects: in "The Moslem Wife," as seen earlier in this chapter, and in "A Painful Affair."40 Perhaps the parodic treatment of purple patches of prose replaces any direct allusions to purple in "Speck's Idea." A pamphlet, "crudely printed on cheap pink paper," picked up by Speck at the end of the story, is more "purple" than any other passage. On the black and white page, however, Gallant depends on size and shape rather than colour to achieve her parodic effects: FRENCHMEN! FOR THE SAKE OF EUROPE, FIGHT THE GERMANO-AMERICANO-ISRAELO HEGEMONY! Germans in Germany! Americans in America! Jews in Israel! For a True Europe, For One Europe, Death to the Anti-European Hegemony! (47)

Earlier, as Speck jotted his original notes for the show, the image of his words printed "on a creamy catalogue page" has provided him with inspiration (10). Now, rewriting his introduction to the show, Speck transposes the confused political proclamations of the pamphlet on to the back of the pink sheet rather than into his usual yellow notebook. He begins by praising Cruche for seeing "with instinctive prescience ... the need for a Europe united from the Atlantic to the" but breaks off his sentence. Speck, with his preference for westward movement (he is now travelling from the eastern city limits westward into the city), is unable to imagine any further eastward movement. He continues but again cannot finish his thought: "That Cruche skirted the murky zone of partisan politics is a tribute to his ..." (47-8). His notes become increasingly disjointed and elliptical; he has not "skirted the murky zone of partisan politics" but intruded deep into enemy territory in his game of power politics with Lydia. "Nothing political had ever struck Speck as being above the level of a low-grade comic strip" (6), and as he now sees himself "at the center of a shadeless drawing, hero of a sort of cartoon strip" (46), he is a white speck lost in the "dark political valley" (6) he has been compelled to enter. Each transaction to wrest

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paintings from the widows has been a political act: "Like a swan in muddy waters, Speck's ancient Bentley cruised the suburbs where his painters had lived their last resentful seasons" (18). The speck recedes into the panoramic map of Paris, a map similar to that which Barthes describes "under the Tower's gaze, composing] itself like an abstract canvas in which dark oblongs (derived from a very old past) are contiguous with the white rectangles of modern architecture."41 Each transaction with Lydia has brought Speck closer to the edge of an abyss. At first he tells her that the point of the show is "getting Cruche back on the market. The time has come - the time to ... to attack. To attack the museums with Hubert Cruche": "As he said this, Speck saw the great armor-plated walls of the Pompidou Art Center and the chink in the armor through which an 80 x 95 Cruche 1919 abstract might slip ... And France was the least of it; London, Zurich, Stockholm, and Amsterdam materialized as frescoes representing the neoclassical facades of four handsome banks. Overhead, on a Baroque ceiling, nymphs pointed their rosy feet to gods whose chariots were called Tokyo' and 'New York.'" He has won the battle, and his final leap will not be over the edge of a cliff (20), but upward to gain control of the ingress to that boot-shaped country: "Because this one I am keeping, Speck decided; this one will be signed: 'By Sandor Speck.' He smiled at the bright, wet streets of Paris as he and Cruche, together, triumphantly crossed the Alps" (48). Speck's idea is the balloon that will float him over the Alps; his gallery will thus acquire the prestige and stability he has so long sought. In "Overhead in a Balloon," which takes place several years later, Walter provides a glimpse of his employer, harassed by financial problems. Speck has just paid "a packet" for a picture story in a Sunday supplement, "with captions that laid stress on the establishment's boldness, vitality, visibility, international connections, and financial vigor." One of the photographs tells another story, a picture of Speck "close to collapse, leaning for support against the wall safe in his private office" (50). This, of course, may simply be what Walter wants to see. Walter confesses to Aymeric his hatred of all art except the kind that Aymeric does on commission: "That, at least, has some meaning - it lets people see how they imagine they live" (54). Aymeric has turned from painting portraits during the "sunnier decades" of his career to pictures of ivy-covered country houses with white shutters, "a stretch of lawn with white chairs and a teapot and cups," and his client's and his own names "cleverly embedded" into the social calendar of Le Figaro, whose "scattered pages" are casually reproduced (49). Already Aymeric's market, these "slabs of Parisarea real estate, to be sold and sold again," has dried up (50). The

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irreversible economic decline predicted in "Speck's Idea" has taken its toll, and "art had sunk low on the scale of consumer necessities." Speck has been forced to show "part of his own collection - his lastditch old-age-security reserve" - and to "flog" his Vlaminck India ink, which "had been certified genuine by an expert now serving a jail sentence in Zurich" (35), to one of the Marxist embassies on his street. Political and religious factions, competing to survive in a market-driven economy, have devalued belief and principles in order to be all things to all people as they wage war to retain their foothold (13). Now the artists, gallery owners, and patrons have entered the fray, where differences are welcomed with the fist. Because the Eiffel Tower is "an utterly useless monument," a uselessness that bestows on it "the great imaginary function which enables men to be strictly human," "it achieves a kind of zero degree of the monument; it participates in no rite, in no cult, not even in Art."42 Now, however, it has been replaced by essentially commercial edifices, the dwarfed Beaubourg and dwarfing Montparnasse Tower. As monoliths, great levellers, engorging and spewing out a homogenized product, both fail to nourish. "The dark shopping center with its windows shining for no one was a Magritte vision of fear" (45). Will this be the function of future art? Will windows eventually be dimmed in the void as light is totally absorbed? Will the dark shopping centre itself be all that remains? Barthes argues that with the Eiffel Tower at the heart of Paris, "there is no fantasy which fails, sooner or later, to acknowledge its form and to be nourished by it."43 Speck has seen hope, a future, in the "new and brassy radiation" of "the urban aurora" (46). A similar image in "Luc and His Father" (9 Oct. 1982) links this radiation to the rise of the New Right. Luc has been attracted by a political group that gathers on winter afternoons "to consider the false starts of history"; he sits in "a pale room, with a soft-voiced old man telling him about an older, truer Europe. Luc was learning a Europe caught in amber, unchanging, with trees for gods."44 Later in this story the amber haze assumes browner tones, in colours reminiscent of "The Four Seasons" but far more sinister and foreboding: "Above the city stretched a haze of pollution, unstirring, all of an even color. The sun suffused the haze with amber dye, which by some grim alchemy was turned into dun. Roger saw through the haze to a forgotten city, unchanging, and it was enough to wrench the heart" (88). The "brassy radiation" appears new to Speck, but as these similar amber images suggest, it is simply the inferior glow of any culture whose institutions have developed to serve Mammon. While the current political and social climate persists, there can be no art in which

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opposites find a balance and complements a juncture. Instead, what will continue is the aggressive - often violent - takeover of weak by strong in an attempt to expunge difference. Rudolf Arnheim writes that "in an iconic image, such as a map, no detail is ever hermetically closed off from its context. Maps discourage the isolation of single items. They preserve the continuity of the real world. They show things in their surroundings and therefore call for more active discernment on the part of the user ... the user is also invited to look at things intelligently. One aspect of looking at things intelligently is to look at them in context."45 Farce and parody are appropriate modes for Gallant to expose the impercipience of characters to the vast panorama against which their own lives are mere specks. Barthes defines panorama as "an image we attempt to decipher, in which we try to recognize known sites, to identify landmarks." Panoramas, Barthes continues, demand intelligent viewing: "that is what intelligence is: to reconstitute, to make memory and sensation cooperate so as to produce in your mind a simulacrum of Paris, of which the elements are in front of you, real, ancestral, but nonetheless disoriented by the total space in which they are given to you, for this space was unknown to you ... a panorama can never be consumed as a work of art ... the bliss of sensation (nothing happier than a lofty outlook) does not suffice to elude the questioning nature of the mind before any image."46 The forms of farce and parody permit Gallant to reveal her characters' failure, in their desire to make everyone and everything conform to their own "specks," to perceive the diversity in their panoramic landscapes. They are modernist characters in a postmodernist narrative. Linda Hutcheon argues that "postmodernism's irony is one that rejects the resolving urge of modernism toward closure or at least distance. Complicity always attends its critique."47 Overhead in a balloon, Gallant's characters have opportunities to view the panoramic landscape and read its map, but overwhelmed by the balloon itself and buoyed high above the ground, they fail to see the landscape below or the guy-lines attaching balloon to basket. In her farcical and parodic treatment of contemporary Paris, in the most demanding and challenging fiction she has written to date, Gallant marshals all the tools of the visual arts to expose the panoramic landscape below. As readers, we are engaged - often unwittingly - in the mapping of the landscape, its plotting and critique.

7 Towards an Illumination of Gallant's Late Fiction

Speaking generally of "the metaphysic that informs Gallant's vision of reality/' Janice Keefer concludes that "Gallant's way of seeing is at the furthest possible remove from that of the visionary"; nowhere, Keefer contends, are there "the consolations of form, the artist's role as priest of the imagination, and the proposition that art can somehow order and make meaningful the chaos of experience."1 Gallant's canon provides few examples of vision and illumination in the conventional sense: an artist's revelation of the unseen or elucidation of the opaque by infusing the raw material of art with a spiritual or intellectual light that kindles or sparks in the reader an intensified responsiveness and thus more enlightened outlook on life. In Gallant's earliest fiction, published in the 19405 and 19505, characters through whom the narrative is told or reflected tend to be too myopic because too self-absorbed to acquire a perspective and sense of proportion to discern the gap between subject and object, preconception and reality; nevertheless, Gallant's readers, alert to her fiction's visual cues, are provided with fluid and multiple perspectives that permit them to bridge these gaps and so gain insight that the characters fail to attain. Gallant's fiction of the 19605 and early 19705 exposes the effects of the characters' purblindness, chiefly the dehumanization consequent upon the imposition of pattern or shape by those too incapacitated by narrow circumstances or maimed psyche to escape "the consolation of form" to which Keefer refers; thus, as with the earliest fiction, insight or illumination, while available to Gallant's responsive readers, is often closed to the characters. With

231 Towards an Illumination of Gallant's Late Fiction the expansion of Gallant's palette as she represents her world and simultaneously celebrates and parodies it, especially in her stories of the mid and late 19705, moments of illumination multiply for characters and readers alike. This illumination, fluid and open, resembles the impact of parody described by Linda Hutcheon: "With parody - as with any form of reproduction - the notion of the original as rare, single, and valuable (in aesthetic or commercial terms) is called into question. This does not mean that art has lost its meaning and purpose, but that it will inevitably have a new and different significance. In other words, parody works to foreground the politics of representation ... post-modernist parody is a value-problematizing, de-naturalizing form of acknowledging the history (and through irony, the politics) of representations."2 In a world grown dark through the reductiveness caused by materialism and commercialism, traditional light effects connoting inspiration and enlightenment are inappropriate. This is apparent in the outbreaks of violence that punctuate Gallant's stories during a threeyear period at the end of the 19705 and beginning of the 19805 - from the time of "Speck's Idea" (19 Nov. 1979) to "Grippes and Poche" (29 Nov. 1982) - and that then recur in stories of the 19905 such as "In Plain Sight" (25 Oct. 1993) and "Scarves, Beads, Sandals" (20 and 27 Feb. 1995). Only a writer who has guided her readers to look and see - among even the palest and darkest and greyest shades will provide illumination and discover light in the black madness of the contemporary world and psyche. Gallant's most recent achievements re-create her world with the perspective, density, shading, coloration, and occasional muted and splintered light effects that not simply reflect and double but also refract and multiply the original. V I O L E N C E IN A C O L O U R L E S S , S T R U C T U R E D W O R L D ! 1979-1982

Violence is particularly evident in the group of four stories anthologized in Overhead in a Balloon - "A Painful Affair," "Larry," "A Flying Start," and "Grippes and Poche"3 - tied together loosely through the character of Henri Grippes, a French novelist living in Paris, and in a sequel to this quartet, "In Plain Sight," that is included in The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. "Grippes and Poche," the most substantial of the five stories, focuses on the relationship Grippes develops with O. Poche, a tax controller who summons Grippes to query his financial statements and becomes his muse for a series of novels Grippes publishes in the 19605 and 19705. Passing time is marked by the changing colour of the file folders in which Grippes's financial

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records are kept in Poche's office. When Grippes is first summoned to Poche's "windowless, brown-painted cubicle," France is five years into de Gaulle's presidency; Grippes's as yet meagre record is enclosed in "a dun-colored folder" (130). Time passes: "The duncolored Gaullist-era jacket on Grippes' file had worn out long ago and been replaced, in 1969, by a cover in cool banker's green. Green presently made way for a shiny black-and-white marbled effect, reflecting the mood of opulence of the early seventies. Called in for his annual springtime confession, Grippes remarked about the folder: 'Culture seems to have taken a decisive turn'" (139). Later in the 19705 the black-and-white folder is replaced by one in "a pretty peach mottled shade" that darkens and fails to stand up to Grippes's annual reviews: "It was the heyday of the Giscardian period, when it seemed more important to keep the buttons polished than to watch where the regiment was heading" (140). At the story's end, with a Socialist government in power, Grippes "wonder[s] about the new file cover. Pink? Too fragile - look what had happened with the mottled peach. Strong denim blue, the shade standing for giovinezza and workers' overalls? It was no time for a joke, not even a private one" (147). Ironically, the file folders in the tax office provide the colour in these stories about Paris, and the essentially colourless but structured Poche provides the inspiration for Grippes's series of novels. The novels emerge as Grippes becomes aware of "shadowy outlines behind a frosted-glass pane" and then admits these incarnations of Poche; these shadows are "turned into young men, each bringing his own name and address, his native region of France portrayed on color postcards, and an index of information" (136). Being shadows, they fail to illuminate present or future but instead represent Grippes's reactionary response and avoidance of the contemporary world, "a slice of French writing about life as it had been carved up and served a generation before" (137). Years earlier Grippes has been deterred from moving to London by Victor Prism's obviously exaggerated but still "strange and terrifying account of gang wars, with pimps and blackmailers shot dead on the steps of the National Gallery" (103). Now Grippes is confronted with equally terrifying scenes of violence that at least partially explain his failure to confront contemporary life. Grippes's "illumination," like Speck's, occurs one winter evening, but what seems imminent now is the final sunset rather than the brazen dawn of the earlier Overhead in a Balloon stories: "he crossed Boulevard du Montparnasse just as the lights went on - the urban moonrise. The street was a dream street, faces flat white in the winter

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mist. It seemed to Grippes that he had crossed over to the nineteeneighties, had only just noticed the new decade. In a recess between two glassed-in sidewalk cafes, four plainclothes cops were beating up a pair of pickpockets." Grippes justifies not writing about "real life" with the argument that "to depict life is to attract its ill-fortune," but he then decides that there is a greater authority than the violence he has just witnessed: "Four gun-bearing young men in jeans and leather jackets were not final authority; final authority was something written, the printed word, even when the word was mistaken. The simplest final authority in Grippes' life had been O. Poche and a book of rules" (146-7). And so Grippes finds himself faced with a void, unable to find anything in today's world about which to write. "The frosted-glass door was reverting to dull white; there were fewer shadows for Grippes to let in"; ultimately Grippes faces "a flat-white glass door" (145-6). Grippes thinks he has found a new muse, a woman he has seen praying in a "rebel church ... where services were still conducted in Latin," but she "moved off in a gray blur" with "a streaming window between them Grippes could not wipe clean" (148-9). To avoid fear and obsession, harbingers of madness, Grippes retreats further into the past for his subjects and inspiration; as he moves from white to grey, the black "madness" of his landscape and inscape threatens (149-50). A change in government brings no changes to this landscape but simply hands the reins of power over to the more aggressive faction of the moment. "In Plain Sight" demonstrates Grippes's disillusion when the Left is given its chance to incarnate the principles to which it had been clinging for over five decades. These principles have taken the shape of "Utopia rising out of calm waters, like Atlantis emerging, dripping wet and full of promise" with "spires and gleaming windows, the marble pavements and year-round unchanging sunrise." For Grippes this image disappears when "a computerized portrait of Francois Mitterrand, first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic, had unrolled on the television screen, in the manner of a window blind. Grippes ... had voted for a short list of principles, not their incarnation."4 When they have the potential to be realized, Grippes's principles assume a new form: "Utopia was a forsaken city now, bone-dry, the color of scorched newsprint. Desiccated, relinquished, it announced a plaintive message" (878). Grippes writes well into the night an article entitled "Utopia Our Way," which he keeps "as cloudy and imprecise as his native talent could make it. Visions of perfection emerge and fade but the written word remains to trip the author who runs too fast for his time or lopes alongside at not quite the required pace" (880). Grippes is of the second variety

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of writer. His reconstruction of Utopia is as an imagined cinema of bygone days with leg-room, clean floors, ice cream "sold by a motherly vendor, [which] tasted of real vanilla," and audiences that applauded indiscriminately. The once "capacious theater" has "been cut into eight small places, each the size of a cabin in a medium-haul jet." Grippes's article concludes with confidence "that a drastic change, risen from the very depths of an ancient culture, would soon restore intelligible speech" (881). Grippes's domestic problems are no less banal than his politics. Public and private are eerie reflections of one another. He is haunted by Mme Parfaire (to polish, to perfect), who wishes to play wife, mother, servant, and muse to him. Her only rival seems to be Mme Obier, who dresses "in layers of fuzzy black." For others Mme Obier may be one of "the floating shreds of his past," but for Grippes "she was the fragment of a rich cultural past," the past "of the sixties, when her flowing auburn hair and purple tights had drawn cheers in the Coupole." It is little wonder that Grippes, shadowing his older women friends across "the line to a final zone of muddle, mistakes, and confused expectations" (870-1), discovers that his resources and inspiration are growing dim. The story concludes: "his goddess is a victim of the times, hard up for currency and short of ideas, ideas of divine origin in particular. She scarcely knows how to eke out the century. Meanwhile, she hangs on to 'Residents are again .../ hoping (just as Grippes does) that it amounts to the equivalent of the folding money every careful city dweller keeps on hand for muggers" (887). Alternative images connoting inspiration in "In Plain Sight" offset these final allusions to devalued currency and testy notices penned to fellow tenants. "As an inventor of a great number of imaginary events Grippes knows that the reflection of reality is no more than just that; it is as flat and mute as a mirror. Better to sound plausible than merely in touch with facts" (885). What provides Grippes with the inspiration to forge links between past and present, personal and public, memory and history, inner and outer, imagination and fact, is an inexplicable two-toned siren, which for older Parisians "has the tone and pitch of a newsreel soundtrack. They think, Before the war, and remember things in black-and-white." This siren interweaves with Grippes's sleeping dreams and thus keeps his "rare bursts of political optimism in perspective ... with a mixture of dread and unaccountable nostalgia: the best possible mixture for a writer's psyche" (868). Depending solely on verbal memory stimulated by the garishness of his immediate surroundings - clouds that have "soaked up the lights of Montparnasse and gave them back as a reddish glow," moths that "beat about inside the red shade" of his

