Stories of the Middle Space : Reading the Ethics in Postmodern Realisms [1 ed.] 9780773591035, 9780773536890

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Stories of the Middle Space

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Stories of the Middle Space Reading the Ethics of Postmodern Realisms

Deborah C. Bowen

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2010

ISBN 978-0-7735-3689-0 Legal deposit second quarter 2010 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% postconsumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from Redeemer University College. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BDIP ) for our publishing activities. library and archives canada cataloguing in publication Bowen, Deborah, 1948 Stories of the middle space : reading the ethics of postmodern realisms / Deborah C. Bowen. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7735-3689-0

1. Ethics in literature. 2. Christian ethics in literature. 3. Realism in literature. 4. Postmodernism (Literature) – Canada. 5. Canadian fiction (English) – 20th century – History and criticism. 6. English fiction--20th century – History and criticism. I. Title. PS8191.E85B69 2010

C813’.5409353

C2010-900100-1

This book was typeset by Em Dash Design in 10.2/13 Sabon

Contents



Acknowledgments vii Prologue: Between Word and World 3 A Christian Apologia Introduction: Narrative and Ethics Face to Face 20 Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin

1 True Stories and the Oppressions of History 59 A.S. Byatt , “Sugar”; Joy Kogawa , Obasan; Penelope Lively , Moon Tiger; Salman Rushdie , Midnight’s Children

2 Magic Realism, Social Protest, and the Irrepressibility of Language 99 Salman Rushdie , Midnight’s Children; Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry; Jane Urquhart , Away

3 Parodic Myth and Sacred Story 135 Thomas King , Green Grass, Running Water; Julian Barnes , A History of the World in 10½ Chapters; Timothy Findley , Not Wanted on the Voyage

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4 Writing with Photographs: Art, Lies, and Realist Developments 166 Roland Barthes , Camera Lucida; Michael Ignatieff , The Russian Album; Michael Ondaatje , Running in the Family; Carol Shields , The Stone Diaries

5 The Genres of the Middle Space 199 A.S. Byatt , “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”

Epilogue: Narrative Trace, Textual Grace 229 Notes 239 Bibliography 253 Index 273

Acknowledgments

The completion of this book has been a long time coming, and there are a number of organizations, groups, and individuals whose help and support I would like to acknowledge. First, grateful acknowledgment of a Pew Evangelical Scholars’ Research Fellowship which bought me a research leave for the whole of 1998, and thus enabled me to set off on the winding journey which this narrative has taken. I am also very thankful to have been one of the recipients at my home institution, Redeemer University College, of funding under two SSHRC Aid to Small Universities Grants, 1999– 2002 and 2002–05, which provided resources that otherwise would have been unavailable for continuing my research. Various groups have provided the opportunity along the way for a public airing of some of these thoughts and schemes – among them ACCUTE (the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English), N eMLA (the Northeast Modern Language Association), NECCL (the Northeast Conference on Christianity and Literature), the CCCU (the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities), the University of Toronto Graduates Christian Fellowship, and audiences at Redeemer University College colloquia and conferences. Thanks are due to several colleagues whose encouragement enabled me to find initial direction for my journey – in particular David Lyon at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario; Richard Middleton at Roberts Wesleyan College in Rochester, New York; Brian Walsh at Wycliffe College in the University of Toronto; and Al Wolters at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario. There are also a number of people who have at various times offered me support and encouragement along the way, even when the project was going in directions they

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might not themselves underwrite: colleagues at Redeemer University College include Hugh Cook, Jacob Ellens, Douglas Loney, Ray Louter, Bert Polman, Betty Spackman, and Richard Wikkerink; and colleagues and advisors further afield include David Lyle Jeffrey at Baylor University, Bruce Johnson at James Madison University, Roger Lundin at Wheaton College, and Susan VanZanten at Seattle Pacific University. I owe a special vote of thanks to those who have read sections of the manuscript at various times and from a variety of perspectives, and have offered me tough and constructive criticism: I think specially of Daniel Coleman at McMaster University, Paul Harland at Augustana College in the University of Alberta, and Keith Wilson at the University of Ottawa; I should also acknowledge early encouragement from the members of the Outrageous Christian Scholars’ group in Hamilton, 1999–2000. Most particularly I record my gratitude, admiration, and affection to George Piggford, C.S.C., at Stonehill College, whose insightful readings and rigorous but tactful questions have had a deep influence on the final shape of this book, by keeping me to the road less travelled even when it would have been much more comfortable to be somewhere else. Above all, my chief editor and publisher at McGill-Queen’s University Press, Roger Martin, has been a constant support and encouragement, especially in the fairly frequent dark days when I thought I would never find time or energy to complete the project. Thanks for your unfaltering understanding, kindness, and confidence in me, Roger. My gratitude also to Kyla Madden, Joan McGilvray, and the other MQUP staff, unfailingly professional, helpful, and gracious withal. And to Michael Allerton, the indexer. And finally, I owe heartfelt thanks to my family, longsuffering through months and years of vague meals, semi-absent parenting, and hogging of the computer – to Ben and Anna, thank you for believing in your mom; and to John, my love, gratitude, and admiration, as always. The true stories in this book owe a debt to all these people. The false ones still face me with my own responsibility.

Deborah C. Bowen “Under the Mercy” June 2009



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Copyright permissions “Witness,” by Denise Levertov, from Evening Train, copyright © 1992 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Victoria,” “Aunt Clarentine, 1916,” “Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club,” “Cuyler and Mercy, 1902”: photographs excerpted from The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. Copyright © Carol Shields Literary Trust. Reprinted by permission of Random House Canada. World English rights and Canadian English rights. Some small parts of chapters 1, 2, and 3 appeared in preliminary form in “A Christian Epistemology of Postmodern Realist Fiction,” published in Selected Papers; On the Eve of a New Millennium: Belief and Unbelief as Expressed in Literature, Philosophy, Theology and the Visual Arts (Manchester, NH: St Anselm College Press 1999), 24–30. Some parts of chapters 1 and 2 appeared in an earlier form in “Postmodern Realism and Fictional Play: Rushdie, Winterson, and the Historical Imperative,” in The Strategic Smorgasbord of Postmodernity: Literature and the Christian Critic, ed. Deborah C. Bowen 253–64 (Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007). Some parts of chapter 3 appeared in an earlier form in “Novel theories of spiritual pilgrimage: Julian Barnes’s History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters and Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted On The Voyage,” published in Proceedings: Conference on Christianity and Literature, 1999 Northeast Regional Meeting (New York: Nyack College 1999), 24–33. Some parts of chapter 4 appeared in an earlier form in “The WellLit Road and the Darkened Theatre: Photography in Biographies by Michael Ignatieff and Michael Ondaatje,” published in World Literature Written in English 31, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 43–9. I am grateful to the publishers for permission to cite and adapt my own earlier material.

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Stories of the Middle Space

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Prologue

Between Word and World A Christian Apologia

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity It is [the] break of the covenant between word and world which constitutes one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself. George Steiner, Real Presences The postmodern theorists have discredited ethnocentrism and logocentrism so zealously that they have failed to see their own anthropocentrism. Why reject a priori the very possibility that things may speak to us in their own right? Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide

I sit in my study, looking out of the window into the huge maple tree in the front yard. The leaves, jostling against winged russet and limegreen seedpods, have that slightly dusty, used look which presages their decline and fall. The white sky glimmers behind them. They move constantly in a light August breeze. Or is it that they move inconstantly? Is the sky perhaps blank, rather than glimmering – or both? And might the dusty look of the leaves imply a narrative other than one that anticipates their imminent end? How do I describe this tree, for which words are so inadequate, but which gives me such a lively sense of its reality and otherness? When I first look out of the window, is it not the tree’s “this-ness,” its selfhood, that I meet, so that the finding of words for it is a secondary move, a signifying activity of struggling to represent, in which a different, language-conscious “I” takes the helm?

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The nineteenth-century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, engaging precisely this struggle in his sonnet “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” wrote Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came. Hopkins was drawing on the theology of the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus when he talked about things “selving,” acting out their identity in the mere process of being. This insight into the distinctive identity of things is also central to the philosophy of the twentiethcentury Jewish literary scholar George Steiner, who argues that a transcendent reality is the ground of all art. He talks about “the inviolate enigma of the otherness in things and in animate presences” and “the irreducible weight of otherness, of enclosedness, in the texture and phenomenality of the material world” (Real Presences 139–40). Yes – and I want to protest that the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign radically misses the tree’s selfhood, which always and already exceeds its telling by any language other than its own “speak[ing] and spell[ing].” I want to declare that there is something pre-textual even about my experience of this tree. Assuredly, its meaning and history I can access only textually – but that moment of lostness in its leaves, of peace in its movement, is, I want to say, a humanly pre-linguistic meeting with its otherness. Northrop Frye talked of the way human language is initially used to differentiate us from the world, but I think he was wrong. The differentiation has already happened when it is not human words that I turn to, but the “speaking” of the tree itself. In part it is because of the voiceless voice of this tree that I want to write this book. What follows in the prologue is my own particular outworking of Seyla Benhabib’s dictum that “The political and ethical project ... is to increase everyone’s capacity to articulate in public their standpoint as they see fit” (“In Defense” 189). My own “ethical project” here is to try to articulate the fit that I see.

Of course I recognize that the hermeneutics of suspicion apply to the semiotics of vision as much as to (the tautology of) literal words. My vision is pre-informed by my contexts – geographical, historical, material, social, intellectual, emotional, and religious. Nietzsche: “There



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are no facts, only interpretations.” And yet. There is an unexplained supplement in the selving of the tree, which is for me much better accounted for by a recognition of its quietly insistent presence than by an insistence on signified absence, on deferred and differing identity within a textuality beyond which there “is” nothing. When the contemporary Canadian poet and cabinetmaker John Terpstra writes, “In theory, at least, there are no limits to the speech of trees” (Naked Trees 59), I think he knows something about their language which structuralist and poststructuralist theories can hardly hear – are not even really interested in attending to. Indeed, if I maintain the prior significance of “otherness,” Jacques Derrida himself could be cited on my side; here he is, speaking in 1981: I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite. The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the other and the other of language ... The other, which is beyond language and which summons language, is perhaps not a “referent” in the normal sense which linguists have attached to this term. But to distance oneself thus from the habitual structure of reference ... does not amount to saying that there is nothing beyond language. (Dialogues 123–4) More on this later. For the moment, enough to say that it is the “other” beyond human language by which I feel addressed, and to which I must be faithful. It is too easy in the world of contemporary literary theory not to declare one’s position if it is “other” than those of the current orthodoxies, which may assume that notions of presence have been exposed as so much pretense in the service of the interests of the erstwhile liberal-humanist establishment. What to do, if both my experience and my commitments refuse to allow me to read against the intransigent reality of that other voice? This is the ethical challenge I feel I must try to meet.

A First Premise One powerful line of defence is, rather surprisingly, articulated by that agent provocateur of contemporary literary theory, Stanley Fish. Arguing in 1996 to the logical boundaries of his anti-modernist

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epistemology, he asserted that “evidence is never independent in the sense of being immediately perspicuous; evidence comes into view (or doesn’t) in the light of some first premise ... that cannot itself be put to the test because the protocols of testing are established by its preassumed authority” (“Why We Can’t” 23). Fish will not, of course, help me objectify or absolutize my experience of the tree’s intransigent reality, but he will help me explain how I can articulate it. In fact, he says, “in the absence of a fixed commitment – of a first premise that cannot be the object of thought because it is the enabling condition of thought – cognitive activity cannot get started. One’s consciousness must be grounded in an originary act of faith – a stipulation of basic value – from which determinations of right and wrong, relevant and irrelevant, real and unreal, will then follow” (19–20). The parallel that Fish draws between the notions of “a fixed commitment,” “a first premise,” “an originary act of faith,” and “a stipulation of basic value” is instructive: faith and ethics are, he argues, foundationally prior – together they constitute an enabling condition for thought, evaluation, and the very experiencing of the real. Twentieth-century post-structuralist theorists by definition worked from an assumption of interestedness on the part of the perceiver. Already in 1957, the French semiotician Roland Barthes assumed that what speaks is what is humanly constructed: “In a single day, how many really non-signifying fields do we cross? Very few, sometimes none. Here I am, before the sea; it is true that it bears no message. But on the beach, what material for semiology! Flags, slogans, sign-boards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages to me” (Mythologies 112). Because the sea is beyond human construction, and Barthes’ first premise, or what Fish calls his “originary act of faith,” is that “signifying fields” are human-made, his reading of the sea is that it “bears no message.” Similarly, the American pragmatist Richard Rorty, cited from 1989 in the first epigraph to this chapter, believes that the world in itself does not speak without human intervention. I, from a very different first premise, find that it does. I want to affirm that the sea, too, has its own voice to which we would do well to attend. In this way I am demonstrating that, as Fish suggests, “the difference between a believer and a nonbeliever is not that one reasons and the other doesn’t, but that one reasons from a first premise the other denies” (“Why” 35). I am “a believer” in the traditional Christian faith, a faith I came to embrace both through a process of reasoning for which Fish’s formulation allows, and through a series of intuitions about the “voices”



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of the world around and beyond me, with which I would argue his formulation is less well equipped to deal. As a result, my first premise in coming to the writing of this book, and thus “the enabling condition of my thought,” is that there is a Creator God for whom the createdness of the world is intended to enact a “selving” of ongoing delight, and to whom the suffering of that world therefore causes deep pain. In recognizing this first premise, then, I am talking not only, and not even primarily, about reason and argument and evidence, but also about experiential, relational ways of perceiving and knowing – what Steiner calls “certain non-systematic, counter-theoretical intuitions or ... compulsions to conjecture [about] the transcendent” (85). Although Derrida uses the phrase “transcendental signified” to refer to any concept which transcends interpretation in the sense of stabilizing and therefore ending it, in religious tradition the notion of transcendence implies not the ending of interpretation but its beginning, not the stabilizing of signification but its overthrow.1 To talk of the transcendent in a religious context is to imply the impossibility of any human construction of self-evident and final meaning, and the ultimate limitations of any theoretical system, because in such a context one is faced with otherness that is unnamable, that cannot be comprehended or exhaustively understood by mere human words. Paradoxically, to talk of transcendence in a religious context is on occasion to sound remarkably like Derrida. And in thus naming my first premise I am talking less about reason and argument than about narrative, and about narrative as something inhabitable: specifically, I am talking about the call to live within the Christian story – a story that affirms the material world as well as the transcendent, and that invites me to a place of response and responsibility within that world.2 This story constructs me as dust, but infinitely valuable dust. It asks me to recognize that I too am created, that I too am a being with “this-ness,” as is every other being on the face of the earth. This story invites me to recognize that, seeing the trials and struggles of its creatures, the Creator of the story has gone so far in love as to seek out a way to bridge the transcendent and the earthly, a way of mediation that entails the Creator’s entering that story to participate in it, to identify with its suffering, and to empower its unfolding to a happy ending. The Christian story thus understood is the story par excellence of the “middle space”: this is the story of a Creator who delights in the material world and encourages and empowers its participants to work for shalom “Shalom” is a Hebrew word meaning

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a harmony between word, world, and transcendent Other that issues in justice and kindness for all by all. This is the Christian story that influences both how I read the world as text and how I read the texts of literature.

However, I am of course aware that a Christian world view is likely to come up against several immediate objections, particularly though not exclusively as it presents itself to a non-Christian readership in the world of literary scholarship.3 First, there is the problem that I have already been engaging, the problem of reference: can the world be said even to exist, let alone “speak,” separately from the perceiver? Second, there is the problem of the metanarrative: haven’t all metanarratives, since Lyotard, been subjected to the “incredulity” of the survivors of their oppressive rule? And third, there is the related issue of logocentrism: doesn’t a Christian world view predetermine all interpretation and silence all difference? I would like to speak to these three objections at the outset, and to join in a brief conversation with their proponents, in order to explain something of the grounds on which I will be proceeding.

Reference Why is it that the referentiality of language has become so problematic? In Western intellectual history, investigations into the nature of language have probably never been as central as they were in the twentieth century, and what made these investigations particularly noteworthy was the apparent divorce of language from external reality. Steiner in Real Presences (1989) argues that from classical times until the late nineteenth century there had been an underlying “core of trust” between word and world, “conceived of and existentially enacted as a relation of responsibility” (90). He contends that, in the late 1800’s, Mallarmé’s insistence that “non-reference constitutes the true genius and purity of language” and Rimbaud’s deconstruction of the first-person singular into the plurality of “je est un autre” were demonstrations that aesthetics had become separated from an ethics of responsibility, because they seemed to share no mutual ground (96, 99, 101). The science of modern linguistics, inaugurated in a famous series of lectures by Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 1900s, was distinguished from previous linguistic study in having undergone a “fundamental



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shift from a referential to an internally-relational semantics” (105). When the linguistic sign is taken to be the union of a sound pattern (signifier) and a concept or image (signified), then there is a sense in which the object, or referent, of the sign is completely elided. Thus Saussure’s account of the linguistic sign brackets the “thing” or referent altogether because it is not part of the internal structure of language (Moore 14–15). On this reading, “[t]here is in words and sentences no pre-established affinity with objects, no mystery of consonance with the world” (Steiner 105). The relationship between the referent and its sign is indirect, conventionally determined, and, in the end, arbitrary. There are two reasons why such a reformulated understanding of language is of vital importance. First, once language is understood less as a physical and psychological phenomenon, a core of trust between word and world, than as a set of signs whose values are defined by their relationships within a specific system, then language is constituted as a completely culturally determined institution, and the way in which reality is described is recognized as a matter of social construction. This lays the burden of ethical responsibility squarely on the shoulders, or on the tongues and beneath the pens, of any given society’s languageusers, since social constructions can presumably be reconstructed otherwise if they are found to be unjust. But second, once language is considered not primarily as referential but as internally relational, it seems a small step to the position that the only reality we can perceive or know is the one constructed by language. What, then, of the “voice” of trees, or the sea, or a transcendent Other? It is Derrida who has most famously declared that there is nothing that does not pass through textual practice to reach us: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” – “There is nothing outside the text,” or “There is no outside-text” (Of Grammatology 158). However, according to Derrida himself, this statement has been much abused in interpretation. In the 1981 interview from which I have already quoted, he asserted that “[i]t is totally false to suggest that deconstruction is a suspension of reference.” What deconstruction tries to show, he says, is that “the question of reference is much more complex and problematic than traditional theories supposed” (Kearney, Dialogues 123–4).4 Derrida does not deny the reality of history, the world, and the “other,” but argues that they can be experienced only indirectly, as a network of textual traces which are constitutive of meaning: “every referent and all reality has the structure of a differantial trace, and ... one cannot refer to the ‘real’ except in an interpretative experience” (Limited Inc 136–7, 148). He is

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thus complicating common assumptions about the referential nature of language, rather than suspending the world to which language refers. My concern is to reintroduce that world, by complicating linguistic theory through attention to the initiatives of language-speakers, both human and other-than-human. In this differently constituted dialogic model, it may well be the “real” that refers to us, rather than the other way around. We become the referents of an Other’s speech. “Why reject a priori,” asks Albert Borgmann in the third epigraph to this chapter, “the very possibility that things may speak to us in their own right?” (Crossing 117). If Saussure brackets the referent as not being part of the linguistic system with which he is concerned, and Derrida complicates the nature of reference in that it inevitably renders the referent only indirectly accessible through text, the response of the pragmatist is to recognize the reality of the world but not to see it as intrinsically related either to language or to truth. Thus Richard Rorty offers his own critique of the traditional conception of truth as a correspondence of sentences to the world outside them, and consequently of language as essentially referential and descriptive. In addressing the issue of truth head-on, he argues that “[w]e need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations” (Contingency 4–5). For Rorty, then, language constructs truth: in fact, truth is defined as that which language can construct about the world. “Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false” (5). This supremely anthropocentric definition of truth has little to say to an understanding of truth as something that can be “out there,” that has to do with “this-ness” and relational, counter-theoretical knowledge more than with human description and construction. Because of Rorty’s first premise about the linguistic nature of truth, he will approach truth only as an issue of verbal surfaces, and not as one of metaphysical depths.



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But as I have been suggesting above, the epistemology which underlies the Western cultural tradition – that of Judaeo-Christian faith – starts from an understanding of referents as exceeding and standing outside human representations of them. Such an epistemology may tacitly or explicitly assume that these referents have non-verbal “languages” with which to communicate with those who have ears to hear: “Each mortal thing” that “speaks and spells” itself tells the truth about itself. We might say that each mortal thing enacts truth – that it “truthes,” if you will.5 The truth-of-things pre-exists human language, and shows their relationship to the Creator: according to the Hebrew scriptures, “The heavens declare the glory of God ... Day to day pours forth speech” (Psalm 19). Moreover, not only is there a prior relationship of every creature to the Creator from whose perspective alone each creature is wholly seen, but in this narrative God’s words are literally and actually constitutive of their referent: “And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). By contrast, human words are always and essentially secondary to their referent, though they can evoke, explore, and even reshape it. While shaping our vision according to their construction, such human words are ultimately derived from our creaturely relationship to God. What is more, because they are in this sense relational rather than merely systemic signs, they will render us responsible to God before the referent that exceeds them. For the Christian reader there is, then, a relational ethics inherent in our use of language.

Metanarrative This epistemology is foundational to the Judaeo-Christian narrative that has shaped Western culture. Of course, in 1979 the postmodern condition was axiomatically described by Jean-Francois Lyotard, “simplifying to the extreme,” as “incredulity” toward master- or meta-narratives, those explanatory truth-schemes that have undergirded the world views of the past: not only religious beliefs but also philosophical systems, political theories, systems of myth and desire (Postmodern Condition xxiv). These “grand narratives,” Lyotard argued, were “apparatuses of legitimation” used to validate knowledge and universal values, but have become untenable in the cultural heterogeneity of the West in the twentieth century and beyond. In particular the problem revolves around the traditional and culturally legitimizing nature of such narratives. In postmodernist thinking any notion of the “timeless essence,” whether

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of the self, or of history, or of truth, has come to be understood as a dangerous fiction because of the way in which it places itself outside the realm of historical and political practices and there tacitly claims unassailable authority. Some part of the twentieth-century genealogy of this suspicion of timeless essences is worth charting briefly here. Already for philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, writing in the heavily authoritarian Soviet Union of 1934, the “primary language system” of an ideology acts as a “myth” which presents itself as “an absolute form of thought” and “then substitutes itself for the connections and interrelationships of reality itself” (“Discourse” 367–9). Especially as he sets it over against an absolutism of thought, Bakhtin’s relational and extra-linguistic definition of “reality” is important here, and I will return to it later. For Roland Barthes, writing in the postwar Europe of the 1950s, the “myth” of a “universal human nature” is a dangerous pietism which disguises historically determined conditions under the realm of Nature and so prevents or disables interventions on behalf of social justice (“Great Family” 101). Barthes critiques bourgeois ideology for “continuously transform[ing] the products of history into essential types” (Mythologies 154–5). Barthes sees metanarratives as myths of this kind, myths whose end is “to immobilize the world: they must suggest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions” (155). So the dangers of metanarrative are those of an abuse of power, dependent on a lack of awareness of or response to local historical conditions. And then again, in an interview conducted shortly before his death in 1984, the French poststructuralist historian Michel Foucault remarked, “It is one of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are part of their landscape – that people think are universal – are the result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made” (“Interview” 11). I consider it to be highly significant, then, to recognize that Bakhtin, Barthes, and Foucault, in their antipathy over fifty key years of the twentieth century to the concept of static universals, share an ethical concern: to overthrow the metanarratives – communist, consumerist, Judaeo-Christian – which they believe have deprived people of justice and freedom, and even of “reality itself.”



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But the absence of any overarching metanarrative is no guarantee of justice and freedom, or a wise use of power, either; in fictions, as in the real world, competing “little narratives” may also be potentially highly dangerous. “Ours is not the first moment in history,” wrote American literary critic Wayne Booth in 1988, “when observers have feared that they might drown in a flood of rival myths” (Company 325, 349). He argued that in effect every writer of narrative creates a “mythic metaphor” for the nature of the world as he or she sees it, and that the fictional worlds thus created become rival metaphors for the allegiance of the reader. Where Booth’s response was to espouse “a rigorously plural ethical criticism” (350), a number of recent theorists have seen the danger that a plurality of narratives can splinter into “a maze of often mutually antagonistic micropolitics” (McLaren and Lankshear 411). Expressing an urgent concern to find “nontotalizing alternatives to liberal humanist discourse,” since liberal humanism is still read as the reigning oppressive metanarrative of the West, such theorists are seeking “a liberation ethics ... which includes solidarity with the marginal and oppressed” (411, 406) – a metanarrative, in fact, though with careful recognition of the “contingency of all universality” (Laclau 23). Post-colonial criticism is particularly concerned to negotiate the ethical implications of the middle spaces not only between word and world, but also between local and universal, because it is impossible to speak for or about the marginalized and the “subalternized” without moving into the realm of ethically valenced enquiry.6 Indeed, it seems that human beings quite simply need a story to live by. As Paul Ricoeur has put it, “A life is no more than a biological phenomenon as long as it is not interpreted” (“Life” 432). This need for an interpretation, a meaning, in fact a story, might begin to explain why, among a large coterie of postmodernists, a covert metanarrative was inevitably at work: “[t]here is constant talk of liberation from binary hierarchies and truth-schemes, but the truth-scheme which remains privileged throughout is the notion that there is no truth to be found, or at least no language to communicate it” (Thornton and Thornton 135). There are various ways to address this crux, and various more hopeful voices can be heard in the ensuing conversation. For a start, some would argue that a metanarrative does not have to explain everything; what is necessary is that it is practically productive. As Terry Eagleton suggests, “There is a difference between a theory from which everything else can be supposedly deduced ... and a narrative which is ‘grand’ in the sense of providing the matrix within which many, but

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not all, of our other practices take shape” (Illusions 111). The emphasis in sociological discourse on practices and contexts stems from this kind of qualified pragmatism, which may have a more absolutist belief system behind it. In the postmodern situation where reason is recognized as only one among a number of modes of evaluation, alongside intuition, emotion, imagination, and so on, we may even expect what from a modernist viewpoint would be called contradictions of belief and practice; the focus for investigation becomes “how people make a life, rather than just ... how they make sense” (Lyon, Disneyland 76). But it is also true that the nature of universal or global values is increasingly seen to be important, particularly when questions about the survival of the planet and of humanity itself are becoming more and more urgent.7 It is for these kinds of reasons that one 1994 study of religion and globalization already argued that “a global civil religion is both possible and likely” (Beyer 227, quoted in Lyon, Disneyland 146) – a proposition that, in the long shadow of the recent excesses of militant Islam and Christian fundamentalist responses thereto, may seem unnervingly prescient. For my money, an overtly and intelligently Christian response to the critique of metanarrative that deserves serious attention is that of J. Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh in Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be (1995). Here Middleton and Walsh describe a “Christian alternative to both the naive, rationalistic realism of modernity and the radical perspectivalism or constructivism of postmodernity” and offer what is in effect a revisionist articulation of the Christian metanarrative (147). Taking the Bible as presenting the founding and normative Christian story, Middleton and Walsh attempt to deflect the predictable criticisms of this most prominent metanarrative of Western (oppression and) civilization by re-presenting it in a postmodern frame, reading it as both non-totalizing and self-critiquing. This they accomplish by identifying within the biblical narrative three “counter-ideological” factors: the creational purposes of a God who cannot be contained by a merely partisan reading; a radical sensitivity to suffering; and the openendedness of a story which is never static and invites readerly participation. The “dynamic, processive” epistemology which Middleton and Walsh propose as what I will call a Christian postmodern realism takes seriously the notion of the biblical story as dynamic narrative rather than static propositional statement (169). It begins by insisting on the creation story’s account of the “givenness” of reality, rather than “the heroic pretensions of autonomous world construction” which are



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endemic to the modern project (146). Middleton and Walsh argue that, despite the malpractices of history, a biblical world view should lead to an understanding that the given “is not there for our mastery but is offered to us as an invitation to covenantal responsibility” (152). At the same time, this kind of Christian postmodern realism has “a profound regard for both the finite and the fallen character of our epistemological context”; it recognizes that “all knowing is provisional, open to correction, redirection and deepening” (170). Middleton and Walsh thus propose that the biblical metanarrative, as a text that exceeds formulaic treatment and includes its own internal checks to counter reductionism, is accessible to productive contemporary readings.8 I want to nuance the term “metanarrative” by deflecting it away from its enmeshment in notions of fixity, ideology, and system, and returning it to its roots in a more flexible, literary notion of narrative. “What cannot be expressed logically,” writes J. Hillis Miller of the relationship between narrative and logically insolvable human problems, “one is tempted to say, we then tell stories about” (Critical Terms 74). Though any narrative must be shaped, propelled through a sequence in time, and eventually brought to some kind of a close, to describe it as fixed or static is to misunderstand the nature of narrative and its interaction with the reader. When Bakhtin distinguished between certain kinds of mythic fixity and “the connections and interrelationships of reality itself,” he was describing the difference between the absolutism of ideology and the relational character of narrative. By using the term “metanarrative” for the Christian story that I live within, I want, like Middleton and Walsh, not to abandon the sources of moral strength arising from a transcendent religious imperative, but at the same time to acknowledge the storied, relational nature of the biblical narrative. I want to take account both of the problematic question of reference and of the need for ethical accountability grounded in a socio-historical frame. Here are parameters for a theistic postmodern realism that stems from the same roots as the socio-cultural legacy of Western civilization, but sets out to nurture the growth of new fruit from those roots, of a variety that can flourish in a postmodern climate profoundly critical of its own history and inheritance. Middleton and Walsh’s interest is primarily theological and socio-cultural rather than literary, but it is their commitment to the scandal, in postmodern terms, of a monotheistic God, alongside their recognition of the power of a narrative shaping of the biblical accounts, and their identification of the dynamic of narrative as both a primary vehicle of world view

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and a spur to ethical action, that make this model particularly resonant for my own examination of texts – and my response to the language of trees.9

Logocentrism What is it about the notion of logocentrism that has seemed to send chills down the postmodern spine? For Derrida, who coined the term, a signifying system centred on the “logos” means a system where logic, reason, and speech are understood to be complete and self-present in their meaning. Derrida’s critique of Western philosophy is that it has always been centred on such a notion of presence, thereby ignoring and silencing difference, ambiguity, and indeterminacy. By contrast, Derrida holds that nothing empirically defined can be essentially determined – that presence is always deferred – that signalling this “différance” is, indeed, the purpose and power of language. Derrida’s critique is taken not only to be a critique of the Western intellectual tradition, but also to be intentionally anti-theological. However, it is possible even for a believer in the Judaeo-Christian God to hold that the theology against which Derrida inevitably writes is as much in need of correction as the philosophical tradition that he counters. Derrida’s comment that “[t]he critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the ‘other’... which is beyond language and which summons language” potentially makes space for a transcendent Other. An ongoing “conversation” between system and narrative, fixity and process, human knowing and human limit, is necessitated by any encounter with even the trace of an ultimate Other. Theology, though useful within its limits, must be ever mindful of those limits: it has feet of clay, because its Referent speaks so loudly from “beyond language.”10 And reason is not the only god that needs to be dethroned. Just as reason is a fine servant but a dangerous master, so too imagination. While the arts may, with rare and significant exceptions, avoid apotheosizing the closed rational system, at times they have run the equal and opposite risk of deifying the human imagination. The attempt initiated under Romanticism to situate “presence” in the arts put them forward as a substitute for traditional religious beliefs. Steiner calls this attempt at meaningfulness a kind of “theological-philosophic animism” and declares that it “must be laid bare. Signs do not transport presences” (Presences 121). He argues that indeed there is meaningful presence in the poetic, but its autonomy is confirmed by the fact that it escapes



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full circumscription and determination. Representations in the arts are mobile, self-correcting, and incomplete: in fact “[t]he falling-short is a guarantor of the experienced ‘otherness’” for the reader or viewer, who would otherwise be reducing the “other” to the “same” because “the act of reception would be wholly equivalent to that of the original enunciation. Our guest would have nothing to bring us” (175).11 Meanwhile, from within the Christian tradition, there have been strong and varied responses to the contentious notion of logocentricity. On the one hand, a commentator like the British literary critic Valentine Cunningham sees biblical logocentricity as “already deconstructionist” because it includes within itself not only the via negativa, the desert experience of the aporetic, but also a notion of bewilderment and mystery at the heart of relationship with God (402–3). On the other hand, David L. Jeffrey asserts that the logocentric tradition is misnamed. He argues that Christian literary theories are far less idealistic about language than the concept of logocentrism suggests. Though such theories are “generally fideistic, affirmative of an ultimate Truth or Logos,” they are also “firmly sceptical about the power of human language to more than dimly refract that Logos,” whether in writing or in speech. Here that attitude of “principled mistrust” toward the written word which Christopher Norris ascribes to Christianity is extended to include speech too (Norris 229). Thus, Jeffrey asserts, “Christian theory may be Logos-centered, but it is not logocentric” (“Mistakenly” 37, 39). In any case, the primary question for Christian literary theory has never concerned a lack or plenitude of meaning: sufficient meaning has always been assumed for a choice to be made about responsible reading and ethical praxis (40). This rearticulation of an ethical poetic is strikingly congruent with that of the secular proponents of what I will be calling postmodern realism, an issue that will be explored more fully in the introduction to this book. Perhaps the most important thing to say here is that Derrida is clearly right to recognize the impossibility of thinking about language outside the text of Western history. For this very reason, Cunningham can enter into spirited conversation with Derrida by asserting that “when the word-world relationship is at issue, then the question comes down, sooner or later, to theology,” because in the Graeco-JudaeoChristian tradition of the West, “all thinking about the word is inevitably done in the shadow of logos and the Logos” (Reading Gaol 363). In a radical move, Cunningham argues that this relationship of logos to Logos could even be called “the master trope” for all contemporary

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reading, writing, and theorizing, because all Western engagements between word and world are “parasitical” upon traditional thought about the Word who is Christ, the incarnated Word of God, so that “religion is the perpetual frame ... of the deconstructive argument” (367).12 It is this Word that has enabled a middle space for dialogue, for representation and betweenness, even when the Word itself (or Christ, Himself) goes unrecognized.

I have long been interested, then, in what appears to me to be the intransigence of given reality, the ways in which that reality is variously constructed in language and the accompanying relationships of response and responsibility. If I were to frame my own argument, albeit reductively and two-dimensionally, in terms of a triangle at whose apex is the mysterious but determining notion of “the transcendent,” and at whose base are the two points “word” and “world,” then the formulation of a Christian postmodern realism will take account of all three of these points and, in doing so, will circumscribe the relational “middle space” of my title. In this formulation I hope to avoid the pitfalls of ontotheology since, rather than reading the Other onto the world, my desire is to recognize the prior and necessary activity of the transcendent Other in first reading me. And since it is in the circumscribed middle space that all textual negotiation must take place, it is with a consciousness of such prior claims that I will offer in this book a reading of various modes of postmodernist fiction. I want to recognize the ways in which contemporary literature and contemporary literary theory grapple with deeply felt conjunctions and disjunctions between speaking the world and the world speaking. I hope to show how profoundly the conscience and compassion of these writers and critics have often been stirred up by an awareness of the responsibility implicit in response – to a text, to a face, even to a tree. And since my own faith perspective must always and already be my starting point in these matters, I hope to bring my Christian world view to bear in a way that is neither dismissive of nor naive about the complexities of world and text outside a frame of Christian belief. I hope to demonstrate my awareness of having been given gifts by these texts, at the same time as having read athwart many contemporary theoretical conventions in a way that may be generative of new insight. A fresh critical awareness of the influence of the biblical metanarrative may read the concern with response and responsibility as an instance



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of the ultimately God-initiated nature of humankind’s desire for justice and harmony – an instance, in fact, of what is theologically termed “common grace.” At root I am suggesting that to read contemporary fictions as a moderate postmodernist who also identifies with the Christian story is to stand consciously in the middle space traced over by the Transcendent and created by the Word for concourse between word and world, and to read through the lens of hope in an eternally compassionate Creator. Thus my considerations of various postmodern realist fictions will, I hope, substantiate a reading of language, even within and under postmodernity, as having the ability to speak meaningfully of and to a given world which must always already be “speaking” in excess of that human language. As the Marxist (and Catholic) critic Terry Eagleton has written, “To inhabit a language is already by that very token to inhabit a good deal more than it, and that there is that which transcends language is exactly what the interior of our language informs us of” (Illusions 13). In the middle space between word and world – this place of common grace, traced over by the Word of transcendence – true stories are still and always created. Derrida, in warning, has said that the age of the sign is essentially theological. And, of course, my finding in the middle space not only story, nor only traces of the transcendent, but God as mediator, is a central aspect of my faith perspective. However sobered I may be by a religious heritage which must at many key historical junctures be condemned as deeply dishonourable, and however humbled by my own culpable construction within it, I am honoured to confess that, striving to be aware of both my response and my responsibility, I read and write under the sign of Christian.

Introduction

Narrative and Ethics Face to Face Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin

Texts tax readers with ethical duties which increase in proportion to the measure with which they are taken up. The ethics of reading is to think the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger. Adam Newton, Narrative Ethics Levinas tells us the first word. The first word is the phrase you shall not commit murder. Or, it would be a phrase if it were not without words altogether; it is said by the face, the eyes. Richard Bernasconi, “Levinas & Derrida” The significant word lives beyond itself, that is, it lives by means of directing its purposiveness outward. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”

Everyday Ethics Lazing on the deck in the hazy warmth of a late afternoon in August, I had been idly flicking through the pages of our city’s monthly glossy magazine, a publication which depends heavily on upmarket advertising and is “mailed to selected homes” in our area. Sandwiched between a piece about customized tailoring and a full spread heralding a new townhomes complex, and interrupted by a section called “Body and Soul: Your Better Health and Wellness Guide” (“Learn to live in the present,” “Get into rhythm with nature,” “Become a child again,” etc., etc.), thirteen whole pages had been given over to a feature section called “The Good, The Bad, The Banal.” The blurb announced “[t]he pivotal question – what’cha gonna do when they come for you? How to be an ethical person in a dirty world.” Intrigued to discover what approach this magazine might take, I read on. The first article in the section was by the editor. Still lamenting her long-ago failure to speak to a grieving friend when the friend’s



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child died of cancer, Elizabeth Kelly asked, “I wonder, how many of life’s critical tests are we permitted to fail before the moral high ground to which we all presumably aspire eludes us forever?” She continued, “As a society we love to loudly puzzle over what is right and what is wrong, paying lip service to makeshift moral dilemmas as if they were entertaining aspects of a gigantic and enduring party game. Meanwhile, as individuals we so easily recognize right from wrong ... It is our greatest collective lie – the modern pretense that we do not know. The trick is not in the knowing; the trick has always been in the choosing ... And the truth is that in matters of right and wrong, in the choice between good and evil, some people simply try harder than others” (46). More than this, she added a romantic codicil: “choosing to do good elevates everyone in its radius, infusing the very air with something morally akin to the spiritually resonant, life-affirming fragrance of lilies on breezy spring evenings.” What fascinated me about this argument was its assumption that the traditional theological concept of natural law still holds: “we” all know right from wrong and “we” all aspire to the “moral high ground.” No suggestion here of the postmodern problematization of the subject, the destabilization of value systems through a clash of interpretive communities, or even the social construction of reality. For Kelly, writing for middle-class homes in a large urban centre, and even though this urban centre is highly multicultural and therefore likely to be plural in its world views and faith commitments, her readers initially seemed to be differentiated only by how hard they try to choose good, as unequivocally associated here with right as evil is with wrong. But, as it turned out, Kelly did not stop there. She went on to assert that this binary, of good/right vs evil/wrong, might not be so straightforward after all. Perhaps the wrong choice might be a good choice; perhaps the right choice might be bad. And why? I pricked up my ears, looking for some clearer definition of terms, or some narrative illustration to move the discussion forward. But Kelly went on to suggest that “there is an intuitive part of me that realizes that sometimes the wrong choice is as important as the right one,” because “doing the wrong thing in the service of a cockeyed idea or a misplaced passion is as integral to maintaining your balance as night is to day and black is to white and male is to female” (47). So, I thought. This is what happens to deconstructed binaries in the arena of everyday moral choice: they are reduced to what “maintains your balance,” the ultimate Western value of self-serving individualism. The article ended with Kelly

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apparently justifying a choice for marital infidelity on the basis that it is “a choice nevertheless” (48) – and one backed up, moreover, by centuries of lyric poetry. I was inclined to feel that she thus offered a textbook example of what Terry Eagleton, in considering the reductio ab absurdum of liberal choice as in itself the ultimate value, has called “a sort of adolescent ethics” (Illusions 85). But the magazine had more to offer. This section on “The Good, The Bad, The Banal” also included interviews with four “prominent people,” each of whom was asked to consider what he or she would do in a particularly demanding and ethically complex situation. Their narrative responses in turn were assessed and commented upon by “an ethicist,” Robin Tapley, of the University of British Columbia. His article, entitled “The Crooked Halo: A blueprint for ethical decision-making,” offered three modes of approach to problems and five modes of action for the ethically challenged. Customarily, he said, people faced with moral decisions consider one or more of three things: pragmatic consequences, the treatment of others as humans with dignity, and issues around maintaining their personal integrity. He suggested that “we can increase the odds of being, or becoming, the kind of people we want to be” [read: “good”] by avoiding absolutist thinking; being prepared to live with imperfect results; initiating behaviours after moral reflection rather than imitating societal norms; standing our moral ground; and being self-interested without being selfish. And “the bottom line,” Tapley argued, “is that if you are honestly trying to be a good person – you can’t be far from succeeding” (54). It was clear, then, that Tapley, like Kelly, was working with an underlying humanist worldview: he talked of “giving other people their due,” of “treat[ing] people with respect, honouring their humanity and dignity. We don’t want people treated like things, or tools to be used to our own advantage” (53). Tapley did not give his readers any first premise on which he might be founding this moral stance. On the other hand, when he offered a definition of a “good” person, he was conscious of working with a more pragmatic and historically variable concept: he suggested that, in his opinion, good people are likely “flexible of thought,” people who “pick and choose their approach to moral problems depending on the particulars of the problem” and “use thoughtfulness and empathy to reason out how they should respond to the situation.” This might be called an Enlightenment rationalist definition flavoured with a little Romanticized pragmatism. Moreover,



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according to Tapley, goodness may possibly be something to be achieved by hard work. But suppose one’s definition of goodness were to centre around generosity of spirit, or an otherworldliness about material possessions, or closeness to God – would it still be something achievable by human effort? Suppose ethical behaviour were to be equated with sticking to one’s principles, whatever they might be, in face of extreme temptation to recant, would Tapley necessarily applaud? And suppose, in a different cultural frame, goodness were to be defined in the way that something quite other – say, self-centredness, or skill in being deceitful – is defined in the traditional Western humanist model, would “we” still argue that a person striving to be good couldn’t be far from succeeding? In other words, it seemed to me that Tapley was eliding issues of presupposition and avoiding the problem of culturally incompatible definitions. In a contemporary multicultural, heterogeneous society, what does goodness look like? Can it in fact be thought of as a universal? And how does it relate to happiness? I found it telling that in the same issue of Hamilton Magazine there appeared a full-page review of Mark Kingwell’s pop-philosophy text, Better Living: In Pursuit of Happiness from Plato to Prozac (1998). Kingwell reported that, at time of writing, seventeen million Americans were taking Prozac, making it the drug of the end of the twentieth century; but Kingwell himself, offering no easy answers, provided instead what the reviewer called “an intellectual examination of happiness.” The reviewer continued, “In the end, when Kingwell concludes that the only route to happiness is through virtue – ‘The happy life equals the good life’ – it should really come as a surprise to no one. We all know it deep down, but most of us are unwilling to acknowledge it – happiness may not be a choice, but it does take a lot of work” (Lealess 31). Back to Aristotle. I poured myself more lemonade in sober acknowledgment of the demanding task ahead. But on turning to my second journal for deck-reading that day, Books in Canada, I discovered that it is precisely what “we all know” that was being questioned in another review of Kingwell’s book, this one by Thomas Hurka, like Kingwell a philosophy professor. Speaking about heuristic possibilities to a readership presumably in more literary mode and therefore more linguistically self-conscious than the readership of the Hamilton Magazine, Hurka explained that Kingwell’s book “offers philosophical therapy, proposing to help us toward happiness by changing our idea of what happiness is,” but in the event providing only “disappointingly thin” philosophical discussions: the proposition

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that virtue and satisfaction go hand in hand is stated but never really explored, he said, in contemporary terms (24). Precisely we do not know that “the happy life equals the good life,” suggested Hurka, and this was the equation that needed examination. Since the slats of the deck lounger were by this time sticking against my legs, I decided to pursue at least the happy life in the cool of indoors. Whatever one may make of Kingwell’s contemporary take on the notion of virtuous satisfaction, two immediate concerns for me were, first, how the very different writers I had encountered that afternoon were defining and using the terms “real,” “reality,” “knowing,” “knowledge,” “truth,” “goodness”; and, second, on what basis ethical decisions could be assumed to have any general validity, relevance, or meaning at all. In other words, even lazing on the deck I had arrived pretty swiftly at fundamental questions of ontology, epistemology, and moral philosophy – questions which are central also to my reading of fictional narratives and my academic work. This seemed to support Stanley Fish’s assertion that “Everyone is always and already an ethicist, enacting value in every activity, including the activity of reading. The only question is, which of the many possible ethicisms – ethical stances – should one affirm?” (“Common” 254).1

Postmodern Ethics Let me backtrack for a moment in order to suggest a way forward. In the prologue, I proposed that everyone needs a story to live by. I cited Paul Ricoeur’s comment that a life is nothing more than a biological phenomenon until it is interpreted, with the implication that the shaping of meaning is little less than the shaping of humanness. I argued that it is in the “space” between the world and the word that we shape such meanings, and that it is vital to recognize that the non-human world has its own ways of “speaking” into this space, outside human language. I suggested, further, that the biblical metanarrative on which Western culture has been built encourages a relational way of shaping meaning that is quite congruent with one face of the postmodern. I pointed out that in this traditional metanarrative of faith, the relationship of creatures to their Creator is prior to the language of those creatures, who are thus always already bound by a relational ethic of responsibility to the Creator. The story, I argued, is one that asks to be inhabited – a story where the transcendent mediates a space of meaning so that the creaturely may live in harmony with their world and with



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the transcendent itself. But now I need to add that, of course, insofar as narrative is relational, it always calls for response; this imperative is not limited to those who aim intentionally to inhabit the Christian metanarrative, nor even to those who overtly acknowledge a transcendent reality, but is relevant for anyone who wants to live at peace with his or her neighbour, mediating across the middle space between world and word in a responsible way. There is a pragmatics of relationality, as Kelly and Kingwell are aware. Back at my desk that evening, then, I found myself pondering issues of ethics and its less sophisticated cousin morality, in particular as they relate to reading and writing narratives – the everyday kind in which we try to make sense of the stories of our lives, and the more carefully crafted kind which we usually think of as literary texts. What is the relationship between the everyday morality of Kelly, Kingwell, and their publishers, and the consciously postmodern (or even, some might now say, post-postmodern) ethics of the literary academy? I turned back to the proposition that, once you believe that “reality does not possess a signifying nature but is an interactive, cultural, social, and historical process,” you may well be driven to place issues of language front and centre (McLaren and Lankshear 382). As I suggested in the prologue, with this epistemology and from this first premise, language becomes a major site of social responsibility, and therefore a key means of addressing perceived injustice. “Discourse” no longer denotes interactive speech in any value-neutral way; rather, you come to understand discourse as a textual practice conditioned at every point by cultural, social, and historical factors. Thus, a critical reading of even the culturally conservative Hamilton Magazine will point out that it creates its readership as pragmatic moralists with a liberal humanist base; the Books in Canada reviewer engages in the process of shaping social reality by assuming his readers will question the traditional link between happiness and virtue. Meaning itself becomes a contested event, and the struggles over meaning and the material conditions of textual production are read as inherently political, partisan – and personal. It was Nietzsche, after all, who claimed that every proclamation of a truth is the expression of a will to power. Thus politics, says Fish, is a name for the condition of difference that one can never escape: “properly understood, the political – the inescapability of partisan, angled seeing – is what always and already grasps us” (“Common” 249). And this, in the last analysis, applies as thoroughly to deck-reading as to academic texts.

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But if you conclude that truth can be known only in relation to a socio-political context, which will shift, and if reality can be understood only by its linguistic traces, which will vary from one context to another, what happens to any grounds for ethical decision-making? Does this relational, contextual kind of linguistic knowledge imply that the deck must be built on air? And what kind of validity can be afforded to ethical decisions when the category of the ethical is itself under dispute, like all other categories, as an ideological construction? In fact, for a goodly portion of the postmodern period, “ethics” was for many in academia and beyond “the proper name of power, hypocrisy, and unreality,” because, like the concept of metanarrative which I discussed earlier, ethics was identified with a discredited universal law which justified “projects of mastery” (Harpham 387–8). A distinction is commonly made between ethics as a generalizing and de-individualizing discourse, and morality as a matter of particular and individual instantiations of social behaviour (395), as usages cited earlier in this chapter in fact illustrate. But within postmodernity the discourse of ethics then remains under suspicion as a tool of an oppressive general law. And thus poststructuralism, the contemporary academic discourse that has most strenuously performed the notion that truth and reality are constructed by language, has often been taken to mean “a valorization of impulse, desire, and transgression, which sanctions an ethical ‘anything goes’” (Jay 39).

A Defining Pause — But here, as I settle in to the more scholarly environment of the study and leave the deck-reading behind, I should pause for a moment to clarify my use of three key terms. First, a further comment about poststructuralism. The discourse of poststructuralism can perhaps best be defined in this context as that kind of philosophical theorization which has characterized the specifically linguistic and textual extremes of postmodernism, and which critiques all structures of universal knowledge by opening them to radically contradictory readings. Poststructuralism, as a theory of knowledge and language, has sometimes been described as the theoretical and intellectual endoskeleton of radical postmodernist critique.2 Derrida, for instance, would accept the label “poststructuralist” while refusing the less rigorous and more ambiguous term “postmodernist.” By their conservative critics, poststructuralist thinkers have often been castigated as self-serving



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amoralists, said to have “abandoned the ethical impulse of the Western humanist tradition for the aesthetic play of linguistic signifiers without flesh and blood referents” (Jay 38). This is unfair, as I hope will shortly become evident. Second, a word about the broader and more troublesome terms “postmodernity” and “postmodernism.” “Postmodernity” I am taking primarily to denote the historical periodization of Western societies under post-industrialism – a period that follows, and can be read as continuous with, the industrialism of modernity. It points to a cultural condition characterized by globalization, consumerism, hyperreality in the media and advertising, and the ubiquitous power of Information Technology. The term is actually, therefore, more common in the discourses of history, sociology, and the social sciences than in that of literary criticism per se. “Postmodernism,” on the other hand, I am taking to be a theory of society and culture, a cultural and intellectual phenomenon that is capable of critiquing postmodernity, albeit complicitly, as its chief Canadian exponent over three decades, Linda Hutcheon, has taught us to say. “Postmodernism” used in this way implies a greater possibility of agency than does the term “postmod­ ernity.” The postmodernist thinker, writer, or artist is self-conscious about cultural norms, and de-naturalizes or ironizes or even parodies the supposed universals of tradition. Those who read the postmodern condition as marking a break with high modernism emphasize postmodernism as anti-élitist, democratic, and concerned with local and specific conditions. However, it is also important to note that, in the critical materials I will be referencing, the two terms “postmodernity” and “postmodernism” are not always clearly differentiated, sometimes by inadvertence, but sometimes for special effect. For instance, Hutcheon points out that the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson engages in intentional slippage between the terms, because he sees the whole postmodern enterprise as embodying the decadent “cultural logic of late capitalism” and reinforcing the “reprehensible” socio-economic effects of postmodernity, including aesthetic activity turned into commodity production by financial greed (Politics 25; “Postmodernism” 56). Hutcheon herself, on the other hand, has wanted to keep the terms separate because of her argument that postmodernism has the ability to critique postmodernity (26). In my view, the terms “postmodern” and “postmodernist” are most usefully limited to being employed as the adjectival forms of “postmodernity” and “postmodernism,” respectively, and I will try to

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use them in this way throughout the discussion that follows. But given that the terms are not always clearly distinguished in my source materials, some slippage seems to be inevitable – and even, sometimes, beneficial. Thus, the term “postmodern realism,” which is not my own and which I will explore later in this chapter, I might logically have coined as “postmodernist realism” if starting from scratch.3 But in working with “postmodern realism” as the given term, I have come to appreciate the element of historicization and periodization it thereby retains. It reminds me that, as Thornton and Thornton put it, “postmodernism itself is circumscribed by a cultural, material and temporal condition that is historically non-transferable” (124).

— and an Ethical Return As I settle in at my desk and return to considering the issue of contemporary ethics, I should comment first on the widespread fear that, in this unsettled intellectual climate, poststructuralist methodologies have the effect of debilitating any general ethical stance and erasing the rationale for socially accountable action. Thus an ethical pragmatist like Richard Rorty can find himself criticized for out-and-out amorality. Rorty’s talk about “useful” terminology and “profitable” topics has led some critics to dismiss him and other theorists sympathetic to him as opportunist and unprincipled. Jameson, for instance, reads the depthlessness that Rorty embraces as historically unperceptive and politically irresponsible: “In faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts” (66). Jameson’s concern is for the restoration of the possibility of political action – that we should “regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion” (92). Unsurprisingly, some Christian literary critics have been as negative as their Marxist counterparts about the ethical modalities of the contemporary theoretical scene. For instance, Roger Lundin, responding to the Rortian model, has extended this to a castigation of the underlying motivation of much American postmodernist literature as the manipulation of reality in the service of self-centred desire. Lundin has written, “Postmodernism holds out the promise of boundless liberty; it creates a world so profoundly trivial that it starves and stifles the spirit” (“Pragmatics” 37). After all, “anything,” he says, quoting Rorty’s comment on the Romantics, “can be made to look good or bad by being



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redescribed” (30). Showing a similar suspicion about the motivations behind postmodernist texts, David L. Jeffrey, in an influential article in the 1980s, condemned postmodernism as impelled by superbia, by human vanity and pride rebelling against the authority of the word, understood as related to a divine Word of oppressive Christian history. Jeffrey contrasted this rebellion to what he described as the disinterested and tolerant analyses of traditional liberal humanism (“Caveat” 438–45). In arguing in this way, he did not address the criticism that the cloth of the Western tradition has been cut on a moral bias: as even a critic sympathetic to the tradition puts it, “Inquiry is not generally [sic] value-free ... Moreover, liberal universities were never as free from political, commercial, class, and gender interests as their rhetoric implied” (Marsden 6–7). What Jeffrey’s reading missed (and he himself went some way toward redressing this balance at the end of his later People of the Book) was that beneath much recent writing and criticism there lie a profound disappointment, pain, and anger over what have been experienced as the exclusionary and oppressive effects of traditional metanarratives and their linguistic usages. And what all such readings miss is that there is, in fact, even in overtly poststructuralist work, intense interest in social responsibility, though it may be labelled “political” rather than “ethical” by critics for whom the discourse of ethics remains tainted by its enmeshment in traditional power structures.4 Rorty himself is serious about ethics: “The realization that the world does not tell us what language games to play should not ... lead us to say that a decision about which to play is arbitrary” (Contingency 6). It turns out that Rorty is not abandoning a sense of responsibility for language, or for truth; rather, he recognizes that, if he really believes that language constructs the truth we can know, then our linguistic responsibility is enormous. As if to illustrate the weight of this responsibility, it was arguably the posthumous debacle over the deconstructionist critic Paul de Man that most clearly put ethics back at the top of the literary critical agenda. When de Man was revealed, four years after his death in 1983, to have written articles for a collaborationist newspaper in Belgium during World War II, the accusation that he had been complicit with Nazi atrocities undermined the validity of his studied impersonality in literary criticism (Harpham 389–91). And people then needed to come to terms with the ethical significance of an evaluation of the author as morally compromised. So, for a variety of reasons, there has been considerable interest in ethics under postmodernity. What poststructuralist and more broadly

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postmodernist writers have often shared, however, is a resistance to defining the ethical in terms of a system of coded norms and values: Lyotard goes so far as to say that the mark of a “pagan” (and therefore, in his terms, liberating) ethics is precisely its refusal to provide any external command system to follow (Just Gaming, quoted in Jay 40). The only real “responsibility” worthy of the name, some argue, comes with the removal of any grounds or rules on which we might rely to make our decisions for us (Keenan 1). Ethics understood in this way clearly accords well with a poststructuralist and more broadly postmodernist commitment to heterogeneity, difference, and marginality. But the problem is also clear: how do we adjudicate between conflicting ethical claims? (Jay 41, 47).5 Thus, to adapt Fish’s question: which ethical stance should one affirm, in the middle space between world and word? In the absence of a consciously articulated first premise, in fact, can we do any better than work with the unexamined assumptions and elisions of the Hamilton Magazine? And could – or should – literature do more for a reader like Elizabeth Kelly than provide an aesthetic justification for adultery?

A Taxonomy of Literary Ethics Of course there is a long-standing connection between literature and the discourse of ethics that has been theorized variously over time. To go no further back than a century and a half in Britain, that watershed period of Victorian humanism responding to the church’s newly troubling doctrinal uncertainties might be exemplified in Matthew Arnold. He ascribed a central role to poetry as offering a salutary “criticism of life,” and to the whole tradition of Western literature as providing a civilizing influence through “the best that is known and thought in the world” (“Function” 15). And in the 1920s the formalist critic I.A. Richards famously represented a whole attitude to aesthetics between the two World Wars when he declared that “poetry is capable of saving us” (Science 82–3). But in the postmodern era this attitude to the traditional Western canon came under heavy fire because of that canon’s ethnocentrism, its embodiment of white male hegemony, and its privileging of values that were perceived as maintaining an inequitable status quo. Recently, ethical issues have received renewed and reconfigured attention not only from philosophers and media pundits, for whom moral quagmires have always arguably been fair game, but also from the world of academic literary scholarship. Literature, understood



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now not as an autonomous aesthetic good but as a historicized form of discourse, has become as contested a discursive arena as any other, and with it the relationship of literature to ethics. In the final year of the twentieth century, “Ethics and Literary Study” was the focus of a Special Topic issue of PMLA , the publication of the prestigious Modern Language Association of America. The call-for-papers had suggested, among other heterogeneous subtopics, “the ethics of reading, writing, criticism, interpretation, theorizing, and teaching,” and “the significance and causes of the current reemergence of ethically valenced inquiry within branches of literary scholarship.” In his introduction to the resulting special issue, the guest editor, Laurence Buell, pointed out without surprise that the contributions received demonstrated that there is no unitary ethics movement among contemporary literary scholars, but that “this pluriform discourse interweaves many genealogical strands” (7). His subsequent taxonomy is a useful one, and worth summarizing briefly here. Buell distinguished these genealogical strands as, first, those descended from the critical traditions that focus on the moral thematics and underlying value commitments of literary texts and their implied authors: the Arnoldian-Leavisite conception of literature as ethical reflection; the Emersonian tradition of the intellectual history of moral thought; and that kind of ethically oriented criticism which is focused on the rhetoric of genre. The second strand consists in “the reciprocal turn of certain philosophers toward literature,” in particular Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty, whose arguments about the importance of reflection on literature as a supplement to moral philosophy and the significance of literary works as model embodiments of social values have “abetted revival of a moral or social value-oriented approach to literary studies” (8).6 The third strand is made up of the later writings of Derrida and Foucault in their impact on poststructuralist literary theory: Derrida, in a re-evaluation of the ethics of deconstruction in light of Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of “‘unlimited’ responsibility” to the other (of which more later); Foucault, in a new attention paid to subjectivity and agency, in “the care of the self conceived as an ethical project” (9). And, finally, Buell pointed to an increased self-consciousness about professional ethics, so that concerns about the ethics of critical theory and practice have been brought together with concerns about the ethics of professional conduct, for instance in studies of canon formation and change (11).

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Moreover, Buell mapped a revisiting of the three traditional foci of author, reader, and text (12–13). The figure of the historical author qua author needs to be attended to after all, in that her or his inferred position as writer stands in dialogue with – and in some cases in contradistinction to – the voices of the literary text and evidence that can be adduced there about its ethical commitments. A concurrent recuperation of readerly responsibility emphasizes literature less as something the reader may appropriate to him- or herself, as in traditional reader-response criticism, than as “the reader’s other” to be engaged in “conscienceful listening.” Textual engagement figured as virtual personal encounter implies that reading a fictional narrative is similar to encountering a real person, with the consequent responsibility of respect due to the stranger – what one critic calls a “constitutive force [of] relations which bind tellers, listeners, and witnesses” (Newton 29). But the mainstream of contemporary ethical-critical readings seemed to Buell to concentrate on the formal or generic contours of literary texts, where the actual structure of a narrative is taken to imply ethical relations and an ethical telos. This helpful charting of the discourse of ethics both within and beyond literary scholarship demonstrates how variously understood such a discourse may be, and how varied its provenance. Even overtly conservative critics, while continuing to approach literature via the moral thematics of literary texts, understand it as also “political” even when apparently furthest from overt political statement. Notice, for instance, the parallelism of politics and ethics in the two final phrases of George Steiner’s comment that “[t]he ‘purest’ work of art, the most abstemious from conceivable empirical instruction or appliance, is, by virtue of that very purity and abstention, a sharply political gesture, a value-statement of the most evident ethical import” (Real Presences 143–4). In another approach, itself a striking return to the Romantic notion of poets as the “legislators of mankind,” Rorty argues that poets and novelists will be the philosophers of the future because, with the demise of faith in grand narratives, they alone can nurture human sympathy in the way that is necessary for social solidarity. Here Rorty’s liberal humanist roots show above the surface: he sounds like a postmodern Matthew Arnold. And in a further variation on contemporary ethico-literary inquiry, literary theorist Geoffrey Galt Harpham describes fiction and ethics as directly linked through theory. Harpham is interested not only in the way that narrative “tests the capacity of theory to comprehend and regulate practices,” but also in “the power



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of actual life ... to elude or deform theory” (“Ethics” 402). Reading Kelly on an August deck; sitting at a study desk looking out into the maple tree: here are actual situations, implies Harpham, where a dialogue between narrative and theory will relate life to consciousness and in so doing will situate the reader in ethics. Thus my move from deck to desk was a move not from an untheorized space to a theorized one, but from my position in an immediate narrative to a consciously mediated one. In the middle space of dialogue and representation, theories of ethics are played out.

