&Drang LITERARY ARTS JOURNAL ISSUE TWO
WINTER
2021
Contents Poetry Jonathan gill – phobos; Isaac Worthington – feindre; words; dinner party; John Gediminas knight – étude xiii; étude xviii; étude xxiii; Mikhail muyingo – seasonal haiku; nature haiku; a portrait of student life; Charles eager – the birth of venus; Caliban; JanÁČek; the distillation of an idea; The holy lance found at Antioch, a.d. 1098 Adam lee – the continuing; rainbow roads; song; what’s left; fear and loathing; insomniac; the dream; Controlling mind; the hike; forgetting; you are nothing; remembrance of things past; Alba rodriguez – insomnia; disenchanted; roll your own dice; Iliana gutch marinov – solitude
Fiction Edwin black – fading dreams of yesterday Charles eager – youth Isaac Worthington – fullskuck Matthew Lazenby – Christmas letter
Essays Jonathan gill – lord jim and hegel’s lord/bondsman dialectic Debarati Choudhury – thinking through time: narrative ethics in David b’s epileptic Iliana gutch marinov – the ‘soporific effect’ of limes: lime and the evocation of lost memory in Elizabeth bowen’s to the north Vlad condrin toma – discourse, figura: from the male gaze of the vita nuova to the eternal gaze of the divina commedia
Project Coordinator: Vlad Condrin Toma Illustrations: Condrea Toma Editorial Consultants: Elena David; Charles Eager
POETRY
Jonathan gill
PHOBOS
Loom nights under a Martian light
Slices of life clocked in second-hands—
Amidst a splayed suburbia spiring from
But down I gravitate and again
A dead-eyed crater, our
Find alleyways always
Moon presiding, god of war;
Red light means stop.
Out of sunroom orange I step into violetbasking night
One third mortal, two thirds divine
Oxygen mask secure clasps a face unsure
I am holding together, but not well
While hedgehogs scuttle around my feet
Reaching my lodge, I unwind
A bus passes, but I skip it,
Dowsed in radiowaves, crest and trough,
Though the travel’s far, to my dorm on the craterwall,
Tech of crest and trough,
I should stop before I transit, to
Here the mechanical crickets
Pick up some vegetables, sunflower seeds,
Of the respiration machine.
From a convenience store shelved between tomes,
I have twenty-one grams of loneliness to surrender,
Its logo scrawled in cuneiform;
An offering for a friend I cannot find
I pay with fingerprints, return to the brisk air
Before I plant the white flag;
Beneath the constellation of scorpion men.
But should I take out my telescope
Above, the only horizon not of dust and chrome,
And peer across the hallways of the stars
If I should jump, I weigh sixty-four grams
And trenches of the land,
And am surrounded by storeys,
Still would he not appear,
Making journeys of parabolas—
And if I ask for him, my words will vanish
Rising action, suspension, a flash
As faint music in the sky
Of sensation, recapitulation;
Between spires and cinder and intervals of fear; Our origin here a violent birth, Satellites of space dust
POETRY | 1
Isaac worthington WORDS One day I will run out of words and it will be very peaceful. I’ll say my last and then live on the beautiful side of a definitive full stop in a silence that’s sure of itself. Yes, one day I will run out of words and it will be so peaceful indeed but for now I am plagued by them. They’re bouncing around the inside of my skull like wild ferrets screaming up and down my veins as kinky baboons do branches. I’m about to sneeze embourgeoisementism chronic oneirataxia is stuck in my ear and I’m dreadfully worried about ejaculating phosphenical gumbo.
FEINDRE As I stand at the pedestrian crossing by the bridge in Barcode the Kaffebrenneriet behind me and the Deloitte building over the road and to the left it occurs to me that everything in this exact moment is mimicking something else. the crossing lights now burning deep green in the shape of a man click repetitively like a happy cicada as several buses sound their horns angrily like feral geese, squawking at each other without any resolve. to the right, the Munch Museum stoops like a weary old captain and the sky above it has drawn itself shut using the grey cirrus clouds as curtains the residual stains of a late autumn sun glowing grey marigold, exhausted firefly somewhere behind and far back. the water beneath the bridge moves slow and sibilant like an infinite teacher’s shh and I, perhaps least importantly have the audacity to stand there with my hands in my pockets looking like I have somewhere important to be like a real human person the final charade as it were in this moment where everything is pretending very badly to be something else.
DINNER PARTY You sit two spaces to the right and amicable voices patter back and forth over a table lavish with doomy looking canapés. The ambience is less of an ambience and more of a mood particularly when the host pronounces the French red wine we’re sipping a little too well. Somebody else comments on the pronunciation, but pronounces pronunciation weirdly and in my head I’m stuck between the words twee and trite and somehow end up squarely on twat. Somebody says something about Palestine and somebody else says something about philistines and somebody else misquotes Wittgenstein, and all the while you have the audacity to sit there tacitly on the curve of my quivering periph like the last sentence of a book I’m currently two paragraphs shy of; I ever so much want to glance but I’m afraid of ruining everything.
POETRY | 2
john Gediminas knight a hobapouracub-asleep DUNK… ÉTUDE XIII: TURN A KEY
cud-a-quid-a-quitter-tamer
To Be Spoken Aloud
shamerall, lawyerbosh, yapperquick-baboonacan
computer cuter shoot a conker
a twitter-shelter-gamer-staler,
dunk a shrinker stinker shower
bar-a-sky-a-yeah-a-kisser
do a lower loud, a tower,
zitherzap a pitacry
stower bow a belter banter
a shy a piracy a bobber,
end a crank, crack an hour,
crop-a-robber-see-a-bye-a-belter
wow a skelter scour DUNK.
stick-tock-song
drinker ranker shell a jammer
shopper-popper-bring-a-lop
gel a luller lala law…
a lager gala DUNK.