235 Towards an Illumination of Gallant's Late Fiction

desk lamp - Grippes finds himself plagiarizing words he has heard and read (881-2). He finally digs into his remembered past and recreates a visual image, rather than a verbal account, that has the immediacy and originality to blend imagination and fact and so to illuminate and validate the narrative it sparks. Grippes begins to shade in a drawing he has been sketching of "a tall Renault, all right angles, built in the thirties, still driven in the early forties by blackmarket operators and the police. He shaded it black and put inside three plainclothes inspectors" (882). The drawing becomes mobile in his memory as the car approaches his grandparents' farm and, after young Henri has inadvertently betrayed his grandfather, as it leaves with his handcuffed grandfather. The young Henri has given the police the clue they need to the whereabouts of his grandfather's contraband money when he suggests that they look "in the dark and in plain sight" (883). With his structured men and pious women Grippes has avoided the dark and thus the light that the abysses of memory and history might shed on his life in contemporary Paris. In "Grippes and Poche" Grippes's series of novels inspired by Poche has earned him acclaim and popularity with readers of every type: "The shoreline of the eighties, barely in sight, was ready to welcome Grippes, who had re-established the male as hero, whose left-wing heartbeat could be heard, loyally thumping, behind the armor of his right-wing traditional prose" (Overhead in a Balloon, 141-2). Later, when Poche has deserted him as muse, and Grippes is considering whether the pious woman he has seen praying will be his next, he wonders if "he could get away with dealing with her from a distance. All that was really needed for a sturdy right-wing novel was its pessimistic rhythm: and then, and then, and then, and death. Grippes had that rhythm" (148). Now, years later, in "In Plain Sight" the siren's two tones split rather than mesh, and Grippes still favours the linear form: "He could hear two distinct tones and saw them as lines across the sky: a shrill humming - a straight, thin path - and a lower note that rose and dipped and finally descended in a slow spiral, like a plane shot down ... the somewhat deeper note fell away quite soon; the other, more piercing cry streamed on and on, and gradually vanished in the bright day" (Selected Stories, 885-6). In "these leaden times" (876) Grippes has failed to discern the spiralling silver plane, preferring the linear movement that he thinks connects past to present to future ... and death. For Grippes the siren remains "a long ribbon of sound [that] unwinds in his sleep," and he cannot capture the image on paper. He cannot transpose visual to verbal: "Everything is gray-on-gray - pavement, windows, doorways,

236 Learning to Look

faces, clothes - under an opaque white sky. A child turns toward the camera - toward Grippes, the unmoving witness. Then, from a level still deeper than the source of the scene rises an assurance that lets him go on sleeping: None of this is real." The call goes unheeded. Although he associates the air-raid siren with his war years on the farm with his grandparents and in Paris after his betrayal of his grandfather, he cannot trace how or why he makes this association: "it still belongs to black-and-white adventures - in a habitual dream, perhaps to peace of a kind" (874). The image of the "silvery plane" (874, 875), also associated with the air-raid siren, is from "the slow, steady swindle of history and experience" (882) that he denies: it is from the war films he saw in his youth, "the best historical evidence his waking mind can muster" (874), and the sites of films being shot in contemporary Paris in which "a silvery plane ... follows its own clear-cut shadow over the heart of Paris" to incite the "authentic" appearance of "panic in the streets" (875). For Grippes, the silvery, downward-spiralling plane remains simply a metaphor to describe the lower tone of the siren. The only effect that an awareness of the greys has on him is to make him wary of donning his newly cleaned, apple-green plastic jacket "acquired a whole generation ago. The jacket might seem too decorative for these leaden times - it is the remnant of a more frivolous decade ... but it is not shabby. Shabbiness arouses contempt in the world outlook of a goon. It brings on the sharp edge of the knife" (876). As the bohemian auburn hair and purple tights of Mme Obier are of the past, so too the apple-green jacket; he instead seriously considers the option of the "rose velvet" middle-class respectability of Mme Parfaire, which would not only provide him with well-cooked meals and vigilant caretaking but also "stop the downward spiral of her dreams," which implicate him in sinister intrusions on her life (878, 886). In contrast, Gallant's muse continues to spark the imagination, and Gallant herself to illuminate life around her - past and present, history and contemporary events - material that while perhaps "in the dark" is also "in plain sight." Nor has she, as Grippes, mired in a "sturdy right-wing" prose rhythm of "and then, and then, and then, and death," reached a stalemate. Instead, she has caught the movement of the silvery plane, not just plummeting but levelling off, rising, dipping, looping. Emulating the movement of a plane rather than the restricted linear movement of the hot-air balloon, her muse has inspired her to reflect and refract the world around her with the perspective, density, shading, coloration, and illumination, however subdued and fragmented, essential to escape flat reproductions that fail to be plausible.

237 Towards an Illumination of Gallant's Late Fiction

"VISIONS OF PERFECTION" ILLUMINATED While reflecting and refracting contemporary scenes and issues, "Speak's Idea" and "Overhead in a Balloon" parody the metaphoric conception of the illuminative function and significance of art, and hence its visionary potential. When Speck considers the structure of his spring show, his first thought is that "it might be worthwhile lacquering the walls black, concentrating strong spots on the correspondence, which straddled half a century, from Degas to Cocteau."5 This correspondence is as much an invention as the artist to whom it is addressed: "Populist yet refined, local but universal, he would send rays, beacons, into the thickening night of the West, just as Speck's gallery shone bravely into the dark street" (8). In Cruche, Speck thinks he has found the artist to give lustre to "the comforting lights of the gallery" (7), but Speck's lights are eclipsed by the derrick lights, shop windows, and brassy radiation of commerce and industry more powerful than his small gallery. For Walter art is a rival to religion as a form of creation, "a dabbling in colors, sentiment cut loose and set afloat by the sight of a stained-glass window" (60). In a world in which "we have stopped trusting our feelings" and "been shown not only the smile but the teeth" (9), the gleaming white animal smile of Lydia Cruche emerging victorious out of the dark with her battered black umbrella raised as a trophy (44-5) could well ensure the failure of art to guide, sustain, or illuminate. With the more delicate, mellow tones of the Magdalena quartet, the only lights that seem to blaze are those of the checkpoint when the train is brought to a stop; however, once these are seen to be "dull and brown,"6 other lights, mostly artificial, to compensate for the lack of natural light, are perceived as providing the consolation of companionship and community: Magdalena with her "sunny hair" (154) and "sunny" nature (157); the harsh yellow star that stands out "on top of some folded silk things the color of the palest edge of sunrise" (156); Edouard and Juliette's L-shaped apartment, so dark that "the lights [were] turned on all day in winter," and their studies, from which they "could look out and see the comforting glow of each other's working life, a lamp behind a window" (1623). Edouard thinks art to be antithetical to these lights and sense of community. As Magdalena and Edouard part at Marseilles, he inserts a book of poetry between them because "poetry is meant for one reader only. Magdalena, gazing tenderly down from the compartment window, must have seen just the shape of the poem on the page. I turned away from the slant of morning sunlight - not away

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from her ... I stuck to our promise and never once raised my eyes. At the same time, I saw everything - the shade of her white hatbrim aslant on her face, her hand with the wedding ring" (160). Edouard prefers to move in shadows, given the damage he has inflicted on the lives of the two women he loves and the exposure that full light might impart. When Juliette learns that Edouard has seen Magdalena several times more than the once he admits to, she scrutinizes him closely, as she would the American novels she translates, and has one of her "unexpected visions. Just now, it was as if three walls of the court outside had been bombed flat. Through a bright new gap she saw straight through to my first marriage. We my first wife and I - postured in the distance, like characters in fiction" (165). Appropriately Edouard makes documentary television series, having given up any aspirations he had as a young man to write novels about characters who fail to recognize that they are "all dead ... in a special Hell, made to measure" (171): "Because I can't wrench life around to make it fit some fantasy. Because I don't know how to make life sound worse or better, or how to make it sound true" (174). He instead enters his own Hell made to measure, the life of "one of those uneasy, shadowy couples, perpetually waiting for a third person to die or divorce" (181). Only after Juliette dies does he brave "the flat, shadeless light of [the suburban] line ... said to attract violent crime" (177) to visit his now infirm "poor, mad, true, and only wife," Magdalena, but he still spurns the illumination that her "pure love" might spark (187). In contrast, Juliette has sought and discovered "a different coloration to her manner, a glaze of independence, as though she had been exposed to a new kind of sun," when, after travelling alone to America, she returns and demands an interview with Magdalena (181). This interview may bring nothing but her recognition and acceptance that "those who outlasted jeopardy had to be covered" (165), but this "chink of light"7 sustains her and confers on her a certain dignity in her sacrifices and disappointments. The same stoicism and moderation, which come with hardship and experience, and therefore the same mellow colours and flickering lights emerging from darkness, whiteness, and greyness, pervade Across the Bridge. The opening quartet - "1933," "The Chosen Husband," "From Cloud to Cloud," and "Florida"8 - is typical. The final two stories are dominated by the relationship between Raymond and the Carette sisters, Marie and Berthe, Raymond's mother and aunt respectively. Raymond, the perpetual adolescent decked out in his silver and white cowboy suit, still clings to "the summer of 1969, for the ease with which he jumped from cloud to cloud" with a mother and aunt who doted on him: "Berthe thinks of how easy it must have

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been for Raymond to leave, with the sun freshly risen, slanting along side streets, here and there front steps sluiced and dark, the sky not yet a burning glass ... When she and Marie ransacked the house on Boulevard Pie ix, looking for clues, imagining he'd left a letter, left some love, they kept the shades drawn, as if there were another presence in the rooms, tired of daylight" (41). This other presence is that of Marie's deceased husband, Louis, the intricate arrangements leading to their marriage being the subject of "The Chosen Husband." Raymond's last memories of his father are of him "dying of emphysema, upright in the white-painted wicker chair, in blazing forbidden sunlight." Louis spends his last days with "gaze upturned ... as if ... seeking divine assistance," staring "at a moon in sunlight, pale and transparent - a memory of dozens of other waning moons" (34). Raymond, attracted by a recruitment advertisement on television picturing "a swaying carpet of jungle green, filmed from a helicopter," has enlisted to fight in the war in Vietnam (39). Father and son both are burnt out from this futile seeking of something of significance in barren landscapes. In "Florida" Marie and Berthe also seek something of significance through their gaiety and symbols of affluence. Marie dresses for a paltry Christmas dinner at Raymond's latest seedy Florida motel venture in her hibiscus-patterned chiffon and her red sandals, and boasts of Berthe's red and gold Christmas tree and of her sister's purchasing power: Berthe buys her own fur coats, the latest "a mink coat (pastel, fully let out)" (46-8). Marie returns from Florida "dressed in a new outfit of some sherbet tone - strawberry, lemon-peach - with everything matching, sometimes even her hair" (43). Little has changed since, as young women in "The Chosen Husband," Marie and Berthe dressed alike in marine blues, reds, and whites (13-14, 21, 22, 28). Only on the day that Louis comes to propose marriage is Marie dressed in colours of mourning - she wears Berthe's mauve and black kimono with a mauve chiffon scarf over Berthe's aluminium curlers - but she immediately changes into "Berthe's white sharkskin sundress and jacket and toeless suede shoes" (27). Like garish splashes of colour on a neutral background, these women fail to find "grounding," and Marie absorbs and then transmits to Berthe "silvery shocks" - "like a small silver bullet" - every time she visits Florida (51, 44, 43). Even the "paper-white narcissi on Marie's dressing table, a welcome-home present [from Berthe] reflected on and on in the three mirrors ... absorbed a charge and hurled it back" (44). In contrast with the representatives of these later generations is Mme Carette, mother of Berthe and Marie, portrayed in "1933" and "The Chosen Husband" in mauves and dove greys - "the colors of

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half-mourning" (5, 14) - shades that blend with the "whitish stone" of the houses with front steps "painted pearl-gray, to match the building stone" in the respectable part of Montreal where they live (13, 16): "She wore the neutral shades of half-mourning, the whitish grays of Rue Saint-Hubert, as though everything had to be used up - even remnants of grief" (21). Mme Carette is attired in the colours that best complement the black and white snapshots in which her image is captured and the memory she ultimately will become, the only "eternal" life she may attain: "The wedding party walked in a procession down the steps and around the corner: another impression in black-and-white. The August pavement burned under the women's thin soles ... Three yellow leaves fell - white, in a photograph" (30). Berthe, the spinster aunt, is both inside and outside this picture, as she will be both inside and outside the new family that forms when Marie leaves to live with her husband in a different part of town: "Berthe saw the street as if she were bent over the box camera, trying to keep the frame straight. It was an important picture, like a precise instrument of measurement" (31). "Forain" (24 June 1991) depicts a similar failure of bright lights and colours to blend with or complement the "leaden" tones of a world poised between darkness and light. Blaise Forain (he is French, although his surname might suggest otherwise), publisher of translations of East European literature, has a premonition of the final "blaze" his company will likely experience since "the destruction of the Wall - radiant paradigm - had all but demolished Forain" (123). He has just attended the funeral of the brightest light in the "Blaise Editions" firmament, Adam Tremski: "Every light in the city was ablaze in the dark rain. Seert through rivulets on a window, the least promising streets showed glitter and well-being ... Suddenly, although he had not really forgotten them, Forain remembered the manuscripts he had snatched back from Halina ... What if there were only a little, very little, left to be composed? ... Filling gaps was a question of style and logic, and could just as well take place after translation" (128-9). Forain goes ahead with his publication of Tremski's text, and despite his doubts about the translated and edited version, "a posthumous novel-length manuscript of Tremski's was almost ready for the printer, with a last chapter knitted up from fragments he had left trailing" (130). The gaps have been filled by translator, editor, and reader, but since the revisions depend solely on "style and logic," we are left to wonder how faithful Forain has remained to Tremski, to what degree the text illuminates the novel The Cherry Orchard, "with a moody description of curses and fistfights as imported workers try to install a satellite dish in the garden," that Forain himself has considered writing (124-5).

241 Towards an Illumination of Gallant's Late Fiction Among the stories of Overhead in a Balloon and Across the Bridge, "A State of Affairs" (23 Dec. 1991) emerges as the one most closely approximating the balancing of celebration and parody of Gallant's stories of the mid- and late 19705. The story excels in its effective use of second person to augment Gallant's characteristic third-person narration; the reader is therefore more directly addressed as inside and outside, unseen and seen, dark and light are threaded into everchanging positions and relationships. The perspective is flexible and fluid, unlike "The Concert Party" (25 Jan. 1988) and "Mile Dias de Corta" (28 Dec. 1992 and 4 Jan. 1993), in which the effect of secondperson narration is solely absurd. In "The Concert Party" the narrator, Steve Burnet, assumes a second-person perspective to address Harry Lapwing, a man he dislikes: "I thought that if I could not keep my feelings cordial I might at least try to flatten them out, and I remembered advice my Aunt Elspeth had given me: Tut yourself in the other fellow's place, Steve. It saves wear.'"9 Steve's experiment is unsuccessful: the "you" is capricious and obtrusive, and Harry Lapwing is as distasteful to Steve (and reader) as when the experiment began. All the "flattening" has succeeded in doing is bringing out Steve's old grudges and peevishness. In "Mile Dias de Corta," the drawing of the reader into the text is parodied as, throughout the story, the narrator addresses an actress who once boarded with her and who has become pregnant and then been abandoned by the narrator's son. The narrator has been prompted to write to this woman when, after many years, she sees her on a television commercial: "The shot of your face at the oven door, seen as though the viewer were actually in the oven, seemed to me original and clever. (Army said she had seen the same device in a commercial about refrigerators.) I wondered if the oven was a convenient height or if you were crouched on the floor" (155). In both examples the narrators' literalness in interpreting the world through other eyes flattens, frames, and eventually skews perspective and proportion. As Steve, in "The Concert Party," switches back from second to first person, he concedes: "In plain terms, this is not a recollection but the memory of one, riddled with mistakes of false time and with hindsight" (35). Once again, the concept that art has illuminative potential is parodied. In contrast, the beautifully balanced proportions and modulated shifts of "A State of Affairs" complement the lucid perspective that illuminates M Wroblewski's "state of affairs," so avoiding the ludicrous perspectives that mar these other two stories. In the opening pages of "A State of Affairs," "you" is introduced simply to reinforce the narrator's appeal to readers to put themselves in the scene and imagine or see the contemporary "state of affairs" as Wroblewski

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perceives it. As the story shifts gently and gradually into the mind of Wroblewski, the "you" embraces both reader and Wroblewski's correspondent, an old friend who has remained in Warsaw. The scenes shift more and more inwards after Wroblewski has received a long letter from his friend that tells of a death threat he has received in response to his talking on radio of his wartime ghetto experiences. His friend attributes this hatred to human nature: "On that score, nothing has changed ... It is in the brain, blood, and bone. I don't mean this for you. You were always different." Wroblewski takes his friend's comment as "a compliment, yes, but no one wants to be singled out, tested, examined, decreed an exception" (132), and so his anecdotes and observations become an argument to convince his friend that there is hope of redemption and salvation through the goodness of human nature. "He had been holding silent conversations with no one in particular for some time. Then the letter came and he began addressing his friend. He avoids certain words, such as 'problem,' 'difficulty/ 'catastrophe,' and says instead, 'A state of affairs'" (139). When, at the end of the story, the narrative shifts entirely to Wroblewski's monologue, the positions of reader and Warsaw correspondent completely overlap. We have been drawn into the "state of affairs" of this man who apologizes for being "boringly optimistic," even though he recognizes that there are distorted minds responsible for death threats and shouts of "Hitler lives!" This story is of a survivor to a survivor, and when Wroblewski ends with "I may have more to tell you tomorrow. In the meantime, I send you God's favor" (147), we feel that although, like his wife, he may be advancing to senility, it is not dementia, and that his optimism and blessings are warranted. Lucid and responsive, sane yet aware of the potential for madness, poised between light and dark, the perspective is quintessentially Gallant. Two versions of dawn in the story illuminate a reading of the light effects, particularly as associated with this theme of sanity and madness. The first comes with reference to Wroblewski's wife, Magda, who has lost all track of time and place: "She is poised on the moment between dark and light, when the last dream of dawn is shredding rapidly and awareness of morning has barely caught hold. She lives that split second all day long" (134). As Magda sinks further and further into memories of the past, her dawn is an extension of the night and the dreams it produces. In contrast, the second version of dawn is that of Wroblewski himself, who, recognizing the banality of evil and suffering, fears neither past nor present: "Shreds of episodes shrugged off, left behind, strewed the roads. Only someone