The Ethics of the Face: Levinas In this complex and multivalent discursive context, and given these conversations and histories, my attention was drawn to one of the most original and influential twentieth-century thinkers on issues of ethics and responsibility: Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995). Levinas is a Jewish philosopher who studied under Husserl and Heidegger in the late 1920s, and who introduced their phenomenological thought into the philosophical circles of Paris in the 1930s and 1940s, though finally and decisively turning away from the privileging of “individual, heroic, critical being” (Piggford 9) as it came to be expressed in Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism in the 1930s. Levinas has been a significant influence on a number of poststructuralists, including Derrida who, twenty-five years his junior, shared both Levinas’s Jewish heritage and his phenomenological formation. They have each written about the writings of the other, and each can be said to have influenced the other (see Critchley 11 ff). Buell has proposed that there is mounting evidence for Levinas’s becoming “the most central theorist for the postpoststructuralist dispensation of turn-of-the-century [i.e. twentieth to twenty-first century] literary-ethical inquiry,” and that much of the credit for this is due to Derrida for having brought Levinas’s work to the attention of literary scholars (“Pursuit” 9). But before I consider his importance for literary study, I need to look briefly at his contribution to philosophy – or, more accurately, in contradistinction to it. Derrida asserts that already in Levinas all the concepts of Western philosophy “are dragged toward the ‘agora’, summoned to justify themselves ... by confessing their violent aims” (Writing 97). In an age of skepticism about absolutes and universal law, Levinas believes in unconditional obligation within the phenomenologically particular scene. In an era of linguistic constructivism, Levinas believes in

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the prior demand of the Other in the face-to-face encounter. And yet, like Derrida, he valorizes difference over sameness and critiques the Western ontological tradition of presence. In fact, arguably his most original contribution to ethics and philosophy is the assertion that “man’s ethical relationship to the other is ultimately prior to his ontological relationship to himself” (Dialogues 57). Levinas does not see it as problematic that, as he puts it, “[t]here exists no theoretical justification of ethical commands”; rather, he argues, such commands are inherently relational. They “always come from outside,” from an “‘Other’ with whom the listener has a nonreciprocal relationship of obedience” (Jay 40, 42). For Levinas, ethics is understood as an activity in relational responsibility, and it precedes ontology, understood as the attempt to comprehend the “being” of what is; ethics is thus prior to the whole project of Western philosophy. Where the philosophical tradition has required ethical theory to be harmonized with the truth claims of reason, Levinas questions this assumed order of priorities. In fact, in the service of ethics he is concerned to disrupt ontology with metaphysics, because he understands ontology to be a totalizing and reductionist enterprise whereas metaphysics is non-totalizing and, as he says, “opens us to the infinite otherness of transcendence” (Dialogues 48). Declaring that he sees the deconstruction of the Western metaphysics of presence as “a golden opportunity for Western philosophy to open itself to the dimension of otherness and transcendence beyond Being” (64), Levinas articulates what Richard Kearney in dialogue with him calls an “ethics of transcendence based on the primacy of the other over the same” (48, italics in original). This reversal of the traditional philosophical priority of self over other obviously has profound ethical and, indeed, religious implications. And so it is noteworthy and even startling that, in Levinas’s working against the Greek identification of the Divine with unification or totality, he explicitly argues from what he calls the Judaeo-Christian ethical perspective. He understands this perspective as “an alternative approach to meaning and truth” (55) because it asserts that the “I,” the self, can only be known not in autonomous self-consciousness but in response to the other for whom it remains responsible (48). Levinas holds, then, that “[m]an’s relationship with the other is better as difference than as unity: sociality is better than fusion” (58). This ethic of a “better” sociality will be important later, in our consideration of the dialogic power of narrative. And for Levinas these notions of sociality and otherness also refer to the (un)knowability of God, for God as the



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absolutely Other can be encountered only in and through our ethical “face-to-face” rapport with our fellow human beings: “God thus reveals himself [sic] as a trace, not as an ontological presence” (67). For Levinas, then, the originating impulse of the ethical cannot be a purely pragmatic concern, as Rorty suggests, nor is it simply natural. Rather than proposing, with Elizabeth Kelly, that ethical behaviour is just a matter of trying harder, Levinas holds to a strong conviction about human waywardness: he asserts that ethics is “against nature because it forbids the murderousness of my natural will to put my own existence first” (60). Thus he recognizes the necessity of the motivating power of ethics coming from a source “beyond nature,” and goes as far as to read divine intervention into the presence of the other person: “we could say that God is the other who turns our nature inside out, who calls our ontological will-to-be into question” (61). It is not even enough to talk about the freedom to choose between good and evil, for being face to face with the other gives me no freedom to choose either way. “As soon as I acknowledge that it is ‘I’ who am responsible, I accept that my freedom is anteceded by an obligation to the other. Ethics redefines subjectivity as this heteronymous responsibility in contrast to autonomous freedom” (63). As Richard Cohen puts it, ethics for Levinas “disrupts the entire project of knowing with a higher call, a more severe ‘condition’: responsibility” (Face 5). The uncompromising nature of this “call” has disconcerted not a few of Levinas’s readers, but the constitutive nature of responsible relationship is key to my project of a narrative ethics of the middle space. I think it is worth noting in this regard, too, that Levinas’s notion of prior ethical imperatives privileges the face of the other as a voiceless voice. As the second epigraph to this chapter says, “Levinas tells us the first word. The first word is the phrase ‘you shall not commit murder.’ Or, it would be a phrase if it were not without words altogether; it is said by the face, the eyes” (Bernasconi 188). I would be inclined to situate Levinas’s “first word” in relation to Judaic law and the sixth of the Ten Commandments, but he prefers to separate the theological and the philosophical. For him, the face’s saying of “Thou shalt not kill” is a kind of promise, or, in different relational circumstances, a threat, rather than merely a command – that is to say, I cannot kill the trace of the absolutely Other in that face, because the Other exists in a different realm from me and has a different kind of being from me. For Levinas the intersubjectivity of the command comes from an understanding that “To kill is not to dominate but to annihilate. It is to announce

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comprehension absolutely,” and thus to attempt to reduce the other to the same by the violence of totalizing and fixing (Totality and Infinity 216). Instead, the face’s gaze calls for(th) a responsive ethic of care, so that Levinas can define what he calls “Saying” as “[a]ntecedent to the verbal signs it conjugates,” as “the proximity of one to the other, the commitment of an approach, the one for the other” (“Essence” 112). Here, then, in Levinas is a prelinguistic “liberation ethics” in the making, a wordless ethics of “this-ness” expressed in the vocabulary of religion, which is in effect for Levinas the vocabulary of ethics. As he expressed it in an essay of 1976, “Ethics is not the corollary of a vision of God. It is this very vision ... To know God is to know what one must do ... The pious is the just” (Difficile Liberté 33–4). For Levinas, ethics is thus a kind of voiceless language of relational communication that is able to access and reverence the “difference” of the other in a more direct way than the language of any theorization. This relational language for Levinas is the expression of the face of the other, which speaks without words, which has a voiceless voice. Levinas perceives human language as inadequate to fully convey difference, whereas the unspoken language of the gaze achieves something like this adequacy through its being-in-itself: as Hopkins put it, “myself, it speaks and spells.” In Levinas’s relational ethic of sociality, then, where any personal freedom of mine is overwritten by my obligation to the other and my very being is bound up in such responsibility, the face of the other “speaks” both its absolute difference from me and my absolute obligation to it. Levinas’s influence on the ironically named “father” of poststructuralism, Derrida – or, at least, Derrida’s accord with Levinas – is evident as early as Derrida’s comments in a 1981 interview. Here he talks with Richard Kearney about re-evaluating “the indispensable notion of ‘responsibility,’” and asserts that deconstruction, his poststructuralist practice of reading, is “vocation – a response to a call” from the other, “an openness towards the other” (Dialogues 121, 118, 124). If ethics is taken to be the discourse of relational responsibility, we are bound to conclude from Derrida’s remarks that for him, as for Levinas, there is a profoundly ethical motivation behind his destabilizing of the Western philosophical tradition. In fact, in his edition of a 1994 roundtable with Derrida, the philosopher John Caputo provocatively described deconstructionist thinking as a “new Enlightenment” because it puts responsibility to the other before the rights of the self (Nutshell 52). And it is not then a big step to what Caputo argues elsewhere, that one



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can see a resonance with the biblical ethics of mercy in those versions of deconstruction where there is an explicit concern for the outcast and marginalized (“Response” 169). Thus Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh have suggested that since Levinas and Derrida, whom they have described as the two postmodern thinkers to raise the strongest ethical objections to Western modernity, are both self-consciously Jewish, “it could be argued that some aspects of postmodernity actually constitute a philosophical articulation of the prior, pervasive biblical concern for justice toward the marginal” (“Scalpel” n 224–5). And so, to the extent that the concern of both groups is with the political and historical contexts of literary texts and with the “agencies of power” to which language is tied, radical postmodernist readers and traditional Judaeo-Christian readers have been surprised to discover themselves on the same “side” (Walhout 16). As Levinas himself expresses his apprehension of the God of ethical philosophy, this God is “not God the Almighty Being of creation, but the persecuted God of the prophets who is always in relation with man, and whose difference from man is never indifference” (Dialogues 67–8). Thus we might read a recuperation of the God of Jewish (and Christian) tradition which emphasizes God’s relationship with the creation and God’s immanence, at least as trace, rather than divine mastery and distance from the creation, as not only in line with the prophetic books of Hebrew scripture but also as one specific instance of a reinhabiting of the biblical narrative with particular cultural resonance for readers in a postmodern age. And Levinas’s phenomenological project of philosophical theology presently has considerable cachet. It is increasingly the case that, even though he is not a literary critic, Levinas is having a major influence in those literary circles concerned with ethical reading after poststructuralism. He has been critiqued as dismissive of art but, in fact, he accords a crucial role to the aesthetic and literary because he sees there a potential escape from what he calls “ontological claustrophobia” (Llewelyn 9). He refuses simply to idealize art since he is aware of art objects as cultural products that are subject to market forces; nevertheless. he presents images, in contradistinction to the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, as more “real” than what commonly passes as reality. He writes, “the word poetry, to me, means the rupture of the immanence to which language is condemned, imprisoning itself ... Inseparable from the verb [Greek poiein, to make, create], it overflows with prophetic meaning” (Proper Names 185 n 4). Precisely because representation – a standing-in for something of something other than itself – is always and

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necessarily illogical and incomplete, poets “point their readers’ attention to gaps, fissures, and spaces in the logic of being” (Piggford 5), and therefore foster a readerly awareness of what escapes such logic, and of other possible modes of response to such gaps. “It is of the essence of art,” writes Levinas, “to signify only between the lines – in the intervals of time, between times – like a footprint that would precede the step, or an echo preceding the sound of a voice” (Proper Names 7). Because in this way literature and art dethrone the supremacy of reason and intellect, Levinas goes so far as to suggest that they are more inherently ethical than philosophy, including his own philosophical project (44). Levinas’s contemporary and fellow-phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur asserts, analogously, that reading literature develops a “narrative intelligence” which is “much closer to practical wisdom and moral judgment than it is to science and, more generally, to the theoretical use of reason” (“Life” 428). Of course both Ricoeur and Levinas are here following Aristotle, who taught that poetry is more truly “philosophical” than, for instance, history, since history is too dependent on the events of real life to consider the universal aspects of the human condition. Levinas muses at one point about the writer Max Picard, whom he never met, but whose face he had the impression of having seen because he had read his work: “To me, to speak of Max Picard is almost like evoking an apparition, but one that is strangely real. That is perhaps the very definition of a poetic experience” (Proper Names 94). Poetic – that is to say, literary – experience as otherworldly but real: this suggests that Levinas has a very high and even Romantic view of literature, which can in an almost hallucinatory manner figure forth the face in a way that propositional language cannot. He writes, “The being of things is not named in the work of art, but says itself there, coinciding with the absence of things that words are” (131, my italics). This distinction between the naming of being and the way that being can “say itself” through art is another expression of Levinas’s assertion that to think ontologically is to limit the being of the other, because being transcends reason but is given its own “voice” in the face of the other and in the paradoxes of art. “Literature casts us upon a shore where no thought can land – it lets out onto the unthinkable ... Literature is the unique adventure of a transcendence beyond all the horizons of the world, which even the boldest departures do not let us flee” (134). A number of younger literary critics whose concern is the ethical turn recognize a considerable debt to Levinas; one who might be taken



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as representative, because his indebtedness is extensive and overt, is Adam Newton, from whose Narrative Ethics (1995) I have already quoted. In a move similar to Harpham’s, Newton wants to propose “narrative as ethics: the ethical consequences of narrating story and fictionalizing person, and the reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness, and reader in that process” (11). Newton is using Levinasian terminology when he describes narrative-as-ethics as “relationship and human connectivity, as Saying over and above Said, or as Said called to account in Saying” (7). He correlates the “realm of the Said” with an ontological tradition that insists on “moral propositionality” and seeks to critique this realm through “the domain of Saying,” understood as “ethical performance” (5): one of his key postulates is Levinas’s own dictum that “[l]anguage as saying is an ethical openness to the other; as that which is said – reduced to a fixed identity or synchronized presence – it is an ontological closure to the other” (Dialogues 65). Narrative as the process of “Saying” holds open the connections of risk, responsibility, and gift between teller and reader; and even insofar as it enacts a completed statement, a “Said,” the performative nature of narrative yet prevents this completion from being “closure to the other.” Narrative is defined by its openness and dynamism. Encounter with the text is figured here, as Buell’s taxonomy suggested, as virtual personal encounter. Unlike the fixed “grand narratives” of modernity, narrative fictions thus understood put the reader in the dynamic position of face-to-face responsibility: “[o]ne faces a text as one might face a person, having to confront the claims raised by that very immediacy, an immediacy of contact, not of meaning” (Newton 11). Since “narrative situations create an immediacy and force, framing relations of provocation, call, and response” where intersubjective ties precede understanding, narrative “translates the interactive problematic of ethics into literary forms” (13). While Newton is not dismissive of the role of reason in organizing plot, sequence, and character depiction, he privileges narrative as a vehicle of much more than the rational: its embodying of interpersonal relations, like Levinas’s commitment to the inherently ethical nature of the encounter with the other, presents opportunities that cannot be reduced to the terms and conditions of abstract rational argument. On this account of the application of Levinasian philosophy to fictional narrative, fictions will effectively perform ethics as “interactive dramas of encounter and recognition” which enact interpretive engagement (12), and will thereby render their readers accountable to

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their encounter with otherness in a way that non-narrative philosophical texts are less readily able to do. The first epigraph to the present chapter is from Newton’s conclusion: “Texts tax readers with ethical duties which increase in proportion to the measure with which they are taken up. The ethics of reading is to think the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger” (292). The structure of fiction and the structure of personal encounter are clearly “two separate modes of intersubjective access,” but nevertheless fiction engages us, “places claims upon us, not exactly as life and persons do, but similarly, and with similar ethical consequences” (26). What, exactly, is the reader’s responsibility? Newton’s claim is for a “chastened or self-aware essentialism” that, in reading, has developed “tacit knowledge” in the form of “representational frames held in common” for naming and negotiating the world (27). This is the responsibility to feel-with rather than feel-the-sameas, to understand while standing under, to renegotiate empathy as the post-humanist non-self-identical subject who is always under ethical construction within those very negotiations themselves. Levinas’s contribution to a theory of ethics is, then, premised on his understanding of a relational ethics where responsibility to the other always takes primacy over the self. His contribution to a theory of narrative is based on his understanding of art as a modality where things can “speak themselves” beyond ontological language and where ethics is therefore more at home than in philosophical discourse. His contribution to a religious reading of narrative comes from his attention to a Judaeo-Christian perspective, which he names as “an alternative approach to meaning and truth” because of its emphasis on selfhood discovered through responsibility, and because he understands God to reveal God’s self as a trace in the face of the other.

The Ethics of Narrative: Bakhtin But there is another vitally important dialogue partner whom I must introduce into this conversation about narrative and ethics, and that is the literary theorist par excellence of the “middle space” of my book’s title, the Russian Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). Some readers will already have suspected, for instance, that Newton’s discussion of narrative ethics must surely acknowledge a debt not only to Levinas but also to Bakhtin, whose insights as an ethicist have gained increasing currency in the last twenty-odd years. As befits someone who speaks in a mediatory way, Bakhtin has been found radically unsystematizable:



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he has been appropriated variously as a revisionist formalist, a Marxist, a deconstructionist avant la lettre (his writings on the novel dating mainly from the 1920s and 30s), and, most recently, as an Orthodox Christian. I mentioned him briefly in the prologue in terms of his relational definition of the real, the “connections and interrelationships of reality” standing over against any “absolute form of thought.” Levinas and Bakhtin are in this sense both theorists of the interpersonal; Bakhtin’s particular contribution to my project here comes initially from the fact that he is not only a philosopher but also a literary critic and a discourse analyst. Bakhtin is best known for his privileging of the novel genre, over and above the traditional and classical genres of drama, lyric, and epic, as the one most able to express and embody relational reality. He valorizes a relational middle space between epistemological extremes: he is “an opponent of both system and ‘relativism’ – that is, he resists the idea that in literary as well as real-life structures either there is system or there is nothing. All lasting value is generated in the ‘middle space’ of subtly voiced and negotiated human exchanges” (Emerson 244). Already twenty years ago, British novelist and critic David Lodge wrote, “If we are looking for a theory of the novel that will transcend the opposition of humanist and post-structuralist viewpoints and provide an ideological justification for the novel that will apply to its entire history, the most likely candidate is the work of Mikhail Bakhtin” (After 21). Bakhtin’s distinctive contribution to contemporary thinking about the novel comes primarily at the level of language, in the move from semiotics to discourse. Lodge pointed out that for Bakhtin the word is “not, as in Saussure, a two-sided sign – signifier and signified – but a two-sided act. Bakhtin’s linguistics is a linguistics of parole. The words we use come to us already imprinted with the meanings, intentions and accents of previous users” (After 21). Thus words are neither static nor abstract elements in a system, but fundamentally social and dialogic. This perspective is shared by Levinas, who asserts that words do not have “isolable meanings” reducible to content, because “language refers to the positions of the one that listens and the one that speaks, that is, to the contingency of their history” (“Meaning and Sense” 36–7). Lodge was talking about Bakhtin when he argued that his insight “gets us off the hook of deconstructionist scepticism about the possibility of meaning,” since there is no need to try to defend the possibility of stable meaning in individual utterances; one can merely accept the fact of meaning’s

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existence in the process of intersubjective communication, which will include the utterance’s non-verbal as well as verbal context and the relations between speaker, addressee, and the object of reference (After 57–8). But Lodge could equally well have been referring to Levinas, who puts a similar emphasis on the contextual nature of meaning: “There never was a moment in which meaning first came to birth out of a meaningless being, outside of a historical position where language is spoken” (“Meaning and Sense” 38, italics in original). What is distinctive to Bakhtin is that he sees literature, and especially prose fiction, as the site of the most illuminating representations of how this rich contextualization works in practice. At this point any notion of an ideological “metanarrative” most clearly parts company with the notion of fictional narrative as understood by Bakhtin and those espousing his theory of the novel. And this difference is, not surprisingly, largely a development from context. For Bakhtin, writing under the oppression of Stalinism, what he calls the “monologic discourse” of a single authoritarian voice intent on interpretive closure is unethical because it functions as a repressive, totalitarian imposition that denies the validity of paying serious attention to the other.7 “Dialogic discourse,” on the other hand, recognizes the inevitably intertextual nature of language, in which every word is resonant with the “voices” of other contexts, other languages and idiolects, and in which the meaning of every word is produced anew in social interaction. Again, the congruence between Bakhtin and Levinas is evident when the latter writes, “Each word meaning is at the confluence of innumerable semantic rivers” (“Meaning and Sense” 37). Bakhtin spells out a key implication of this linguistic intertextuality: “there are no ‘neutral’ words and forms – words and forms that can belong to ‘no one’... Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions” (“Discourse” 293). And so it is that, as soon as any writer writes “the least noun,” as Annie Dillard expresses it, “the whole world starts pouring onto his page” (Living by Fiction 50). It is thus Bakhtin more than any other literary theorist of the twentieth century who has elevated the novel to the status of multi-dimensional truth-telling. Rather than relegating the novel to an inferior position as the poor relation of poetry, a genre with a much older pedigree and the one that Levinas was inclined to privilege, Bakhtin considered the novel to be central to his aesthetic, critical, and philo­ sophical project because of this ability to contain a multiplicity of



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voices and heterodox points of view. The novel is both more able and more concerned than the traditionally canonical genres to express the inherent “dialogism” of language and culture by means of “its discursive polyphony, its subtle and complex interweaving of various types of speech” (Lodge 21). Bakhtin uses the term “heteroglossia” to describe the coexistence in any utterance of other utterances in conflict with it, and argues that this conflict is at its most concentrated in the novel: he asserts that “heteroglossia either enters the novel in person (so to speak) and assumes material form within it in the images of speaking persons, or it determines, as a dialogizing background, the special resonance of novelistic discourse” (“Discourse” 332). Bakhtin sees it as unethical to ignore “the historical life of discourse” because, in so doing, one would contribute to “a reification of the word (and to a muffling of the dialogism native to it)” (346). That kind of linguistic totalitarianism deals the death-blow of divorcing word from world: “when discourse is torn from reality, it is fatal for the word itself as well; words grow sickly, lose semantic depth and flexibility, the capacity to expand and renew their meanings in new living contexts – they essentially die as discourse, for the signifying word lives beyond itself, that is, it lives by means of directing its purposiveness outward” (“Discourse” 353–4). In other words, far from bracketing the referent and suspending the world outside the linguistic sign, Bakhtin’s notion of “discourse” depends on the referent for its very life. Bakhtin has reintroduced the world into the linguistic equation; the signifying word does not merely signify within a system but “lives beyond itself.” In this regard, Bakhtin and a critic like Rorty exist on different planes. For all his emphasis on intertextuality, Bakhtin is not recuperable by contingent poststructuralism. He believes too much in the vital significance of the beyond-language.8 It is then not surprising that, because the novel is “multiform in style and variform in speech and voice,” Bakhtin emphasizes its nature as a social phenomenon, shaped not so much by an individual writer as by public forces (“Discourse” 261). Moreover, since he defines the novel in terms of “a diversity of social speech types ... and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (262), he is also classifying it as a rhetorical genre, as close to journalism, moral philosophy, and everyday dialogue as to the traditionally “artistic” genres of epic, dramatic, and lyric (Vice 70). Though Bakhtin himself does not overtly address the dialogic relation between the reader and the text, his emphasis on the internal dialogism of the word sets up an implicit expectation of an

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answer on the part of the addressee. As he himself puts it, “The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction.” Bakhtin asserts that “[t]he listener and his response are regularly taken into account when it comes to everyday dialogue and rhetoric, but every other sort of discourse as well is oriented towards an understanding that is ‘responsive’ – although this orientation is not particularized in an independent act and is not compositionally marked” (“Discourse” 280). Thus, Bakhtin stresses not only that the discourse of the novel expects readerly response to its rhetoric, but also that, in its freedom to include all kinds of “heteroglossia,” it works to establish a centrifugal impulse that stands in tension with any tendency toward totalizing control. So Bakhtin’s “middle space” is also the space of ethics, insofar as dialogic discourse respects the “voices” not only of literal dialogue partners but also of the many and diverse contexts with which any word comes already imprinted. Bakhtin privileges the genre of the novel because it is heteroglossic and because, like the individual signifying word, it engages with the “historical life” of discourse by “directing its purposiveness outward.” The novel therefore also implicitly valorizes the place of the reader, who is called to a “responsive understanding.” In fact, with initial similarities to Levinas, Bakhtin believes in a middle way toward defining and comprehending the self. Levinas understands the self as defined in its relationship of responsibility to the other; Bakhtin understands selves as constituted by their answerability before others – dialogism liberates the self into meaning, so that intersubjectivity is a life-bringing gift. However, there is a significant difference from Levinas in this concern with mutuality. For Levinas, the self is virtually an effect of the other. For Bakhtin, only another consciousness, outside of my own and able to view me from a number of different spatial, temporal, and psychological perspectives, can offer me a unified sense of my personality; Bakhtin characterizes this as “a loving gift mutually exchanged between self and other across the borderzone of consciousness” (Morris 6). This gift-giving potential of one for another has a particular connection to the genre of the novel because it may be “most meaningfully bestowed narratively – across time, and through a call of/for stories” (Newton 47). And the novel’s outward purposiveness relates to the construction of the reader, as much as to the construction of the fictional characters within the story itself.



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Where Levinas undertheorizes the self in order to focus discussion on the other, and thus to redress what he perceives as the imbalance of Western philosophical history, Bakhtin as a literary critic is concerned to retheorize the self of author and critic, as well as of fictional characters, as dialogic constructions. In fact, he goes as far as to see the temporally unfolding experience of reading a novel as analogous to the development of the self (Emerson 244). Newton picks up on this idea: “in its orientation to others and in the irreducible difference between itself and another, the self suggests not merely a dialogic but a ‘novelistic’ entity – defined by some necessary sort of narrative orientation to others.” This kind of understanding of the construction of the self offers a fresh and optimistic approach to that notion of a split self which has dissolved faith in the old humanist subject because “[t]he self’s inner division is a sign of life, not estrangement, since it records the presence of others, the saving heterogeneity of consciousness” (Newton 47). Finally, then, it is this narrative understanding of both the construction of self and the responsibility to the other that underscores for Bakhtin the inherently ethical dimension of the telling and receiving of stories: “Narrative is ethics in the sense of the mediating and authorial role each takes up toward another’s story” (48). And here I want to suggest that it is key, in considering the ethics of narrative, to consider Bakhtin’s not-uncomplicated though continuous relationship to an Orthodox Christian faith. In this context heterogeneity may literally be “saving” insofar as it describes a subjectivity premised on a relation to the Otherness of God. Susan Felch has argued persuasively that, especially because Bakhtin throughout his work is “a theorist of contexts, of particulars,” it is vital to situate him within his own traditions, one of the most central being Judaeo-Christian theism (Felch, “Tradition” 7). Citing his Art and Answerability, Felch sees the notion of a created order that “is what it is independently of human thinking and judging and desiring and willing” as something that undergirds Bakhtin’s appreciation of the world as “a beautiful given” (8). While not suggesting that theism is the only tradition to influence Bakhtin’s work, nor that its Christian framework remains uncomplicated throughout his life, Felch is one of a growing band of Bakhtinian scholars who contend that Bakhtin is “a theistically-motivated thinker” for whom Judaeo-Christian theism is, “to use Gadamer’s term, an ‘enabling prejudice’ that pervasively shapes the way [he] thinks about the world and about the role of language and literature in that world” (9).9 Felch describes Bakhtin’s “methodological theism” in contrast

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both to the abstract rational systems of the modern and to the open oscillating systems of the postmodern (“Perspectival” 34). She attends particularly to Bakhtin’s understanding of God as ultimate Author, Christ as the perfect self, and the body as the centre of value (31). She argues that Bakhtin grounds his philosophy and ethics of meaning in the claim that God is the creator and we are God’s creatures, given meaning by God’s gaze; and in the person of Christ, who “bestows a redemptive gaze which both completes the other and acknowledges his or her individuality” (25–6). “Since I have experienced Christ’s gaze on me as benign, redemptive, and transformative, I am able to extend this gaze to others” (27) – indeed, I am called to do so, in the responsible task of making meaning (31). This emphasis on the gaze as prior to the call, on being-with as prior to speaking, contrasts with Levinas’s notion of the face of the other whose gaze is imperious in calling me to my infinite responsibility. For Levinas, though the gaze of the other does carry the trace of the transcendent God-who-has-passed, that gaze is not received as unmerited gift from the person of a Messiah, nor do I experience the gaze as redemptively empowering me to extend that gaze to another. For Bakhtin, the gaze is first that of Christ, who gives – in blessing, redemption, transformation – before He calls for response: as the Apostle John is traditionally understood to record it, Jesus famously says to his disciples, “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). God as the transcendent Other has taken the initiative in Incarnation and in relationship. Bakhtin wrote in 1925 that what he most valued in religion was “a personal relationship to a personal God” (Poole 159). Talk of bestowing the gaze is, then, another way of describing the “truthing” of embodied, performative relating which is energized by an ethic of care.10 This kind of emphasis on truthing as activity, rather than on truth as proposition, may run counter to the tradition of ontological philosophy, but it is in tune with the dialogic and dynamic character of the creation and reception of story. Levinas’s position at the heart of postmodern ethical enquiry offers the possibility of reading motivated by a mystery beyond language and thought – an ethics of absence, if you will, in which responsibility is a prior condition requiring no theoretical justification. Levinas as ethicist is in this sense more readily accessible to many in the contemporary academy than Bakhtin, whose Orthodox Christian context may perhaps appear yet more unexpected and alien than Levinas’s Jewishness to those who do not share it. But it is important to recognize that



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Bakhtin’s understanding of the gaze of the incarnated Christ offers a different kind of reading from that of Levinas, founded not on the asymmetry of an absolute responsibility of one individual for another but on the quite differently constituted asymmetry of the prior gift from the divine to the human (see Lock 105). Levinas and Bakhtin are both phenomenologists; they share an apophatic theology in the sense that they both view God as transcendent and humanly inaccessible; they are both concerned for immanence over idealism and for activity over proposition; for both, the face of the other is the primary site of ethical responsibility, or answerability. But whereas for Levinas the Messianic is infinitely deferred, for Bakhtin an Eastern Orthodox “feeling for faith” gives him hope in something prior to the ethical demand, and that is the gracious and unmerited Messianic gift of justification and fulfillment whose source is the transcendent Creator and whose expression is the immanent, incarnated Christ (Poole 165). For Bakhtin it is the gaze of a loving God that is primarily constitutive of our selfhood and thus necessarily prior to our ethical response to the other human creature, a response that is never sui generis but is itself in response to and empowered by the gift of God in Christ. Grace is a gesture that emerges from the apophatic, conveying the profundity of self-insufficiency, and it enables Bakhtin to say, “[W]hat God is for me, I must be for another” (“Author and Hero” 56). Levinas’s is a stern ethics of responsibility alone; Bakhtin’s is an ethics of grace before responsibility that transforms my response to narrative as it transforms my living.

Realism and Responsibility By the time I had reached this point in my reading and thinking about narrative, and ethics, and responsibility, and grace, the seasons had turned, and outside the high bright sounds of that summer afternoon on the deck had settled down into the purr of a fall evening. Having articulated the congruences and differences between Levinas and Bakhtin in what they offer for an ethics of reading, I was encouraged to approach fiction as a privileged vehicle for “truthing,” the novel’s heterogeneity figuring an ethical response to the world and requiring – or requesting – an ethical response to its textual face on the part of the reader. But I found myself wondering whether this is equally so for all fiction, or whether it is especially so for the novel of realist reference that consciously takes the particularity of the world as its

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responsibility. How has the relationship between fictional narrative and the real world been configured in texts that explicitly set out to represent the real? Does a text work most completely “as ethics” when its discourse is most clearly connected to reality in “directing its purposiveness outward”? An outward-directedness would, for me sitting there at my desk, presumably draw my attention to moths fluttering up against the screen window, attracted by a pool of light on the golden wood of my desktop. It might note the children playing a last urgent game of street hockey before bedtime, or the triumphant nine-year-old showing off to admiring friends a live ferret on a leash, or the lone dog echoing monotonously behind a gate up the hill. I thought, almost at random, of novels that begin from their very first sentence with such outward-directedness: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day”; “On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott”; “He had been walking around Halifax all day, as though by moving through familiar streets he could test whether he belonged here and had at last reached home.” And as I remembered these fictional people, walking or desiring to walk, troubled by the weather or the past, looking for home or wanting to escape from it, living in very particular places at very particular times, about to make momentous discoveries, I realized that in thinking of texts authored by Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, and Hugh MacLennan, I had moved into the capacious world of literary realism. It would initially seem reasonable to assume that a Bakhtinian concern with discourse’s directing its purposiveness outward will privilege literary realism as the mode of literature that recognizably depicts what is assumed to be the real world. The realist novel customarily situates its generally middle- or lower-class characters in specific, recognizable times and places, and it gives them recognizably realistic names; it abides by the time of the clock and the rules of cause-and-effect development; it concerns itself with the way in which and the reasons why its characters develop over time. But the assumption of realist normativity itself requires some contextualization, as numerous Marxist critics have pointed out, from Kettle and Watt in the mid-twentieth century through Lukάcs and Williams to Adorno in the more recent past. Since its first definition in the eighteenth century, there has in fact been considerable confusion over the nature of literary realism, largely because the history of the term “realism” in philosophy has itself been fraught



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with contradictions. In a debate that goes back to Aristotle and Plato, on the one hand realism might connote the materialist-particular, and on the other the idealist-universal, depending on whether the quotidian or the transcendent was taken to be the defining property of the real. Thus in the nineteenth century, literary realism is often seen as having two almost contradictory phases of meaning: the correspondence theory of “naive” realism, which holds to a positivist belief in the reality of the external world and in language as providing objective descriptions of that reality; and the coherence theory of “informed” realism, which recognizes the place of linguistic creativity in the making of the real and is particularly interested in the invisible “real” of the psyche and of dreams. Thus realism here is already pluralized. Nevertheless, it is probably fair to say that realism as a literary movement refers primarily to the fiction of the nineteenth century which was informed by a rationalist epistemology in reaction against the fantasies of the gothic and Romanticism, and was particularly responsive both to political and social changes and to the scientific and industrial advances of the day. And this kind of realism is still the default mode of the novel: it is usual for my undergraduate students initially to assume that traditional realism just reflects “the way things are.” But it would be simplistic to suggest that realist writers have always been merely rationalist and positivist in outlook, naively assuming that language can mirror the real world. In his influential The Realistic Imagination (1981), George Levine, for one, argued quite otherwise. The central concern of realist literature, he suggested, has historically been “to use language to get beyond language, to discover some nonverbal truth out there” (Realistic 6). Because realism has depended on “our commonsense expectation that there are direct connections between word and thing,” it follows that, of all literary movements, it has been “most threatened by the contemporary severing of text from referent” (9) under poststructuralist analysis. However, Levine’s thesis is that realism has always been self-conscious about its relationship to reality: even in the heyday of nineteenth-century realist fiction, he argues, its practitioners were actually very aware of using language to discover, explore, or even create a new reality, in the midst of “a world deconstructing all around them” (4) into new formulations of philosophy, science, and theology. It is important here to reaffirm that neither Bakhtin nor Levinas is readily assimilable to poststructuralism in the sense of severing text from referent. As we have already seen, for Bakhtin, the text and

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the referent must be intimately connected: “the signifying word lives beyond itself, that is, it lives by means of directing its purposiveness outward,” and the life of discourse is completely dependent on this worldly connection with the real (“Discourse” 354). And for Levinas, the referent exceeds the text: words are “the absence of things,” but “the being of things” will “say itself” in a work of art (Proper Names 131). Bakhtin is particularly concerned with the real as historical and materialist; Levinas is perhaps more concerned with the real as transcendent and idealist. But neither is interested in language as system rather than usage, and both are committed to language as a matter of living situations: “language refers to the positions of the one that listens and the one that speaks, that is, to the contingency of their history” (Levinas, “Meaning and Sense” 37). We have already seen, too, that Bakhtin considered it unethical to ignore “the historical life of discourse” where words live a “socially charged” existence (“Discourse” 346, 293). In a complementary way, Levine asserted in his work on the novel that the realist impulse is essentially moral. That is to say, realism assumes that the “ordinary” has a significance previously ascribed exclusively to the experience of the select few, and it assumes that the effort at “truth-telling” about that ordinary experience is itself valuable. Even to describe lounging on a deck on a sunny summer afternoon, then, or sitting at a desk in the fading light of a fall evening, carries what might be called moral weight, for realism sees every detail of personal experience as potentially morally significant, and aims to alert readers to the ethical implications of the activities of both reading and writing. Realism’s emphasis on mimetic adequacy in fact reveals a particular concern for the effect on the reader – the more “realistic,” the greater the effect will be (Halperin 7). And realism as a literary method implies that ordinariness is more real, that is, more truthful and representative, than heroism: people are morally mixed rather than simply good or bad. Yet, paradoxically, realistic fiction will often have a romantic undertow because it resolves difficulties by imposing shape and meaning on reality in palpably unrealistic ways (Levine, “Reconsidered” 236, 253).11 And so Jameson defines the “realistic” work of art as one in which “‘realistic’ and experimental attitudes are tried out, not only between its characters and their fictive realities, but also between the audience and the work itself, and – not least significant – between the writer and his own materials and techniques” (“Conclusion” 205). Jameson rightly points out that such an understanding of realism can hardly be



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called representational or mimetic in any traditional sense. Even Alain Robbe-Grillet, leading proponent in the 1960s of the experimental “nouveau roman,” wrote that “[a]ll writers believe they are realists. None ever calls himself abstract, illusionistic, chimerical, fantastic, falsitical ... It is the real world which interests them; each one attempts as best he can to create ‘the real’” (Novel 157). With the development of literary modernism and then postmodernism, conventional realism fell into critical disrepute, identified as it had been with the Enlightenment view of truth as discoverable by the individual through the senses and with a belief in language as transparently mimetic of the real. But in the last three decades there has been a further swing of the pendulum: criticism energized by political and social concerns has recognized the danger of destroying the social accountability of literature along with what are perceived as the methods and metanarratives of a discredited and oppressive liberal humanism. In assaulting the unified subject, for instance, poststructuralist discourse was felt by some to be in danger of erasing the subject of history. At its most extreme, such criticism sounds like this: “If one adopts, in a cavalier and single-minded fashion, the view that everything is discourse or text or fiction, the realia [actual events and physicalities] are trivialized. Real people who really died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz or Treblinka become so much discourse” (Megill 345). If difference becomes merely a formal category with no empirical and historical existence, then this literalization of Derrida’s “nothing outside of the text” enacts just that misreading of which Derrida himself warned, and creates a disempowering “loss of affect.” And so realism has become a focus of reassessment. It had been commonly assumed that the novel, the classic form of realist fiction, could be understood as a characteristic expression of bourgeois society. But Arnold Kettle famously reminded his readership that the bourgeoisie were originally a revolutionary class (Novel 31), and there are those who would like to reinstate the subversive potential of realism, with a nod back to its anti-aristocratic origins in eighteenth-century Europe. Perhaps realism could be mined for more than simple complicity with bourgeois capitalism, even in an era when the media are daily recreating the “real” in news reports, statistics, and surveys.12 The fact that realism is being problematized suggests that it cannot simply be aligned with the empirically verifiable, but that it may complicate the notion of reference by self-consciously occupying a middle space between language

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and the beyond of language, and between the world of the referent and the world that reference creates. This problematization has recently taken a number of different forms. For instance, Jameson argues for a new realism whose function would be clear: “to resist the power of reification in consumer society and to reinvent [a] category of totality” in reaction against the kind of news-bite aesthetic which has the effect of exacerbating the fragmentation of society by damaging “our cognitive relationship with the social totality” (“Conclusion” 212). A response that I find particularly powerful is spurred less by neo-Marxist anti-capitalism than by moral antipathy to Holocaust revisionism: William and Songok Han Thornton have proposed a new paradigm that “accepts the social construction of reality without surrendering the worth of objectivity” (Thornton and Thornton 127). It is from them that I take a central term of my title: arguing that the record of realist writers’ stance on issues of social justice and material reform is “unparalleled in the social history of esthetics,” Thornton and Thornton point to “a more capacious and socially accountable postmodernism: that of ‘postmodern realism’” (127, 123).13 Similarly, from within the discourse of history itself, the postmodernist turn has been explored by Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra, who have attempted to show that “[t]he absence of any transcendent claim to objectivity does not retire the mandate to maximize objectivity by every available means.” Instead, the recognition of a point of interaction between language and world gives rise to “the balanced interpretive methodology that may be called the hermeneutics of postmodern realism” (Thornton and Thornton 132, 130).14

Postmodern Realisms In the following chapters, I hope to show how the oxymoronic term “postmodern realism” offers a productive third way of reading, to be distinguished from either “postmodernism” or “realism” used alone, specifically because it signals both our local and particular constructions of the world and that world’s intransigent reality which “set[s] limits to our ways of seeing, being, and acting” (Felch, “Perspectival” 16). The term “postmodern realism” used at this stage in literary-critical history allows for the reintroduction of the referent into theoretical discourse, pointing again to the importance of specific instantiation over abstract system, as in the Bakhtinian emphasis on parole rather than langue. In exploring some of the disparate manifestations of



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realism in contemporary fiction, I will look for “points of interaction” that exist in the middle space where epistemological limit meets the intransigent “givenness” of the real, and where the word, as Valentine Cunningham puts it, is therefore “always in-between. It is always wor(l)d” (Reading Gaol 60). Mindful of the ethical consequences of narration, I will hope to bring from Levinas a recognition of responsibility to the face even of the textual Other, and from Bakhtin both a consciousness of the historical life of discourse and an awareness of the prior gift of grace that might enable me to gaze upon the Other with attention and care, and to find then, in dialogue with the Other, a reconfigured self. In this overdetermined middle space of narrative ethics, our exploration will take a new look at several well-established fictions of the last quarter-century by Canadian and British writers, including within this grouping several novelists who are members of minorities by ethnicity or sexual preference. Postmodern realism will be rendered as plural. I will consider the performance of narrative ethics under four particular modes: historiographic metafiction, magic realism, parodic myth, and photographic co-optation. I will argue that these four can all be described as modes of postmodern realism because they are all selfconsciously aware of both their constructedness and the intransigence of the worldly realities with which they have to do. Typically, each chapter will open with a brief discussion of a particular story, which will lead into a section that contextualizes and examines the relevant mode of postmodern realism; I will then consider at greater length two or three specific narrative fictions under this rubric. So, in chapter 1, I will consider what Linda Hutcheon has taught us to call “historiographic metafiction” – a fictional playing with historical reference which is deeply self-conscious about its own playfulness. I will look more closely here at the growing conviction that social accountability must accompany any play with notions of historical referentiality, and that, as Bakhtin would argue, it is actually unethical to ignore the historical life of discourse itself. Insofar as literary modernism has often been characterized, however unfairly, as ahistorical and élitist, involving “the substitution of autonomous language for a language of social action,” any “genuine” postmodernism must be historically sensitive and democratically accessible, and must restore socially responsible language (Thornton and Thornton 135). In an attempt to demonstrate the vigour of this kind of postmodernism-with-a-conscience in contemporary fiction, I will investigate the

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re-presentation of the oppressions of history in three important novels of historiographic metafiction: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, which speaks for Japanese Canadians in World War II; Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, which explores Rommel’s Desert War and its effect on what Ondaatje calls “un-historical” people; and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which is a satiric reading of the birth of modern India. All three novels are self-consciously “heteroglossic” in their inclusion of a variety of textual voices and perspectives; at the same time, each self-consciously performs “narrative as ethics” and implicates the reader in what might be called a Levinasian response of responsibility. The second chapter opens with a continuation of the reading of Midnight’s Children, but this time under the rubric of “magic realism,” particularly as a vehicle whose resonances of transcendence reconfigure social protest and the call to readerly responsibility. Magic realism as a literary practice has been linked with a perception of “living on the margins,” providing a means of resistance against whatever totalizing power is seen as occupying the centre (Slemon 10). One Canadian critic, Geoff Hancock, has argued that “the roots of the marvellous aim at satisfying human desires frustrated by fragmentary or erroneous systems of politics, science, and religion” (Hancock 48). Recognizing that this belief in the possibilities of power and renewal in magic realism makes it sound like an alternative to religion, I consider Jeanette Winterson’s British environmentalist and feminist parable Sexing the Cherry, and Jane Urquhart’s Away, a critique of the life of the poor in nineteenth-century Ireland and Canada. I will argue that the ethical power of these narratives is dependent upon their including the magical within the realm of the real. These are narratives that figure language as a sign of the mysterious behind and beyond what is visible and knowable to Western rationalism, pointing to what Levinas calls the “irreducible otherness of transcendence” (“Dialogue” 58). The relevance of language as a major site of social responsibility to reconstruct the real is thus compounded by its substantial magic. The third chapter looks at the parodic reworking of ancient myth in contemporary fiction. It has been suggested that parody is a typically postmodernist paradoxical form in its uses and abuses of traditional texts and conventions, but that, because it enables an active participation in the making of cultural and social knowledge, this is not so much debilitating as invigorating (Hutcheon, Theory of Parody). Here I will consider three novels that offer a subversive rewriting specifically of the biblical metanarrative: first, from a Native Canadian



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perspective, in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water; and then, in two novels which offer a parodic deconstruction and retelling of the canonical sacred story of Noah’s Ark: Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters and Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage. These two novels both propose and enact the passage through demystification to a particular kind of cultural knowledge: a religious sensibility for postmodern times. I will argue that their rewriting of the biblical metanarrative effectively reinscribes a traditional value-system premised on the human necessities of faith, hope, and love, but enacted in the contradictory and fragmentary narratives of contemporary sensibility, and inclusive of those marginalized by the West’s traditional interpretations of the canonical religious journey. Thus the reader is invited to a reconfigured “tacit knowledge” which enables a naming and negotiating of the world based not on identical premises or commitments but on a “chastened or self-aware essentialism” (Newton 27) that recognizes common frames of reference even when not in complete agreement with them. The fourth chapter will look at the co-optation of photographs into contemporary fictions. By first glancing at the opaque power of photography in Obasan and Midnight’s Children, this chapter argues for the photograph as a key hermeneutical site of postmodern realism. Levinas’s emphasis on the voiceless voice of the face that transcends language is complicated by the image of the photograph that witnesses to an absent presence but also to its own constructedness. The central part of this chapter looks at the differing heuristic formulations of Roland Barthes, Michael Ignatieff, and Michael Ondaatje who, in semi-autobiographical texts that journey into family history, use actual photographs reproduced in the text in a distinctive way that foregrounds the difference in their attitudes to the past and to the real. More extremely, Carol Shields in The Stone Diaries completely separates photographs from their reality-in-time and turns them into fiction, thus obfuscating rather than clarifying the writerly relationship to the real and further complicating the layeredness of heteroglossia in her novel. All these texts show how the co-optation of photographs into postmodern realist fictions can be variously read as paradigmatic of the “givenness” of the created world alongside the necessarily provisional and conflicted nature of our constructions of it. These four modes of postmodern realism – the historiographic, the magical, the mythoparodic, and the photographic – often interweave one with another; they are all immediately concerned with issues

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of personal and social accountability and, by virtue of their narrative form, they perform situations in interaction with which readerly responsibility is required. There are of course many traditional and ancient forms of oral storytelling which assume a relationship of call and response – like the midrash stories of Jewish rabbis, the parables of Jesus, the narratives of cultural memory told by indigenous storytellers the world over. And of course the novel has constantly, over its threehundred-year history in the West, been recognized as modelling either a covert or an overt didacticism, in affirming, informing, transforming, or overturning societal norms and conventions. But bearing in mind Bakhtin’s understanding of the novel as a historically mixed and rhetorical genre, I want to explore more fully in chapter 5 the notion that the generic choices and formations of the postmodern realist novel will themselves function as a strategy for involving the reader in a contemporary ethics of reading, in terms of the call to respond attentively to the gaze of the textual Other who is never reducible to the Same as the reader. The key text here will be A.S. Byatt’s novella “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” which conflates elements of all the four subgenres discussed in the previous chapters. The foregrounded liminality of the novelistic middle space becomes a site for the examination of the nature of a “good” story, the construction of the real, and the possibilities of ethical response. Byatt’s understanding of the need to strive for “hard truth” alongside her awareness of the inevitable “lies” that are our modulated perspectives is indicative of her postmodern realism, which parallels Bakhtin’s notion of genre as “a mediation between world and text” and the world both as something given and as something to be achieved. This final example of Byatt is significant also in her efforts to “make sense” of life, as someone in the post-Christian West who believes Christianity to be metaphysically empty but imagistically still very powerful. I will suggest that in experiencing the imagistic power of Christianity, Byatt is experiencing in a particularly acute way those unavoidable “gaps and fissures in the logic of being” for which Levinas privileges literary and artistic representation as it points to a “real” reality beyond ontology. Insofar as literature negotiates the encounter between language and the world, a Levinasian reading might suggest that literature is thereby in the most privileged position of all, the position of the middle space where the really real is almost apprehendable. And a Bakhtinian reading might suggest that the encounter between language and the world is negotiable ultimately because of a prior



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encounter between the transcendent and the creaturely, in the gaze of divine gift. For, as this book sets out to consider postmodern literary realisms in their imbrication with an ethics of responsibility, it is undergirded by the belief that a dynamic reading of the Judaeo-Christian metanarrative continues to speak grace into the concerns for responseas-responsibility in contemporary literary culture, particularly as such a reading points to the Saying of divine involvement in human life.

A Note: On Proper Names But just before I embark on these investigations, I need to comment on my approach to authorship. Levinas in his book Proper Names argues on the one hand that “[a]rtistic activity makes the artist aware that he is not the author of his words” (140) – the ancient notion of inspiration – but on the other hand that there is profound danger in “genealogy as exegesis, the dead bodies of words swollen with etymologies and devoid of logos, borne by the drift of the texts” (4). His response is to suggest that “[p]erhaps the names of persons whose saying signifies a face – proper names, in the middle of all these common names and commonplaces – can resist the dissolution of meaning and help us to speak” (4). It is the only responsible course, to attribute saying to a speaker, for “language refers to the positions of the one that listens and the one that speaks, that is, to the contingency of their history” (“Meaning and Sense” 37). And as I have already mentioned, Bakhtin too sees words as essentially matters of praxis between speaking persons – “there are no ‘neutral’ words and forms – words and forms that can belong to ‘no one’ … Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions” (“Discourse” 293). No word is ahistorical; every word is relational. “The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction.” Thus the vital and constitutive importance of the listener and his response. Since both these theorists, then, understand language as parole rather than langue, and are therefore concerned with the living usages of semantics rather than the scientific paradigms of semiotics, with words as action rather than as system, their own words ask to be situated in their own contexts and particulars. And further, since this relational and historicized notion of the word is key to my own project,

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then all the theories and critiques that I stand upon, hoist myself around, jump over, or use as stepping stones must also be recognized as coming from someone, some person with a voice, and a face, and even an intention, and not just from an abstract dissemination of textuality. Words are articulated by a speaker or narrator and to an addressee. These contexts matter. Thus, in this book it is more than a matter of avoiding technical plagiarism to try to ensure that each comment, each theory, has a proper name attached to it. There is a genealogy of citation, and intertextuality is both diachronic and dialogic. Moreover, I want particularly to flag my approach to authorial commentary. When an author comments on his or her own work, this is of course in a different voice and with a differently constructed subjectivity from the authorial voice(s) of his or her text, but it has a particularly intimate relationship to that text, and though I do not assume such commentary is uniquely authoritative, nevertheless I do want to pay attention to the contextual uniqueness of its insights. When I quote authors commenting on their fiction, I do not do so in the naive belief that they speak some kind of unproblematic Truth about their own work, but rather in the recognition that their relationship to their work is a historically and contextually privileged one that needs to be taken seriously into account in the hermeneutical enterprise. What follows, then, takes me right back to the specific voices and contexts and faces of the tree outside my window, the magazines on that summer deck, and the children playing street hockey on a fall evening. As an investigation of the ethics of postmodern fiction, these chapters will start with a story by Byatt as they also end with her; they will pay particular attention to the relationship between the world of books and the world that books are about – the world inhabited by both authors and readers, by me and by you. These chapters set out to ask how the real world gets into contemporary fiction, what questions this raises, and what the reader might be expected to do about it.

1

True Stories and the Oppressions of History A.S. Byatt , “Sugar” / Joy Kogawa , Obasan / Penelope Lively , Moon Tiger / Salman Rushdie , Midnight’s Children

In the Jewish tradition the opposite of history is not myth. The opposite of history is forgetfulness. Eli Wiesel, “Myth and History” An old saw attributed to various historians says that if you know only one history of an event you know nothing about it. Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep If the writer is located nowhere except in the rhetorical spaces of language, there can never be a politics of address. Syed Manzurul Islam, “Writing the postcolonial event”

“ Sugar ” : No Difference but Air In “Sugar,” a short story first published in the New Yorker in 1987, the British novelist A.S. Byatt engages with questions of storytelling, memory, and truthfulness. Byatt’s narrator, faced with the terminal illness of her father, finds herself considering how family history is transmitted: the ways in which such transmission is affected by the time and place of narration, the state of mind of the narrator, and the purposes of the storytelling itself. Her father has always been a taciturn man, but in his final illness becomes a storyteller, seeming to want to fill in gaps and set records straight for his children. After all, “[h]e was a judge. When I say that of him, I do not think of him as sitting in judgment. I think of him as a man with an unwavering instilled respect for evidence, for truth, for justice” (Sugar 217). Even so, in these last weeks he “was trying to form a just and generous idea of his own

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father, whom he had fought, at a cost to both of them. So his account had also its bias” (219). And of his life in general he was trying to “construct a tale, a myth, a satisfying narrative” (231), with the result that the tale becomes suspect as a record of evidence, though not as a record of experience. “He was partly being kind to me too, confusing us both” about his life-expectancy in the final illness (218). So what is a true story? The narrator’s mother takes a different approach to storytelling from her husband: even her own family origins are remembered in “a myth [that] had grown up with no foundation in evidence” (234). We are told, in the first line of Byatt’s story, that “[m]y mother had a respect for truth, but she was not a truthful woman.” Although she was very distressed when her husband accused her of being “a terrible liar,” in fact “[s]he lied in small matters, to tidy up embarrassments, and in larger matters, to avoid unpalatable truths. She lied floridly and beautifully … to make a story better” (215). And when she was upset, “the narrative power became disjunct” so that she would tell differing versions of a story (220). The stories the narrator herself is telling are punctuated with phrases like “my mother implied,” “my mother claimed,” “in my mother’s phrase” (221), “my mother’s version” (225), “my mother’s contribution, and perhaps suspect” (226), “her favourite tale” (230) – all of which, then, mark the stories as evidentially unreliable. It is in visiting with her dying father that the narrator has come to see that “much of my past might be her [the mother’s] confection” (240). And so the narrator is writing this story to find a new “idea of the past” because of her discovery in those final weeks with her father that “the idea I had, which was derived from my mother’s accounts, was not to be trusted and bore no very clear relation to truth or reality” (219). At the same time, she recognizes her similarity to her mother: “I have inherited much from her. I do make a profession out of fiction. I select and confect. What is all this, all this story so far, but a careful selection of things that can be told, things that can be arranged in the light of day? Alongside this fabrication are the long black shadows of the things left unsaid, because I don’t want to say them, or dare not, or do not remember, or misunderstood or forgot or never knew” (241). Instancing a specific group of events that she has so far chosen to omit, the narrator says, “To omit them is a minor sin, and easy to correct. But what of all the others? What is the truth? I do have a respect for truth” (241). In this echo of the initial comment about her



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mother, which she has herself shown to be problematic, the narrator compromises her own narrative authority yet further. She herself may be unreliable, not only because she lacks courage or memory or knowledge or understanding, but also because she appreciates the aesthetic power of a “good story.” Like her mother, she has always been a reader; she sees the events of everyday through the lenses of canonical Western literature. Her sense of her grandparents, and of her own origins, is “a kind of Dickensian melodrama of which my mother had been a brisk and humane witness and my father a practical hero” (218). She thinks of her Aunt Gladys as a character from D.H. Lawrence or Charlotte Brontë (222); her grandfather as Dombey (225), as Mr Brocklehurst from Jane Eyre, or as Mr Murdstone from David Copperfield (242); and her father’s “doomed Rhine-journey” as straight out of the Götterdämmerung (232). As a child her favourite book was Asgard and the Gods: Tales and Traditions of our Northern Ancestors, which showed her that stories might not have happy endings, and where the beautiful and threatening tales seemed “truer” to her than the Bible-story of the Resurrection (233); she associated “Our Northern Ancestors” with her father’s wild family (234). She is aware, too, that it is possible that her memories of the day when she went to see the boiling of the sugar in her grandfather’s candy factory are clear because she “wrote about it at the time” (242): “It is the first piece of writing I remember clearly as mine, the first time I remember choosing words, fixing something” (245). “Words were there to be used,” and the two adjectives she particularly remembers using in this writing are “spun-glass,” from Frances Hodgson-Burnett’s Little Princess, and “emerald,” from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (245). Thus her reading, her writing, and her life are manifestly all part of one interwoven text. But the notion that words “fix” anything, that the narrative “I” can “fix” the story for anyone other than the narrator at a specific point in her life, is radically undercut by the heteroglossic nature of language and by what Bakhtin would call its “socially charged” past history. “Spunglass” and “emerald” come trailing clouds of past glory. And then there are the problems of memory, and of the contextual development of the self. At the end of a story which the narrator says she has set out to tell about her grandfather but which is centrally about her parents, the last and climactic narration is an account of the childhood memories unlocked by the funeral of her father, which she overlays with his long-ago return from the war – though even then she

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“confuse[s] the memory of his return hopelessly with his parting” for it (248). So much conflation and overpainting of generations, of leavetakings and arrivals, of death and of joy – “[h]ow to be sure with all the years fading between then and that last cold day?” she cries. What she does remember – “this is surely memory, and not accretion” – of her father’s return is “a terror of happiness. I was afraid to feel. This event was a storied event, already lived over and over, in imagination and hope, in the invented future. The real thing, the true moment, is as inaccessible as any point along that frantic leap” into her father’s arms (248). Does Byatt’s story, then, finish with separation or with reunion? The father himself “is and was myth,” even though his return from the war is a real event in space and time. And yet, knowledge begins not in the moment of experience, but in the process of narration: “After things have happened, when we have taken a breath and a look, we begin to know what they are and were, we begin to tell them to ourselves” (248). But if it is in “telling [events] to ourselves” that we begin to know them, again that question: what is a true story? The master-trope of Byatt’s story is its title, “Sugar.” Not by accident are the mother’s stories described as “confection” and the narrator’s fiction-writing as requiring that she “select and confect.” The extraordinary discovery of the trip around the candy factory is that humbugs are made of two strands of sugar, the only difference between the brown and the white being that the white has been spun in air. “‘It’s the air that does it,’ my grandfather said. ‘Nothing but whipping in air. There’s no difference between the two stripes in a humbug but air: the sugar’s exactly the same’” (244). Despite the translucent glories of the other “delectable” sugar sweets, it is this discovery about humbugs that the narrator labels “the most miraculous moment” (244), and to which she returns in the very last line of her story. Just as words fail, but begin, to recall the real presence of the father, so there are physical “markers” which fail, but begin, to recapture the past: the last of these markers that the narrator mentions are “the melded and twisting hanks of brown and white sugar,” whose difference lies only in air. Words can neither fix meaning nor create it out of thin air, but they can construct meaning out of a substance whipped into shape by the air they breathe. It is perhaps not incidental that “humbug” in British English is slang for “nonsense,” or, more precisely, for stories that are a lot of hot air, that try to convince the reader of possibly suspect information, probably for the storyteller’s own gain. In Byatt’s story, those hanks of sugar represent the inaccessible real of



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mere occurrence, twisted together with reality that has been spun and played with in narrative, till the story convinces us that “we begin to know what they are and were” (248). The airy confections of the mother twisted together with the evidential solidity of the father create the narrative. And Byatt did not call the story “Humbug”: she called it “Sugar.” For confectionery is also the storymaker’s art. Byatt’s own commentary on “Sugar” demonstrates how strong the autobiographical context is for her here. “The idea for this story presented itself to me initially as a kind of temptation. I had been thinking about the problem of the relations between truth, lies and fiction all my life … The formal pattern of ‘Sugar’ rose up before me, seductively elegant, some years after my father’s death … I found I had used his dying … in order to think about the nature of truth and writing. And that was something I had been brought up to think was wrong” (Passions 21). Levinas might suggest something different: that a fictional discourse, a story about truth and writing – and dying – is more likely to be ethical than a philosophical discourse because it recognizes its own gaps and fissures, the impossibility of representation being the Same as its subject. Be that as it may, acknowledging that the notion of truth as merely palatable construction has become more commonplace during her writing life, Byatt argues, “whilst it was once attractive (séduisant?) to think that whatever we say or see is our own construction, it now becomes necessary to reconsider the idea of truth, hard truth, and its possibility. We may be, as Browning said, born liars. But that idea itself is only wholly meaningful if we glimpse a possibility of truth and truthfulness for which we must strive, however, inevitably, partial our success must be. I do believe that language has denotative as well as connotative powers” (24). In its acceptance of the constructed nature of truth statements together with its recognition of the desirability of objectivity, this is the confession of a postmodern realist. The ethical implications are also paradoxical: “[t]here is a certain amount of defiance in ‘Sugar’. Defiance of the moral imperative (my own, my family’s, my culture’s) that one should not ‘eat up’ life with the order of art” – but also an attempt to be truthful, while recognizing that there are truths its author may choose not, or may omit, to tell (25).

Narrative and Ethical Purchase What is a “true story”? And will it be a “good story”? The aesthetic/ ethical doubleness of “good” here is only more obvious than the

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equivalent doubleness in “true.” Not surprisingly, there has been lively debate within postmodernist criticism about the ethics of the relationship between the historically real and the fictionally constructed. When one tells a story, and particularly a story which uses events from the real world, where does the shaping of those events come from, and in whose interests? In the introduction I argued that Levinas understands literary art as a profoundly ethical modality where, by virtue of the gap aesthetically foregrounded between referent and word, things can “speak themselves” beyond the constraints of ontology. And Bakhtin privileges narrative fiction over other literary forms because of its unique ability to contain heteroglossic voices and to resist a totalitarian monologism. These are ethical positions, to be sure, but they each presume a generosity toward the other, or at the least a motivated responsibility before the face of the real, which allows for a shaping of events in the interests of the other. Bakhtin is well aware that narrative can be controlled by an imposing authorial voice that renders the narrative closed rather than open, and postmodernism in general has been marked by its awareness of the impossibility of disinterestedness. Roland Barthes, as a key figure of the early postmodern, articulates a central tenet of postmodernism’s often implicit metanarrative when he asserts that “historical discourse is in its essence a form of ideological elaboration” (“Discourse” 16) – any shaping of historical narrative will always and inevitably embody a world view and an agenda that cannot be disinterested. And Hayden White, maverick theorist of the narrative status of history, agrees: he suggests that the very form of any narrative invests in meaningfulness, unity, and closure. The coherence that the novelist can invent is something that the historian desires, and it is offered to him not by the events themselves but by the genre of narrative. White argues that this offer is a significant work of the imagination: “[the] value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary” (Content 24). Imagination and reality work hand in hand here in producing in the narrative of history what White calls “a specifically human truth,” driven by desire – though “[o]ne can produce an imaginary discourse about real events that may not be less ‘true’ for being imaginary” (57). Indeed, this narrative reconstruction of the past is a prime way by which society ranks events with respect to their significance to that specific culture (10) and regulates the moral authority without which, White asserts, social reality is unthinkable



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(25). Narrative, in this view, is both formally necessary and inevitably imbued with moral purpose; the (hi)storyteller will always have a moral lesson in tow. Rather as Marshall McLuhan argued that the medium is the message, so White wants his readers to recognize this notion of the “content of the form.” The distance from historical and cultural narrative to fictional narrative is on this count a small one: White argues that history involves the same subjectivity, selection, narrativization, and figurative conventions as fiction. It is true that neither all historians nor all literary critics are happy about this blurring of disciplinary boundaries. In the relationship between the real and the imaginary that is the play of history within fiction, for instance, some literary critics feel that fiction will be aesthetically the poorer for what they perceive as a lazy dependence on “fact.”1 However, as we have seen, the binary of invention vs. reality is one that both contemporary theory and contemporary fiction unsettle. The oppositions between fact and fiction may be read as stemming from a simplistic understanding of realism but at the same time, as Byatt recognizes above, a commitment to some kind of realism has come to be widely accepted as morally necessary, especially by those critics energized by political or social concerns. True, those great stories of the Western past are now often perceived as the metanarratives of oppression because they centred on the white, culturally privileged, and geosocially centralist male, to the exclusion of racially, economically, and sexually marginalized groups. But there is an awareness of the danger of throwing out the baby of social responsibility along with the bathwater of cultural elitism – the Leavisite conscience along with the Leavisite curriculum, if you will. Byatt’s story suggests that, without story, truth is absolutely inaccessible, and within story, truth is completely constructed. But she herself affirms that such dependence of truth upon narrative in no way obviates the necessity to search for truth and to respond ethically to its relational demands. A recognition of the imperatives of this middle space of postmodern realism involves the conviction that any play with notions of historical referentiality entails serious social responsibility. Proposing that “[t]he ‘language-game’ of narration ultimately reveals that the meaning of human existence is itself narrative,” Paul Ricoeur also spells out the ethical corollary: “The implications of narration as a retelling of history are considerable ... The history of the vanquished dead crying out for justice demands to be told” (“Dialogue” 17). There are Others who need to “speak,” before whom we bear the responsibility of witness.

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One of the most basic questions that must be asked, then, about “the forest of narrativities” that is our daily life in the media-saturated West is the question of ethical purchase. In whose interests is a narration unfolding? Are those interests, once brought to light, ones which the reader may applaud, or ones which as an ethical subject she will abhor? Levinas talks about the way in which “the poetic verb” can “betray itself” into fixity and commodification as it is swallowed up by cultural production in the totalizing order of society (Proper Names 148). But what is the reader’s responsibility to the textualized Other? What, in fact, is an ethical reading? White argues that the very act of creating narrative demonstrates not only the human desire to organize life into coherent and meaningful sequence, but also the need to pass judgment upon that sequence in a way that elicits a moral response from the reader (Content 24). It is not far from such an understanding to the proposition of narrative-as-ethics, in the recognition that narrative necessitates relationships of response and responsibility between teller, listener, witness, and reader. Writing that is self-conscious about its mediation of fact and fiction requires a similar self-consciousness in its readers if it is to fulfill its potential to be ethically powerful. “The fusion of fiction and historiography,” asserts Donna Pennee, “challenges a reader’s ethical position, for if a reader denies epistemological and ontological status to fiction, s/he may also deny such status to history, and in so doing denies (or fails to take) responsibility for actions and beliefs” (Pennee 14). In recognizing literature’s ethical potential, we might then put the historical shoe on the other, fictional foot: “history proves that language, rhetoric, texts, are real enough to cause atrocities of all sorts. Why can’t texts be used to stop atrocities?” (18) Even after the demise of widespread belief in the civilizing power of “culture,” can’t literature be expected to fulfill at least some of those traditionally fine goals related to the nurturing of creative sympathy and understanding? Can’t we expect even postmodernist historical fiction to develop in its readers that “chastened or self-aware essentialism” (Newton 27) which will negotiate the world through representational frames held in common with the textual Other, and in the process will reconstruct the readers themselves? In other words, can’t contemporary literature which deals with factualities of the real world still both teach and delight?