baller tell a badder bander
strip-blip cork-a-taker
backer cobber well a weather
bureaucratic-ocarina
hither hawthorn other venter
breathe a crane-a-clean a soother
tether try a tab a DUNK
tooth a teether gabble straight
wall or staller tall or gabber
a hater greet, plopatopper,
gall a wam, then a feather
fleece righter heepaban
tanner-spanner new… never,
a brand, a stander, a shaker, a dance
fit a stain DUNK.
trancer rant a kelp a bleeper DUNK…
train the grant a shawl.
blot a player, grime a hot,
spick, pick a cuppa healer peer
a trot, tot, tod, a primer,
leper stooper…
bat a broom ability.
troop-root a rot-a-seal DUNK.
accompany a yet, trapper,
gene a croc DUNK.
wrap a gapadapfob a ring,
cranker DUNK.
a wrong gong treater sing a
DUNK.
seat, sock…
DUDUDUDUNK.
mud a sodden conasack, cost attack a help…
pillar-lipper-gripper-granter
a pore a roar aurora…
tipadill a dip-a-taunter
are a.
stauncher-rawer-griller-rail,
reep a DUNK.
paper-sipper mailer-pains a zipper-tricker-stint a surer
potter, wreath, a jotter, sham,
sheep a peeper-trek-a-tell,
a gotatrinket ab, a sewer,
a bell-a-pinaleaf (a fleeter)
fewer, ewe-you, a bencher, yet her.
tantamount a flora tent a
shelf.
renter-flip a drain-a-floor.
a chauffeur dough, a felt…
flower-howler-steep-a-ticker
deafer heather, stutter-vamp DUNK,
bricker-wish a ship-a-keeper
a sender.
peek blend a globadoor
show a lend, a slender…
POETRY | 3
tat a pond…
finned, grime, thing, hurter, haunching, fifth.
a tone.
fond, grimy, thin, hurt err, haunching, fifth fifty.
a…
fondle, grimy, fin, hurt, err, haunting, fifth, fifty.
sand.
fondly, grimy, din, hat, purr, taunting, fizz, fifty.
a fisher…
fondly, grimily, dins, had, purse, tenting, fizzy, fifteen.
geese.
fondly fonder, grimily, dins, cad, puss, tending, fizzy, fifteen.
a.
fond lee, founder, grimly, diss, gad, push, tending, dizzy, fifteen.
grass. a.
fond, lee, founder pounder, dimly, diss, gab, pish, mending, dizzy, fifth teen. fond, bea, flounder, sounder, dimly, disser, jab, pish, mender, disease, fifth, team.
DUNK.
pond, pea, flounder, sunder, timely, dissers, dab, dish, mender, daisies disuse, fish, deem. panned, pew, flounder, asunder, timely, dissers, tab, lish, mend, dozes, diffuse, fisher, dream.
ÉTUDE XVIII: PHYLOGENY FORWARD To Be Spoken Aloud
spanned, po, founder, ascender, timeless, dissers, tab lish, meant, doses, refuse, fetcher, dreamer. wad.
spanned, pro, founder, ascend, time lets, toneless, dissers tab lish meant, toes is, refuge, pitcher fetched, dreamers.
wad. wad.
spammed, pro founder, assigned, time, lots lest, tuneless, disestablishment, toes, biz, refugee, pitcher, fessed, dream us.
wad. wad.
spammed.
wad what.
profounder.
wad, what.
unsigned.
wad, what.
tomb.
quad, what.
slots.
quad, what.
zest.
quad, watch.
tuneless.
quad, watch.
disestablishment.
squad quad, watch.
nose.
squad, quid, watch.
busy.
squad, quid, watch.
refugees.
squad, quid, botch.
preacher.
squad, grid, botch.
fist.
squat, grid, botch.
dream.
squat, grid, botch.
us.
squashed, grid, botcher batch. squashed, grid, botcher, batch. squashed, griddle, butcher, batch. sloshed, griddle, butcher, patch. slushed, griddling, buncher, patch. flushed, griddling, muncher, pitch. flushed, grilling, puncher munching, pitch. flushed, grilling, punter, munching, pits. fished, grinning, punter, lunching, pits. fished, grin thing, shunter, lunching, pith. finned, grim, thing, hunter, launching, fifth. POETRY | 4
ÉTUDE XXIII: BROKEN REEL To Be Spoken Aloud
drink, pinker sinker pinker drink, pinker kipper dapper drink, pinker sinker pinker banker tanker ranker wrapper
dlrink, pinker sinker pinker drink, pinker kipper dapper drink, pinker sinker pinker banker tanker ranker wrapper
rot, hotter pot, cotter rotter totter potter pecker rot, hotter pot, cotter trotter otter water wrecker
rot, hotter pot, cotter rotter totter potter pecker potter pecker spotter decker trotter otter lotta lapper
dlrink, pinker sinker pinker dlrink, pinker kipper dapper dlrink, pinker sinker pinker banker tanker dlranker wrapper
Word Études I call these little pieces “word études”. They are to be performed aloud and by anyone. These études came from my desire to write musical compositions that can be accessible and performable by almost anyone, whether from a traditional musical background or not. In the word études, I used punctuation, spacing, italicising, and capitalising to shape the musical effects of the études, such as tone and rhythm. The indeterminate nature of the reading-speaking process—such as accent, tone, rhythm, and pronunciation—is embraced in the études. No matter if you use these word études for public performance or private practice, I hope you find the same joy of speech that I have found in making them.
dlrink, pinker sinker pinker dlrink, pinker kipper dapper dlrink, pinker sinker pinker banker tlranker ranker wrapper
dlrot, hotter pot, cotter dlrotter totter potter peeker rot, hcotter pot, cotter trotter otter water wrecker
dlrot, hotter pot, cotter rotter totter potter pecker plrotter pecker spotter decker trotter otter lotta lapper laaaaaaaaa-DO!
POETRY | 5
Mikhail muyngo
SEASONAL HAIKU
VIII. Demise
I.
dead suburban street
Russian Summer
dead end for the low-skilled lot
Hot as oven-fresh bread
dead drunk winter blues.
long as the great Volga runs; August comes baking.