243 Towards an Illumination of Gallant's Late Fiction

pledged to gray dawns would turn back to examine them. You might as well collect every letter you see lying stained in a gutter and call the assortment an autobiography" (136). What, then, are the "chinks of light" in which Wroblewski expresses confidence (132)? What are these chinks of light that illuminate the grey dawn rather than recede into the blackness of night and madness? Wroblewski depends on these chinks of light because he lives in a bureaucratic world whose acts of charity are a parody of giving and receiving: the mayor's boxes of Christmas chocolates distributed to the elderly, dutifully collected despite their being unwanted and so staggeringly large that they are impossible to store (137); or the revocation of the television tax of a man who has simply "filed an affidavit" declaring his penury, "here, in Paris, where every resident is supposed to be accounted for; where the entire life of every authorized immigrant is lodged inside a computer or crammed between the cardboard covers of a dossier held together with frayed cotton tape" (138). Moreover, Wroblewski lives in a world whose colours he no longer recognizes. The coloured snapshots of relatives in Canberra that he receives from his wife's niece are of total strangers, and so he files them in large brown envelopes (131). When he receives a letter from "a Mme Carole Fournier, of Customers' Counselling Service" at his bank offering him a cash credit of fifteen thousand francs, he sees the gift as "a bright balloon with a long string attached. The string could be passed from hand to hand - to the bank and back. He saw himself holding fast to the string" (141-2). This balloon and string, he discovers, he is too old to receive. At the bank, he is in a red, white, and blue world that excludes him as much as does the termination of the Nansen passports, which until recently had entitled Wroblewski and other Polish political refugees to reside in France for nearly fifty years (139). On the "cerulean surface" of the bank's computer screen, he can read facts about himself: "Her computer, like all those he had noticed in the bank, had a screen of azure. It suggested the infinite." The red plastic rims of Mme Fournier's glasses match the two red combs in her hair. Her office is "a white cubicle with a large window and no door" and "white lateral blinds at the window." Outside the bank is a familiar world, but inside the colours complement the interrogation rather than the welcome that the letter implied he would receive (143). In contrast are the inviting white awning and umbrellas at a favourite neighbourhood cafe, the Atelier in Montparnasse, reminding him of "the South, when Nice and Monaco were still within his means and not too crowded ... He can retrace every step of their holiday round ... a change into spotless, pressed clothes

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- cream and ivory tones for Magda, beige or lightweight navy for him. An aperitif under a white awning" (136). The comfortable familiarity of this memory again contrasts with a recent excursion his doctor has ordered him to take after he has "had a dizzy spell in the street and had to enter a private art gallery and ask to sit down. (They were not very nice about it.)" Wroblewski has gone to SaintMalo, "alone in a wet season." He has visited Chateaubriand's grave, on which Sartre had urinated and "from the edge of the grave took the measure of the ocean": "He left the grave and the sea and started back to the walled city. He thought of other violations and of the filth that can wash over quiet lives. In the dark afternoon the lighted windows seemed exclusive, like careless snubs" (142). In Saint-Malo there is no pretence of Wroblewski's being anything but an outsider, whereas the bank has trifled with its customers' desire to be special, part of an exclusive circle or club. Wroblewski, enticed by the deceptively affable tone, thinks that the cash credit might prove useful to his wife after he has died and before the will is settled. When he first approaches Customers' Counselling Service, he continues to feel welcome, as Carole Fournier's "profile reminded him of an actress, Elzbieta Barszczewska. When Barszczewska died, in her white wedding dress, at the end of a film called The Leper, the whole of Warsaw went into mourning" (143). As the cordial and gracious atmosphere turns into that of an interrogation, Wroblewski and Mrne Fournier, understanding that the system has made them both dupes, refuse to let the system undermine their humanity and dignity. Mme Fournier, "touch[ing] her talisman, Gemini, as if it really could allow her a double life: one with vexations and one without," apologizes to Wroblewski and tells him he should not worry about "the problem" of his death. Nor is Wroblewski a comic figure in the silly charade the bank has inflicted upon him: "He adjusted his hat at a jaunty angle. Everything he had on that day looked new, even the silk ascot, gray with a small pattern of yellow, bought by Magda at Arnys, on the Rue de Sevres - oh, fifteen years before. Nothing was frayed or faded. He never seemed to wear anything out" (146). Wroblewski does not ignore the darkness that threatens, nor does he attempt to ward it off in dignified but meaningless poses and gestures. He is only too aware of "the dark riddle of the man and the death letter" that his Warsaw friend has received (133), the "violations and ... the filth that can wash over quiet lives" (142), the darkness towards which his wife's mind is drifting, and his own "problem" of impending death. He cannot fail to be reminded of this darkness with the tower of Montparnasse shadowing the neighbourhood in which

245 Towards an Illumination of Gallant's Late Fiction

he lives and the cafes he frequents. His courage to confront the tower sustains him, a quality nourished by his cultural experiences, confused as some of his memories of names and dates of these may be. It does not matter whether it was the announcement of the death of President de Gaulle or President Georges Pompidou that, on his sixtysixth birthday, brought to a close a performance of Ondine in which Isabelle Adjani (perhaps) played her first important part. "It is history," and what remains is the collective gasp of the audience (144). The movie in which Barszczewska starred may not have stirred all Warsaw to mourn, but the memory still connects Wroblewski to a city that he has long departed. At the end of the story he writes to his friend: "Please take good care of yourself. Your letters are precious to me. We have so many memories. Do you remember The Leper, and the scene where she dies at her own wedding? She was much more beautiful than Garbo or Dietrich - don't you think?" (147) Even if his friends, the Polish political refugees in Paris, have had their Nansen passports revoked and are now "stateless," some have and can still make their small contributions. Of the three people Wroblewski mentions (all aged between eighty-one and eighty-eight), only a "former critic of East European literature" has "at some point [fallen] into a depression and [given] up bothering with letters." An engraver "who still works in an unheated studio on the far side of Montmartre" converses with Wroblewski about the best strategy to take to counteract this new "state of affairs." A third, an artist, has given Wroblewski the greatest gift of all. She "once modelled a strong, stunning likeness of Magda. She could not afford to have it cast, and the original got broken or was lost - he can't remember. It was through a work of art that he understood his wife's beauty. Until then he had been proud of her charm and distinction. He liked to watch her at the piano; he watched more than he listened, perhaps" (139-40). Wroblewski is not himself an artist, nor has he made any direct contribution to the arts - before retiring, he taught French at the Polish high school - but he has developed an artist's ability to see beauty, "chinks of light," in a world where the sordid and banal threaten to close the gaps and extinguish the light. The first "evidence" that Wroblewski presents to his friend of a world where redemption is possible is the conjectured small gesture of the owner of Chez Marcel, who "would remember them, offer free glasses of cognac with their coffee: jovial, generous, welcoming - One Europe, One World." Even in the Atelier, which opened in the 19805 but which Wroblewski thinks of as "the new place" - "It seems to have been in Montparnasse forever" - has newspapers "on wooden holders,

246 Learning to Look in the old way" and patient, usually courteous waiters (132-3). The Montparnasse tower, unlike the azure or cerulean computer screens suggesting infinity but spawning only facts, reflects and re-creates a landscape that can be imaginatively grasped: "Across the street the mirrored walls of the building that now rises above the Coupole reflect an Ile-de-France sky: watered blue with a thin screen of clouds." Wroblewski imagines his friend confronting him with assembled memories that contradict his reading of this re-created scene: "His friend in Warsaw is completely alert, with an amazing memory of events, sorted out, in sequence. If he were here, at this moment, he would find a historical context for everything: the new building and its mirrors ... Who, after hearing the voice of an old man over the radio, could sit down and compose a threat? ... his friend might say: I have seen his face, which is lean and elegant. What do you still hope for? What can you still expect? So much for your chinks of light" (133). Wroblewski holds fast simultaneously to the world around him and to his vision of it. He confronts the darkness of the looming black tower - itself as powerless as the blue computer screen, itself simply a reflection - and finds colour and light and life as images flow pass and are caught and multiplied in its black mirrored surfaces: "I will go out and meet you, or the thought of you, which never quits me now. I will read the news and you can tell me what it means. We will look at those mirrored walls across the boulevard and judge the day by colors: pale gold, gray, white-and-blue. A sheet of black glass means nothing: it is not a cloud or the sky. Let me explain. Give me time. From that distance, the dark has no power. It has no life of its own. It is a reflection" (147).

C O N C L U S I O N : A V I S U A L I Z A T I O N AND CELEBRATION OF THE UNSEEN In the preface to Encounters: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (1971), one of the first successful collections "to explore the encounters between literature and the visual arts," John Dixon Hunt, arguing against a formulaic approach to these encounters, observes that while all the essays in the collection "provide literary texts with visual analogues that illuminate their creative or cultural origins and meanings," each essay "determines its own method and comparativist criteria."10 The next step, Hunt believes, will be "assessing the procedures and results of such case histories" so that "the critical possibilities of any larger scheme of relationships between art and literature [can] begin to emerge."11 The dangers inherent in critical approaches that draw parallels between literature and the visual arts

247 Towards an Illumination of Gallant's Late Fiction - "at their least successful there emerges a rather arbitrary series of correspondences, almost a parlour game of analogies in which the two forms are shuffled for more intriguing juxtapositions" - are equally formidable even with writers who have been directly influenced by the visual arts, Hunt warns.12 Yet he encourages critics to pursue these lines of investigation: "just because it is difficult to isolate clearly how a writer has used structures learnt from the visual arts or how words may be deployed in place of images it seems no reason to shirk what can be for several literary works and events a crucial encounter with the visual arts."13 Over a decade later James Heffernan edited Space, Time, Image, Sign: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (1987), a collection of essays growing out of a conference held at Dartmouth College in 1984 that was mandated "not simply to make specific comparisons across the borderline between the arts, but to scrutinize the borderline itself, to raise explicitly theoretical questions about the complex relations between images and texts." As a theoretical text, this collection was to establish "new principles of comparison" between the pictorial and literary arts and so augment previous "juxtapositional or periodic" studies of the relation between the sister arts, studies that "have analyzed the way in which a particular picture resembles, recalls, or influences a particular text that is juxtaposed with it, or ... have tried to explain how a given set of pictures and texts together define a particular historical period."14 With this and similar works that have followed these two pioneer collections of essays, critics have reached no consensus on theoretical principles on which to base comparisons between literary and visual arts/5 and so we are left with the text, with the picture. Martin Jay's essay "Vision in Context: Reflections and Refractions" (1996) begins with the observation: "The model of 'reading texts/ which served productively as the master metaphor for postobjectivist interpretations of many different phenomena, is now giving way to models of spectatorship and visuality, which refuse to be redescribed in entirely linguistic terms."16 An examination of Gallant's fiction contributes substantially to the ongoing theoretical debates about "the complex relations between images and texts." Gallant's early fiction challenges the traditional distinction between the visual arts as spatial and the literary arts as temporal/7 Later, we see her fiction challenging the boundaries that critics have erected between the visual arts, thought dependent on ocular perception of the external world, and the literary arts, thought dependent on mental conception of an inner world. Throughout, the greatest challenge that Gallant's fiction issues to those who would erect boundaries between the sister arts is a great strength: a style that makes visible the invisible through gaps and

248 Learning to Look

absences in texts that stimulate the reader-spectator's imagination; a style that inspires us to picture things not there but that are prestructured by the language of the text. Wolfgang Iser writes: "Communication in literature ... is a process set in motion and regulated not by a given code but by a mutually restrictive and magnifying interaction between the explicit and the implicit, between revelation and concealment. What is concealed spurs the reader into action, but this action is also controlled by what is revealed; the explicit in its turn is transformed when the implicit has been brought to light."18 Arthur Danto paraphrases Paul Klee's observation "that art does not render the visible but renders visible, which means that we see by means of art something not to be seen in other ways, something in effect that must be made visible," and concludes that "art attains here the level of thought, and the artwork is a thought given a kind of sensuous embodiment."19 Gallant expresses a similar point when, in the preface to her Selected Stories, she contemplates "the shock of change" that often instigates the "impulse to write" and contributes to "the stubbornness needed to keep going": "Probably, it means a jolt that unbolts the door between perception and imagination and leaves it ajar for life, or that fuses memory and language and waking dreams. Some writers may just simply come into the world with overlapping vision of things seen and things as they might be seen" (xiv-xv). Throughout the five decades of her writing career, the visual properties of Gallant's style have evolved from what Woodcock describes as her ability to create an "impeccable verbal texture and [a] marvellous painterly surface of the scene imagined through the translucent veil of words, the kind of surface that derives from a close and highly visual sense of the interrelationship of sharply observed detail."20 From her earliest explorations of displacement and the disparity between perception and reality, through her later explorations of memory and history, to her more recent explorations of the role of culture in a contemporary world where commercialism and madness threaten to extinguish the potential for illumination and enlightenment, Mavis Gallant has exercised powers of envisaging and rendering the world - "things seen and things as they might be seen" - parallel to the ways that the artist sees and re-creates it. She challenges her readers to look and respond through allusions, analogies, and structures suggesting the lines, shapes, and colours that confer on her fiction the perspective, proportion, density, and fluidity to illuminate the printed page. Engaged in these visual properties of Gallant's fiction, we acquire a heightened percipience of the manifold richness of worlds and lives that may otherwise have been relegated to the unseen and unsung.

Notes

PREFACE

1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11

12

Gallant, "Paris Truths," 42. Iser, The Act of Reading, 21. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 203. This phrase, which I have used in my title, is borrowed from the title of a useful guide by Joshua C. Taylor, Learning To Look: A Handbook for the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1957). Hancock, "An Interview with Mavis Gallant," 55. Gallant, preface to The Selected Stories, xvi-xvii. Ibid., xvii. Lessing, Laocoon, 90. Ibid., 91. Heffernan, ed., preface to Space, Time, Image, Sign, xiii. The "significant debate" has given rise to a large number of books and articles in the last forty years, including those mentioned below as well as most of the essays in W.J.T. Mitchell's The Language of Images and in Jeffrey R. Smitten and Ann Daghistany's Spatial Form in Narrative. Frank, The Widening Gyre, 8-9. The original version of this essay was published in three parts in the Seivanee Review (Spring, Summer, Autumn 1945). Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 8. In an earlier study, The Colors of Rhetoric, Steiner, after an extensive historical overview of "the painting-literature analogy" (1-18), describes the resurgence of critical interest in this analogy and the ways in which discussion of the sister arts has been affected by the "revolution in critical thinking ... clearly related to the

250 Notes to pages x-y

13 14 15

16

spread of structuralism and semiotics during the last two decades, and the corresponding interest among recent philosophers in linguistic and aesthetic issues" (19; see esp. 19-32). Heffernan, preface to Space, Time, Image, Sign, xiii. Summers, "Real Metaphor," 231-2. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 86. In the next section Gombrich explains why the term "language of art" should be regarded as "more than a loose metaphor" and why the assumption that language uses "conventional signs" and painting "natural signs" is false: "All art originates in the human mind, in our reactions to the world rather than in the visible world itself, and it is precisely because all art is 'conceptual' that all representations are recognizable by their style" (87). Referring to the work of linguist Benjamin Whorf, Gombrich concludes "that language does not give name to pre-existing things or concepts so much as it articulates the world of our experience. The images of art, we suspect, do the same" (90). Gallant, Home Truths, xii. CHAPTER ONE

1 Gallant, Home Truths, 230. 2 Corbeil, "Home Truths with a Touch of Gallant Wit," 21; cf Fabre, "An Interview with Mavis Gallant," 99; Keefer, Reading Mavis Gallant, 9; Gallant, preface to Selected Stones, x, xii. 3 Gallant, Home Truths, 249. 4 Gallant, preface to Selected Stories, xi. 5 Iser, The Act of Reading, 169. 6 Leith, "Remembering Montreal in the 405," 4. 7 Baele, "A Canadian at Home in Paris," ci; Gallant, preface to Selected Stories, xiii-xiv. 8 Gallant, "Fresco Class," Rotogravure, 9 Nov. 1946, 12-13; "Window Artist," Standard Review, 31 Jan. 1948, 3; "Family Doctor," Standard Magazine, 4 Sept. 1948, 4, 22. 9 Hancock, "Interview," 42, 45; Martens, "An Interview with Mavis Gallant," 178-9. 10 The Standard article that was the outcome of this trip was probably "These Are the First Impressions the War Brides Formed of Canada," Rotogravure, 13 Oct. 1945, 4-9. 11 Gallant, Paris Notebooks, 157. 12 Dates given in parentheses, here and throughout, are those of original publication. Only in the case of "Up North" does it seem, from Gallant's comments in this introduction to Home Truths, that few revisions were

251 Notes to pages 8-15

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

actually undertaken: "I typed 'Up North' about eight years later, almost as I found it. Some pages had the wobbly look of having been written in a train, and I probably started it during a journey very like the one described while on assignment for The Standard" (xix). The outcome of this assignment could have been one of several articles, the most likely being "Land Auction," Photonews, 12 Aug. 1950, 8-11, on St Felicien, northern Quebec. In an interview Gallant explains that although "Thank You for the Lovely Tea" was written early, the finished version, the complete story, was made years later, and that it is mainly the dialogue that remains from the original. Boyce, "Image and Memory," 29. Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 121. Steiner goes on to observe that modernist writers, despite their radical intentions, were often influenced by the compromises being made by visual artists and consequently produced richly ironic and parodic works, Steiner's main example being the "Nausicaa" chapter of Joyce's Ulysses, which she analyses in chap. 5 of Pictures of Romance. Martens, "Interview," 169. Gallant, "Good Morning and Goodbye," 2. Gallant, "Three Brick Walls," 4. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," 1. 72. Fabre, "Interview," 101. Keefer, Reading Mavis Gallant, 63. As with the Linnet Muir stories, this story draws on Gallant's experiences in Montreal during the 19405. According to Judith Skelton Grant's biographical sketch in Mavis Gallant and Her Works, Gallant worked for a short time in the 19405 in a Montreal real estate business (2). Fabre, "Interview," 96-7; Martens, "Interview," 168, 172-3; Monroe, CBC interview. Gallant, "A Wonderful Country," 4. Gallant, Home Truths, 6-7, 16. Iser, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction," 20-2. Hatch, "Mavis Gallant and the Fascism of Everyday Life," 21. Esslin, Bertolt Brecht, 13. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 455-6. The nature of these effects is developed in Gombrich's Art and Illusion when he argues that "Cubism ... is the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture - that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas" (281); "The function of representational clues in cubist paintings ... is to narrow down the range of possible interpretations till we are forced to accept the flat pattern with all its tensions" (286). This conclusion has been disputed by Mark Roskill in The Interpretation of Cubism (176-82), particularly the idea of a cubist painting's becoming in

252 Notes to page 15

28

29

30 31

itself the only reading possible. This controversy relates to one of the challenges that Keefer sets herself in Reading Mavis Gallant: "one of the aspects of her work with which I shall attempt to come to terms is the 'silencing effect' of her authoritative tone and incisive diction, which can turn every narrative statement into a pronouncement ex cathedra" (viii). Keefer most fully addresses this issue in chap. 3, when illustrating that the openness of Gallant's language counters the tendency to closure of the reductive world of which she writes. Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 123. In The Colors of Rhetoric, Steiner, discussing "the cubist core of modernism," observes that even though art historians disagree as to what constitutes cubism and even though "cubist painting itself contains technically distinct, even opposite, phases," critics drawing parallels between cubist painting and modern literature proceed with the assumption that "the cubist analogy involves both the matching of technical elements of painting with those in writing (haphazard at best without a systematic view of the two arts) and the comparison of ideologies, of aesthetic presuppositions. Proponents of the cubist analogy usually begin with cubism's disruption of the Renaissance norms of linear perspective, chiaroscuro, and other means of suggesting three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional medium" (179). Paul Duval, Four Decades, reports the following comment made by Alfred Pellan: "I embrace the surrealism of Andre Masson, Klee and Miro. But for Dali and Tanguy - those clever magicians - I have no respect ... the subconscious is only a part of the painting problem. Surrealism has added to the richness of the artist's raw material. That material should still be filtered through the conscious mind. The painter should be like a fisherman who keeps some fish and throws the rest back. Then, of course, the fish should be carefully mounted" (113). See, for example, Fabre, "Interview," 100; Gallant, preface to Selected Stories, xiv, xvi-xvii. Although Gallant seems fascinated by the phenomenon of dreams, her suspicion of them as a worthwhile subject for art can be detected in two Standard Magazine articles, "Freud or Double Talk?" (29 Mar. 1947) and "Dreams" (30 Oct. 1948), in which she questions the value and reliability of symbolic analysis of images in dreams. It is not surprising, therefore, that Gallant's later interest, as demonstrated in her New York Times Book Review article "Paris Letter: The Unsuccessful Surrealist" (28 May 1972) and in her comments on this article in her interview with Hancock (51), is in surrealism as a political rather than a viable artistic movement. Nor is it surprising that in her 1982 CBC Radio interview with Susan Leslie, although acknowledging that she finds something curious about dreams and relating a dream she had of Lucy