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Historiographic Metafiction Where a traditional theorizing of the novel may emphasize its debt to “facts” as the historically real, and a postmodernist theorizing of the novel may emphasize its construction of “fiction” in face of the historically unknowable, Hutcheon’s now well-established term “historiographic metafiction” is another oxymoron of the middle space, like postmodern realism, that offers to make sense in the conjunction of the two. Although Byatt’s story is enacted at the level of personal rather than public history, its concerns are closely represented by Hutcheon’s term, coined to describe “the postmodern ironic rethinking of history” in books that are “intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Poetics 5). Hutcheon argues that historiographic metafiction is transdisciplinary: it includes narrative in literature, history, and the discourse of postmodernist theory, in that “its theoretic self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past.” In Hutcheon’s view, historiographic metafiction is paradigmatically postmodernist because it works with these conventional forms and contentual approaches in order to subvert them. We probably need to recognize upfront that the traditionalist reader (and perhaps especially the traditionally religious reader) is likely to be troubled by such subversion: if what has been taken to be historical truth is shown to be mere construction, say the alarmists, can the ultimate demise of Western civilization be far behind? But this reactionary response can be turned on its head. It is often argued, indeed, that the death knell of traditional Western civilization was rung in the first half of the twentieth century by the real events of what traditionalists might call “history itself.” The catastrophes of two World Wars showed that even the most developed countries of this civilization were powerless to prevent the maelstrom arising from within themselves. This line of argument sees postmodernism not only, in Fredric Jameson’s phrase, as the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” but also as an ironical response to a cultural impasse, the unmasking of the untruth of the Arnoldian Romantic belief in the power of civilization to civilize. It is on grounds such as these that even some mainstream contemporary theologians may condemn the “crushing orthodoxies” of traditional philosophy and religious faith, whose very systems blinded them to the abuses those systems could hide: “where there is the legitimation

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of structure without the voice of pain embraced, there will be oppression without compassion” (Brueggemann, Living Toward 44).2 This is Bakhtin’s critique of monologic discourse, which he calls unethical because it functions as a repressive dismissal of and closure to the story of the Other. However, as we have already heard, “Even granting that all facts are mediated, that is no excuse for a ‘wall to wall’ abandonment of historical referentiality. Rather it mandates a radically revised mediation of fact and fiction” (Thornton and Thornton 138) – a new emphasis on the middle space of dialogism. Inevitably, a historiographic work which melds history and fiction takes on a historical responsibility that would not “encumber a work of blatant fantasy.” This simultaneous inscription and undercutting of linguistic authority parallels the ironic inscribing and subverting of textual form that Hutcheon sees as paradigmatically postmodernist: “[t]he ‘real’ referent of … language once existed; but it is only accessible to us today in textualized form” (Poetics 93). She asserts, however, that it is a mistake to read such irony as trivializing: she cites Umberto Eco’s argument that, in fact, irony may be the only way in which we can be serious about the past, once we are aware of the impossibility of discursive innocence (39). Perhaps, indeed, an ironic reading is just that radical revisioning of the relationship between fact and fiction which the Thorntons are calling for – a recognition of the necessity for tropes that foreground the gaps and fissures in the logic of representation. Moreover, postmodernist fiction will at one and the same time inscribe and subvert the traditional forms and approaches. If narrative closure is considered now to carry potentially negative associations of coercion, silencing, and stasis, rather than its prior positive associations of coherence and meaning, then a postmodernist text that plays with history is likely to play ironically with textual unity and closure as a means of alerting the reader to his or her ethical responsibility. Is there then no possibility of coherence and closure without irony in contemporary literature? And what of traditional texts in which such coherence and closure are presented as redemptive – must they all now be read ironically? To listen to some contemporary critics, one might conclude that this is indeed the case. But irony may be the shield of the wounded as much as the defence of the skeptical. Presumably a different life experience and a different world view commitment could even today allow for a more affirmative reading of certain possibilities of coherence and certain aspects of closure, while recognizing the impossibility of narrative innocence and the inadequacy of representational mimesis.



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Biblical Metanarrative The central text of the Western tradition, the Bible, which was traditionally claimed as the supreme instance of narrative-as-ethics, has particularly in the last fifty or sixty years been under attack as advocating violence, racism, homophobia, and the worst excesses of an oppressive patriarchy. For the most part, it does not invite an ironic hermeneutic, except by the non-believer. What might be the response of scholars who still have a commitment to understand the Bible as a text of ethical authority without ironizing it? Middleton and Walsh are two such scholars: they address the accusation that any philosophy or religious tradition is oppressive which legitimates structure while silencing pain by arguing that the biblical metanarrative is in fact centrally concerned with the voice of pain, the necessity of justice, and the work of restoration. Without lessening its metaphysical authority, they see the Bible as enacting what Levinas would call the Saying of ethical openness to the Other because it resists closure by inviting readerly participation beyond the text.3 They propose that the biblical notion of covenantal, dialogic order points to an analogous social order that will deal honestly and respectfully with pain. They term this a “redemptive order,” oriented toward shalom; the Hebrew word implies a situation of dwelling at peace and in harmony, in relation not only to God and the self, but also to the natural world and to the social world of other human beings. Some Christian critics have looked at ways in which this pattern of narrative ethics embodied as shalom in the Bible may be applicable also to other texts. On this kind of reading, historical narrative is not purely construction, even teleologically, because of its future orientation.4 And the central redemptive event of the Incarnation remains vitally available to a broad range of writers. A number of postcolonial writers in diverse geosocial situations have countered and mimicked any implicit claims to the Eurocentricity of the Christian story by creating indigenous or hybridized Christ figures who protest against injustice (Carey 182).5 In other words, this Christian story carries power for the oppressed even when, historically speaking, it is the uses that colonial power have made of the story that have been a major cause of the oppression, and even when the fiction writers concerned do not themselves ascribe to the faith behind the founding narrative. The biblical metanarrative is read, even here, as a paradigmatic instance of a story shaped by moral agendas but available for translation into new

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circumstances, so that the retelling of it continues a “Saying” of ethical responsibility on behalf of the oppressed. Of the three contemporary historiographic novels I want to consider in this chapter, one is marked specifically by what I will argue is a nonironized appropriation of the Christian story, one ostensibly refuses a religion that it in other ways tacitly inscribes, and the third, which by virtue of its categorically slippery nature will slip through the gaps and past the ending of this chapter to open the next one, demonstrates a kind of hybrid cross-cultural religious sensibility. It will not be surprising that notions of coherence and closure are ironized more directly in the novels that are not committed to the Christian metanarrative of a covenanted shalom that will eventually come to be in historical future time. But all three novels are profoundly concerned for an ethical reading, and all three are marked as postmodernist by their approach to history as construct and reality as knowable only through narrative. These novels therefore offer significant opportunity to consider the ethical purchase of narrative-as-genre that I was discussing earlier. After all, theoretical postulates and posturings must be checked and balanced by literary texts themselves, in what Levinas calls “the revelatory power [of] symbolic form” (Proper Names 82). Language needs primarily to be recognized as contextual and discursive; it is a healthy thing when theories about reading are forced to confront practice in writing. 6 The novelist already knows, after all, about the middle space of narrative where “[a] sentence always means more” (Steiner 82).

Obasan and the Name in the Stone Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) is a novel marked overtly by the Christian story. It was the first novel to tell the story of the oppression and internment of Japanese Canadians in Canada during and after World War II. The story has autobiographical roots for Kogawa because, as a child, she was one of those Japanese Canadians forcibly removed from the west coast to be interned in the British Columbia interior and then, after the war, “dispersed” by government decree into rural Alberta. In writing the story, she is in one sense writing herself. With the exception of the first five pages of the novel, which stand as a symbolic key to the rest, the whole narrative takes place in a three-day period following the death of the narrator’s Uncle Isamu. The novel is structured as a re-membering through flashbacks and historical documents of the circumstances around the childhood of the narrator,



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Naomi Nakane, in Vancouver, in Slocan, British Columbia, and then in Granton, Alberta; it leads up to a final climactic revelation of the fate of Naomi’s long-absent mother in the holocaust of Nagasaki. As both a “true story” and a “good story,” this novel has had an enormous impact. In the political arena, it helped to provoke the Canadian government’s apology in 1988 to Japanese Canadians and the act of compensation known as the Redress Settlement: at the ceremony that year, part of Obasan was read. In literary circles, its blending of elliptical fictive-poetic storytelling and historical documentation – what Hutcheon has called its “confronting the discourse of art with the discourse of history” (“Beginning” 25) – influenced the way “history” is conceived, and garnered for the novel a number of prizes, including the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1981, the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award in 1982, and the Canadian Authors Association Book of the Year Award in 1982. As historiographic metafiction, then, this novel has received a good deal of attention. The text “problematizes the very act of reconstituting a history by comparing it to the process of writing fiction” (Goellnicht 287–8); and “the telling of tales is in Obasan no insignificant act. It is, rather, a strategic act of signification that conditions both individual and collective history and subjectivity. Narrative, in other words, is where we come from” (Jones 213). The novel demonstrates its postmodernity by “focussing on the material ‘documentation’ of history and story, refusing to see either as simply ‘pre-textual’ events unconditioned by specific, contextualized ‘tellings’” (Jones 214). More recently one critic has argued that mimetic readings of Obasan as a historical novel in which language points transparently to the referent are simplistic since the novel disallows any ready embrace of language as the medium of truth (Cheung 126). “Naomi [the narrator] proceeds tentatively, and insists that facts alone do not history make. She traverses the historical landscape in slow motion and delivers a microscopic worm’s eye view of the muted sufferers” (Cheung 164). Kogawa herself, during an interview in November 1989, demonstrated a similar attitude to “facts” when she said, “I’m finding that so many ‘facts’ are an encumbrance to the fiction – but they still insist on being present. Documents and facts are intended to direct our prejudiced hearts but rarely provide direction by themselves. I have boxes and boxes of documents but what I need is vision and vision comes from relationship. Facts bereft of love direct us nowhere” (Redekop 17). But for all the attention this novel has attracted as a historical narrative marked by the conscious subjectivity

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of the postmodern, Obasan has been less thoroughly explored as a story that depends at a profound level upon the Christian metanarrative and Christian tradition. If we agree with Bakhtin that it is unethical to ignore the historical life of discourse, then this lack is one that needs to be addressed. Joy Kogawa grew up in a Japanese Christian family; her father was an Anglican minister. Kogawa has said in interview, “I think that Christianity is possibly the deepest aspect of me” (Solitudes 96). In conversation with a class of students, she mentioned that she “habitually reads a randomly chosen biblical text every morning” (“Witnessing” 101). Her spiritual vision affects everything that Kogawa sees. For instance, speaking of her relation to politics and the real, she says, “The political reality, real as it is, is … an imposition of order on something that is much more complex, and if I am going to be true to what is real within me, I will attend far more intently to that complexity; that is, tap the spiritual” (Sounding 157). It would seem important, then, to pay attention to this spiritual sensitivity in Kogawa when approaching her texts, recognizing religion as a key discursive practice in play in the author’s self-construction.7 In light of Kogawa’s personal and sociocultural context, it is hardly surprising to find that not only is the text of Obasan shot through with Christian images and symbols, but that the structure of Obasan owes much to the biblical metanarrative, and the crisis and resolution of the novel are embodied in the trope of the Anglican communion service. However, I have been struck by the fact that the most visible studies of the Christian influences in Obasan have been made by those unsympathetic to the Christian faith and to its investment in a redemptive but open-ended ordering for shalom. For instance, Shirley Geok-lin Lim argues that “Obasan carries a bitter critique of Christian discourse. The images offered in the use of biblical language are contextually ‘ironized’ and depleted of their significance” (“Japanese” 304). Cheng Lok Chua, too, asserts that Kogawa uses Christian leitmotifs ironically, which “puts an ironic question to the Christian ethic professed by Canada’s majority culture” (“Witnessing” 99).8 One cannot dispute the presence of a powerful critique in Obasan of the white racism that exists even among those who call themselves Christian: a minister one Sunday turns Uncle away from the communion rail at church (38); the most outspokenly anti-Japanese Canadian alderman in Vancouver has a father who is an Anglican clergyman (88); a United Church minister is reported as advocating that they should “kick all the Japs out” (102). However,



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I want to suggest that Lim and Chua’s dismissing of the significance of the biblical language and Christian imagery in the novel as simply ironized is a misreading of the struggle for faith that the text embodies, and does it an injustice. Even white Christians are not all bad: the “missionaries” in Obasan are well-intentioned social activists who hand out toys to the children being sent off to the internment camps (112), offer classes to the children of Slocan (138), intervene to prevent violence in childhood racial squabbles (154), get up petitions and write impassioned letters to the government about the injustice of the later dispersal policy (184, 187), and try to discover the fate of the internees’ relatives in Japan (212, 234). But the focus of Kogawa’s novel is not on the white Christians: it is on the expression of Christian faith within the Japanese Canadian community itself. One avenue of exploration that seems often to have been ignored by critics is the degree to which traditional Japanese codes of behaviour overlap with those of Christian faith.9 For instance, the solicitousness for the welfare of the other that a critic like King-Kok Cheung sees as typical of Japanese culture (Articulate 162) is equally valued in Christian ethics; similarly, Cheung’s description of Obasan’s “serving hands” as evidence of her “Japanese inheritance” (150) overlooks the degree to which an ethic of service is also central to Christian teaching. This view of Asian Christianity as at certain points drawing together two compatible traditions is completely at odds with that of, for instance, the influential anthologizer Frank Chin, who in a polemical essay in 1985 declared that “[a] Chinese Christian is like a Nazi Jew” (“This is Not”122), and thus reinforced his longstanding reading of the relationship between Christianity and Asian American culture as inherently antagonistic, leading to cultural self-annihilation as religious identity denies ethnic identity. Cheng Lok Chua, on the other hand, seems to shift ground on this one: finally she writes, “Through Kogawa’s book, through Naomi’s speaking her story, Kogawa transubstantiates the stony silence of the Japanese Canadians’ victimization into a speaking manna-bread of communication” (106) – a transubstantiation that seems palpable enough, particularly given its political outcome in the real world. Chua points out, too, that the final image in Obasan of the moon as a stone freed from gravity whose reflection dances on the water embodies the promise that “stones could yield a manna and confirm a new identity” (106) which is implied by the novel’s epigraph from the biblical book of Revelation: “To him that

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overcometh / will I give to eat / of the hidden manna / and will give him / a white stone / and in the stone / a new name written … .” 10 Embodiment is key here. The notion of the “word made flesh” is central to this book, for both spiritual and cultural reasons. Cheung has pointed out that in Japanese culture considerable emphasis is placed on learning both to read and to contribute to a “speech” that is wordless, embodied in gesture, expression, and posture. Reference is in excess of language; the face of the other is a voiceless voice, obliging me to responsibility. This necessary skill in cultural reading demonstrates an “attentiveness” that is privileged far above verbal dexterity, not least because it requires relational sensitivity. As Kogawa put it in the Redekop interview, “Facts bereft of love direct us nowhere.” For her, then, the “true story” is one composed of information received through loving relationship, because it is only by virtue of such relationship that the writer, and the reader, will find direction. Indeed it may be in the dialogism of such relationship that writer and reader receive the gift of the Other which is constitutive of their own selfhood. In the same way, the very notion of what Lim calls “Christian discourse” is meaningless and effectually voiceless unless it is embodied in this kind of loving relationship; like Bakhtin in his repudiation of the unethical nature of monologic discourse, Kogawa critiques a disembodied discourse but affirms the word made flesh. Naomi Nakane, at the book’s opening a single, thirty-six-year-old schoolteacher in Alberta, has for many years lived in a state of passive tension, trying not to think of past or future. The present of this book lasts for the three days after her Uncle’s death and the gathering of the family to mourn. Attending the wake for her uncle and trying to pay attention to the needs of her aged aunt Obasan, Naomi does not want to remember the past – either the good, as Obasan has always encouraged her to do, or the bad, as her other aunt, Emily, pushes her to do. She does not want to remember the lost paradise of early childhood in Vancouver – though already there was a snake in the garden, in the form of Old Man Gower, whose sexual abuse of her caused her initial psychic separation from her mother. She does not want to remember being cast out into the wilderness of the ghost town of Slocan in the interior of British Columbia, even though over those three years of 1942–45 her community rebuilt itself there, “harvesting the wilderness” (139) where the mountain air was blue and the gardens became green and lovely. She does not want to remember the hell of the beet farm near Lethbridge where, in the time of the “dispersion” by the



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Canadian government after the war had ended in 1945, she and her family were sent to toil at inhuman labour in the vast dry fields, and to live like beasts in a flimsy one-room shack. She does not yet know the salvific power of the loving word that rises through death; the story of the novel is the story of her unwilling discovery of such knowledge. The death of her uncle jars her passivity, “sends [her] mind scurrying for significance” (Obasan 5), and the documents collected by her aunt supply the external impetus for her emotional surgery. It is in her uncle and aunt’s living-room that the letters that speak of her long-absent mother are finally made known to her and thus, eventually, death “breaks open” the stone. The parallels with the central trajectory of the Christian story are not far to seek. On the one hand, there are a number of overt biblical references. The narrator uses the epigraphic quote from Revelation 2:17 to situate the most resonant images of the journey to hope; Emily uses a quote from Habakkuk 2:2, “Write the vision and make it plain,” to situate her own chosen way of pursuing justice (31). The angel in the fiery furnace from the Book of Daniel (48, 131, 205), the valley of dry bones from the Book of Ezekiel (160), the exchange that Esau makes in Genesis of his birthright for a “mess of pottage” (184), the New Testament pool of Siloam where those who are sent must bathe to find sight (111) – all of these find their analogues in Naomi’s story. But on the other hand, and more importantly for the structure of the whole novel, Naomi has gone through a life experience that parallels the journey from Eden to the wilderness to exile and the longing for a return; now in these three days she goes through an experience that parallels the journey of a Christian disciple who follows the trajectory of Christ’s crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. Her faith, which has been dormant, is tested and brought to life; the word, which has been stone and silent and dead, bursts into telling and freedom as the new day dawns at the very end of the book, and the flowers in the coulee give off a faint, sweet perfume: “If I hold my head a certain way, I can smell them from where I am” (247). The image is resonant: now that she holds all the information about her mother and knows its silence has been spoken with love, Naomi can choose to respond to that information “in a certain way” that enables her to enjoy the beauty and promise of the world, where “[t]he song of mourning is not a lifelong song” (246), and where the moon and the river dance soundlessly together as the mother’s love is forever sure. This response, far

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from being ironized, is a turn away from either forgetfulness or irony and toward shalom. The key to the Christian context of the novel is also more than paper word. It is the embodied word in Nakayama-sensei, the faithful Anglican priest (named, incidentally, for Kogawa’s own father) who works tirelessly to shepherd his flock over many years. He is present at every major turning-point in the novel. Naomi remembers his presence in church in Vancouver at the Christmas nativity concert, which she recalls as part of a time of joyful light and song in dark places (71–2). After Pearl Harbor, as the Japanese Canadians on the West Coast are rounded up and sent to internment camps, the Japanese ministers take leadership of the different groups from their congregations (109); when the Nakanes arrive in Slocan, they are met by Nakayama-sensei who shows them to the cabin he has found for them, lowly and tumbledown but private and away from the crowds (106). Even though humanly discouraged by the bleakness of the situation, he leads them in a prayer of thankfulness for the preservation of life and community: “‘Together,’ Sensei says, ‘by helping each other ....’ It sounds half like a rallying call, half like an apology as if he is somehow responsible” (122). If the self is constituted by an answerability before others, then too the exiled community will be constructed and maintained through interdiscursive response and responsibility. In Slocan Nakayama-sensei conducts Grandma Nakane’s funeral, and even though for Naomi “[t]he words that are spoken … are not understandable,” the controlled power of his chanting voice is evident to her: “I felt that he could make the walls of the building fall down were he to let out all his breath” (129). The referent exceeds language as the voice chanting the service is much more than words. And time and again we are shown how the strength of this community is profoundly connected to its being a community of worship. After the end of the war when the shocking orders for further “dispersal” are given, Nakayami-sensei is there to give the Nakane family and their friends Holy Communion in their home before they are scattered (175). Speaking partly in English, partly in Japanese, he conducts the Anglican Eucharist service, and as he follows the form of service he must omit neither the prayers of confession, nor the exhortation to love of neighbour, nor even the prayer for Christian unity which finally asks that God will “save and defend all Christian Kings, Princes and Governors; and specially Thy servant George, our King: that under him we may be godly and quietly governed” (176). Patricia



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Marby Harrison sees Nakayama-sensei in this prayer as “articulating the connection between Christianity and institutional racism” and as “seem[ing] to condone the government’s behavior even as he urges the Japanese Canadians themselves to submit in the name of Christ to … this bigoted authority” (Harrison 159–60). I think it is truer to the nature of the service to see Nakayama-sensei as holding on to the traditions and teachings of faith in a time of grave trial, and as reminding his parishioners of the grand eternal picture even in the midst of great pain in the small local one. Sometimes a metanarrative offers a healing perspective that a local narrative cannot grant. For Naomi, again, “the meaning of the words is unknown,” even though this service is so familiar (177); she has not yet grown to a place of faith where it is possible to “give thanks in all circumstances,” as in the Christian scriptures St Paul counselled in his first letter to the persecuted Christian church in Thessalonica (1 Thessalonians 5:18). Of course Chua (“Witnessing” 104) is right to recognize the irony of the central point in the communion service where, as he breaks the bread, Nakayama-sensei says, “in the same night that He was betrayed He took Bread; and when He had given thanks, He brake it, and gave it to His disciples, saying, ‘Take, eat ….’”(Obasan 177). The Japanese Canadians are specifically identified here with the betrayed Christ – but surely this is less a turning away from the Christian story than a powerful and ironized re-membering of its ongoing relevance and power, in the middle space between loss and freedom. The final prayer of the service traditionally asks God to accept the renewed “souls and bodies” of the communicants as “a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice” (177). The sacrificial lives of the Japanese Canadians in the next chapters are given extraordinary power when read through this rubric. Nakayama, in his own words, says, “In a time like this, let us trust in God even more. To trust when life is easy is no trust” (178). He promises to visit them, God willing, wherever they go. And he does. In Alberta for the next twenty years Nakayama-sensei makes regular visits to the Nakane family in Granton, as well as to all the others of his flock. Emily later describes his “desperation to keep the community together” because he is “a deeply wounded shepherd trying to tend the flock in every way he could,” even though the sheep have been “stampeded in the stockyards and slaughterhouses of prejudice” (186). She tells Naomi about the time he went out east to take pictures of as many young Japanese Canadians as he could so that he could show the photos to their parents back in the camps, to reassure them

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(187). In the early days in Granton, if the Nakanes were working in the beet fields when Nakayama-sensei arrived, he would come and work beside them and would find a way to joke and chat with Uncle (203). When the absent father dies in hospital of tuberculosis, it is Nakayamasensei who comes to break the news to the family, and to read from the Bible with them (206). After the war is over, Nakayama-sensei is the first Japanese Canadian to visit Japan, planning to find out about Naomi and Stephen’s mother and grandmother; in the event, his wallet and his address book are stolen by Japanese pickpockets, and he can do virtually nothing, defeated by the “enemy” who are supposedly his ethnic brothers, but his attempt is nevertheless an embodying of his word of love. For him, Christ’s gaze of love has been experienced as the necessary empowerment prior to the call to responsibility for the Other. And then, finally, in the present of the novel, Nakayama-sensei arrives at Obasan’s house after Uncle’s death. With the green tea of welcome, Naomi serves Uncle Isamu’s last loaf of the “everlasting stone bread” (227) that he had made for years and whose metaphoric weight is everywhere apparent in a novel where Naomi tells us from the very beginning, in her gloss on the epigraph from Revelation, that “the word is stone” and the manna is hidden from her. Nakayamasensei begins his visit with a long prayer of thanksgiving, during which Naomi’s inattentive and alienated brother Stephen, in an act symbolic at once of desecration and of his refusal of the community, breaks a corner off the bread, but then changes his mind and sticks it back on the slice. Then, for the first time, Nakayama-sensei reads in the pile of Aunt Emily’s documents the letter from Grandma to Grandpa Kato, which tells in Japanese of the horrors of the bombing of Nagasaki and the disfigurement and defacement of the mother. Breaking the silence is vital if the next generation is to find health; the documents involved are described as being “as heavy as a loaf of Uncle’s stone bread” (31). Nakayama-sensei reads Grandma Kato’s letter twice in silence, and only then out loud, repeating the first page once he has gained his composure enough to continue. By careful reference to Japanese cultural norms and to Kogawa’s writing style, Cheung has deconstructed the binary of language/silence that has often been used as a heuristic tool in criticism of Obasan (Articulate Silences 126 ff). In this scene Nakayama-sensei first digests in silence written words which he then voices out loud to Naomi and her brother, thus embodying with a textual twist Cheung’s thesis that in the outcome of this novel “[t]he avenues of silence and the avenues



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of speech are conjoined” (162). As the faithful priest receives the burden and the responsibility of breaking this bread of paper wafers for members of his flock, he recognizes that, however great the brokenness, out of it will come new life. Just as Uncle’s “stone bread” could only be “speared” with a sharp knife point (13), so the letter must be pierced with the pain of recognition. So Naomi’s early comment is transformed: “If you can’t even break it, it’s not bread … It’s all stone” (13). After he has read the letter and put it away, Nakayama-sensei says, “That this world is brokenness. But within brokenness is the unbreakable name. How the whole earth groans till Love returns” (240). This is the Christian story of incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and promised shalom. Here is the metanarrative of care for the oppressed that Nakayama-sensei inhabits and offers to his flock as gift. And there is yet another textual resonance here. Before he reads the letter aloud, Nakayama-sensei speaks to the grown children: “‘Naomi,’ he says softly, ‘Stephen, your mother is speaking. Listen carefully to her voice’” (233). In fact the letter was written not by the mother, but by Grandma Kato; the mother had made a pact to say nothing, and prayed that her children would never be told the truth. The implication, then, is that the mother can “speak” through her story, even when it is told from the point of view of another: she has no face, but the extremity of her pain and disfigurement declares its love and commitment to her children. And what is more, the silent mother can “speak” even after the story is told: at the end of this chapter, Naomi says, “Mother. I am listening. Assist me to hear you” (240). Chapter 38 that follows is Naomi’s piecing together of all that she has learned, through her mother’s remembered closeness, through her childhood dreams, through the shreds of external evidence that she has now accumulated; it is her prayer to her mother, her letter to her; it is her hearing of her mother’s voice whole. Chua reads Kogawa’s play with the trope of resurrection – the toy Easter chicks, the mother hen who pecks the baby chicks to death – as ironical because Naomi and Stephen’s mother does not return to life, and “[t]hus a symbol that ought to mean life has been displaced into a symbol of death” (67). This seems to me to be an impoverished reading of the chapter. Nakayama’s prayer, “Teach us to see Love’s presence in our abandonment” (243), is fulfilled in Naomi, whose “hearing” of her mother’s powerlessness is itself empowering because of the recognition of the love within it. Naomi says to her mother, “perhaps it is because I am no longer a child I can know your presence though you are not here. The letters tonight are skeletons.

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Bones only. But the earth still stirs with dormant blooms. Love flows through the roots of the trees by our graves” (243). This, surely, is a kind of resurrection, for both mother and daughter, the “real presence” of the mother known through gaps in the logic of linguistic being. Obasan, then, is not only a novel in which Naomi must re-member because, as Elie Wiesel has written of the Jewish tradition, “true” history is the opposite of forgetfulness, but also a novel for which an awareness of biblical intertext and biblical resonance supplies a necessary and sometimes unexpected layeredness of exegesis. As Middleton and Walsh argue for the metanarrative of the Bible, so this novel expresses the struggle to find a redemptive ordering which, while neither legitimating nor ignoring pain and brokenness, is concerned for healing, restoration, and justice, both individual and corporate. In this novel, prayers can be prayers of gratitude, but they can also be cries of despair. The figure of the absent mother becomes a metonymy for the absent God, or what Kogawa has called “the experience of divine abandonment”; she declares that “Love’s presence is only understood when stripped of its potency and paradoxically its power to heal us comes when we embrace its impotence” (Redekop 783). The trace of the divine has passed by; there is power in the recognition of this. For Naomi, only when the pain of her mother’s absence is embraced and understood as pain that was motivated by and endured in love can recovery come. Such a retelling and reinhabiting of the biblical story does continue the “Saying” of ethical responsibility on behalf of the oppressed, and for the reader as much as for the characters. As Cheung argues, “Kogawa suggests that open accusations and outspoken demands, while necessary, are insufficient. Emily’s thundering for justice will not solve any problem until people genuinely care. By heeding the poetry of the narrative, by witnessing to the quiet strength of issei such as Obasan, the reader may well experience a change of heart” (Articulate 167). Here is narrative ethics at work, constructing a chastened and self-aware attentiveness in the reader. Even though the appeal is quiet, even though Kogawa does not privilege the activist Aunt Emily over the pacifist Aya Obasan or speech over silence, nevertheless the power of this novel to act for the oppressed is acute – so much so that it has been instrumental in stimulating action in the political world outside itself. This is a novel whose discourse “directs its purposiveness outward” and thereby demonstrates that historiographic metafiction



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may tell a true story that speaks directly and efficaciously against the oppressions of history.

Moon Tiger and Kaleidoscopic History A.S. Byatt talks of how she “used” the dying of her father to think about the nature of truth and of writing. Like Obasan, Penelope Lively’s novel Moon Tiger, winner of the 1987 Booker Prize in Britain, is concerned to negotiate in face of injustice, suffering, and death; unlike Obasan, its relation to Christian faith is apparently ironical in an almost entirely dismissive way. However, an understanding of the vital human necessity of narrative shaping underlies Lively’s novel at every turn, and demonstrates, in the absence of God, a more modernist (and genealogically Romantic) notion of the author as creator of order and sense out of the apparently random and senseless. Moreover, I am going to suggest that Moon Tiger could be taken tacitly to inscribe a religion that in other ways it ostensibly refuses. The novel opens in a hospital room, where the narrative voice is that of an elderly woman, Claudia Hampton, dying of cancer. “I’m writing a history of the world,” she says to the nurse. She is a historian by training and a writer by profession. She wants finally to “round things off” by giving “[t]he whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute – from the mud to the stars, universal and particular, your story and mine”; this will be “[t]he history of the world as selected by Claudia: fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents” (1). The key historical event on which the novel turns is the 1940–42 Desert War in North Africa, and particularly the Rommel campaign of 1942, during which Claudia is a war correspondent stationed in Cairo and manages to manipulate a brief trip to the battle-front. Lively the professional historian informs us in a prefatory note that material for these sections of the novel was obtained in part from war diaries and memoirs, photographs and films, in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London, and in part from her own childhood experience of living in Cairo before and during the war. The focus in the novel is not a record of war per se, but the effects of war on the private lives of those who are touched by it – and, supremely, on Claudia. The keys to her memory are provided by the collective past, which “is public property, but … is also deeply private” because “[t]he signals of my own past come from the received past” (2). What is crucial for her about the Desert Campaign is that here she meets and falls in love with

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Tom Southern, a young British tank commander who constitutes the core of her existence for the rest of her life, even though he is killed in the campaign. The absent centre, whose absence by no means implies unreality. Lively’s interest in history is endemic to all her work, and an awareness of the aporiae of historical discourse is crucial to her sense of her own writing task. Like Claudia, she is a historian by training and a writer by profession. The constant theme of her novels from the beginning has been, as Jane Langton puts it, “the continuity of the past into the present, and the subtle relation between collective memory (history) and personal memory” (Langton 464). In an interview several years before the publication of Moon Tiger, Lively asserted that “the one thing we all share is the capacity to remember; the novelist tries to convey the significance and the power of that capacity in fictional terms, to make universal stories out of the particular story that we each carry in our own head” (469). One of the ways that a postmodernist writer will avoid turning the other into the “same” in such a universalizing enterprise is to respect not only the difference of the other, but also the otherness of the self: Lively writes out of a keen awareness of the self as a non-self-identical and heterogeneous subject. She has talked of “the palimpsestic quality of both people and places, those layerings of memory of which both are composed” (465). The narrative structure of Moon Tiger is predicated on such layering: the tropes that Claudia uses for it are the turn of the kaleidoscope and the sedimentation of rock strata. For her history of the world Claudia chooses “a kaleidoscopic view” over a linear narrative, on the basis that this will be “an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water” (Moon Tiger 2). But rock strata of course imply chronology: an external kronos that is not answerable to the kairos experiences of individually significant moments. Claudia is in fact very conscious of “the strata of faces” as she looks in old age at her own and sees it as “an appalling caricature of what it once was” (20). She is very conscious of the history of her own body, both as it has been marked by personal events in her life and in its impersonal links to the evolutionary chain of being (166–7). She is conscious too of her own past selves, “all the Claudias of whom I am composed” (206). Like the fossils in the rocks and the cities under the desert sand, Claudia is marked by the passing of time. Though



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for Levinas one’s own image is part of the self and never, therefore, “other” in the sense that he defines as the site of ethical responsibility, I want nevertheless to suggest that the fact that Claudia does not at the beginning of the novel extend an ethic of care to her own past “face” marks her as ethically underdeveloped, as clearly as do some of her more obviously suspect behaviours. The narrative trajectory will be such that her self-awareness is chastened into greater self-acceptance before her death – and the reader’s sympathy for Claudia will also have grown to respond to her with respect. Lively’s writing therefore demonstrates that she is in some senses a traditionalist. If she would not quite subscribe to the cause-and-effect structuration of traditional realism, she does nevertheless look for what she calls “a sense of progression.” She says, “I still think that the novel should tell a story … I don’t necessarily want to see things nicely rounded off and all the ends tied up. But what I do want is a sense of progression, that one thing stems from another even when the things may be not events but the author’s gradual unfolding of characters and their motivations. I want a novel to gather force” (Langton 469). The meeting of a kaleidoscopic, palimpsestic, heteroglossic mode of narration with Lively’s desire for “a sense of progression” is the primary, paradoxical tension that marks Moon Tiger as a text of postmodern realism. The palimpsestic is evident in the structuring of the book around a multiplicity of perspectives. “If you know only one history of an event,” declares Wayne Booth, “you know nothing about it” (Company 365). Thus in Moon Tiger: an event will be told from one point of view, and again from a second point of view, and then again from a third. In the book’s opening memory, for instance, we learn about Claudia’s childhood tumble down the steep cliffs at Charmouth – appropriately enough as she examines the rock strata for fossils – first from a feisty young Claudia herself, then from her indignant brother Gordon, then from her tense and embarrassed mother. Claudia the elderly historian, who is remembering this event in the present, comments that “[t]he voice of history, of course, is composite” (5). Anticipating Hayden White, she adds, “when you and I talk about history we don’t mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled” (6). Since she was a child, Claudia has revelled in this ravelledness – up to a point. She has loved argument, which “is the

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whole point of history” (14); in her popular history books, relying on the fact that her readers know the basic storyline, she has been able to “omit the narrative” and instead “flesh it out; give it life and colour, add the screams and the rhetoric” (2). To this extent, like Lively, she wants a story to “gather force” rather than to be “nicely rounded off.” But “[n]ot even the most maverick historian – myself, perhaps – would deny that the past rests upon certain central and indisputable facts. So does life; it has its core, its centre” (70). Even Claudia, then, has her narrative core: the relationship with Tom Southern, the depth and intensity of which leaves her breathless and overwhelmed. Lively’s use of the “moon tiger,” the green spiral of mosquito-repelling coil left to burn through the hot Cairo night, images this layering and inexorable movement toward the centre, even as it burns itself to ashes. For Claudia perforce exists in time, so that her own history must move from beginning to end, from childhood to old age. The episodes of Moon Tiger are often linked non-chronologically by image – the hospital curtain whose name Claudia cannot recall and which gets her thinking about childhood experiences with the power of language; the poinsettia plant that her sister-in-law Sylvia brings, which reminds Claudia overwhelmingly of poinsettia flowers in the desert sand with Tom; her dream of Aztecs which takes her back to the factually inaccurate movie for which she was amused consultant. But there is nevertheless an overall chronological development to the novel, moving albeit irregularly from Claudia’s childhood to her death. And there is a distinct sense of climax at the end of the novel, in the kairos event of the rediscovery and reproduction of Tom’s wartime journal, followed by the kronos event of Claudia’s own death. There may be no chronology inside Claudia’s head, but there is outside of it: the rock strata, the absence of Tom, her aging body, the world that continues after she dies, the narrative line itself, and the reading of it in time. Claudia knows that the “real” is not merely what she composes, and Lively’s narrative structure insists on the reader’s knowing this too. Nevertheless it is narrative that “makes sense” of the world. When Tom falls in love with Claudia, his sense of the future becomes chronologically and directionally oriented: “‘I want things I’ve never had much of a taste for hitherto. I want stability. I want to live in one place. I want to make plans for next year and the one after that and the one after that. I want’ – he lays a hand on her arm – ‘… I want to get married’” (121). Musing on the sort of job he might take after the war back in England, he says, “I want to see the fruits of the earth



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multiply and all that sort of thing. I want to make provision for the future” – which includes having a child (122). Tom’s journal at the end of the novel reveals the vital human necessity of this kind of narrative shaping. He describes the absence of a sense of time in the middle of the desert war, where “[y]ou don’t remember further back than half an hour. You don’t anticipate except in your stomach” (195). His memories are composed of “[t]he moments that rear up” (198), and when he tries to describe the events of the previous week, the task is almost impossible: “Even if it were expedient I couldn’t say now what came before what, where we were when, how this happened or that, in the mind it’s not a sequence just a single event without beginning or end in any proper sense simply a continuity spiked by moments of intensity that ring in the head still” (196). But when one night he experiences full-blown panic about his situation, the only way he can move beyond it is through story: tell[ing] myself I am not really here. That I am moving through this place, this time, must do so, cannot avoid it, but soon I shall come through and out beyond into another part of the story … So I make myself move backwards and forwards, lying there huddled in the sleeping-bag on the cold sand – backwards to other places, to childhood … Forwards into obscurity but an obscurity lit by dreams which is another word for hope … And at last the primitive paralysing thing loosens its grip and I even sleep, to be shaken awake by my driver. 0500 hours; I am tense but sane. (201–2) What Tom has experienced is the necessity of story, of narrative which has a past and a future as well as a present, for his sanity, and therefore for his psychological survival. There could hardly be a more telling illustration of Ricoeur’s assertion that “Narrative preserves the meaning that is behind us so that we can have meaning before us … Narrative carries us beyond the oppressive order of our existence to a more liberating and refined order” (Dialogues 22). Unlike the apparently carefree gazelle that he has watched a day or two earlier, Tom can say, “I have a story, which makes me a man, and therefore sets me apart” (201). In giving him back the gift of himself, narrative saves him from madness, in fact – though not from death. The great irony of Tom’s death, in the bigger story of the novel, is that it occurs during a

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“welcome break” on a trip to the field workshop, when he is caught in an enemy air attack. Thus Claudia’s much later response to the comment in Tom’s journal that “[m]aybe one day she will help me make sense” (204) of the desert war experience is to say, lying on her own deathbed, “I can’t” – she is too aware of the gaps in the logic of representation: I know what happened next; I know that Rommel was pushed out of Africa and that we won the war. I know all that has ensued. This dispassionate sequence explains – or purports to explain – why the war happened and how it evolved and what its effects have been. Your experience – raw and untreated – does not seem to contribute to any of that. It is on a different plane. I cannot analyse and dissect it, draw conclusions, construct arguments. You tell me about gazelles and dead men, guns and stars, a boy who is afraid; it is all clearer to me than any chronicle of events but I cannot make sense of it, perhaps because there is none to be made. It might be easier if I believed in God, but I don’t. All I can think, when I hear your voice, is that the past is true, which both appals and uplifts me. (206–7) What is a true story? Byatt argues that, though within story truth is always constructed, yet without story truth as the phenomenological experience of meaning is completely inaccessible – “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” Claudia’s story ends with her experience of a final kairos moment of wonder and elation at the sun shining on raindrops on her hospital window against the backdrop of an orange sky, and then comes the emptiness created by her death, in a room where the radio continues to deliver the evening news. Time continues without Claudia; but Claudia has had her own epiphany. Thus to the very end the novel maintains this tension between the intransigence of reality and the kaleidoscope of experience, palimpsestically laid the one upon the other. Indeed, Lively’s own sense of the power of narrative is that it has a traditionally ethical base. At a reading at Toronto’s Harbourfront Writers’ Festival in the fall of 1988, she said, “History does not in fact exist. It’s a series of conflicting testimonies like personal histories”; at the same time, she told the audience, “I write within the English tradition of the novel of social comment.” The implication here is clearly that the way in which the novelist of historiographic metafiction puts



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together the “conflicting testimonies” has an ethical (and therefore political) edge, in that the resultant novel makes a comment on society which draws the reader’s attention to the unjust, the dishonest, and the ridiculous. Traditional social comment assumes an ethical base, and Lively’s postmodern realist fiction is no different. Here is confirmation of Hayden White’s argument that narrative in its very shaping and formulation cannot avoid being marked by moral agendas. What, then, is the “social comment” that the novel is making? Moon Tiger has been accused by some critics, I think unfairly, of providing an inadequate challenge to the received male vision of war, of offering an insufficiently powerful critique of hierarchies of all kinds, and of acquiescing to a traditional understanding of culturally determined gender roles: after all, Claudia, though a powerful woman, is powerful largely because of the opportunities offered by the traditional dynamics of male-female sexually inflected interaction – “being a woman seemed to me a valuable extra asset” (14). Other critics are troubled by the novel’s seemingly uncritical attitude to colonial power and its lack of interest in the people indigenous to the Egypt which lies at its heart. In other words, it has not been found easy to claim Lively for the camps of various brands of feminism, post-colonialism, or cultural studies. But these criticisms fall short because they elide so much of the palimpsestic subtlety of the novel – and as a result they miss the point. What this novel does is demonstrate, on the one hand, the inevitability of constructing the past according to our own cues and perspectives, and, on the other, the intransigence of real people, real events, real living, and real dying, that intervene in our narratives and force us to come to terms with them. There is social comment implicit or explicit in every word of this overlay. Perhaps the starkest intransigencies of Claudia’s life present themselves to her in her children, physical and surrogate, through whom she is attached to public history in very specific ways: the histories of Eastern Europe, of Hungary in particular, and of Egypt in the Desert War. But these attachments are none of them straightforward: each must be narrated in its own terms. First, the stories that the feisty Claudia and the flamboyant Jasper have told themselves about their daughter Lisa, whom Claudia calls “my poor Lisa, a silent and pasty little girl” (9), do not reflect Lisa’s own lively inner world or the circumstances of her adult life, which are a closed book to her parents. But they have constructed her story to explain her difference from them: “she never looked or behaved like either of us.” Here we see that

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the construction of difference can function as oppressive and controlling, as readily as can the assumption of sameness. The difference, we might say, lies in the ethic of responsibility to the other on the part of the teller. Second, the arrival on the scene of Laszlo, a young student stranded in England at the time of the Russian invasion of Hungary, provides Claudia with a surrogate child temperamentally more suited to her than Lisa. Laszlo has been “washed into [her] life by the Kremlin” (175), and for him she does come to feel “compunction, responsibility, and, eventually, great affection. Which is quite a lot” (179). She endures his erratic moods and his disturbing surreal paintings; she looks out for him in a way she has never done for Lisa because his extreme behaviour seems to her “an appropriate commitment to life” and suggestive of “the tumultuous unfettered society of Eastern Europe” (189) – precisely the lineage which Lisa might have been expected to demonstrate, but does not. Suitably, it is Laszlo who finally delivers Tom’s devastating journal into Claudia’s hands in the hospital, in her last few days of life. And then, third, there is Claudia’s secret child: the miscarried child of Tom, conceived in Cairo during the war, and lost after Tom’s death. This child is known only by its traces in the hospital record and in Claudia’s memories, but it is for her as strong a tie to the past, both private and public, as any that she owns. Her children teach her the unavoidable and unavoidably painful interrelation of private and public life. They also teach her humanity. Claudia’s capacities for sympathy and compassion are sharpened over time as she slowly experiences the construction of an ethical maternal self through her interaction with the “otherness” of her children. It is through her relationship with Tom that Claudia learns firsthand of the realities of war and of love, and is humbled. It is through Laszlo that she learns most acutely to feel pity for the effects of war, and takes personal responsibility. When Laszlo first decides he must stay in England, Claudia says, “You’d better go out and buy a coat and a thicker sweater before the weather gets any colder. You can’t go on walking around clad as for the central European summer.” And then, because she sounds so unlike her customary imperious and curt self, “Good grief, she thinks, who is this talking?” (175). Lisa too has a profound effect on Claudia’s inner development, so that the dying Claudia is able to apologize to her for having been an inadequate mother. And after the apology, Claudia lets the reader into something of this emotional history, the unavoidable



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interweaving of the universal with the particular: “I never expected Lisa to grow up. For years, when she was a child, I waited for the Bomb to drop. As the world lurched from Korea to Laos to Cuba to Vietnam I was simply sitting it out. And Lisa’s experience sharpened the horror. What might happen to the whole of humanity became concentrated on Lisa’s small limbs, her unknowing eyes, her blithe aspirations. I may have been an inadequate mother, but I was still a mother; through Lisa, I raged and feared. I would never have admitted to those dark nights of the soul” (182). But as she has aged, Claudia has become less anxious and more hopeful. Despite the continuing reality of wars and rumours of wars, she has come to recognize her dependence on other people, the interdependent heterogeneity of the human community, and it has made her more tolerant, more accepting. In her last moments, she thinks, “I need [the past]. I need you [Tom], Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, all of them. And I can only explain this need by extravagance: my history and the world’s. Because unless I am a part of everything I am nothing” (207). Though John Donne in the seventeenth century knew this – “No man is an island” – such a notion of interdependence was superseded under modernity by the Cartesian rationality of “I think, therefore I am,” and Claudia’s fierce independence and reliance on her wits during much of her life has followed this same trajectory. But at last, a child of postmodernity, she is returned to the necessity of communality. We recall that Bakhtin understands personhood as something received in relationship, “a loving gift mutually exchanged between self and other across the borderzone of consciousness” (Morris 6), and Levinas asserts that the self is known not in autonomous self-consciousness but in response to the other for whom it remains responsible (Dialogues 48). This, finally, is the lesson that Claudia understands. Her personhood has been formed in relationship, and as a result her fierce independence has come to be tempered by both passion and compassion. The fact that the novel closes, as it opens, with a narrative voice different from Claudia’s reminds us that Lively’s own storytelling is in a relationship of non-identity with Claudia’s – her own version of “making sense” has been accomplished through but has exceeded this tale of a virago tamed. Clearly Lively is more committed to realism than Claudia is: she does not buy the notion that experience is to be understood only kaleidoscopically – she provides us with a chronological backbone to the synchronically heteroglossic narrative. The reasons

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for this have to do with Lively’s understanding of the place of fiction in a secular society. Lively has declared herself to be a “stern agnostic” (Times 35). God in Claudia’s history is called “an unprincipled bastard” (54) who must be there in the story because His name has been such a force in the world, whether or not He actually exists: “God shall have a starring role in my history of the world. How could it be otherwise? If He exists, then He is responsible for the whole marvellous appalling narrative. If He does not, then the very proposition that He might has killed more people and exercised more minds than anything else” (56). The religious people in Moon Tiger are simple-minded or bigoted: the pleasant but unthinking nurses in the hospital; the sheep-like British upper-class in Egypt, dressing nicely to go to service in the Cathedral and thanking God for being on their side in the war; Lady Branscombe and Claudia’s mother, baptizing Lisa because “‘The poor little pet – one wants to do everything one can for her’” (55) – also to provide an opportunity to display the family christening robe. Claudia’s own experience of God is of silence and absence – though this, of course, is a type of spiritual experience with a long history, and one that in the present context might remind us of Levinas’s God whose trace is seen only in the face of others. Claudia has turned to God several times in moments of great distress, both in childhood and in adulthood, but God has not answered her – or, at least, has not given her the answers that she sought. Whether or not we should read her final epiphany as religious in any strict sense of that term, this experience of wonder and serenity comes to her only at the very end. Lively herself has said, in an unpublished lecture on “Fiction and Religion,” “I call myself an agnostic, which implies inability to believe in a deity, rather than outright rejection of the very concept of deity. I know that I can’t believe in a god, and why I can’t, but I accept that others can, respect their reasons for so doing without accepting them, and feel a curious combination of envy and wonder at the solaces available to them which are not available to me” (9). Though Lively’s agnostic stance does not lead her to show “envy and wonder” toward the more religious people in Moon Tiger, it does nevertheless have particular significance for her writing. Lively declared in an interview that, for an agnostic novelist, writing is “an attempt to find some kind of order where there appears to be none, to attribute some kind of meaning to a life which, in agnostic terms, apparently has no meaning” (Hurley Moran 158 n 5). Lively might be thought more readily alignable with a Romantic or a



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modernist sensibility than with a postmodernist one when she argues that fiction provides for the modern secular age the coherence, order, and enlightenment that religion has traditionally provided for those who believe in God. But, as I suggested in the introduction, this view of fiction as quasi-religious in function is actually surprisingly present in contemporary philosophy. In the absence of sense, make fiction. And after all, if like Levinas we reject the Western ontological tradition of “sense,” then we will read God as beyond sense in any case. Thus, perhaps Claudia’s (and Lively’s) rejection of the idea of God is more in keeping than they might suppose with what Richard Kearney calls “anatheism” – a return to God in a kind of post-creedal mysticism,11 as suggested in Claudia’s final ecstatic experience and even in her growth into responsible selfhood through face-to-face relationship with others. Claudia herself may not be able to “make sense” of her life, but the novelist, who exceeds Claudia as God exceeds the Creation, can package the whole in such a way that the reader seems to discover, if not sense, then a “true story,” with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The novelist’s kaleidoscopic vision includes not only the many Claudias but also the heteroglossic voices of the other characters; moreover, this vision recognizes the way in which the reader’s knowledge grows through time, through exposure to kronos as well as kairos, and this vision directs the reader’s gaze to abuses of power as they have been expressed in both public and private ways. The resultant postmodern realist fiction treats history ironically but totally seriously, thereby unsettling the orthodoxies of traditional realism without losing the ethos of social responsibility inherent in that mode. And it treats religion ironically too, but leaving more of a trace of the God-who-passes than might perhaps have been anticipated, by either writer or reader.

Midnight’s Children and the Location of the Writer If Obasan presents a society which at its moments of greatest distress is held together by community worship, and Moon Tiger presents a world in which the private consolations of religion are largely displaced onto the function of the writer, Midnight’s Children (1981) demonstrates a hybrid sensibility at play with textuality as an embodiment of the instabilities of postcolonial Indian myth and history. This novel, for which Salman Rushdie won not only the prestigious Booker Prize in

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1981 but also, in 1993, the Booker of Bookers for Best of TwentyFive Years of the Booker Prize, is a prime example of historiographic metafiction. At one and the same time riotously playful, profoundly subversive of traditional Western socio-cultural and literary norms, and deeply serious about political and social issues, Rushdie’s novel performs a complex relationship between historiographic metafiction and an ethical sensibility. Early critical analyses of Rushdie’s fiction can be divided roughly into two categories: those that emphasize its metafictional nature and its experimental attempts to “de-colonize” English; and those that emphasize the fiction’s more narrowly “political” purposes of commenting on Islam, and on Indian and British society and politics (Fletcher 3). But since 1988 it has become necessary to attend to a differently focused analysis of Rushdie’s fiction, one that pays more specific attention to the location – spatial, temporal, and also religious – of the writer. Because of what became known as “The Rushdie Affair” surrounding the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa, or decree of death, against Rushdie for his supposed attack on the prophet Mohammed in The Satanic Verses, the political and the religious are unavoidably enmeshed in any discussion of Rushdie’s work, and Rushdie himself has become the supreme instance of the problematic relationship between history and fiction. “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”: here the so-called “death of the author” is no safely textual trope but an issue of police surveillance and international government negotiations, and the concomitant “birth of the reader” has involved the violent deaths of upwards of fifty people connected with the distribution, reading, or discussing of the book. Even though negotiations in 1998 between the British government and the government of Iran offically ended the threat against Rushdie, those who know Islam in Iran argue that his life is still in danger, since for Iranian Muslims the fatwa remains a permanent sentence, reaffirmed by the Ayatollah succeeding Khomeini (who died in 1989); thus, executing Rushdie remains a duty incumbent on all zealous Muslims (Pipes 53, Bennett 34).12 Rushdie’s varying responses to the life-threatening situation his fiction has brought upon him have been provocatively analyzed by David Bennett. The hybridity and multiplicity of the text of The Satanic Verses are replicated in the ethical performances of its characters; but is ethical identity as much a function of performance outside the text as within it? Bennett shows how Rushdie made successive attempts to identify with the three “imaginary totalities” of British national identity, the



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autonomy of fiction as distinct from history, and the religion of Islam. All three attempts, suggests Bennett, ring hollow because they appear as attempts to contain the dissemination of meanings celebrated by postmodernist palimpsestic texts like Rushdie’s (“Salman Rushdie as Post-postmodernist” 14). Writing in 1997 and therefore before the soi-disant end of the fatwa, Bennett asks, “Does Rushdie’s present predicament illustrate the impossibility of performing politically the ‘deconstruction’ of every unitary identity which postmodernist writing – in its critique of representation as such – undertakes on the page? Or does Rushdie’s performance of identity since the fatwa illustrate precisely the multiple and incommensurable identifications that individuals often make in the struggle to survive?” (23). The unprecedented challenge faced by democracy in multi-ethnic post-colonial societies, argues Bennett, is a rethinking of the concept of citizenship – with its connotations of equality, individuality, and equivalence – to accommodate cultural difference (27). Here the post-colonial historical moment shows up a profound crisis in liberal ideology (23). And, we might add, in narrative ethics. If Rushdie the politician has been found to be more likely to perform allegiance to liberal humanist totalities than Rushdie the novelist, this will affect our reading of him as “the poet laureate of cultural hybridity” (Bennett 9) as well as our understanding of the performance of the ethics and politics of cultural difference. Syed Manzurul Islam, concerned specifically for the ethics and the politics of reading, sees in all of Rushdie’s novels a genre of “migrant’s writing” where the ethico-political question is always that of the migrant subject, in Midnight’s Children as much as in The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was writing Midnight’s Children in North London in 1980 and 1981, at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s clampdown on immigration and the resultant streetwise animosity toward ethnically marked “foreigners.” Thus the narrative recounting of the formation of the national subject in India bears a close resemblance to the predicament of the migrant subject in Britain: “when Rushdie writes about India, his text never fails to function as an imaginary of the imaginary present homeland located in Britain” (127). Hutcheon has said of historiographic metafiction in general that one of its defining characteristics is that it “render[s] inextricable the public and historical and the private and biographical” (Poetics 94). Reading Midnight’s Children under the genre of historiographic metafiction will disclose the textuality of the sources of historical knowledge while at the same

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time recognizing how such materials are unavoidably enmeshed in the “real” personal history and location of the writer. From the outset, Midnight’s Children aligns itself quite precisely with the history of India. The best-known historical events that it lays claim to are the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, the 1947 birth of independent India, Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, the language riots in Bombay, the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war resulting in the partitioning of Bangladesh in 1971, and the Emergency of the mid-1970s accompanied by its forcible-sterilization campaign. The historical personages cast by Rushdie include India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, her son Sanjay, and Pakistan’s General Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, as well as any number of lesser figures. India and the narrator of Midnight’s Children share not only a birthday but also a history: Saleem Sinai was born on the stroke of midnight, 15 August, 1947, and from that moment Saleem’s history and India’s are intimately and hyperbolically entwined – Nehru writes to baby Saleem at his birth that his life “will be, in a sense, the mirror of [India’s] own” (MCh 122). But Saleem makes factual mistakes, even about dates and places; he is clearly an unreliable narrator, and actually tells us so himself – he knows he has got the date of Gandhi’s assassination wrong. What, then, are we to make of his storytelling? Rushdie writes in a 1983 essay, “History is always ambiguous. Facts are hard to establish, and capable of being given many meanings. Reality is built on our prejudices, misconceptions and ignorance as well as on our perceptiveness and knowledge. The reading of Saleem’s unreliable narration might be, I believed, a useful analogy for the way in which we all, every day, attempt to ‘read’ the world” (“Errata” 25). Manzurul Islam suggests that Saleem’s unreliability marks his narrative as a migrant’s tale: he remembers as he can his imaginary homelands, so that his memories are to be seen as “objects of ethico-political investment” rather than cognitive propositions (128). And reality is built on our prejudices and misconceptions: Rushdie’s commentary seems prophetic of his own future situation. The “real” is the product of the imaginary, the fact is produced by the narrative simulacrum. The “content of the form” of Midnight’s Children is complicit with but subverts the conventions of the realist novel. This is a book that initially seems to fit Henry James’s complaint about novels being “loose baggy monsters”: Rushdie says it is long because the whole point was to include as much of life as possible, and actually he cut it by half in revision. But at the same time the book is extremely carefully



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structured, one might even say obsessively so, and this intentionally, because it is a book which problematizes and thematizes how narrative composes meaning – or, as Ricoeur puts it in interview with Richard Kearney, how “the meaning of human existence is itself narrative” (“Dialogue” 17). “One of the deliberate efforts in the book,” Rushdie has said, “was to leave loose ends: I was very interested in the idea of implying a multitude of stories in one’s structure, through which one picked one narrative path” (Harrison 48). There are recurrent images and motifs and coincidences in Midnight’s Children; there is a central, cryptic, and slowly materializing prophecy about the narrator, who is continually recapitulating events-up-to-now so that he can save his life from meaninglessness. By making the key equivalence that between the life of this narrator, Saleem, and the nation of India, Rushdie takes the whole notion of realist reference as mimesis, or mirroring, to a fantastic and hyperbolical extreme: all through the story Saleem finds precise parallels between his life and that of India. By circuitous logic he can show, for instance, that Nehru’s death was his fault (279), that his revenge on his mother for her unfaithfulness precipitates a national crisis with the navy (262), and that the purpose of the entire Pakistani war was to unite him with the old life of his childhood in India (373). But if such hyperbolic mimesis undercuts the assumptions of traditional realism, it also parodies the conventions of romance. Northrop Frye’s listing of the motifs of romance sounds very much like a description of many of the elements in Midnight’s Children: “stories of mysterious birth, oracular prophecies about the future contortions of the plot, foster parents, adventures which involve … narrow escapes from death, recognition of the true identity of the hero and his eventual marriage with the heroine” (Secular Scripture 4). In this novel the Bildungsroman of the narrator involves his discovery that he is not a romance hero after all – that his childhood dreams are in direct conflict with the world of realism. In his constant protestation that “to understand me you’ll have to swallow the world,” Saleem moves from megalomania to world-weariness; the heterogeneous self is another of the concepts that Rushdie holds up to parody in order to demonstrate the need for chastened self-awareness. Where Lively’s Claudia needed to accept her dependence on others, Rushdie’s Saleem needs to recognize that it is nothing special to be multiple: “each ‘I’, every one of the nowsix-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude” (383). He may be the sum total of all his experiences, but this kind of constructionism is part of the realist subtext: rather than being destined for

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glory by noble birth, “[i]n Rushdie’s parody of romance,” as Neil Ten Kortenaar puts it, “we are what we have been made” (“Inescapable Romance” 772). A further use of parodic hyperbole in this novel problematizes the very notion of readerly responsibility that Levinas has bequeathed to postmodernist discourse. Saleem takes the responsibility of reading to such absurd lengths that his overdeveloped sense of personal accountability causes him to crack under the strain – he says, “I am literally disintegrating” (MCh 37). As Hutcheon points out, here “the unified male writing subject is not only decentered and radically split, but is actually splitting” (Poetics 163). It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Rushdie therefore intends to absolve the reader of responsibility before the face of historical narrative. Quite the opposite: the call is to read more intelligently. Narrative-as-ethics calls the reader as listener and witness into a relationship of responsibility with the teller, the listener, and the witness within the tale. It may be true that history is always ambiguous and perspectival, but this does not mean that there are no events of which to take account, or that no account is more legitimate than any other account, or that there is no voice of actual, physical pain to attend to. Saleem’s express purpose in telling his story is to “awaken an amnesiac nation” (MCh 443) to the inhuman effects of national politics that have escaped excoriation. He may be unreliable and paranoid, but his conscience and his imagination have survived alive and well, and the history he has lived through has real-world referents. As he writes, almost everyone in his family is dead, killed in the Indo-Pakistani war. And so Rushdie is playing a deadly serious game with more than historical narrative. Words in this novel have hyperbolic power: they are so potent that they can appear to write or unwrite life and death. In the raids over Pakistan, “aircraft, real or fictional, dropped actual or mythical bombs.” “Did bombs fall? Were explosions true? Could even a death be said to be the case?” (341) Does it depend on which reports you read and believe? Can death itself escape deconstruction? We might recall here Jean Baudrillard’s assertion that the Gulf War never really happened – it was entirely a creation of the media (see Lyon, Postmodernity 52). It is to expose the inhumanity and abusiveness of such rhetoric that Rushdie is writing. “If the writer is located nowhere except in the rhetorical spaces of language, there can never be a politics of address,” declares Manzurul Islam. Hyperbole has always been a tool of indignation that in effect advocates moderation; it is the



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middle space, where the constructed must recognize the given, that is the space of ethics. To this end Rushdie works not only in the mixed genre of self-consciously fictive history, but also, and in light of his personal allergy to monologic and totalizing religion, in the modality of the magic-real. Thus, in its double-act as both historiographic metafiction and magic realism, Midnight’s Children slides out from under the end of this chapter and into the beginning of the next.

As I was making some early notes for this chapter, the newspapers were full of the story of a Russian submarine which had malfunctioned (had there been an explosion?) and which had apparently irretrievably sunk to the bottom of the ocean in Arctic waters. The official story which the Russian press tried at first to broadcast was that there had been no survivors of the initial disaster and that death had been more or less instantaneous for all on board. But when access was finally and with great difficulty gained to the submarine, the search crew found the body of a Russian sailor with a recently completed letter on him that proved that there had indeed been survivors for some time after the sub went down. Postmodernist theory has taught us that the narratives of history are a human construct and can therefore be rethought. This has massive ethical implications for the ways in which marginalized or powerless people and groups can be empowered by being given a historical “voice,” and for the possibility of official histories being subverted and undercut in the name of different and revisionary understandings of justice. However, it is also true that referents, which have a phenomenological reality and whose reality can be abused, can “speak” back. The Russian submarine had its own internal message to deliver: it was not possible to regard it merely as an artificially constructed surface. Silenced mothers – in Obasan, as in the “Mothers of the Dispossessed” in Latin-American twentieth-century political history – have both material and psychological ways to communicate. Even trees declare their treeness. The “other” cannot be treated as mere construct: there is a significant/signifying difference between epistemology – how we can know, phenomenology – our experience of what can be known, and ontology – what we have traditionally thought there is to be known. In a cultural climate which acknowledges such aporiae, reading will inevitably be ironized and consciously thematized as responsible, for what Levinas teaches us in philosophical terms it is arguable that we always

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already knew in pragmatic and empirical terms: ethical response precedes ontological formulation. I respond to the face of the other out of much more than merely reason and logic, and this face makes demands on my humanity long before I get around to theorizing it. As I have suggested above, a renewed interest in the ethics of historical narrative must inevitably lead to a renewed consideration of the place of metanarrative. The Rushdie Affair dramatizes particularly vividly the ethical problems of competing metanarratives in a world of cultural relativism, and leaves a profound uneasiness about “[w]hat kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves” (Haraway, quoted in Bennett 26). It may not be possible any longer simply to dismiss or ironize religion, as at the surface-level of Lively’s liberal humanist model, for we have been reminded now that religion may literally explode beyond the text. The Christian reader – and readeras-writer, like Kogawa – is committed to construct an ethics of fiction in dialogue with the biblical metanarrative which reads the human condition through a trajectory of creation, fall, and redemption; such a reader cannot read responsibly without becoming motivated by a concern for the oppressed and the outsider, as understood within the desire of the Divine for universal shalom. A reading informed by this kind of epistemology and this kind of praxis will recognize, with Hayden White, “the function of the imagination in the production of a specifically human truth,” while at the same time taking seriously the intransigent reality, and real value, of the story’s referents. Byatt worries that “one should not ‘eat up’ life with the order of art”; the postmodern realism of historiographic metafiction turns such consumption into production, as it describes the face of contemporary ethics in a historically valenced narrative to which the reader must be responsible. Moreover, it is in meeting the gaze of this face that the reader will come to a chastened self-awareness of her own implicatedness in both cultural and religious history.