IX. spring: three willow trees
II.
swinging Rastafari dreads
Summer
nest three little birds.
unplanned pregnancy that is all he left behind
X.
I'll name her Summer.
Early spring crisp frost breath cloud damp upon your face
III.
glistening sunshine.
‘Onomatopoeic feast’ she splatters glugs squirts
NATURE HAIKU
he puffs hisses gags and burps:
XI.
summer berry feast.
Dandelion clock puff: you’re blowing me a kiss
IV.
boy I’m strobe-hearted.
Midsummer garish cock
XII.
4 o’clock
Two paths in a wood
dawn’s approaching.
first leading to the pond; plop second to the drop.
V. Leaves like fallen tears
XIII.
standing in a pool of gold
Pond frogspawn can grow
late Autumn is here.
placid peaceful protected surrounded by reeds.
VI. Belarus winter
XIV.
snowflakes scattered in the field;
Stars take me beyond
weightless covering.
like a flicker in the eye: spark imagined worlds.
VII. Like a wrinkled rug
XV.
Shar Pei keeping my feet warm
Hampstead Heath early
it's snowing outside.
Keats and Byron wandered here Musing by the pond.
POETRY | 6
XVI.
XXII.
Two plump slimy worms
For my three long years
in a gooey sludge they swim
blistered fingers, aching wrists
and seem so buoyant.
Bachelor of Arts.
XVII.
XXIII.
Living
Tesco realism
Grandma and grandpa:
Caribbean Twist
these two flaccid flowers
fizzing, frothing in my hand
now living their eighties.
no beach, just a rug.
XVIII.
XIV.
Nature
“You are what you eat”
Impenetrable
Cup of breakfast tea
what you see is what you get
hot baked beans on toast with cheese:
behind the sphinx smile?
fit meal fit student.
XXV. A PORTRAIT OF STUDENT LIFE
Hyde Park
IXX.
just ten minutes late
Sustenance
students playing frisbee still
Frayed textbook in hand
Green grass, lecture wait...
diet for good student or dust-mite to grow plump.
XVI. Cramming
XX.
Brotherton midday
Ode to creation
silent sacred study space –
by my coffee cup
snores interrupt peace.
a volume, book of poems lies heart fashioned by me
XXVII. Fleeing
XXI.
Book—like a vast crane
New life
soar on origami page
Old toast on white plate
I’ll journey with you.
blanket of grey fluffy froth spores coming to life
XXVIII. June Studying is pain April may nurture our pain June pain dissipates.
POETRY | 7
My poetic offering, ‘Nature, Seasons and the Student Experience: A Cyclical Journey’, is a modern adaptation of the haiku form. On the modern haiku form, D. B. Clark notes the enjoyment that he derives from 'trying to achieve and transmit [experiences] through a form that I self-impose'. Similarly, it is the compact and laconic nature of this poetic form that attracts me to it, as I am forced to be judicious and discerning in my linguistic choices. This compels me to write in a manner that is economical and yet distinguished by rhythmic clarity and lucid beauty. I have adopted aspects of the traditional haiku form, namely, as Bruce Ross notes, the connection of the first line to a 'large, more generalised aspect of nature'. In line with the Western haiku tradition, however, I tend then to move beyond the theme of nature to focusing on a seminal aspect of student life in a series of poetic portraits. This transition is intentional, as it moves the reader from a mere telegrammatic consideration of nature to a more engaging confrontation with the differing realities of the student experience. I was particularly careful in the redrafting process to take heed of the warning in Campanello’s ‘Poem M.O.T.’ against stretching ‘sound and sense unproductively’. In ‘Onomatopoeic Fest’, for instance, I was keen to evoke the process of eating in a sensual and indulgent manner with clear sexual undertones. In my composition, however, it was the terse nature of the haiku form that prevented my sensory descriptions from unproductively giving way to euphemism. I have deliberately chosen to omit a title for certain haiku while providing a clear title for others. For the latter, the heading clearly sets out the principal theme of the haiku. In contrast, the former gives the reader interpretative freedom to assimilate each section as they see fit.
Bibliography Clark, D. B., My Modern Haiku (London: Lulu, 2006) Campanello, Kimberly, ‘Poem M.O.T.’ Ross, Bruce, How to Haiku: A Writer’s Guide to Haiku and Related Forms (Boston: Title Publishing, 2002)
POETRY | 8
Charles eager
THE BIRTH OF VENUS
When Kronos hacked Ouranos’ organs,
JANÁČEK
Threw in the sea, My awareness awoke.
I sit here in my garden in Hukvaldy, Passing the time with feeding my three hens,
Amidst the primordial world,
Mrs Bilá, Mrs Slavkovská, Mrs Kovalská,
I rose from the waves,
Who flit about with Čipera and Čert, my dogs,
Spume clinging my robes.
And who jump each night upon my table
As I came ashore,
For their evening caresses: while I Notate the songcalls of birds
Flowers budding at my feet
Which, later, I shall dispose into my works.
And the grasses also springing
Endless are the shelves I keep of notebooks
The Hours and the Graces
In which I have transcribed
Took my hand and led me:
The aural beauties Nature lays feastlike out, Transposing Nature into Art,
And as I came ashore
In that marvellous work of symbol,
I saw that I was beautiful.
The music stave. They May think me mad, but, hearing the song Of my Jenůfa or of my Katya
CALIBAN
Or of my cunning vixen, they Shall prefer my madness to their dull sanity.
‘Tis dim. ‘Tis dim but real,
Later, I shall write to Mrs Stösslová. I know,
This crawling and creeping,
In my inward heart, she loves me not
Trundling about ungainly,
Nor hates. I am a comical and motley fellow,
This million-pinches-feeling,
No abject object, one of indifferent bemusement.
This brawling-weeping.
Never we mind. A man does things
I sense it, out, on the carapace,
And, doing things, produces others.
The surface of my crabby corpus,
All artists find their way
Felt, like th’imperative to dinner.
Through experience’s tough-tough school.