253 Notes to pages 15-22

32 33

34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41

42 43 44

Dreyfus, Gallant claims that she no longer reads Jungian dream analysis, preferring to "coast along with improbabilities" and "the idea of mystery." Gallant, Home Truths, 17-18. In her Standard Magazine article "Give the Kid a Gory Story" (29 June 1946) Gallant selected a passage depicting this scene "at random from standard fairy tale classics on the market" as having a particularly "Poe-like horror" (15). Jung, The Basic Writings, 302-3. Ibid., 304. Barrett, "Kinetic Art," 211. Keith, A Sense of Style, 115. Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 7. Steiner refutes Albrecht von Haller's reservations about the potential of language, which she quotes as an epigraph for her chapter on "Pictorial Narrativity": "Nature knits up her kinds in a network, not in a chain; but men can follow only by chains because their language can't handle several things at once." Gallant, Home Truths, 49-50. Iser, The Implied Reader, 283. Accompanying the typescript of "The Picnic," originally entitled "Before the Battle," is a note written by Gallant indicating that this story was one of the first stories she wrote in France, 1950-51. It was published in the New Yorker 9 Aug. 1952. The typescript is located in the Mavis Gallant Collection (MS Collection 189), box i, file 28, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. Gallant, The Other Paris, 117-18. Ibid., 30. Iser, The Act of Reading, 135-9. Conversely, Gombrich, in "Image and Code," argues that "learning to read an ordinary photograph is very unlike learning to master an arbitrary code," as other kinds of visual and literary arts demand (16). In Art and Illusion Gombrich focuses more on formal differences than differences in viewer response, arguing that although both photographer and artist "translate" rather than "transcribe" what they see, the "humble activity" of the photographer relies to a greater extent on transcription (36), "the image on the retina" over "the image in the mind" (66). In passing Gombrich remarks that "it would be wrong to conclude ... that the symbolism of photography is merely conventional. It appears to be learned with surprising speed once the nature of the required adjustment is understood" (53). Only in "Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye" does Gombrich develop the topic of viewer response in the context of "the fascinating problem of the various standards of truth which we have learned to accept in our commerce with visual images" (217).

254 Notes to pages 22-5

45 46

47 48 49

50 51 52 53

54

Lorraine York, in The Other Side of Dailiness, concludes that in this latter essay Gombrich demonstrates "the role of human culture in a supposedly natural visual object": "What we are left with is no longer the nineteenth-century conception of photographic truth, that of the window on the world, but various humanly constructed notions of visual truth" (12). York observes that "one result of the current theoretical ascendancy of culture has been the politicization of photographic theory" (15), and in both York's overview of this theory (9-17) and in Graham Clarke's recently published The Photograph (in particular, chaps, i and 2), the discussions of the theories of Roland Barthes (especially in Camera Lucida and Image-Music-Text), Umberto Eco, John Berger, Jean Mohr, Susan Sontag, Victor Burgin, and Frank Webster confirm that the photograph, both in its production and in the viewing of it, is governed by cultural and political concerns. Iser, The Act of Reading, 206-7. Iser discusses these perspectives throughout his critical writings but identifies them most precisely in The Act of Reading, 35, and elaborates in his section entitled "The Structure of Theme and Horizon," 96-9. Gallant, The Other Paris, 173. Ibid., 57-8, 66, 68. In an aptly entitled article published in the 4 Oct. 1987 issue of the New York Times Magazine, "Paris when It Shimmers," Gallant captures in language what Mike fails to capture in paint. Her opening and closing descriptions (19, 47) are particularly evocative of the different greys that Paris winters produce. Quotations from this article appear in chap. 5. Iser, The Act of Reading, 112. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 201-2. Ibid., 128. Gallant has remarked in several interviews that many of her stories are inspired by scenes she has remembered or observed and then herself responded to by filling in the indeterminate gaps, so building a vividly detailed fictional composition that is more real for her than the memory of the original. Baele, "A Canadian at Home in Paris," cio; Boyce, "Image and Memory," 30-1; Hancock, "Interview," 28, 45, 58. Gallant has thus defined a position for herself as creative writer similar to that described by Iser for the reader: the writer bridges the gaps of indeterminate characters and situations she has observed, as her readers must bridge those gaps in her texts. Fabre, "Interview," 96-7; Martens, "Interview," 168, 172-3; Monroe, CBC interview; Gallant, preface to Selected Stories, xvi-xvii. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painiing, distinguishes "the activity of the gaze, prolonged, contemplative, yet regarding the field of vision with a

255 Notes to pages 25-37

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67

certain aloofness and disengagement ... from that of the glance, a furtive or sideways look whose attention is always elsewhere, which shifts to conceal its own existence, and which is capable of carrying unofficial, sub rosa messages of hostility, collusion, rebellion, and lust ... Painting of the glance addresses vision in the durational temporality of the viewing subject; it does not seek to bracket out the process of viewing" (94). Keefer, Reading Mavis Gallant, 22. Gallant, The Other Paris, 190. Iser, The Implied Reader, 283. Fuller quotation appears earlier in this chapter. Iser, The Implied Reader, 279; The Act of Reading, 20-2, 108-11. Gallant, The Other Paris, 74-5. See Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," 11. 96-8, 106-9. Gallant, My Heart Is Broken, 45. Gallant, The Other Paris, 213. Gallant, "The Old Place," 72. Gallant, The Other Paris, 34. Iser, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction," 40. Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 144-5. The theories of Leon Battista Alberti, an early Renaissance writer and artist, established principles of perspective that influenced painting for centuries. Fabre, "Interview," 101. Fuller quotation appears earlier in this chapter. CHAPTER TWO

1 Frank, The Widening Gyre, 15-16. 2 Smitten, introduction to Smitten and Daghistany, eds., Spatial Form in Narrative, 20. 3 Smitten and Daghistany, preface to Spatial Form in Narrative, 13-14. 4 Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 123. 5 Gallant, Green Water, Green Sky, 46. 6 The only time that colour appears with reference to Bob is when Flor laments the lack of bright flashes of colour in Europe; in contrast, Bob sees "the sun flash off a speedboat and everywhere he looked he saw color and light. The cars moving along the Croisette were color enough" (107). Perhaps Bob's inability to distinguish between the random and the intense reduces everything to white or black - to a reflection of all colours or no colours. 7 This idea is developed by Mullins, The Painted Witch, who, although not addressing Biedermeier artists specifically, discusses how artists have traditionally 'outfitted women to enhance their "value as a man's possession ... She is a prize, a prized object" (106). A series of such

256 Notes to pages 38-45

8

9

10 11 12 13

14

15 16

women, adorned with pearls, jewels, silks, laces, and furs, can be seen in Joseph Stieler's portraits, now housed in Schloss Nymphenburg, Munich; see illustrations in Bohmer, Die Welt des Biedermeier, 241-3, and Stieler's portrait of the aristocratic Amalie von Schintling (1831), of which there is an excellent reproduction in Norman, Biedermeier Painting, 127. Also helpful for defining this attitude towards women are Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal, and Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, especially chap. i. Such paintings as Renoir's Nude in the Sunlight (1875) or the more pallid Blonde Bathers of the i88os - note their wedding bands - well illustrate this. See reproductions of these in Renoir, 75, 105, 107. Mullins, The Painted Witch, 84-5, comments generally about Renoir's attitude of taming and owning the loved object. Attitudes towards Manet's Olympia differ greatly, but Paul Valery's comments in his introduction to the catalogue for the Manet centenary exhibition (1932) are noteworthy here: "Her empty head is separated from her essential being by a thin band of black velvet. Impurity personified - whose function demands the frank and placid absence of any sense of shame - is isolated by that pure and perfect stroke. A bestial Vestal of absolute nudity, she invokes a dream of all the primitive barbarity and ritual animality which lurks and lingers in the ways and workings of prostitution in the life of a great city." Valery, Triomphe de Manet, trans, in Degas Manet Morisot, 109. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," 11. 80, 87, 98. Despite the delicately coloured images, Bonnie is usually pictured in chic black; see, for example, 27, 134. Attwater, ed., The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, 313-14; Coulson, ed., The Saints, 425-7. That Bonnie has ambitions this way is reinforced when she promises to help an artist who has a flattering portrait of her in his studio (63). It is interesting to note in this context the Pre-Raphaelites' preference for red-headed models for their Venus and Madonna figures, this being the case with Rossetti and Burne-Jones particularly. As such, then, Flor sees herself much as many Victorian women saw themselves. See chap. 2 of Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 5.1.218-21. Gabo, "Russia and Constructivism: An Interview with Naum Gabo by Arbam Lassaw and Ilya Bolotowsky, 1956," in Gabo, 160. Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance, 141, traces this "rather mystical concept" to Apollinaire and his contemporaries: "The 'fourth dimension' implies for the perceiver a liberation from the fetters of his own static position. He is able to see as a simultaneity what before was

257 Notes to pages 45-7 visible to him only as a function of time ... The subject is thus presented as a synthesis of a number of temporally distinct perceptions." 17 In her interview with Hancock, Gallant identifies Proust as her "favourite writer, if there is any such thing" (21). Proust is one of the writers whom Joseph Frank discusses in The Widening Gyre. Focusing on the last volume of Le Temps retrouve, Frank argues that Proust transcends time through imaginative engagement with the past: "At certain moments ... the physical sensations of the past came flooding back to fuse with the present" (20-1). The consequence is, Frank elaborates, that "the narrator now begins to understand that in order to become conscious of time it has been necessary for him to absent himself from his accustomed environment (in other words, from the stream of time acting on that environment) and then to plunge back into the stream again after a lapse of years. In so doing he finds himself presented with two images - the world as he had formerly known it and the world, transformed by time, that he now sees before him. When these two images become juxtaposed, the narrator discovers that the passage of time may suddenly be experienced through its visible effects" (22-3). Parallels can be noted between the shifting perspectives of Green Water, Green Sky and Proust's "discontinuous presentation of character," which, Frank observes, allows the reader to experience "pure time" with the narrator: "Proust forces the reader to juxtapose disparate images spatially, in a moment of time, so that the experience of time's passage is communicated directly to his sensibility" (24). Gallant's techniques in this novel, like Proust's, are analogous to Impressionist painters' juxtaposition of "pure tones on the canvas, instead of mixing them on the palette, in order to leave the blending of colors to the eye of the spectator" (Frank, The Widening Gyre, 25). Winfried Siemerling, "Perception, Memory, Irony," 146-52, explores the presence of Proust in Green Water, Green Sky. 18 Despite Janice Keefer's contention in "Mavis Gallant and the Angel of History" that Gallant's two novels are "period-piece histories of female experience and sensibility," the archetypal images created through Gallant's adaption of the techniques of the visual artist surely place this novel in the context of Keefer's general thesis concerning Gallant's fiction, that "female experience, in which passivity, captive and sometimes complicit suffering have been traditionally the norm, becomes archetypal of the human experience of history" in today's world (301 n 32, 296). 19 Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, 238. The gaze in Gallant's fiction invites more extensive examination than it has yet received. Lacan's theories, especially those points from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The

258 Notes to pages 48-51

20

21 22 23 24

25 26

Visible and the Invisible (1964) upon which Lacan draws in chaps. 6 and 7 ("The Split between the Eye and the Gaze" and "Anamorphosis") of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (trans. 1978), as well as Merleau-Ponty's indebtedness to Lacan's "The Mirror Stage" (1949), could contribute much to any exploration of the gaze in Gallant's fiction. Karen Smythe touches on Lacan's theories in several essays - in "Green Water, Green Sky: Gallant's Discourse of Dislocation" she argues that "Green Water, Green Sky lends itself to a psycholinguistic study" and applies Lacan and Barthes to the "matriarchal discourse of dislocation" in the novel (79, 84), and in "The Silent Cry" she discusses Flor's madness as a "regression ... to a point in life prior to the 'mirror stage'" (120) - but there is no mention of the gaze. Significantly, Gallant dedicates the final Linnet Muir story, "With a Capital T," to her friends Madeleine and Jean-Paul Lemieux. Jean-Rene Ostiguy, Modernism in Quebec Art, comments on this portrait, Fine Days: "The figure is framed, as in a window, overlooking the landscape; one wonders whether the artist was looking from an interior or from a balcony. The figure herself watches and meditates ... it deals with interiors and with people in contemplation. Already in 1930, Lemieux had painted a little gouache entitled Interior, showing a bedroom where the artist's image is reflected in a mirror" (46). Gallant, "Rose," 37. Besner, The Light of Imagination, 21, 17. Gallant, In Transit, 61-2. "When We Were Nearly Young" is, as both Besner, The Light of Imagination, 21-2, and Ronald Hatch, "Missing Connections," 24-5, have aptly noted, autobiographical, describing several years that Gallant spent in Spain before settling in Paris in the early 19505, and has even been included in a book of essays - Modern Canadian Essays, ed. William H. New (Toronto: Macmillan 1974) - as well as in the short-story collections In Transit, The Moslem Wife and Other Stories, and Selected Stories. Unlike other locales where she has spent some time (Quebec, Ontario, the New England states, Paris, southern France, northern Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and so on), this landscape of Spain Gallant revisits only twice to tell stories ("When We Were Nearly Young" and "Senor Pinedo," discussed in chap, i above). She uses Spain primarily as a holiday destination in such stories as "Going Ashore," "By the Sea" (17 July 1954), "Two Questions" / "A Question of Disposal" (10 June 1961), and "The Circus" (20 June 1964). Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 2. She develops this point in her first chapter, "Pictorial Narrativity." Besner, in The Light of Imagination, comparing Puss and Jean as narrators, emphasizes the genteel/rebellious or conventional/bohemian

259 Notes to pages 51-3 dichotomy. Ultimately, however, he reaches the same conclusions that I reach, as the title of my next chapter indicates: "On one level, both stories are about the possibilities of relationship, and about love frustrated, denied, and concealed, love unannounced, or hoarded, or grudgingly apportioned. But more importantly, both stories enact the consequences of memory's language misunderstood. The tyranny of form - of snapshots, portraits, pictures, tableaux, framed still lifes - dictates its reports to both women, reports which Jean is more successful than Puss in transforming into the language of fiction" (38; emphasis mine). 27 Gallant, My Heart Is Broken, 175.

28 Bernice Schrank, "Popular Culture and Political Consciousness in Mavis Gallant's My Heart Is Broken," makes some pertinent comments on the empty forms to which Gallant's characters reduce literature. Examining this passage in "The Cost of Living," Schrank concludes: "[Puss] ignores the modest stoicism of Beckett's waiting and Yeats's acceptance. Precisely because it has meaning for Puss, literature is an unwelcome intrusion, an unnecessary rubbing of one's nose in the dirt, something imposed on her from without that she is unwilling to accept. It is indeed ironic that the one character who is able to interpret literature correctly retreats from its implications" (62). 29 Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, writes, "if a picture seems the nearest thing to a mirror-image of the external world, music, of all the arts, is the most remote: except in the trivial echoism of programmatic passages, it does not duplicate aspects of sensible nature, nor can it be said, in any obvious sense, to refer to any state of affairs outside itself" (50). Rudolf Arnheim would tend to disagree. In his conclusion to "The Reading of Images and the Images of Reading," 87, he remarks that because "music is uniquely favored by combining the direct sensory expression of sounds with its highly abstract way of depicting the forces that govern human and natural existence," music is sometimes regarded as "the highest of the arts." Arnheim's position is therefore closer to that of Peter Rabinowitz, in "Fictional Music," 197, when he argues that "all music ... is imitative since it is symbolic of the forms of human emotion or the patterns of the universe." The "tyranny" of such forms, as they relate to music, will be observed at the end of the next chapter in the discussion of "Bonaventure." 30 Similarly, the stage name "Patrick" is never explained: "He was sorry he had taken it - I have forgotten why" (167). Another phrase that Puss must explain, because translated, is M Rablis's dismissal, in French, of Sylvie as a "miserable little thief," which "sounded harmless, in French, in the feminine. It was a woman's phrase, a joyous term, including us all in a capacity for frivolous mischief." Puss, it seems, is giving theft an inconsequential context here to justify the confession of the next

260 Notes to pages 55-73

31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39

40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

sentence: "I stepped inside [Sylvie's] room and picked up the diary, and a Japanese cigarette box, and the petticoat, and one or two other things" (161). The word "bonheur" (193) and the words "cost" and "living" from the title will be discussed later. Armstrong, Odd Man Out, 54. Ibid., 1-2. Ibid., 130-1; cf 60-1. Gallant, My Heart Is Broken, 89. This phrase from "Its Image on the Mirror," quoted more fully later, is also found in "When We Were Nearly Young." Carlos is described as having "the unfinished, the undecided, face that accompanies ... the fear of the open heart" (In Transit, 66). Murray, "'Its Image on the Mirror': Canada, Canonicity, the Uncanny," 115-18. Heather Murray discusses this "in"/"on" distinction in several different contexts. Ibid., 122-5. Gallant, Home Truths, 281. Barthes, "Objective Literature," in Critical Essays, 19. Because the phrase "the old madwoman" is placed immediately after the pronoun "me" - "She stared round and back at me, the old madwoman, and said" (70) - the reference could be seen to apply to Jean herself. Throughout the early chapters of Pictures of Romance Wendy Steiner develops the argument that whereas in medieval art a sense of narrativity was achieved through "temporally discrete sections," such as panels, when in Renaissance art painting came to be "a symbol of the transcendent object - beautiful, outside of time's depredations, complete in itself," cohesiveness, harmony, and the consequent spatiality were achieved through freezing "the world at a single moment in time" (1-2). This series is the subject of Magdalena M. Moeller's Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Die Strassenszenen 1913-1915. Dube, Expressionism, 44. Klinkowitz/'The Novel as Artifact," 40-2. Ibid., 45-6. Cf Barthes, "Literature and Discontinuity," in Critical Essays, 171-83; Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, 82ff. Frank, "The Dehumanization of Art," in The Widening Gyre, 166. Ibid., 171-2. Frank, The Widening Gyre, 59-60. Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 177. CHAPTER THREE

i Establishing exact chronology among Gallant's stories of the next fifteen years is difficult for several reasons. One reason is suggested by a