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Magic Realism, Social Protest, and the Irrepressibility of Language Salman Rushdie , Midnight’s Children / Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry / Jane Urquhart , Away

Pace Hegel, it would seem at present that what is real is irrational, and what is rational is unreal. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism Among the kinds of hierarchical binary oppositions upon which authoritarian ideologies depend, one is the conventional distinction between natural/supernatural, which in the form of the real/fantastic is in many ways the basis of narrative technique in itself. Linda Lamont-Stewart, “Androgyny as Resistance” Without diminishing in any way what one sees every day, the stories of miracles respond to it ‘from aside’ with irrelevance and impertinence in a different discourse, a discourse one can only believe – just as an ethical reaction must believe that life cannot be reduced to what one sees of it. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

Rushdie and “ A Special Style ” If looking at Midnight’s Children as historiographic metafiction brings into focus the complex relationship between history, textuality, and authorial location, looking at Midnight’s Children as magic realism produces a quasi-religious comic novel in which the nature of language itself is problematized in the service of readerly responsibility. The presence of nonrational, magical elements in an otherwise apparently realistic, rational world serves as a rejection of the overwhelmingly scientific, rational approach to life which has been characterized as the dominant Western post-Enlightenment view (Harrison, Rushdie 55). Rushdie himself, interviewed in 1985, made very clear why he

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considered a turn away from traditional Western realism to be a necessary ethical choice: You need a special style to speak or write about India. The first thing that you notice about the country, apart from the sheer number of people living there, is that they believe in God, that the divine is a part of everyday life. If you employ realism – a rational, Western way of using language – to describe such a society, you are implicitly being critical of it. Therefore you must use language in a manner which permits God to exist – the divine to be as real as the divan [couch] I am sitting on. In any case, realism can no longer express or account for the absurd reality of the world we live in – a world which has the capability of destroying itself at any moment. (quoted in Harrison, 12) Although this view would not be shared by others of his countrymen, such as Rohinton Mistry, who write in more traditional realist mode about religious people in India, nevertheless it is clear that for Rushdie, realism is culturally inappropriate for a novel about India, in which the divine is taken as “natural.” In an Indian context, the realism of Western rationalism is not, pace Levine, either truthful or moral; there needs to be an element of what we might call everyday magic, in order to reactivate realism’s traditional desire to empower everyday people by reflecting their world and spurring them to ethical response. In fact Rushdie, as we can see in that final sentence above, would go further and suggest that traditional realism is unrealistic and unethical for any novel of the late twentieth or early twenty-first century, in which any benign belief in rationality is absurd. A primary way in which Rushdie approaches a new kind of realism is through play with the medium of language itself. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the key equivalence in Midnight’s Children is that between the life of Saleem Sinai and the nation of India, an equivalence in which the notion of realist reference as mimesis is taken to a fantastic extreme. Just as Saleem, “buffetted by too much history,” is physically falling apart when the book opens, so the novel abounds in other literal embodiments of metaphor: the Reverend Mother vows not to speak and swells up month by month with the unspoken words inside her (MCh 59); baby Saleem finally learns to blink, because “nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time” (125); Ahmed Sinai, when the state freezes his assets, becomes physically impotent and icy



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cold (136); Saleem discovers when hidden in the basket of dirty laundry the secret of his mother’s life (160). If language here is perceived as so visceral, so mimetically literal, it is perhaps not surprising that the controlling trope of the book is the making of chutney. Saleem as he writes is running a pickle factory, and each chapter of the book fills a jar of pickles into which Saleem is blending his history, his memories, and his dreams, so that eating them – reading the book – will awaken an “amnesiac nation” (443). Here the risk for the reader, and his or her consequent responsibility for the story, are therefore quite overt. It is as if Rushdie is issuing the same challenge that Thomas King gives at the end of each of his 2003 Massey Lectures, saying of his own storytelling, “Take it. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. Make it the topic of a discussion group at a scholarly conference. Put it on the Web. Forget it. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now” (Truth 60). In this instance, Saleem is aided and abetted in his making of story-marinated chutney by his would-be mistress (if only his “pencil” would work), his “dung lotus” Padma, who is also the naive surrogate reader of his story, the one who “bull[ies] me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next,” the one who loves both the down-to-earth and the fabulous (MCh 38). However, although Saleem tries, he says disingenuously, to write in “plain unveiled fashion” about the “fantastic heart” of his story (195), Padma is bewildered; convincing her of his tale becomes his touchstone, “because in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe” (270–1). By including such a figure, Rushdie establishes an educative antithesis between Padma and the reader across the borders of the text and thus ironizes and problematizes the act of reading in a way that promotes not dismissal but further thought. How can the reader avoid the crass simplicities of a Padma? What is he or she being persuaded to believe? How can she or he consume the pickled story in a more sophisticated way than the text’s surrogate reader is able to do? And what kind of ethical awakening might this entail? First, such a reader knows that pickles have to marinate: the sum of the language is more than its parts, and the form of the novel “speaks” a certain kind of content. Rushdie has been accused of writing a pessimistic book. His comment on this accusation is to say, “The story of Saleem does indeed lead him to despair. But the story is told in a manner

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designed to echo … the Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration … The form – multitudinous, hinting at the infinite possibilities of the country – is the optimistic counterweight to Saleem’s personal tragedy” (“Imaginary Homelands” 16). There is a distinction to be made, Rushdie argues, between the disintegrating narrator and the regenerative form of the book; the manner in which the story is told echoes the country’s possibilities. For Rushdie, language is pickled but potent, because it refers beyond itself: the form as well as the word lives, as Bakhtin might say, “by means of directing its purposiveness outward” (“Discourse” 354). The reader who encounters the novel in this way is the counterweight to Padma. The body of the narrator may split and disintegrate; the body of the book has a paradoxically unsuppressable substantiality and power which the non-naive reader is responsible to recognize. Furthermore, a more sophisticated reader will recognize that Rushdie plays with the techniques of languages other than the verbal as he concocts Saleem’s story – languages even less amenable to linearity and naive realism. Saleem’s Uncle Hanif had tried to reform Indian cinema away from melodrama and fantasy in favour of documentary realism: he was working on a movie called “The Ordinary Life of a Pickle Factory” (MCh 236). But the film was never made, and the pickle factory of the book, like that of Saleem’s head, is itself a huge melodrama. “Ordinary life” in Saleem’s world is hardly amenable to traditional realism. As Richard Cronin writes, “The Indian English novel cannot be written by a simple realist, but only by a writer willing to flirt with fantasy, a writer ready to dally with the Bombay talkie” (Cronin 205). The novel is itself overtly influenced by Rushdie’s knowledge of film technique. In an interview in 1982, he said, “The whole experience of montage technique, split screens, dissolves, and so on, has become a film language which translates quite easily into fiction and gives you an extra vocabulary that traditionally has not been part of the vocabulary of literature.” This “extra vocabulary” offers a further way of expressing the interpellation of the magical and fantastic with the verifiably real, and of pushing the experience of reading the book beyond the linear narrative of Padma’s expectations. Moreover, making the reader aware of filmic techniques will tend to point not only to the elusively mysterious within the real but also to the constructedness of what readers will usually assume as real. My response to a filmed face will depend on my distance from the screen –Rushdie uses this image as a gloss on Saleem’s experience of the past being more believable, the more past it is: “Reality is a question of



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perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions, the illusion dissolves – or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality” (MCh 165–6). Closeness to the cinema screen makes a balanced perspective impossible. The dissolving faces are a figure for the annihilation that the melodramatic Saleem prophesies for himself when, at the end of the book, he will explode as a “broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street” and be trampled underfoot, reduced to “specks of voiceless dust” (463). But is it true that the cinematic illusion of a face “is reality”? Such a hyperbolic dramatization of “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” is problematic because it removes any notion of proportion. We might argue, with Levinas, that in a face-to-face encounter, whether textual or actual, there is a responsibility to receive the other as a recognizably human other; we might even suggest that there is a responsibility to pay attention to him or her as the reader would her- or himself expect to have attention paid. Thus, if the context requires a close examination of the other’s skin (you are a dermatologist; you are checking for adverse reactions to a cosmetic product), then such an examination is a responsible response. But if the context requires a welcome or a paying of attention to another human being qua human, then it is appropriate to maintain a more moderate (and often culturally determined) distance – to take, as it were, neither the seat at the back of the hall nor the seat which requires you to press your nose against the screen, but to aim for a space in the middle. The constructedness of our experience of reality, in other words, has an ethical dimension – a point that Midnight’s Children at other moments is keen to emphasize. That Dr Aadam Aziz falls in love with his future wife by examining different parts of her body through a seven-inch circular hole in a bedsheet is presented as a comic but ethically dubious ruse on the part of the girl’s father to ensnare a suitable husband. His encounter at last with the patient’s face is carefully manipulated to be the conclusion of a text of seduction. Thus the ethics of perspective takes us back to the whole problematic of postmodern ethics, which I have been suggesting is most productively focused on the relational responsibility of care before the face of the other. And in fact Saleem’s special gifts at every point dramatize

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the demands and risks of such responsibility. For of course the primary contentual magic of the novel springs from the coincidence of Saleem’s birth. The thousand-and-one “Midnight’s Children” of the title – “the number of night, of magic, of alternative realities” (217) – are the children who were born in that first hour of 15 August 1947, and they are an extraordinary bunch because they all have miraculous gifts. The closer to midnight they were born, the more extraordinary the gifts. And Saleem’s are the most extraordinary of all. By the time he is ten, and aided by plugged sinuses and a bicycle accident, his head has become a kind of internet for the Children of Midnight, who meet in his head over chat-lines and hold conference sessions; not least of their problems, as gifted preadolescents, is learning how to respond to one another graciously and to use their powers for the public good. Since Rushdie is in fact writing this novel before the invention of chat-lines, his book becomes in itself a kind of prophecy. And then, when Saleem’s sinuses are forcibly drained, he acquires a new magical facility: a preternatural sense of smell which means that, like the traditionally omniscient writer of fiction, he can not only detect emotion but can also sniff out good and evil. But of course Saleem’s ability is ironically framed: he turns tracker-dog for the Pakistani army because he has seen and smelled too much of the horrors of war to be able to feel anything human, without the magic intervention in the Sundarbans which restores him to the consciousness and conscience of his own past. In fact the relationship between magic and sleight-of-hand is constantly problematized in the novel. In the ghetto named for them in Delhi, the magicians themselves “disbelieved, with the absolute certainty of illusionists-by-trade, in the possibility of magic” (386): to them, true magic is the use of artifice, constituting reality by the will. This is also a fitting description of Saleem’s work in telling tales and making pickles – the place of art. It is true that magic does not, in the end, defend him against either the horrors of war or the sterilization program of Indira Gandhi, pictured here as a politicized Cruella de Vil with hair half-black and half-white. In a fantastic commentary on the mass-sterilization campaign of the 1960s, the Widow projects herself as the ultimate monologic deity, or OM , and rounds up the perceived threat of the Children of Midnight to subject them to “sperectomy: the draining out of hope” (437–8). Nevertheless, there are stronger forces here even than the three destructive “mighty fantasies” that Saleem names as money, religion, and the collective myth of nationhood (112). There is a magic in this book that lies beyond artifice, a magic that the



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magicians do not understand and that the text does not explain away, by which Saleem is spirited invisibly away from Bangladesh to Delhi in a basket. And perhaps most of all, there is always and already the magic of language. When at the end of the book Saleem’s three-year-old son Aadam finally speaks his first word, it is not “abba” but “abbacadabba.” As Rushdie has had cause to discover in the fantastic story of his own endangered life, this kind of magic is ultimately irrepressible. Even as he disintegrates, Saleem will have birthed a magical child of language, his story, its terror and its exuberance to be born anew in the response of every reader.

Magic Realism as Border Crossing This play with the mimetic is entertaining, witty, self-conscious – but it is also very serious in the ethical questions it is asking and the problems it is posing. What is “real”? What is the relationship between imagination and practical daily living? Does language reflect or constitute our reality? What are the implications of understanding the human being as homo dicens, one who speaks, and homo faciens, one who makes, or creates? What responsibilities are attendant on these capacities? Serious play of this kind in the middle space between different types of reality has come to be associated in the literature of the later twentieth and early twenty-first century with the oxymoronic term “magic realism.” Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris may be quoted here in summary of a widely accepted premise, that “magic realism is a mode suited to exploring – and transgressing – boundaries, whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical, or generic. Magical realism often facilitates the fusion, or coexistence, of possible worlds, spaces, systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes of fiction” (Zamora and Faris 5–6). In fact the term has itself moved between worlds and did not start life in a strictly literary context. An interest in the marvellous was stimulated in the France of the 1920s by the Surrealists under André Breton, who rejected a sterile rationality in favour of a search for the marvellous in dream sequences and free thought association. The term “magic realism” was coined in 1925 by the German art critic Franz Roh, to describe the interventions of the dream and the imagery of the unconscious in Post-Expressionist art. Roh understood magic realism as an attempt to express “the magical spirituality of the external world and the miracle of existence” (Chanady 49). Despite this subject matter, the painting style that Roh

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was describing was characterized by sharply focussed detail; in later art criticism the term “magic realism” was used for those types of photographic naturalism where, nevertheless, “paradoxical elements or strange juxtapositions convey a feeling of unreality, infusing the ordinary with a sense of mystery” (Oxford Dictionary of Art 305). From the 1940s to 1960s the term came to be associated in literature especially with writing coming out of Latin America – for instance, in Cuba with the work of Alejo Carpentier (who had spent time in Paris with the Surrealists), in Argentina with the work of Jorge Luis Borges, and in Colombia with that of Gabriel García Márquez. These Latin American writers, united in their disillusionment with rationalist humanism, turned back to the peasant roots of their cultures to celebrate the supernatural and miraculous, the hidden reality behind the visible world which they felt European realism had excluded. Fredric Jameson, in a discussion of magic realism in film, gives it a more overtly political edge by finding in it evidence of “the coexistence of precapitalist with nascent capitalist or technological features,” which therefore makes it particularly generically suited to dramatizing the relationships between history, culture, and politics (“Film” 311). Either way, “magic realism” has proved useful for describing a particular variety of bordercrossing that is now prevalent in contemporary fictions of the West as well as those of countries in the global south and southwest.1 Although there is some consensus that “magic realism” names a body of literature not easily categorizable otherwise, there is also general critical agreement that it is a very elastic term which resists precise definition. When one Canadian critic, Geoff Hancock, attempted to define the distinguishing marks of the magic real in the 1980s at the first major North American conference on magic realism, he produced a list of features many of which we would now attribute to postmodernist fiction in general: exaggerated comic effects; hyperbole treated as fact; liberation from a boring world; dramatic settings treated as extraordinary; a labyrinthian awareness of other books that highlights concerns of other writers; the use of fantasy to cast assumption on the nature of reality; an absurd recreation of ‘history’; a parody of government and politicians; unusual perceptions based on biased or distorted points of view; a meta-fictional awareness of the process of fiction-making; a reminder of the mysteriousness of the literary imagination at work; a collective sense of the



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folkloric past; a concern with the structures of fiction and the imagination; and profound implications for readers of books, be those books history, fact, or fiction. (“Magic or Realism” 28) At the time a friend wrote to Hancock singling out what he called the “collision” of the European intellectual tradition with the “mythic” perspective of indigenous peoples; in a landscape that is supercharged, “the miraculous events and symbolic characters we associate with the myth or folktale are depicted in the realistic style of a nineteenthcentury European novel” (25–6). In response, Hancock suggested that part of the attraction lay in what we might now call the heteroglossia of “primitive” cultures, where the many voices of magic, art, religion, and other worlds are received without distinction (26). Relating the totemic nature of images in both “primitive” art and magic realism to the archetypes of dreams which “contain aspects of the ‘reality’ we all share,” Hancock asked, “Can the marvellous be a way of truly awakening us, of closing that gap between our waking and our sleeping selves?” (28) Perhaps, he suggested, in the magic real we may rediscover forgotten memories that have been degraded by contemporary life. A fiction that is not limited by linear perceptions of time, cause and effect relationships, and the supposed accuracy of facts may highlight qualities that have been submerged by rationalism, and may thus unveil a new reality (Hinchcliffe 44). As a result Hancock discerned a quality of affirmation and renewal in magic realism: “the roots of the marvellous aim at satisfying human desires frustrated by fragmentary or erroneous systems of politics, science, and religion” (35). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that magic realism has in the last several decades been identified as a particular mode of post-colonial writing – writing against the centre, writing beyond the confines of the established political and social structures. On the margins it can provide “a positive and liberating response to the codes of imperial history and its legacy of fragmentation and discontinuity” (Slemon 21). In fact Stephen Slemon sees the unassimilability of magic realism to traditional generic definitions as one of its particular strengths, insofar as it suggests that “there is something in the nature of the literature it identifies that confounds the capacities of the major genre systems to come to terms with it” – genre systems that are themselves, in Slemon’s view, examples of centralized totalizing systems (10). Slemon chooses instead to place the concept within the context of post-colonial cultures as a distinct and recognizable kind of literary discourse, and to show

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how magic realist texts “recapitulate, in both their narrative discourse and their thematic content, the real social and historical relations that obtain within the post-colonial culture in which they are set.” He argues that in magic realist fiction, for instance, the two separate narrative modes or opposing discursive systems of fantasy and realism “never manage to arrange themselves into any kind of hierarchy” (11), and thus reflect the actual social relations within the individual suspended in the middle space between an indigenous cultural language and the language of the colonizer (12). But this notion of opposing systems or separate narrative modes does not seem to ring true to the understanding of many of the fiction writers themselves. García Márquez, for instance, in response to his fiction’s acquiring the label “magic realist,” protests that he is simply describing the nature of the real as he knows it. And this kind of response is not limited to writers from non-Western cultures. Canadian West-Coast novelist Jack Hodgins, often described as a magic realist, writes, “This thing called ‘magic realism’ is not magic at all. It’s real. I don’t write anything unreal or unbelievable or even improbable” (quoted in Hancock, 10). We might recall Robbe-Grillet’s comment that all writers believe they are realists. Critics too, perhaps: Hancock himself says that, growing up as he did beside a cemetery, a penitentiary, and a lunatic asylum, in a town overshadowed by a dormant volcano where the Sasquatch was reputed to live, and having a professional wrestler as a neighbour and the hometown movie star as high-school homecoming speaker, “[r]eality has always appeared fantastic to me” (23). The early exponents of magic realism in the European art world also saw it this way; Pierre Mabille, for instance, wrote in 1940 that the marvellous exists in reality, though one needs faith to capture it, but that one must reject a dualistic view of the natural and the supernatural as contradictory – a dualism that the myth and folklore of “primitive” peoples generally avoid because, according to Mabille, they are capable of grasping intuitively what “civilized” people can only partially find through artificial means (quoted in Chanady, “Origins” 57). It is true that there is little distinction drawn in the earlier discussions between the magic, the marvellous, the fantastic, and the supernatural, all of which are understood as variations on the theme of a “non-rational” reality. Tzvetan Todorov does make distinctions between the marvellous, characterized by an unconditional acceptance of the supernatural; the fantastic, in which the reader hesitates between rational and irrational explanations; and the uncanny, where events



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that initially appear supernatural are explained rationally at the end (quoted in Chanady, “Origins” 57). But distinctions of this kind seem to be impositions of the Western rationalist mind against which magic realism may be read as reacting, and as such they seem largely irrelevant to a recuperation of the folkloric past. Indeed, in what might be interpreted as a variation on Slemon’s point that lack of distinction has itself been a pre-eminent rhetorical device of postmodernity, the power and attraction of a TV series like The X-Files depended precisely on the viewers’ (and participants’) inability to distinguish between the categories of “natural” and “supernatural.” Thus Christopher Warnes can assert that the key defining quality of magical realism is that it depends on a kind of “principle of equivalence” between the fantastic and real, representing both without allowing either a greater claim to truth (Warnes 3). Of course, literary reaction to rationalistic positivism was not born with magic realism. There is a genealogy from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romantic poetry and fiction through to the early twentieth-century literary movement of Modernism, which was also profoundly interested in the workings of the non-rational – particularly, after Freud, in the imagery of dreams and, after William James, in the mental stream-of-consciousness. And even in the fictions of nineteenth-century high realism, the non-rational had a propensity to find a way to break through. It might appear, for instance, as pathetic fallacy or anthropomorphism in the novelist’s imagery. In Dickens’s Bleak House, the yellow London fog is described like a creature – a forerunner of the cat-like fog in T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In A Tale of Two Cities there is a coffin that seems to run down the street by itself, and there are gargoyles on a French chateau that seem to cry out. Another way in which the non-rational has traditionally found a place in predominantly realist fiction is through dreams and visions. Christian’s dream journey in that seventeenth-century precursor of realism, Pilgrim’s Progress, depends on an acceptance of this kind of reality; so too Jane Eyre, in which it is after Jane prays desperately for direction and help that she hears Rochester’s voice calling to her across impossible miles. However, Bunyan’s story must exist primarily in a dream world to be acceptable to the conventions of his first readers, whereas Brontë’s story must exist primarily in a real world to be acceptable to its later readership. The contemporary magic realist story, on the other hand, exists equally in the worlds of the dream and the everyday – in fact, it conflates the two. Whereas the magic of

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Romanticism is often self-generated, and can be equated with a kind of super-sensibility, the magic of magic realism is a breaking-in of the non-rational from “outside” the bounds of conventional rational logic. This coexistence of the rational and the non-rational in a narrative middle space suggests a congruence between magic realism and other versions of postmodern realism. It is also because magic realism involves the existence of the magical in the everyday realist world that it is distinct from romance or fantasy: it is less a matter of the reader’s entering the world of faery, of Hobbits, or of Narnia, than of those worlds entering the reader’s, and on equal terms. There is no Lewisian wardrobe door to step through, no precise boundary marking one world off from the other. The genealogy of magic realism stretches back to the folktales of oral tradition, where supernatural and magical events take place in a real world known to the listeners. This coexistence of two worlds – or, rather, this lack of distinction between worlds conventionally seen as distinct in the postEnlightenment West – is also the main feature which sets magic realism apart from a self-conscious playing with levels of fiction, because by convention the players in that kind of fiction accept the different ontological status of each different level. In Hamlet, for instance, the playwithin-a-play is effective precisely because it is recognized by all the characters, and the audience, to be on a different plane from the main action; and in To The Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay’s telling of the story of “The Fisherman and his Wife” to her young son James functions as a commentary on the wider dynamic of the novel exactly because the reader recognizes its ontological status as different from those of the narrator and the listener. There is a different kind of distinction to be drawn, then, between those for whom magic realism is an aspect of phenomenological reality (for instance, those who experience a region like Latin America as marvellous in itself) and those for whom it is merely the name of a literary genre, dependent on the interpretation of the reader. Of the two theorists of the magic real whom I have cited most often, Geoff Hancock would take the first position, and Amaryll Chanady the second: she assumes that, though the reader may be drawn in by a magic realist text, she or he will never unambiguously believe in it. Although the magic realist text “integrate[s] the supernatural into the code of the natural, which must redefine its borders” (Magical Realism 38), Chanady still assumes a disjunction between the reading subject and the post-reading subject, inasmuch as the integration of the text will



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not spill out into the world; in other words, magic realism for Chanady does not “direct its purposiveness outward.” Once the reader ceases her willing suspension of disbelief, the conventional categories of the natural and the supernatural will reassert themselves. But I would argue that an integration of “natural” and “supernatural” is now more likely to happen for the Western reader than in 1985, when Chanady published her book – that there has been a change in the conventional and quotidian ways in which people in the West are prepared to describe the real.

Spiritual Returns We might, for instance, consider the number of recent TV shows which have dabbled in magic realism by featuring angels as central characters. Brian McHale comments that “in postmodern poetics, angels evidently serve, among other things, as realized metaphors of the violation of ontological boundaries … [A]ngels call attention to the plurality of worlds and world-visions in postmodern texts, and to the ontological ‘seams’ or ‘rifts’ between adjacent or rival worlds which often fissure these texts” (McHale 202). It is with these angels in mind that I want to propose that magic realism has connections not only to myth and dream narratives on the one hand and to self-referential fiction on the other, but also to the genre of spiritual narrative. We might read magic realism as a twentieth-century and sometimes technologically inflected version of the medieval genre of the narratives of saints’ lives, or even of biblical narratives which foreground the so-called “miraculous” as normal. Michel de Certeau persuasively suggests that when Latin American peasants countered their socio-economic plight in the 1970s by telling stories of their regional hero as “Saint” Damiao, these religious stories opened “a utopian space in which a possibility, by definition miraculous in nature, was affirmed” (Practice 16). De Certeau sees such stories of the middle space as having a specific ethically empowering dimension because they reintroduce, “in the mode of supernatural events, the historical contingency of this ‘nature’ [of ubiquitous social and economic injustice] and, by means of celestial landmarks, create[] a place for this protest. The unacceptability of an order which is nevertheless established [is] articulated, appropriately enough, as a miracle” (16). When Herod wants Jesus to walk across his swimming pool in Jesus Christ Superstar, he is articulating a desire to be shown the magically real without an awareness of or interest in its socially and politically subversive power.

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Postmodern literary theory has generally-speaking been read as antitheological if not anti-metaphysical. But some critics see the turn away from positivism and rationalism as actually facilitating the search for spiritual reality.2 Wayne Booth, for instance, interviewed at the MLA Convention in 1995, suggested that the “new obscurity or new mystification” which results from the abandonment of Enlightenment confidence in positivist rhetoric is helping to produce “a genuine revival of religious questions. Twenty years ago nobody in English departments or sociology departments was wrestling with the kinds of questions that religious inquirers have always wrestled with. Now everybody is – even though sometimes very maladroitly and without knowing precisely what they’re doing” (“Brighten” 205–6). As Terry Eagleton wrote rather grumpily the following year, the worm has turned: “Pace Hegel, it would seem that what is real is irrational, and what is rational is unreal” (Illusions ix).3 There is an intriguing parallel development in the sociological dimensions of the turn away from positivism. To consider one influential text from as far back as 1969, Peter Berger’s A Rumor of Angels argued for a sociological way of making space for religion in a world which seemed to have become unable to appreciate the numinous. Though transcendence had been reduced to a rumour, “signals of transcendence” were apparent in human order, and particularly in play and hope and damnation and humour, all of which entail movement from human experience toward statements about God (95, 53). Faith needed to be inductive, based not on mysterious revelation but on daily experience (60). “Today, the supernatural as a meaningful reality is absent or remote from the horizons of everyday life ... very probably of the majority of people in modern societies,” so that “[t]he theologian more and more resembles a witch doctor stranded among logical positivists – or, of course, a logical positivist stranded among witch doctors” (5, 8). This position has clearly lost its authenticity in a contemporary world of religious phenomena like Toronto’s Airport Vineyard,4 America’s Moral Majority, the New Age movement, Islamic Fundamentalism, the rapid spread of Pentecostalism in the Two-Thirds World,5 and widespread church growth in Africa and Asia, not to mention those television angels. But Berger admitted that sociological tools are not good prognosticators, and he was therefore open to the kinds of “surprise developments” that have emerged in the decades since the 1960s. And of course his emphasis on the everydayness of “signals of transcendence” accords with a magic realist sensibility as well as a religious one.



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Thus almost forty years later, in 1996, another sociologist, David Lyon, responds to Berger, pointing out not only that religion is far from dead, but also that it is now recognizable as such a powerful and irreducible aspect of being human that it needs to be incorporated into contemporary social analysis (“Religion” 14). This already before 9/11, before Bush’s “War on Terror,” before the attempted “liberation” of Iraq. Lyon suggests that consumer capitalism’s emphasis on taste, to satisfy “the new centrality of what might be called a ‘sacred self,’” and the new appreciation of the symbolic realm evident in the power of the media image, might themselves be seen as evidence of a quest for transcendent meaning (20). In a more recent book, Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times (2000), Lyon argues that “religion can easily be misunderstood as merely customary behavior (like churchgoing) or as cognitive activity (logical beliefs) whereas in fact it also – more profoundly – has to do with faith, identity, and noncognitive aspects of life such as emotion. It also informs – sometimes transforms – very practical everyday life activities. In contemporary Colombia, for instance, Pentecostal revival is credited for resisting corruption and reducing domestic violence” (37). The burgeoning presence of the magic real in contemporary fiction seems to me to point in similar ways to a search for spiritual realities which may issue in transformative social practices.6 Though such spiritual connection may be claimed as grounds for political and ethical accountability, we must be careful not to imply, naively, that all spiritual interest is ipso facto going to have constructive and ethically positive effects. Of course this recognition of the potentially deadly effects of incompatible spiritual commitments is particularly pronounced since the devastating events of 9/11 in the United States in September 2001, and their aftermath. But already in the West the end of the twentieth century had seen a dramatic increase in interest in spiritual dynamics that promote self-interest and personal power, as much as in those that encourage altruism and self-sacrifice. Religious interest may not necessarily involve the kind of ethically and morally regenerative power that might conventionally be ascribed to a renewed concern with spirituality. The “sacred self” can become its own god; the “Holy War” can kill as many people as the manifestly unjust one. It is also important, in the context of this chapter, to recognize that the spiritual interventions of magic realist fiction, often related to the paradigms and powers of indigenous myth, may be quite deliberately unconnected with or, particularly in Europe and the Americas,

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subversive of traditional Judaeo-Christian faith. However, as I argued in the introduction, one traditional Christian descriptor for the active presence of God in the world, regardless of the belief systems of those touched by it, is the term “commom grace.” Thus I want to suggest that because magic realism, in a way that might distress Berger, is based on mysterious revelation understood as everyday experience, and because its impulse is ethical and corrective of social injustice, its presence in contemporary fiction may be interpreted as a mark, however complex or unclear, of this common grace. At the very least this means that in many instances the Western Judaeo-Christian religious heritage is deeply implicated in the magic realism of contemporary fiction, and that an engagement with this web of connections may provide insight into both the sensibility and the ethical purchase of the fiction. Berger wrote prophetically in 1969 that “a rediscovery of the supernatural will be, above all, a regaining of openness in our perception of reality,” and that this openness would have moral and political significance (95). As I mentioned above, the subversive potential of the magic real has been noted by a number of critics and practitioners. Magic realism has been linked with the perception of “living on the margins,” where it can provide “a positive and liberating response to the codes of imperial history” (Slemon). In the rest of this chapter I want to look at two magic realist novels of the last two decades of the twentieth century: British novelist Jeanette Winterson’s environmentalist and feminist parable in Sexing the Cherry (1989), and Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart’s quasi-romance on behalf of first- and second-generation Irish Canadians in Away (1993). Each novel is counter-cultural, both in the sense of being interested in characters who have been marginalized by mainstream society and its literature, and in the concomitant sense of being critical of traditional history and its victors. In each novel, the narrative of the magically real is an arena of serious play, in the service of profound ethical and political concerns before which the reader is called to be responsible.

Sexing the Cherry and the Magic Substantiality of Words If, as Rushdie suggests, realism may be perceived as unrealistic because an uncritical belief in rationality has come to seem absurd in the late twentieth century, this is precisely why some writers find magic realism, as “a counter-culture of the imagination” (Dash 66), to be



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an appropriate mode not only for novels set in what some might call “naturally” magic environments like India or Latin America, but also for novels in supposedly much more staid places, like Britain. Magic realism can offer freedom of expression to those who experience life as lived on the margins of imperialism and rationalism, whether through their race, class, gender, or system of belief. Thus in the last decades of post-imperial, post-Thatcher Britain, it was not only “world writers in English” like Rushdie who were writing in magic realist mode: there were others, of a variety of stripes, who turned to the magically real in response to the perceived exhaustion or restrictiveness of the conventions of traditional realism. In a postmodernist revisioning of St Augustine’s famous assertion about God that “Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee,” Dinah Birch, in reviewing Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry for the London Review of Books, actually suggested that “wanting to believe in magic might well be a symptom of a need to believe in God,” and pointed out that skepticism about institutional religion was one of the most marked characteristics of the current renaissance of the fairy tale. Even in Britain, it seems, the divans that Rushdie refers to are not enough. In Sexing the Cherry, the blurring of genres within a magically real world allows for a savage satire of those “erroneous systems” of politics, science, and religion to which Hancock pointed, at the same time making possible an almost lyrical reinscription of faith in postindustrial, post-conventional hope and love. Winterson constructs a social and political commentary against the relativism and amorality of the postmodern world of industry, big business, and male chauvinism, and she does this through the palimpsest of a story set in seventeenthcentury London overlaid with one in the twentieth century. The two epigraphs to the book signal the relationship of the magic to the real as one which deconstructs a traditional Western materialist belief in progress by suggesting that time may be read as indivisible into past, present, and future, and that matter “is empty space … and points of light” (8). If time is curved and rounded like a globe, and matter is as light as air, then where is the authority of traditional realism? It seems that a foundling adventurer and his dog-breeding giantess of a mother from the seventeenth century can reappear “some years later,” as a sailor and an environmental activist in the twentieth century, with no textual or ontological impropriety. Moreover, if it is “Lies 2” and “Lies 6” that declare “Time is a straight line” and “Reality as something which can be agreed upon” (Cherry 83), then a speaking back to the mores of

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traditional realism will require the kind of non-realist interventions that concern Winterson here. As Angela Marie Smith argues, “Any ascription to the totalitarian mode of historical narrative, to linear and finite understandings of time, and to a single ‘true’ reality makes it possible to merely exist in the present without any awareness of responsibility to the past” (“Fiery Constellations” 30). Thus Winterson weaves the English Civil War (1642–49), the execution of Charles I (1649) and the subsequent Interregnum of the Puritan Commonwealth and Protectorate (1649–60), the Great Plague (1665) and the Great Fire (1666) of London, and the real-life seventeenth-century figure of John Tradescant the Younger, Royal Gardener and world traveller, around and through the story of Nicolas Jordan, the bearer of an appropriately liminal and apocalyptic name, and his mountainous (m)other.7 Like Midnight’s Children, Sexing the Cherry can be read as a novel of historiographic metafiction; the epigraphs already signal pre-textually a theoretical awareness of history as construct. But Winterson is less interested in problematizing the reader’s desire for facts than in revisiting narratives of the past for the sake of reordering the present. She exposes hypocrisy and self-serving in both seventeenth and twentieth centuries, and consigns both to the fires of hell. She espouses adventuresomeness, honesty, and moral courage in both centuries, and forces the reader to readjust her sights in defining these qualities afresh: the gigantic Dog-Woman, for instance, takes literally the scriptural injunction about “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” and collects whole sackfulls of Puritan eyeballs and teeth out of a quasi-innocent desire to please God and avenge the death of Charles I. In the twentieth century Nicolas Jordan’s environment is not noticeably improved when he considers his context of the World Bank, the Pentagon, butter mountains, wine lakes, and chemical factories which pollute the rivers with mercury and phosphorus. However, though the satire of Winterson’s novel is harsh and dirty, there is an underlying lyricism that reformulates under postmodernism a neo-Romantic belief in imagination, and celebrates its potential for altering the conditions of the real. Above all, it is Winterson’s magical realist approach to language that embodies and expresses this postmodernist Romanticism. In this novel, as in Midnight’s Children, words are magically real, right from Jordan’s first description of the city he visits during troublesome conversations, a city “which every so often must be thoroughly cleansed of too much language”: “Men and women in balloons fly up from the main square and, armed with mops and scrubbing brushes,



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do battle with the canopy of words trapped under the sun. The words resist erasure. The oldest and most stubborn form a thick crust of chattering rage. Cleaners have been bitten by words still quarrelling” (17). Jordan once accompanied a cleaner in a balloon who, “though she told me it was strictly forbidden, caught a sonnet in a wooden box and gave it to me as a memento. If I open the box by the tiniest amount I may hear it, repeating itself endlessly as it is destined to do until the day someone sets it free” (18). Words here have a life of their own; they can be dangerous; they are shapeshifters; they are, above all, substantial. On the one hand the real world is always in excess of language: as Nicolas Jordan says of the researcher at the end of the story, “I wanted to thank her for trying to save us, for trying to save me, because it felt that personal … But when I tried to speak my throat was clogged with feelings that resist words” (142). On the other hand, another way of looking at this same excess of emotion would be to say that words can be too substantial to be manageable. As Jordan’s foster-mother the Dog-Woman said of him, when earlier in the book he returned from a sea-voyage, “I wanted to tell him things, to tell him I loved him and how much I’d missed him, but thirteen years of words were fighting in my throat and I couldn’t get any of them out. There was too much to say so I said nothing” (108). For similar reasons, words can be used as a disguise, a front, by a character like the prince who tells his princess that he is in love with his mistress but loves his wife: “Translated, that means, I want everything. Translated, that means, I don’t want to hurt you yet. Translated, that means, I don’t know what to do, give me time” (57). In effect, words in this novel are so substantial that they can actually constitute the materialization of another world: it is in the city of words, the groundless city where houses have ceilings but no floors so that meals are held on suspended furniture and nights are spent in suspended beds, that Jordan sees Fortunata, the dancer who is so light that she can climb down from a window on a rope which she cuts and re-knots a number of times during the descent. This is the woman “whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt” (21) and whose name suggests both blessing and risk. To his credit, Jordan when face to face with this blessing and this risk does take responsibility: he becomes a sea-voyager. Eventually Fortunata becomes his lover – material or not, “empty space and points of light,” she is as substantial as the words that describe her. Later, his considering of the rule book by women about how to treat men makes Jordan so heavy with sadness for male

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folly that he cannot get up off the ground and has to be carried up like a great fish by a flock of sea birds. Words are, in this magic-real world, substantial enough to be material. This emphasis on the magic reality, the substantiality of words, is particularly significant for the reader in the Christian tradition.8 As I mentioned briefly in the prologue, one of the most fundamental ways in which Christians and other “people of the Book” working in literature and philosophy have felt their position to be undermined by the relativisms of the postmodern age has been in terms of the emptying out of the word, the “logos,” so that it is understood to “mean” only in relation to other words within a system and not in relation to anything outside itself. This emptying out may seem to suggest the “destruction of transcendent or referential valuation in literature” (Jeffrey, “Caveat” 442). But both religiously committed critics and others prepared to accept a “moderate postmodernism”9 have argued that it is a fallacy to suggest that the only alternatives are absolute knowledge or relativism (D. Allen, 120), and have affirmed a middle space for true stories – that “[l]anguage may be subjective, historical, and culture-bound and at the same time have the capacity to speak truthfully about reality” (Walhout 19). After all, the Christian tradition is centred not only, or even primarily, on a written or codified word, but also on the Word incarnated in Christ, himself historical and culture-bound in his physical being and yet, so the Christian faith teaches, the mediating embodiment of eternal reality. To employ a Levinasian model of language here is also to recognize a quality of unboundedness, of what Levinas in early work calls the transcendence of transcendence; the issue for him is not so much one of emptying out language as of recognizing what he calls its “excendent” quality – as expression of relationship, and therefore as ethically significatory, above and prior to ontology. Because for Levinas the business of language is not primarily comprehension but rather the mode of address of relationship, it is therefore antecedent to cognitive systematization, and, indeed, like the Word as Christ, it is ethics itself. It is clear that Winterson wants to foreground the generative and substantive power of language in her literalization of metaphor. But, though she takes an explicitly anti-Christian stance, most clearly expressed in her largely autobiographical first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), it is not at all clear that she wants to destroy transcendent valuation. Angela Marie Smith has even suggested that for Winterson, as for Walter Benjamin, “the textual and philosophical



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yoking of secular and theological impulses is central to the conception of a radical politics” (“Fiery Constellations” 22). Already the DogWoman’s pro-Royalist actions are driven by a simple, indeed simplistic, belief in the Divine Right of Kings and the immanent power of God. But one might also say of Sexing the Cherry that the whole novel is built, in its magic reality, upon an insistence on the transcendent power of words, of words having “presence” which exceeds their mere function in a linguistic system. Or, to use less ontologically compromised terminology, Winterson’s play with language makes space for both the referential and the transcendent because she is conscious of embodying in words a magic realism that is shot through with the trace of the incommensurable, of the Other, even perhaps with what Levinas would call the “God in passing.” She demonstrates, because of her engagement with language at more than the merely cognitive level, that a sentence always means more. In its involvement with issues of power, the magic realism of Sexing the Cherry is therefore and specifically a political tool. The woman chemist in pollution research reminds Nicolas of someone pretty he feels he knows, someone he is determined to travel until he finds. But she also has an alter ego who is “huge and powerful, a woman whose only morality [is] her own and whose loyalties [are] fierce and few” (125); she imagines she is “huge, raw, a giant” because of her anger against corrupt and selfish uses of power. And just as the Dog-Woman in her moral outrage collected eyeballs and teeth, this twentieth-century woman collects the men from the boardroom in the World Bank, from the Pentagon, from motorcades and mansion house dinners, throws them all in a sack with some calculators, and marches off to butter mountains, wine lakes, and grain silos. There they pack the food surpluses and distribute them in “a great human chain of what used to be power and is now co-operation. We change the world” (123). It is not surprising, perhaps, that Dinah Birch’s review talks of this book’s “exuberant blend of the historical and the fabulous,” and concludes that “Sexing the Cherry has a rare and winning quality: it cheers you up.” In this novel, the reader is changed, as well as the world, when through an immediacy of contact with the text she or he is won over to belief in previously unimagined possibilities. Winterson’s savage irony is Swiftian. Though feminist critics were quick to note her “sexual politics of heterogeneity and a vision of hybridized gender constructions outside an either/or proposition, at once political and postmodern” (Doan 154), less attention was initially

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paid to the ways in which she here uses fiction “to interrogate, trouble, subvert, and tamper with” amorality and hypocrisy in popular religion and politics, and in the world of industry and big business. Winterson in an interview has expressly said that she understands the invention of stories as a political act, and that she is “hoping all the time that it will challenge people, both into looking more closely at these things they thought were cut and dried and also, perhaps, into inventing their own stories” (Marvel 168). The seriousness of affect amid all this play is, then, both palpable and intentional. An understanding of narrative as risk, responsibility, and gift from teller to reader is foregrounded by Winterson’s comments. As the end of the novel suggests, “the future lies ahead like a glittering city” which can be imagined otherwise precisely because, like the present and the past, it takes shape first in our minds (Cherry 144). Moreover, the magic realism of Sexing the Cherry is not only practically political but also revisionary at the micropolitical level, in the service of a recreation of the self. Jordan says, “When I left England I thought I was running away. Running away from uncertainty and confusion but most of all running away from myself. I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way” (80). The self here describes a kind of graft between self and self-as-other. The self in its narrative orientation to other selves experiences an inner division, a heterogeneity, that can lead to growth and renewal as this Bakhtinian gift of intersubjectivity brings a new consciousness of interpellation in life. Jordan experiences this gift as dance: when he finally finds Fortunata she is on an island, running a dancing school where the dancers spin so fast they turn into humming points of light; and, of course, “Islands are metaphors for the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise” (80). In this process of responsible selving through desire, Jordan’s sense of the real and the substantial is reconfigured. He has the last words of the book, as he sails away with Fortunata, heading for the future, but recognizing that only the present is experienced as real: “And even the most solid of things and the most real, the best-loved and the wellknown, are only hand-shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light” (144). Winterson’s novel might seem, then, to have made words substantial and substance mere words. But there is something more at stake here than fantasy or language games: taking as key the trope of



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the dancers who turn into points of light, we might say that Winterson is interested in the relationship between time and matter and matters of the heart. The individual is real – the self exists – only in and through relationship, which is as much as to say, with Levinas, that “the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world” (Dialogues 60). On his journey to find Fortunata, Jordan says, “The self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once” (80). In the seventeenth century, the Polstead Black and Morello cherries were grafted together as a female tree that would produce new fruit sui generis; Jordan wonders whether this art of grafting is something he might apply to himself (78). Similarly, this novel of the middle space is the story of grafts between past and future, between inner and outer, between one character and another, between realism and magic, to produce new fruit “resistant to [the] disease[s]” of the old and able to grow where previously growth was thought impossible. Magic realism is Winterson’s countercultural tool with which to subvert traditional conceptual paradigms. Through it she rejects as absurd the rationalism of twentieth-century systems of power, and through the substantiality, the magic reality, of language grafts a new hardy growth onto a “tender” and “uncertain” plant, thereby producing a “third kind” (78) which has the potential to change the world. To those who might ask, if time is indivisible and matter is empty space and points of light, why the quotidian physical world would concern us at all, Winterson frames the answer in terms of palimpsestic story. As she protests against mercury poisoning at the end of the novel, the woman-hero, the modern-day combination of Fortunata and the Dog-Woman, says, “I don’t know if other worlds exist in space or time. Perhaps this is the only one and the rest is rich imaginings. Either way it doesn’t matter. We have to protect both possibilities. They seem to be interdependent” (128). Stories of the imagination themselves matter, in material ways; Winterson’s own text confirms this, in creating through the genre of magic realism a fresh understanding of the constitutive relationship between interpersonal meaning and historical responsibility.10 But there is one relationship that Winterson leaves unprotected. What of the people to whom her story has been unjust, most notably (because without exception) the seventeenth-century Puritans? Jeffrey Roessner argues that in Winterson’s revisionist reading of the

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Puritan Revolution, any move toward ideals of democracy, rationality, and objectivity is shown as coincident with the valuing of both sexual repression and normalized heterosexuality, and healthy desire (which equates in this novel substantially with lesbian desire) itself comes to be seen as a strong foundation for identity (Roessner 108). Winterson “presents passion as an instinctual and uncontrollable force that cannot be repressed without harsh consequences” (105). Her Puritans are self-righteous and sanctimonious, and the men grotesque in their unleashing of sexual repression: witness, in particular, the scene where the Dog-Woman executes two of her Puritan antagonists in a brothel where they are engaged in homosexual sex, and others rush to have sex with their dismembered corpses (Cherry 86–9). Is this kind of rewriting of the tradition legitimized by its satirical intent? Can moral outrage in itself be elevated into a moral value? Or might a grafting of such outrage onto reworked history yield fruit just as dangerous as that in response to which it is being produced? A legitimating stance to ethical questions cannot be assumed. I would say that Winterson depends upon a definition of justice in her moral outrage about social issues that she herself transgresses in her presentation of Puritan sensibility. The Dog-Woman, who is after all even by her loving son’s account “a fantasist, a liar and a murderer” (92), as well as the monstrous embodiment of female agency in the power struggles of politics, religion, and gender, is presented sympathetically: “I do not think of myself as a criminal, and indeed would protest any attempt to confine me in Newgate. My actions are not motivated by thought of gain, only by thought of injustice, and I have searched my soul to conclude that there is no person dead at my hand who would be better off alive” (129). No such self-justifying reflection is allowed to the Puritans of the story. Swift’s most caustic satire works more powerfully precisely because on the one hand it allows for exceptions to the tarring and feathering and, on the other, it recognizes the complicity, potential or actual, of both narrator and reader, thereby emphasizing the necessity of acknowledging the fallibility of that very humanity to whose moral sensibilities the satire is appealing. To the extent that Winterson’s characterization is caricature, to the extent that it depends on an implicit self-legitimizing metanarrative of “us” against “them” and the desire to reduce “the other” to “the same,” she weakens her case and damages the narrative ethic that her magic realist text otherwise so powerfully embodies.



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Away and the Spiritual Politics of Narrative Urquhart’s project in Away is less flamboyant, less carnivalesque, and less satirical than those of Rushdie and Winterson. In fact, her novel can be read in some ways as a traditional romantic fiction. The sensibility is that of a fairy story as much as of a realist novel. Urquhart would probably echo Hancock’s point that “magic realism shows the difficulty of distinguishing what is real from what is fantastic. It’s all a trick of perspective” (35); she would be likely also to sympathize with Jack Hodgins’s assertion that “This thing called ‘magic realism’ is not magic at all. It’s real” (in Hancock 10). In her novel, Urquhart writes not just about the mystery of a young woman who is believed to be “away” because she has been stolen by the dead and a simulacrum left in her place, but also about the mysteries and miracles of the natural world, of poetry and legend, of travellers’ tales and Native storytelling, of visions and dreams, and of dance and/as speech. The central concern of the novel is ambiguously articulated at its end by Old Eileen, who constitutes the link between present and past, as the woman who gave the story to her granddaughter, the present storyteller: Eileen says, “There are so many ways, you understand, of giving yourself away” (351). Away bears many of the marks of typical romance fiction. There are the stock characters, both comic and tragic: the naive but philanthropic upper-class English eccentrics, the Sedgewick brothers Osbert, who paints watercolours, and Granville, who writes bad patriotic verse; the good-hearted but superstitious Irish priest Father Quinn, who has to repress his desire for the young woman he is meant to be exorcising; the woman herself, so beautiful that the whole island of her home village is in danger of being possessed by images of her; her equally beautiful and equally mysterious daughter, born in Canada, who retreats into herself and into the arms of a willow tree, and dreams of what will come across the waters; the wildly handsome young Irish fanatic with whom the daughter falls in love, and who turns out to be a government spy, however fantastic his ability in the Irish dance. There are the patterns of folk tale: the blessings and curses; the passing down of the story to the next generations; the cyclical nature of the action, in which three women lose three water-borne lovers, each of whom has dark curls, pale skin, and green eyes; the generous-hearted outsider who helps the hard-working farmer and whose daughter gains the farmer’s hand in marriage; the talismans with at least historical and maybe magical significance; and, always, the moods and insistent

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presence of water, as sea, as rivers, as lakes. The novel’s three parts are structured by the epigrammatic folk wisdom of an enigmatic Irish triad which carries echoes of biblical wisdom literature, “The three most short-lived traces: the trace of a bird on a branch, the trace of a fish on a pond, and the trace of a man on a woman.” In such a universe, that a young girl might see visions of the future and learn wisdom from a talking crow, or that an old man might rediscover the maiden of his dreams on the other side of the world, or that a young man might dance his way out of jail, seem hardly surprising. In such a universe, in other words, the unlikely is the expected: realism has been overtaken by romance, and anything is possible. Anne Compton has suggested that Urquhart’s work marks “a late twentieth-century renaissance of the romance, [which] revives in cultural periods when mystery, whatever its source, is threatened” (Compton 213). But it is a mistake to classify Urquhart’s novel too simply as romance. She has set her story very carefully in known and attested history and geography. She gives precise and detailed accounts of the social and economic conditions first of early nineteenth-century Ireland – for instance, of the fact that even at the height of the potato famine “‘shiploads of grain [were] leaving the ports every day for England’” (Away 93); then of nineteenth-century Irish settlement in Southern Ontario; and finally of slum conditions in dockside Montreal, where the huts of the Irlandais “melt each spring” in the flooding by the St Lawrence (307). Moreover, a contemporary concern for the loss of farmland to industry along the great river informs the frame-story of the novel. And then the descriptions of how the desperate seven-year-old Liam learns to care for himself and his baby sister when his mother disappears into the forest are graphically realistic and unromantically urine-clouded, even as the child thinks he sees his mother weaving back and forth in the light along the pine trees at the edge of the clearing. Urquhart’s interest is in just these borderlands, these meridinal spaces between home and away, land and water, fact and imagination, realism and romance. Of her drowned sealover, the beautiful Irish peasant-woman Mary thinks, “If she had been asked to describe him, she would have said that he was the exact spot where the sea touches land, the precise moment of the final reach of the surf. That was the place and the time of him. She would forever, then, seek shorelines and beaches” (24–5). And this interest is in the service not only of an engrossing story, or even of the power and significance of imaginative and “otherworldly” truth, but also of a voice for the historically underprivileged and oppressed. Libby Birch has pointed out that



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nineteenth-century literary and historical perspectives on Irish women immigrants to Ontario are “often the work of writers who identified with Ontario’s ruling class”: not so Urquhart, who in Away “exemplifies an Irish female peasant consciousness who rediscovers mythic Ireland and seeks to preserve such myths by transcending normal Canadian nineteenth-century society” (L. Birch, 115 – emphasis in original). What precisely, then, is the place of the magical, in this magic realist novel? For some characters, like Liam as an adult, there is a struggle to believe it exists at all. Most of the time he discounts the magical as part of an unreal fairy-tale world of the imagination, and a dangerous one at that, in the way it seems to steal his sister Eileen away from him. But then his heart is touched by the skunk-charmer’s daughter, and his property is freed of skunks by the father; Urquhart makes a suggestive parallel here between the transforming powers of love and of magic. From the beginning of the novel, Mary’s encounter with the dying sailor on the beach is figured as an encounter with a mythic lover, who comes to her “from the otherworld of Ireland’s green heroic past as a psychic supernatural experience” (L. Birch 117). Mary’s “daemon lover” seems to transform her when she bathes in the sea: “He enveloped her like her own skin and she a stone sinking under his weight. He forced her to want other elements to breathe beyond that which was available in the ordinary air, and then, moments later, the air was no longer ordinary” (Away 24). He also transforms her thoughts and educates her imagination through “the pictures he had shown her: distant harbours, far shores, rivers penetrating foreign continents, a glimpse of a strange dome or monument, a riot of flowers the colour of flame dancing on a weird strand, mountains flickering on a horizon” (37). The magical for Mary actually becomes the real: “The real, now, was a hand shimmering under water, distorting in the liquid atmosphere,” and she in the everyday world “a mere memory of herself” (47). But unrequited love is not the only force operative in the magic of the novel. Though Sheila Ross’s review asserts that Urquhart transforms the Irish folk-myth about people who are “away” by “attributing this kind of madness … not to supernatural external forces, but to the blocking of a strong prophetic/poetic power by unrequited love” (Ross 177), this is to oversimplify both the breadth of resonance that Urquhart gives to the term “away” and that “principle of equivalence” in the interdependence of the supernatural and the natural that is suggested by describing the novel as magic realism.

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For most of Urquhart’s characters, the susceptibility to magic is rooted not so much in human love and longing per se as in a spiritual sensibility about life, and specifically a sensibility educated either in Native spirituality or in Catholicism filtered through folk tradition. A composite spiritual sensibility is demonstrated for Liam in the skunkcharming episode where, after the skunk-charmer’s prayers to the saints, Doherty instructs the skunks, through words written on the ground in white limestones from the lakeshore, to “Go forth and multiply elsewhere” – which is as much as to say, away. When the skunks are seen to leave three days later, all the stones are ceremoniously thrown one by one into the Great Lake, to keep the animals permanently away (Away 281–2). The connection of the notion of leaving with health, physical or spiritual, is also made in an earlier scene in Ireland where the starving peasant farmers play out a tableau, previously enacted only at wakes, of a ship under full sail, and shout “Away, boys, away” (112): in the dire circumstances of the potato famine, it is their going away themselves that may save them from disaster, just as, in the ceremonies attendant on funerals, the one hope is in a sailing away by faith to the new life of another world. The women in the story provide particular loci for this composite spirituality. Compton sees the “multigenerational quest for the spirit lover,” contained within the realist narrative of emigration and settlement, as structuring the text (Compton 225). And Libby Birch has observed that “Moira,” the name by which the dying young sailor appears to address Mary (though in fact he is gasping out the name of his ship), is a pre-Christian form of Mary that “derives from the Trinitarian form taken by the goddess Aphrodite as ‘the Great Moira’ said to be older than time” (L. Birch 116). In the Canadian forest Mary meets the Indian, Exodus Crow, who provides a link between Celtic culture and that of Canadian First Nations, in identifying not only with the notion of living under cultural threat, but also with Mary’s spiritual sensibilities. Exodus Crow recognizes in Mary the “Manitou” of spirit life, and they share stories – hers, of the folk history of her people, and her place in it; his, of the spiritual history of his people. “He told the woman of the first missionary who had visited his grandfather, and how this missionary had spoken of Moses and God and Jesus. His grandfather had listened and had believed what the missionary said. But when his grandfather told the missionary about the spirits that surrounded and protected his tribe the white man had scoffed at him. ‘I believe you,’ the grandfather of Exodus had said. ‘Why don’t



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you believe me?’” (181). Mary, coming out of a version of Christianity learned through Irish folk culture, believes Exodus’s story of Manitou, as he believes hers of the spirit lover in the lake, feeling for the first time “there might be some wisdom in the white people beyond what they preached from the Book of Exodus” (180) – a book which his mother had abandoned in disappointment when it turned out to be “filled with battles for land and the making of laws” (175). Tended by Exodus, Mary stays in the forest near to her spirit-lover in Moira Lake for seven years. She tells him about “the time of the stolen lands of her island, and of the disease, and of the lost language and the empty villages … [and how] the old kings and lords of England had cut down each tree until bare hills were left behind” (184). Herb Wyile observes that, “[a]s a repository of cultural memory and the pain of colonial exploitation, Mary provides a good illustration of the subtle merging of the mythic and the political which characterizes so many magic realist texts” (Wyile 34). Exodus responds to Mary that “some white men had seized my people’s land and killed many animals for sport and abused our women”; then, as he tells her bereaved husband seven years later, “[s]he embraced me and said that the same trouble stayed in the hearts of both our peoples” (Away 185). Mary’s daughter Eileen draws this parallel again, a generation later, when she says to her newly landowning brother, “I think that the English took the land from the Indians same as they took it from the Irish. Then they just starve everybody out, or … they evict them, or both” (279). The distinction is specifically drawn between Liam, who becomes a landowner, and Eileen, who becomes a lake-owner without money passing hands, since her inheritance is a spiritual one, the lake “a possession she had inherited at birth” (239). With Eileen and Liam, the next generation, “the portrait of nationalism takes a more ambivalent turn, as the relationship between the two shows how problematic the weight of cultural heritage can be in a new land” (Wyile 35). Liam, the pragmatist, becomes a neo-colonial who mimics the capitalism of his ancestors’ oppression (36). Eileen goes to the other extreme. As a child she has the same magical sensibilities as her mother. At seven she dreams that Exodus will come to visit them in the woods, some days before it happens; he will be, she says, a crow with a top hat and a pipe. When Exodus arrives, crows’ feathers around his hat, he tells Liam that the crow is his spirit-guide, and when he leaves, it is by flying away as a crow. For seven years, as he had cared for Mary, he now becomes Eileen’s counsellor and friend,

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“her bird; her secret. She had tried once or twice to share him with her brother but his lack of belief had eliminated the possibilities for the crow in any other life but hers” (Away 220). It is the crow who brings Eileen gold from the creek, thereby precipitating the visitation on the family of what the crow calls “the curse of the mines” (225) which begins with the sale of their settlement to Osbert and the move of the brother and sister to a farmstead near Colborne on Lake Ontario. Once there, Eileen forgets Exodus, as she turns from a forest child into the lake child of her mother: “mostly she was disturbed by [the lake’s] familiarity; her sense that she was related to it in ways she couldn’t understand ... It’s mine, she had told her brother, not knowing at all what she meant by the assertion other than that it was true” (239). But it is particularly in the passionate presence of the Irish agitator Aidan Lanighan, who literally dances his politics, that “her premonitions, which as a child she had never doubted, … completely deserted her” (254). “In his arms she was assaulted, stolen, by a learned mythology” (259), the forgotten crow failing to gain her attention in the midst of her wild romanticism, and finally even the person of Exodus fading from her memory altogether. This loss is also the loss of the magic of the natural world for Eileen: “The ice looked like tin, cheap and plentiful; the moon, itself, as though it could be easily flicked, like a coin, from the sky. No magic existed beyond the plans she created for Aidan Lanighan, and herself at his side” (295). Importantly, it is when Eileen hears D’Arcy McGee speak in parliament about national unity and justice, his words “a significant message carried on cadence” (338), that she suddenly recalls Exodus Crow, the “wise man” she had listened to as a child. But when in her misplaced Irish loyalty she decides McGee has betrayed the voice of her father’s people, “[t]he bird in her mind flew away again, breaking through green” (339). I will return to this explicit parallel between Crow and McGee, which is key to my reading of the novel. Clearly, Urquhart recognizes magical reality in the natural world. The cameo scene in which the landlord Osbert and the peasant Mary crouch to look at a tidepool on an Irish beach captures the heart of this magic: “The woman, it seemed, was enchanted by the fragility and gracefulness of what she saw so that words came to her slowly. ‘See how that one moves,’ she said, once, ‘as if it were unfolding some great secret there in the water’” (90). His exchange with Mary, his recognition of the ethic of careful wonder in her response to the world, makes Osbert move from the dilettante attempt to preserve sea-creatures



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through his drawings to the socially motivated attempt to preserve the Irish peasantry through emigration. The sickness of the natural world is also described in quasi-magical terms: as the potato blight spreads in Ireland, “These are the beginnings of despair. The clouds part and the last rays of sun blanket a landscape of unspeakable beauty … The sweet, dark smell of the change is confused with that of hidden roses … The air smelled of loss – of a beautiful absence” (76-7). It is not insignificant, too, that Eileen later finds her dangerous lover Aidan in a flooded Montreal, as if it were only in a city overwhelmed by water that she might discover her destiny: “She recalled that she had always anticipated a sail, an arrival by water” (304). The natural world is magical, not only in its immediate glories and perils, but also in those things beyond the reach of common knowledge. Mary, reading Easy Lessons in General Geography under her new husband’s tutelage, had “examined, with astonishment, engravings of deserts, jungles, and mountain ranges, exotic beasts that jumped or thundered through life in vast inland territories, birds too huge to fly, mice too huge to scamper, and strange human beings dressed as birds or beasts themselves” (61). When the Irish peasantry first hear of the possibility of emigration to Canada to escape the devastations of the potato famine, the Canadian landscape is described in magical terms: “Everything was growing, [the pessimists] asserted, all the time, and a man who stood still for too long was likely to be pinned to the ground by the rambunctious vines eagerly seeking light. Because of this growth, the pessimists continued, everything became, or had already become, too large. The mountains were unclimbable, the rivers unfordable, the forests impenetrable, and the trees in them unchoppable” (115). Though these reports are inaccurate, there is a truth hidden in their exaggerations, for “in Away, the natural world is absorbed in the supernatural” (Compton 217). Compton in fact suggests that Urquhart is writing “secular scripture,” in which “the lives of the gods intersect with, intervene in, the lives of mortals. In [this] ‘secular scripture,’ the land usurps the place of the gods; its powers infuse the human imagination” (213). She proposes that it is “the mysterious power of landscape” that is figured as the supernatural being of the daemon lover (217). As he reveals himself to Mary, the spirit lover is described as “bright water with the flash of sun in it and the tumbling shadows of leaves”; he also reveals the Canadian forests of her future to her, where small butterflies are “moved by the way the breeze tossed light. He was the touch of this

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light. Then he was the evaporating drops of moisture that shone like stars on the forest floor before entering air” (Away 98). The notion that the natural world has a life of its own is often anthropomorphized in this novel. When Liam first arrives in the Canadian backwoods as a child, the people who come to help his family build a cabin, emerging out of the trees, seem to him like “some of the forest’s trees” themselves, “magically transformed into human beings” (143). Later, when his mother leaves him and goes away to live by the lake of her spirit lover, he confuses her with the light among the trees at the forest’s edge (158); and in her dying, she herself becomes for him “one of several trees rooted in an alien landscape” (186). Liam’s sister Eileen takes childhood refuge in a willow tree which is described as “a miracle”: “its feminine skirts and long hair passive in the breeze, exotic as a palm …. In winter, Eileen ran her hands over its supple bones, climbed high and watched the forest. In summer, she parted its curtains and stepped inside its mystery. She could hardly see out during the day. The long lip-shaped leaves moving in the wind and the shattered sunlight giving the surrounding air the look of green water” (221). Like the rest of the natural world, the willow tree is both real and magical, “other.” It commands attention even in its passivity. It has, we might say, a voice. And this suggestion is not merely analogical, for Urquhart is acutely attuned to natural phenomena as they are bound to the magical power of language and of story. Compton has argued that in all of Urquhart’s fiction, there is an ecological dimension: “Passing on the story is crucial to the balance of relations between human organism and environment” (Compton 214). The “ship’s cargo” that Mary will take with her to the New World, says her daemon lover, is story – all the stories of her people’s past, of kings and gypsies and monks and warriors and beautiful women and scholars and saints and teachers – and the ability to pass it on (Away 127–8). The starving Irish peasantry quite simply need a story to live by, as in the midst of ice and storm they imagine the visit of an elegant rescuing ship: “Slowly, the ship was built, timber by timber, in the crumbling cabins, until the emigrants-to-be held her in their hearts as the greatest possession of all” (119). When Old Eileen is wanting to tell her story to the young Esther, she waits “for the light, the wind, the position of the clouds to suggest when she should speak” (348). And Esther, telling the long story to herself again on her last night in the farmhouse, knows that story is work: she “will work all night whispering in the dark” (21). Here Urquhart’s sensitivity is closer to Winterson’s than to Rushdie’s, in emphasizing the romantic power



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of words, though she lacks Winterson’s satirical bite almost completely. For Urquhart, what matters is the way in which story recreates the past and influences the future – her novel exemplifies Ricoeur’s assertion that “the meaning of human existence is itself narrative” (“Dialogue” 17). Esther’s story is being told during the twelve-hour nightshift of a cement company which is excavating the limestone quarry on what was once the family farm: “Esther’s regenerative story is the antithesis of the industrial process that converts landscape to cement” (Compton 213). Language and story are connected not only to the natural world, then, but also to the political. In Ireland Brian, Mary’s husband, laments the fact that the oppressors – the English – are taking away his people’s language and therefore his people’s voice, by replacing the local “hedge schools” with National Schools and the local language with English: “The old language will disappear forever, and all the magic and the legends. It’s what they want, what they’ve always wanted, to be rid of us one way or another” (Away 74). In Canada his daughter Eileen learns Fenian poetry “as though committing scripture to memory” (285) and devours “the bizarre combinations of fact and fiction” (292) in the outlawed newspaper the Irish Canadian, whose editor is regularly thrown into jail by the authorities. The Irish-Canadian politician D’Arcy McGee’s great gift is his almost magical powers of language: “when he opened his mouth to speak, the world around him stood at silent attention; his words a subtle net thrown over the chaos of any crowd … no one within hearing distance had the power to turn away” (283). It is when Eileen hears McGee speak in parliament that she is confused about who is the enemy (337). Confederation-era politics required some “moderate accommodation,” and not the extremism of the first Irish settlers; Eileen’s fetishized, romanticized nationalism leads in the end to her “romantic, cultural, and political alienation” (Wyile 40). For what the magic real is doing in this novel is complex. Aidan Lanighan turns out to be a spy for McGee, so that the Irish loyalists who trust Aidan are deceived more by him than by McGee. Is Aidan right? Does the magic real work on behalf of a lost cause, and can the loyalty of the imagination be too extreme? Wyile suggests that the transportation of nationalism from Ireland to Canada is portrayed as problematic insofar as it raises questions about the nature of history and cultural memory (32). At the end of the story, betrayed by her imagination and the betrayer of her lover, Eileen has “sudden terrible knowledge, the release from the mortal dream.” She is aware of her

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mother’s voice: “So this is what it is to be away … You are never present where you stand … Your flagstones are a series of dark lakes that you scour, and the light that touches and alters them sends you unspeakable messages … Each corner is a secret and your history is a lie. Eileen turned her head to look at the solid wall against which she had rested for hours … She … began the long journey home” (Away 345). This seems like a restatement of trust in the dailiness of physical realities and a distrust in extremes of imagination and romance. Aidan, in the moment after McGee’s death, which he had been working to prevent, spits at Eileen, “It was all play for you, wasn’t it. All some kind of dream … some kind of goddamned otherworld island. You think this will make things better for our people? … Did you hear a single thing McGee said? Did you listen to what he wanted?” (343). Where Winterson’s islands of the heart are places of power and self-disclosure, Urquhart’s are disconnected retreats. In the last pages of the book, Eileen in old age is recorded as telling her granddaughter Esther about Aidan. She says, “He was always there, where he stood … He was the energy of the real moment while I was always turning the moment into something else altogether. Inventing it. Interpreting it. You have this gift in you, the ability to be where you are, but I am in you as well and there will be times when you want to drift away … If I were you I would be where I stand” (355). And this is what Esther does, becoming a successful farmer because “she was told a story at twelve that calmed her down and put her in her place” (3). As Bakhtin warned against the divorce of word from world, lest words “grow sickly [and] die as discourse,” so Esther learns the value of tethering her imagination to the land she stands on. Does the book, then, finally affirm “the real moment” over its invention or interpretation or explanation, a being-in-the-present over the life of the imagination? Qualifiedly so: for it is the spirituality of Exodus and Mary that Eileen forgot, their each believing in the other’s magic realities, in the face of both hardship and disloyalty on the one hand and legal battles and land claims on the other. Urquhart draws a specific parallel between the spiritual wisdom of Exodus and the practical political wisdom of D’Arcy McGee, both of whom lose their powers in this novel through the unbelief of their followers. Where Mary had been “away” under Exodus’s tutelage, Eileen has been “away” under a misapprehension about McGee, who is Aidan’s political spiritguide, and could have been hers too. Mary returns to her family only in death, but Eileen returns to the house where her sister-in-law, half



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Ojibway, says, “You’ve come home now to stay” (347). Here Eileen will live on her “otherworld island” (346) in safe retreat, now that D’Arcy McGee has, she says, “put me in my place” and she has come to believe that politics is nothing but an ocean of shifting sand (350). And what, then, of the very end of the book, the triumph of capitalist industry and the destruction of the narratives in the limestone (356)? Where Winterson argues for the need to protect the realities of both time and space, and ends her book with the torching of a chemical factory, Urquhart can be read as capitulating to an imaginative quietism: however real the work of story, it does not defeat the work of the quarry-builders which destroys the landscape and, with it, the past. A key to this problem lies in Esther’s understanding of her role as a kind of bardic poet (133). In Esther the magic and the real find symmetry: the chastened Eileen is Esther’s spirit guide and, through her, both the romantic and the pragmatic find a voice. The story in the reader’s hands, as told by Esther in the framing narrative, itself enacts the revitalization of a lost mythology (Ross 176): “[w]hat is particularly compelling about Away is that it both participates in that process of recovery and dramatizes the degradation that has rendered that recovery such a pressing need” (Wyile 43). Urquhart shows both romantic excess and pragmatic capitulation to be inadequate; what magic realism enables her to do is to lay claim to a middle space between levels of mythological and romantic appropriation, on the basis of their legitimacy in the politics and the landscape of the now.