Only liberty for me is if
My way is thus. So fill I each day
I look out with my weak,
Thick with the tones and sounds of Nature,
Wat’ry eyes beyond,
Drowned in the textures of my lovely Czech,
In gawping and gazing,
And my lovely Lachia’s musicality.
Past my Lady’s beauty, Past Master’s majesty, Out on the fulgent Moongod Me amazing. POETRY | 9
THE DISTILLATION OF AN IDEA
Of Our Most Holy Saviour. I made
for John Gediminas Knight
To take it, but the Saint He told me to return there,
It swam through something like a thousand of a thousand years,
After the city’s taking, with twelve companions, And returned me to the camp.”
Within a puzzle like an aether or a realm it floated, Until in the incision of a single, perfect moment,
His wondrous vision told, strains,
It moved. There leaving the ideal demesne for our today,
Both of doubt and marvel,
Where being spoken it gained life, it joined that world of us, The dreamy real, which without births like these, would
Murmured round the camp. Rumour bustled busily that day.
come undone.
Adhemar the Bishop, in accord With Church’s methods, Cast cautious doubt before him,
THE HOLY LANCE FOUND AT ANTIOCH, A.D. 1098
A safeguard ‘gainst the snares
during the First Crusade
Of over-quick credulity.
There came in June, when the crusaders
Other men, of simpler piety, drank the vision
Were there at Antioch,
Like good wine, or water after long thirst,
There came to the generals’ tent
Praising The Lord for His provident vision.
A lowly, poor-clad peasant
Count Raymond was of that sort,
Of Provence, Peter Bartholomew by name,
To whom the Lance was cherished ever after,
Who had had a vision,
Even after the trial by fire, death,
Notwithstanding, they say,
And discredit of Peter Bartholomew.
His drunkard and miscreant fame: Had had a vision, wherein
“When was this then?” asked Adhemar,
Saint Andrew, with a strange, silent figure,
Seeking this fancy’s ground in truth.
Told Peter of the Holy Lance,
“In December, Excellency,” replied
That lance which had pierced the side
The visionary, shamefaced at his delay.
Of The Blessed Lord Himself,
“I thought not to be heard,” he spoke,
That the Holy Lance lay here at Antioch.
“By great men, and went to Edessa, where, In February, I saw the Saint again,
“I was borne,” he said, “My masters,
Again with the gorgeous youth, chastising my
I was borne within the Antiochan walls,
Delay, wherewith my eyes suffered
Dressed as I was, but the shirt on my back,
Deservèd pains, and were awhile blinded.
Within Saint Peter’s Church, which the Turks
Meanwhile the Saint told me of God’s
As a mosque had but lately used, alas.
Especial care for the crusaders, and
The Saint took me to the Southern Chapel
That the Saints themselves yearned
And vanished awhile into the earth,
To take bodies again and join the fray.
Before crashing serenely out, Bearing the Holy Lance of Christ, That Lance which had pierced the sacred side POETRY | 10
“My courage failed again, till,
To fervent prayer, as madly
Late in March, the Saint again
He searched the ground, till
Appeared to me, whilst I was with
The lance’s point was to be seen splitting
William Peter, my Master,
The earth: and there was joy,
Who heard the exchange, though
Joy immeasurable, in the city then.
He did not see the Saint himself.
Then,
Not gaining audience with you,
The second night, appeared
Count, I followed some to Mamistra,
Again to Peter the Saint
When again the Saint chastised me,
And his young, beauteous companion.
Ordered me back. But my earthly master Bade me on to Cypress; yet, crossing
“Behold,” said the Saint, “how God
The sea, we thrice were driven back
Has given the Count what
By powerful tempests. I then lay awhile
He would no other, and made
At our island of Saint Simeon,
Him Standard-Bearer of his army,
The time when you took gloriously the city
Provided his love to God persist.”
In which now we stand. In the late battle
Peter Bartholomew bowed, begged mercy
I was here, and almost fell, nearly crushed
For his people, and asked the Saint,
Between two steeds retreating. The Saint came,
“Who is your youthful companion,
Scolded me; so sore it was, I could delay
Beautiful beyond all others?”
No more. I told my mates, Who doubted but brought me here
“Draw near, see, and kiss his foot,” the Saint
To say to you.”
Replied. Drawing near, Peter stopped, seeing
Then spoke the Count of Toulouse,
Suddenly a bloody wound upon it. Peter
“I trust thee, though our Bishop doubts.
Then stalled, as said the Saint, “Behold,
I say, in five days let us undertake
The Son Who hung upon a cross,
A Holy and a Solemn search under
And His wounds, behold.” Looking,
The Southern Chapel of Saint Peter’s.
The peasant fell into reverent quiet,
Meanwhile, humble Peter, I commit thee to
Whereat the Saint continued, “The Lord
The care of my own Chaplain.”
Now commends a Feast Day To celebrate the finding of the Lance,
According with the Saint’s instruction,
Whereat let the clerics sing, ‘Lustra
Twelve went with Peter to the Church
sex qui iam peracta
To delve beneath the earth.
tempus implens corporis,’
All day, dawn to evening,
Up to the sixth verse, ‘Agnus
They searched; some went away,
in cruce levatur immolandus
Or in despair or in care of the castle
stipite’. To the people tell this.”
Of Antioch, threatened yet by Turks,
And Peter Bartholomew,
Whilst few remained. Peter Bartholomew
Who knew no letters, did so.
Leapt into the pit, clad but in shirt, Rousing those about him
POETRY | 11
Adam lee THE CONTINUING
WHAT’S LEFT
These days there’s nothing to do
It’s one of those days where nothing happens.
but walk. You start from the city,
You wake up and nothing happens.
wander, aimless, past suburbs,
You make coffee
then step beyond all traffic
and nothing happens.
trees and railways. You place
You say hello
one foot on a country path,
and nothing happens. You want to die and nothing happens.
you go, you carry on. What else is there?
There is nothing.
The paths to nowhere wind on. You go shopping.