261 Notes to pages 73-4

2

3 4 5 6

note Gallant appended to a file of six manuscripts written in 1963-64: "The date I have given on each does not mean that I wrote it on that day, but that I completed it and sent it off. 'Written' is my own shorthand for 'finished' ... Some took as much as three years [to write]. I was in the habit of working on several things at once" (box i, file 24, Thomas Fisher Library; initialled "M.G." and dated "May 1980"). The stories in this chapter representing the early 19605 are found in four different anthologies: My Heart Is Broken, The End of the World, Home Truths, and In Transit. With few exceptions, I have attempted to date and establish chronology through first publication in the New Yorker, but at this particular point in the magazine's history William Shawn had stockpiled manuscripts to such an extent that it was often some years between acceptance and publication. Gigi Mahon, in The Last Days of the New Yorker, reports that "under Shawn, there was an important distinction between getting bought and getting published that irked writers. Shawn was obsessed with building an inventory of works, countless of which never appeared in the pages of the magazine. Others could molder for as long as ten or fifteen or twenty years before publication" (71). Gallant remarks (note in box i, file 14, Thomas Fisher Library): "The Captive Niece was held for nearly three years before being published, Good Deed even longer. At one point in the nineteen-sixties I realized I had twelve unpublished stories in the New Yorker's files. It took a flight to New York and a personal visit to break up the log jam. These long waits no longer exist; at least, not in my experience. I used sometimes to wait three years before protesting." Hatch, "The Three Stages of Mavis Gallant's Short Fiction," 93. In "Mavis Gallant: Returning Home," Hatch traces this characteristic back to the earliest stories, those in The Other Paris: "Gallant's portraits reveal that the positive correlation between 'individual' and 'social' has degenerated into the wasteland of 'personal-impersonal.' It turns out that the im-personal society is the creation of persons who lack true individuality. Indeed, in many of the stories, Gallant's artistry is such that it is impossible to tell where the individual ends and society begins" (96). Both Besner, The Light of Imagination, and Grant, Mavis Gallant and Her Works, in their extended analyses examine the evolution of this characteristic in Gallant's fiction. See n 6 below. Gallant, Paris Notebooks, 177. Woodcock, "Memory, Imagination, Artifice," 77. Hancock, "Interview," 45-6, 48. Discussion inspired by Gallant's comments in the Hancock interview began with Woodcock's article "Memory, Imagination, Artifice" in the same issue of Canadian Fiction

262 Notes to pages 74-5

7

8 9

10 11

Magazine as this interview and his coining of the phrase "helical patterning of memory" to describe the shape of Gallant's fiction (75). Janice Keefer, Reading Mavis Gallant, referring specifically to the analyses of Woodcock, Hatch, and Grazia Merler, criticizes them for "payfing] inadequate attention to the persistence in her fiction of linearity and progression - plot, if you will - without which the helices and spirals of the stories would lose their tension and uncoil into shapelessness. Gallant's fictive structures are dual: the backward spirals that give her characters access to memory are intersected by the forward hurtle of time" (163). While this criticism seems justified with reference to Merler's analyses in Mavis Gallant: Narrative Patterns and Devices (for examples, 8, 24), both Woodcock and Hatch recognize and do justice to these dual movements in Gallant's fiction, as will Grant, Mavis Gallant and Her Works (19-23), and Besner, The Light of Imagination (throughout but summed up 151-2). Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 19-20, observes that Hayden White distinguishes various modes of history-writing by their "internal structuring that allows a proper beginning and ending" and that White "finds annals and chronicles problematic as narratives" because "they have merely an onset and a termination." Steiner draws primarily upon White's essay "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," Critical Inquiry 7, no. i (Autumn 1980): 5-27. Gallant, Paris Notebooks, 184. Even in her interview with Boyce, "Image and Memory," where Gallant uses the word "shape" to describe what she attempts to see in the "bits and pieces" of her original outpourings, her further observations negate that this shape is anything fixed and/or absolute (30). Gallant, Paris Notebooks, 205. A note in box i, file 11, Thomas Fisher Library, indicates that Gallant finished writing "Virus X" on 13 Mar. 1964; a note in file 24 indicates that she finished it 13 Mar. 1963 and published it Jan. 1964. Given the erroneous publication date in file 24 ("Virus X" was published in the 30 Jan. 1965 issue of the New Yorker), 1964 would seem a more likely finish date. File 11 also contains the note that both "Bonaventure" and "Virus X" were revised after the New Yorker accepted them, the latter "so much so that no original ms exists." Gallant's German stories, most of which are published in The Pegnitz Junction, will be considered in the next chapter even though several were finished early in the 19605. Gallant's note in box i, file 24, indicates that "Ernst in Civilian Clothes" was finished 8 May 1963. It was published in the New Yorker on 16 Nov. 1963, one month after "An Unmarried Man's Summer" (12 Oct. 1963). "An Autobiography" would follow the next year (i Feb. 1964), but no other Pegnitz Junction story came out until 1969 ("The Old

263 Notes to pages 75-9

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24 25

Friends"). "Willi," a story rejected for inclusion in Pegnitz Junction in favour of "Ernst in Civilian Clothes," and still not anthologized, also appeared in the New Yorker at this time (5 Jan. 1963). "One Aspect of a Rainy Day," another story with German characters, was published in the New Yorker 14 Apr. 1962; it too is not anthologized. Hancock, "Interview," 40-1. Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, 80, 163. Dube, Expressionism, 7. Hatch, "Mavis Gallant and the Fascism of Everyday Life," 13. Frank, The Widening Gyre, 59. Smitten, introduction to Smitten and Daghistany, eds., Spatial Form in Narrative, 21. Gallant, In Transit, 143. Gallant, "The Events in May: A Paris Notebook -i," in Paris Notebooks, 22. Nochlin, "Women, Art, and Power," 14. Nochlin quotes Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. i, An Introduction (New York: Pantheon 1978), 86. Ibid., 43. Is it mere coincidence that several of Philip Surrey's paintings of 1939 that mark his development "away from lyrical painting to more socially involved themes" have aspects similar to Gallant's story, including the title, that establish the more political direction her prose will take? Charles Hill remarks that Surrey's exposure to life and art in New York and Montreal during the Depression prompted "his recognition of a growing malaise and the imminence of conflict [that] is reflected in his art." These elements are first to be noted in the "gaunt and awkward figures" of Surrey's Sunday Afternoon, in which, Hill contends, Surrey "paints with less fluidity and more concern for structure, accentuating the macabre reality of the individual sitters." Cf another 1939 painting, The Red Portrait. Hill attributes Surrey's "simplified forms of the buildings and increased solidity of the forms" to the influence of Goodridge Roberts. These two paintings were exhibited in Montreal and elsewhere in North America throughout the 19405 (Canadian Painting in the Thirties, 128, 201; see 141-2 for black and white reproductions of these two paintings). Gallant, My Heart Is Broken, 203. Ardagh, The New France, 285. Gazing and staring are to be found throughout these stories, but in only a few do the personal implications of the watcher/watched breakdown become quite ominous. In "Acceptance of Their Ways" (30 Jan. 1960), for example, Lily Littel "watches" in her imagination Mrs Freeport snooping through Lily's belongings but not finding her locked diary, in which

264 Notes to pages 79-89

26 27 28

29 30 31 32

33 34 35

Lily records those thoughts she dares not speak (My Heart Is Broken, 6). In "Better Times" (3 Dec. 1960) Susan has a clarity of vision that "sees" through the walls of her aunt's villa the shadowy lurking figures as dispossessed men, not romantic smugglers (In Transit, 79-81). Where her husband is concerned, however, she is not so successful in piercing appearances; although he finds it "terrible having a witness" to what he has become, she never seems able to penetrate his "real feelings [which] were layers deep" (83). Much of the narrative is filtered through Guy observing Susan observing him as she begins "to get the drift of things" (79). All this watching culminates in a kind of hallucination when, after Susan announces she no longer wants to be married, Guy "reacted no more than a sleeping lizard that, tormented, could not move an eye or a frozen limb. Unable to adjust his eyes to a fixed point, Guy placidly watched a transparent Susan detach herself from his wife and slip to one side. Interested, but not alarmed, his reflexes all one minute behind, he saw Susan and her double smash a clock" (89). Granted the internalization is given obliquely in "Sunday Afternoon" rather than directly, as Besner discusses in The Light of Imagination, 45-6. Barthes, "The World as Object," in Critical Essays, 12. Barthes is discussing Courbet's Atelier, which he describes as "a complete allegory." In this respect Veronica differs from Marian Kimber, the fashion model in Gallant's "Thieves and Rascals" (July 1956). Charles, Marian's husband, "had noticed a small crowd outside the Museum of Modern Art ... looking at his wife who stood, posed, against the glass doors ... She paid no attention to the crowd, and although she stared, one would have said, straight into her husband's face, she appeared not to see him" (82, 85). Marian has not always been impervious to such stares and confesses to her husband that as a girl, "people used to stare at me on the street. I remember the men, mostly. They still look at me like that, like someone rubbing their dirty hands all over you. Only now it doesn't frighten me" (86). Gallant, My Heart Is Broken, 218. Hancock, "Interview," 46. Woodcock, "Memory, Imagination, Artifice," 76, 77. This is an attitude critics have occasionally accused Gallant of taking and from which in early stories such as "Acceptance of their Ways" (30 Jan. 1960) and "The Deceptions of Marie-Blanche" (Mar. 1953) she is not wholly free. Keefer addresses this concern in Reading Mavis Gallant (esp. 46-8). Hancock, "Interview," 40. Gallant, My Heart Is Broken, 253. "Orphans' Progress" is dated earlier - May 1964 - on the first page of the manuscript copy (box i, file 21, Thomas Fisher Library).

265 Notes to pages 89-106 36 Hatch, "Missing Connections," 25. "Careless Talk" is the ninth of nineteen stories appearing over fifteen years in the New Yorker that are included in In Transit. In terms of dating, it is slightly after the midpoint between the first, "By the Sea" (17 July 1954), and the final, "Good Deed" (22 Feb. 1969). 37 Gallant, In Transit, 123. 38 Bawden, ed., The Oxford Companion to Film describes the "tremendous success" Goupi-Mains-Rouges had "in occupied France, with its realistic portrayal of rural life ... and the close, sympathetic observation of people and their relationships which was to become Becker's hallmark" (59). This film is deemed "undeservedly neglected," especially because it demonstrates the balance Becker achieved between form and content: "His control of each film's individual rhythm was outstanding: much of his ability to reproduce detailed social milieux is in the cutting and juxtaposition of shots. This technical accomplishment was, however, never allowed to take the place of intelligent observation of men and women in relation to each other and their surroundings" (60). 39 Notation accompanying manuscript, box i, file 11, Thomas Fisher Library. 40 Gallant, Home Truths, 178. 41 Ibid., 223. 42 This is the same movie to which Frau Stengel wants to take her young charges in "A Day Like Any Other" (7 Nov. 1953), another story about frontiers. Mrs Kennedy, the children's mother, forbids them to attend the movie, not because it is cruel but, worse, because of its vulgar sentimentality. Gallant, The Other Paris, 220-1. 43 Gallant, Home Truths, 135. 44 Keefer, Reading Mavis Gallant, 12, refers to "Bonaventure" as one of Gallant's "puzzlingly elliptical and opaque fictions." 45 Levi, "Music and National Socialism," 172. 46 Ibid., 167. 47 In this portrait of Katharine there is a clear connection with similar portraits in other stories where the subject is compared to Holbein women. This point is elaborated in the next chapter with reference to the mother in "The Statues Taken Down" and Helena in "The Old Friends." 48 Richardson, "The Nazification of Women in Art," 71. 49 Ibid., 66. 50 Ibid., 66. 51 Iser, The Act of Reading, 167. 52 Ibid., 198-9. 53 Ibid., 197. 54 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 243-4. 55 Ibid., 234-5.

266 Notes to pages 107-16 CHAPTER

FOUR

1 Hancock, "Interview," 39-40. 2 Gallant, Home Truths, 176. 3 Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece, 3. Further references are given in textual parentheses. 4 In "Its Image on the Mirror" Jean Price in her opening painterly allusions and descriptions of Allenton (My Heart Is Broken, 57-8) could very well have had in mind the pointing John the Baptist and other more subtle demonstrative gestures of the Crucifixion panels of the Isenheim altarpiece in its closed state. 5 Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, 34; cf 55-8. Further references are given in textual parentheses. 6 Quoted in Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," 208-9. 7 Gallant, Paris Notebooks, 177. 8 Ibid., 163. Further references are given in textual parentheses. 9 Kleinfelder, The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze, 98-9. Kleinfelder is taking issue with the argument that Norman Bryson develops in chap. 5, "The Gaze and the Glance," of Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, that "Western painting is predicated on the disavowal of deictic reference, on the disappearance of the body as site of the image; and this twice over: for the painter, and for the viewing subject" (89). 10 Until the publication of the German story "O Lasting Peace" (8 Jan. 1972) the first-person narratives, with only one exception, fail to exploit the possibilities of the form and therefore will not be examined here. Excluded are "The End of the World" (10 June 1967), "Sunday after Christmas" (30 Dec. 1967), "April Fish" (10 Feb. 1968), and "The Accident" (28 Oct. 1967), an incident that forms part of the background to the third-person A Fairly Good Time but was not included in the final version of this novel. The one exception is "Wedding Ring" (28 June 1969), mentioned in the next chapter. 11 On the manuscript copy of "The Statues Taken Down" Gallant has made a notation that this story was finished in May 1964 and edited by William Maxwell of the New Yorker (box i, file 27). A notation on the manuscript of "Questions and Answers" indicates that this story was written December 1964 (box i, file 23, Thomas Fisher Library). 12 Gallant, In Transit, 161. 13 This description corresponds to the drawing of Grace, Lady Parker, a reproduction of which is in Jane Roberts's Holbein and the Court of Henry vm, 80-1. 14 Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," 211-12. 15 Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, 103, 150; cf 78-9, 153-4. m Women and Film E. Ann Kaplan, drawing on the work of Karen Horney, Laura Mulvey,

267 Notes to pages 117-28

16

17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25

and Claire Johnston, extends such observations beyond art in the Third Reich when she argues that the voyeurism endemic to film has "a sadistic side" absent in fetishism because while idealizing, as does fetishism, voyeurism also, through disparagement, attempts to control, dominate, punish, and ultimately annihilate the threat that women pose (30-1). Of La Mediterranee (1905), one of the statues that would eventually stand with seventeen others in a kind of open-air Maillol museum in the Tuileries, established near the Carrousel in 1964, Bertrand Lorquin, in Aristide Maillol, observes its "Olympian calm" and "motionlessness and inwardness" (48). Perhaps Maillol's statues exhibit this cold monumentality because he rarely used models, preferring, as he himself confessed, to work from "the general idea" (Lorquin, 70). Lorquin, however, believes this kind of art is well suited for an outdoor environment: "Monumental sculpture, and outdoor sculpture in particular, must emphasize space as a limit and occupy it with its mass ... Monumentality allowed Maillol to bring out a quality that is inherent in all his sculpture: its ability to measure itself against open space" (140). Lorquin continues, noting a monumentality and proximity of Maillol's statues that particularly appealed to German officers of the occupying forces: "A monument, [Maillol] felt, should not be a demonstration of virtuosity placed above the viewer, but should on the contrary be primarily a work of art. Bringing down the monument from its heights was part of his aesthetic program. Monumentality does not require to be looked up to, but simply to be looked at. This was a radically new concept of the function of monumental sculpture, for it introduced a new relationship between the statue and the viewer. It brought down the sculpture to eye level" (146). Gandelman, Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts, 56. Ibid., 67. Gallant, In Transit, 179. The published version reads "moment," but in the typescript (p 5) at the Thomas Fisher Library the typing error "momement" has been corrected to "movement." This is a pencilled correction like other proofreading symbols rather than the black pen corrections that are Gallant's. A note in red pen at the end of the typescript reads, "All corrections mine. MG" (box i, file 23). The New Yorker version (28 May 1966) also reads "movement" (33). Gallant, Home Truths, 101. Besner, The Light of Imagination, 122. Gallant, "Willi," 29. Hancock, "Interview," 51. Gallant, In Transit, 212.

268 Notes to pages 128-33 26 27 28 29 30

Gallant, The Pegnitz Junction, 143. Denzin, The Cinematic Society, 47. Ibid., 164, 186. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," 1. 48. Gallant, "One Aspect of a Rainy Day" (14 Apr. 1962), 39. Cf the passage in "Ernst in Civilian Clothes": "On an uncrowded screen a line of ghosts shuffles in snow, limps through the triumphant city, and a water cart cleans the pavement their feet have touched" (The Pegnitz Junction, 144). As Hatch, "Mavis Gallant and the Fascism of Everyday Life," suggests, this is probably a reference to Stalingrad at "the almost sacramental moment of linked joy and suffering as the Russians cleanse their city of limping German ghosts" (28). Visually, they are similar to "the English poor" to whom Frank Cairns exposes Linnet Muir in "Varieties of Exile" through old copies of Picture Post: "we considered slum doorways and the faces of women at the breaking point. They looked like Lenin's 'remnants of nations' except that there were too many of them for a remnant" (Home Truths, 272-3). All are reminiscent of Peter Brook's production of King Lear, on which the 1970 movie version is based, which was first performed in the United Kingdom in 1962 and then toured both Western and Eastern Europe during the early and mid-1960s. Brook's version has been the impetus for many debates on the contemporaneity of King Lear. Not only "the experience of Auschwitz and two world wars" but also "Brook's vision of a barbaric world open[ing] up during a period when a new barbarism seemed to be setting in with the Cold War and the building of the Berlin Wall" (Foakes, Hamlet versus Lear, 60, 63) makes Brook's productions of King Lear especially relevant to late twentiethcentury audiences. The observation of assistant director Charles Marowitz that, in Brook's productions, "as characters acquire sight it enables them to see only into a void" (quoted in Foakes, 60) seems particularly pertinent to a discussion of Gallant's Pegnitz Junction stories. In "The Rough Theatre," an essay in The Empty Space, Brook describes King Lear "as a vast, complex, coherent poem designed to study the power and the emptiness of nothing - the positive and negative aspects latent in the zero ... the play is directly related to the most burning themes of our time, the old and new in relation to our society, our arts, our notions of progress, our way of living our lives" (94). 31 This novella has received extensive critical examination. Besner's discussion in The Light of Imagination (esp. 82-93) remains one of the best. Other writers who provide insights on the surrealistic visual qualities of this novella are Woodcock, "Memory, Imagination, Artifice," 85-7; Hatch, "The Three Stages of Mavis Gallant's Short Fiction," 101-3; Hatch, "Mavis Gallant: Returning Home," 97-9; Merler, Mavis Gallant:

269 Notes to pages 133-49

32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

Narrative Patterns and Devices, 56-63; Keefer, Reading Mavis Gallant, 171-80. Manuscript annotations (box i, files 25 and 11, Thomas Fisher Library) indicate that Gallant finished writing "An Autobiography" on 25 Sept. 1963 and "Bonaventure" on 17 May 1965. Gallant, Home Truths, 136. Gallant, The Pegnitz Junction, 101. Gallant, The Other Paris, 217-19. Ronald Hatch discusses this story in his article "Mavis Gallant and the Fascism of Everyday Life," 11-13. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, no. Ibid., 257. Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," 205-6. Gallant, The Pegnitz Junction, 104. In this respect Erika resembles some of the women in "The Statues Taken Down," discussed in the first section of this chapter. In chap. 5 of Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts, entitled "Toeing the Line," Claude Gandelman develops the importance of the line in blatantly politicized art, such as that of the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution, and how this emphasis on line was inherited, through Kandinsky, by antifascist writers prior to the Second World War in "the question of parallelism (or nonparallelism) between political and aesthetic developments" (72). Gandelman discusses the work of Bertolt Brecht, "an admirer of line. Brechtian theater is dialectics on the stage, that is, the representation of a political development whereby a given situation reverses into its opposite, a given political line into an antithetical line ... [T]he gesture of demonstration ... lies at the core of Brechtian aesthetics. This Gestus des Zeigens, this showing that one is showing, which turns the actor into an index of the part instead of an icon of it, encapsulates the concept of the politization of aesthetics" (72-3). Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," 209. Gallant, In Transit, 187. Keefer, Reading Mavis Gallant, 180. Gallant, My Heart Is Broken, 89; In Transit, 66. Gallant, The Pegnitz Junction, 96. Besner, in The Light of Imagination, comments extensively on the "atemporal, ahistorical vacuum" in which this friendship exists, and traces how this story, like others in The Pegnitz Junction, "is narrated in the simple present tense, effectively enacting this friendship's suspension out of time and beyond historical implications" (71). Gallant, The Pegnitz Junction, 162. Ibid., 170. Gandelman, Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts, 67.