Light Seriousness Magic realism represents a rejection of modern rationalism and nineteenth-century positivism and an attempt to recapture and to legitimize what was often lost or at least undervalued in modernity: namely, the fantastic, the non-rational, and the spiritual. I have suggested that magic realism is the genre of fantasy peculiar to the postmodern era, as science fiction was the genre of fantasy peculiar to the modern age. Science fiction too was, and still is, a strongly ethically inflected genre, concerned as it is with the power that human beings might use and might find used upon them. Magic realism is particularly characterized by its blurring of the boundaries between fantasy and reality, as they may be blurred for children at play. And I have suggested both that this blurring provides opportunity for serious political or moral interventions and that it is indicative of a renewed valorization of the

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non-rational and even of the spiritual. In an interesting turn away from the skepticism of liberal theology, which downplayed the supernatural and interpreted the miraculous as psychologically induced or as merely metaphorical, magic realism does not draw an ontological distinction between the magical and the real, and thus makes a powerful statement of its own faith: both are real, both are true, and both can be interpreted as spiritually charged. As Jordan says in Sexing the Cherry, the real and the imaginary “seem to be interdependent.” In radical magic realism, like that in Midnight’s Children and Sexing the Cherry, a division between levels of reality is thus hardly an issue. The central characters in the story accept “magic” as everyday. In more selfconscious magic realism, the disjunction between levels is itself the site of the questionings about the real and its value. In fiction that stands on the borderline between romance and realism, questions are asked both sides of the border. Urquhart’s novel Away presents magic as on the one hand a mark of the sensibilities of simple country people, and on the other as the key to the sort of storytelling that grips and thus enables the construction of responsible selfhood. Some years ago I came across an intriguing article, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Postmodern,” celebrating that “splendid lightness of being” which does not deny the weightiness of life’s conflicts and sorrows but refuses to be weighed down by them into a heavy application of religious laws. “Could such a thing be what Jesus had in mind when he called his sad-eyed disciples away from the weight of the law and towards the life of the spirit?” (Percesepe 134). As every child knows, play is a serious business; and so too a move from weight to lightness is of serious religious significance. The writer of this article wanted “to make space for the splendid lightness of postmodern philosophic and religious discourse as a resistance to the weight of modernity, and a way to keep hope alive in a world of suspicion” (119). Magic realist fiction is premised on a lightness of this serious and potentially health-giving kind. Both Levinas’s radical ethics of transcendence and Bakhtin’s christological asymmetry of divine gift imply what my epigraph from de Certeau at the beginning of this chapter declares, referring to miracle stories: that “an ethical reaction must believe that life cannot be reduced to what one sees of it” (Practice 17). Thus the genre of magic realism enables far-reaching, boundary-crossing possibilities for narrative-as-ethics.

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Parodic Myth and Sacred Story Thomas King , Green Grass, Running Water / Julian Barnes , A History of the World in 10½ Chapters /

Timothy Findley , Not Wanted on the Voyage

It is well known how often our ‘realistic’ literature is mythical ... and how our ‘literature of the unreal’ has at least the merit of being only slightly so. Roland Barthes, Mythologies Myths are not unchanging and unchanged antiques which are simply delivered out of the past in some naked, original state. Their specific identity depends on the way in which each generation receives or interprets them according to their needs, conventions and ideological motivations. Hence the necessity of critical discrimination between liberating and destructive modes of reinterpretation. Paul Ricoeur, “Dialogue” with Richard Kearney Readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life Nothing travels more extensively and effectively than myth. Paul Ricoeur

King Trying to Set the World Straight Fiction that plays seriously with reality is likely in particular to consider how received interpretive frames can themselves be reinterpreted. And of course such frames are often themselves stories. There is, then, a significant area of overlap between certain kinds of magic realist fiction and fictions which unsettle those traditional founding stories that we call myth. One novel that could be described both as magic realism and

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as a parodic version of myth is Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1993), a subversive rewriting of the biblical metanarrative from a Native American perspective. Four old Indians and the trickster Coyote take turns retelling the story of the creation of the world, trying to get it “right,” never succeeding, and forever starting over and over. The stories they tell are a mix of Native and biblical mythology, and they are the heroes and villains of their own tales, which are interwoven with those of the modern-day realist characters of the book, Indians making lives for themselves in the contemporary world. What with the Dead Dog Café, where “dog” is served in daily variations as a tourist attraction; what with Portland going off to Hollywood to be a nine-to-five Indian with a prosthetic nose; what with the old Indians’ magical reshaping of a John Wayne western on TV so that the Indians win; what with Coyote’s ubiquitous interferences, and the shapeshifting of the four old Indians into the figures of Native creation myth reinterpreted through Western cultural iconography, Green Grass, Running Water is a hilarious read – but it is always clear that the humour is in the service of vehement socio-political critique. As Margaret Atwood has written of two earlier stories of King’s, he can “get the knife in, not by whacking you over the head with [the fiction’s] own moral righteousness, but by being funny. Humour can be … a subversive weapon, as it has often been for people who find themselves in a fairly tight spot without other, more physical, weapons” (“Knife” 244). One powerful paradigm of Native writing in Canada is evident in hybrid texts which use the language of the colonizer in order to subvert colonial discourse, appropriating certain aspects of colonial culture as tools of resistance by deconstructing the opposition between Native and non-Native (see Horne 255). It has been argued that in this novel King comes down on the side of Native culture as “better,” and thus fails to avoid a mere reversal of the binary. But this is not the only possible reading. Ken Derry contends that King succeeds in rendering judgments without simply reinscribing oppositional terms specifically through his use of magic realism, which enables him “to reverse and deconstruct colonialist, Manichean dualism” (Derry 4, 10). It is not merely the Western religious figures like the grouchy God, the completely obnoxious Noah, and the self-centred Young Man Walking on Water who are objectionable; King’s Native characters have faults of their own. The four sacred Native figures, First Woman, Changing Woman, Thought Woman, and Old Woman, all begin their stories by



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falling into the Water World through self-absorption or carelessness, and Coyote’s interventions are vain and self-indulgent. Thus for King, “as long as he retains a degree of humility and humour in his judgements, there remains a crucial gap between his own position and the one he is judging” (Derry 11). It is central to King’s fiction that the four old Indians inhabit not only the overlapping worlds of the real and the magic real; they also exist in the world of religious myth. They are trickster figures who move readily between three mythic worlds: those of Christian scriptural tradition, native North American legend, and white Western cultural iconography. Known in the hospital where they are longstay geriatric patients as Mr Red, Mr White, Mr Black, and Mr Blue, the Indians have Christian analogues in the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from the Revelation of St John the Divine. There the red horse symbolizes bloodshed; the white horse, war and conquest; the black horse, famine; and the pale, or “chlorine,” horse, death. In the Book of Revelation, the Four Horsemen represent the inevitable consequences of militaristic imperialism and presage the “endtimes” when God will restore the earth to God’s kingdom. In the novel, the red, white, and blue cars – parodic revisionings of Columbus’s three ships – are destroyed when they surge over the broken dam which kills Eli, and the black car has smashed, killing Eli’s wife. Here the cars represent the American Way of Life and its inevitable destruction, which prefigures a more positive narrative line for the Native Indian in North America. The loss of the cars creates “the possibility for a new mythic discovery of America. If we are going to fix the world anew … we need to fix our myths” (Matchie 165). As King himself said in the 2003 Massey Lectures, addressing the issue of the reified identity imposed by Western culture upon the Indian, “What’s important are the stories [that] we make up to try to set the world straight” (Truth 60). Accordingly, the guises of the four Indians in their roles from Native Indian mythology are female, and symbolize different stages in the creation and history of the world. Where First Woman as Eve is a renaming of God the Creator, and Changing Woman a replacement for both Eve and the survivors of the Ark, Thought Woman is a rival to the Virgin Mary, and Old Woman a challenge to the divine power invested in Young Man Walking On Water, an extremely unflattering analogue for Jesus. The alternative creation story told through these four fallible female characters here supersedes that of Christian mythology. But the Indians also appropriate to themselves the roles

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of four Western cultural icons of individualism, endurance, and the pioneering spirit: the Lone Ranger, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye. They specifically reject the roles of the colonized native sidekicks, Tonto, Queequeg, Friday, and Chingachgook, and choose those of the dauntless white heroes (Lamont-Stewart 125). Although these four old Indians are in one sense prehistoric, their stories pre-dating the Judaeo-Christian Genesis account, they also function in the present-day world and on the realist plane of the novel, getting involved in the lives of the contemporary Native characters. This blurring of boundaries between myth and realism is the central feature of the particular kind of socially accountable postmodernist fiction that I want to consider in this chapter.

Myth and Realism At first sight it might seem that myth and realism are intransigently opposed as modes of discourse. Where myth has conventionally been associated with distant history, idealized figures, and transcendence over the material environment, realism, as we have already recognized, is a mode more generally associated with the last three centuries, ordinary people, and an immersion in the material world of space and time. Where myth traditionally implies belief in a stable metaphysical order and a totalizing metanarrative, realism implies skepticism about any beliefs beyond those based on reason and empirical evidence. In fact, as we have also seen, within a postmodernist ethos such skepticism is extended to any “given” beliefs, including those about the empirical world. A postmodernist sensibility privileges the ironic over the “commonsensical” while questioning all received stories and systems and disregarding all traditional authorities, in a mode of serious play. One consequence of this ideological clash between the universalism of traditional myth and the particularism of both realist and postmodernist story has been the destabilizing of the distant relationship of myth to the material and quotidian. The history of myth in the twentieth-century West is the story of how such a destabilization came about, and it may be useful to sketch that history here by tracing the genealogy through its most prominent exponents. Beginning the sketch in the early years of the last century reminds us that myth was afforded a significant place in the formulations of anthropology and the newly emergent practice of psychoanalysis. Through religio-cultural studies such as J.G. Frazer’s The Golden



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Bough (1890–1915) and Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), myth was associated with transmitted patterns of cultural and ritual behaviour. Through the work of Freud and then of Carl Jung, mythic norms came to be seen as providing the grounding universals for a psychoanalytic frame of reference. Jung was particularly interested in the mythic dimension of dreams and fantasies; in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) he proposed that myth offers an archive of archetypal images. Affinities with structuralism have been detected in Jung’s concern with archetypes as the structures and organizing images of the psyche which, together with basic human instincts, form what he famously dubbed the “collective unconscious.” But his work is better described as mythocentric than logocentric since his concern is still with essence and symbol rather than with the language of semiotics (see Cleary 384). A generation later, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was also exploring systems of mythology to find universal structures existing in the unconscious, and his work had a deeper congruence with structuralism since he was interested particularly in the semiotic, examining mythic formulations as responses to the cultural demands of everyday life. In Structural Anthropology (1958) and influenced by the structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson, he argued that mythic meaning is generated not by any intrinsic essence but by the relationship between different elements, or “mythemes,” of mythic language, which reflect the universal mental operations that structure this language. Levi-Strauss’s concern in his ethnographic studies was to formulate the logical relationships and principles which underlie the transformations of myth for new social purposes, based on the belief that one could recognize in these transformations a parallel with the workings of linguistic systems. A link between myth criticism and linguistic structuralism also developed as a particular approach to literary analysis. In his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye produced the most systematic statement in English of the theoretical approach to myth criticism. Frye understood literature as projecting an organized myth of human experience; his thesis was that in every society mythological thinking, with its language of metaphor, is “the framework and context for all thinking” (Words xvi), and that literature both transmits and diversifies this mythology. By producing a classification of what he judged to be the essential literary modes or “myths,” Frye provided a bridge from literary structure to linguistic structure; ironically, this gave further impetus to the move away from the centrality of literature that

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Frye himself advocated and toward the investigation of a wide range of human activities under the linguistic model of structuralism. Because it was about structure as activity rather than essence, and because it insisted upon the arbitrary and historical rather than the natural character of the sign, structuralism helped to legitimate those interpretive modes that assert the constructivist nature of postmodern social reality. However, poststructuralists inveighed against the reductive tendency in structuralism to turn relational descriptions of function into totalizing explanations of system, thereby conflating the cultural and the “natural” once again. In particular, they questioned the very notion of structure and sign as stable entities, and destabilized them by revealing their dependence on the endless play of deferred presence. Jacques Derrida’s famous lecture “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” given at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and the first text by Derrida to be translated in the United States, is often taken to signal the arrival of poststructuralism in English-speaking literary theory. However, it had already been a mark of some neo-Marxist and more generally leftist criticism to expose the social dangers of reading mythic structures as systemically stable, by examining how they could be coopted to validate the manipulative simulacra of a capitalist economy. In the late 1930s, for instance, Walter Benjamin was working on a critique of the culture of modernity in Paris, in which he set out to show the significant power of mythic forms even in an age that prided itself on marching into the future guided by reason alone. Looking to the cityscape around him as evidence of a parasitical link between the mythic and the material, he developed an extended image of the Paris arcades as ritualistic passageways leading down to the dark world of the city’s mythic heart of dependence on the symbolic value of material goods (McCole 241–4). His project was left unfinished at his death, but his extensive working notes demonstrate his ongoing concern with critiquing and reconstructing traditions of idealism and romanticism. Peter Demetz has called Benjamin’s Paris project a “true triumph of the master of hermeneutics who, in ‘reading’ the things of the world as if they were sacred texts, suddenly decodes the overwhelming forces of human history” (Demetz xvi). But perhaps the most extensive and damning indictment of twentieth-century (ab)uses of myth was that of Roland Barthes. In his 1957 book Mythologies, which I mentioned in the prologue in relation to immobilizing metanarratives, Barthes developed the argument that



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myth is a metalanguage that distorts by transforming a historical reality into “nature” and implying a natural relationship between signifier and signified (129–31). In fact, said Barthes, contemporary myth is a type of social speech usage, a form of signification rather than a concept, defined not so much by content as by the implicit intention of myth-as-genre. He described the conventions of sports, advertising, cinema, food, and general consumer behaviour as myths in this sense, as ways in which the dominant ideology asserts itself. “Myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. Now this process is exactly that of bourgeois ideology” (142). Barthes argued that in a bourgeois society, myth is an apparently depoliticized form of speech which gives things “a natural and eternal justification” simply by talking about them, and implying that they are statements of fact that go without saying (143). He castigated contemporary myth as having to do not with truth but with capitalist use-value, in whose interests “the very end of myths is to immobilize the world: they must suggest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions” (155). Myth of this kind functions in a way quite contrary to traditional myth: by giving to the everyday and contingent a veneer of transcendence, it feeds the requirements of a capitalist system to engender both consumer need and consumer satisfaction. For Barthes, then, a contemporary mythologist like himself had to be a demystifier, whose essential job was to transform the decadent economic uses made of myth. He held to a concomitant philosophy of the language in which such demystification might be enacted, arguing that since language is merely a form it cannot be either realistic or unrealistic, though its ideological malleability means that it can be either dangerously mythical or productively “counter-mythical.”1 He argued that the language of man [sic] as a producer – “revolutionary language proper” – is never mythical because myth is by definition unrealistic, a fixed and monologic ideology unrelated to “the making of things” and concerned only with the preservation of images of the real (Mythologies 146). On this model, a realist attempt at representation is ultimately impossible, in that it implies transparency while enacting ideology; signification, on the other hand, is recognized as ideological from the beginning (136–7). Barthes suggested, therefore, that “the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will

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be a mythology” (135) which will “[give] to the problem of realism a frankly semiological solution” (136). However, an antipathy of this kind between realism and myth need not be assumed, and some of the later twentieth-century thinking about realism did not make that assumption. Gregory Lucente, for instance, in his influential 1981 book The Narrative of Realism and Myth, argued that some kind of enmeshment of realism with myth is an age-old phenomenon, dating back at least as far as the debate between Plato’s idealism and Aristotle’s empiricism. Lucente saw myth and realism as different emphases in narrative, modes that are finally inseparable in the creation of narrative meaning (ix). Since even the traditional realist narrative depends upon aesthetic convention and illusion, it develops through a combination of the basic components of mythic idealism and realist materialism in interaction at all levels of narration, plotting, and character configuration. “In narrative fiction, the transcendent fullness of myth, which locates its significance not in the world of time and matter, but in a realm beyond temporal and spatial limitation, thus complements the worldly plenitude of the realist sign, as it recodes on an idealized level what realist representation codes on the material one” (40). Because of its imbrication with myth, realist literature is able to maintain a stance “at once conservative and visionary, grounded in the fictionalized life of its present yet mindful of both the past and the future” (145).2 But another significant theorist whose work suggests a fruitful interrelationship of myth and realism is a philosopher whose concerns with narrative, identity, and interpretation have already come up many times in this book: Paul Ricoeur. Where Benjamin wanted to unmask the myths of modernity in order to liberate their desires into a “genuine history” (Gilloch 12), and Barthes wanted to demystify myth by displaying its power base in ideology, Ricoeur wanted to free myth from the perception that it is ahistorical and merely ratifies a fixed hierarchy, and instead to uncover both its historicity and its symbolic energy. He saw the “essentially symbolic” nature of myth as the key to its ongoing power of cultural reinterpretation and understood myth, like poetry, as infinitely generative, in offering “a disclosure of unprecedented worlds, an opening on to other possible worlds which transcend the established limits of our actual world” (“Myth” 44). But he was also alert to the dangers of both ideological and unrealistic uses of myth. He distinguished between symbolic and what he called “pseudosymbolic” reading, the latter being that kind of misreading that turns myth into



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ideology and therefore in his terms deserves to be called demythologizing, “not concerning its symbolic content but concerning the hardening of its symbolic structures into dogmatic or reified ideologies” (41–2). His concern here with reification clearly echoes Bakhtin’s critique of monologistic discourse, language repressively intent on interpretive closure and dismissive of the voice of the other. Ricoeur argued that “genuine myths” can always be reinterpreted in terms of both personal and collective liberation as they open up the possibility of new worlds, and that critical discrimination is vitally necessary between liberating and destructive modes of interpretation (40).3 He distinguished between a structuralist analysis of codes and his own interest in a hermeneutical analysis of meanings, especially in terms of the textual capacity for what he called “world disclosure” (45). His understanding of myth was thus at once historically grounded, universally applicable, and ethically motivated.

Parodic Myth, Creative Misreading, and Religious Faith In light of these kinds of reconsideration of the relationship between myth and realism, I want to suggest that postmodernist rereadings reimagine the positive power of myth in ways that remain symbolic even while engaging in a kind of realist literalization. It can be argued, I think, that a recognizable characteristic within postmodernist writing is the use of mythological material less as cultural symbol than as parodic literalization or actualization. The notion of myth, then, has changed shape again. The postmodernist literalization of myth is a creative misreading, a “reading back” against ideologically reified myth, in the service of just that transcending of dogmatic limits which Ricoeur was looking for and which Bakhtin would undoubtedly applaud. This reading-back appropriates a fresh space for meaning in the interstices, the middle spaces, between world-making and inherited worlds. An actualization of mythic motifs and archetypes places the emphasis on a disjunction between the text and the mythical pre-text that enables the text to “reflect on its own ontological (world-making) procedures” (McHale 253). One way of understanding the move from modernism to postmodernism is to identify an underlying cognitive shift – from the multiple perspectives of a skeptical epistemology, concerned with the instability of individual consciousness, to the multiple discourses of an improvisational ontology, concerned with the

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instability of the entire perceived world (34). And one kind of confirmatory evidence of such a shift might well be postmodernist writers’ playful literalization of traditional myth. Where Jameson somewhat predictably maintains that “the central problem of a political art under capitalism is that of co-optation” (“Conclusion” 209), I want instead to suggest that the dynamic of such a process can work in reverse: that the art can co-opt and “bleed” the capitalism, if you like, rather than only the other way around. I will argue that this is analogically what happens in the parodic novels I am going to discuss in this chapter, the parodic being the most overtly self-conscious mode in which the power of myth has been reappropriated for contemporary fiction. It is of course germane to my argument here that Bakhtin had much to say about parody. He claimed that ancient and medieval parodic forms had actually prepared the ground for the “impiety” of the novelistic form itself as it came to prominence in the nineteenth century, particularly insofar as parody “destroyed the homogenizing power of myth over language [and] freed consciousness from the power of the direct word” (“Prehistory” 60). For Bakhtin, as for Barthes, a mythic and magical attitude to language and the word was a totalizing force in its “absolute fusion of word with concrete ideological meaning,” and was therefore to be resisted as monologic and oppressive (“Discourse” 369). Bakhtin contended that, contrary to popular expectation, “authentically realistic” forms of discourse require a distance between language and material reality, an escape from that notion of a oneto-one correspondence between word and thing which he called an “absolute dogma ... within the narrow framework of a sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia.” He argued that it is through the playfulness and hybridity of parodic forms that “[l]anguage is transformed into a working hypothesis for comprehending and expressing reality” because it is freed into the “heteroglossia” of diverse voices (“Prehistory” 61). That contemporary fiction should turn back to create parodic forms of mythic narratives is, then, Bakhtinian with a vengeance, encoding a contemporary discourse in which to provide sufficient distance to be authentically realistic. As I have been arguing, postmodern realisms involve the simultaneous inscription of more than a single perspective; they will therefore seek to avoid mythic language used ideologically because of the way such language represses the diversity of quotidian reality. Privileging the novel for its embrace of diversity, Bakhtin argued that “the prose art presumes a deliberate feeling for the historical and social concreteness



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of living discourse, as well as its relativity, a feeling for its participation in historical becoming and in social struggle” (“Discourse” 331). As I suggested in the introduction, he therefore understood the novel as essentially a form of social participation. Contemporary parody is also and inevitably immersed in social struggle. Linda Hutcheon, arguably the foremost commentator on parody in the North American academy of the late twentieth century, claimed in A Theory of Parody (1985) that this mode can be understood as typically postmodern, in its simultaneous use and abuse of traditional texts and conventions. Rather than seeing this complicity as apolitical or as a culpable co-optation of the status quo, however, Hutcheon read it as enabling an active participation in the making of cultural and social knowledge. It is important to note here that Hutcheon defined parody not as a ridiculing and comic imitation, but as a parallel and ironic counter-text: a form of imitation characterized by ironic inversion, a repetition with critical distance (Theory 5, 6). Thus parody, as a combination of “respectful homage and the ironically thumbed nose,” can offer a productive speaking-back to tradition, because this kind of textual appropriation functions both as a conservative force in its dependence on previous aesthetic forms and norms, and as a revolutionary force “capable of transformative power in creating new syntheses” (33, 20). On this telling, parodic myth, far from being divorced from contemporary social knowledge, is immersed in such knowledge to the end of reformulating and challenging it. This kind of “reconstituted” or “reinterpreted” myth is concerned for the “authentically realistic” in face of the “commonsensical,” unquestioned, and therefore hidden ideologies of received discourse. It is partly by treating myth as a construct and not as a given that recent critical literature has recognized the possibilities of this seriously parodic form of revisioning which depends on the originating myth for its power. Parodic myth provides a way of avoiding mythic absolutism: it denaturalizes tradition by opposing to it a heteroglossia that, in refusing a one-to-one correspondence of word and thing, is “authentically realistic.” Parodic myth functions by drawing on the power both of the myth behind the parody and of present-day empirical experience. In this way parodic or counter-myth can be read as a variation on Barthes’ “artificial myth” and as a specific mode of postmodern realist literature, because it unsettles conventions by confronting them with historicized reality and, in so doing, depends upon even as it transgresses the authority of its textual predecessors.

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It is an ironical commentary on and a particular manifestation of discourse as power, in the service of a contemporary social good. The consciously intertextual nature of a dependence on mythic predecessors is significant not only for the parodic project as a whole but also from the perspective of Christian faith. The post-Enlightenment debates of the nineteenth century about the historicity of miraculous events in the Bible, and specifically in the life of Christ, introduced the word “myth” to describe primitive modes of expression by cultures not yet capable of abstract conceptualization. In the mid-twentieth century an understanding of myth as implying something “unhistorical” was connected particularly with names like that of Rudolf Bultmann, in his description of the resurrection of Christ as “a mythical event, pure and simple,” by which he meant a vital subjective experience of the disciples of Christ but not an objective historical occurrence. Some scholars influenced by modern scientific materialism would then argue that such myths must be dropped, where others would hold that the hidden truth of the myth must be “demythologized,” or freed from its mythological expression. The trickle-down effect of these scholarly debates was that many orthodox believers came to associate “myth” negatively with existential, unverifiable experience; any alignment of the biblical metanarrative with myth seemed to threaten their commitment to a faith with objective historical foundations by judging their authenticating story as false.4 Of course, the word “myth” is commonly used in this dismissive sense, aligned as near as may be with superstition which the mature adult is expected to outgrow. But in fact even in conservative theological circles the notion of myth may be presented more positively, more as it has been used in much literary criticism; for instance, conservative New Testament scholar I.H. Marshall asserts, “To say that a story is a myth is not to pronounce on its historical truth or falsity; it is to say something about how it functions (just as a parable may be historical or fictional) ... The important question about a myth is whether it is valid or invalid in the point that it makes” (Marshall 450). One test of the flexible power of the biblical metanarrative, then, must surely come when its “mythology” is parodied, and when the ways in which it has been (mis)understood or misappropriated over centuries are foregrounded for scorn or ridicule. Parody is the genre of two well-regarded late-twentieth-century novels that I want to consider here: Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989) and Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984). Both novels embody the paradoxically realist power



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of parodic myth in offering a deconstruction and retelling of one of the archetypal journey narratives of the biblical story. Both novels propose and enact the passage through demystification to a particular kind of cultural knowledge – what I would call a religious sensibility for fragmented times. And I am going to argue that, in constructing such knowledge, both novels are inevitably dependent on the values of the very narrative which they subvert. Some readers may find the parodic nature of these novels troubling or even offensive to their faith. However, I want to suggest, on the one hand, that religious readers can recognize a validity to the parody by which they need not feel threatened, and, on the other hand, that nonreligious readers can recognize a validity to the underlying “mythical” narrative which should be taken seriously. If it is true that parodic myth depends on the originating story for its authority, then these novels reinforce something about that story below the surface of the parody. If it is also true that parodic myth recounts what is “authentically realistic” in response to what is ideologically bound, then the parodic surface matters deeply too.

The Secular Arks of Julian Barnes The stories in Barnes’s novel problematize from the first the central question (literally and physically in the middle of the book) of how to turn catastrophe into art. It is a tribute to the novel that other novelists have lauded the sophistication of its parodic sensibility. Joyce Carol Oates, for instance, suggests that Barnes’s play with the relationship between life and art is intended to show the porous borders between them, how “[r]eality becomes myth as ... myth becomes reality” (13). And Salman Rushdie has called this book “fiction as critique” – of received history, of accepted ideas: “the novel as footnote to history, as subversion of the given, as brilliant, elaborate doodle around the margins of what we know we think about what we think we know” (Imaginary 241). The novel opens with a jaundiced look at the archetype of the journey motif expressed in the story of Noah’s Ark. Told by “the stowaway” on the Ark, this tale is from the perspective of one who “was never chosen,” a woodworm. And so he can be, he suggests, a more reliable narrator than one of the chosen: “When I recall the Voyage, I feel no sense of obligation; gratitude puts no smear of Vaseline on the lens. My account you can trust” (History 4). Though, of course, personal disinterestedness would be only one kind of measure

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of trustworthy narration. The lens can be smeared by many factors, as A.S. Byatt pointed out in “Sugar”: a story must always negotiate the limitations of the narrator’s courage, or memory, or knowledge, or understanding, as well as the effects of an aesthetic appreciation for the power of a good yarn. In other words, a true story is always already a construct, as Barnes proceeds masterfully to demonstrate. The novel’s ten and a half chapters journey in discrete episodes through time (from biblical to medieval to Victorian to contemporary), space (from Turkey to Australia to the Amazon to the United States to Europe), and genre (thriller, sci-fi, satire, art criticism, journal, epistolary fiction), at once embracing and demystifying the construction of Western cultural mythologies across history, geography, and literature. The novel finishes in the apocalyptic dream-world of a secular and ultimately unsatisfying heaven, where the narrator can have everything he ever wanted, until he begins to discover that “getting what you want all the time is very close to not getting what you want all the time” and he is glad to wake up (307). The woodworm pops up parenthetically in picture frames, Bishop’s thrones, and boats to remind the reader of the marginalized, the untold, the Other story eating away at the canonical one. Barnes’s book seems to present itself as the quintessential postmodernist novel, parodying traditional texts, undercutting traditional boundaries, and problematizing traditional metanarrative. But the underlying affirmations of the book may suggest something different. In her review of the book, Oates calls Barnes “a quintessential humanist, it would seem, of the pre-post-modernist species”; in his monograph on Barnes, Merritt Moseley describes him as someone who “insists on the moral responsibility of art [and] who believes in good and evil” (Moseley 124). Traditional terms, not least for a realist novelist. In fact Barnes has overtly referred to himself as a moralist (McGrath 23). For in this novel there is another, more seriously parodic voice than that of the woodworm – serious in the way that Hutcheon has argued we should expect of postmodern parody. In the parenthetical half-chapter of the title, a voice which seems to be identified with that of the author himself appeals to the power of love to save us – not from history but from unhumanness: love, says this narrator, is our only hope. Not that love is “the promised land, an ark on which two might escape the Flood”; in fact “it may be an ark, but one on which anthropophagy is rife” (History 229). But even though love will most likely go wrong, it “gives us our humanity, and also our mysticism. There is more to us than us” (243). In Rushdie’s opinion,



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though he finds fault with Barnes for writing more as an essayist than a novelist on this point, Barnes’s view of love “almost saves the day ... the idea that the opposite of history is love is worth hanging on to, like a lifebelt, like a raft” (Imaginary 242). In other chapters of the book, lifebelts and rafts figure prominently. Several of the disparate stories of the novel involve a narrative that demonstrates the ark of love and its failures: the tour-guide who has to decide between his skin and his integrity, and tries but fails to keep the girl at the same time; Kath, who loves animals and freedom more than an abusive husband or a sane mind; Charlie, who even after a traumatic trip through the Amazon believes his love for Pippa to be real despite his inconstancy; Spike, whose love for God leads him into self-deception and his wife into money. Barnes’s characters do try to hang on to the lifebelt of love, with varying degrees of honesty and success. Other stories explore the dehumanizing effects of love’s absence in different types of demonization, on the journeys of various arks through the ages: the unchosen animals on the first ark, the Jewish refugees on the dispossessed liner St Louis in 1939, people from the “wrong” countries on a cruise ship in a contemporary terrorist hijacking. In different stories, Barnes takes this human tendency to divide others into those who are acceptable and those who are expendable and considers it from legal, medical, ethical, political, and indeed theological standpoints. The stories come to demonstrate the profanity of the felt need to separate passengers in the human ark into clean and unclean, even – or perhaps especially – when this is apparently for the sake of something religious. As Gregory Salyer puts it, “Whatever else Barnes may have done in this novel, it is clear that he means to eat away at our efficient categorization of life into clean and unclean, sacred and profane, true and false” (Salyer 232). Barnes always collapses the categories back into one another by appealing to an ethical base implicitly shared with his readers, and defined in that parenthetical half-chapter as love, without which the history of the world is “ridiculous [and] brutally self-important” (History 238). As a result, “this novel problematizes more than history – it problematizes the sacred. The problem of history is foregrounded, but the problem of the holy is nearly always in the background pressing to be heard” (Salyer 221). And in his modes of addressing this “problem of the holy,” Barnes is arguably articulating a religious sensibility for fragmented times. Some chapters question the notion of the saintly. This is evident not only in the dictatorial Noah, but also in the driven Jesuit priest

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who loses his life on the Amazon, in the obsessive Victorian woman explorer who sacrifices herself to a vision on Noah’s mountain, and in the astronaut who on the moon hears God’s voice telling him to find Noah’s Ark. At the same time, other chapters demonstrate the strangely flattening effect of the wholly secular: Project Ararat as merely a religious version of Project Apollo, the commercial movie adaptation of the epic missionary journey, heaven without God. Lucente argues that it is characteristic of mythic narrative to possess a privileged means of structuring and emphasizing its discourse: that of reiteration in recurrent cycles (48). A History of the World is a book obsessed with the cycles of history, their repetition with critical distance, their existence both outside of and within the consciousness of individual human actors. In the end it is the very repetition of the cycles, and not merely the individual stories themselves, that enables ethical reinterpretations to take place. The postmodernist form of this novel, in a short story sequence with interlocking thematics and genre choices speaking back to one another, itself embodies a reinterpretation of those ethical dilemmas which raise questions about faith and hope as crucial elements in the choice between competing constructions of reality, and which are manageable, though not solvable, through love. It is vitally important, too, for a consideration of the paradoxical relationship of myth to realism, that Barnes connects love with truth – in fact, he calls this “the prime connection” (243). In his parenthetical half-chapter, he writes, We all know objective truth is not obtainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some Godeyed version of what ‘really’ happened. This God-eyed version is a fake – a charming, impossible fake, like those medieval paintings which show all the stages of Christ’s Passion happening simultaneously in different parts of the picture. But while we know this, we must still believe that objective truth is obtainable; or we must believe that it is 99 per cent obtainable; or if we can’t believe this we must believe that 43 per cent objective truth is better than 41 per cent. We must do so, because if we don’t we’re lost, we fall into beguiling relativity, we value one liar’s version as much as another liar’s, we throw up our hands at the puzzle of it all, we admit that the victor has the right not just to the spoils but also to the truth. (History 243–4)



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As a secular postmodern realist’s statement of belief in the narrative of the middle space, this passage is hard to beat. Belief in as great a degree of objective truth as we can manage to believe in is a necessary step of faith against the void of relativity – and against the power plays of the one with the most cards, the most media coverage. Belief that some measure of objective truth is attainable is a shoring against our ruin: it is a salvation, without which “we’re lost” into the hands of power, rather than love. But Barnes’s analogy, the medieval painting with pictures of the various stages of Christ’s Passion all present at once, need not be read in the way the narrator reads it here – need not be seen as “fake.” Since it is most likely that the first viewers of such a painting understood how to read the painterly conventions employed to represent a sequential narrative, Barnes’s analogy can lead to a different conclusion: that there are always conventions by which what is believed to be objective truth can be presented to those who understand their conventionality. Perhaps a “God-eyed version” may take account of creaturely conventions; perhaps this is, in the end, the conclusion Barnes is wanting to draw. There is a necessary interrelationship, argues Lucente, between the ideal and the real, the mythic and the realist. The very last line of A History of the World reads, “I dreamt that I woke up. It’s the oldest dream of all, and I’ve just had it” (307). Barnes’s use at such a key point of this conventional and “timeless” concept expressed in very simple language suggests that the power of his fiction is the power of mythic archetypes resituated and reconsidered for the secular audience of the late twentieth century.

The Unholy Ark of Timothy Findley Like Barnes’s novel, Not Wanted on the Voyage is a retelling of the story of Noah’s Ark to show that “it wasn’t like that.” At first sight it is a book which seems utterly to demolish the authority of biblical myth, and instead to persuade the reader that this myth has been a construction in the service of an abusive patriarchy. Findley conflates the whole last however-many-thousand years of time and space into an anachronistically charged environment where Edwardian musichall songs coexist with pre-Christian sacrificial rites on a green hillside. Here the sinister reality is that, as Bill Ashcroft puts it, “[t]he great myth of salvation becomes a saga of destruction in the name of minority righteousness and the extension of petty power” (Ashcroft 98). God is presented, “like something out of a Hardy poem” (Keith 128), as an

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elderly, vain, lozenge-sucking Yaweh who chooses to die; his viceroy Dr Noyes, as Lorraine York attests, is a fundamentalist scientist who increasingly becomes the fascist tyrant, modelled in some quite specific ways on Hitler and combining in himself both pope and dictator (York, Front Lines 111–13). Mrs Noyes drinks too much gin, like her counterpart in medieval mystery plays, but she is given good reason to do so by her megalomaniac husband. She also plays those music-hall songs on the piano and trains the choir of sheep to sing the Latin mass; but once under the tyrannical rule of Noah on the Ark the animals lose the ability or desire to sing. And the world never reappears from under the water: Mrs Noyes prays to the sky for rain so that the ark will go on forever because anything is better than a new world under Dr Noyes. W.J. Keith has pointed out that “Findley follows Blake ... in being of the Devil’s party – and knowing it. He writes within the tradition of Romantic revolutionary myth, where energy and justice wage war from below against the despotism of a sky-god” (128). This kind of revolutionary myth is the antidote to fascism, which Ricoeur describes as the deviant “myth of absolute power” and cites as a prime reason why we must always approach myth critically (“Dialogues” 39). Findley, creating here a corrective counter-myth, is the archspokesman for anti-fascism. A number of critics (for instance, Brydon, Ingham, York) have argued that all Findley’s work is energized by an intense anti-fascist moral agenda – fascism understood not merely as a political force but also as a social, environmental, and familial poison. Fascist thinking is manifested in all that is cruel, violent, lacking in imagination, and power-hungry; it is formalized in centralized, totalizing, and hierarchical systems whose interpretation is also in the hands of those with the power. But for Findley, such monologic repressiveness is at root the product of fear: “Findley has made it clear on many occasions that he sees a darkness descending, a Dachau of the mind. The heart of this darkness (which is fascism in all its life-denying guises), the power which closes the gates, is nothing more (or less) than fear” (Ingham 54). Findley avoids an alternative “absolute myth” of positive closure in his novel, with its ending that will never end. Instead, he suggests counterforces to the poisonous fascistic tendencies of fear: community and discussion rather than hierarchical edicts, imagination and compassion rather than violent exclusion, and what Brydon rather neatly describes as a valorizing of mystery rather than mastery (Findley 78).



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Like Barnes’s novel, then, Not Wanted on the Voyage is not only a reinvention of biblical myth but also a retelling of the Holocaust story of World War II and of every other fascist outrage perpetrated on the innocent (see York, Front Lines 107). In the prologue to the novel, Findley contrasts a presentation of the Noah’s Ark voyage as an upperclass marine excursion with an account of it as the end of the world. The power relations in the oppositions between Noyes and Mrs Noyes, fire and flood, megalomania and compassion, chaos and order, invite the reader to recognize an alternative history belonging to those not wanted on the canonical voyage. The subordinated women and animals become analogues for all oppressed minorities – Jews, the handicapped, homosexuals, and any others who march to a different drum from the one beaten at the totalitarian centre. As many species of life are abandoned or deliberately annihilated in the course of the voyage, “[m]ultiple forms and possibilities of being are lost forever” (Tiffin, in Ashcroft 102). The unicorn is slaughtered, the faeries are refused entrance to the ark, the furry demons are thrown overboard. However, neat categories are what enable the functioning of Dr Noyes’s regime, and so Findley troubles them (Lamont-Stewart 22). Helen Tiffin has suggested that the “hybrid” forms of Lotte the ape-child and Lucy the androgynous angel can be read as representing a disruption of the binary system of authority (Ashcroft 103). Lucy, though not Lotte, survives Dr Noyes’s tyranny and embodies the one remaining site of supernatural power at the end of the book; Lotte persists only as the trace of guilt and fear in Dr Noyes’s psyche, perhaps even as the trace of the Other who would bring him redemption if only he would acknowledge his responsibility to her face. Thus Findley’s novel is a moral fable which uses parody to expose the perversions and abuses of power that religious myth, particularly in its character as a narrative of origins, has been made to serve (see Brydon 77). Two major areas of concern for Findley, as for Barnes, are the environment and nuclear power. But when Lorraine York describes him as writing against “the Judaeo-Christian notion of using the natural world for one’s own designs” (Front Lines 121), it is important to point out that this widely accepted formulation itself reflects a perversion of the biblical directive to humankind to exercise stewardship and care for the natural world. In the Genesis account of creation, it is God’s blessing on humankind that people should “fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over … every living thing” (Genesis 1:28–30). The implications of the word translated “subdue”

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are radically different from those of “oppress,” as the implications of the word translated “dominion” are radically different from those of “domination,” and it is to the church’s shame that, over the centuries, she has often not been able, or perhaps willing, to distinguish between the two. The notion of “subduing” involves the tempering of one part that all parts may flourish together; the notion of “dominion” involves the good ordering of the whole that each part may be freed into its own selving. York does make the point that it is in keeping with this biblical mandate to steward the world with care for Findley to suggest that human beings become “environmental Nazis” when they treat “the creatures of the earth as ‘cargo’ which is not wanted on our current technological voyage” (Front Lines 111). The Genesis account gives humanity – specifically both men and women – the responsibility to care for creation; but in the biblical narrative the gift and the blessing predate the Fall, and that fall into self-centredness twists the original mandate into a shape it was never intended to have. And so Findley shows also in the sociopolitical realm those ways in which the Judaeo-Christian myth has been twisted by the powerhungry into a justification of rampant imperialism, where might is right, and the gospel of love and respect for the other is repressed to the lower decks. Helen Tiffin, speaking as one of the first wave of postcolonial literary critics, describes how Findley “writes back” to the centre of empire by reimagining this story that is a source myth in Western civilization for “motifs of destruction and salvation – destruction of the many, salvation of the few” (Ashcroft 97–8). Tiffin argues that, by coopting the practices associated with Gayatri Spivak’s term “Othering,” Findley makes his own anti-imperialist move, and demonstrates from the “other” side how “the assumption of authority, ‘voice,’ and control of the ‘word’ [involve] seizure and control of the means of interpretation and communication” (97). But where Spivak is using the verb “to other” in a detrimental sense, Levinas would have us re-imagine such a verb responsibly, so that “othering” is not an activity of aggressive and death-dealing codification, but rather an acceptance of the life-giving responsibility to put the rights and needs of the other before my own. Findley is not interested merely in inverting the opposition of other vs. other-oppressors, but rather in troubling its distinctives into an implicit commentary on the nature of human needs and communities. Even Dr Noyes remembers fondly and sadly his happy days with his wife, and his totalitarianism is motivated at least in part by a sense of loss and of



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profound fear. The end of the novel is not the triumph of those either above or below decks, but an uneasy truce. Findley’s parody also reinstates a beneficent if limited supernatural power, a counter-mythology, in the person of Lucy/Lucifer, the wife of Ham and the drag queen of heaven. Lucy represents creativity, imagination, a questioning of conventional, codified social norms; she brings magic light into the darkness of the ark and is associated with the sweetness and communal productivity of the bees. Lucy’s ability to function in this role, however, depends upon readerly concurrence in a particular ethical paradigm, an underlying value system which honours trust, imagination, and compassion – the secularized counterparts of the more traditional religious triad of faith, hope, and love. Like Barnes, Findley is a moralist: indeed, Donna Pennee has described his novels as “moral metafiction … driven by a moral imperative to articulate counterdiscourses” (Pennee 19). Pennee calls Lucy, Mrs Noyes, and Mottyl the cat “a most unholy (indeed, antiholy) female trinity” (82), but I want to suggest that in a broader sense it is precisely in problematizing the sacred that these three reinscribe the holy, in writing the alternative text that creates the counter-myth. Findley’s meshing of myth and realism is in the service of what he himself calls “edge.” Asked by Laurie Kruk if he saw himself as a realist writer, Findley expressed a strong aversion to traditional realism: “Taken with its literary face, I would hope I’m not a realist, because a realist is probably the dullest thing you can be … [But] if by realist you actually mean an anchor in the real heart, the real spirit and the real turmoil of real life: then yes ... I want edge” (Kruk 125). He called his fiction an interpretation of reality which “clarifies the messed-up lack of cohesiveness in real life” (126). This notion of realism with “edge” has led, in Not Wanted on the Voyage, to a novel whose narrator, offering his narrative of what “really” happened, “proceeds to transpose a thoroughly fantastic story – in which God and his angels mingle with human beings in a world that contains, at least at first, faeries, demons, dragons and unicorns, as well as singing sheep and talking animals – into the discourse of realistic fiction” (LamontStewart 117). I find this comment of Linda Lamont-Stewart’s a more satisfactory description of Findley’s mythic/realist blend than that of Corinne Demousselle, who argues that the novel, “as the biblical text, is allegorical and fable-like rather than realistic, with symbolic characters and situations which perfectly convey Findley’s advocated antifascism” (Demousselle 47). Demousselle does point out that through

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the anachronisms of the book (particularly in references to the two World Wars, Edwardian songs, and astronomical discoveries) Findley prevents the reader’s simply considering the novel as fairy tale, but she still dismisses the characters as types rather than “subtle, realistic personalities.” In her confusion over the mode of discourse that Findley is employing, she does not recognize the parameters of postmodern realism, nor the parodic force of counter-myth. I was reminded here of Levinas’s comments on Maurice Blanchot: I might suggest that for Findley too, “now that the gods have left, literature lets speak and be accomplished that which is most radically non-world: the being of beings, the very presence of their disappearance” (Proper Names 131). There is something realer than real about the unicorn, the faeries, the furry demons, their demise pointing to what Findley was getting at in wanting “the real turmoil of real life.” Their magic reality speaks back to their material absence through the power of parodic counter-myth.

Parodic Myth, Religious Narrative, and Generic Subversion And can Findley’s novel, like Barnes’s, be seen as articulating a religious sensibility? Of course this depends on one’s definitions. Recently I came across an article by Harold Heie, a Christian writer concerned to map out a “moderate version of postmodernism” which negotiates a middle space between the orthodoxy of a static belief system and the supposed progressivism of a dismissal of universal truths (Heie 144). Heie works with a definition of religion adapted from one proposed by Monroe and Elizabeth Beardsley in their introductory text on philosophical thinking. Religion, in this view, is any set of beliefs providing answers to certain basic questions that all humans ask, together with the attitudes and practices determined by those beliefs: (1) What are the fundamental characteristics of human beings? (2) What are the characteristics of non-human reality of greatest significance for human life? (3) Given the nature of humanness and the universe, how should humans try to live? (4) What methodologies should we use in seeking answers to the first three questions? (143). Such a description of religion as a world view effectively deconstructs the notion of religious neutrality by assuming some kind of religious position on the part of every human being. In terms like these, Barnes’s and Findley’s parodic myths are clearly religious texts, even sacred stories, because they embody and enact a radical methodological strategy for



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addressing these first three questions about the nature of human and non-human reality and our ethical response thereto. In subverting a primary Western archetype – that of the voyage or quest – through a parodic counter-mythology, these writers require of their readers a considered assessment of the corrupt cruises of contemporary cultural and political crises. They suggest potentially more fruitful ways to navigate the human life-journey – ways that can be seen as the reimagining of a traditional trope, as much as a departure from the abusive applications of the inherited myth. And thus they are religious texts also in a more culturally specific way. David Lyon has argued that postmodernity has led to the “detraditionalization and deinstitutionalization [of] communities of memory,” so that “religious symbols and stories are … cut loose, free-floating, fluid,” reappearing as cultural resources (Disneyland 189). But the recastings of religious myth that I am exploring suggest that any reappearance as cultural resource is itself dense with cultural memory, without which the stories could not function parodically as they do. As Bakhtin has pointed out about all of language, so inherited religious stories are not, in fact, free-floating, but moored to the dock by a rope that ties them to their history and tradition, and without which their substance becomes chimerical. Language refers, as Levinas puts it, to “the positions of the one that listens and the one that speaks, that is, to the contingency of their history” (“Meaning” 36–7). By this account, language can never consist in free-floating signifiers because it is a social and dialogic and historically bound enterprise, determined by use and praxis. Both Barnes and Findley are well versed in cultural memory, and because they have been raised in the Western tradition, this means that they are well versed in the religious stories of the Judaeo-Christian heritage. Both writers evoke Western cultural history within the universalizing context of a myth whose canonicity lends the authority of the trace to their fictions. At the same time, of course, the parodic treatment of this myth deliberately raises questions about the reliability and danger of inherited modes of thought, especially when they are read as carrying the weight of religious truth. It is therefore no surprise that these two novels also meld traditional literary genres in a way that at once recognizes and subverts the ideological implications of genre. At one level, both Barnes and Findley use the conventional expectations of linearity and physical precision associated with the genre of realist travel narrative. Barnes’s novel, in proposing a history of the world, acknowledges a minimal linearity: it

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starts with the Ark and ends in heaven. A number of his stories involve detailed descriptions of boats, travelling conditions, and the material necessities of life. Findley’s novel recognizes its traditionally realist forebears in its concern with the building of the Ark and its journey as well as with the development of a community, albeit an alternative to the dysfunctional one in power. But these novels are also concerned with parodic re-presentations of generic convention. A History of the World parodically appropriates a wide generic range, including science fiction, thriller, legal case study, art criticism, and documentary, nudging the reader to recognize the different ideology and aesthetic implicit in each. Narrative authority, for instance, is traditionally of a different kind in a legal case study and a sciencefiction story. By poking fun at the sixteenth-century plaidoyers in “The Wars of Religion,” one representing the inhabitants and one representing the woodworms in a case against the woodworms’ dangerous and destructive behaviour in a local church, Barnes does not merely foreground the discrepancy between legal rhetoric and a humble, nay ridiculous, problem, but also calls into question the whole notion of objective authority and juridical proof. By setting “The Survivor” and “The Dream” in two different versions of a sci-fi otherworld, Barnes stretches the boundaries not just of science-fiction stereotypes but also of the moral imagination. There is a parallel being drawn here between the human capacity to endure suffering (Kath: her abusive husband, her readings of the environmental results of nuclear disaster) and the human capacity to endure pleasure (the dreamer: his strangely unsatisfying satisfactions, his final return to quotidian reality). What does it mean to survive, to dream, at this point in the history of the world, this point in the reader’s reading? If the survivor’s story is unreliable and the dreamer’s vision is banal, maybe there is another narrative that the reader should pay attention to – a narrative which parodies generic convention in order to draw attention to its constructedness and to push the reader into recognition of the ways in which language, story, narrative, and indeed religious myth, are always already embedded in history and psychology. Thus they must neither be read as naive realism nor be lived at what Ricoeur calls “the immediate level of myth” [my italics], but must be recognized as “mediated and opaque” and always requiring to be read with critical distance (“Dialogues” 39). In a comparable way, Not Wanted on the Voyage signals to the reader to take into consideration the generic perspectives of myth, fable, and elegy, as well as the conventional realism of the novel. The



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myth of Noah positions Findley’s story in a prehistoric time and a universalized space of meanings around survival, sanctuary, and the interventions of the divine. The fable motif, expressed most strongly through the centrality of animal characters (Mottyl, Bip and Ringer, the Unicorn), suggests a morality tale with a lesson to be learned, especially in relation to the fragility of the ecosystem and the necessary interdependence of human and animal realms. The elegiac tone of much of the novel – and in particular Mrs Noyes’s and Mottyl’s elegies for the loss of a “wonderful” and “vital” and “real” world (174, 333, 343) – prompts a lament for the passing of the cultural norms of a lost age. Clearly the story gains moral depth and weight for the significance of its implicit truth claims through its resonances with these traditionally non-realist genres. At the same time, the elements of magic realism encourage the reader to recognize the subversive power of a quasi-religious sensibility. Though the faeries are destroyed by Noah’s exclusion of them from the Ark, they have been able to give Mrs Noyes her sign of eternity by flying in a parabola, and so they pass on a kind of alternative power for the future. And Lucy, who loves but distrusts her warrior brother Michael Archangelis, counters him with her imagination and her role-play; she it is who “starts a rumour … of yet another world” (284) and who embodies hope and possibility for the underlings on the Ark. That both novels call into question the cultural frames of reference upon which they are at the same time dependent is an aspect of that reintegration of aesthetic and political spheres which is one face of the postmodern, where the demand is for an examination of art in its social relations, particularly insofar as these relations involve the power to determine others’ lives. It is significant that in neither novel is there a clear and satisfactory end to the voyage: both texts refuse closure to their readers and implicitly require instead a mediated narrative ethic, not merely of response to the other within the text, but also of response to the foregrounded “otherness” of the face of the text itself. The constructedness of the text has an ethical dimension. In calling for a recognition of their textuality as freighted and opaque, these novels call for an intelligent appropriation of their culturally subversive values into the ongoing saga of the readers’ lives. Kath, the possibly delusional woman in the chapter of Barnes’s novel called “The Survivor,” has a quasi-prophetic role: she declares that “I look at the history of the world, which they don’t seem to realize is coming to an end, and I don’t see what they see” (History 97). Can we trust a psychotic to

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know about the end of the world? On the other hand, why should we trust her keepers? In the following (central, middle) chapter the narrator argues that, like the survivors in “Scene of Shipwreck,” Gericault’s famously ambiguous painting, “[w]e are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us” (History 137). At the end of the novel, Barnes’s narrator wakes up from his banal dream of heaven knowing he must decide how to negotiate his own mortality. The reader awakes to a similar knowledge, in medias res in his or her own life, at the little death of finishing the book. In Not Wanted on the Voyage, Findley’s battered ark sails wearily on, its different factions conscious of the need to maintain their uneasy peace in order to ensure their survival. The epigraph to the novel is three lines from Phyllis Webb’s poem “Leaning,” which become resonant with the fate of planet earth and its passengers: “And you, are you still here / tilting in this stranded ark / blind and seeing in the dark.” Here is an extratextual message to the reader to be attentive to the retold myth not merely as distant mythology, but also as vital present and historicized reality. As Findley has said to his readers in another context, “Pay attention: paying attention pays off” (“Countries” 106). Thus when Pennee declares “More fiction – that’s what Lucy offers, just as Noah turns to illusion when the flood waters settle” (92), she is doing fiction a disservice. Surely Findley’s point (as Pennee’s, elsewhere in her argument) is that the writing of fiction and history shares an ontological status that must be taken very seriously because it is very powerful. Myth is a world-shaper – it opens onto other possible worlds. Narratives cause action. Stories, as Thomas King would say, are dangerous – “so you have to be careful with the stories you tell” (Truth 10). And the story of the interpretation of stories, the critical appropriation of myths in their reimagined genres and forms, requires readerly responsibility too. Hutcheon’s definition of the contemporary parodic enterprise as marking difference by the use of repetition with critical distance is useful here.5 As Findley and Barnes write counter-myth, they reveal the stifling and coercive power of the atavistic passages between myth and materiality to which Benjamin pointed, but at the same time they affirm the commitment to the positive in Benjamin’s critique of myth by using mythic forms parodically in the service of material history and social progress. In their dethroning of the “governing powers” of an ancient mythical passage, they demonstrate not merely the dangers of replicated power, but also the contemporary reality of the ethical



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battles fought in such middle spaces. Whether on the slopes of Mount Ararat when the faith runs dry, in a hospital bed when the psychologist doesn’t understand the possibilities of nuclear holocaust, in the trackless Amazon jungle when your own and your culture’s past catches up with you, or in the bowels of a reeking and swaying ark when the bears are afraid, these authors describe the spatial and temporal passageways of what I might call a mythic-realist topography – that of the struggling, historically constrained subject who is unavoidably embedded in universalizing and, ultimately, religious values. Ricoeur asserts that the very survival of myth already calls for perpetual historical interpretation with critical discrimination, that myth may be liberatory rather than exclusionary (“Dialogues” 40). And we recall Bakhtin’s declaration that distance lends to discourse not so much enchantment as authentic reality. At the same time, what Hutcheon calls the “authorized transgression” of parody is dependent on the dual drives of conservative and revolutionary forces that inherently divide it (Theory 26). In the most obvious sense, then, by bringing myth and parody together Barnes and Findley are reinterpreting, reimagining, and ironically recoding myth: they repoliticize it by historicizing and denaturalizing it in order to push their readers into paying attention to the way genre and myth work – into looking into the faces of history and taking responsibility for how they see in the present. However, the counter-mythology of Barnes and Findley still depends on a shared and largely assumed code of ethics. Neither writer allows myth to be defined merely as fate or unwilled recurrence; each shows that, as much as it can exert a sterile and confining power, parodic myth can have a genuinely fruitful religious function, in the sense of embodying and enacting fundamental questions about human identity and behaviour. This paradoxical ambivalence between conservative repetition and revolutionary difference acts as a consciousness-raising device by preventing the unconscious acceptance of a narrow ideological stance and enabling a new moral and social concern (103). Like satire, parody requires an institutionalized set of values not only in order to be understood, but even to exist. Thus both Barnes and Findley must assume basic humanistic sympathies in their readers while reappropriating and textualizing those sympathies at a distance from the myth they are repeating. Perhaps I can argue that, in Derrida’s terms, both authors are using a kind of white mythology, a metaphysics whose origin is effaced but which remains “active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible

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drawing covered over in the palimpsest” (“White” 11) – though the metaphysic here is more Levinasian than modern, assuming as primary not logic and reason, but ethics. In effect, both these rewritings of the biblical epic reinscribe a traditional value system premised on the foundational religious categories of faith, hope, and love, but reformulated in contemporary secular terms as trust, imagination, and compassion. Their revisionary mythology is inclusive of those marginalized by the West’s traditional interpretations of the canonical religious journey, and enacted in the desacralized and ironized narratives of contemporary secular sensibility.