You try to escape from yourself
But there is nothing
but a terrible force drags you down.
on the shelves, no one stalking the aisles, so you stop and stare out the windows at nothing.
RAINBOW ROADS Sitting in your room it seems like
Somewhere
miles and miles to get back home. But
a car burns.
where is home anyway? Our hosts are On the way back to your apartment gone. And no one can hitchhike down
there is again nothing.
interstellar lanes to reach (after aeons)
You look up at the sky
something more amiable.
and notice as the day
A glittering world, a pale
begins to disappear
star. Or anywhere where
and a vast, black bruise
every instant might be exaltation,
starts to stain
bliss. We are left in our rooms with an
the horizon.
eviction Nothing again. notice. And it doles us out a number of years
It begins to rain.
but nothing comes over the horizon, nothing appears except rehashed images: no rainbow roads, highways of endless grey.
FEAR AND LOATHING There is a certain feeling one gets some
SONG
evenings
O, that energy has withered away.
as the young retire into one another’s arms.
It’s gone elsewhere – a distant
When, to stone what’s living, a moon comes.
corner of the Universe, maybe.
When the head rests silently in the hands But O, it’s withered away,
and is buried there… That feeling is like a
that energy, that energy.
person
That energy that sent us up
beating at a dark house’s door.
to the stunning blue
It is a call that (as always) no one answers.
of the mountain’s top
It is a vast, red wall. It is a perpetual night that has no answers.
is gone, it's gone, it's withered away; it’s gone, it's done, that energy.
POETRY | 12
INSOMNIAC Last night, unable to sleep I got up in the dark and asked, “Who’s there?” CONTROLLING MIND
The window was half-open. An icy wind from the stars
And I remember
was blowing into the room.
the village we passed through with quaint stone-grey houses.
“Who’s there?” I said.
And in the garden of one a girl was swinging and singing and stopped to look at us
Nothing replied or appeared.
as we strolled past,
The moon, swimming
briefly amused by the out-of-place
in its lake of blue,
strangers looking for the way to the high ridge.
looked empty and far away.
One house was selling orange marmalade THE DREAM
in jars and had left the box propped up outside on an old wood chair.
When we went hiking the striking blues and greens
You walked up the gravel path
and flowers and yellows
and posted a fiver through the front door;
and hedgerows of that day
and I wondered that no one came out to greet us when the letterbox
made me realise we are inside a story:
flapped with shining, rustic face and welcome
and that all we need to do and reassurance against our growing
is act out our part and wait
doubts about victory over those subtle brutes:
for the little dreaming girl
the men back in the City swathed in black
who one day imagined us all
cloaks, mysterious, unreachable, located in tall
to get sleepy and shut the book,
towers, always retreating to a higher point when challenged.
and the universe’s lights will switch off.
POETRY | 13
THE HIKE This can’t be the way. Farmers are eyeing us coldly and the swathe of trees (clearly engaged in some silent conspiracy to obscure our path) is limitless. The cow’s glance as we pass is sinister.
Every time we think we’ve struck the path to the pike, we come instead
YOU ARE NOTHING
to the outer fences of private property
You are nothing but an unfinished epic
which, though undoubtedly
begun then abandoned
the abode of perfectly friendly people,
by a harried author, who one day carelessly discarded the
always seems like a reproach.
pieces of parchment next to the sea, left to the mercy A tall, iron gate firmly shut.
of the spray of foam and sharp rocks.
A red sign bearing the image And now the pages drift where they will…
of a raised, accusatory finger. The blunt façades of blank windows.
You are nothing but a desiccated will; a husk, emblem or symbol of something high, pure and original
Lost as we are, it seems ridiculous
that no one can reach.
to consider that our counterparts are You are nothing but a half-formed face -
standing at the summit even now.... And it
a skull crushed by nothingness and
is a bitter thought that these avoided
noise. Or, worse still, a porcelain doll;
getting caught in the various webs of
a mannequin that stares and stares.
treachery that are closing in around us.
FORGETTING You never realise how far you’ve come until you turn and look back down the white path up which you came, ringed by mountains. But by that point it’s too late. As soon as you start to consider turning back the sky turns black, light falls, the temperature drops, worried about wolves the sun slides behind the tops of hills. Then a heavy rain begins to pummel the white path, each drop sending up a vague, intangible dust.
POETRY | 14
A VISION
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
113 pages into your life, you
I
lay back (floating in cool pools of black), and decided you were sick.
An imagined face always rises to the
Then gravely you donned the patient’s
surface of my mind.
blue, sceptic gown – and, walking slowly down to the river of fire flowing freely through the grime-caked, calloused heart
It frowns in crowds,
of the city, began to sing, distractedly
smiles deceptively like all the famous drowned, with Ophelia
in halls of dreams.
and Paul Celan you sang, II
“Here I am, at the river’s edge, at a bank in space (since everything is spinning through space),
Even though it’s been years
beneath white stars burning and brief and inarticulate.
since you wandered off,
And everything now is stark quiet though
alone, into that black forest
mechanisms hum at night. Slowly we degenerate, and though
and performed an act
morning brings
which caused a dark star
construction sites and the screams of seagulls, still
to burn malevolently
nothing in the night sky,
cries aloud with a common language. All conscious objects burn with their own sweet subjective inarticulate pang, and everything is solitary and lost, nothing is one
one which I
in the vast sprawling vault of expanding black,
alone, with your dark
which, whatever you do, gets bigger and emptier
permission, can see.
each night,” III
– but that was it. Your song ended at the edge of the cold, cold river, and in the sick grey morning
Oh, sometimes when I sit alone
it seemed that all the previous mysteriousness
at my desk, or wander, aimless
was disappearing,
through a dark wood or forest I suddenly stop
including the bitter, burning
and peer around,
shades of Paul Celan and sweet Ophelia.
imagining I have heard the sound of the crunch of a leaf by a foot, or the light swish of a branch, then, greeted only by silence, I will turn and carry on, but afraid to look back, and doubting that I am alone.