270 Notes to pages 149-51 51 Kleinfelder, The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze, 60-1. Kleinfelder quotes from Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966; trans. New York: Vintage Books 1973), 4-5. CHAPTER

FIVE

1 Hancock, "Interview," 47. 2 Gallant, From the Fifteenth District, 230. 3 The challenges that Gallant's fiction of the 19703 issues to those engaged in thematic interpretation provide Lawrence Mathews with a focus for his provocative article, "Ghosts and Saints"; however, he perhaps errs on the side of reading no meaning, "no thematic significance," from "the texture of a world that is intensely and comprehensively rendered." His contention that a distinctive feature of the stories of From the Fifteenth District is that they "satirize our drive to find meaning in every fragment of human experience" seems valid but overstated in its conclusion that we are given a "world of concrete, sensory reality ... blessedly without meaning: it is the world to which we turn, naturally, in order to escape (or transcend) the world of human meaningfulness, the world of history" (159-60). 4 Gallant, "What Is Style?" Paris Notebooks, 177, and preface to Selected Stories, ix. 5 Woodcock, "Memory, Imagination, Artifice," 75. See chap. 3, n 6. 6 Gallant, The Other Paris, 144. Cf Gallant's description of the way the writing process works for her, scenes coming to her "complete in themselves but like disconnected parts of a film" (preface to Selected Stories, xvii). 7 Examples can be found in "An Alien Flower," The Pegnitz Junction, 180; "Ernst in Civilian Clothes," The Pegnitz Junction, 143-4; and "A Report," In Transit, 209-10. 8 Gallant, "What Is Style?" Paris Notebooks, 177. 9 See especially, "Bonaventure," Home Truths, 135; "Virus X," Home Truths, 188-9, 19510 In the 11 and 17 May entries of the notes she kept during the unrest in Paris in 1968, "The Events in May: A Paris Notebook - i," Gallant records talking with a young woman, Barbara, whose remark that the rioting students need German students to organize them Gallant sees as a revelation of the failure of the young to have any memory of the Germans' treatment of their parents. Gallant comments on Barbara's mother's failure to react to this remark: "I feel as if I were watching two screens simultaneously," the screens of memory and forgetting (Paris Notebooks, 15, 20). This passage is the basis of Debra Martens's "The Past Projected," in which Martens sorts out various readings of

271 Notes to pages 151-6

11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Gallant's inclusion of the themes of memory and history, forgetting and absence of history. Reaching the same conclusion as Besner, she argues that "Gallant sees the need for memory to be informed by knowledge of the past" and that Gallant's characters often fail to use their power of memory and thus "allow their lives to be trapped by what they choose to remember. The simultaneity of the two screens, the tension between continuity and discontinuity, describes a relationship between memory and history that is personal, political, and moral" (53). Cf comments on Proust's bridging of past and present in chap. 2, n 17. Gallant, "Reviewing the Movies," Montreal Standard, 18 June 1949, 19. Ibid., 5 Aug. 1950, 13. Gallant, "Dreams," Montreal Standard, 30 Oct. 1948, 5. Notation on ms in box i, file 13, Thomas Fisher Library. Gallant, Home Truths, 35. Gallant rarely makes substantial revisions between her stories' first publication in the New Yorker and any subsequent publication in anthologies; "Saturday" is an exception. Besner compares the New Yorker opening to the revised Home Truths opening and concludes that "virtually all of her revisions consist of cuts in the expository passages which had clarified the distinction between Gerard's dreams and his waking reality ... The revised 'Saturday' in Home Truths dramatizes more acutely Gerard's exile from a home in language in order to prevent readers from deciding too quickly which events really 'happen' in the story as opposed to those which happen only in Gerard's mind. In this sense, the revised story immerses readers in a disorientation similar to Gerard's" (119-20). Hancock, "Interview," 55. Cf Gallant's comments, quoted in the introductory section of chap. 3 above, concerning closure as it relates to general shape or form. Martens, "Interview," 160. Hancock, "Interview," 47; cf Boyce, "Image and Memory," 30; Gallant, preface to Selected Stories, xvii. Hancock, "Interview," 28; cf Baele, "A Canadian at Home in Paris," cio. Gallant, "What Is Style?" Paris Notebooks, 177. Hatch, "The Three Stages of Mavis Gallant's Short Fiction," 99. Gallant, The End of the World and Other Stories, 107, no. Plot as mythic pattern is parodied in "Varieties of Exile" when Linnet sketches the outlines for permissible "plots" that feature remittance men. Since a remittance man could at any time break the pattern, she concludes that "the plot of the romance" - "what everyone repeated and what the remittance man believed of himself" - "is a load of codswallop" (Home Truths, 266-7). Linnet approaches this theme from

272 Notes to pages 157-71

25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40

another angle when she discusses "guilt-drenched" children seeking ancestral roots and dramatic family legends, only to find "smaller potatoes than the children had thought ... The male line, then, was a ghost story. A mother's vitality would be needed to create ectoplasm, to make the ghost offspring visible" (271). Comments and parodies such as these render inappropriate Grazia Merler's structuralist approach in Mavis Gallant: Narrative Patterns and Devices (1978). Merler ignores the parodic element of "Varieties of Exile" in her brief discussion of this story (16-17). Gallant, "Limpid Pessimist: Marguerite Yourcenar," Paris Notebooks, 184. See introductory section of chap. 3 above for fuller quotation. Gallant, The End of the World and Other Stories, 128. Ibid., 131. Hatch, "The Three Stages of Mavis Gallant's Short Fiction," 97-8. Gallant, "Saturday," Home Truths, 48. Gallant, "In Youth Is Pleasure," Home Truths, 234. Publication dates in the New Yorker for the stories in the Linnet Muir series are as follows: "In Youth Is Pleasure" (24 Nov. 1975), "Between Zero and One" (8 Dec. 1975), "Varieties of Exile" (19 Jan. 1976), "Voices Lost in Snow" (5 Apr. 1976), and "The Doctor" (20 June 1977). "With a Capital T" was first published in Canadian Fiction Magazine (1978). All in-text parenthetical references in the following section to these stories are to Home Truths. This notation is written on a file card inserted at the beginning of the New Yorker story filed in box 10, Thomas Fisher Library. Hancock, "Interview," 25. In a note in box i, file 15, Thomas Fisher Library, dated September 1980, Gallant remarks that she has two other half-written stories from this period but doubts if she will finish them: "The thread has been broken, perhaps owing to three visits I made to Montreal between 1975 & 78. The Montreal of my memory disintegrated. The stories are not autobiographical, but as close as I have ever come to memory in fiction, a thin line between." Hancock, "Interview," 27-8. Ibid., 28. de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 6-7. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 46. Grant, Mavis Gallant and Her Works, 14, sums up and concurs with these positions; Hatch, "The Three Stages of Mavis Gallant's Short Fiction," 93, 104, 106-7, and "Mavis Gallant: Returning Home," 96, 100-2; Besner, The Light of Imagination, 93, 105-16; Keefer, Reading Mavis Gallant, 183. Gallant, "Paris Truths," 48.

273 Notes to pages 171-81 41 42 43 44 45 46

47

48 49 50 51 52 53

54

55 56 57

Gallant, "Paris When It Shimmers," 19. Ibid., 47. Hancock, "Interview," 20-1. Sandford, The New German Cinema, 37. Ibid., 70. Gallant's comments in her essay "What Is Style?" on two stories in From the Fifteenth District, "His Mother" and "Gabriel Baum," may be applied to others in the collection (although in the case of the title story perhaps for reasons other than those given here): "The atmosphere, particularized, is of a fading world ... It may be that the Europe of the nineteen-seventies already secreted the first dangerous sign of nostalgia, like a pervasive mist." Yet prefacing this description is Gallant's observation that these stories "are about loss and bewilderment" (Paris Notebooks, 176), themes fixed by no particular time or place that characterize stories throughout Gallant's canon. See n 39 above. Woodcock's comments on "Irina" are particularly relevant ("Memory, Imagination, Artifice," 80-2), as are Keefer's on the unsatisfactory nature of the uncollected story that dates from this period, "The Burgundy Weekend" (Winter 1979). Keefer sees the failure of this story as a failure of experimentation with form and style that elsewhere produces rewarding challenges for the reader (Reading Mavis Gallant, 67-71). Similar reservations have been expressed about "From the Fifteenth District" (30 Oct. 1978), but the fantastical basis of this story seems to justify the experimental form. Gallant, From the Fifteenth District, 214-15. Skupy, ed., Insight Guides, 63. Woodcock, "Memory, Imagination, Artifice," 75. Skupy, ed., Insight Guides, 42-3, 46-9. Ibid., 19. The context of this image provides very different connotations from those of a similar allusion referring to the dying Alec Webb in "The Remission": "His blood was white (that was how he saw it), and his lungs and heart were bleached, too, and starting to disintegrate like snowflakes. He was a pale giant, a drained Gulliver, cast up on the beach, open territory for invaders" (Gallant, From the Fifteenth District, 89). Likewise, Laurie, in "Potter" (21 May 1977), has Piotr bring her from Poland "a soporific potion," which induces "the vivid, colorful dreams of opium sleep" and which for the unimaginative Laurie is a means of making her sleep "less boring" (Gallant, From the Fifteenth District, 178). Ibid., 76. Ibid., 5. Woodcock, "Memory, Imagination, Artifice," 80.

274 Notes to pages 181-8 58 Ibid., 82, 77. 59 A similar aversion to brick, more specifically brick dust, was noted in the discussion of "Bonaventure" in chap. 3 above and also in the quotation from "Saturday" earlier in this chapter when "brown and brick and sand" are identified as "the color of winter and cities." This aversion is perhaps partially accounted for by a confession of Linnet Muir's, surely autobiographical, during a particularly vicious description of "an Ontario city, a place full of mean judgments and grudging minds, of paranoid Protestants and slovenly Catholics. To this day I cannot bear the sight of brick houses, or of a certain kind of empty treeless street on a Sunday afternoon" (Gallant, Home Truths, 223). Linnet is more ambivalent about "the reddish-brown Montreal stone that colors, in memory, the streets of [her] childhood and that architects have no use for now" when describing a federal government building, a "heavy Victorian structure" (238-9). Conversely, the reddish-brown stone becomes part of an "aesthetically comfortable" image (292), as was seen earlier in this chapter. "The Four Seasons" and the three Linnet Muir stories in which these references are found were all published in the New Yorker within a ten-month period in 1975 and 1976. 60 Gallant, Home Truths, 327. 61 "The Four Seasons" is another story that provokes an interest in its names, some associated with colours: Un-win; Chaffee (chafe, chaff, coffee); Horace Dunn (classical writer, done, dun); Carmela, who has been given the "southern name" of her Sicilian grandmother (5) (mendicant religious order, honey-coloured sweet); Edward Stonehouse (an early-twentieth century king, a cold and hard abode). 62 Hancock, "Interview," 28. 63 Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 333. 64 Arnheim, New Essays on the Psychology of Art, 207-8. 65 Ibid., 212-13. 66 Arnheim, "The Perception of Maps," New Essays on the Psychology of Art, 202, 195. CHAPTER SIX

1 Gallant, "Between Zero and One," Home Truths, 248. Quoted in context in chap. 5 above. 2 Fabre, "Interview," 97. "Speck's Idea" (19 Nov. 1979) was published, although not necessarily written, before the first of these short satirical pieces, "A Revised Guide to Paris" (11 Feb. 1980). This was followed by other purely satirical writings: "From Sunrise to Daybreak (A Year in the Life of an Emigre Review)" (17 Mar. 1980), "Dido Flute, Spouse to Europe" (12 May 1980), "From Gamut to Yalta" (15 Sept. 1980),

275 Notes to pages 188-201

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12

"Europe by Satellite" (3 Nov. 1980), "Mousse" (22 Dec. 1980), "Mau to Lew" (1981), "French Crenellation" (9 Feb. 1981), "This Space" (6 July 1981), "On with the New in France" (10 Aug. 1981), "La Vie Parisienne" (19 Oct. 1981), "Siegfried's Memoirs" (5 Apr. 1982), "Treading Water" (24 May 1982), and "Leaving the Party" (3 Mar. 1986). All except "Mau to Lew" (in Exile) were published in the New Yorker; none has been anthologized. Gallant excludes "straight humor and satire" from Selected Stories because it "dates quickly" (preface, xviii). The quotations are from Gallant's 1985 interview with Gabriel, "Fairly Good Times," 24-5. In Gabriel's Canadian Forum (Mar. 1994) review of Across the Bridge, "Gallant Language," she describes Overhead in a Balloon as "an anatomy of European moral decay, whose ironic theological resonances make it a kind of cartoon Wasteland" and defends her assessment: "The adjective is one Gallant would not resist; she has written appreciatively of both the creators of Walter Mitty and Sarah Binks, and once told this writer tongue-in-cheek that her most important influence might have been the thirties' comic strip heroine, Little Orphan Annie" (39). This quip is not included in the published interview. Arnheim, "The Perception of Maps," New Essays on the Psychology of Art, 200. Gallant, Overhead in a Balloon, 139. Gallant, "What Is Style?" Paris Notebooks, 177. See opening of chap. 5 above. Besner, The Light of Imagination, 106. Gallant, From the Fifteenth District, 36-7. Ibid., 89-90, 95-6. This suggestion is reinforced by a similar allusion in "In Youth Is Pleasure," published just nine months prior to "The Moslem Wife." Linnet arrives in Montreal with "only the fewest possible summer clothes," notably a white pique jacket and skirt, having "deposited at the various war-relief agencies of New York" all her other possessions: "In those days I made symbols out of everything, and I must have thought that by leaving a tartan skirt somewhere I was shedding past time" (Gallant, Home Truths, 220-1). Gallant, From the Fifteenth District, 124-5. Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," 11. 13-15. Although Dr Blackley promises to send Netta some Dylan Thomas poems (68), this poem, occasioned by the dying of Thomas's father, would not have been among them, as it was not published until 1952. The story's narrator seems to be writing "The Moslem Wife" well after the end of the war - for example, it is said of Dr Blackley that "in those days men still liked soldiering" (66) - and so connections with this poem, whose style and structure so well transform the private grief of the poet into

276 Notes to pages 202-7

13 14 15

16 17

18

19

a public statement of resistance to grief and dying, are not an anachronism. Thomas, "Fern Hill/' 11. 43, 52-4. Gallant, Home Truths, 237. Jewison, "Children of the Wars" (112, 119), groups this story with "Ernst in Civilian Clothes" (16 Nov. 1963) and "The Latehomecomer" (8 July 1974) because "The Latehomecomer" and "Gabriel Baum" are juxtaposed in From the Fifteenth District. The parodic elements in "Gabriel Baum" place it with Gallant's later stories rather than those of mid-career. Manuscript annotation (box 2, file 2, Thomas Fisher Library) - "written in the summer of 1978" - supports this later placement. Gallant, From the Fifteenth District, 151. Gallant's farcical treatment of the ideas of choice and action in the story (particularly in the third section, with the introduction of Briseglace) suggests the demise of Sartrean existentialism during the 19505. La Meduse, located near the Montparnasse tower, is slightly west and south of the St-Germain-des-Pres area, where these intellectuals of the war years held court, and only about ten blocks from Les Deux Magots, made famous by Sartre and his disciples. By the late 19505 the whole area, including the cafe, was more an attraction for tourists than a mecca for intellectuals. In chap. 11, "Intellectuals in Disarray," of his work The New France: A Society in Transition, 1945-1977, John Ardagh describes these changes with great insight and vigour. Gabriel, "Fairly Good Times," 23-4. It is unclear from what follows in this interview whether Gallant thinks the change is for the better or worse. Surprisingly, Gallant does not mention the Montparnasse tower in her two articles "Paris When It Shimmers" (1987) and "Paris Truths: On the Street Where She Lives" (1986), although the tower looms over rue Jean Ferrandi, the street where she has lived since the late 19505. There is a similar ambivalence in her 1981 "Paris: The Taste of a New Age" (Paris Notebooks), although she is clearly critical of the "lowering" effect that this structure, visible from most parts of Paris, has had on its immediate surroundings (167-8). To Barbara Gabriel's observation in the 1985 interview that "the new German cinema is so obsessed with the Nazi period," Gallant responded: "Yes, but it's a myth to them. Parents were very silent to their children" ("Fairly Good Times," 24). The same obsession and mythmaking is to be observed in French filmmaking of the 19605 and 19705. Anton Kaes, in his section "The Flight from Memory" in From Hitler to Helmut: The Return of History as Film, calculates that "between 1975 and 1985 alone, more than fifty new feature films dealing with National Socialism were made in West Germany, nearly as many as in all the

277 Notes to pages 207-22

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35

thirty years before. The numbers are impressive, but from an aesthetic point of view most of these films mean very little: they recycle images of images." These images, "now routinely reproduced," were part of "an iconography of the Nazi era" perpetuated in "great international art films of the early 19703" (Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien and Francois Truffaut's The Last Metro are identified as particularly significant) that "presented the fascist past through imagery so powerful that most subsequent films about the Third Reich were invariably influenced by these films ... The Third Reich itself was often reduced in these representations to a semiotic phenomenon: ss uniforms, swastikas, shaved napes, black leather belts and boots, intimidating corridors and marble stairs have become mere signs unmistakably signaling 'fascism'; they serve as a suggestive backdrop that lends the private events in the foreground historical weight and consequence" (22). Kaes concludes that most damage was done when these images were absorbed by television productions that conveyed the sense that the images were "in the past tense, narratively closed to the viewer's present. Their 'authentic' reconstructions showed the past as finished and done with; no one needed to be affected by it" (23). Gallant, Paris Notebooks, 167-8. A briefer description conveying the same attitudes towards "the old Montparnasse station" is included in "Across the Bridge," set in the 19505 but told from the perspective of 1991: "Hardly anyone remembers it now: a low gray building with a wooden floor. I have a black-and-white postcard" (Gallant, Across the Bridge, 100). For example, Hancock, "Interview," 39. Sandford, The New German Cinema, 11. Ibid., 40. Gallant, From the Fifteenth District, 118-19, 12^Gallant, Overhead in a Balloon, 163. All in-text parenthetical references to the Magdalena quartet are from Overhead in a Balloon. Godard, "Modalities of the Edge," 72-3. Ibid., 75, 97. Gallant, Overhead in a Balloon, 2. Ibid., 58. Hancock, "Interview," 41. Barthes, "The Eiffel Tower," The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, 12-13. Ardagh, The New France, 309-10. One pamphlet put out by the Paris Travel Service (Broxbourne, Herts., U.K.), "Your Passport to Paris," defines the centre's "aim ... to make culture easily accessible to people, of all interests and ages" (28). Gallant, Paris Notebooks, 172-4. Barthes, "The Eiffel Tower," The Eiffel Tower, 4, 9.