Trickster Ethics But what about Thomas King’s parodic myth, with which this chapter began – a parody that seems not only to deconstruct the Judaeo-Christian metanarrative but also to show it trounced by a shape-shifting trickster-narrative of Native Indian provenance? Can we still argue that there is here a shared base of traditional values and ethics, when a central consideration of the fiction seems to be to embody a clash of cultural-religious norms? When Old Woman meets Young Man Walking on Water, a prissied-up version of Jesus, and gives him his comeuppance by singing to rest the waves that he cannot make still (Green Grass 349–52), is it legitimate even to look for moments of congruence between the two faith systems represented by these characters, or is this to exercise a kind of cultural imperialism all over again? Despite the humour of King’s parodic narrative, the frustration and anger of a subalternized people are not far below the surface: though the characters from Native Indian mythology may be self-absorbed or careless, or, in the case of Coyote, self-indulgent and vain, they are also amused and spirited, whereas King shows the fascism of “Christian rules” as rigid, death-dealing, self-serving, and hypocritical. There is a difference here from Findley’s subversions in Not Wanted on the Voyage, where the alternative system is set up by Lucy and Mrs Noyes from within the familial structure of the abusive system and depends on those very values of respect, community, loyalty, trust, imagination, and compassion to which a healthy understanding of the JudaeoChristian metanarrative is committed. There is a difference, too, from Barnes’s appeal to the power of love, defined very much in terms of the Western humanist tradition, and in his novel where the revalorized “other” may be animal, may be female, may be Jewish – but is never



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clearly non-white. In any case, the values of the Native Indian metanarrative as represented in King’s novel seem to be primarily inventiveness, skill at getting out of trouble, good humour, and the ever-present possibility of beginning the story over again. And yet. This is not to look closely enough at the magic real characters who inhabit not only the quotidian world of reality and the otherworld of myth, but also the metanarrative world of the storyteller and novelist: the four old Indians. What, essentially, is their motivation for action – what draws them periodically out of their hospital and launches them afresh into the world? They are motivated by a love of justice, by compassion, and by a concern to “fix up the world” on behalf of the Native Indian population. They are, in this sense, not only trickster-figures but also saviour-figures. The trait of divinity in the trickster, says David Heinimann, allows us to read him as “the postmodern postcolonial saint” who represents both play and politics, and whose role is to teach the reader “to recognize and accommodate alterity” (Heinimann 1, 3). The old Indians’ supernatural powers may be limited, they may be liable to create disasters as easily as solutions, but their hearts, as we say, are in the right place. At least they can get a John Wayne Western to tell the story from an Indian point of view – and dispatch the John Wayne character into the bargain. This scene implies, as Thomas Matchie puts it, that “fixing the world involves fixing our myths” (Matchie 157). Is there not a sense, then, in which King’s story works only if his intended readership (which is presumably not all Native Indian, given the way his book has been marketed) shares a value system, an ethic of care, with his tricksters? Like a quadrupled Good Samaritan, these trickster characters are affable and warmhearted, looking to help out people in distress where they can. Like parodic versions of the four gospel-writers, they want to take turns telling the story, and they want to get it right. The fact that they have other roles that are less easily assimilable to a Christian world view – the four Women of Native creation legend, and even the four mavericks of Western cultural iconography – does not deflect from their pivotal roles as the weavers-together of these two worlds and of the worlds of realism and myth. Indeed, their culturally specific roles in opposing worlds confer a doubled authority on their bridging project. As Babo the hospital cleaning woman says to Dr Joe Hovaugh (a.k.a. Jehovah), “Isn’t that just the trick” (406). King’s novel is tricky through and through. And I want to suggest that one final trick is to appropriate and subvert the powers of both Native Indian and Judaeo-

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Christian creation narratives, in order to appeal to readerships of both communities and beyond. First, the heteroglossic mythic source. Heinimann has argued that the salvation motif in this novel comes not from Christian ethics but from postmodern/post-colonial pluralism (Heinimann 12); I think this positioning of Christianity as one pole of a binary opposition is too simple. The novel’s ethical appeal depends upon a religiously nonspecific adherence to values of justice, compassion, and care, which transcends both Judaeo-Christian and traditional Native faith perspectives by appealing to their commonalities, and therefore downplays at the level of the overall message those differences which, at the level of the narrative particularities, create the humor and the bite of the novel. Ricoeur tells us that some Jewish exegetes describe myth as having not only a “chronicle dimension” for a specific community but also a “wisdom dimension” for all humankind (“Dialogues” 43); Levinas talks of a generalized “lay morality” which is “humanistic concern for our fellow human beings” and which “already speaks the voice of God” (Debates 76). These feelings after a common human ethic reimagined in a common human story rehistoricized are versions of what Christians call common grace. Second, the plural reader. If the trickster “embodies the turn from theory to conduct and performance” and the relationship between reader and work becomes itself the site of “trickster ethics” (Heinimann 1), then the nature of the intended audience is of paramount importance in determining what tricks to play; and, as I have suggested above, it seems clear that King is writing to multiple audiences in this novel. There are section titles and openers in untranslated Cherokee; there is an ongoing assumption of some knowledge both of Indian modes of storytelling and of First Nations creation stories. And the Indians get the last laugh at almost every point. But the book speaks to white audiences who can pick up on their own cultural and religious myths and who can laugh right along with the deconstruction and parodic reinscription of these myths. And the novel is written, after all, in English. The expectation seems to be of an educated readership with a foot in both worlds, inhabiting an uneasy middle space of Western privilege – not, perhaps, unlike Thomas King himself. Moreover, there is something else to be said about the structure of the novel. Rather as Rushdie sees in the structure of Midnight’s Children an embodying of a positive message of fecundity and renewal in contradistinction to the sterility and fragility of its central character



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Saleem, so we might suggest that the bricolage of King’s novel, so fragmented but the strands so carefully interwoven, represents a kind of harmony that the novel’s storyline often disavows. Marta Dvorak has described King’s “conjunctive strategy of intertextuality” which creates a synergetic reconstruction: “[h]e weaves separate fragments of story intricately together to form a network of convergence, demonstrating that with all our multitude of variants, we are all telling/living the same story. Bridging all rifts and fractures, T. King’s writing strains towards ‘unicity,’ one smooth continuous curve of space and time: a forever beginning and neverending story” (Dvorak 75–6). The conjunctive forces at work between centre and margin – assimilation, appropriation, acculturation – work both ways. Native culture is absorbed by white culture: Lionel wants to be John Wayne. But white culture also assimilates and appropriates Native culture: the Dead Dog Café is a tourists’ delight, in which Native people show that they too “can play the game of acculturation and win” (74). This reading downplays the problem of granting credence to any “smooth continuous curve” in a postmodern and post-colonial context, and underestimates the fracturing potential still present at the end of the novel; nevertheless, I think it is true to say that, in terms of making possible an emphasis on ethical unity across cultural diversity, the middle spaces of parodic myth enable King to have his cake and eat it too.

4

Writing with Photographs: Art, Lies, and Realist Developments Roland Barthes , Camera Lucida / Michael Ignatieff , The Russian Album / Michael Ondaatje , Running in the Family / Carol Shields , The Stone Diaries

What makes photography a strange invention – with unforeseeable consequences – is that its primary raw materials are light and time. John Berger, Another Way of Telling In a secular culture, [photographs] are the only household icons, the only objects that perform the religious function of connecting the living to the dead and of locating the identity of the living in time. Michael Ignatieff, The Russian Album In the end, the Pencil of Nature has drawn a house of mirrors. Richard Lacayo, in Time magazine

How can a picture talk ? Thus far in this exploration of the fictions of postmodern realism we have considered three oxymoronic categories of the “middle space”: historiographic metafiction, magic realism, and parodic myth. We have seen how each in its palimpsestic boundary-crossings offers specific culturally sensitive possibilities for narrative-as-ethics. Now, in this chapter, I want to look at a particular non-verbal form of storytelling, and that is photography. I am going to argue that, because photographs are both dependent on the givenness of the physical world and yet at the same time manifestly constructed, they can be read as paradigmatic of postmodern realism. In light of my discussion in the prologue of “voiceless voices” and, in the introduction, of the importance that Levinas gives to the face as the “speaking” of responsibility for ethical response, I want to consider how the faces in photographs may



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“speak.” Where might the voices be coming from, and how might the reader be expected to respond? So, first, a brief look at photographs in two novels that I’ve already considered in earlier chapters of this book. When Naomi asks the just-widowed Obasan what those letters are about, in the Japanese that she cannot read, in the file folder that she has never studied, Obasan does what she has always done: she fetches a photograph of Naomi as a toddler clinging to her mother’s leg. “Here is the best letter. This is the best time. These are the best memories,” she says (46). Rather than reveal the contents of the letter about the holocaust at Nagasaki, Obasan chooses a different kind of letter, one that can be read cheerfully; she is trying to be obedient to the request of Naomi’s dead mother, that the children never discover what really happened to her. But in the following chapter of the book, Naomi reads that cheerful photograph otherwise, demonstrating that even her happy childhood memories may be unbearably painful in light of their difference from all that follows them and their distance from the bleak present. When the longing for her childhood happiness is aroused, Naomi says, “I am drawn into a whirlpool”; all she is left with now are “[f]ragments of fragments … Segments of stories” (53). Photographic images without words or contextualization are frozen in time and cannot “see” or “speak” beyond their borders. At the beginning of the novel, when Naomi is considering the family photograph on the wall at Obasan’s house, she distinguishes between the humourless but satisfied faces in the picture, who seem to consider that “for ever and ever all is well,” and the subsequent stories that she knows, the ones that lead her to respond, “But it isn’t, of course.” For, speaking as a teacher, she says, “[e]ven my eleven-year-olds know that you can’t ‘capture life’s precious moments’, as they say in the camera ads.” Naomi goes on, in fact, to question whether even the touted happiness of her family photo is authentic: “From a few things Obasan has told me, I wonder if the Katos were ever really a happy family” (20). Later in the novel, Kogawa makes explicit the fact that, because of their vulnerability to different readings, photographs can be used for different purposes. A newspaper clipping that Aunt Emily has kept from 1945 shows the press picture of a Japanese family evacuated to the Alberta beet farms, and the caption reads “Grinning and Happy” (193). The “factual” report that follows talks about how valuable the Japanese workers have been for the beet harvest. But Naomi has an alternative factual account: “The fact is I never got used to it and I

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cannot, I cannot bear the memory. There are some nightmares from which there is no waking, only deeper and deeper sleep” (194). The hardship was so extreme that even recalling it feels to Naomi like major surgery with no anaesthetic. She describes the heat and the dirt and the cold and the utter exhaustion; she says, “‘Grinning and happy’ and all smiles standing around a pile of beets? That is one telling. It’s not how it was” (197). It is narrative that puts the reader into the dynamic position of face-to-face responsibility; without a narrative context, the story behind the photograph is hobbled because photography renders the faces within it static, flat, and impenetrable. The face for Levinas holds a kind of sacred mystery: it is the place par excellence where God leaves the trace of transcendence – but that is in the plasticity of the real. A photograph’s flatness has translated the face out of its being and into something less. And hence it needs narrative. If Obasan in this way emphasizes the hermeneutic vulnerability of photographs, in Midnight’s Children photography graphically implicates reader as well as writer in a kind of performance. For instance, Rushdie makes use of photography as a technique to problematize the notion of personal identity: the photograph does not so much reflect an identity already extant, he suggests, as lend an identity to a subject it has constructed. The matriarch Reverend Mother Naseem provides a significant counter-example: however ridiculous her identity may be, it is perhaps the least in question of that of any character in the novel – and of her there are no photographs anywhere in the world: “[s]he was not one to be trapped in anyone’s little black box” (Children 41). “Photos take away pieces of you,” the Reverend Mother contends. She tells her daughter-in-law Amina that she was very concerned when she saw Amina’s photograph in the paper with baby Saleem because “you had become so transparent I could see the writing from the other side coming right through your face.” When Amina tries to protest, Reverend Mother merely responds, “I give thanks to God you have recovered from that photography” (138). Recovery, by this definition, involves a return to opacity. But there is one photograph in this novel that the narrator Saleem specifically presents as speaking rather than silent theatrical performance (45–6). Its relationship to the subsequent narrative is instructive: not only does it suggest the political tensions of an emerging nation-state, it also foregrounds the artifice of magic and story. In this fading photograph, taken in 1942, Saleem’s father Aadam Aziz is shaking hands with Mian Abdullah, nicknamed the Hummingbird,



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once a magician in the Delhi ghetto, now the leader of the Free Islam Convocation. In the background stands the Hummingbird’s patron, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, and next to her his personal secretary, the poet Nadir Khan. All four people are suffering from what Saleem calls the “optimism disease”: they believe that the Muslim League can be overthrown and India be maintained as a non-partitioned state. This is a photograph, says Saleem, of the optimists meeting their leader. Though the scene is immobile, in Saleem’s telling it is not silent. The Rani, who is “going white in blotches, a disease which leaked into history and erupted on an enormous scale shortly after Independence,” whispers “through photographed lips that never move” that she is the victim of her cross-cultural concerns: “My skin is the outward expression of the internationalism of my spirit” (45). Whether this explanation is offered to the others in the photograph or only to the reader is unclear. But a conversation ensues, “as if between expert ventriloquists.” Nadir Khan has “hair long like a poet’s”; he confesses – to the others? to the reader? – “It’s true; I have written verses …” Mian Abdullah interrupts him to castigate the verses: “Not one rhyme in page after page!” In response to the Rani’s inquiry Nadir admits that he is a modernist. The atmosphere becomes tense, though Nadir’s interest actually seems more postmodernist than modernist in that he is concerned to democratize art so that “my poetry and – oh – the game of hit-the-spittoon are equals.” The Hummingbird, on the other hand, wants art to uplift: “it should remind us of our glorious literary heritage!” The Rani, trying to keep the peace, suggests humorously that she supply an elegant silver spittoon and set aside a room for spittoonhittery. Now the photograph “has run out of words”; Saleem notices that the Hummingbird is impatient to get away – all the time he has been staring over Aadam Aziz’s shoulder at the door beyond which “history calls.” The immediate response of Padma, the textualized naive reader, to this passage about the speaking photograph is, “What nonsense. How can a picture talk?” (46). Of course it is no surprise to the more sophisticated and distanced reader of the text of Midnight’s Children that the writer should choose to put words into the mouths of characters created photographically, since by definition he all the time puts words into the mouths of characters (including Padma) whom he creates verbally. Thus Saleem renders the relationship of the reader to these flat photographic faces a dynamic one. But it is worth considering why the narrative composed by these words concerns itself primarily with

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aesthetics rather than politics, in this photograph of an ostensibly political occasion. Several answers suggest themselves, all of them related to Saleem’s role as the producer of the text. First, it is with Nadir Khan that Saleem is particularly concerned, since Nadir will be Saleem’s mother’s first husband – and Nadir is a poet. Second, Saleem is less concerned with the Hummingbird himself than with his origins in the magicians’ ghetto. Even in a still photograph, the ex-conjurer can swallow a hand, and in the theatre of politics as much as of entertainment, the art of illusion is central. But third, we are made aware of the particular effect Rushdie achieves by asking the reader to consider the photograph as a construct, as in itself a kind of visual literature, stilled but speaking, interpreted according to the needs and interests of the writer who is reading it. Because of the self-conscious performance of the writing surrounding this photograph, the image is paradigmatic of that playing with aesthetic distance and that emphasis on frame and the construction of the subject which have been taken to be hallmarks of postmodernism. It parodies a traditional understanding of mimesis; it refuses the viewer/reader the security of transparent reference, even suggesting in the news photo of Amina where the words are showing through her that transparency is a mistaken goal, and foregrounds instead the notions of artifice and the inevitability of interpretation.

Another Way of Telling This chapter tells the story of a particular aspect of my own readerly development over a period of years, long before the genesis of this book. Underlying the chapter is a tacit documentation of my move, in relation to photographic text, from a naive reader who believed in simple mimetic realism, to a more sophisticated postmodern reader who recognized the complex manipulative artistry inherent in the photographic, to what I have been describing in the context of this book as a postmodern realist reader, one who holds together the relation to the real and the relations of the construct within the same text. As a site of postmodern realist reference, the photograph becomes a peculiarly resonant focus of ethical issues. Partly for that reason, I have made a specific choice about the kind of photographic co-optation I will be considering in the rest of this chapter. The photographs that I discussed above, from Obasan and Midnight’s Children, are dependent, like photographic representations in many other novels, on their



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verbal transmission for the reader to “see” them at all: that is to say, these photographs have already been translated into language and are not visually available for the reader’s interpretation. By contrast, the photographs I want to examine in the rest of this chapter are physically present in the text. This creates a different, and differently mediated, relationship between photograph and reader and raises different, though not less complex, hermeneutical questions, as I shall suggest below.1 One of the strangely powerful things about a photograph is that it witnesses simultaneously to its subject’s reality in time and to its absence. Photography in contemporary literature is often used as a trope for some kind of absent presence; photographic theory encourages a consideration not only of issues of presence and absence, but also of frame, and focus, and manipulation. In fact, it becomes clear that the photo can be appropriated equally by, for instance, the realist, the modernist, and the postmodernist and will then be interpreted accordingly. In the title to this chapter, the “art” is shorthand for a modernist approach – the notion that a photograph can be an art object, stilled and timeless; the “lies” for a postmodern approach – the notion that a photograph is a constructed and manipulated image; and the phrase “realist developments” points both to the traditional notion that a photograph is mimetic of, developed from, the actual world, and also to a developing awareness that realism as a category is a good deal more problematic and more subtle than it is commonly thought to be. On first consideration, postmodern realism and photography might seem to be strange bedfellows. But in fact several of the most significant recent theorists of photography, while affirming the dependence of photographs on the givens of physical reality, do at one and the same time recognize their constructedness. John Berger, for instance, develops a Marxist materialist analysis of photography, which he understands as “another way of telling” that “completes the half-language of appearances” by recontextualizing experience (Another Way 93). And Roland Barthes, grieving the loss of his mother in his final book, Camera Lucida (1981), turns away from his earlier embrace of an endless deferral of textual reference and toward photography as “authentication itself,” a “certificate of presence,” and a “magic, not an art.” In these differing heuristic formulations, both Berger and Barthes demonstrate that the co-optation of photographs into postmodern realist fictions can be read as paradigmatic of a recognition of the “givenness”

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of the empirical world alongside the necessarily provisional nature of our constructions of it. And so, in the rest of this chapter, rather than giving a history of photographic development and then considering some novelistic texts in light of that history, I want to look at photographic theory specifically as it is illuminated by photographic praxis in three memoirs and a novel.

Three Memoirs In a consideration of three writers who used photography in memoirs published in the 1980s, the differences between their modes of realism become readily apparent. The first text that I want to consider, and perhaps the key in this context, is Barthes’ Camera Lucida, ostensibly a book of photographic theory. The second is The Russian Album (1987), apparently a history book, but more truly an exploration by Michael Ignatieff of the relationship between ancestral roots and the construction of the self. And the third is Running in the Family (1982), a book which consistently refuses to be categorized on either side of the binary of biography and fiction, Michael Ondaatje’s running into and away from the images that haunt his childhood. Of course when a writer’s desire is to rediscover family history, the photograph offers itself as a kind of elegiac witness to the previous generation. All three writers make journeys into family history, and all three turn to photographs as testimony, but the differences in the way they use them are indicative of the differences in the way they understand the past, their roles as writers, and the nature of the real. I would describe Barthes as a postmodern realist, to use again that interesting category of the middle space which, more than any other, makes us think again about categories; Ignatieff as a modernist who talks like a postmodernist about constructing the self but uses photography as traditional realist reference; and Ondaaatje as a performative postmodernist whose photos seem sometimes to be modernist art objects. I want to suggest first that Barthes can be read, in Camera Lucida, as one of the most interesting formulators and exponents of the mode of magic realism. When Barthes’ mother died, not much more than a year before Barthes’ own death, his interest in the semiotics of photography dramatically intensified. He pointed to the belief that photographs can testify to the certainty of what-has-been: they witness to a subject’s reality in time as well as its absence. Barthes says in Camera Lucida, “No writing can give me this certainty. It is the misfortune (but also



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perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself ... language is, by nature, fictional … the Photograph is … authentication itself” (85–7). Barthes speaks of the photograph as “a certificate of presence,” not merely an image but “reality in a past state” (87, 82); he argues, therefore, that “[t]he realists, of whom I am one …, do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art” (88, italics in original). If Barthes is a realist, it is clear that the category of “realism” as traditionally understood must undergo some seismic shifts. He argues that because the photo is impenetrable – pace Reverend Mother Naseem, there is nothing under its skin, as it were, nothing on the other side – it is also “the arrest of interpretation”: “It is in proportion to its certainty that I can say nothing” (107, italics in original). Barthes’ characteristic emphasis on jouissance appears here in what he calls the “photographic ecstasy,” which for him involves not interpreting the photograph, but confronting in it “the wakening of intractable reality” (119, italics in original). He argues that what a photograph shows cannot be spoken, put into words; in fact, Barthes asserts in an earlier essay that every attempt to “speak” the photograph through caption or commentary will involve the addition of a connotative message that in effect “tames” the image into compliance with itself (“The Photographic Message” 198). When you read a photograph through its caption, if there is a caption, you most likely see what you are told to see. But the most significant reading of a photograph is strictly personal: it involves not the cultural coding of the image but its subjective wounding – the punctum, or puncturing, by a detail or a moment of time, which pushes the individual reader’s response beyond the frame of the picture into a “blind field” where desire goes “beyond what [the image] permits us to see” (Camera 57, 59). Barthes thus escapes from the frame of cultural coding by an appeal to the “absolute subjectivity” of the spectator’s private response (55). This is the kind of subjective wounding which the narrator recognizes as lacking in the public photographic narrative of Obasan. Barthes calls photography “flat Death” (92, italics in original). It does not in itself actually call up the past; it merely attests that the past existed (82). The only way to overcome its flatness is less by some linguistic addition than by the punctum of desire. This kind of subjective response brings the viewer to pass “beyond the unreality of the thing represented” and to enter “crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into [his] arms what is dead, what is going to die”(117).

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Barthes describes this behaviour, an echo of Nietszche’s crazed response to the dying horse in the street, as “profound madness” (13). He says the photograph is “a mad image, chafed by reality,” because it is a “temporal hallucination” (115). Here, then, is a kind of magic realism: photography as “a magic, not an art” – light-writing, not human writing – writing outside rationality, writing that escapes the network of coded language. The philosopher Mary Bittner Wiseman argues that Barthes is showing how this light-writing can prove past existence but not present existence: thus “the photograph transgresses the customary association of the real with the present” (147). In finding a photograph which captures both the reality and the truth of his mother Barthes can resurrect her, can resolve death in a “treasury of rays” (Camera 82), because the photograph as effigy reaches “that crazy point where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being” (113). So Barthes’ photographic quest in Camera Lucida is selfconsciously sentimental: he is searching for the mother who was real but who is absent. His challenge to the reader, and it is an ethical challenge, is to accept the absence of image, to comply with exclusion from relationship, in respecting the private punctum of the writer. If we were to play with a Levinasian formulation here, we might say that the face must be withheld in order that we may not “kill” it by misinterpretation. Thus, a book to which one comes initially anticipating clarity and lucidity becomes in the event a book that refuses to the reader the covenant of readerly fraternity. Here the face-to-face responsibility “transgresses the customary association” of reading with discovery: the reader’s discovery here is precisely that he or she cannot dis-cover the secret at the heart of the book – and indeed is asked not to try. In his book, Michael Ignatieff is doing something apparently parallel but in fact epistemologically quite different, as he writes his own identity. In a mode reminiscent of Ricoeur, he writes, “For someone like myself in the second generation of an émigré tradition, the past has become the story we write to give weight and direction to the accident and contingency of our lives” (Album 8). He is a historian who nevertheless suggests that history has “less authority than memory” because, unlike the narrative of memory, a factual history cannot meet our “need for belonging”; “[o]ur knowledge of the past cannot satisfy our desire for the past. What we can know about the past and what we want from it are two different things” (5). At the same time, Ignatieff distrusts fiction. In The Russian Album, he is ostensibly writing the story of his Russian grandparents: Count Paul Ignatieff, the last



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Minister of Education in the cabinet of Tsar Nicholas II, and his wife Countess Natasha, who was raised on a vast estate given to her family by Catherine the Great. His sources are Paul’s memoirs, Natasha’s personal reminiscences, conversations with Paul’s children, who are Michael’s father and uncles, and the family photograph album. As historian, Ignatieff says, he owes his grandparents “fidelity to the truth of the lives they had led. Fiction would have been a betrayal” (16). But historical facts are not enough. He is attracted to the photograph because of what he calls its “acute physical tactility,” which testifies to an objective reality (4). But he also understands the photograph as symbolic of the irony inherent in historical narrative: in both the photograph and historical narrative, the more present the past is made to seem, the more aware we are of its distance from us. The book opens with a meditation on photography. In a century which “has made … rootedness the exception” and where connectedness with one’s own past selves is problematic, let alone connectedness with one’s ancestors, photographs are for many families, he says, “the only objects that perform the religious function of connecting the living to the dead and of locating the identity of the living in time” (1–2). This means that photographs are significant both in the historian’s quest for fidelity and in the individual’s quest for identity. However, Ignatieff distinguishes quite specifically between the value of photographs and the value of memory. Despite the “shock” of encounter with photography’s intransigent images, he argues that photographs can document only the distance between present and past – “they cannot bind past and present together with meaning” (5). Memory is integrative, photography is disjunctive. Memory integrates time, creates a mythology within which the self is constantly reimagined, but the photograph may subvert this continuity by presenting disjunctive fragments which “remind us how discontinuous our lives actually are. It is in a tight weave of forgetting and selective remembering that a continuous self is knitted together” (6). When Ignatieff asserts that “[m]emory heals the scars of time. Photography documents the wounds” (7), his comments resonate with Barthes’ contention that the photograph blocks memory by becoming a counter-memory which “fills the sight by force” and allows nothing to be “refused or transformed” (Camera 91, italics in original). Ignatieff wants to “stay close to the initial shock of [his] encounter with [his grandparents’] photographs: that sense that they were both present to [him] in all their dense physical actuality and as distant as stars” (Album 16); but his desire to “preserve memory” will be met through

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writing. Barthes searches for his mother’s essential self, and finds her, but denies us access – tells us that access is phenomenologically impossible. Ignatieff searches out his grandparents’ lives, and tells them, narrates them for his children. What is fascinating, then, is that though he is attracted to the excess of photography, its tactility and intransigence, his memoir must bring about what Barthes would call a “taming” of photographs. The most obvious sense in which this is true is that he incorporates the photographs in the time-honoured way, in the middle of the book, with captions, in a carefully controlled linear narrative. Michael Ondaatje, in a third genus of memoir, specifically sets out in Running in the Family to write fiction, which he claims to find more truth-telling than attempts at fact. In the final acknowledgments of his book, Ondaatje thanks a number of relatives, friends, and colleagues for the raw material of his narrative, and then adds this: “While all these names may give an air of authenticity, I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or ‘gesture.’ And if those listed above disapprove of the fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts” (Running 206). For Ondaatje, fiction and authentication are not in opposition to one another. His book is the result of travels back to Ceylon where he went spurred by the “bright bone of a dream” about his father (21). He sets out to return to the family he had grown away from: he calls them “those relations from my parents’ generation who stood in my memory like frozen opera. I wanted to touch them into words” (22). And he sees photography as another kind of fiction. So he allows the photographs in his book to sustain heteroglossic, plural meanings, in the same way that his written fiction will do. The photographs that open each main section of his text are untitled except insofar as the sections themselves are titled; they have no captions and are only sometimes referred to specifically in the narrative. Ondaatje’s photographs are paradigmatic of what he is doing in a fictional memoir: they exceed explanation, they silently dramatize impossible contingencies. Like Barthes, Ondaatje refuses to tame his images with words. A particularly telling example of this photographic excess is found in the fourth section of Running in the Family, which is called “Eclipse Plumage” (Running 103). The section opens on a group photograph that, several pages later, the reader concludes must be that of a fancydress party in the 1920s which included Aunt Dolly and Michael Ondaatje’s grandmother, the infamous Lalla. This photograph has, Ondaatje says, “moved tangible, palpable, into [Aunt Dolly’s] brain,



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the way memory invades the present in those who are old” (112). Even when Dolly can no longer see it, the photo here is thus equatable with memory, and not distinct from it, as it would be for Ignatieff. Dolly knows the expression of everyone in the picture – and what is particularly significant for Ondaatje’s purposes is that they are all acting. The world Ondaatje is discovering is one of plumage – wild disguises, heady games – long since discarded, “eclipsed,” but never forgotten. Earlier he has been unsettled that the ubiquitous rumours, scandals, and far-fetched stories associated with his family imply a lack of intimate knowledge by them or about them. Here he finds that kind of intimacy, in the way an elderly aunt claims mental ownership of a showy photograph; here, then, is also the suggestion that theatricality may not be a barrier to intimacy so much as one avenue to it. Because the photograph has authority for Dolly, it acts as a catalyst between the factual world of everyday and the fantasy world of magic: the photograph represents the reality of those people in their mystery, as if their fancy dress were only one degree more theatrical than the dress each person clothes him- or herself in, physically and psychologically, each day. So the photograph becomes less an inaccessible secret or an evidential document than a trope for theatre, understood as a dynamic and playful version of control which always recognizes its own duplicity. The notion of the theatrical is important for Barthes’ view of photography too. He says specifically that he sees the photograph as “a kind of primitive theater” which makes meaning by assuming a mask – in fact, the meaning is the mask (Camera 32, 34). He gives the example of “the portrait of William Casby, photographed by Avedon: the essence of slavery is here laid bare” (34; photo, 35). In calling the photograph a “temporal hallucination” he likens it to a “Tableau Vivant” where the photographer produces a kind of death even while trying to preserve life (91–2, italics in original). In this sense the photograph “always contains [the] imperious sign of my future death” (97): it turns the subject into an object, a “specter,” and the “Total-Image” can be equated with “Death in person” (14). But for Barthes photographs can overcome death by being entered subjectively; their theatrical nature as signs of death can be deferred by the supplement, the punctum, of individual response. Barthes’ use of the trope of theatre is, then, to do with the cultural coding of the photograph rather than its essence. What he calls the “weight” of the image can actually be erased by “extreme love” (12) – like that, for instance, between mother and

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son. Without the punctum of love, however, images are problematic for Barthes, in a way they are not for Ondaatje with his more dynamic conception of theatre. Barthes sees images as potentially dangerous insofar as they block authentic engagement and prevent unmediated desire; in a series of comments that resonate with his critique of contemporary mythologies, Barthes argues that we live in a society of the “generalized image-repertoire” where “the human world of conflicts and desires” is “completely de-realize[d] … under cover of illustrating it” (118–19). Ignatieff is suspicious of images in a more traditional sense. I have already suggested that, given Ignatieff’s comments about the intransigent power of photography but its need of words to give meaning, one might expect his book to show at least some ambivalence in its approach to the photographs he includes. But not at all. In practice, he gives definitive interpretations of every photograph he either mentions or reproduces in the text. The effect of these interpretive interventions is that, as often as not, the “shock of encounter” one experiences is actually the shock of disjunction between the various possible interpretations of the image that one might think of and the monologic meaning that Ignatieff has unequivocally decided on. For example, Ignatieff interprets a photograph of Paul aged two with his mother (Album 112c) as showing how they characteristically shrink from the public gaze, and how they had from the beginning that “closed circle” of devotion which Paul was to return to at moments of crisis in his life (46). The pattern-maker is also at work when he interprets snapshots taken of Paul by the Ignatieff governess Peggy Meadowcroft as evidence that “she conceived a hopeless and embittering passion for him which helps to explain the frustration behind her ferocious regime” (155). There are photographs taken by Peggy on an Easter holiday in the Scilly Isles in 1922 or 1923, and Ignatieff writes that “Paul’s seductive and elusive smile beams out at Peggy … She held on to those pictures till the end of her life” (156). But people do, after all, customarily hold on to photographs: that is their raison d’être. Earlier in the book Ignatieff himself has explained why they are carefully kept, for reasons little to do with romance. And as for the “elusive smile” – we are none of us strangers to the artifice of saying “cheese.” These photographs of Peggy’s are not reproduced in the text, so that we become suspicious of their interpretation only because we see Ignatieff’s “taming” at work elsewhere. For instance, in relation to another of Peggy’s pictures – a photograph of Paul with a file of



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convalescent soldiers at Kroupodernitsa, his mother’s home in the Ukraine, in 1915 (112g, bottom) – Ignatieff writes that Paul “is wearing a tail coat, striped pants, wing collar and tie, with an astrakhan perched jauntily on the back of his head. He is standing at attention with his hands down the creases of his trousers. He is smiling. Beside him stand the soldiers, one on crutches, another with a bandaged arm, another with the white gauze of a dressing showing at the neck. They are not smiling” (99). Here the “shock of encounter” is quite pronounced. In the photograph, all the soldiers are standing to attention, at least in as leisurely a way as Paul is doing. There are several without obvious wounds, as well as the ones with bandages. It is true that they are not smiling broadly, but nor do they look particularly somber. We may deduce that Ignatieff has read into the picture a specific meaning which suits his understanding of Paul’s character and the pattern of his narrative. In other words, he has tamed the photo. Importantly, Ignatieff is aware that his historian’s obligation to keep faith with the future by transmitting the memories of the past is at odds with a personal need in him. He says that, while his grandfather’s identity was a matter of an inherited and unquestioned destiny, his own is “a matter of choosing the words I put on a page” (9). From the outset, then, this project of finding out about the past is a question of composing and choosing the self. This strongly control-oriented approach leads Ignatieff to write a book in which the composition of self and the compilation of history are at times antagonistic to one another. He himself points out that memory is multi-faceted and often not reducible to a single narrative – “Even today the brothers still argue heatedly about some things and I could not hope to establish who was right” (15). But his personal need for a united and linear history overrides his awareness of the existence of such irreconcilables. So his authoritative treatment of the photographs is actually symptomatic of his treatment of his material as a whole. He is the philosophical modernist who needs to create unambiguous and monologic meaning and purpose through turning his life into a work of art. The implication is that the reader’s response should justly be to comply with Ignatieff’s narrative. Thus, Ignatieff’s theories about photography are largely subverted by his practice in using photographs. Ondaatje, on the other hand, is consciously subversive with the photographs he includes. Much more interested in the heteroglossic than the univocal, he seems to give up authorial control to other voices and to strange images. Ondaatje wants

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to be the teller of the “well-told lie,” and so a consciously manipulative approach to his material is essential. We might consider, for instance, what Ondaatje makes of the photograph he has been “waiting for all [his] life,” the only photograph he has found of his mother and father together (Running 161). Ondaatje’s photograph introduces the penultimate chapter, “What We Think of Married Life,” and it shows Mervyn and Doris on their honeymoon, making crazy faces for the camera (163). Ondaatje says he takes it as evidence that “they were absolutely perfect for each other,” as “hams of a very superior sort” in their own private theatre (162). The context of this photograph is important in giving it a voice. The immediately preceding story is “partly about the way the camera can be made to lie” (Draper 20). And the immediately following section, set on a tea plantation a hundred miles from Colombo where Ondaatje’s half-sister Susan lives, concludes, “This is the colour of landscape, this is the silence, that surrounded my parents’ marriage” (167). Though they shared a code of humour, Ondaatje’s parents were also profoundly unalike in that, as a defence against the world, his mother typically used theatricality while his father used reserve. It is in an uncaptioned photograph like this one that the meeting of the theatrical and the unspoken is most powerfully enacted. The invitation to the reader is to generosity, but also to a dynamic engagement with the image, with the face-to-face responsibility it presents, rather than to confirm a closed authorial reading. For Barthes, the most powerful image is one he does not give to us. It makes of course a startling and pointed statement, in a book full of photographs, a book about photographs, that the one photograph he has been looking for is one he does not reproduce. He has been looking at all kinds of photographs, alone in the apartment where his mother died. He is “looking for the truth of the face I had loved” (Camera 67). And he finds it in a photograph of his mother as a child – a faded photograph where he rediscovers “the figure of a sovereign innocence,” the photographic pose transformed into “that untenable paradox which she had nonetheless maintained all her life: the assertion of a gentleness” (69, italics in original). This photograph achieved for him “the impossible science of the unique being” (71, italics in original); and he does not show it to us because “[i]t exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’; it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science … at most it would interest your studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound” (73, italics



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in original). In other words, its mode of existence for us would be different – it would, perhaps, be just history, or just theatrical spectacle. The silence that Barthes therefore chooses is the silence of absence. He has said earlier that “[a]bsolute subjectivity is achieved only in a state, an effort, of silence (shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence)” (55). In the Winter Garden portrait of his mother as a child, the photographer has caught his mother’s “air,” the expression of her truth: “All the photographs of my mother which I was looking through were a little like so many masks; at the last, suddenly the mask vanished: there remained a soul, ageless but not timeless, since this air was the person I used to see, consubstantial with her face, each day of her long life” (109–10). Barthes is engaged in what he calls a “science” which is subjective specifically to him; and at the most profound moments it is, therefore, a kind of transcendent intimacy in which we cannot share.2 As one might expect, Ignatieff is more aware of what he considers to be the partial nature of the photographic image than its pregnant silence or its private wound. He feels a constant need to supply that verbal “taming into compliance.” For instance, Peggy’s happy snapshots of the children in Petrograd have to be melodramatically contextualized: “Everyone smiles easily: only the light – of autumn 1916 – is dark behind” (Album 103). Ignatieff often refers to the light in his photographs; Ondaatje equally often refers to the importance of shadow. His is an underworld to Ignatieff’s marked and lighted road; Ignatieff writes to keep back the darkness, whereas for Ondaatje, the romantic postmodern, many of his seminal ideas belong to the dusk or the night. And for Barthes, it is the light itself which writes impenetrably, producing the photographic image that is “unrevealed yet manifest” (Blanchot, quoted in Camera 106) – the inaccessible, external product of “camera lucida,” not the dark passage of “camera obscura.” So it is no surprise when Ignatieff interprets the last photograph of his book into the closure of a traditional realist ending. The photograph shows Paul and Natasha in old age. It is taken in the winter of 1944, in Upper Melbourne, Quebec, where they have settled into their new life of exile (Album 112j). Looking at it impartially through Barthes’ studium of historical perspective, we might see here two dignified elderly people standing close together. But for Ignatieff this photograph is shot through with past tensions and future dreariness. He describes Natasha’s smile as quizzical; he refers to her stance as awkward, like that of a shy girl, and to the way Paul is standing a fraction

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apart from her, elegant as ever, and still not smiling. He points out that both Natasha and Paul are wearing slippers in the snow. “Spring is months off; the darkness will soon close about the house. It is the last picture in the album” (165). Interestingly, it is a picture that for the first time elicits an explicit personal response from Ignatieff. He wants to walk up the path to the house with his grandparents, and help them in, to sit with them by the fire. But this is less a moment of emotional communion than of a recognition of otherness. Though they cannot bequeath Ignatieff’s identity to him, they have kept faith with him: “These strangers are dear to me not because their lives contain the secret of my own, but because they saved their memory for my sake” (185). In his turn, Ignatieff has written to save their memory for the sake of his children. “I want to leave the road marked and lighted, so that they can travel into the darkness ahead, as I do, sure of the road behind” (185). Not for Ignatieff any notion that the way the face “speaks” might be valuably heteroglossic, nor that the responsibility it imposes on the reader might be dynamic and self-reflexive. His confidence rests upon his having shaped and patterned the past into that single “road behind,” with photographs along the way giving assurance of past reality. The final chapter of Running in the Family contains both a recognition of otherness and also a profound moment of communion. It opens with the most sustainedly elegiac piece in the whole book: Ondaatje intimately imagines one of Mervyn’s drunken nights after Doris has left him. Finally Ondaatje says of him, “There is so much to know and we can only guess. Guess around him … he is still one of those books we long to read whose pages remain uncut” (Running 200). The aloneness of the father is an experience common also to the son, alone at the end of the book. He has stumbled on an emotional communion with his father and with his own childhood. Mervyn thought it was objects that had stayed and people who had disappeared, in his life. The photograph at the head of this final chapter has stayed: not actually a picture of Mervyn but of four children – Michael Ondaatje and his brother and sisters, presumably – playing in the pool in front of the white sheet of a waterfall. And it is true that the water, as an element of flux in continuance, is presumably still there now that the children have grown. But, of course, Ondaatje’s rediscovery of his father gives the lie to Mervyn’s conclusion anyway. People have not, after all, abandoned him. A new book of his life has been opened. The reading experience, then, is one in which Ondaatje’s taking the risk of polysemeity gives to



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the reader the gift of response and responsibility for the other, and a renewed sense of hope and possibility – of escape beyond the frame. Barthes’ last photograph in Camera Lucida is, predictably, impenetrable. If a photograph catches the subject’s air, it is as if it has caught “an aim without a target” (Camera 111). “That lower-class boy who holds a newborn puppy against his cheek (Kertesz, 1928), looks into the lens with his sad, jealous, fearful eyes: what pitiable, lacerating pensiveness! In fact, he is looking at nothing; he retains within himself his love and his fear; that is the Look” (113, italics in original). This is how the photograph “separates attention from perception” (111) and yields up only attention – the boy can look without seeing; his look is held back by something interior. Such a photograph has nothing to do with communication and everything to do with hallucination: as spectators, we are affected (and therefore guaranteed the boy’s being) or the magic is insignificant, in the literal sense that it does not signify. Barthes can take this risk with a picture of an unknown boy in a way that he cannot take the risk with a picture of his mother. Will there be a punctum beyond the frame of the picture? Or will we tame it, by making it into a work of art, or turning it into a generalized image? These are the two ways in which Barthes sees photography as tameable: the modern and the public postmodern. By refusing both he accepts the madness, the “intractable reality” of the photograph – the what-has-been. “Tame” photography has only relative realism, “tempered by aesthetic or empirical habits” and subjected to “the civilized code of perfect illusions”; “mad” photography allows the realism to be “absolute” by “obliging the loving and terrified consciousness to return to the very letter of Time” (119). In this is the photographic ecstasy. And in the end we see that the physical presentation of these photos is symptomatic of the writers’ understanding of the nature of narrative and the nature of the real. Ignatieff binds all his photographs together in the centre of his text and captions them carefully. He uses them strictly as illustrative material to support a thesis substantially proposed in the memoirs of his grandmother. Ondaatje’s photographs are uncaptioned; they function as alternative fictions, parallel to and commenting upon the text, and inviting the reader to enter the play. Barthes’ photographs have citations from his text as well as identifying captions, but they are presented less as specimens than as certificates, less tamed by language than foreign to it, more authentic than it, outside of its codes. Ignatieff’s image for his narrative is a road, Ondaatje’s a theatre, Barthes’ a quest. The historian uses each photograph as a

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signpost; the poet sees each one as a theatrical performance, concealing and revealing a silent melodrama; the theorist of desire on his courtly quest to rescue the maiden (his mother as a child) is wounded by the photograph, which has the magic of “a new being, really: a reality one can no longer touch” (Camera 87). Or I could put it this way: each writer chooses that reading of photography which best satisfies his desire. Barthes’ “afterword” to his parodic autobiography Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) says, “On écrit avec son désir, et je n’en finis pas de désirer” – “One writes with his desire, and I am not done with desiring.” The ascription to photography of “intractable reality” is as great a need for him, in coming to terms with his mother’s death, as Ignatieff’s need for a clear road and Ondaatje’s need for a colourful and dramatic re-presentation of his family. Ignatieff’s lighted road charts the modernist desire for meaning and order, what he himself calls a “desire to master time’s losses” (Album 5). Ondaatje’s theatre of tricks and disguises is a performance in which Ondaatje finds himself: his is the postmodernist play of fiction as substance. Barthes’ scientific-subjective quest is postmodernist too, in its elision of genres, its decentring of the subject, its fragmentary and reflexive structuration; but it is also a quest for authentication, for the real, and an identification of magic. That is why I see Barthes as a postmodern realist in this text, indeed a magic realist – it is no longer the present subject that can be certified as the real, but the past one, through its patterning of light and through the magic traces of a different kind of language, written without human hands. The present is certifiable only in the future, by magic, or by the utter subjectivity of love. Thus the photograph can serve as art, as lies, and as realism, and writing with photographs can be developed under much more variable conditions than I in my initial naïveté had supposed.

A Novel: The Mad and the Tame in Photographic Play The fourth text that I want to discuss plays with photographs in a way that none of the previous three would countenance: it uses photographs completely fictively, separating their reality-in-time from the subjects that they initially authenticated. The question I want to address is whether such a use of these writings created by light and time has “unforeseeable consequences,” to borrow a phrase from John Berger, and, if so, of what kind. Could such a treatment of the photographic



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image, in erasing what Berger calls “the social function of subjectivity” represented there, even be called unethical? The British critic Valentine Cunningham, whom I mentioned in the prologue, proposes that photos of real persons and places intended as illustrations of fictions always belong to the middle space, because they show “what Roland Barthes very properly comes around to at the end of his (and his mother’s) life: namely, the intermediate nature of signs and texts, poised between reference inwards and outwards, always stuck with and between words and the world – nothing less than the troublingly dual textuality of narratives” (Gaol 93–4). It is Berger, however, who points out the important distinction to be made between photographic and other kinds of text. The photograph, he says, has “another way of telling” which requires contextualization in order to mean fully. The presentation of the appearance of a disconnected instant “can only acquire meaning insofar as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself” (Another Way 89). He argues that the photograph offers irrefutable evidence about existence but says nothing about its significance: “At one level there are no photographs which can be denied. All photographs have the status of fact. What has to be examined is in what way photography can and cannot give meaning to facts” (98). Berger differentiates between private photographs, which contribute to a living memory because they are read in a context continuous with that from which the camera removed them, and are thus still surrounded by meaning, and public photographs, which have nothing to do with their readers or with the original meaning of the event, and are therefore vulnerable to arbitrary use (About Looking 52–3). In Berger’s opinion, a recognition of the photograph’s dual nature as both reference and artifice is the prerequisite for responsible photographic practice. Carol Shields’s 1993 novel The Stone Diaries could be said to take as its subject the “troublingly dual textuality” that Cunningham describes, but playfully to blur this dual nature of the photograph in order to illustrate a particular epistemological position. The curious thing that might first strike a casual browser of this novel is that it has a centrefold section of photographs at all. Biography, then, the reader assumes. Or history, at least. But no, apparently not: this is fiction – winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in Canada in 1993, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the United Kingdom, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the United States in 1995. Despite the fact that there is a detailed family tree at the opening to the

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book, despite the fact that the character whose thoughts and memories apparently constitute most of the book is carefully framed with historical reference, this book is not in any traditional sense biography. Who, then, are the people in the photographs? And why are the photographs there at all? Our initial response to the discovery that the people in the carefully captioned photographs are not – indeed, cannot be – who they say they are, might be to smile and applaud Shields’s clever extralinguistic ploy to encourage the reader to believe in her fictional characters. A considered response, however, is more complex. If they are not who the book says they are, who are they? And how might those original subjects feel about their identification in this high-handed way with the not always admirable characters of a fictional tale? Moreover, why has Shields provided photographs of some extremely minor characters and not of other characters absolutely central to the story? Why do some major characters appear only in baby shots? And why are several photographs that are carefully described in the text not reproduced in the centrefold? And then again, since there are a number of very significant places and landmarks described in the novel, and described even as having appeared photographically in the press of the time, why are there no photographs of these places and landmarks reproduced for the reader? Pragmatically, we might say, Well, presumably Shields has just made available the shots she could easily accumulate, perhaps from her own family records. But this seems disingenuous. Does she, or does she not, want to convince us of the reality of what she describes? And there lies the rub. An examination of the photographic gaps and absences, as well as of the often intriguing and confusing photographic presences in The Stone Diaries, confirms the radical and subversive postmodernism of this novel’s appeal. Stone, so solid, so unshakable, is converted here into a substance as fluid as water. And photography, traditionally the seal of the reality of its subjects, is here made to play a game of undermining the assurance of the reader in any such stable reality. The “stone diaries” centre on the life of Daisy Stone Goodwill Flett, whose mother Mercy Stone grew up in the Stonewall Orphan’s Home in Stonewall County, Manitoba, and was named for the local stone, like every other orphan child there born outside of wedlock. Though Daisy gives up her own private journal on her marriage, and her travel journal gets lost, her memories and commentaries and those of other people create a set of “entries,” a kind of diarized life-story, notably one that elides or excludes a number of the most significant experiences of



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her life: education, sexual initiation, childbirth. Besides their oral manifestations, the “diaries” are also the stone quarries in which her father etched his early life, the stone tower he built to her mother’s memory, and the stone buildings that continue to mark his subsequent life story as a wealthy stonecarver. Some of the “stone diaries” are the stones that cause tragedy: the death of Daisy’s foster-mother, Clarentine, who is struck by a cyclist and thrown against the cornerstone of the Royal Bank building in Winnipeg; the death of Daisy’s husband of one day, Harold Hoad, who on their honeymoon falls drunk from the bedroom windowsill to the stone pavement below. Others of the “stone diaries” are the stones that describe character: that of Daisy’s unknown fatherin-law, Magnus Flett, in his younger days a stone quarrier who left behind a reputation of “[u]nyieldingness … Narrowness. Stone” (299); that of Daisy herself as her family imagines her in her last days – “Our genes are pure granite” (356). In other words, these diaries are both metaphorically and literally “of stone,” and the writing of diaries is a trope for the living of private lives. Gordon Slethaug suggests that “[t]he use of stone and diary together is deliberately ambiguous, standing in certain respects for the appearance of solidity and general continuity but only in relation to contingency and randomness” (71). Daisy’s father the stonemason sees stone as “supportive of a good life and representative of stability, endurance, and even transcendental beauty,” Slethaug argues, as it is the substance which supports and images his progress through life; but Daisy’s mother and stepmother are connected to stone in terms of “arbitrariness, lack, absence, instability, and impermanence” – the memorial tower that suffers vandalism and weathering, the Orkney fossils that represent life stopped by some cataclysmic intervention. Daisy’s final vision of her own effigy is paradoxical too: the initial image of her mother in the book is extravagantly fleshy, and yet this last image for Daisy is of a merging with the maternal in the stone effigy of death. Shields writes, “Stone is how she finally sees herself, her living cells replaced by the insentience of mineral deposition. It’s easy enough to let it claim her. She lies, in her last dreams, flat on her back on a thick slab, as hugely imposing as the bishops and saints she’d seen years earlier in the great pink cathedral of Kirkwall. It wasn’t good enough for them, and it isn’t for her either, but the image is, at the very least, contained; she loves it, in fact, and feels herself merge with, and become, finally, the still body of her dead mother” (Diaries 358–9). We

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might say that in this image Daisy creates a mental photograph of her own “flat Death.” If stone, customarily symbolic of strength and immovability, can in this book represent such a wide range of incompatible traits in its telling of stories, it is hardly surprising that photography, a mode that has proven amenable to the different epistemologies and heuristics of realism, romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism, is in this novel a shapeshifter extraordinaire. As stones can be diaries which tell strange stories about the people engaged with them, so photographs, “lightwritings,” can be diaries which tell obfuscating stories about the people flickering through them. Slethaug is not the only critic to have pointed out that Daisy herself is absent from the photograph gallery in the centre of the book: he sees this omission as highlighting Daisy’s “lack of a consistent and unitary persona” (62) and as one of the gaps that makes the reader “wonder who and what Daisy really was, apart from her social context and network of relations” (63). But some of the photos that are included in the centrefold also emphasize the lack of a consistent persona: for instance, the centrefold portraits of Daisy’s stepmother, Clarentine, are so totally unlike one another that, if they were not labelled, the reader would never guess they were meant to be of the same person (centrefold iii). Winifred Mellor takes Slethaug’s point further in asserting that “Daisy Goodwill in The Stone Diaries has no face”: “[u]nseen, unheard, this woman occupies a cavern of vacancy at the centre of the text” – she is merely a textual construct, “[w]holly constituted by language” (97, 106, 104). While I appreciate Mellor’s attempts to conflate a feminist agenda with a deconstructive methodology, I am more inclined to argue that Shields is primarily interested in inscribing the notion of Daisy’s unappreciated and unspoken “givenness” that exceeds the textual means she has to hand. In interview Shields said of Daisy, “I intend her to be evasive, although any woman in this century [i.e., the twentieth] can understand what it feels like to be erased from the culture” (Thomas 60), and “A lot of women are erased from their lives, sometimes as a result of their own actions and attitudes, but mostly for societal reasons” (web interview 3). These comments suggest not merely a concern with a character’s textual construction but also, and vitally, with the realities of an unrepresented and ultimately unrepresentable extratextual life. The signified, it seems, will always exceed the signifier.



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Victoria – from Shields, The Stone Diaries

However, Shields’s “evasiveness” also makes a comment on the nature of narrative composition. Deborah Schnitzer suggests that Shields’s photographs “masquerade as fact in the fiction” to “provide a tempting fraud,” and that Shields “plays with the photograph as icon” because “[l]ike Daisy, the photographs sustain the illusion of both facsimile and artifact” (Schnitzer 29–30, 34, 32). The “fraud” is suggested in part by the fact that there are photos included that seem insignificant, or random, or dubiously attributed. For instance, there are pictures of Hannah Goodwill, Cuyler’s mother, who hardly figures in the story (Diaries, centrefold iii); of “Bessie McGordon, matron of Stonewall Orphans’ Home,” who does not figure at all (iii); of Harold Hoad as a baby, but not as the young man whom the reader would look for (iv); of “Beans” Anthony which looks remarkably like that of Mrs Hoad (iv); of Daisy’s daughter Alice as a baby (vi), and her son Warren as a child, in which he looks like a little girl (v). Then there is one of Daisy’s great-niece Victoria with curly hair, when the text tells us specifically that Victoria’s hair is straight, and the photograph in any case appears much older than one taken in the early 1960s would do (centrefold v) – in fact, it looks very like the early (absent) picture of Daisy might have looked, the one in which Clarentine noted the “exceptional curliness” of Daisy’s hair (51). The photograph gallery concludes with two pictures of Daisy’s daughter Joan’s daughters

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and one of Victoria’s children, who hardly figure in the story at all (centrefold viii). On the other hand, there are a number of significant photos that are verbally described but not physically included in the book. Not only this early picture of a curly-haired Daisy, but also the one of which Clarentine comments that Daisy is “possessed of a spare, neat body” (59), and the one of Daisy aged eleven in a straw hat on the riverbank with Clarentine and her son Barker, later to be Daisy’s husband (60–1): this last is the photograph that Cuyler studies, as he tries to grow into love for this child whose birth has caused the death of his wife (61). Appropriately, the wedding photo (not included in the book) that Daisy possesses of Cuyler and Mercy is described as blurred, thus functioning analogically as a metaphor for what Shields calls the “slender and insubstantial, … almost arbitrary” nature of the connection between Daisy and her mother, who died minutes after Daisy’s birth, leaving her to grow up feeling orphaned and disconnected from the world (189). The Tribune newspaper’s photo of Cuyler’s famous tower is also blurred: Clarentine writes to him, “My son, Professor Flett, regarding the tower’s rather blurred likeness on the page, grew most curious to see it as it really is, but as you know he never travels anymore to Tyndall since his brothers have gone West” (53). As she is recovering from the measles, Daisy sees a photo in the Family Herald of Cuyler together with the tower (54). Clarentine’s letter reports to Cuyler thus: “‘Is that truly my father?’ she demanded of me, and I assured her that indeed it was. She became most anxious to pay you a visit, and would talk of nothing else for days, but we believe, Professor Flett as much as myself, that such a visit would cause too much excitation in one so recently recovered from a serious illness” (54). The reader is here being placed in a position similar to that of Barker or Daisy: interested, but not free, and by implication not sufficiently agile or strong, to make the journey to see for him- or herself. The blurred signifier points only to itself, and the absent referent can only be taken on trust. And then there are the three photos that Magnus Flett holds on to when he leaves Canada to return to the Orkneys where he was born. Two of these are described but are not presented in the centrefold: one is of Magnus and Clarentine in their wedding photo, carefully detailed even down to his holding of his earlobe (96); the other is of their three boys, whom Magnus feels he has lost, as children of six, four, and two. The third photograph, the one included in the book, is that of the Ladies’ Rhythm and Movement Club, but, with only Magnus’s



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Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club – from Shields, The Stone Diaries

description of Clarentine to go on, it is unclear which figure is meant to represent her (97). This photo, we are told, always brings Magnus back to “the proven fact of his wife’s happiness”: trying to understand her desertion of him after twenty-five years, he reassures himself that in this photograph she does not look at all like the wife of a brutal, oppressive husband (98). He has heard it said that “[a] painting will lie, but the camera insists on the truth” (97); the trouble is, our own look at the photo does not appear to show this happiness, this “sassy smile,” at all.3 This is the photo that Magnus still has with him when he lives into extreme and celebrated old age in Britain, as the subject of various newspaper and TV stories, but unphotographed for this novel (295). And so it is not the degree of celebrity that ensures a public picture; such attention is the product of a rhythm and movement every bit as unreliable as the painter’s flattering eye. Shields’s own comments on her decision to include the photographs are instructively ambiguous. She says, “When I read real biographies, I always turn to the photos in the middle. I’m always checking the image against the text” (web interview 3). She does not tell us whether she considers image or text to have the greater authority – or whether this “checking” is the reader’s own mode of story-construction. And because omissions and gaps are part of the way we recall our lifestories, “It’s as though you end up your life with a boxful of snapshots. They may not be the best ones, but they’re the ones you have. All the other pictures are in an album somewhere.” But could that be an

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Aunt Clarentine, 1916 – from Shields, The Stone Diaries

album as unsettling as the centrefold of The Stone Diaries? After all, from whose point of view are some photographs deemed “the best ones”? The reality effect that photos initially seem to provide actually offers only random confirmation – and this, in itself, works as metonymy for the way memory constructs the past. “I wanted them to be random photographs, and not very good photographs, like the kind you find in the bottom of your drawer” (Thomas 59). Thus, when there are discrepancies between Shields’s textual descriptions and the photographic images, what reaction is she looking for? How has she completed Berger’s “half-language” of appearances? In Barthes’ terms, has she “tamed” the image? And what readerly reaction does she get? One possible reaction is that of the website interviewer whose “Discussion Questions” include this in response to the first picture in the centrefold: “Although Daisy describes her mother as ‘extraordinarily obese’ and taller than her husband, a photo reveals that Mercy Goodwill is actually shorter than Cuyler and no more than ordinarily husky. Is Daisy lying? Or does she merely have ‘a little trouble with getting things straight’?” (web interview 4, my emphases). This interviewer has been entirely hoodwinked by the referential power of the photograph – its “tempting fraud” – and has missed completely the notion of photograph-as-construction which Shields is foregrounding by creating photographic portraits of fictional people. A more sophisticated reaction to the discrepancies is that of Deborah Schnitzer, who suggests that the dissonance reminds us that “what we see is an act .



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Cuyler and Mercy, 1902 – from Shields, The Stone Diaries

of choice, an expression of who we are” (Schnitzer 31). She “seek[s] the photographs again and again, using them as reality checks even as [she] appreciate[s] their inauthenticity”; she tells us, “There’s no way of grounding the text by verifying its credentials empirically … This photograph is and is not ‘Cuyler and Mercy in 1902. ’” In the end she must accept that Daisy has “the startling ability to draft alternate versions” (Diaries 190), and that – rather like photography – she “simply can’t be relied upon to provide an unambiguous account. She’s gifted, and the gift tricks – distorts and clarifies, retracts and confirms, thwarts and encourages discontinuities” (Schnitzer 33).4 And the conclusion we must comes to is that Shields uses her photographic gallery to obfuscate rather than to clarify. The photographs fit the narrative only partially and with difficulty because Shields believes that life itself is random: “I like to collect stories of other people’s coincidences because I suspect that that’s how the universe really works. Everything I’ve read

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about chaos theory bears this out” (web interview 4). A distinctly postmodern kind of mimesis – a mimesis in which the reflection is distorted and unclear because distortion and lack of clarity are endemic to any perception of the subject. And yet such an account is only partially satisfying. We must factor in the degree to which Shields is playing with the material substance of the photographs, engaging in a game of chance – using the photographs as a visual illustration of the problematics of representation. For, if signs are “poised between reference inwards and outwards, always stuck with and between words and the world” (Cunningham, Gaol 94), photographs are a particular kind of sign, indexical as well as iconic, “reality in a past state,” in which the signifier is still attached to the world which had a central hand in its production by light-writing. By lifting these signs from their original contexts and ascribing “false” names to the images, Shields has realigned the signifying weight in favour of words. In doing so, she has effected a divorce between signifier and referent, separating the subject’s reality-in-time from its photographic authentication and working against what Barthes calls the photograph’s “intractable reality.” We could argue that all’s fair in love and books; the fact that a number of these photographs are from Shields’s family album seems to allow for a private playfulness as well as a public gamesmanship. In any case, Shields mentions in an interview that “of course” she asked her children for their permission to use photographs of them (web interview 3). But a photograph carries a thicker and referentially more determined trace than a word; in Berger’s terms, a photo is a quotation, not a translation, and to misname this trace is a bit like forging a passport, which raises a whole new kind of ethical question. What about the photographs here that, through time and distance and lack of special privilege, are beyond the reach of official permissions: the ones that the editors came across in antique shops, or those that Shields found in a postcard market in Paris (Thomas 59), or the one of the Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club that she found at “a small country museum here in Manitoba” (web 3)? Berger would probably say that such misnaming is a subjection of the photograph to arbitrary and irresponsible use, by removing it from lived contextual memory and emphasizing its artifice at the expense of its reference. Bakhtin’s warning about the danger of ignoring “the historical life of discourse” and thus contributing to a “reification of the word” (“Discourse” 346) could be applied equally well here to the



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use of photographs purposely dislocated from their originary contexts, faces without faces. In his book In the Reading Gaol, Cunningham’s concern, which he sees as the traditional concern of writing in general, is with “what is happening in the place of the convergence between aesthetic, textual stuff – which is to say rhetoricity – and a something else – namely the historico-worldly Other beyond the text, out there in the extra-linguistic, heterologic zones of that which is not merely verbal” (Gaol 61). This “place of convergence” is particularly insistent in photographs, because of their intransigently material cause in the relation of the method of production to the substance of the referent. Barthes’ concern that the “generalized image repertoire” of contemporary society has the effect of “derealizing” the human world of conflicts and desires under cover of illuminating it stems from this same awareness of the special material relationship in the photograph between referent and signifier, a relationship whose unobservance is fraught with ethical danger. For Barthes the only truly real – one might even say the only truly ethical – mode of existence for the photograph is the private mode of love rather than of public cultural appropriation; he would read Shields’s co-optations as photographs tamed into compliance with a narrative in which they have no substantial part because it occupies a different order of reality from theirs. But of course for Shields this is precisely the point. Although she is more cavalier with her photographs than Ondaatje, her view of the role of writing is as high as his, in that fiction is more likely than socalled “fact” to reveal ultimate realities. However, rather than seeing the photographs as alternative fictions, as Ondaatje does, Shields uses them as a kind of elaborate joke on the realist reader. Where Michael Ignatieff’s centrefold of photographs testifies to his historian’s desire to avoid fiction in a turn toward clearly ordered referentiality, Shields’s centrefold embodies her profound mistrust of empirical evidence and her assertion of sites of omission as opportunities for the truth-telling of the fictive imagination. This assertion is particularly apparent in an early passage in The Stone Diaries where Daisy is describing the way her father has been carving stones to build into the memorial tower for his wife. Once embedded in the tower, these stones display their carved patterns only evasively: “you have to stand at a certain distance, and in a particular light, to make them out. This impediment is part of the charm for [my father]. What he carves will remain half-hidden, half-exposed, and as such will reflect the capriciousness of the revealed

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world” (64). In a parenthesis, Daisy tells the reader, “I wish somehow you might see these carved surfaces, how they send back to the eye a shiver of yielded revelation, so full of my father’s sad awkwardness and exertion, yet so cunning in their capture of precious light” (Diaries 65). The first time I read the book, and superficially influenced by the photographic centrefold, I wrote in the margin at this point, “No photo?” On subsequent readings, I became aware that the whole text, centrefold and all, actually undermines the authority of photography. Its photographic omissions, confusions, overdeterminations, and sidetracks suggest that the photographic record cannot in fact capture that “shiver of yielded revelation” anything like as powerfully or truthfully as Shields’s written words can, because the words can give a depth of emotional connotation which allows freeplay to the reader’s desiring imagination. Cuyler’s “elaborate cipher” may be invisible to the reader’s eye, but it is richly and variously visible to the imagination. It is also important to note the powerful relationship here between images and spirituality. Cuyler’s carvings include “a few holy words” surrounded by many images of natural things: birds, flowers, fish, faces, sun and moon – “The tower is a museum of writhing forms, some of which he has discovered in the Canadian Farmer’s Almanac or the Eaton’s catalogue or in his illustrated Bible” (64). The experience of carving and building the tower is a profoundly spiritual one for him: “What he feels when the finished stone slips finally into its waiting space is the hand of God upon his head, the Holy Ghost entering his body with a glad shout” (65). Daisy calls her father an “ecstatic”: “For Cuyler Goodwill, a man untrained in conventional theology, the human and the divine are balanced across a dazzling equation: man’s creation of God being exactly equal to God’s creation of man, one unified mind bending like a snake around the curve of earth and heaven” (66). We recall that Ignatieff talks of photographs in a secular culture as “household icons, the only objects that perform the religious function of connecting the living to the dead and of locating the identity of the living in time” (Album 2), but for Cuyler Goodwill this function is performed by the much more ancient marker of stone, “the signature of the spiritual” which “can be assembled and shaped into praise and affirmation” (63). The Judaeo-Christian tradition within which Cuyler carves out his own ecstatic place, and whose ancient roots are twined around biblical narratives of “memorial stones” recalling moments of spiritual and material significance, has a very conflicted past in terms of



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its relationship to images, and most particularly images of the divine. Banned in early Judaism, treated with extreme suspicion in early and some later Protestantism, and still a cause of disquiet among some Christians of a conservative evangelical persuasion, images have had a bad press, both because they can appear to reduce the transcendent to the material and because they may seem to pave the way for an overdetermination of interpretations.5 Would Jesus have sat for a portrait photo, or been snapped by friends on the shore as he preached from a boat on the Sea of Galilee? It is probably all to the good that these questions could not arise. Jesus’s parables, and the stories of his life and teaching, are his “memorial stones.” Cuyler Goodwill’s literalization of such stones, his own illustrated Bible hybridized with overlayings of the Eaton’s catalogue of contemporary commercialism and the Farmers’ Almanac of traditional knowledge, avoids the dangers of the image by rendering it inaccessible to any eyes other than those who come with the punctum of personal dedication. The spiritual significance of these stone diaries suggests, then, that Shields views both the ecstatic and the everyday imagination as better served by verbal cues than by photographic traces. However, we need finally to look again at the traces she has incorporated because, to adopt Berger’s terms again, it seems that there are indeed “unforeseeable consequences” to the fictionalizing of photographs: that is to say, the displaced and reappropriated materiality of the photographic subjects speaks not only of randomness in use but also of a lost particularity in production and of the ethical imperatives in the hermeneutic enterprise. Because photographs are so context-dependent for a just meaning – witness Barthes’ decision not to include the all-important photograph of his mother in Camera Lucida – they are peculiarly open to misinterpretation. As they affirm the reality of the physical world they also assert the necessity for an ethical hermeneutic. Am I, then, arguing that what Shields has done with her photographic centrefold is unethical? No – though I am suggesting that, in a different kind of novel, a closed-ended novel with, perhaps, a clear ideological agenda, or even in just a traditional realist fiction, it would be. In this instance it is precisely the postmodernist nature of Shields’s novel that defends her appropriation of the photographic material against the charge of ethical irresponsibility. The Stone Diaries foregrounds the construction of differing understandings of the real, and in so doing demonstrates a self-critiquing hermeneutic. To take a particularly pertinent instance, after her description of her father’s

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spiritual relationship to his stone-carving, Daisy describes how “the religious impulse” is understood quite differently by others – by the pacifist Methodists and persecuted Quakers of Winnipeg in 1916, by Clarentine, by Magnus Flett, by the Wesley College principal, by the Wesley College student in love with Barker Flett, by Barker Flett himself (Diaries 65–8). In fact, if we were to return to Middleton and Walsh’s defence, in Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be, of biblical narrative as non-totalizing, we would find this particular criterion to be transferable to The Stone Diaries: it too displays a radical sensitivity to suffering, an open-endedness that invites readerly participation, and an author (this time with a lower-case “a”) whose interests and concerns cannot be contained by a narrowly ideological or partisan reading. “The given,” argue Middleton and Walsh, “is not there for our mastery but is offered to us as an invitation to covenantal responsibility” (Truth 152). In the tacit covenant between Shields and her readers, we recognize that she is not so much attempting to “master” her photographic images by misnaming them, as playfully demonstrating the impossibilty of any such mastery of the material world. And yet – their excess speaks loudly enough to escape the novel’s bounds; the reference of the photographs remains outward and, by calling for a doubled, palimpsestic reading (their meanings in The Stone Diaries overlaid on their original, yet more hidden meanings), they stand in their constructedness and their intransigent givenness as paradigmatic of postmodern realism at its nub. Ignatieff tames his photographs with words. The other three writers we have considered here avoid such taming, Barthes by guarding the private ecstasy of the image, Ondaatje by putting the images into theatrical play, and Shields by allowing her images the freeplay of their worldly origins even in the midst of her text of alternative words. Only Shields takes this ultimate risk, and as a result her writing depends the most on readerly responsibility; it is the most postmodern realist text of them all.