POETRY | 15
Alba rodriguez
INSOMNIA The voice in the darkness, The spiral ahead; Three-quarters of Vodka, A night you will dread.
ROLL YOUR OWN DICE The air wasn’t moving,
The absence, the pit,
So neither was I,
The room dimly lit;
The ocean was calling,
No chance at redemption,
So I went for a fly.
I’m willing to admit. My Father once gave me And lastly, the tunnel,
A piece of advice:
A hollow of light;
‘You go to these fuckers, And roll your own dice.’
Hope shyly walking Towards neverland.
My dice are quite complex, Not always the same,
DISENCHANTED
I think they’re shapeshifters
The angel is wounded so she never sleeps,
When I’m not awake.
But under her eyelids is lingering still The thought of a promise; abandoned foothill That’s never forgotten, and so she just weeps.
So the air wasn’t moving And neither was I. The ocean kept calling,
The angel, the angel! She’s coming tonight,
And I rolled my own dice.
Dressed in scarlet and ready to fly; She climbs to the rooftops, but she leaves a trail Of sadness and anger that’s ready to ignite.
The angel is flying no more as of now, Her eyes (pale red shadows) are bright in the dark, Reflecting stories of times good and bad, On mild proportion of three quarters to one.
POETRY | 16
Iliana Gutch Marinov
SOLITUDE
In this room a beam of light Filters in through the curtains. Filaments of dust dance in the still air Before going to settle in the shadows.
In this room I look out I fill every expanse, every gap With the mutterings and murmurings of my mind.
Outside on the frozen lake The wild geese call, Bathing their wings in the gentle rays Of the soft hibernal sun.
In this room, time unveils itself before me An ever-expanding vortex Throbbing with a thousand unutterable questions That assail me, unrelenting, in the glimmer of half-light.
In the silver twilight the wild geese take flight Beating their noiseless wings Across the frozen lake.
POETRY | 17
Fiction
FADING DREAMS OF YESTERDAY Edwin Black Sleep gently beckoned to Dr. Aberley. His car rocked gently on the road, its engine a humming monotone breaking through the quiet. Trees drifted by on either side. The darkness spilled out from between them, wrapping ivy-like around everything it touched. Too long a day. Sleep all day tomorrow. Oh God yes. In another hour he would be greeted with the smokestacks of the steelworks waving him good morning as he made his way through the rabbit warren streets of Taylorstock. Yawning, he turned on the radio. “This is 2LO calling, the official broadcast of the British Broadcasting Company. It is 1AM, London time. And now the news from the Empire...” The voice drifted like a lullaby. Seconds shifted by, each one adding another tonne to his heavy eyelids. He reached Ireland before turning it off. Desperate to keep his eyes open he peered at the road in front, disregarding the passing trunks as much as possible. Counting them would be like counting sheep. Three near break outs, one violent patient, and a useless nurse. Christ I need my bed. He shook his head, hoping to dispel sleep for a few moments more and the trees, completely oblivious to his plight, still rolled on by. “Bloody Hell,” he grumbled. He felt the darkness on his shoulders, trailing down his arms. It was warm, comforting. Slowly, he settled into his seat. It was coming, the tingling rise of sleep through his spine making him lose all idea of reality. Suddenly, a white shape stepped into the road. Aberley jolted upright and slammed the breaks. For a moment, fear seized him. Grandmother's voice cracked in his ears, retelling old stories of the strange folk who wandered Blackcliffe Forest, and just what these beings did to little boys who wandered too far from home too late in the day. As the moments passed his years returned to him. From boy to man again, he saw the figure for what it was. He stepped out of the car. “What the buggering Hell do you think you are doing out here?” The figure swayed from left to right, as though they were walking in place. As he got closer his eyes widened. It can't be. How on Earth? “Mrs. Dunn?” She was clad in a medical gown, the light reflecting from it making her look all the more gaunt. Her long hair tumbled in a mess that splashed about her neck and shoulders, raising slightly in the wind, waving away what life she had left to her. She mumbled softly. “They won't go away. They won't go away.” She flicked her her head up. Her eyes were like those of an owl. Aberley approached carefully. “They wouldn't go away and now I'm here. Where am I? I want to go home! They won't go away!” “Mrs. Dunn – it is me, Dr. Aberley. Archie. You know me – from the Home.” “Doctor? Doctor? Why am I out here? There was a door and a hallway and now I'm here! They wouldn't go away, you see. They wouldn't go away!” Halfway to disbelief, Aberley took her gently by the shoulders and led her to the car. The nurses really messed up on this one. They'll get a thorough bollocking as soon as I get the chance. He sat her down, making sure that she would not be able to lift the door handle and escape into the wilderness. She was still talking when he closed the door. He looked down the road and heaved a sigh. It was an hour's drive that was now ahead of him. They had better let me stay the night. Once he re-entered the car he pressed the back of his hand to the old woman's forehead. Warm. Normal. That's odd. She must have been out for hours at least. Other than her confusion there was no sign of physical ailment. Aberley's eyebrow rose. “So, Mrs. Dunn, what are you doing out here in the middle of the night?” Her head shot round. “I told you. I have friends over. They wouldn't leave – they simply refuse to go away! I told them not to make so much of a noise as I wanted to go to bed. Well, they just laughed, having too much of a good time you see, but were good enough to show me to my bedroom door. I went through and now I'm here. Where am I? I have friends over. Five. Making too much noise...” Aberley sighed. He let the babble continue. Always the same. She went through a door and then another, got lost, and kept going. FICTION | 1