278 Notes to pages 222-31 36 In "The Eiffel Tower" Barthes observes that although the "fantasy of a panoramic vision" began with Victor Hugo's "chapter of Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) devoted to a bird's eye view of Paris" (8-9), and although the Cathedral and the Tower form "a symbolic couple, recognized, so to speak, by Tourist folklore, which readily reduces Paris to its Tower and its Cathedral," Notre Dame "is not the highest of the city's monuments (the Invalides, the Pantheon, SacreCceur are higher)" (12). 37 Ibid., 4, 15-16. 38 Gallant, The Other Paris, 178. 39 Is Gallant again perhaps indulging in a delightful piece of wordplay and association with the name of Bellefeuille, the senator and fellow Mason whose home Speck visits to view the Cruche collection and where he observes "the dark November trees of the Bois de Boulogne" (33)? "Feuille" means both leaf and sheet of paper, and thus brings together several of the yellow and yellow-brown references in the story. A connection can also be drawn between "Bellefeuille" and "Chassepoule," the owner of the Amandine bookshop. Gallant never specifically identifies the street in Faubourg Saint-Germain on which Speck's gallery is located, but given its proximity to St Clotilde and the description of Walter's detour past the Ministry of Defence after coming up at the Solferino Metro stop (60), it would be near rue de Bellechasse, which passes on the west side of the Musee d'Orsay. Chasse, of course, means hunting or shooting, so Chassepoule's game is a hen! 40 In "A Painful Affair" (16 Mar. 1981) Miss Pugh takes it upon herself to restore to its original purple an effigy of "St Cumula, virgin and martyr," who had "painted herself purple and jumped into the Seine, where she drowned. The pagan, touched by her unwavering detestation of him, accepted Christian baptism, on the site of what is now the Paris Stock Exchange" (Gallant, Overhead in a Balloon, 106-7). 41 Barthes, "The Eiffel Tower," The Eiffel Tower, 12. 42 Ibid., 5-7. 43 Ibid., 4. 44 Gallant, Overhead in a Balloon, 74, 85. 45 Arnheim, "The Perception of Maps," New Essays on the Psychology of Art, 195. 46 Barthes, "The Eiffel Tower," The Eiffel Tower, 10-11. 47 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 99. CHAPTER

SEVEN

1 Keefer, Reading Mavis Gallant, 22. 2 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 93-4.

279 Notes to pages 231-48 3 The New Yorker publication dates for these four stories are as follows: "A Painful Affair" (16 Mar. 1981), "Larry" (16 Nov. 1981), "A Flying Start" (13 Sept. 1982), and "Grippes and Poche" (29 Nov. 1982). All references to these stories are from Gallant, Overhead in a Balloon. 4 Gallant, Selected Stories, 877. 5 Gallant, Overhead in a Balloon, 10. 6 Ibid., 155. 7 The phrase "chinks of light," from "A State of Affairs" (Across the Bridge, 132, 133), will be found in several passages quoted later in this chapter. Unless otherwise indicated, all further references, given in textual parentheses, are to Across the Bridge. 8 "1933" was published as "Declasse" in Mademoiselle (Feb. 1987). The remaining three were published in the New Yorker. "The Chosen Husband" (15 Apr. 1985), "From Cloud to Cloud" (8 July 1985), and "Florida" (26 Aug. 1985). 9 Gallant, "The Concert Party," 32. 10 Hunt, ed., preface to Encounters, 7, 9-10. 11 Ibid., 9. 12 Ibid., 9-10. 13 Ibid., 10. 14 Heffernan, ed., preface to Space, Time, Image, Sign, xiii. 15 Ibid., xiv. The editors' preface to Word and Visual Imagination, ed. Holtgen, Daly, and Lottes, remarks that "the relationship between word and visual imagination, or word and image, is a topic that continues to excite considerable interest. This interest manifests itself in conferences, journals and publications" (5), which are then duly mentioned (5-7). Although the studies in this particular collection attempt "to illuminate the variety of literary experience through the interaction of the verbal and visual in given works," they "may be regarded as case histories of different modes of interaction of the verbal and visual": "In the search for answers we cannot readily apply models deriving from either linguistics or communications theory as though they were monolithic systems" (7-8). 16 Jay, "Vision in Context," Vision in Context, ed. Brennan and Jay, 3. 17 In his foreword to Spatial Form in Narrative, ed. Smitten and Daghistany (1981), Joseph Frank writes: "Critical ideas are even more notoriously short-lived than most of the literature that gives rise to them; but the stubborn longevity of my youthfully audacious conjectures seems to indicate that they managed to hit on something central to the modern (and even postmodern) situation of literature in our time" (11). 18 Iser, The Act of Reading, 168-9. 19 Danto, "Description and the Phenomenology of Perception," Visual Theory, ed. Bryson, Holly, and Moxey, 211. 20 Woodcock, "Memory, Imagination, Artifice," 74.

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Works Cited

ARCHIVES

Mavis Gallant Collection. University of Toronto, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. MS Collection 189. WORKS BY MAVIS

GALLANT

"Good Morning and Goodbye." Preview 22 (Dec. 1944): 1-3. "Three Brick Walls." Preview 2.2. (Dec. 1944): 4-6. "Give the Kid a Gory Story." Standard Magazine, 29 June 1946, 9, 15.

"Above the Crowd in French Canada." Harper's Bazaar 80 (July 1946): 58, 59, 128-9. "A Wonderful Country." Standard Magazine, 14 Dec. 1946, 4, 8. "Freud or Double Talk?" Standard Magazine, 29 Mar. 1947, 3, 14. "An Art Curator and His Critics." Standard Magazine, 12 June 1948, 3, 16, 22. "Dreams." Standard Magazine, 30 Oct. 1948, 5, 11. "Art for the Family Pocketbook." Standard Magazine, 6 Nov. 1948, 5, 22. "Reviewing the Movies." Montreal Standard, 18 June 1949,19. Review of Little Women, Reign of Terror, Adventure in Baltimore, Whiplash. "Art Hoaxes that Baffle the Highbrow Critics." Standard Magazine, 23 July 1949, 17. "Success Story of a Canadian Artist." Standard Magazine, 29 Apr. 1950,18-19. "The Flowers of Spring." Northern Review 3, no. 5 (June-July 1950): 31-9. "Reviewing the Movies." Montreal Standard, 5 Aug. 1950, 13. Review of Caged, Silent Dust, So Young So Bad, No Man of Her Own, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Kill the Umpire, Sundowners.

282 Works Cited "Madeline's Birthday." New Yorker, i Sept. 1951, 20-4. The Other Paris. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1956. Toronto: Macmillan 1986. "Thieves and Rascals." Esquire 46, no. i (July 1956): 82, 85-6. "The Old Place." Texas Quarterly i, no. 2 (Spring 1958): 66-80. Green Water, Green Sky. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1959. Toronto: Macmillan 1983. "Rose." New Yorker, 17 Dec. 1960, 34-7. "Crossing France." Critic 19, no. 3 (Dec. i96o-Jan. 1961): 15-18. "One Aspect of a Rainy Day." New Yorker, 14 Apr. 1962, 38-9. "Willi." New Yorker, 5 Jan. 1963, 29-31. My Heart is Broken. New York: Random House 1964. Toronto: General Publishing Co. 1982. "Paola and Renata." Southern Review ns i, no. i (Jan. 1965): 199-209. A Fairly Good Time. New York: Random House 1970. Toronto: Macmillan 1983. "Paris Letter: The Unsuccessful Surrealist." New York Times Book Review, 28 May 1972, 4, 22-3. The Pegnitz Junction. New York: Random House 1973. Toronto: Macmillan 1982. The End of the World and Other Stones. 1974. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1982. From the Fifteenth District. 1979. Toronto: Macmillan 1981. "The Burgundy Weekend." Tamarack Review 76 (Winter 1979): 3-39. Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories. 1981. Toronto: Macmillan 1982. Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris. Toronto: Macmillan 1985. Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews. 1986. Toronto: Macmillan 1988. "Paris Truths: On the Street Where She Lives." Destinations, Winter 1986,42-8. "Paris When It Shimmers." New York Times Magazine, 4 Oct. 1987, 19, 40, 42-3, 46-7. "The Concert Party." New Yorker, 25 Jan. 1988, 32-42, 46-56. In Transit. New York: Viking 1988. Markham, Ont.: Penguin 1989. Across the Bridge: New Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1993. The Moslem Wife and Other Stones. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1994. "Scarves, Beads, Sandals." New Yorker, 20 and 27 Feb. 1995, 240-50. The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1996. SECONDARY SOURCES

Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. 1953. London: Oxford University Press 1971. Ardagh, John. The New France: A Society in Transition, 1945-1977. Originally published as The New French Revolution. Martin Seeker & Warburg 1968. 3rd ed., 1977. Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin Books 1978.

283 Works Cited Armstrong, Carol. Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1991. Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. New Version. Berkeley: University of California Press 1974. - New Essays on the Psychology of Art. Berkeley: University of California Press 1986. - "The Reading of Images and the Images of Reading." In Hefferman, ed., Space, Time, Image, Sign. 83-8. Attwater, Donald, ed. The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, and ed. Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin 1983. Baele, Nancy. "A Canadian at Home in Paris." Ottawa Citizen, 27 Feb. 1988, ci, cio. Barrett, Cyril. "Kinetic Art." In Concepts of Modern Art, ed. Tony Richardson and Nikos Stangos. New York: Harper 1974. 211-23. Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. 1953. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. London: Jonathan Cape 1967. - Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1972. - Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang 1977. - The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang 1979. - Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. 1980. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang 1981. - The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang 1985. Bawden, Liz-Anne, ed. The Oxford Companion to Film. London: Oxford University Press 1976. Besner, Neil K. The Light of Imagination: Mavis Gallant's Fiction. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1988. Bohmer, Giinter. Die Welt des Biedermeier. Munich: Verlag Kurt Desch 1968. Boyce, Pleuke. "Image and Memory." Books in Canada, Jan./Feb. 1990, 29-31. Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Atheneum 1968. Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. London: Macmillan 1983. Clarke, Graham. The Photograph. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997. Corbeil, Carole. "Home Truths with a Touch of Gallant Wit." Globe and Mail, 7 Nov. 198!, 21. Coulson, John, ed. The Saints: A Concise Biographical Dictionary. New York: Hawthorn Books 1958. Danto, Arthur C. "Description and the Phenomenology of Perception." In Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey. Cambridge: Polity Press 1991.

284 Works Cited de Beauvoir, Simone. Memoirs of A Dutiful Daughter. 1958. Trans. James Kirkup, 1959. Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin 1963. Denzin, Norman K. The Cinematic Society: The Voyeur's Gaze. London: Sage Publications 1995. Dube, Wolf-Dieter. Expressionism. 1972. Trans. Mary Whittall. New York: Praeger Publishers 1973. Duval, Paul. Four Decades: The Canadian Group of Painters and Their Contemporaries, 1930-1970. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company 1972. - High Realism in Canada. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company 1974. Eliot, T.S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Collected Poems: 1909-1962. London: Faber 1963. 13-17. Esslin, Martin. Bertolt Brecht. New York: Columbia University Press 1969. Fabre, Michel. "An Interview with Mavis Gallant." Commonwealth 11, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 95-103. Foakes, R.A. Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993. Frank, Joseph. The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1963. Gabo, Naum. Gabo: Constructions, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, Engravings. London: Lund Humphries 1957. Gabriel, Barbara. "Fairly Good Times: An Interview with Mavis Gallant." Canadian Forum, Feb. 1987, 23-7. - "Gallant Language." Canadian Forum, Mar. 1994, 38-40. Gandelman, Claude. Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1991. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1979. New Haven: Yale University Press 1984. Godard, Barbara. "Modalities of the Edge: Towards a Semiotics of Irony: The Case of Mavis Gallant." Essays on Canadian Writing^ (Winter 1990): 72-101. Gombrich, E.H. The Story of Art. 1950. 12th ed., enlarged and redesigned. London: Phaidon 1972. - Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. 1960. 2nd rev. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1972. - "Standards of Art. The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye." In Mitchell, ed., The Language of Images. 181-280. - "Image and Code: Scope and Limits of Conventionalism in Pictorial Representation." In Image and Code, ed. Wendy Steiner. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan 1981. 10-42. Gorham, Deborah. The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal. London: Croom Helm 1982. Grant, Judith Skelton. Mavis Gallant and Her Works. Toronto: ECW Press, nd.

285 Works Cited Hancock, Geoff. "An Interview with Mavis Gallant." Canadian Fiction Magazine 28 (1978): 18-67. Hatch, Ronald B. "Mavis Gallant: Returning Home." Atlantis 4 (Autumn 1978): 95-102. - "The Three Stages of Mavis Gallant's Short Fiction." Canadian Fiction Magazine 28 (1978): 92-114. - "Missing Connections." Essays on Canadian Writing 41 (Summer 1990): 21-5. - "Mavis Gallant and the Fascism of Everyday Life." Essays on Canadian Writing 42 (Winter 1990): 9-40. Hayum, Andree. The Isenheim Altarpiece: God's Medicine and the Painter's Vision. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1989. Heffernan, James A.W., ed. Space, Time, Image, Sign: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts. New York: Peter Lang 1987. Hill, Charles C. Canadian Painting in the Thirties. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada 1975. Hinz, Berthold. Art in the Third Reich. Trans. Robert and Rita Kimber. New York: Pantheon Books 1979. Holtgen, Karl Josef, Peter M. Daly, and Wolfgang Lottes, eds. Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Imagination. Erlangen: Univ.-Bibliothek Erlangen-Niirnberg 1988. Hunt, John Dixon, ed. Encounters: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts. London: Studio Vista 1971. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge 1989. Hutchinson, Helen. "Home Truths." Interview. W$, 8 Jan. 1984. Iser, Wolfgang. "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction." In Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. J. Hillis Miller. New York: Columbia University Press 1971. 1-45. - The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 1974. - The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 1978. Jay, Martin. "Vision in Context: Reflections and Refractions." In Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay. New York: Routledge 1996. Jewison, D.B. "Children of the Wars. A Discussion of From the Fifteenth District by Mavis Gallant." Commonwealth Essays and Studies 9, no. i (Autumn 1986): 112-20. Jung, C.G. The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung, ed. Violet Staub de Laszlo. New York: Modern Library 1959. Kaes, Anton. From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1989.

286 Works Cited Kaplan, E. Ann. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Methuen 1983. Keefer, Janice Kulyk. "Mavis Gallant and the Angel of History." University of Toronto Quarterly 55, no. 3 (Spring 1986): 282-301. - Reading Mavis Gallant. Toronto: Oxford University Press 1989. Keith, W.J. A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada. Toronto: ECW Press 1989. Kleinfelder, Karen. The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze: Picasso's Pursuit of the Model. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1993. Klinkowitz, Jeremy. "The Novel as Artifact: Spatial Form in Contemporary Fiction." In Smitten and Daghistany, eds., Spatial Form in Narrative. 37-47. Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. 1947. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1974. Leith, Linda. "Remembering Montreal in the 405: A Conversation with Mavis Gallant." Border/Lines 13 (Fall 1988): 4-5. Leslie, Susan. Interview. Audience. CBC FM, 6 Feb. 1982. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. 1766. Trans. Ellen Frothingham. New York: Noonday Press 1965. Levi, Erik. "Music and National Socialism: The Politicisation of Criticism, Composition and Performance." In The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich, ed. Brandon Taylor and Wilfried van der Will. Winchester, UK: Winchester Press 1990. 158-82. Lorquin, Bertrand. Aristide Malliol. London: Thames and Hudson 1995. McLean, Stuart. Interview. Sunday Morning. CBC Radio, 19 Apr. 1981. Mahon, Gigi. The Last Days of the New Yorker. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing 1988. Markle, Fletcher. "Interview with Mavis Gallant." Telescope. CBC TV, 22 and 29 Jan. 1969. Martens, Debra. "An Interview with Mavis Gallant." Rubicon 4 (Winter 198485): 150-82. - "The Past Projected: Mavis Gallant and Joseph Roth." Essays on Canadian Writing 42 (Winter 1990): 41-56. Mathews, Lawrence. "Ghosts and Saints: Notes on Mavis Gallant's From the Fifteenth District." Essays on Canadian Writing 42 (Winter 1990): 154-172. Merler, Grazia. Mavis Gallant: Narrative Patterns and Devices. Ottawa: Tecumseh Press 1978. Mitchell, W.J.T., ed. The Language of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1980. Moeller, Magdalena M. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Die Strassenszenen 1913-1915. Munich: Hirmer Verlag 1993. Monroe, Pat. Interview. The Afternoon Show. CBC (Vancouver), 17 Feb. 1984. Mullins, Edwin. The Painted Witch: How Western Artists Have Viewed the Sexuality of Women. New York: Carroll & Graf 1985.

287 Works Cited Murray, Heather. "'Its Image on the Mirror': Canada, Canonicity, the Uncanny." Essays on Canada Writing 42 (Winter 1990): 102-30. Nochlin, Linda. "Women, Art, and Power." In Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey. Cambridge: Polity Press 1991. 13-46. Norman, Geraldine. Biedermeier Painting, 1815-1848. London: Thames and Hudson 1987. Ostiguy, Jean-Rene. Modernism in Quebec Art, 1916-1946. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada 1982. Rabinowitz, Peter J. "Fictional Music: Toward a Theory of Listening." In Theories of Reading, Looking, and Listening, ed. Harry R. Garvin. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press/East Brunswick, NJ: Associated University Presses 1981. 193-208. Renoir. New York: Harry N. Abrams/Arts Council of Great Britain 1985. Richardson, Annie. "The Nazification of Women in Art." In The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich, ed. Brandon Taylor and Wilfried van der Will. Winchester, U.K.: Winchester Press 1990. 53-79. Roberts, Jane. Holbein and the Court of Henry vm: Drawings and Miniatures from The Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland 1993. Roskill, Mark. The Interpretation of Cubism. Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press 1985. Sandford, John. The New German Cinema. London: Oswald Wolff 1980. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. 1953. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. Special abridged ed. New York: Citadel Press 1969. Schrank, Bernice. "Popular Culture and Political Consciousness in Mavis Gallant's My Heart Is Broken." Essays on Canadian Writing 42 (Winter 1990): 57-71Siemerling, Winfried. "Perception, Memory, Irony: Mavis Gallant Greets Proust and Flaubert." Essays on Canadian Writing 42 (Winter 1990): 131-53. Skupy, Hans-Horst, ed. Insight Guides: Budapest. Trans. Susan James. 2nd ed., updated by Marton Radkai. Singapore: Hofer Press Pte Ltd 1995. Smitten, Jeffrey R., and Ann Daghistany, eds. Spatial Form in Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1981. Smythe, Karen. "Green Water, Green Sky: Gallant's Discourse of Dislocation." Studies in Canadian Literature 14, no. i (1989): 73-84. - "The Silent Cry: Empathy and Elegy in Mavis Gallant's Novels." Studies in Canadian Literature, 15, no. 2 (1990): 116-35. Sontag, Susan. "Fascinating Fascism" (1974). In The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich, ed. Brandon Taylor and Wilfried van der Will. Winchester, U.K.: Winchester Press 1990. 204-18.