5

The Genres of the Middle Space A.S. Byatt , “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”

Something that is always implicit about writing, the condition precisely of fiction, of text [is that] [t]he word is always in-between. It is always wor(l)d. Valentine Cunningham, In the Reading Gaol Since reality is incomplete, art must not be too much afraid of incompleteness. Literature must always represent a battle between real people and images. Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness” Every meaning will have its homecoming festival. M.M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres

The Strategic Shiftiness of Genre The four modes or subgenres of postmodern realism which I have distinguished – the historiographic, the magical, the mythoparodic, and the photographic – are, of course, interpenetrating. For instance, Away has been called historiographic metafiction with a particular emphasis on the fantastic, whereas we have looked at it here under the rubric of magic realism; Midnight’s Children can be considered both as historiographic metafiction and as magic realism; Green Grass, Running Water may be read both as magic realism and as parodic myth, with a strong metafictional undertow; The Stone Diaries, which we considered under the rubric of photographic co-optation, is a parodic autobiography which can also be read as historiographic metafiction. And this generic shiftiness is, of course, partly the point. Genre is not as easily attributable as we have traditionally been accustomed to think; in any case a certain undecidability has notoriously attended the novel from its beginnings. Thus, is Running in the Family a novel, or is it more helpfully described as a memoir, or a parodic biography? What about A

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History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters? My students routinely have a hard time, at least initially, in attaching the descriptor “novel” to this collection of generically varied and thematically loosely related stories. Even more disputably, might we call Camera Lucida a novel, rather than a theoretical text about photography, or a memoir recounting an elegiac period in the author’s life, and if so, what advantages would be gained? Genre signals to the reader a certain set of expectations about what is to follow, providing him or her with a hermeneutical frame of reference. “I read crime novels on the weekends” displays a different interest and a different set of expectations on the part of the reader from “I try to keep up with the latest prizewinning fiction” or “I’m a sucker for romantic comedy” or “I relax best with the sports section and a cappuccino.” The crime novel will likely be judged and found wanting by the lover of romantic comedy: the expected plot properties, development, and denouement will simply not materialize. However, recent thinking about genre has moved away from a static, essentialist understanding to one which recognizes genre as a shifting construct dependent for its full meaning on context and historical period. It is difficult, for instance, for present-day readers to respond to Dickens’s sentimentalism, so foundational to the sentimental novel of his day, in anything approaching the way that his contemporary readers did: of the scenes between Lucie and her father in A Tale of Two Cities, students are wont to ask incredulously, “But is Dickens serious?” Though it is true that genre signals to the reader a particular hermeneutical frame – Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is in a tradition of satiric hyperbole, and will be (indeed, initially was) profoundly misunderstood if this is not kept in mind – nevertheless, genres manifest themselves differently and are differently understood in different historical periods. This means that generic formations, transformations, and interrelations are not merely, as it were, matters of form, but matters of hermeneutics and ethics which cross over into the territory of the socio-political. In terms of our explorations in this book, it means that generic play is intended to alert the reader to more than clever literary pyrotechnics. I suggested earlier, particularly when exploring postmodern play with the slippery genre of magic realism, that genre has ideological implications. For instance, because magic realism has such rich potential for subverting centralized and totalizing systems of meaning, a writer like Jeanette Winterson may use it not merely to delight but also to shock her readers into political awareness. Similarly, Timothy



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Findley plays with parodic myth in order to strengthen his indictment of patriarchy and environmental insensitivity. When Running in the Family is undecidably memoir or fiction, Ondaatje is making a point about the nature and construction of personal narrative: in any case, as he says in his afterword, “In Sri Lanka, a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.” And when Midnight’s Children presents itself as magic realism but also as history, Rushdie is playing against the sedimentation (Fredric Jameson’s term) within these generic modes in order to reinforce the struggles of India as more multi-dimensional than their portrayal in the conventional understanding of the West. All these writers have developed through generic slippages and instabilities their own strategies for engaging the reader’s imagination in the tasks of ethical responsibility, often on a public stage. Under the classical rubric of literature’s purpose “to delight and teach,” contemporary fiction writers have found in blended genres a powerful means of enhancing and challenging our notions of both pleasure and responsibility. We need here to return briefly to Bakhtin, the writer who has done more than any other to give theoretical legitimacy to the novel as a genre. I suggested in the introduction that Bakhtin’s privileging of the genre of the novel stems from his understanding of its nature as a social phenomenon that contains a multiplicity of voices and heterodox points of view. Bakhtin saw the novel, through its interweaving of various types of speech into a discursive polyphony, as both more able and more concerned than the traditional canonical genres to express the inherent dialogism of language and culture. In its freedom to include all kinds of “heteroglossia,” or “differentiated speech,” the novel works to establish a centrifugal impulse and to critique any tendency toward totalizing control. I also suggested that Bakhtin holds a distinctive position among twentieth-century literary theorists in that he was an opponent of both system and “relativism” in literature as in life. He was concerned for parole rather than langue, as a working-out of the insight that words come to us already imprinted with the meanings and intentions of previous users; they are not abstract elements in a system, but fundamentally social and dialogic, so that meaning is created in the contextualized process of intersubjective communication between speaker, addressee, and the referent. Moreover, Bakhtin’s emphasis on the internal dialogism of words implicitly sets up an expectation of readerly response, since all discourse, including novelistic discourse, is “oriented towards an understanding that is ‘responsive’” (“Discourse” 280). And Bakhtin believed that the implication

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for ethics is that, as Caryl Emerson puts it, “[a]ll lasting value is generated in the ‘middle space’ of subtly voiced and negotiated human exchanges” (“Bakhtin” 244). This notion of the “middle space” has gathered a variety of resonances as we have journeyed through this book. I began in the prologue by asserting, confessionally, that I understand it as the space of the Christian story, since at the heart of that story is an incarnated God, a Word, who enters time to bridge the transcendent and the earthly and to participate in the meta-story for the good of the created world. I went on to propose that the middle space is the space of language understood as parole, words with a lower-case “w” traced through by their ultimate derivation in a creaturely relationship with God the Word, and used relationally in discourse. And for this reason, language-as-parole is the space of relational ethics: there is a responsibility inherent in the use of words, defined not primarily as elements in a semiotic system but as meanings in the semantic relationships of discourse, which begins in dialogic relationship with the divine and flows from there to relationship with others. A Christian postmodernist stands consciously in this middle space, then, a space where she or he is aware of perspectival limitation and a historically situated immanence that is traced through by the Transcendent and filled with possibilities for discursive creativity. But we must go further, to become consciously inclusive of those who do not hold to a confessionally religious world view. If our very subjectivity is a dialectic between the self and mediated social meanings, as Ricoeur suggests, then again it follows that there is “an ethics of the word”: “language is not just the abstract concern of logic or semiotics, but entails the fundamental moral duty that people be responsible for what they say” (“Dialogues” 32). If our daily reality consists in different kinds of “data” which we can know only imperfectly and which exceed our language for them, this intransigent excess of the immanent world is also characteristic of the middle space between closed system and disorganized chaos. And if one defining characteristic of literary realism is its concern for ordinary people’s choices in their interactions with this given world, then literary realism too is a creature of the middle space. For, at its heart, this middle space is the place of interaction and dialogue – the space of “negotiated human exchange,” of relational meaning. Thus language and text in the middle space are understood not as polysemic, self-referential abstractions but as relational: they mean in context, and in relationship



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to teller, listener, and reader. Identity – selfhood – in the middle space is understood not in Cartesian solipsism but in relationship: it is constructed through dialogue and interaction with others. Ethics in the middle space is understood not primarily as a matter of codes or laws but as relational responsibility. And, to return to my earlier assertion, even God, in this middle space, is apprehended relationally: not as dogma or the fixity of a static metanarrative but as trace in the face of the other, as story inhabited and lived out, as transcendence expressed in the “voice” of the tree. The subgenres of the novel in this book are genres of the middle space in a particularly acute sense. All novels that allow for heteroglossia and multiple points of view in their realist involvement with the world of everyday are novels of the middle space as Bakhtin understood it. But I am pushing that generic understanding further when I talk of novels of postmodern realism, novels that set out to subvert the generic codes of fiction. The novels I have considered in this book are novels of this more self-conscious middle space, in terms of their positioning across and between generic classifications, a positioning which undermines readerly expectation and any understanding of genre as static or closed. This generic shiftiness foregrounds the holding together of the intransigence of everyday reality and the constructedness of our understanding of it. I have considered narrative in itself as a kind of ethics, in its binding together of the teller, the listener, and the reader in a position analogous to Levinas’s face-à-face of primary responsibility. But the narrative which engages in generic slippage makes a particular kind of claim on the reader: it pushes him or her to become freshly aware of context and convention, recognizing genre’s grounding in social circumstance and ideological struggle. Genre is here best understood in Bakhtin’s terms, as in itself a mediation between world and text which needs to be studied in performance because it will be “reborn” in every new work (de Bruyn 84). “The logic of genre is not an abstract logic,” wrote Bakhtin (italics in original). “Each new variety, each new work of a given genre always enriches it in some way, aids in perfecting the language of the genre” (Problems 157). My argument, then, is that the particular manifestations of generic transformation in a postmodern realist novel will “aid in perfecting” the genre’s call to ethical responsibility.

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Middle Space in “ The Djinn in the Nightingale ’ s Eye ” At the outset of this volume, in chapter 1, we considered British novelist A.S. Byatt’s story “Sugar” as an instance of historiographic metafiction. Now in the final main chapter I want to look at her 1994 novella “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” in which she conflates in a particularly productive way the generic categories we have been exploring throughout this book. Alexa Alfer and Michael Noble have read Byatt’s work as “an ongoing series of re-imaginings of the novel and its various (dis)contents,” particularly in view of the “theoretical puzzlements” that overshadowed twentieth-century fiction (Alfer and Noble 6). Byatt’s novels and short stories ask to be read as consciously designed explorations of artistic representation, the relationship between perception and language, and the cultural constructions underlying the novel form itself. I would like here to consider how Byatt’s play with genre offers a paradigmatic instance of the ethical purchase of postmodern realisms as I have been describing them in previous chapters. “The Djinn” is centrally concerned with the power of story and its relationship to history; it is profoundly magic realist in sensibility; it plays parodically with the retelling of myth; and it looks critically at the culture of the image and the ethical issues brought into focus by its contemporary omnipresence. A postmodernist novella, then – but not in any solipsistic or self-indulgent sense. Kathleen Coyne Kelly has written of the collection in which “The Djinn” is the title story, “Once again, Byatt’s work is thoroughly informed by postmodern sensibilities; at the same time, she contests some of postmodernism’s pessimism about the impossibility of storytelling, especially in ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,’ the centerpiece tale” (Kelly 114). Byatt’s story has a twist at the end which is specifically the result of the ethical choices made by the central character and which situates Byatt firmly in the ethico-realist novelistic tradition that she is also subverting. It is hard to say whether Byatt’s tale is a long short story or a short novel. It is hard to say whether it is fancifully autobiographical: many of the details fit with circumstances of Byatt’s life that she has related in other contexts. It is hard to decide whether it should be classified primarily as magic realism, or to determine whether the attitude to images here is realist or magical. Or should this tale be described as parodic myth, or historiographic metafiction – or, as the book’s subtitle disingenuously directs, “fairy tale”? Jane Campbell suggests that in



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“The Djinn” Byatt sets out to critique the ideological implications of the fairy-tale genre from a feminist perspective, in order to give women “power in their own lives while exposing the male control that is a stock feature of the genre” (Essays 135). So, that mode of definition does seem productive. But, of course, the generic indeterminacies are precisely the point because Byatt is at once clearly inside and yet liminal to the traditions of British realism. She wrote, in the introduction to her 1991 collection of essays Passions of the Mind, “The problems of the ‘real’ in fiction, and the adequacy of words to describe it, have preoccupied me for the last twenty years. If I have defended realism, or what I call ‘self-conscious realism’, it is not because I believe that it has any privileged relationship to truth, social or psychological, but because it leaves space for thinking minds as well as feeling bodies” (Passions 4). What does Byatt mean by identifying self-conscious realism as spacious in this way? In some respects, it seems, such realism is nearer to the world of Dickens or the Brontës than to the worlds of Jane Austen or George Eliot, and, yes, nearer to ancient fairy tales than to the realism of the bourgeois novel. She works in the mode of what David Lodge has called “crossover fiction” (“Today” 208) – fiction that makes use of different generic strata and resonance to create a mediation between world and text that rebirths the readerly relationship to the real. In the year of the publication of the “Djinn” story Byatt wrote, “I think I have always worked very close to my dream imagery, and I’ve always been very unsatisfied with a reductive social realist image of what a novel is doing, because I have had this strong sense that poetic images and visionary images and dream-structured narratives are of equal importance” (“Dreams” 235). Byatt’s defence of realism, then, is capacious enough to include dreams and visions and poetic imagery, as well as the materiality of the everyday world. Moreover, her writing characteristically traverses the territory of myth and legend, and their relationship to religious faith. Her abandoned doctoral thesis was on religious allegory in seventeenth-century British literature: she has suggested that “[i]t is not too much to say that this unwritten work, with its neoplatonic myths, its interest in the incarnation, in fallen and unfallen (adequate and inadequate) language to describe reality, has haunted both my novels and my reading patterns ever since” (Passions 3). In looking at Byatt’s “self-conscious realism,” then, and the performance of generic slippage that this mode of narrative inevitably entails for her, we find something

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of a paradigmatic case for investigating what kind of ethical purchase is produced by play in the middle space.

Djinns Past: The Real and the Imaginary “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” is a story that from its opening words works a game of defamiliarization through its play with unexpected genre conventions. Here is the first sentence: Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy. (95) Having anticipated fairy tale because of the formula tag “Once upon a time,” the reader is startled to recognize, beneath the cadences of fairy-tale description, her own world: “Wait a minute, she’s talking about now!” Thus Byatt conflates the world of fairy tale and the world of everyday – but not quite. It would be more accurate to say that she makes use of the distance between the fairytale and the everyday to sharpen the reader’s sense of what is appropriate, and to question a world where the everyday apes the fairy tale through the tacit medium of material wealth. Is there an implicit suggestion that fresh strawberries should be available in dead of winter only in fairy tales? What is the apparition of a Texan herdsman doing with a houri (a nymph of the Mohammedan paradise, and thus by extrapolation any woman of sensual beauty) on a Nicaraguan hillside at dusk, when his herds are back in Texas? At what cost, this business of men and women hurtling through the air at all? It seems that for the central character, at any rate, the road to happiness in such a self-indulgent culture lies through disconnecting – through being “largely irrelevant.” At least, that is how she is first introduced. We are quickly to learn, however, that as a woman over fifty whose marriage has failed and whose children have



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left home, she “must come to terms with her fate, must understand that she is approaching death and overcome her fear of it” (Maack 124). The second paragraph of the novella is equally destabilizing. We learn that this woman’s business is storytelling – but not, as we might expect from the fairy tales of the world, in the persona of a fearful queen, or a lover-minstrel, or a holy dervish, or a court magician. Contemporary storytelling is of a different stripe: “She was merely a narratologist, a being of secondary order, whose days were spent hunched in great libraries scrying, interpreting, decoding the fairytales of childhood and the vodka-posters of the grown-up world.” This woman’s business, then, is “decoding” rather than telling the primary narration itself; and her decoding activities take her into both the world of childhood and the world of advertising copy – these activities are, in other words, generically transgressive. Readers who know Byatt’s work will not be surprised to meet another example in Byatt of an academic setting and a protagonist who is a literary critic: “Sometimes also, she flew” – to conferences where “narratologists gathered like starlings, parliaments of wise fowls, telling stories about stories” (95–6). As we begin to compose for ourselves the story of this story about stories, we become aware of our own complicity in the kind of critical activity, the kind of decoding, which is here the subject of pastiche. Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls” is a dream-poem about a conference of birds who meet on St Valentine’s Day to choose their mates, but end up debating the relative merits for romantic success of a “courtly love” approach vs. a pragmatic one; they come to no conclusion, and agree to meet again in a year’s time to continue their debate. Byatt’s evocation of this parliament, then, makes fun both of annual conferences and of the motives of their attendees. The flying narratologist, Gillian Perholt, thinks of the pleasures she experiences in solitary flying as embodied in the phrase “floating redundant,” words with a fine and ironic literary pedigree, but “of course, not her own; she was, as I have said, a being of a secondary order” (98). The phrase was originally Milton’s, to describe what Byatt calls the “insolent and lovely” beauty of the serpent’s coils in Paradise before he tempted Eve. Here is a nice example of the way in which Byatt’s writings “habitually emphasize the creative potential of an intersection – rather than mutual effacement – of storytelling and critical thought” (Alfer and Noble 2). The etymology of the wording combines the notions of floods and overflowing; in Gillian’s appropriation of this phrase, it suggests her expertise in the world of narratology,

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at the same time as pointing toward her own redundancy as wife and mother. When her husband faxes her the information that he is leaving her, she “imagines herself grieving,” but in fact, on that sunny day in a cheerful room, she finds that she feels “like a prisoner bursting chains and coming blinking out of a dungeon. She [feels] like a bird confined in a box, like a gas confined in a bottle, that [has] found an opening, and rushe[s] out” (103–4) – this last simile foreshadowing the release, in the second half of the story, of the djinn from the glass bottle called a nightingale’s eye, and thereby suggesting a parallel between Gillian and the genie. She sees herself here as “an unprecedented being, a woman with porcelain-crowned teeth, laser-corrected vision, her own store of money, her own life and field of power, who flew, who slept in luxurious sheets around the world, who gazed out at the white fields under the sun by day and the brightly turning stars by night as she floated redundant” (105). Thus the phrase crosses the borders between literature and life, past and present, one contextual interpretation and another with a quite different history; it also blurs the distinctions between these times and places and readings, into a pleasurable ambiguity. This kind of palimpsestic doubleness is a hallmark of the novella throughout. The conference that Gillian is attending is called “Stories of Women’s Lives”: “This was a pantechnicon title to make space for everyone, from every country, from every genre, from every time” (105). Such an attempt at universality elides boundary markers in the service of an ethic of inclusiveness, but in so doing it also inevitably creates out of the university campus a marketplace, a theatre, a cave of illusions: “The conference, like most conferences, resembled a bazaar, where stories and ideas were exchanged and changed. It took place in a cavernous theatre with no windows on the outside world but well provided with screens where transparencies flickered fitfully in the dark” (106). Moreover, the storytelling of the conference is situated in the politically exclusive environment of the modern-day Muslim state of Turkey, where in the audience some of the young men in jeans are effectively soldiers in uniform, and some of the young women are wearing scarves as a sign of religious defiance. Any blanket attempt at universality “to make space for everyone” is likely to be at least partly illusory because it is in danger of eliding these immediate political and religious differences. Gillian Perholt and her old friend Orhan are not blind to the parallels between the lives of these young women and



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those of the oppressed women in the stories that the conferees have come to tell. At the conference, Gillian herself tells and analyzes a story that she hates, but that haunts her: Chaucer’s version of the story of Patient Griselda. Gillian presents the husband, Walter, as a man with an overweening desire to plot and narrate. He orchestrates the intrigues around Griselda so that the denouement may be all the more “splendid and satisfactory” (115). Near the end of the story, Walter reveals that his new young bride is none other than Griselda’s daughter, and the bride’s attendant is none other than Griselda’s son, neither of them killed in infancy as she had been told, but both of them carefully raised to adulthood – and Walter explains that he now wishes to be reconciled to Griselda, who has passed all the tests of her faithfulness and patience. At this point in the retelling of the narrative, Gillian herself experiences the doubleness of narrative telling as she is unable to retain her position merely as decoder and instead has an unwilled and acute experience of identification with all the oppressed women of all stories, turned to salt, locked in glass boxes: for a moment she is frozen and cannot speak. What she sees in the auditorium is the shape of her fear, “a cavernous form, a huge, female form, with a veiled head bowed above emptiness” and grey from head to foot – a shape that epitomizes old age and a destitute vacancy (118). As the narrator puts it in Rudy Wiebe’s story “Where is the Voice Coming From?”, “I am no longer spectator of what has happened or what may happen: I am become element in what is happening at this very moment” (Canadian 379). The narrator is always implicated in the narration. When Gillian recovers she tells how Griselda, embracing both her children tightly, swoons into unconsciousness, perhaps wanting to strangle them out of “the finale so splendidly brought about by their lord and master.” Gillian comments that “the peculiar horror of Patient Griselda does not lie in the psychological terror of incest or even of age. It lies in the narration of the story and Walter’s relation to it” (120). The act of storytelling in itself, here, figures as ethical debasement: Byatt’s implicit play with the connotations of the narrative descriptor “plot” is centrally important. The story is terrible, says Gillian, because Walter “has assumed too many positions in the narration; he is hero, villain, destiny, God and the narrator,” who has taken from Griselda “what could not be restored,” the best part of her life. Walter has, we might say, mastered generic perfomance, sliding across the boundaries between one mode of fictional existence and another,

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becoming well-nigh coextensive with the text. In taking the positions of God, of narrator, of hero and of villain, he has controlled the narrative into monologism and effaced its dialogic character; consequently, he has effectively erased any real relationships in the middle space and rendered the narrative unethical. Griselda is figured as a site of paralysis whose only powerful option seems to lie in escaping from the story altogether. Gillian concludes that the stories of women in fiction are always the stories of stopped energies, “and all come to that moment of strangling, willed oblivion” (121). Though Orhan too is concerned to show that it is not character that is destiny in these folk tales, he wants to demonstrate the way in which women can perform genre, can use “cunning and manipulation from a position of total powerlessness” (124). Thus he turns to Scheherezade’s story of Prince Camaralzaman and the djinn, which is, appropriately for a metafictional narrative, “only half-told in the manuscripts of the Nights” (126). And here Orhan explains the nature of djinns. They are, he says, an order of beings of the middle space, between angels and man – “creatures of this world, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible,” and like enough to human beings that rules exist concerning their marrying and having sexual relations with them (131). Orhan demonstrates how this tale puts the djinns in the curious position of those who control destiny through organizing circumstances to bypass character and foreground sex, thereby functioning as “the narrative contrivance of a group of bizarre and deeply involved onlookers” (133). Orhan concludes that “[i]t is as though our dreams were watching us and directing our lives with external vigour whilst we simply enact their pleasures passively” (134–5) – except that, he says, “the djinns are more solid than dreams.” Though we never discover how much of this story is Scheherezade’s, and how much is Orhan’s own textual appropriation from other sources, it sets up the reader for a tale in which Byatt’s own commitment to the importance of dream imagery will be actualized in the magic realism of djinns who are as present and as powerful as anything else in the dailiness of the story. As Orhan goes into a more technical description of narrative layers, Gillian retreats into her own layered narrative, remembering a childhood outing to a movie that featured a genie. When the movie was interrupted by an air raid, and the children were evacuated to a makeshift shelter in the cellar, the child Gillian continued to imagine the wings and fire of the djinn (136). Again the doubleness: from early childhood, the imaginary and the real have been for her inseparable,



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even indistinguishable. It is not by chance that Gillian and the djinn are both described as creatures who, like a gas confined in a bottle, or like Griselda confined in her monologic tale, are ripe for a way of escape. The titular preoccupation of Byatt’s story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” thus concerns the liminality of the middle space, its imaginative possibilities, and the dangers to which it is peculiarly liable. Gillian’s experience of visiting the Museum of Anatolian Civilization in Ankara is similarly a parodic blend of history, the mythical, and the religious, as she is shown around by her own particular Ancient Mariner, a museum guide in the form of a bulky troll-like man with a sheepskin jacket and a shiny bald head who “was the best, the most assured raconteur she could hope to meet” (141), and who Orhan suggests later was actually a djinn. It is not merely that any attempt to disentangle the “factual” from the “imaginary” is presented as an impossible and pointless task, but that Byatt privileges the imaginative possibilities of the middle space between worlds as more powerful, and finally more humanizing, than any environment controlled by what might be conceived of as the merely factual. The merely factual has no appeal for Gillian. On an excursion to Ephesus, she finds the statues of Artemis, “fecundity in stone,” both more intriguing and more believable than the stories of St Paul in Ephesus which, as a child, she was “required to believe” were true (163). In fact, she had hated the stories of St Paul and the other apostles because they were “told to her as true stories, and this somehow stopped off some essential imaginative involvement with them.” She had always found the characters of Greek and Roman epic more real than Paul, who had seemed a cardboard figure by comparison. But it is worth considering at this point, as Gillian seems not to do, the place of generic conventions in creating this response. What makes a true story? There is an intentionality at work behind generic choice. The biblical story of St Paul is told in the Acts of the Apostles, whose writer, the historian Luke, is aiming to make his narrative sound as much unlike myth or fairy tale and as much like factual reportage as possible because his premise is that faith needs to be based on believable empirical evidence. The stories of Gillian’s favoured Greek and Roman heroes are of course told mainly in poetry, their aim quite different from Luke’s, because they have no interest in asserting a literal over an imaginative truth. That an imaginative child faced with this choice of genres should opt for poetry and epic over journalistic reportage

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and doctrinal illustration is hardly surprising, particularly when the likely nature of the storytelling is taken into account. Around the “true stories” of the Bible record might accrete a no-nonsense attitude of facticity which Gillian’s Sunday School teacher might feel duty-bound to replicate – indeed, might not have the talent to avoid. Around the “imaginary stories” of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses no such caveats would apply, and imagination could be given full rein. As a result, the characters of the biblical account might remain flat and unreal to the child, whereas the characters of the legendary account would fill out into vivid dramatis personae. Moreover, Byatt wants to affirm the psychological truth of story. In a 1980 essay entitled “‘The Omnipotence of Thought’: Frazer, Freud and Post-Modernist Fiction,” she asserts that “[t]raditional realism works with probabilities, correcting the melodramatic or fairy-tale expectations of romance. Later magical realists use the conventions of older genres to explore unconscious fantasy or psychic truth” (Passions 127). It is with the possibilities of this second group that she is allying herself in “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.” The biblical narrative has it that St Paul denounced Artemis in the very theatre in Ephesus where Gillian is now standing, and had then to leave the city because of the uproar he created. But, almost at the end of “The Djinn” story, the wish that Gillian has made between the two statues of Artemis, her arms held (as the magic required) by two women of the same name (“Djinn” 159), does indeed come true. According to Gillian’s reading of the biblical account, she could have no possibility of a positive relationship to St Paul, and nothing she could want to ask of him; according to her reading of mythology, on the other hand, she can voice to Artemis her deepest desires. The fulfillment of her wish – that she speak at a major conference in Toronto – is a confirmation of Gillian’s place of honour as a respected and wise woman in her society. And religion’s imbrication with myth is reinforced by the legend she is told of the Virgin Mary’s dying in Ephesus. Even though the legend of Mary’s house here can be traced back only to an ecstatic vision experienced by “a sick German lady” in the nineteenth century, Gillian imagines the Virgin Mary as an elderly and bewildered woman who waited in Ephesus for death until “this real dead old woman had in part become the mother goddess, … the crowned Queen” (166). This overlay of the “real” with the legendary takes Gillian back in her mind to the statues of Artemis, as she “understood that real-unreal was not the point, that the goddess was still, and always had been, and in the foreseeable



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future would be more alive, more energetic, infinitely more powerful than she herself.” At that moment, forcibly reminded of her own death waiting for her, she experiences for the second time her unnerving ghoul vision. And, true to the conventions of fairy story, there is a third such encounter, this time in the desacralized temple of Haghia Sophia in Istanbul, which figures as a kind of negative middle space. It “could feel … like a meeting-place of cultures, of east and west, the Christian Church and Islam, but it did not. It felt like an empty exhausted barn, exhausted by battle and pillage and religious rage. Whatever had been there had gone, had fled long ago, Gillian felt” (172–3). And there is a powerful vacancy at the centre: in this place that is both museum and mosque, there is a magic pillar with a hole in it, worn away by the faith of those touching it in hopes of fulfilling their wishes. It is typical of the undecidabilities of this tale that Orhan can remember neither where the pillar is nor what, precisely, the hole does. When Gillian is forced by three Pakistani women to put her hand in the hole, the liquid inside makes her flesh crawl. The guidebook that Orhan translates for the Pakistani husband declares that this water, blessed by St Gregory Thaumaturge the Miracle-Worker, is “efficacious for diseases of vision and for fertility” (175) – but the husband is an Islamic fundamentalist who sees only the decadence of the West and understands this pillar to be part of a holy shrine of Islam, so it is unclear whether, in a building that he claims for a rising Islamic jihad, the pillar appeals more to a universalist or a particularist sensibility. Possibly the husband is himself in need of healing from metaphorical diseases of vision and fertility. Gillian feels only that the building’s old spirit has died and the new spirit is one that does not speak to her but fills her with fear (176). Like the story of Walter who takes every position in his narrative, this is a space not open to the discourses of heteroglossia or the ethic of care. In Gillian’s experience of it, it is not even a space in which is the trace of an absent God.1 When the man has left, disgruntled and offended to discover that Gillian is not married to Orhan but is English and has therefore understood all the insults against the West that he has uttered, Gillian points out to Orhan the potential doubleness of Haghia Sophia’s name itself: “If I were a postmodernist punster, … I would make something of Haghia Sophia. She has got old, she has turned into a Hag. But I can’t, because I respect etymologies, it means holy. Hag is my word, a northern word, nothing to do with here” (178). Orhan replies that “[l]ots of

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American students here do think Hag is Hag. They get excited about Crones,” and adds, “You have said it now … Even if you repudiate it.” This is an instance of Bakhtinian heteroglossia: the coexistence in one utterance of other utterances in conflict with it. It is also, to use Hutcheon’s terms, an instance of the complicity of the postmodern, which inscribes even as it critiques – and does so in order to point to the ethical questions which arise within a situation of epistemological uncertainty.

Djinns Present: The Genie in the Bottle It is now, almost precisely halfway through Byatt’s long short story, when we have been presented with the traditional situation of women in monologic narratives, the interdependence of the narratives of religion and history, and the inevitability of epistemological perspectivalism, that a specific and private narrative of Gillian’s own becomes the focus of attention. And it is in Gillian’s experience in her hotel room in Istanbul, a physically liminal middle space enclosing a personal story which no-one else can corroborate, that the performance of the narrative genres of historiographic metafiction, magic realism, parodic myth, and photographic co-optation demonstrates most complex slippage. This is the story of the genie in the bottle. In the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Gillian has acquired from a merchant, one of Orhan’s students who had, appropriately, written a dissertation on Yeats and Byzantium, a stoppered glass bottle which might perhaps be a valuable nineteenth-century “çesm-i bülbül,” or nightingale’s eye, or might perhaps be a recent Venetian imitation. Gillian is very attracted to this bottle: she “collected glass paperweights: she liked glass in general, for its paradoxical nature, translucent as water, heavy as stone, invisible as air, solid as earth. Blown with human breath in a furnace of fire” (182). The store owner does not know why the flask is called a nightingale’s eye – “[p]erhaps nightingales have eyes that are transparent and opaque” (183). Gillian decides she must have the bottle, for a reason that critiques mimetic representationalism: “[b]ecause the word and the thing don’t quite match, and I love both of them” (184). The store owner sells it to her for a small sum, “as if it were Venetian, because you like it, and you may imagine it is çesm-i bülbül and perhaps it will be, is, that is” (184). Gillian takes this indeterminately labelled flask back to her hotel room. What, exactly, may she imagine there?



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What happens next is framed in an intriguing and important way. “Time,” says the narrator, “passes differently in the solitude of hotel rooms. The mind expands, but lazily, and the body contracts in its bright box of space” (185). Gillian’s first temptation alone in a hotel room is always to channel-surf on the television, imperiously commanding the images of the “capering shadow-theatre” to pass before her in their “transparent life.” The narrative foregrounds the morally confusing nature of these disparately juxtaposed images: a plane in flames, a daredevil priest, a tsetse fly, a “houri” tasting raspberry fudge, “jeeps full of dirty soldiers in helmets brandishing machineguns” – “fact or stunt?” “narrative or advertisement?” “fact or drama, which?” (186). Generic slippage between the already slippery genres of historiographic metafiction, magic realism, and parodic myth is endemic, then, to the functioning of television imagery because here the blurring of generic boundaries may be a power move in the commercial service of audience manipulation. As Michel de Certeau puts it, such “narrations” have “the twofold and strange power of transforming seeing into believing, and of fabricating realities out of appearances” (Practice 186). The discovery on the TV of a live game of tennis is a purist narrative by comparison: “Dr Perholt was accustomed to say, in her introductory talks on narratology, that whoever designed the rules and the scoringsystem of tennis was a narrative genius of the first order,” arranging these things to maximize both tension and pleasure for the watchers (“Djinn” 186–7). She loves the skill of the cameramen, “as the camera can make these heavy muscled men hang at rest in their billowing shirts,” and the geometry of the game, “the white lines of increasing difficulty, of hope and despair, the acid gold sphere of the ball, the red dust flying, the woven chequered barrier of the net” (187–8). A live match has “the wonderful open-endedness of a story which is most beautifully designed towards satisfactory closure but is still undecided,” and “must, almost certainly come. And in the fact of the almost was the delight” (188). Byatt is here setting out for the reader the specific joys of narrative-as-dialogic-game, in contrast to the “horror” of narrativeas-monologic-control that Walter and other story manipulators have displayed earlier in the story. As Gillian had said of the story of Patient Griselda, “There is no play in this tale” (120); in a game there must be play, because the play’s the thing – the point, the site of shifting power negotiations, the place of polyphonic possibility. Narrative, to avoid the strictures of a Bakhtinian critique, must remain open, organic, and

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embodied rather than becoming fixed and rigidly propositional. It must have room for play. The glass box of the television is analogous to the glass box of Gillian’s shower. She has told us that, now that she is not expected to participate in tennis but only to be audience to it, Gillian loves tennis in the glass box “as she had loved bedtime stories as a child” (187). She is outside this box. But she is inside the glass box of her shower, herself become participant. And from here she will enter the narrative newly baptized under her own power, in stark contrast to the women encased in the glass boxes of fairy tales awaiting, like Sleeping Beauty, the rescuing male kiss.2 Thus, having showered, Gillian decides to wash the çesm-i bülbül bottle, “to bring the glass to life” (190). This happens more dramatically than she expects: the bottle leaps in her hands, the stopper flies to the ground, and out comes “a swarming, an exhalation, a fast-moving dark stain” which “gathered and turned and flew in a great paisley or comma out of the bathroom. I am seeing things, thought Dr Perholt” (191). And indeed she is. As the djinn materializes in Gillian’s hotel bedroom, and shrinks himself to manageable size, holding the television in one hand, the reader is barely conscious of the skill with which Byatt has unsettled the mimetic conventions of realist fiction (the careful placing of physical and temporal context in the presentation of the hotel bedroom, the shower, the television remote) by its interpolation with myth, magic, and metafiction, and has made the djinn eminently believable through the juxtaposition of the photographic imagery of television with the imagery of this event of “seeing things.” Since, Byatt silently addresses the reader, you are so easily willing and able to believe the images on the television, why not these other images from a different and older glass box? Gillian “was later to wonder how she could be so matter-of-fact about the presence of the gracefully lounging Oriental daimon in a hotel room. At the time, she unquestioningly accepted his reality and his remarks as she would have done if she had met him in a dream,” that is to say, with an awareness of an other than everyday reality and a sense that, though she would not wake up from him, “she did feel she might move suddenly – or he might – into some world where they no longer shared a mutual existence” (206–7). Here is a vivid destabilizing of the binaries of what Edward Said taught us to call Orientalism, so that the Oriental becomes ordinary and the everyday is Orientalized into unexpected shapes and possibilities. We might recall again Byatt’s comment on her own writing, that she has



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always worked close to her dream imagery: “I have had this strong sense that poetic images and visionary images and dream-structured narratives are of equal importance” to the quotidian imagery of social realism (“Dreams” 235). Meanwhile the djinn and Gillian, creatures one of a timeless storyworld and the other of a world of time and decay, have much to negotiate. When the djinn whisks a tiny Boris Becker homunculus out of the game on the TV and onto the hotel’s chest of drawers, Gillian’s demand that he be replaced into his game is motivated by notions of fairness and generosity: “You must understand that you are disappointing millions of people, all round the world, interrupting this story – I’m sorry, déformation professionelle, I should say, this game” (199). The slippage between the notions of story and game is of course the point. For there are rules, at least insofar as there is an ethic of responsibility before the face of the other. Asking us to consider the responsibilities involved in the larger-than-life nature of a tennis match as television performance, Byatt pushes Levinas’s face-à-face responsibility of one individual before another to become a responsibility in face of millions. And then there is dinner. The meal that Gillian and the djinn enjoy is the product of Room Service plus a number of djinnic extras; we are not asked to distinguish between the substantiality and taste of these two kinds of food, the everyday and the daimonic, served on the same plate. When the djinn begins to tell the story of his life, his tales too are a blend of history and romance, incorporating the Queen of Sheba and Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci into his narrative of love and entrapment and Eastern exotica. And when Gillian and the djinn discuss the nature of the real, Gillian’s own story is also freighted with the exotic. She describes an imaginary boy-companion she had in childhood who was “more real than – reality – as the goddess of Ephesus is more real than I am” (236). And she tells a story of how her late-adolescent beauty was so perfect that it had completely undesired effects on otherwise sane and stable men, and it frightened her: “It was like … having a weapon, a sharp sword, I couldn’t handle” (241). Something about this beauty was unstable: “It was lovely. But unreal. I mean, it was there, it was real enough, but I knew in my head it wouldn’t stay – something would happen to it” (242). Is this beauty that didn’t stay more or less “real” than the magically stable beauty that Gillian acquires through her first wish of the djinn, for an imperfect but “unexceptionable” thirty-five-year-old body? The notion that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” becomes an epistemological

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game at this point – a question of the degree to which the “real” must be a matter of permanence through time or stability in space. And so as Gillian and the djinn, liminal creatures in the middle space of a hotel room, share their experiences, we see how the performance of generic slippage raises questions about the construction of the real and the ethical responsibility of response.

Djinns to Come: The Solid Metaphor of Glass Of Gillian’s three wishes that the djinn is by tradition bound to grant her, then, the first is for herself – that she should be restored to her body as she last really liked it, which turns out to be at around age thirty-five. Her second wish, she says, is for the djinn, because she wants to give him something: she wishes that he would love her. But the djinn points out the doubleness in her motivation here: “You give and you bind, like all lovers” (251). This second wish is not yet ethical in the sense of being for-the-other; it is playing for itself in a kind of palimpsest of desire because, of course, one of the central ways in which Byatt is playing games with the conventions of the fairy tale is in having the daimonic and the earthly relate on an erotic level. In the event their lovemaking is wonderful and indescribable: “All lovemaking is shape-shifting – the male expands like a tree, like a pillar, the female has intimations of infinity in the spaces which narrow inside her. But the djinn could prolong everything, both in space and in time” (251). And afterwards, because indeed he does love her (again, the traditional convention of the wish explores a “psychic truth”), he agrees to stay with her for a while. What Gillian had wished at the Haghia Sophia pillar was that she were not a woman because, in the stories she studies, she sees women as unable to do more than sit and wait for their fate (248–9). Her own story, however, and particularly her third wish, will alter the pattern, and the reasons for this will involve the same ethic of responsibility that she insisted upon for the djinn in his dealings with Becker in the game of tennis – and that Byatt is by implication expecting of the reader, the decoder of this story. Several months later, Gillian and the djinn are again in the liminal space of a hotel room, back in Toronto for the conference at which she is the featured speaker. And this time it is the djinn rather than Gillian who experiences the untethered nature of commercially generated photographic images. Where Gillian as she channel-surfed could command the images to appear, the djinn is immersed in them because



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he exists in the same realm as they. As he flies from his bottle out over Lake Ontario, he is deeply saddened by the traffic-jam of images in the airwaves: “politicians and pop-stars, TV evangelists and vacuum cleaners, moving forests and travelling deserts, pornographic bottoms and mouths and navels, purple felt dinosaurs and insane white puppies” (255). His main concern is that there is no room for him to spread his wings. “The Koran and the Old Testament, he told Dr Perholt, forbade the making of graven images, and whilst these were not graven, they were images, and he felt they were infestations.” Thus his sadness has an ethical dimension: in a clever turning of the Saidian tables, Byatt has the Orient represent a kind of moral traditionalism and the capitalism of the Occident epitomize amoral excess. The djinn’s depression at the lack of space suggests that there are certain formal requirements for a true narrative ethics; the indiscriminate traffic-jam of images at cross purposes closes down possibilities and imposes restrictions willynilly. Even though the djinn finds the “flying faces” interesting, and even though he is learning their languages and their tongues, “it is as bad in the upper air as in bottles” because the way through has to be negotiated without any real dialogue. Here an apparently heteroglossic environment is being manipulated in the service of a totalizing system of capitalist enterprise to foreclose any relational responsibility. Gillian’s paper at the conference will have unexpected presentational quirks and relational consequences. This gathering at the University of Toronto is “a prestigious conference, to use an adjective that at this precise moment is shifting its meaning from magical, from conjuringtricks, to ‘full of renown’, ‘respectable in the highest’, ‘most honourable’” (256). Byatt has the term conserve both its older and its newer meanings – even at the micro-level, the language of this novella participates in the game of slippage between generic conventions. Gillian’s paper engages the metanarrational topos of “Wish-fulfilment and Narrative Fate: some aspects of wish-fulfilment as a narrative device.” Her argument is intended to be that characters in fairy tales “are subject to Fate and enact their fates. Characteristically they attempt to change this fate by magical intervention in its workings, and characteristically too, such magical intervention only reinforces the control of the Fate which waited for them, which is perhaps simply the fact that they are mortal and return to dust” (258). But her paper too turns out to be slippery: she finds that it twists away from her intentions even as she gives it, under the influence of the djinn, whom she notices sitting in heavy disguise (next to the narratologist Todorov, no less) in the

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audience. She is telling a story she learned in Turkey, where stories are prefaced by “perhaps it happened, perhaps it didn’t” (259). This is the story of a fisherman and three apes that he draws from the ocean – one dead, the second dying, the third gleaming with health. By using his wishes discreetly, the fisherman creates a “happy ever after” world; the snag is that with each wish the gleaming healthy ape gets smaller, which he believes to be his inescapable Fate. However, in Gillian’s altered version of the story the fisherman pre-empts fate by his refusal to indulge in greed: he says to the ape, “I wish … that you would take the next wish, if that is possible, and wish for your heart’s desire” (265). And so the ape disappears. Back in her hotel room Gillian complains to her djinn that he had made her paper incoherent: “It was a paper about fate and death and desire, and you introduced the freedom of wishing-apes” (269). Nevertheless, the event impels her to offer to the djinn the same gift that the fisherman offered to the third ape: “I wish you could have whatever you wish for – that this last wish may be your wish” (270). Annegret Maack has argued that Gillian thus “shows mastery in foregoing desire, and the gift of the act of wishing is her attempt ‘to incorporate the idea of death into the experience of life,’” to use Lionel Trilling’s description of the Freudian death-wish, “—the acceptance, in other words, of her fate” (Maack 129). However, at the same time as Gillian’s act repeats the fisherman’s generosity, it also recapitulates the generosity that she had herself expected of the djinn in relation to Becker. Jane Campbell suggests, rather, that with the djinn’s help “Gillian has fulfilled her own requirement that there should be play and freedom in narrative, even to the point of risking loss of control over one’s story” (Campbell 143). Indeed, Gillian expects the djinn to disappear immediately, like the ape. Instead, he demonstrates his loving responsibility to Gillian by dissolving the bottle (turning it into glass marbles), thanking her, and taking her out to find a gift to remember him by. The chosen gift is a domed glass paperweight containing many colours, because glass is an element of the paradoxes of the middle space, where opposites are held in tension: it is “made of dust, of silica, of the sand of the desert, melted in a fiery furnace and blown into its solid form by human breath. It is fire and ice, it is liquid and solid, it is there and not there” (271). The paperweight, says the djinn, is called “The Dance of the Elements.” Gillian responds, “‘Now to the elements – Be free and fare thou well,’” the final words of Prospero as he frees his spirit-servant Ariel in The Tempest.



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As a present-day Prospero, Gillian is still half in thrall to her slave’s magic. Several years later she meets the djinn again in a shop in New York where she is poring over two paperweights, one containing the snake of death and fate (151), and the other containing a flower of eternal youth (149), “side by side, held in suspension” (276). The djinn buys them both for her. “Oh glass,” she has said to the shop owners, “it is not possible, it is only a solid metaphor, it is a medium for seeing and a thing seen at once. It is what art is” (274–5). This duality is something Byatt herself has discussed in Passions of the Mind in relation to Wittgenstein’s famously ambiguous figure understood by the mind to be, in some sense, both duck and rabbit (Passions 15). Michael Levenson concludes of Byatt that, in finding the median between language understood as a self-supporting self-referential system and language understood as a naive correspondence with the world, she exploits “the abundance of metaphor, a perpetual variety that settles nowhere.” In “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” this abundance is realized and embodied in the “solid metaphor” of glass, the medium for seeing and the thing seen which is the self-conscious doubleness of the weighted paper of middle space, the nightingale’s eye and the paperweight, the genie both held and freed. Campbell argues that “The Djinn” “blends the fairy tale, where, as Gillian points out, characters are ‘subject to Fate and enact their fates,’ and the novel, where characters have ‘choice and motivation’” (Campbell 143). At the same time, the parallel between Gillian and the djinn suggests the power of narrative and fairy tale, the power of this teller, and the power of Byatt herself to “float redundant” and thereby to be released from the tight boxes and bottles of the realist world into a world of ever-present otherness “full of forever possibilities” (“Djinn” 272). Byatt’s “self-conscious realism” enacts Bakhtin’s notion of genre as a mediation between world and text, in demonstrating the doubleness of the very terms of this binary: “There are things in the earth, things made with hands and beings not made with hands that live a life different from ours, that live longer than we do, and cross our lives in stories, in dreams, at certain times when we are floating redundant. And Gillian Perholt was happy, for she had moved back into their world, or at least had access to it, as she had had as a child” (“Djinn” 277). When Gillian asks the djinn, “Will you stay?” he replies, “No. But I shall probably return again.” “If,” she ruefully responds, “you remember to return in my life-time.” “‘If I do,’ said the djinn.” And that exchange, open-ended, dialogic, conditional, free, is the last word

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of the story (277). The story of Gillian as a woman of stopped energies has been released: in one sense she has escaped Fate (she has an unexceptionable thirty-five-year-old body and an immortal friend); in another sense she has consciously embraced it, through an imaginative conditionality (“If you remember in my life-time”) by which she enacts the possibilities of imagination for release in the lives of other women. Campbell sees this ending as “balanc[ing] the satisfaction of closure and the promise of open-endedness” (144); Alfer and Noble comment that it is typical of Byatt’s fiction to be “not ‘either-or’ but emphatically ‘both-and’” (Essays 11). Thus Gillian’s generosity together with her acceptance of limitation lose her the game of time but gain for her the free play of a wider and, we might say, more transcendent world.

Fantasy, Form, and Faith In the introduction to her Passions of the Mind (1991), Byatt singles out a 1961 essay by novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” as a piece which has been very influential on her own development as a novelist. Byatt calls this essay “both a text about morality in a post-Christian world, and a text about the appropriate fictive form with which to explore that world, in its complexity and depth” (3). Issues of morality, world-appropriateness, and form are central to all Byatt’s fiction, whether in its postmodern realism we label it magic-real, historiographically metafictional, parodically mythical, or some combination of all these. In her essay, Murdoch is particularly troubled by the escapist potential of fantasy. Whereas “what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons,” she classifies fantasy as irresponsible because, according to her definition, it “operates either with shapeless day-dreams … or with small myths, toys, crystals … Neither grapples with reality” (292–3). On the other hand, “Real people are destructive of myth, contingency is destructive of fantasy and opens the way for imagination” (294). This distinction between fantasy and imagination is vitally important. As we have seen, what some readers might describe as fantasy in Byatt’s writing is energized less by any temptation to “deform” reality than by the concern to revitalize the moral imagination that Murdoch advocates. Byatt is as wary of a reductive and pallid kind of fiction as is Murdoch, and recognizes – as does Murdoch herself, in practice – that a questing for imaginative truth necessitates the inclusion of dreams and visions and poetic imagery. And so it is



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the type and purpose of “fantasy” that is at issue. Gillian and the djinn meeting between worlds in the liminal space of a hotel bedroom must “grapple with reality” – with the phenomenological construction of the contingently real, the very foundations of narrative accounting, and the possibilities of ethical response. An aspect of this concern with imaginative fiction is the recognition that narrative form itself requires moral attention. In narrative, writes Murdoch, “form itself can be a temptation, making the work of art into a small myth which is a self-contained and indeed self-satisfied individual … Our sense of form, which is an aspect of our desire for consolation, can be a danger to our sense of reality as a rich receding background” (294). Form is morally suspect when it closes down possibilities of the real rather than opening them up, when it forecloses dialogue and determines conclusions. Walter in the story of “Patient Griselda” is the master of this kind of form and illustrates Bakhtin’s critique of monologic texts, not only in their impact on characters within the text but also in their relationship to the reader, dramatically realized by Byatt in the fateful ghoul’s appearances to the intratextual reader, Gillian. Susan Van Zanten Gallagher has even argued that certain kinds of formulaic fiction, however sanitized their contents, are actually immoral because the rote formulas and mechanical structures of such fiction betray its moral shallowness and offer false consolation (Gallagher and Lundin 143). The difficulty and complexity of the moral life require complex imaginative responses; “reality is not a given whole,” argues Murdoch, and “since reality is incomplete, art must not be too much afraid of incompleteness” (“Dryness” 295). With Levinasian resonance, she sees a literature that is open to incompleteness as potentially more valuable than philosophy because “through literature we can re-discover a sense of the density of our lives. Literature can arm us against consolation and fantasy” (294). But though Murdoch, like Bakhtin, believes that the novel is the literary form most able to present this fuller idea of reality, she writes her essay out of frustration with the many novels that fail to do so. “Only the very greatest art,” she declares, “invigorates without consoling, and defeats our attempts, in W.H. Auden’s words, to use it as magic” (295). In Passions of the Mind Byatt emphasizes that Murdoch’s purpose is to reject “the single vision” in favour of that more “naturalistic” view of the complexities of character which appeals also to Byatt (“Introduction” 3). Though Byatt and Murdoch do not comment directly on Bakhtin, it is here that Bakhtin’s description of the

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polyphonic novel, as he found it realized supremely in Dostoevsky, resonates most fully with Murdoch’s rubric for “the very greatest art.” Such a novel allows for “the density of our lives” and for what Bakhtin termed “the thinking human consciousness and the dialogic sphere of its existence” (Problems 270), rather than settling for any kind of reductiveness or finalizable explanation of character. Bakhtin crusaded against this kind of absolutism, characteristic of the monologic novel, which runs counter to what he saw as the originary spirit of the novel-as-genre, “a genre that is ever questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to review” (Dialogic 39).3 As I have already suggested, Bakhtin’s fundamental understanding of the novel as a genre did not arise from any abstract concept of form imposed from without: instead of a centripetal structure, he focused on the centrifugal force of the many personal voices of linguistic discourse, manifesting themselves within the novel as a historically developing and socially determined form. Bakhtin’s particular contribution to a theorization of the form of the novel is, then, especially relevant to Byatt’s (and Murdoch’s) concerns with the ethics of form and function. The novel is based, Bakhtin argued, on “social speech diversity,” the relational interactions of people using words in diverse situations, and “not on abstract differences in meaning nor on merely narrative collisions” (Dialogic 412). He therefore asserted that “[f]orm and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon” (259). We hardly need recall, in “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” the overt self-consciousness of the narrator’s discussion of the terms “redundant” and “prestigious,” or Gillian’s of “Haghia,” to recognize that Byatt’s writing resonates deeply and playfully with Bakhtin’s formulation of the novel as par excellence the place of heteroglossia, of languages meeting and spinning off one another in the resonating layeredness of meaning in each word as it is used in new social contexts. For this reason the novel, above all genres, is the site of greatest literary realism. The languages of heteroglossia, wrote Bakhtin, “like mirrors that face each other, each reflecting in its own way a piece, a tiny corner of the world, force us to guess at and grasp for a world behind their mutually reflecting aspects that is broader, more multi-leveled, containing more and varied horizons than would be available to a single language or a single mirror” (414–15). The novel’s contact with “the spontaneity of the inconclusive present” keeps it from “congealing” (27), from becoming the dry crystal or the Romantic consolation



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of Murdoch’s discontent. “The novelist” – but here Murdoch would want to add the qualification “the fine and serious novelist” – “is drawn toward everything that is not yet completed” (27). The ending of “The Djinn,” a story long enough to warrant the title “novella,” is the formal expression of an openness, an incompleteness, that is present as the play of narrative freedom rather than of narrative control at every stage of the story. Here there is an immediate congruence with what Levenson in his article on Byatt’s Angels and Insects calls “the Murdochian/Byattian ethic,” which he defines as the responsibility “to escape the temptations of easy subjectivity (opinion, sincerity, fantasy) and to encounter the hard world beyond the self” (Essays 165). This ethic recognizes that the world is not organized for the self, nor centred upon the self. The other is primary; as Levinas would argue, I am responsible to the face of the other even before I can be constituted as myself. Byatt tells us that the artists she admires – for instance, Wallace Stevens, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Rilke, Freud – “knew that the world was not ourselves and not our own, and that it was hard in spite of blazoned days” (Passions 323).4 She goes out of her way to explain that by “hard” she intends to suggest “solid, in the sense of terra firma, and not merely hostile and rejecting” (323). The otherness of the world is both its greatest glory and its greatest threat. And for Byatt the nature of this encounter with the “hard world” is intimately connected with the demise in the West of traditional religious faith. Byatt calls herself “a resolute anti-Christian” (Passions 212). But Michael Levenson argues persuasively that during the 1980s and into the 1990s, Byatt’s critical thinking “returned repeatedly, even obsessively, to our fall into modernity, the ‘demythologizing’ of the Christian world, the loss of the sacred canopy” (166). He suggests that Byatt at first tries to overcome what she calls the “bareness” of a post-Christian world (Passions 323) by an emphasis on physical sensation. But her discovery that “things and metaphors inevitably commingle” is part of her reflection on the place of the spirit, which leads her to the vision of “a worldly existence that depends on straining toward a Beyond” (Levenson 167–8). Though Levenson here depends on the kind of language that Byatt consciously rejects, he offers the valuable insight that the “arduous condition of a post-Christian epoch” involves an “intimacy between realism and fabulism” (169), of which the Christian expression had been, supremely, the life and death of Christ, stretched out between the mundane and the miraculous. Byatt herself writes in

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her long and self-confessedly pivotal 1990 essay on Van Gogh, “It is not possible to avoid the myth of incarnation for long. We slip into metaphor and fiction,” as mythic realities “become flesh” through the imagination (Passions 308). Her response to the use of Christian myth in post-Christian authors is to say that “[w]e all make meanings by using the myths and fictions of our ancestors as a way of making sense, or excitement, out of our experience on the earth” (Passions 312). In the post-Christian world, where “what religion we have has no poetic or other validity,” in Byatt’s estimation (212), “all we can do seems to be to look clearly” (313). “Looking clearly” involves both physical and metaphorical sight. Glass in “The Djinn” is a solid metaphor, both for seeing and for the seen. Glass encloses and glass clarifies; it is cage and (as shower stall, as television, as paperweight) it is space for creative play. The world is hard both as solid matter is hard and as hostile glances and difficult demands on the self are hard. Here we find ourselves returned to chapter 1 of the present volume, and to Byatt’s comment on truthfulness that I quoted there: “whilst it was once attractive … to think that whatever we say or see is our own construction, it now becomes necessary to reconsider the idea of truth, hard truth, and its possibility. We may be, as Browning said, born liars. But that idea itself is only wholly meaningful if we glimpse a possibility of truth and truthfulness for which we must strive, however, inevitably, partial our success must be. I do believe that language has denotative as well as connotative powers” (Passions 24). I suggested in that chapter that this is a formulation of postmodern realism, and in subsequent chapters I have been exploring the parameters of that formulation, involving as it does a relational middle space between reality as socially constructed and reality as ontologically given. In more senses than one, Byatt works in the middle space. She charts a middle path between a view of language as a self-supporting abstract system and a naive theory of linguistic correspondence in which one word simply names one thing (see Levenson 173). She is also consciously both a literary critic and a writer of fiction, and has written about how these two activities conjoin for her – “The direction of my research was wayward and precise simultaneously,” she says, of the work she did when writing Angels and Insects (“True Stories” 192). And in a story like “The Djinn,” Byatt is working consciously in the middle space of open ground between the fated world of the fairy tale and the motivated world of the novel.



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Given the richness Byatt explores in this median position on a number of fronts, it is not surprising that she rejects both literary theory and Christian apologetics when she finds that they employ stiff and predictable analogies and “assimilate sensuous experience into their stable constructions” (Levenson 173). But Bakhtin’s theorizing of the novel as a dialogic genre counters Byatt’s objections to literary theory: his espousing of an active, social notion of language and meaning accords well with Byatt’s concept of “the abundance of metaphor, a perpetual variety that settles nowhere” but that strives to “point at a world beyond the words” (173). And Bakhtin’s dialogism, as I have mentioned earlier, has also recently begun to be read through the lens of his Orthodox Christian faith, as a thinker for whom JudaeoChristian theism is at the least an “enabling prejudice” (Felch 9). We saw in the introduction that, in the world as “a beautiful given” (Art and Answerability 111), Bakhtin’s thinking about life and literature is shaped by an understanding of “God as ultimate author, Christ as the perfect self, and the body as the center of value” (Felch, “Perspectival” 31). Meaning and personhood come from the gaze of Christ: “Since I have experienced Christ’s gaze on me as benign, redemptive, and transformative, I am able to extend this gaze to others” (27). Bakhtin’s writings, argues Felch, are “deeply congruent with perspectival realism” because he “points us to world and word as ‘something given’ (realism) and ‘something-to-be-achieved’ (perspectivalism)” (27, 21). To understand language in this way is consciously to embrace its identity as a creature of the middle space, where the word, as Cunningham writes, is “always in-between. It is always wor(l)d” (Reading Gaol 60). And what Felch calls Bakhtin’s “methodological theism” is, finally, relevant to a reading of Byatt because, where Byatt acknowledges the inherited power of Christian imagery but considers it to be a metaphysically empty form, Bakhtin contends that such emptiness is an impossibility: “Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) – they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future developments of the dialogue … Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival” (Speech Genres 170). Byatt dramatizes just this kind of layeredness and instability in “The Djinn.” Her storytelling offers a paradigmatic example of slippage between the various subgenres of historiographic metafiction, magic realism, parodic myth, and photographic co-optation, the last here

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manifested as fiction which plays with the commodified visual image. In Byatt the essentially social and dialogic nature of postmodernist fiction is performed as something constantly in flux, in development, in incompleteness, for the sake of its power subversively to delight and to teach. Bakhtin’s contribution to Byatt’s fiction might then be to suggest that even the contentual freight that Byatt herself considers dead is part of the solid metaphor of glass seen and seeing. The story of “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” cannot be closed into post-Christian stasis, but carries within it a living ethico-religious framework in which it continues to mean.