“Didn't a nurse visit you for your morphine?” “Nurse? Why would a nurse do that? And where are we going?” Aberley watched her carefully. Not usually violent but I have just picked her up in a frightened state from a place she does not know. Caution, old fellow, caution. “I have friends over. They will not leave. I...have...friends...” The talking stopped. A blank look crossed Mrs. Dunn's face as her breathing slowed. She settled back into the seat and stared out of the windscreen. Completely relaxed, eyes fixed forward, as though she were sleeping with her eyes open. Aberley kept his own on the road. He pictured the cup of tea and the camp bed that were waiting for him in the upper garrets of the Home. Time crawled onwards, the darkness unchanging, the trees constant. Fifteen minutes passed. “Why am I in your car, doctor?” Mrs. Dunn's voice was stronger, fuller. Finally, a moment of clarity. “I just found you in the woods so I am taking you home.” “I see. Sleepwalking, I suppose. I have never done that before – usually dead to the world. Can one walk when under a sedative?” “Well, we will get that sorted once we get back.” “I shall have to write a letter of complaint to the Goodfellows Lodge about this. It is no good allowing patients to wander out the front door now, is it? And the food has been dreadful for the past couple of weeks. Of course, this is if I remember to write the damned thing in the morning. This is getting worse, you know.” Aberley nodded. He liked working with Mrs. Dunn. Hers was a variety of the disease that did not lead to violent confrontation or verbal outbursts. Rather, it was the gentle shrouding of the mind, the slow burning out of the match. The last time her son had visited she kept referring to him as “David” and thought him one of her domestic staff. She's started wandering. That means restraints. Please don't turn into a Screamer. The image flicked into his head of the old woman rolling fruitlessly in her bed, trying to tear herself from it, screaming obscenities all the while. Though he had been working at the home for a long time he still could not quite manage seeing the patients in their final stages. “You said that you had friends over. What's that all about?” Mrs. Dunn raised an eyebrow. “Friends? Why would I have friends at the home? Especially seeing as though Geraldine Farley has been waiting to go off any time now. Friends? Goodness no. No. Friends...” Her voice trailed away and the blank look returned. Aberley kept his eyes on the road, the silence of the ride only broken by the creaking suspension of the car. The early morning silence was as peaceful as the river on a still day. Small ripples of fish swimming by replaced the rapids and tides of winter, the raging white water long forgotten. During the day, the road would be populated by steel vans making their way to Sheffield. For now, though, Aberley could not help but feel a deep solitude, even in the presence of Mrs. Dunn. Half an hour to go. You can do it, old man. You can get there. “They come as two, then three, then four — They come for what's behind the door. They come as three, then four, then five — Then it's time to pay the tithe.” It was almost sung, as though the old woman could not quite decide what the tune was. “They come from other places, my friends. Far away but close. Five of them came through the door and they will not leave. I want them to go away, I want them to leave, but they will not. They will not leave. Friends through the door. Friends.” The gates of the home came into view. No lights could be seen through the windows of the large building, though the gatehouse still looked occupied. The night-guard emerged, perplexed at first, but accommodating once he realised what had happened. “No idea how she'd have gotten through, sir,” he said. “Gates are locked tight after midnight.” Aberley carefully handed Mrs. Dunn to the on-duty nurse. After a lengthy discussion with the Matron it was found that he could not be put up – two others had also found patients wandering outside the grounds. He relented and drove through the woodland once again. The trees of Blackcliffe Forest drifted like clouds on a windy day. Be there Hell or high water I will get home. Finally, the tall smokestacks rose above the treeline, silhouetted by the dawn. Aberley could not help but smile. FICTION | 2
His car puttered through the cobbled street, pulling up to the curb. The terrace house loomed above him as he fumbled with his keys in the lock. Bed is so close. So bally close! The door opened and he all but leapt through, yawning before turning on the light. Facing him, stood in various parts of the room, were five tall shadows.
FICTION | 3
YOUTH CHARLES EAGER
"When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah?" King Lear
It was one of those inchiostral early mornings when Chesney Ryan appeared before his apartment door on the street, young, nonchalant, not quite carefree, coated in blue jeans, a white tee, and one of those brown bomber jackets, cigarette in hand, exuding, for all that he seemed to pertain to an earlier time, no sense of cliché. You know the type, those mornings—there are such evenings too, those times when the sun is lowering, seeming to meld with the earth—when it looks like the gods or God, or whoever it is up there, have spilled their ink-bottle across the sky in a radiant confusion. The clouds swelled with it, meeting the trees and bushes of the park across the street, which were almost popping with rich green, it being early Spring and they photosynthetically pulsating with new life: the sky looked purple-blue, and the trees and bushes gold-green. I guess that every life contains some tragedy, no matter how small, and Chesney's was his youth. Some are made into tragic youths by dying young—you need no list of examples from me—but he was of that sort who became a tragic youth by growing old, one whose life had lain in the thrills of youth and who, when they began to fade, could feel only that endless nostalgia which is their corollary. As one might expect, that sadness and melancholy were well on their way by now, Chesney now being in his twenty-sixth year; but they were mollified with the liveliness of present youth and its present pleasures, youth getting ready to leave, his bag in his gloved hand, with trenchcoat wrapped up about his neck as guard against the rapine of Winter—though not going quite out-of-door just yet. One of those youthful pleasures was the very cigarette from whose last inhalation he had just taken joy before throwing the butt carelessly to the ground, where it danced with the leaves in the early Spring winds. He was cognisant meanwhile that, for the amount he was smoking, his health might not get away quite scot-free later in life: yet when he had taken up the habit (or as he and his schoolfriends had conceived it, 'the art!') some ten years before, he had always intended to enjoy it young and to leave off well before any serious consequence could be felt. Often are our youthful programmes the daemons of our age. Soon he would have to play an afternoon show (jazz piano—well, 'jazzy': he was no Art Tatum or Bill Evans), at a restaurant which served a rich clientele. Unlike others of his age and generation, he was relatively free of envy for the rich, and he felt no hatred or even dislike for them, so it was easy to work there. They tipped him well, and they complimented his playing with sincerity and even on rare occasions with understanding, although for the latter Chesney often had to have recourse to his studious coevals. That meant, in plain English, his college buddies, or his university mates. He had worked his fingers to the bone and his brain nearly to a liquid to get into a jazz programme somewhere fancy (I can't recall where now, nor can he), and he considered the qualification an expensive paper—it must be said, rather bitterly. Yes, it had been too expensive. Might have been better used in rolling cigarettes. Five years out of that college, and he was still just scraping by on gigs, mostly restaurants. It was a lucky thing he came from a comfortable, albeit not hugely wealthy background. He could rely on family for support. He sometimes wondered, in more meditative and solemn moments, how the less fortunate got by in that great, lively, expensive city—if at all. But most of the time he was 'busy starring in his own life', as my own dear Mother used to say when wanting, in her wisdom, to remind me of my own insignificance; and his mind was, alas, greatly limited in its focus, as are all ours. Anyway, that was how it was in the great drama of city living. People used to ask whether there weren't a nice girl—or indeed boy, if that suited him better—to start getting along with. Of course, there had been a few, but really his questioners didn't understand his mind on this—didn't understand his real indifference. They didn't see that his devoted mistress was the city itself, its lights, its limitless FICTION | 4