288 Works Cited Steiner, Wendy. Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 1978. - The Colors of Rhetoric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982. - Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988. Summers, David. "Real Metaphor: Towards a Redefinition of the 'Conceptual' Image." In Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey. Cambridge: Polity Press 1991. 231-59. Thomas, Dylan. "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night" and "Fern Hill." In Collected Poems: 1934-1952. 1952. London: J.M. Dent & Sons 1964. 116, 159-61. Valery, Paul. Triomphe de Manet suivi de "Tante Berthe." 1932. In Degas Manet Morisot, trans. David Paul. New York: Pantheon Books 1960. Woodcock, George. "Memory, Imagination, Artifice: The Late Short Fiction of Mavis Gallant." Canadian Fiction Magazine 28 (1978): 74-91. York, Lorraine. The Other Side of Dailiness: Photography in the Works of Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Laurence. Toronto: ECW Press 1988.

Index

Abstract art, 6, 7, 15, 68, 75; and German tradition, 75-6, no Audience, 71, 131, 158, 214-15, 221, 229, 230-1, 241-2, 247-8; appeal to, 50, 145-6, 241-2; characters' consciousness of, x, 47, 79-81, 120-1; direct address, 64, 241; distancing, 14, 25, 26, 84, 110-11, 113; gaps of indeterminacy, 5, n, 13-17, 20-4, 31-2, 36, 1056, 214, 230, 247-8; guiding of, vii, n, 13-15, 17, 20-1, 24, 25, 34-5, 56, 84, 214, 230-1; in text, 15, 23, 35-6, 39, 49, 50, 59-60, 71, 79-81, 86, 100, 103-4; visualizing process, vii, 5, 22-6, 32-3, 149, 186-7, 229/ 247~8 Automatistes, 6, 15 Barthes, Roland, 60, 71; on gaze, 47, 79; on panorama, 220, 229; on Paris landmarks, 220, 222, 223-4, 227> 228; on photography, 254^4 Beaubourg, 112, 222-3, 22$ Becker, Jacques, 91 Biedermeier, 37, 42, 46 Body: see Distortion, Fragmentation, Line: linear bodies, stick figures Borduas, Paul-Emile, 6, 15 Brecht, Bertolt, 14, 69, 2691141 Brook, Peter, 132

Cartography: see Maps Cartoon, 188-9, 224/ 22^ Cinema: see Film Collage, 51, 55 Colour: black, 182-3, 1&5/ 193~4/ 202-3; brown/brick, 153, 155, 165, 171, 1825, 191-2,194, 196, 200, 224-5, 228, 237, 274n59; complementary, 43, 225-6; grey, 24, 43-4, 151, 171, 172-5, 185, 224, 239-40; and dreams, xi, 151-2, 153, 155, 159, 160, 162-3, i/2/ 177; and memory, xi, 49, 151, 153, 158-9, 160, 162-3, 1(V/ 168-9, X72/ ^4' J86; polychromatic, 155, 157, 158-9, 160, 164, 167, 168, 170, 171-3, 177, 178, 182-7, 188, 191-2, 198, 203, 209, 212-14; purple, 200, 225-6; versus shape, 186-7; white, 153, 158, 161, 162, 168-9, ^7°> 171, 182, 191-4 Commodification of art, 217-18, 223, 227-9 Cubism, ix, 5-8 passim, 10, 14-15, 17-19 passim de Beauvoir, Simone, 164, 165-6 Degas, Edgar, 54-5, 175 Dehumanization of art, 71-2, 84, 230 Density, 36, 73, 79, 85, 181, 236 Depth: see Dimension: third dimension

290 Index Dimension: flatness, x, 11, 22, 23, 36, 45, 47-8, 49-50, 52, 54, 65, 77, 94, 97-8, 100, 236; fourth dimension, 10-11, 17, 22-3, 25-7, 45-6, 71-2, 257ni7; third dimension, 10-11, 15, 17, 22-7 passim, 45-6, 71-2, 76, 79, 94, 252n28 Disorientation: see Vertigo Distortion: amputation, 118; anorexic, 117-19, 138, 149; of bodies, 108-9, 113-/ 113-25, 133, 138, 140, 141, 145, 149; disfigurement, xi, 119; disjointed, 105; dismemberment, 103; and Expressionism, no; see also Fragmentation Eiffel Tower, 220, 222, 223-4, 227/ 22& Eliot, T.S., ix, 8, 10, 28, 38, 76, 130 Expressionists, 64-5, 75-6, 77, in, 118; and National Socialists, no, 130 Fanck, Dr Arnold, 134-5 Fascism, 75, 85, 101, 112, 123-5, 14^~7' 178, 217; art policy, 75-6, 110-11, 112, 130; depiction of women in art, 102-3, 116; effect on survivors, 107, 133; films, 134-5; and form, 71-2, 75-6, 267ni6; on music, 101; see also Fanck, Riefenstahl Film: black and white, 150-1, 153, 158, 172, 174, 175, 203, 208; Heimatfilm, 207-8; new German cinema, 172, 208; Occupation, 206-7, 210-11; technicolour, 151, 172 Fluidity: see Kineticism Form, 52, 65-6, 68, 74-6, in, 114-19, 122, 124-5, 15°-1/ 224/ 23°; conventional, 56, 62; empty, 51-7, 59, 61-4, 66-7, 106, 130-1; fixed, 149; formlessness, 65-6; idealized, 59, 62, 65, 71, 75-6; spectral, xi, 118, 131, 133, 146, 147, 178; tyranny of, viii, 51, 64, 68, 71-2, 224, 230, 258-gn26; see also Spatial form Foucault, Michel, 77, 129-30, 149 Fragmentation: bodies, 54-5, 103, 11819; and cubism, 14-18; sense of self, 9, 40, 41, 101, 141-2; see also Distortion Frame: arrested moment, vii, 7-8, 18, 20-2; enclosure, 10, 18, 21-2, 40, 44, 47; escape from, 8, 16-18, 21-2, 32-3; of subjectivity, x, 25, 34-5, 36-7, 41, 50,63

Frank, Joseph, ix, 34-5, 71-2, 76, 2571117, 279ni7 Gabo, Naum, 17, 45 Gallant, Mavis: parents, 3-4, 161; upbringing, 3-4, 166; on the writing process, vii-viii, 11, 15, 248, 254^3, 27on6 - Across the Bridge, xi, 189, 238, 241; "The Chosen Husband," 238-40; "Florida," 238-9; "Forain," 240; "From Cloud to Cloud," 238-9; "Mile Dias de Corta," 241; "1933" ("Declasse"), 238-40; "A State of Affairs," 241-6 - The End of the World and Other Stories: "The Accident," 266nio; "The End of the World," 266nio; "Malcolm and Bea," 152, 155-7, 159/ ^7r' "New Year's Eve," 152, 157-9; "The Wedding Ring," 152, 157, 266nio - A Fairly Good Time, 266nio - From the Fifteenth District, 170, 172, 181, 189, 212, 27on3, 273n46; "Baum, Gabriel, i935~( )," xi, 188, 202-12, 273n46; "The Four Seasons," 177-86, 190, 191, 194, 228; "From the Fifteenth District," 273^6, n47; "His Mother," 172-7, 192, 273046; "Irina," 150, 171, 172, 2731147; "The Latehomecomer," 123, 127, 201, 208-9, 276ni5; "The Moslem Wife," xi, 171, 172, 177, 188, 190-202, 207, 226; "Potter," 273n54; "The Remission," 177, 194, 273^3 - Green Water, Green Sky, 5, 8, 34, 36-47, 78, 79, 81, 258ni9 - Home Truths, 47, 64; "Between Zero and One," 4, 160, 170, 188, 272^0, 274n59; "Bonaventure," 77, 92, 100-6, 133, 134, 144, 151, 262nn, 274n59; "The Doctor," 160-2, 165-8, 170, 272n3o; "In the Tunnel," 123-6; "In Youth Is Pleasure," 3, 95, 160-2, 16870, 202, 272n3o, 274n59, 275nio; "Jorinda and Jorindel," 7, 15-18, 20, 48, 49, 157; "Orphans' Progress," 77, 89; "Saturday," 152-5,159,171, 274^9; "Thank You for the Lovely Tea," 7, 1015,17,18, 20; "Up North," 7,17-20, 76, 79, 201; "Varieties of Exile," 59, 160, 161, 168, 170, 268n30, 27i-2n24,

291 Index

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-

-

2721130; "Virus X," 49, 75, 77, 89, 92100, 105, 106, 107-9, 125' 151/ "Voices Lost in Snow," 160-6, 169-70, 272^0, 2741159; "With a Capital T," 160,163-4, 169, 184, 258n20, 272n30 In Transit, 89, 123, 151; "April Fish," 266nio; "Better Times," 264^5; "By the Sea," 258^4; "The Captive Niece," 26ini; "Careless Talk," 77, 8992; "The Circus," 76-7, 258^4; "Good Deed," 123, 26ini; "The Hunter's Waking Thoughts," 76; "A Question of Disposal" ("Two Questions"), 76, 258^4; "Questions and Answers," 114, 119-22, 141; "A Report," 123, 128, 151; "The Statues Taken Down," 11419, 144, 2651147; "Sunday after Christmas," 266nio; "Vacances Pax," 123; "When We Were Nearly Young," 47, 49-50, 56, 71, 26on34 Linnet Muir stories, xi, 11, 151, 157, 159-70, 171, 189, 212, 25in2o; see also Home Truths Magdalena quartet, xi, 189, 212-14, 220, 237-8; see also Overhead in a Balloon My Heart Is Broken: "Acceptance of Their Ways," 263-4^5, 264^2; "Bernadette," 30, 76; "The Cost of Living," 47, 50-6, 71; "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street," 77, 85-8, 89, 106; "Its Image on the Mirror," 47, 50-1, 56-71, 126, 133, 266n4; "The Moabitess," 30; "Sunday Afternoon," 77-83, 85, 86, 89, 106; "An Unmarried Man's Summer," 77, 81-5, 86, 88, 89, 123, 262nn The Other Paris, 26im; "About Geneva," 22, 26-8; "Autumn Day," 22, 31-3, 47, 71, 76; "A Day Like Any Other," 30, 133-4, 2651142; "The Deceptions of Marie-Blanche," 2641132; "Going Ashore," 22, 28-30, 79, 258^4; "One Morning in June," 22-7, 79, 224; "The Other Paris," 21, 22, 30, 78; "The Picnic," 21, 30; "Poor Franzi," 22-7, 30, 76, 79, 139; "Senor Pinedo," 30, 258n24; "Wing's Chips," 151 Overhead in a Balloon, xi, 188-9, *94/ 241; "The Colonel's Child," 189, 21213, 238; "A Flying Start," 231;

"Grippes and Poche," 189, 231-3, 235; "Larry," 231; "Lena," 189, 212-14, 23&; "Luc and His Father," 228-9; "Overhead in a Balloon," 189, 215, 216-17, 221, 227-8, 237; "A Painful Affair," 226, 231; "A Recollection," 189, 21213, 220, 237-8; "Rue de Lille," 189, 212-13, 220, 237-8; "Speck's Idea," xi, 189, 215-29, 231, 232, 237 - Pegnitz Junction, xi, 47, 64, 75, 77, 92, 111, 113, 123, 151, 198, 2691147; "An Alien Flower," 123, 133, 146-9, 151, 206; "An Autobiography," 123, 13342, 262nn; "Ernst in Civilian Clothes," 123, 128-32, 151, 208, 2623nn, 268n3o, 276ni5; "O Lasting Peace," 123, 133, 142, 144-6, 266nio; "The Old Friends," 123, 133, 142-4, 195, 262-3nn, 265n47; "Pegnitz Junction," 123, 133, 194 - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant: "In Plain Sight," 231, 233-6 - Uncollected: "The Burgundy Weekend," 273^7; "The Concert Party," 241; "Crossing France," 76; "The Flowers of Spring," 7, 11, 13; "Good Morning and Goodbye," 7-11, 13, 17, 18, 20, 24, 89; "Madeline's Birthday," 10-11; "The Old Place," 30-1, 76; "One Aspect of a Rainy Day," 123, 132, 263nn; "Paola and Renata," 76; "Rose," 47-9, 56, 71, 157; "Scarves, Beads, Sandals," 231; "Thieves and Rascals," 264^8; "Three Brick Walls," 7-13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 89; "Willi," 123, 126-8, 131, 132, 263nn; "A Wonderful Country," 7, 11-13 Gaze, 47, 55, 103, 106, 113, 119, 129-30, 149, 220, 254~5n54, 257-8ni9, 2634n25; glance, 25, 113; scrutiny, x, 35-6, 85, 86,106,121-2; staring, 92, 117,118, 119-20, 264n28; surveillance, 79-81, 102-3, 120-2, 129-30; watching self, 147, 148; see also Barthes, Voyeurism Gombrich, E.H., vii, x-xi, 251^7, 25341144 Griinewald, Matthias, 107-11 Gyre, 36, 38, 42, 43-4, 45 Helical patterning, 23, 73-4, 100, 150, 173

292

Index

Holbein, Hans, the Younger, 115, 144, 265^7 Idyll, xi, 188, 191, 194, 196, 208-10, 212 Impressionists, 37-8, 42, 46, 25/ni7 Invisibility, xi, 77, 106, 140, 149, 160-3, 166-70 passim, 230-1, 247-8; consumption, 148-9, 162, 164, 165-6, 229; erasure, 49, 55, 114, 157; extinction, 118; self-effacement, 137 Isenheim altarpiece, 107-11 Iser, Wolfgang: on gaps of indeterminacy, vii, 5, 13, 20-2, 24-5, 32, 36, 1056, 248; on photographic image, 21-2; on reader's perspective, 25; on unwritten text, 27, 248; on vacancies, 106; on wandering viewpoint, 24-5, 27-8 Joyce, James, ix, 8, 32, 76, 25ini3 Kineticism, 5, 17-18, 21, 27-8, 32-3, 44-6, 112-13, 149; and language, viii, ix-x; and reading process, 24 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 64-5, 77, no Lacan, Jacques, 129-30, 257-8ni9 Lemieux, Jean-Paul, 48, 65 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, ix Light, 201-2, 230-1, 237-8, 240, 242-3, 245-6; brassy radiation, 224, 228, 232, 237; illumination, xi, 230-1, 236, 2378, 241, 248 Line, viii, 13, 135-6, 139-40, 141-2, 1434, 146, 149, 150, 177-8, 181, 191, 202-3, 204-6, 209, 211-12, 215-21, 223, 235-6, 269^1; linear bodies, 118, 138, 141, 145-6, 149; linear constructs, 36-9, 434, 59; stick figures, 117-18, 138, 146, i£ Magritte, Rene, 218-19, 223 Maillol, Aristide, 117 Manet, Edouard, 37, 38, 87 Mansfield, Katherine, 8, 94-5 Maps, 113, 187, 189, 220-1, 227, 228 Matisse, Henri, 64, 94, 125 Mobility: see Kineticism Montage, 13, 118, 158 Montparnasse, 205-6, 207, 221, 223, 228, 244-6, 276ni7

Montreal: art scene, ix, 3-7, 14; in the forties, ix, 3-6, 14, 75, 159-60, 25in2o; Sherbrooke Street, 3, 95, 159-60, 169; in the twenties, 3, 159-60 Montreal Standard, 4-7, 169 Monumental art, 65, 67, 75, 110-11, 130, 162, 217-18, 267ni6 Munch, Edvard, 42, 44, 47 National Socialists: see Fascism Op art, 23

Panorama, xi, 187, 188, 190, 220, 227-8, 229, 278n36 Paris, 78, 171, 184, 205, 220, 222-3; see also Barthes, Beaubourg, Eiffel Tower, Montparnasse Parody, xi, 187-90, 191, 194, 203, 205, 207, 208-10, 212, 214-15, 217-20, 223-6, 229, 231, 237, 241, 243, 25ini3, 276ni5 Pattern: and depth, 8-9; design, 72, 150-1; harmonizing, 39-41, 62-3, 67; imprisoning, 9-10; shape, 74, 150-1, 157-8; shapelessness, 44, 65-6, 74; versus colour, 186-7 Pellan, Alfred, 6, 15 Perspective: authorial distance, 11-12,14, 25i-2n27, 264.1132; first-person, x, n, 35, 47-71, 113, 133, 142, 266nio; second-person, 54-5, 87-8, 241-2; shifting, 10-12, 14-15, 18, 22, 32-3, 106, 113, 149, 230; spiralling, 23-4, 73-4, 85 Photographic image, 21-2, 24-5 Picasso, Pablo, 6, 94, 113 Plot, 153-4, 156-8, 161, 177-8, 181, 190, 191, 205, 207, 216, 27i-2n24; beginnings, 74, 156-7, 181; endings, 74, 154, 156-7, 181; process, 112-13, J54/ 157/ 27on6; as sequence, 18, 22, 27, 28, 32, 34-5, 60, 61, 71-2, 73-4, 26i-2n6 Point zero, viii, xi, 71-2, 104-5, 107/ 129/ 131, 132, 133, 149, 268n3o Pompidou Centre: see Beaubourg Pre-Raphaelites, 41, 42, 46, 175 Prisme d'Yeux, 6-7, 15, 18 Proportion: foreground and background, 23, 47-8, 51-2, 56, 57, 59-62, 67-8, 73, 76-7, 80-1, 82, 83-5, 88, 89, 91-2, 94, 99, 106; see also Dimension

293 Index Proust, Marcel, ix, 76, 2711110 Religious painting, 61-3, 125-6 Renoir, Pierre Auguste, 38, 133-4 Riefenstahl, Leni, 111, 134-5, 139/ 141 Roberts, Goodridge, 6-7, 263^2 Sartre, Jean-Paul: and existentialism, 276ni7; on gaze, 106, 129-30 Spatial form, ix-x, 34-5, 71-2, 76, 247 Spiral: see Helical patterning Steiner, Wendy, ix-x, 7-8, 15, 18, 32-3, 35, 51, 72, 256-7ni6, 26on40, 262n7

Surrealism, ix, 5-6, 15-20 passim, 133 Surrey, Philip, 4, 6-7, 65, 169-70, 263^2 Surveillance: See Gaze Third Reich: see Fascism Time: see Dimension: fourth dimension Vertigo, 13, 16, 19-20, 22, 38-9, 43-4, 137-9, 141, 143, 181; disorientation, 18-19, 22/ 32/ 21° Voyeurism, 12, 79, 116, 130, 149; see also Gaze