Epilogue

Narrative Trace, Textual Grace Sometimes the mountain is hidden from me in veils of cloud, sometimes I am hidden from the mountain in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue, when I forget or refuse to go down to the shore or a few yards up the road, on a clear day, to reconfirm that witnessing presence. Denise Levertov, “Witness” When consciousness appeared in the world (in existence) and, perhaps, when biological life appeared (perhaps not only animals, but trees and grass also witness and judge), the world (existence) changed radically. M.M. Bakhtin, “From Notes Made in 1970–71” A Chinese writer of prose has observed that the unicorn, for the very reason that it is so anomalous, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to see. Tacitus did not perceive the Crucifixion, though his book records the event. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Modesty of History” It is of the essence of art to signify only between the lines – in the intervals and times between times. Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names

Narrative Trace Though A.S. Byatt dismisses Christian faith as a viable personal option, it is no surprise that as a literary critic and a writer she has a profound appreciation of the foundational nature of the Christian tradition for

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Western literature and art. She understands Christian stories and symbols as fictional but still powerful. When she writes in her key essay on Van Gogh that we all make sense out of our life experiences by using the myths and fictions of our ancestors, she adds that “we play, in a sense, with so few essentials, since the myths became defined as fictions” (Passions 312). And so, for Byatt, God too becomes a fiction, or perhaps an essential trace: in another essay, she comments on the contemporary British poet D.J. Enright that “[his] God is rather like my own, an omni-present absentee whose linguistic essence is reduced to traces of moral and cultural nostalgia, touched with savagery” (5).1 In this light, however, Byatt’s view of the Christian narrative can actually be seen as more accommodating and generous that that of Elizabeth Kelly, whose magazine article on ethics I had been perusing on the deck that lazy summer afternoon at the beginning of this book. Christianity for Kelly is merely an oppressive code which offers moral absolutes that seem largely irrelevant and impotent. She experiences it not as a nostalgic trace but as a monologic and static “Said.” In her article she describes how she was brought up in what she calls a “grim unimaginative” Catholic school where the conduct of the nuns and priests was “not even remotely recognizably Christian” and where she received a “daily-reinforced burden and glory of ascribing ethical dimension to every single choice” under an “inexorable moral pounding” from Catholicism. She experienced this religion as joyless, “sensually sedating,” and morally exhausting. When she says “I just couldn’t hold at bay the enjoyment conferred by a hot dog and a purposeless summer day,” she is describing the effects of a dualism between matter and spirit which sometimes seems to be understood, even by its adherents, as inherent in Christianity. As it turns out, Mark Kingwell too is a “lapsed Catholic,” an expression which he says he has always been fascinated by: “It suggests an insurance policy allowed to expire or an estate permitted to revert … When it comes to religious belief, my life can be separated, it seems, into prelapsarian and postlapsarian periods, split by some defining moment in which I slipped, or fell … from grace and into something else” (Better Living 227–8). Kingwell goes on to describe a “vestigial Catholic superstition” which he says is present from time to time in every Catholic he knows, lapsed or not: “that good fortune must be the prelude to disaster.” Understandably, this “puts a crimp in your enjoyment of the moment, let me tell you.” And as a result “I cannot but view religious belief, of the traditional self-punishing kind, anyway, as



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an imperfect means to happiness” (228). No wonder Kingwell echoes Nietzsche’s condemnation of “the psychological perversity of Christian morality” (305): it is apparent that both he and Kelly suffered under what they perceived as this kind of “traditional self-punishing” religious belief. Obviously Catholics cannot be left to bear the brunt of all this criticism alone, because such disenchantment will also be found among disaffected people educated in other varieties of Christian school, and other versions of the Christian tradition. However, I hope I have made it clear that the Christian stance undergirding the narrative of this book is of a much more expansive kind than the one that Kelly and Kingfield have unfortunately experienced. Theologians like Middleton and Walsh, poets like Hopkins and Levertov, and literary critics like Jeffrey, Cunningham, and even Bakhtin, whatever their differences of tradition and denomination, espouse a Christian position from a much richer understanding of the notion of grace than the one that Kingwell ironically cites. In their readings of the Christian story, grace offers an overarching metanarrative of creational goodness, redemptive suffering, and sustaining ethical power. It is a story in which even the non-believer is a beneficiary, for it is by a “grace” common to the experiential reality in which we all live that Kelly enjoys the material well-being of purposeless summer days and hotdogs and Kingwell has the freedom to choose an ethical path without religion – to make the “individual decision … to be free” (359). And here I’d like to return for a moment to Valentine Cunningham, whose perspective is particularly apposite at this point because, fundamentally concerned like Byatt with the relationship of world to text, he explains cogently why he understands the interface between the real world and the textual world to be represented most tellingly at the heart of the Christian tradition. In other words, like Byatt, he is profoundly concerned with the viability of realism in the contemporary world, but he comes at it from a different vantage point because of his faith-perspective. As I mentioned in chapter 4, Cunningham is interested in what happens in “the convergence between aesthetic, textual stuff … and a something else – namely the historico-worldly Other beyond the text, out there in the extra-linguistic, heterologic zones of that which is not merely verbal” (Gaol 61). For him, the otherness beyond language is an incontrovertible aspect of the linguistic contract: “No rhetoric, no rhetorical system, can exist without its worldly connection, without being, in itself, parasitic upon the worldly

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host – or without the worldly host parasitic upon it” (363). And he posits an equally incontrovertible place for theology: “when the wordworld relationship is at issue, then the question comes down, sooner or later, to theology, because in the Western tradition, the GraecoJudaeo-Christian tradition, all thinking about the word is inevitably done in the shadow of logos and the Logos” (363). Byatt is aware of this shadow pragmatically when she talks of God as “an omni-present absentee,” but Cunningham elaborates his epistemology ruthlessly. He declares: “in all our contemporary engagements between word and world … our practice and our theory are commanded above all by a relationship with … traditional thought and traditional words about the Word that have been of the essence of the preceding so-called Christian centuries. No history; then no rhetoric. But also, no history of Logos, Scripture, Theologocentrism, then no modernist-postmodernist textuality or critical rhetoric – indeed, no textuality at all” (364). Thus Cunningham’s version of the Derridean “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” might rather read “Il n’y a pas de hors-Parole,” with a capital “P” to point up the signifier for the incarnated Word. From Cunningham’s viewpoint, Christian tradition is not merely important for understanding past literature and our relationships of responsibility to it; it is, quite simply, essential for the existence of both past and contemporary texts. And it is this unavoidableness of what he calls the Judaeo-Christian “master relationship” of word to world that must be acknowledged in any study of literature in the Western tradition. Of course this does not mean that only those who confess Christianity can read Western literature intelligently – though their inside knowledge of the tradition should certainly help them with all kinds of issues of context and reference. It does mean that there is a history which intersects with the history of literature in the West that may be ignored only if we are prepared to countenance a broader cultural ignorance. In fact I might argue that such ignorance is ethically culpable, in light of Bakhtin’s assertion that by ignoring “the historical life of discourse” one contributes to a “reification of the word (and to a muffling of the dialogism native to it).”2 In any case, perhaps even for the non-believer, the reader unwilling or unable to make a creedal commitment, the trace of the Christian Logos can be freighted more valuably than merely as contextual historical information. Emmanuel Levinas has written, of his own religiocultural background, “When I acknowledge this Judaic inheritance, I do not wish to talk in terms of belief or non-belief. ‘Believe’ is not a



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verb to be employed in the first person singular. Nobody can really say ‘I believe’ – or ‘I do not believe’ for that matter – that God exists. The existence of God is not a question of an individual soul uttering logical syllogisms. It cannot be proved. The existence of God ... is sacred history itself, the sacredness of man’s relation to man through which God may pass. God’s existence is the story of his revelation in biblical history” (“Dialogue” 54). Here perhaps is a new kind of middle space, a bridge between the believer and the non-believer, which avoids the impasse of creedal statements. If God’s existence can be conceived of as “the sacredness of man’s relation to man through which God may pass” – if God’s existence is to be understood as story, as the biblical narrative, then there is a sense in which all responsible relationship is potentially traced through by God and every narrative is potentially the story of that trace. This awareness of the trace is everywhere present in post-Christian society, even where it is recognized least willingly, as some of the readings of fiction in this book bear witness. At the same time, it is significant that the turn to “narrative theology” within Christian theology in the last fifty years has recognized, as Middleton and Walsh point out, the character of the Christian story as one that invites participation and one that works with narrative compulsion far more often than with static propositions. Moreover, there is power in the old story yet, even in the largely post-Christian cultures of the West. Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic language, shot through with the traces of its own past and holding the potential of its own future, and always the language of someone speaking, negates any possibility of total fixity, but also any danger of ultimate meaninglessness. “Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival” (Speech Genres 170). And, as Cunningham implies but Lyon spells out, in the “consumer choice” culture of the postmodern, even the choice to construct a personal identity will use not only fragments drawn from new media but also fragments from older sacred stories (Lyon, Disneyland 137). What I have been suggesting is that the old sacred story of Christianity may be both less avoidable and more fruitful as a “meaning route” than many postmodern readers might assume, and this in relation to the wider social framework as well as to the individual. In the introduction, I raised the problem of incompatibility in ethics between the claims of the particular and the universal, in a postmodern world where universals are often under suspicion as power moves and particulars are usually hailed as free-floating choices. But the Christian

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story insists on universals that embrace particularity (205) – on a story that is rooted in historical specificity but premised on universal applicability. After all, it becomes increasingly evident that issues of universality are key in our world, and not only to Judaeo-Christian theists. In the words of Terry Eagleton, “As the environmentalists are only too aware, universality in the end means that we inhabit the same small planet, and though we may forget about totality, we may be sure that it will not forget about us” (Illusions 128). Beneath such archi-environmental concerns, Christianity’s positing of a created and ordered universe can offer a basis for belief in some innate human commonalities and abilities to communicate across cultures, even if the building of overt public consensus may need to assume rather more minimal common ground (see Marsden, Secularization 45). But Eagleton is prepared to go further. He makes a fascinating link between postmodernism’s “ability to discern power in powerlessness” and something “behind” it, something that he calls “a precious spiritual tradition which knows how to conjure force out of failure. This is a paradox which can figure only as folly to the prevailing powers, which is the exact measure of its wisdom” (Illusions 91). Couched as it is in language which murmurs “Let the reader understand,” this extraordinary statement reveals Eagleton’s covert Catholicism traced under and around his overtly Marxist commitments. In fact it aligns Eagleton’s understanding of the power of the cross of Christ at the heart of the Christian tradition with that of Cunningham, and Middleton and Walsh, and Hopkins – and Bakhtin.3

Textual Grace The Christian looking at the world of contemporary literature and literary criticism may see the emphasis on realism as a reminder that the ordinary has existence and value; she may read the emphasis on the social construction of reality as a reminder that language needs to be socially accountable to be true to its first Maker. The modes of postmodern realism I have considered in this book even bear the traces of a traditionally “Trinitarian” way of understanding the activity of God in the world: God as Creator, authoring a material and valuable universe; God as Saviour, outside of time but entering history to redeem it; God as Spirit, indwelling the givenness and physicality of daily life and the construction of story, and calling its readers to personal responsibility. This Trinitarian grasping after language to express the activity of God



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has always and already been the ultimate acknowledgment both of the reality of the referent and of its excess. It is not merely subjectivity that is opaque, on this model, but reference of all kinds. And for this very reason, as critics from other belief systems also assert, the responsibility of using language carefully is enormous. I suggested at the outset that the Christian reader and critic might legitimately see the “ethical turn,” a freshly articulated concern with responsibility, justice, and harmony, as a further instance of common grace – God’s initiative in Creation working its way through the language of God’s creatures. Ricoeur has pointed out that, at the very least, the ethical turn demonstrates an ongoing belief in universal rights, even as it rejects a system of totalizing constraints. And in fact a dynamic and process-oriented Christian faith may resonate with and even provide the underlying rationale for the ethical concerns of contemporary literary culture, in contradistinction to the static and defensive models of faith that both Byatt and Elizabeth Kelly object to. Certainly the postmodern realist fictions that I have been discussing are not reducible to fixed systems; they are open-ended and often self-consciously ironic. They recognize the dangers of the monologic metanarrative, but they refuse the divorce of word from world. Though they may not affirm a Christian world view, indeed may consciously oppose such a view, in this link of a middle space between word and world they are inevitably at one level reaffirming the tenets of traditional monotheistic faith, and particularly the notion that responsibility is implicit in response – that human words are secondary to the reference they evoke, but render us responsible to it, and to the people between whom the words pass. “Every sign is a trace. In addition to what the sign signifies, it is the past of him who delivered the sign” (Levinas, “Meaning and Sense” 62). This kind of appreciation of language as intersubjective discourse before it is system is endemic to narrative. Levinas saw literature in general as a mode which reveals the gaps and fissures in “being” but, as we have seen, it is possible to go further than this, to suggest that narrative is already a mode of ethics that asserts relationship before reason and responsibility before knowledge. The Judaeo-Christian tradition is not the only faith tradition to affirm that words are powerful, but it is arguably the one that does so most comprehensively, in the narratives of creation (“God spoke, and it came to be” – God, in creating the world), of relationship (“Here at last is bone of my bone” – Adam, on the creation of Eve), of alienation (“The woman you put here with me

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gave me some fruit” – Adam of Eve to God, after the fall), and of restitution (“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” – Jesus, on the cross). Even as it critiques its own inheritance, then, a theistic postmodern realism can embrace both the question of reference and the need for ethical accountability, as it recognizes the originary ethic of care involved in this relational and Word-based faith, and the real dangers of separating word from referent, Said from Saying, langue from parole, text from life.

And now summer has come round again. As I sit still at my desk, looking out into the great maple tree, green and beneficent, there are people who pass by on the street below – a bright-skinned young couple, a sleek pair of joggers, a tired mother with a sleeping child crumpled in a stroller, two older people striding out vigorously. Sometimes they look up as they pass, and they catch a glimpse of my face. I write their passing; they meet my gaze. The face of the other speaks its difference from me and my obligation to it. The responsibility of the self-conscious observer is perhaps no different from that of the casual passer-by – but it is not my place to decide. Levinas says that “the face is of itself, and, if I may express it so, the mystery of all clarity, the secret of all openness” (Proper Names 95). In the human face the trace of God is manifested, and I am responsible before it. Levinas has rendered me responsible only before this human face. But we may extend that responsibility to texts, and even, after a fashion, to trees, through which also the breath of God has passed, over which we have a certain power of life and death, in which also we may experience grace. In the epigraphic poem at the beginning of this chapter, Denise Levertov speaks of her local mountain, which may be hidden from her by cloud, or by her own inattention. Her responsibility is to make the effort to see, “to reconfirm / that witnessing presence.” This is a matter not only of the unveiled referent but also of the willing heart. Texts of all kinds – narratives, faces, trees, and mountains – “tax readers with ethical duties” (Newton 292); reading them is never an activity free from responsibility. What postmodern realist texts have been particularly able to do is consciously to inhabit the relational middle space between reality understood as given and reality understood as constructed. Though within story truth is always constructed, argues Byatt, yet without story truth is completely inaccessible. These novels recognize that meaning and identity are experienced as narrative



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constructs, and they recognize, therefore, that story is necessary for human life. These novels recognize too that any attempt to mend the world entails mending our myths, our stories about the world, because stories are powerful meaning-makers. For some readers, the incompleteness and the openness that I’ve been arguing are typical of the novel form, and most particularly of the playful shiftiness of the postmodern realist novel, will seem like dubious benefits. How does such incompleteness help in addressing the problem of culturally incompatible definitions of the good, and how does it speak to Stanley Fish’s concern for the issue of choice between competing ethical positions? In one sense, the answer must be that these fictions offer no answer – at least, not directly, and not to the questions as here formulated. Postmodern realist fictions will not offer readers like Elizabeth Kelly or Mark Kingwell a renewed ethical codification, or any clear propositional answer to conflictual ethical questions; but then literature is always more holistic than that, always pointing our attention to the gaps in representation and “letting out onto the unthinkable,” as Levinas would put it. And postmodern realist fictions will also incorporate an attention to hermeneutical strategies, will point the reader back to responsibility for his or her own ways of reading. And so these fictions will offer the reader this: that their ironies and palimpsests, their generic and thematic subversiveness and instabilities consciously situated in the middle space between word and world, will require of the reader “conscienceful listening,” not only to the characters within the narrative but also to the paradoxical voices of its form and its context. And the payoff for such active and respectful listening will be a reconfiguring of the reader’s responsive understanding of the others about whom he or she has read, of the structures and frames through which he or she reads, and consequently of his or her very self in social and interpersonal relations. In the reading pleasure that they give, these fictions are at the same time asking a great deal. There is no room in postmodern realism for a passive reader; the reader is invited – nay, expected – to be not a consumer but a producer, to be involved and active and responsive. Thus, though I believe, as I said in the prologue, that it is in the middle space between world and word that true stories are still and always created, there is a sense in which they are not really true, nor even really created, until they are read, and received, and engaged. Perhaps this is not so very different from the enjoinder to responsibility that the apostle John is traditionally said to have given to the early Christians two thousand odd years ago: “Little

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children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and in action” (1 John 3:18). To divorce word from world is to court death; to bring them together with care is to enter the “truthing” of responsible relational life, and thus the contemporary metanarrative of grace. So, finally, has this book told true stories? That, dear reader, as you close the book, step again across the threshold from word to world, and cross below my window in the murmur of trees on your way, perhaps, to reconfirm the presence of your own mountain, it is your responsibility to decide. But if you look up on your way past, we may be able to greet one another face to face.

Notes

Prologue 1 Derrida’s use of “transcendental” is related to Kant’s notion of a priori categories which make understanding possible because they pre-exist empirical experience. When Kant used the term “transcendental” of his inquiries, he meant not so much that they go beyond experience as that they describe a human structure which is necessary for the possibility of knowledge (Honderich 879). Heidegger, a significant influence on Derrida, drew the terms “transcendental” and “transcendent” into closer relationship by arguing for an other-worldly transcendence implicit in the accessibility of this Kantian transcendental knowledge. Theologically, however, transcendence is much more than a category of rationality and logic, as I have suggested above: it implies an Otherness that is ultimately ungraspable by human minds. 2 It is worth pointing out that for the first Christians, the notion of “belief” entailed not merely mental assent but also a response of trust. The idea of “believing” a story that you didn’t act on was a contradiction in terms. Belief was a dynamic concept that implied trust in the story, obedience to what had been revealed, and faithfulness to that revelation. Thus, belief in a story and responsibility to that story go hand in hand. 3 I should make it clear from the outset that I have neither the desire nor the expertise to write a theological treatise. What follows, then, will be informed by an orthodox Christian perspective, rather than offering a thoroughgoing apologetic for that perspective in the sense of entering into the debates that have engaged contemporary theologians. 4 It may be worth rehearsing here what “deconstruction” means in literary critical parlance, since it is a word that is often sloppily used or misused in the public arena. Deconstruction is the practice of reading, originally named by Derrida, which subverts the implicit claims of a text that it

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can establish coherence and determinate meaning. Deconstruction can be described as a critical operation which demonstrates the inevitable “interestedness” of terminology: it shows how the terms of an opposition depend on one another, and create a hierarchy. For instance, in the binary oppositions man/woman, white/black, wise/foolish, the first term is traditionally valorized at the expense of the second. A Christian might argue that Christ came to deconstruct such binaries by unsettling their culturally determined power-differentials. If language is understood primarily as a differential and arbitrary system of human signs, then the use of the word “language” to describe the mode of communication of the non-human with the human will be assumed to be metaphorical. However, human language may also be understood as a subset of a broader category of language-qua-communication, which includes human non-linguistic relational modes of communication (the face, the arts) as well as the address from the “other” (trees, oceans, the divine) beyond human language. I found it intriguing that the last word in the January 1995 PMLA Special Issue on post-colonialism was given to an article which returned to Kantian metaphysics as authority. Here Satya Mohanty argued, contra contemporary critical dogma, that “[p]erhaps the most powerful philosophical ally of modern anticolonial struggles of all kinds is [the] universalist view that individual human worth is absolute: it cannot be traded away, and it does not exist in degrees” (116). Mohanty explained in a footnote that Kant’s argument about human worth “defends a radical principle that needs no contextual qualification or substantiation,” and that, though it invites specification, “does not depend on such specification for support of the basic claim” (117 n10). But the Kantian a priori are essentially rationally determined: Mohanty emphasized that Kant’s “radical principle” is based on the notion of universal rational agency. In the postmodern context, such a formulation has been called “a philosopher’s creation, a fiction of a dualist philosophical anthropology” (Caputo, “Desire”). A criterion that includes but extends beyond reason is therefore much to be preferred. I suggest that Christianity offers such a criterion, in the belief that the creatureliness of all humankind (for instance, in the aspects not only of reason and imagination, but also of emotion, relationality, and responsibility) shares ab initiis in the image of the Creator, and is therefore of infinite value. The British social theorist Anthony Giddens also made this point in The Consequences of Modernity (1990). Some Christian thinkers go one further than Middleton and Walsh in responding to the term “metanarrative” itself. For example, the philosopher Merold Westphal argues in his book Overcoming Ontotheology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (2001) that “metanarrative” is really not the best term to apply to Christianity since



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in philosophical discourse the prefix “meta-“ implies a second-level order of discourse, “not directly about the world but about a first-level discourse.” Westphal prefers instead the term “meganarrative” for the Christian story since, in his view, scripture and creed, song and sacrament are all “first-order Christian discourse … kerygma, not apologetics” – the story of gospel truth, not defence or explanation of that truth (xiii). Like Middleton and Walsh, Westphal argues that the Christian “grand story” is self-critiquing: it “places ‘us’ under judgment as well” (xv). He distinguishes between this kind of story and the self-legitimizing metanarratives of modernity that Lyotard critiques. Moreover, unlike these modern metanarratives, the Christian story is not the product of philosophy but of revelation (xiv). For this reason Westphal proposes that Lyotard’s criticism of the metanarrative is salutary reading for Christians, since, “whenever Christians tell the biblical story in such a way as to make their systems the repository of absolute truth or to claim divine sanction for institutions that are human, all too human, they become more modern than biblical” (xvi). The Bible is not primarily system but story, not theoretical construct so much as a narrative of good news. Though I have opted in this book to stay with the more commonly used term “metanarrative,” Westphal’s argument for the “meganarrative” of Christianity is persuasive, particularly as it takes into account the difference between a fixed philosophical system and a “grand story” that invites readerly participation. 9 Seyla Benhabib’s formulation of “discourse ethics” has parallels to my project in that she seeks for a middle ground between “an a prioristic universalism and other more radical forms of contextualization” (“In Defense” 175), but she does not allow for the transcendent and must assume a hermeneutical circle of inherited struggle in the definition of the norms of universal moral respect and egalitarian reciprocity (176). Benhabib in fact specifically argues, contra my own position, that “[t]rees do not speak to us,” even though “[a] universalist ethics and an ethic of planetary responsibility can go together very well” (185). 10 It is for this reason that Brian Ingraffia in Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology: Vanquishing God’s Shadow (1995) argues that the god of Western metaphysics is not the God of biblical revelation but a god produced by human reason, and that biblical faith cannot justly be conflated with this “ontotheology” (4–6). 11 There is an instructive difference here from the way in which Derrida identifies with the practice in Jewish thought of writing multiplied commentaries on sacred texts. Both Steiner and Derrida recognize the value of text-on-text, but where Steiner sees the original as an ultimately ungraspable poetic autonomy, Derrida sees a decentred proliferation of deferred meaning and author-ity. For Derrida, in the endlessly productive commentary on sacred texts, each commentary becomes a soi-disant

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“sacred text” in its own right and there is no “first” or “original” sacred text (see Norris 228–9). 12 Cunningham’s use of the phrase “master trope or master relationship” cannot help but suggest the kind of hierarchized servility that the discourses of postmodernism, and in particular its yet more politically sensitive post-colonial and feminist cousins, have taught us to be suspicious of. However, it is important to note that in context Cunningham describes this key relationship of texts to metaphysics and scripture as “belated, punning, parodic, parasitic,” and asserts the historical necessity of recognizing and working with “traditional thought” about it. Thus, I would argue that he is aware of the irony of his usage, but has chosen to use it in spite of itself, rather as Derrida recognizes the necessity of using the very tools he is deconstructing.

introduction 1 Lyotard’s study addresses this issue too: “Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?” (Postmodern Condition xxv) 2 The significant critiques most often associated with poststructuralism are those of Foucault (in his critique of power formations), Lacan (of classical psychoanalysis), Barthes (of literary and cultural tradition), Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva (in their radical feminist critique of categories such as “phallogocentrism”), and, of course, Derrida (in his fundamental critique of Western ontology and metaphysics). 3 In fact, given my interest in a middle space between the constructed and the given, a middle space of relationality and responsibility, and given the recent introduction of the term “post-postmodernism” to describe, among other things, what seems to be a more hopeful and positive reaction against the cynical excesses of postmodernism, I might even have been tempted to coin the phrase “post-postmodernist realisms.” But I would have resisted this temptation, partly because I am interested in exploring those productive middle spaces that I find to be already present in the postmodern as I have here defined it – and partly because of the sheer ugliness of the “post-post” formulation. 4 We might look, for instance, to Foucault’s late writing on sexual ethics, or Lacan’s volume on ethics in psychoanalysis, or Luce Irigaray’s work on the ethics of sexual difference, or Lyotard’s dialogic book on justice, ethics, and politics. 5 Jay himself is in fact writing to appeal for a minimalist “intersubjective rational discourse” which will adjudicate claims even when they cannot be theoretically grounded (47). 6 See, for instance, Martha Nussbaum’s invigorating discussion of teaching courses on “Law and Literature” to law students at the University of Chicago, in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life.



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7 According to Pam Morris, Bakhtin critiques Saussurean linguistics on just this basis, that Saussure’s perception of language is of “monologue divorced from any social context” (Morris 25). Ricoeur also counters the structuralist tendency to treat texts as linguistic objects and argues instead that a text is “a mediation between man and the world, between man and man, between man and himself” (“Life” 431). Language is not merely signs, but signs in sentences, which are relationally determined and historically constituted as elements of discourse. Thus the key distinction between semiotics and semantics (Interpretation Theory 6–7). 8 Bakhtin calls the “reality outside words” the “living contexts” of the words (“Discourse” 353–4). Though phenomenologically he is less interested in referents per se than in socio-political contexts, he is clear that in the novel “any point-of-view … must be a concrete, socially embodied point-of-view, not an abstract, purely semantic position,” and that the novel thus embodies “a historical and concrete plenitude of actual social-historical languages” (412). Moreover, Bakhtin asserts that a language system may act as an absolutizing myth which “substitutes itself for the connections and interrelationships of reality itself (this is the transposition of language categories and dependences into theogonic and cosmogonic categories)”; implicitly, therefore, these latter categories exist outside language. Bakhtin actually suggests that language categories could be purified by paying greater attention to material reality: a “purer formal structure” would be achievable through the “fusion” of language categories with “materially concrete relationships” (“Discourse” 369). 9 See also Ruth Coates, Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Alan Jacobs, “Bakhtin and the Hermeneutics of Love” (Felch and Contino 25–46); Alexandar Mihailovic, Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997); Julie Rak, “The Located Utterance: Bakhtin, Embodiment, Jesus,” in The Strategic Smorgasbord of Postmodernity: Literature and the Christian Critic, ed. Deborah C. Bowen (Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007, 150–72). 10 The beginning of Ephesians 4:15, which describes the life to which the Christian has been called, is inaccurately translated “speaking the truth in love”; the Greek άληθεύοντες is more properly, and holistically, translated “truthing in love.” I am grateful to John Bowen for this insight. 11 This is perhaps why Harry Levin has argued that “realism presupposes an idealism to be corrected, a convention to be superseded, or an orthodoxy to be criticized” (Gates 66). 12 As Michel de Certeau complains, “[t]he media transform the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly ... No story has ever spoken so much or shown so much. Not even the ministers of the gods ever made them talk in such a

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continuous, detailed, and imperative way as the producers of revelations and rules do these days in the name of current reality” which they are fabricating (Practice 185–6). 13 This term “postmodern realism” has also been given currency by the Catholic philosopher Albert Borgmann, who asserts that what has been deconstructed in postmodernity “is not reality but the aggressive and methodical assault on it. Such an attack either destroys or misses reality, and under the sway of modern realism, reality at length vanishes or becomes invisible” (Crossing 117). In place of the kind of aggressive realism represented by modern totalizing schema, Borgmann offers us “a postmodern realism that attends to what he calls ‘the eloquence of reality’” (Truth is Stranger 147). Borgmann, in other words, is another of those who believe that the world speaks on its own account. His call is for a postmodern realism that “accepts the lessons of the postmodernist critique” but that also looks to “resolve the ambiguities of the postmodern condition in an attitude of patient vigor for a common order centred on communal celebrations” (Crossing 116). Borgmann’s concern to resolve ambiguities renders his argument an uneasy fit with those debates in contemporary literary theory which take as axiomatic that ambiguities must persist. But his emphasis on a common societal life accords well with the move from self-centred to other-centred epistemologies in Bakhtin, Levinas, and their followers, and that may be said to stem from the Judaeo-Christian vision of social relationships rooted in shalom. 14 This hermeneutical “point of interaction” between word and world resonates with Harpham’s reading of ethics as “the point at which literature intersects with theory, the point at which literature becomes conceptually interesting and theory becomes humanized” (401). It might also be seen as an early expression of the “post-postmodernist” reaction against an irresponsible and merely ironic relativism: see, for instance, Garry Potter and Jose Lopez, eds., After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism (London: The Athlone Press 2001).

chapter one 1 For instance, Robert Fulford in a 1998 Globe and Mail article discussed the rise of what he called “faction.” He wrote, “A river of facts, stronger than at any other time in this century, courses through serious fiction in the 1990s.” Fulford suggested that until recently, factual research had been seen as popularist, so that “authors seeking literary reputations avoided excessive detail.” He quoted Virginia Woolf’s comment about “distrusting reality – its cheapness,” and critic Maggie Gee in the Times Literary Supplement asking “Why are so many novels ... leaning heavily on actual events for their authority?” Fulford did recognize this move as



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“a return to the novel’s roots”: he even cited Mary McCarthy’s comment that “[t]he passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.” But he seemed not to be concerned with the problematization of “fact in a raw state” that contemporary fiction-writers like Byatt were making central to postmodernist fiction. Nor was he apparently concerned with ethical responsibility to the real, except insofar as such responsibility is seen as an aesthetic “difficulty”: “Can [the author] make his invented characters as powerful as those he imports from the real world?” It is supremely in connection with literature of the Holocaust that this “voice of pain” has made itself unavoidably heard, where the ultimately impossible plenitude of reference can only confront in silence the supposedly endless freeplay of language that poststructuralism asked us to celebrate. William H. Thornton and Songok Han Thornton recognize that Holocaust literature provides the ultimate demonstration that the meaning of testimony is never “reducible to a simple correspondence between words and things” – the referents of Auschwitz can simply never be given adequate signification (“Toward a Cultural Prosaics” 137). As Elie Wiesel has expressed it, “All experience cannot be transmitted by the word” – but the job of the writer is to “strive to communicate it nevertheless” (Estess 98; Evil 189). This metanarrative, assert Middleton and Walsh, involves God as the divine Orderer in covenanted commitment to the ordered creation, and therefore in a two-sided relationship. “A covenantal creation order is dialogic in character, not the monologue of the order-giver to the subjects of that order,” and “since the relationship is one of covenant partnership, the troubles of one partner impinge upon the other” (Truth Is Stranger 165). Middleton and Walsh read the biblical narrative as one in which the Divine takes personally, as it were, the troubles of the human, to the point of personally breaking into history in the Incarnation and subsequent crucifixion of Christ, on behalf of human worth and dignity. It is particularly in light of the example of Christ that they propose the Christian story as centrally concerned with restoration for injustice and pain: “In radical contrast to all notions of an ordered universe that either legitimate or ignore pain and brokenness, the biblical world-view conceives of a creation ordered toward healing, restoration and justice” (164). Thus Alan Jacobs, for instance, argues in a paper on André Brink’s An Instant in the Wind that “[t]he biblical understanding of justice cannot be divorced from the biblical understanding of history: the achievement of a permanent just order, in the vision of the Hebrew prophets, will occur in human time as the culmination of human history” (Gallagher 183). For instance, Augusto Roa Bastos in Paraguay, Roger Mais in Jamaica, Ngugi wa’ Thiong’o in Kenya. For an astute early elaboration of this contention in relation to Rushdie, see Keith Wilson, “Midnight’s Children and reader responsibility.”

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7 After the deconstruction of the authorial role by Barthes and Foucault, references to authorial agency cannot be made innocently, but not to make them at all is to ignore the cultural situatedness of the writer in what I believe to be an irresponsible way. See introduction, 57–8. For the primary critical texts, see Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” 8 Some readers may find this attribution of Christian ethics to “Canada’s majority culture” somewhat ironical in and of itself. 9 One article which does deal favourably with both the Buddhist and the Christian influences in Obasan is Teruyo Ueki’s “Obasan: Revelations in a paradoxical scheme.” Ueki points out that the Japanese have historically superimposed Christian symbolism on Buddhist symbolism and vice versa, particularly in times of persecution. However, Ueki’s key ascription of the notion of Mother as tender comforter to the Buddhist figure of Kannon, Goddess of Mercy, seems to elide the equally powerful image of Mary mother of Jesus in the Christian tradition. Ueki also does not deal with the liturgical issues I am considering here. 10 For a fascinating reading of the crucial importance of this epigraph to a revolutionary re-appropriation of the Christian story for JapaneseCanadian personal and political identity, see Jane Naomi Iwamura, “The ‘Hidden Manna’ That Sustains: Reading Revelation 2.17 in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan.” This is one of very few articles I have found that takes the Christian grounding of the novel as seriously as Kogawa herself seems to have done. Iwamura goes so far as to suggest that Obasan is a “religiously subversive text” (173). 11 See Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God. 12 As recently as June 2007, on his being awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in the Birthday Honours list, Rushdie was again the subject of outrage by devout Muslims in Pakistan and Iran. Iran accused Britain of insulting Islamic values by knighting Rushdie; Pakistan’s Religious Affairs minister said that Muslim countries should break off ties with Britain if it did not withdraw Rushdie’s honour. See Reuters, 18 June 2007: “Rushdie ‘humbled’ by knighthood but others upset.”

chapter two 1 Linda Hutcheon argues that “perhaps the single largest international impact” on the Canadian novel of the 1970s and 1980s “was the internalized challenge to realism offered by Latin American fiction, a challenge that was often called magic realism” (Canadian Postmodern 208). 2 A parallel development in contemporary theology would be that represented by John Milbank and the Radical Orthodoxy movement. Milbank sees the end of modernity and the invalidation of all systems



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of truth based on universal reason as “the opportunity for Christian theology to reclaim its own voice,” as theology can now “ground its claims in the terms of its own language of belief” (Malcolm 1074). For Booth, however, “religious questions” are definable pretty broadly, as any that take cognizance of a reality beyond the quotidian. He argues, for instance, that all serious listening to stories is a kind of spiritual quest because stories “seduce us out of the time-bound world; if we are ‘fully engaged,’ we live ‘elsewhere’ for the time of the listening” (“Story” 164– 5). Since all stories offer this “transcendence of ordinary time,” Booth maintains that the difference between “religious stories” and “secular stories” has been “greatly exaggerated” (173–4). Inside literature, the magic and the real are both the stuff of stories; thus Booth is arguing not so much for the fictionality of magic as for a magic in the real. David Lyon has an interesting analysis of the Airport Vineyard phenomenon in his book Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times, especially 153–9. Lyon suggests that the Airport Vineyard is a “sacred landscape” that “reveals the influences of postmodernizing cultures, with its focus on spectacle, a lack of bodily inhibition, a varied and contemporary aesthetic, extensive use of CIT s [communication and information technologies], and the encouragement of spiritual tourism. Local congregations, touched by the Blessing, are not discouraged from remaining local, but continued contact with the ‘virus’ is assumed” (157–8). Of Pentecostalism in the Two-Thirds World, Lyon writes, “Pentecostalism offers a new kind of calling to mutual support, healing and betterment, spread through story and song, in biography and migration … although as yet its political consequences are unclear” (167). I am not alone in making this connection: already in 1985, Nancy-Lou Patterson called magic realism the place “where the physical and the spiritual world meet … a realism of spiritual contemplation” (“The Spiritual Eye: Magic Realism in Art,” in Peter Hinchcliffe and Ed Jewinski, eds, Magic Realism and Canadian Literature, 24, 26). Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn point out the prevalence of this kind of palimpsestic narration in other contemporary fictions by women: “What Winterson and many other comtemporary women writers seek to explore is the present’s relationship with the past and the inescapability of the historical in the contemporary” (“Hystorical Fictions: Women (Re) Writing and (Re)Reading History,” 137–52). Jeanette Winterson was raised within this tradition, though later rejecting it; she writes, “I grew up with the Word and the Word was God. Now, many years after a secular Reformation, I still think of language as something holy” (Art Objects 153). In Harold Heie, “The Postmodern Opportunity.”

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10 In a powerful counter-argument, Jeffrey Roessner asserts that not only by positioning lesbianism as the new centre but also by presenting a “romanticized vision of passion” and by “endors[ing] an apocalyptic urge to escape history and the power-structures of a male-dominated society,” Winterson’s narrative “risks lapsing into the very kind of counter-sexism that Kristeva counters against.” Roessner is referring here to “Women’s Time,” where Kristeva advocates a third-wave feminism that will think beyond binary distinctions (Roessner, “Writing a History of Difference” 112, 104).

chapter three 1 The difficulties and subtleties of writing with myth were articulated vividly in the Canadian context in 1974 by novelist Sheila Watson. Discussing Wyndham Lewis in a paper entitled “Myth and CounterMyth,” Watson explained that “what [Lewis] feared most as an artist ... was the direct functioning of mythical absolutes in a world obsessed by a myth of relativity” (136); he was always alert to the danger of setting up an “absolute myth” in response. 2 On this kind of reading, it would be appropriate to understand the use of mythic materials by, for instance, the modernist writers of the first half of the twentieth century as transhistorically visionary rather than escapist, in the way they have commonly been read by Marxist critics. Describing modernism’s “closed symbolic systems” in writers such as Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, and Joyce, Terry Eagleton asserts that “[i]t is not difficult to see the flight from contemporary history in the recourse to myth of the major writers of English literature” (Literary Theory 110). Jameson, though less dismissive, nevertheless still suggests that modernism’s style was a defensive move, a way of “managing and containing” social content, “secluding it out of sight in the very form itself, by means of specific techniques of framing and displacement” (“Conclusion” 202). In response we might argue that literature by definition applies techniques of framing and displacement to the raw material of living, and that such techniques may enhance rather than weaken the social power of the writing since the frame, the form itself, has historical and social resonances. Back to Hayden White. 3 Ricoeur also differentiated between two modes of socio-cultural reinterpretation: the imaginaire of reaffirmation, where there is always the danger that it harden into ideology, and the imaginaire of rupture, where the danger is, rather, that it remain schizophrenically utopian without ever producing the conditions for realization (“Dialogues” 29–30). This notion of the imaginaire of reinterpretation needs to be related to what Ricoeur termed the foundational “mytho-poetic nucleus” of a culture, a nucleus which is mediated and opaque but recognizable



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through a combination of synchronic and diachronic analyses of the society (36–8). This mythic nucleus locates a culture’s identity and, constantly reinterpreted by the contingencies of historical circumstance, is constantly forming a repository of response to universal questions about identity, value, and purpose (38–9). Bakhtin’s concern for language in its social contingency again clearly resonates here. 4 It is important to note that Bultmann’s “demythologizing” did not imply a lack of faith. David L. Edwards remarks that “[t]here were plenty of men (Karl Jaspers, Fritz Bun, Herbert Braun and others) who urged him to complete his program by a thoroughgoing secularization, but Bultmann obstinately insisted on the power and grace of the Other who comes. He knew. He had met him. This is his glory, in an age which has exalted research above the encounters of life” (“Rudolf Bultmann: Scholar of Faith,” 730). 5 I would agree with Margaret Rose, however, that this formulation may seem to undervalue the comedic power of parody (see Rose 239ff).

Chapter 4 1 Difficulties over copyright permission have prevented the inclusion in this chapter of a number of photographs that I would have liked to reproduce. The reader will therefore be referred to the relevant photographs as they appear in the primary texts discussed here. 2 In a typically Barthesian gesture, at the moment of describing the Winter Garden photograph that he will not reproduce, Barthes provides us with the substitution of a portrait photo by Nadar of “The Artist’s Mother (or Wife)” (Camera 68). Thus, though his own mother is inaccessible to us, instead, we are given the mother of “the world’s greatest photographer.” 3 It is also noteworthy that, if Clarentine is really in her early forties in this picture that Magnus believes was taken in 1901 or 1902, she would be nearly sixty by the time of the next picture in the centrefold gallery, dated 1916, which seems well-nigh impossible on the visual evidence (centrefold iii). 4 That Schnitzer seems to imply here the possibility of an “unambiguous account” seems to expose her own assumptions of unmediated reference. 5 The Amish are one Christian sect who forbid the taking of photographs at all, perhaps because of a strict interpretation of the belief that God’s people are in God’s own image, and then of the second commandment in the Decalogue: “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep

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my commandments” (Exodus 20:4–6). Some Muslim sects are highly suspicious of the taking of photographs, particularly of women, perhaps because of the dangers of the image being misappropriated. Even in traditions where the image has been a rich part of worship, as in Eastern Orthodoxy, a firm distinction is made between the spiritual preparation and special techniques of representation required for the production of an icon and the apparently casual production of a photograph. Thanks to my colleague Dr Jim Payton for apprising me of this point.

Chapter five 1 I am indebted to George Piggford for the suggestion that Byatt’s Haghia Sophia may function somewhat as Forster’s Marabar Caves in A Passage to India – a space of negation where God is experienced as absence, and the shadow-side of those entering the space is brought to the forefront. 2 For Byatt’s own take on such glass boxes, compare her story “The Glass Coffin” earlier in this collection – a story which also appeared in her 1990 Booker prizewinning novel Possession. 3 Bakhtin’s own examination of novelistic subgenres, “Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel,” arose out of his interest in the nineteenthcentury Bildungsroman. He looked at the travel novel, the novel of ordeal, the biographical novel, and the Bildungsroman on the basis of their construction of the hero, and considered the type of plot and the conception of the world characteristic of each subcategory (Speech Genres 10–59). Even so, the essay opens with the caveat that any investigation into the novel as genre be historical, not “statically formal or normative” (“Bildungsroman” 10). Bakhtin’s editor and translator Michael Holquist points out that, for Bakhtin, “the novel is seen as having a different relationship to genre, defining itself precisely by the degree to which it cannot be framed by pre-existing categories” (Dialogic, Glossary, 428). 4 It is perhaps worth noting here that, in a Levinasian gesture, Murdoch decries “the self-centred concept of sincerity” and promotes “the othercentred concept of truth” (“Against Dryness” 293).

epilogue 1 It is perhaps worth noting that Enright edited The Oxford Book of Death (1983). 2 Regrettably, ignorance of this kind has become quite common in literary critical circles, where through no fault of their own a whole generation of critics has grown up with an almost total lack of exposure to the specifics of the West’s founding Judaeo-Christian metanarrative, and can therefore make embarrassing errors in commenting upon texts written from within



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that tradition. In Canada this is largely the result of the fact that public education has thrown out not only the baby of Christian commitment but also the bathwater of cultural religious knowledge. 3 Note the echoes in Eagleton’s formulation of 1 Corinthians 1:20: “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” This is key to what is traditionally read as the apostle Paul’s discussion of the power of the cross of Christ to bring salvation through apparent weakness.

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Index

9/11, 113 Acts of the Apostles, 211 adultery/marital infidelity, 22, 30 agnosticism, Lively’s, 90 A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, 55, 146, 147–51, 158, 199–200; as parodic myth, 55 Airport Vineyard, 112, 247n4 Alfer, Alexa, 204, 207, 222 American Way of Life, 137 Amish, 249–50n5 anatheism, 91 Anatomy of Criticism, 139 angels, 111 Angels and Insects, 225, 226 Anglican communion service, 72, 76–7 An Instant in the Wind, 245n4 anthropology, role of myth in, 138–9 anti-colonialism, 240n6 anti-fascism, 152 A Passage to India, 250n1 Aristotle, 23, 38, 49, 142 Arnold, Matthew, 30, 32 A Rumor of Angels, 112 Asgard and the Gods: Tales and Traditions of our Northern Ancestors, 61 Ashcroft, Bill, 151, 153, 154

Asian Christianity, 73, 153, 154 A Tale of Two Cities, 109, 200 A Theory of Parody, 145 Atwood, Margaret, 136 Auden, W.H., 223 Augustine, St., 115 Auschwitz, 51, 245n2 Austen, Jane, 205 author, 32; authorial role, 246n7; authorial voice, 64; God as ultimate, 46, 227 authorship, 57–8 Away, 54, 114, 123–33, 199; ecological dimension, 130; fairy story/romantic fiction, 123; as magic realism, 54; three-part structure, 124 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 56, 61, 89, 132, 134, 161, 228, 229; critique of monologic discourse, 68, 74, 143, 223, 243n7; dialogism of language, 201–2, 233; historical life of discourse, 49–50, 52–3, 57, 72, 157, 194–5, 232; language categories, 243n8; narrative ethics, 40–7; notion of genre, 203, 221, 224, 250n3; Orthodox Christian faith, 41, 45–7, 227,

274

i n de x

231; on parody, 144; privileging of novel, 41, 64, 144, 201, 223–4 Barnes, Julian; A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, 147–51; moralist, 148–9; well versed in cultural memory, 157; wide generic range, 158. See also parodic myth Barthes, Roland, 135, 183–4, 195, 196, 198; authorial role, 246n7; Camera Lucida, 171–4; first premise, 6; and metanarrative, 12, 64; on myth, 140–1, 142, 144, 145; notion of theatrical, 177–8; on photographs, 175–6; Winter Garden photograph, 180–1, 249n2 Baudrillard, Jean, 96 Beardsley, Monroe and Elizabeth, 156 belief systems, 14, 18-19, 113-14, 156, 230–1, 232–6, 239n2 believer/nonbeliever, 6–7, 16, 69, 146, 231–2, 233 Benhabib, Seyla, 4, 241n9 Benjamin, Walter, 118–19, 142, 160; Paris project, 140 Bennett, David, 92–3 Berger, John, 166, 171, 184–5, 192, 194, 197 Berger, Peter, 112–13, 114 Bernasconi, Robert, 20 Better Living: In Pursuit of Happiness from Plato to Prozac, 23 Beyer, Peter, 14 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 94 Bible, 13–14, 69, 78, 80, 146, 240–1n8 biblical metanarrative, 13–14, 24; translation into new circumstances, 69–70 Bildungsroman, 105, 250n3

Birch, Dinah, 115, 119 Birch, Libby, 124, 126 Bittner Wiseman, Mary, 174 Blanchot, Maurice, 156 Bleak House, 109 Booker Prize, 81, 91–2, 185 Books in Canada, 23, 25, 71 Booth, Wayne, 13, 59, 83, 112, 247n3 border crossing, magical realism as, 105–6 Borges, Jorge Luis, 106, 229 Borgmann, Albert, 3, 10, 244n13 Breton, André, 105 Brink, André, 245n4 Brontë, Charlotte, 48, 61, 109 Brydon, Diana, 152 Buddhist symbolism, 246n9 Buell, Laurence, 31–2, 33, 39 Bultmann, Rudolf, 146, 249n4 Bunyan, John, 109 Bush, George W., 113 Byatt, A.S., 56, 81, 98, 148, 232, 235, 250n2; Angels and Insects, 225; anti-Christian, 225; Christian faith and, 229–30, 232; importance of dream imagery, 210, 217; Passions of the Mind, 222–4; religious faith and, 205; self-conscious realism, 205; “Sugar,” 59–63, 65, 67; “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” 204–22; and truth, 62, 148, 236 Camera Lucida, 171, 172-4, 183, 197, 200 Campbell, Jane, 204–5, 220, 221, 222 Caputo, John, 36–7 Carpentier, Alejo, 106 Cartesian rationality, 89 Casby, William, 177 Catholics, 230–1



i n de x

Cézanne, Paul, 225 Chanady, Amaryll, 110–11 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 207 Cheung, King-Kok, 73, 74, 78, 80 Chin, Frank, 73 choices, and ethics, 21–3 Christian fundamentalism, 14 Christianity: imagistic power of, 56; oppressive code, 230 Christian literary critics, 28–9 Christian postmodern realism, 14–15, 18 Christian story, 7–8, 14–16; postcolonial writers and, 69–70 Christian world view, objections to, 8 Chua, Cheng Lok, 72–3, 77, 79 citizenship, 93 codes of behaviour, Japanese and Christian overlap, 73 Cohen, Richard, 35 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 61 collective memory, 82 Colombia, 106, 113 colonial discourse, 136 common grace, 19, 114, 164, 235 Compton, Anne, 124, 126, 129-30 consumer behaviour, 141 consumer capitalism, 113 consumerism, 27 covenantal creation order, 245n3 creation, care for, 153–4 creation story, alternative in Green Grass, Running Water, 137–8 Creator, relational ethic of responsibility to, 24–5 Cronin, Richard, 102 cultural relativism, 98 Cunningham, Valentine, 17–18, 53, 185, 195, 199, 227, 231–2, 233, 234, 242n12

275

David Copperfield, 61 de Certeau, Michel, 99, 111, 134, 135, 215, 243n12 deconstruction, meaning of, 239–40n4 de Man, Paul, 29 Demetz, Peter, 140 Demousselle, Corinne, 155–6 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 19, 20, 31, 239n1; commentary on sacred texts, 241n11; and deconstruction, 239–40n4; Jewish heritage, 33, 37; logocentrism, 16; nothing outside the text, 9, 17, 51; on otherness, 5; poststructuralist, 26, 36, 140; transcendental signified, 7; use of “transcendental,” 239n1 Derry, Ken, 136 Dickens, Charles, 109, 200, 205 Dillard, Annie, 42 Donne, John, 89 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 224 dreams, 49, 107, 109, 205, 222–3 Duns Scotus, John, 4 Dvorak, Marta, 165 Eagleton, Terry, 13, 19, 22, 112, 234, 248n2, 251n3 Eco, Umberto, 68 Edwards, David L., 249n4 Eliot, George, 205 Eliot, T.S., 109 Emerson, Caryl, 202 English Civil War, 116 Enlightenment, the, 22, 51, 99, 110, 112, 146 Enright, D.J., 230, 250n1 environment, concern for, 153–4 ethical stances/ethicisms, many, 24 ethnocentrism, traditional Western Canon, 30

276

i n de x

fable motif, in Not Wanted on the Voyage, 159 facts, 67, 68, 71, 74, 185, 244–5n1 fairy tale, 115; “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” as, 204–5, 206, 213 Faris, Wendy, 105 fatwa, 92–3 fear, 152 Felch, Susan, 45, 52, 227 feminism, in Moon Tiger, 87; thirdwave, 248n10 Findley, Timothy, 146, 156–62, 200– 1; Not Wanted on the Voyage, 151–5 first premise/originary act of faith, 5–8 Fish, Stanley, 5, 6, 24, 25, 30, 237 folktales, magic realism and, 110 Foucault, Michel, 12, 31, 242nn2&4, 246n7 Frazer, J.G., 138 Freud, Sigmund, 109, 139, 225 Frye, Northrop, 4, 95, 139–40 Fulford, Robert, 244–5n1 Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten, 223 Gandhi, Indira, 94, 104 Gandhi, Mahatma, 94 Gandhi, Sanjay, 94 García Márquez, Gabriel, 106, 108 gaze: Christ’s, 46–7, 78, 227; Levinas and unspoken language, 36; upon the Other, 53 Gee, Maggie, 244–5n1 gender roles, in Moon Tiger, 87 generic slippage, 201, 203, 205–6, 215, 218, 219 genre, shiftiness of, 199–203 Gericault, Théodore, 160 Giddens, Anthony, 240n7 glass, solid metaphor of, 218–22 global civil religion, 14

globalization, 14, 27 good and evil, 21–2; freedom to choose, 35 goodness, 22–3 Governor General’s Award for Fiction in Canada, 185 Green Grass, Running Water, 135–8, 199; as parodic myth, 54 Hamilton Magazine, 23, 25, 30 Hamlet, 110 Hancock, Geoff, 54, 106–7, 108, 110, 115, 123 happiness, 23 Hardy, Thomas, 48 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 32–3, 39, 244n14 Harrison, Patricia Marby, 76–7 Heidegger, Martin, 33, 239n1 Heie, Harold, 156 Heilmann, Ann, 247n7 Heinimann, David, 163, 164 heteroglossia, 43, 44, 55, 144, 214, 224; allowed for in novels of middle space, 203; of primitive cultures, 107 Hillis Miller, J., 15 historiographic metafiction, 53–4, 67–8, 71, 86–7, 93-4; Midnight’s Children as, 99; Moon Tiger as, 54; Obasan as, 54; Sexing the Cherry as, 116 Hodgins, Jack, 108, 123 Hodgson-Burnett, Frances, 61 Holocaust, 52, 153, 245n2 Holquist, Michael, 250n3 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 4, 36, 231, 234; “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” 4 humanist world view, 22 humbug, 62–3 humour, as subversive weapon, 136 Hurka, Thomas, 23–4



i n de x

Husserl, Edmund, 33 Hutcheon, Linda, 27, 53, 67–8, 71, 93, 96, 145, 148, 160, 161, 214, 246n1 icons, compared to photographs in Eastern Orthodoxy, 249-50n5 ideology, absolutism of, 15 Ignatieff, Michael, 166, 172, 177, 178–9, 181–2, 195, 196; taming the photograph, 179, 181, 198; The Russian Album, 174–6 imagination, deifying human, 16; and reality, 64 imperialism, 154 India, 93–4 indigenous peoples, and magic realism, 107 individualism, 21 Information Technology, 27 Ingham, David, 152 Ingraffia, Brian, 241n10 institutional racism, 77 institutional religion, skepticism about, 115 In the Reading Gaol, 195 Irigaray, Luce, 242n4 irony, 68 Islam, 14 Islam, Syed Manzural, 59, 93, 94, 96 Islamic Fundamentalism, 112 Iwamura, Jane Naomi, 246n10 Jacobs, Alan, 243n4, 245n4 Jakobson, Roman, 139 James, Henry, 94 James, William, 109 Jameson, Fredric, 27, 28, 50, 52, 67, 106, 144, 201, 248n2 Jane Eyre, 61, 109 Jay, Martin, 242n5 Jeffrey, David L., 17, 29, 231 Jesus Christ Superstar, 111

277

Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times, 113, 247n4 John, Apostle, 46, 237 Judaeo-Christian ethical perspective, 34 Judaeo-Christian metanarrative, critics’ lack of exposure to, 250–1n2 Jung, Carl, 139 kaleidoscopic history, 81–91 Kant, Immanuel, 239n1, 240n6 Kantian metaphysics, 240n6 Kearney, Richard, 9, 34, 36, 91, 95, 246n11 Keith, W.J., 152 Kelly, Elizabeth, 21–2, 25, 30, 33, 35, 230–1, 235, 237 Kelly, Kathleen Coyne, 204 Kettle, Arnold, 48, 51 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 92 King, Thomas, 55, 101, 135–8, 160, 162–5 Kingwell, Mark, 23–4, 25, 230–1, 237 Kogawa, Joy, 54, 70–81, 98, 167, 246n10; Obasan, 70–81 Kruk, Laurie, 155 Lacan, Jacques, 242nn2&4 LaCapra, Dominick, 52 Lacayo, Richard, 166 Laclau, Ernesto, 13 Lamont-Stewart, Linda, 99, 155 Langton, Jane, 82 language: categories, 243n8; heteroglossic nature of, 61; language/silence binary in Obasan, 78–9; meaning of, 240n5; as parole, 57; socially charged past history, 61; socially constructed, 9 langue, 52, 57, 201, 236

278

i n de x

Lankshear, Colin, 13, 25 Latin American fiction/writing 106, 246n1 Lawrence, D.H., 61 Levenson, Michael, 221, 225 Levertov, Denise, 229, 231, 236 Levin, Harry, 243n11 Levinas, Emmanuel, 49, 53, 56, 57, 61, 66, 69, 70, 97, 103, 119, 154, 156, 164, 225, 229, 232, 235, 237, 244n13; ethics of the face, 33–40; face of the other, 46; on language, 41, 42, 50; phenomenologist, 47; Proper Names 57–8; reader responsibility, 96; sacred mystery of face, 168; on the self, 44–5, 89, 121; transcendence of transcendence, 118; “unlimited” responsibility, 31; voiceless voice, 55, 166–7 Levine, George, 49, 50, 100 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 139 Lewis, Wyndham, 248n1 liberal humanism, 13, 29 liberal universities, 29 Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin, 72, 73 literary realism, 47–52 literary studies, ethics and, 31 Little Princess, 61 Lively, Penelope, 54, 81–91, 95; agnostic stance, 90 Llewellyn, Mark, 247n7 Lodge, David, 41–2, 205 Logocentrism, 5, 16–19 Logos, relation to logos, 17 London Review of Books, 115 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock,” 109 Lucente, Gregory, 142, 150, 151 Lundin, Roger, 28 Lyon, David, 113, 157, 233, 247nn4&5

Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 8, 11, 30, 241n8, 242n1, 242n4 Maack, Annegret, 220 Mabille, Pierre, 108 MacLennan, Hugh, 48 magic realism: Away as, 54; blurring of boundaries, 133–4; counterculture of the imagination, 114–15; dream and everyday conflated, 109; elastic term, 106; genealogy of, 109–10; genre of fantasy, 133; lightness of, 134; list of features, 106–7; living on the margins, 54; Midnight’s Children as, 54; physical and spiritual meet, 247n6; political tool in Sexing the Cherry, 119; principle of equivalence, 109; Sexing the Cherry as, 54; subversive potential, 114 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 8 marginalized, 37 Marshall, I.H., 146 mass-sterilization, 104 master trope/relationship, 242n12 Matchie, Thomas, 163 McCarthy, Mary, 244–5n1 McHale, Brian, 111 McLaren, Peter, L., 13, 25 McLuhan, Marshall, 65 media, and advertising, 27; image, 113 meganarrative, use of term, 240–1n8 Mellor, Winifred, 188 memory, 61–2 mercy, biblical ethics of, 37 metanarrative, use of term, 240–1n8 middle space, 202–3; Bakhtin’s, 44; bridge between believer and nonbeliever, 233; Christian story as, 7



i n de x

Middleton, J. Richard, 14–15, 37, 69, 80, 198, 231, 232, 234, 240– 1n8, 245n3 Midnight’s Children, 91–7, 99–105, 168, 169, 170, 199, 201; length of, 94; magic in, 104–5; as magic realism, 54; mimesis, 95; narrator, 94–5; quasi-religious comic novel, 99; reader responsibility, 96; Rushdie’s knowledge of film technique, 102 midrash stories, 56 Milbank, John, 246–7n2 mimesis/mimetic, 50, 51, 95, 105, 170, 171 Mistry, Rohinton, 100 modernism, closed symbolic systems, 248n2; literary, 51, 53; magical realism and, 109 Modern Language Association of America, 31 modern linguistics, inauguration of, 8–9 Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 139 Mohanty, Satya, 240n6 monologic discourse, Bakhtin and, 42, 68, 74 Moon Tiger, 81–91; as historiographic metafiction, 54; history, 83–4; interrelation of private and public life, 88; ironical relation to Christian faith, 81; kaleidoscopic view, 82, 86, 89, 91; rock strata/ chronology, 82; sense of progression, 83; social comment in, 87 moral high ground, 21 Moral Majority, 112 moral philosophy, 31 Morris, Pam, 243n7 Moseley, Merritt, 148

279

Murdoch, Iris, 199, 222–4, 250n4, “Against dryness,” 199 Muslims, and photographs, 24950n5 myth: decadent economic uses of, 141; difficulties and subtleties of writing with, 248n1 myth and realism, 138–43; Ricoeur and, 142–3; Roland Barthes and, 140–2; Walter Benjamin and, 140 myth criticism, 139 Mythologies, 140 narrative: ethical base (Lively), 86; as ethics, 39; moral agendas, 87; relational character of, 15 narrative ethics, 69; four modes, 53–6 narrative reconstruction of the past, 64 Native American mythology, 136–8 natural law, 21 natural world, magical reality in Away, 128–30 Nazism, 33 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 94, 95 neo-Marxist criticism, 140 New Age movement, 112 Newton, Adam, 20, 39–40, 45 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 25, 174, 231 Noble, Michael, 204, 222 Norris, Christopher, 17 Not Wanted on the Voyage, 55, 146, 151–62; as parodic myth, 55 novel, Bakhtin’s privileging of, 41, 201 Nussbaum, Martha, 31, 242n6 Oates, Joyce Carol, 147, 148 Obasan, 55, 70–81, 91, 97, 246nn9&10; biblical references in, 75; as historiographic metafiction, 55; photographs

280

i n de x

in, 167–8, 170–1, 173; political impact, 71, 80 Ondaatje, Michael, 172, 176–8, 179–80, 181–4, 195, 198, 201; Running in the Family, 176–8 oppressed minorities, 153 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, 118 originary act of faith, 6 outward-directedness, 47 Overcoming Ontotheology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith, 240-1n8 palimpsestic narration, 247n7 parables of Jesus, 56 “Parliament of Fowls,” 207 parodic myth 54–5, 135–65; Green Grass, Running Water as, 55; A History of the World in 10½ Chapters as, 55; Not Wanted on the Voyage as, 55 parody, 54; comedic power of, 249n5 parole, 41, 52, 57, 201, 202, 236 Passions of the Mind, 205, 221, 222–4 Patterson, Nancy-Lou, 247n6 Paul, Saint, 77, 211, 212 Pennee, Donna, 66, 155, 160 Pentecostalism, 112, 247n5 personal memory, 82 perspective, ethics of, 103 phenomenology, 33 photographs, 166–98; “a certificate of presence,” 173; co-optation in contemporary fiction, 55; difference between private and public, 185; ethical responsibility and, 197; light writing, 174, 188, 194; in Midnight’s Children, 168– 70; in Obasan, 167–8; removed from original context, 194–5; and

spirituality 196–7; in The Russian Album, 174–5; trope for absent presence, 171; “voiceless voices,” 166–7 photography, 55; Marxist materialist analysis, 171 Picard, Max, 38 Piggford, George, 250n1 Pilgrim’s Progress, 109 Plato, 49, 142 pmla , 31, 240n6 poetry, Aristotle on, 38; Levinas on, 37-8; Matthew Arnold on, 30; privileged by Levinas, 42 poets and novelists, philosophers of the future, 32 positivism, 112 post-colonial writing, 107–8 post-colonialism, in Moon Tiger, 87 Post-Expressionist art, 105 post-industrialism, 27 postmodernism, comparison with postmodernity, 27 postmodernity, comparison with postmodernism, 27 Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology: Vanquishing God’s Shadow, 241n10 poststructuralism, 26, 37, 49, 140, 242n2 power, 25–6 professional ethics, 31 Proper Names, 57–8 Prozac, 23 psychoanalysis, role of myth in, 138–9 Pulitzer Prize, 185 Puritans, portrayal in Sexing the Cherry, 121–2 Radical Orthodoxy movement, 246n2



i n de x

rationalistic positivism, reactions to, 109 reader responsibility, 56, 66, 198, 237–8, 245n6 referent, 9–10 resurrection, in Obasan, 79–80 Revelation, Book of, 73–4, 137 Richards, I.A., 30 Ricoeur, Paul, 13, 24, 65, 131, 135, 235; literature and narrative intelligence, 38; and myth, 152, 158, 161, 164; myth and realism, 142–3; mytho-poetic nucleus, 248–9n3; texts on linguistic objects, 243n7 right and wrong, 21 Rimbaud, Jean Nicolas, 8 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 61 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 51, 108 Roessner, Jeffrey, 121, 248n10 Roh, Franz, 105–6 Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 184 Romanticism, 16, 110 Romantic poetry, magic realism and, 109 Romantic poets, “legislators of mankind,” 32 Rorty, Richard, 3, 6, 10, 28, 29, 31, 32, 35, 43 Rose, Margaret, 249n5 Ross, Sheila, 125 Running in the Family, 172, 176–8, 200; notion of theatrical in, 168, 177, 183; shiftiness of genre, 199; “well-told lie,” 176, 180, 201. See also photographs Rushdie, Salman, 114–15, 147, 148–9, 164, 201, 245n6, 246n12; knighthood, 246n12; Midnight’s Children, 91–8, 99–105; “migrant’s writing,” 93; on religion in India, 100;

281

Rushdie Affair, 92, 98; use of photography, 168, 170 sacred self, 113 sacred texts, commentaries on, 241–2n11 Said, Edward, 216 saints’ lives, medieval narratives of, 111 Salyer, Gregory, 149 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 8–9, 10, 41, 243n7 Schnitzer, Deborah, 189, 192, 249n4 secular society, 90–1 self, 44–5, 61–2 semiotics, 57–8, 243n7 Sexing the Cherry, 54, 114–22, 134; blurring of genres, 115; historiographic metafiction, 116; as magic realism, 54; the self and, 120–1; substantiality of words, 117–18 shalom, 7–8, 69 Shields, Carol, 55, 185–98; The Stone Diaries, 185–98 Slemon, Stephen, 107, 109 Slethaug, Gordon, 187, 188 Smith, Angela Marie, 116, 118–19 social responsibility, 25, 29, 54, 65–6 spiritual realities, search for, 113 Spivak, Gayatri, 154 Steiner, George, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 16, 32, 241–2n11 Stevens, Wallace, 225 storytelling, 60 Structural Anthropology, 139 structuralism, 139–40 subgenres, Bakhtin and, 250n3 “Sugar,” 59–63, 148 Surrealists, 105 Tapley, Robin, 22–3 Ten Commandments, 35

282

i n de x

Ten Kortenaar, Neil, 96 Terpstra, John, 5 Thatcher, Margaret, 93 The Consequences of Modernity, 240n7 “The Crooked Halo,” 22 “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” 56, 204–28; palimpsestic doubleness in, 208 The Golden Bough, 138–9 theistic postmodern realism, 15 The Narrative of Realism and Myth, 142 theologians, 67 The Realistic Imagination, 49 The Russian Album, 172, 174–6, 178–9; historian’s obligation and personal need, 179; use of photographs in, 174–5 The Satanic Verses, 92, 93 The Stone Diaries, 55, 185–98; generic shiftiness, 199; not biography, 185; tempting fraud, 189; textual and photographic discrepancies, 191–3 The Tempest, 220 The X-Files, 109 Thornton, S.H. and W.H., 13, 28, 52, 68, 245n2 Tiffin, Helen, 153, 154 Todorov, Tzvetan, 108 Totem and Taboo, 139 To the Lighthouse, 110 transcendent/transcendence, 7–8, 112, 239n1 Treblinka, 51 trickster ethics, 162–5 Trilling, Lionel, 220 truth, 10–11, 63 Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be, 14, 198 tv shows, magical realism and, 111

Ueki, Teruyo, 246n9 unconscious, imagery in PostExpressionist art, 105 universality, 233–4 Urquhart, Jane, 54, 99, 114, 123–33, 134; Away, 123–33 Van Gogh, Vincent, 225, 226, 230 Victorian humanism, 30 vocabulary of religion, Levinas, 36 Walsh, Brian J., 14–15, 37, 69, 80, 198, 231, 232, 234, 240–1n8, 245n3 Warnes, Christopher, 109 War on Terror, 113 Watson, Sheila, 248n1 Webb, Phyllis, 160 Westphal, Merold, 240–1n8 White, Hayden, 52, 64–5, 66, 87, 83, 98, 248n2 Wiesel, Eli, 59, 80, 245n2 Wilson, Keith, 245n6 Winterson, Jeanette, 130–1, 132, 133; language as holy, 247n8; lesbianism as new centre, 248n10; Sexing the Cherry, 114–22; use of magic realism, 200 women, portrayal in Away, 126–8 Woolf, Virginia, 244–5n1 words, 57–8; Bakhtin and, 41–2; relation to world, 3–19, 235–6, 244n14; secondary to referent, 11; substantiality of in Sexing the Cherry, 117–19 World Wars, 67 Wyile, Herb, 127, 131 York, Lorraine, 152, 153, 154 Zamora, Lois Parker, 105