varieties, its adventures, even its boredoms, which were in their own way exquisite, and its agonies, which took on lives of their own and then turned, by their own volition as it were, into blisses. Yes, the performance after lunch; then some 'down-time' back at the apartment; then to the literary society, which was the fancy, more than slightly pretentious official name for the monthly meeting of the book club of which he was part. Although he had always had what one might call a Mozartian ease, if not a Mozartian genius, in music, his supreme passion had always been for literature. In truth, it had been rather a bitter pill when he divined, beyond doubt, his facility in the one and his mediocrity in the other. That first awareness, that a love for something does not, of itself, make it attainable—or more particularly, that a passion in something does not necessitate any notable skill—is injurious in childhood and lacerating in adolescence, which was when Chesney first unveiled for himself the golden, open gate of literature, then found that it was closed fast against him. Still, it asks more than mere mediocrity of skill to kill a true, breathing passion. He read nearly perpetually and attended this literary society, which included decent books and fairly pretty girls—each of whom got prettier the more he spoke about literature with them, seeing their eyes lighten and their hands clutch their books more tightly—most of whom he had by now, in his sixth month there, daydreamt of in some context or another at least once: Vittoria's nuzzleably soft cheek, Tabitha's rich low voice, which put him in mind of red wine (which was yet another passion), and, well, the list goes on. He only disliked Charlotte and Dorothy, the one seeming bereft of any ostensible social skill, and the other striking him too much as one of those slightly stuck up girls from the south who speak with the long a-sound, her clothes just the wrong side of elegant, nearly courtly. She had an imperious air, almost like Good Queen Bess; or, given her complexion, a beguiling and mysterious princess of Persia, perhaps how one might imagine the Queen of Sheba if she were displaced to the glistering present. Although he was sufficiently young to be quite jaded in his work, he began, as he began also to walk about with hands planted in his jacket pockets against the brisk of March, to go over chord changes in his mind, improvisational ideas supplying themselves without volition as he went. Such rêveries a whole day can well be passed in. Favourite melodies swam into and out of his head—Mahler's solemn "Adagietto", Haydn's playful "Surprise Symphony", songs whose names he could not, in sweet frustration, even remember. In such moments he could not do other than reflect on the unfaltering, irreducible, indissectible richness both of the life that he lived and the art by which it was nourished and to which it was devoted. His heart was a young one, one of those seared and cicatrised by Beauty, whose loneliest moments were its most ecstatic. A little half-hour waned. 'Chesney,' he then heard from a ghostly voice beyond his view. He turned. The figure was clutching refined, cotton gloves in one hand whilst her flaxen hair spilled over her camel-coloured coat. La fille aux cheveaux de lin. La femme. Who put such beauty here in the world? he asked himself as a momentary, pleasurable madness took him. 'Do you remember me? Monica?' she continued in his passing silence. It was Oliver's Mother. Schooldays. 'Oliver's Mother. What brings you to town?' 'Of course I remember you, Monica!' He exclaimed with unfeigned cheer. (Again the city had given one of her answerless surprises!) 'How is Oliver? And you? And the family?' Though she was unmissably and unmistakably Monica, she seemed utterly changed. When did she come into such nice clothing? Can't be cheap. Very well made up, all over. Just beginning to grey at the temples. Respect to her for not dyeing it. Since when would she come into the city so? She had been such a homebody when he knew her in their village together. 'Well, fine, really; it's all a long story. . . Actually, I have been running around since nine, and was just about to sit down with a coffee. Would you like to join me? We can catch up, if you want to and you're free.' Although he was not sure whether this would be enjoyable, he was indeed free in schedule as he was in spirit, and assented. They ended up in a bar rather than a coffee-shop, each with a glass of wine. 'So, you have a long story,' he said inquiringly, charming her unintentionally with a self-confidence (or perhaps it was a self-conceit?) which he had naturally lacked in younger youth. 'I do, I do. Well: first of all, Oliver has gone studying in America—California, in fact. I'll be sure to tell him I saw you.' 'Oh excellent; yes, please do. Studying what?' FICTION | 5
'Well, it is something complicated, involving computers. I must say that I don't understand a word of his descriptions myself. You young people nowadays know so much about these objects which to me are so utterly alien!' she laughed to herself. Smiling, Chesney replied, 'Perhaps Oliver does. I can just about use them, when necessary. But they're a mystery to me. Well: good for him. There's good money in that line of work.' 'Oh yes, he's comfortable—and happy, I think.' 'Can't ask for more than that,' he replied blandly. 'No, no,' she said with an air of thoughtfulness which may or may not have been sincere. 'And how about yourself?' she asked. 'What do you do these days? Does work bring you to the city?' 'Yes, well, I pursued my pianistic and musical studies after school. Never was one for technology; or not electrical technology anyway! I finished my studies, oh, about five years back, and now I play a few gigs around here; and, so doing, I scrape a living together.' 'Well, it sounds like something you do for love.' 'I suppose. I suppose it was,' he said with a wry smile. 'And the family? How is everyone else?' 'Bill, my husband—you remember?—is fine. Actually, we separated some time ago. After all of our children had left the house, there was an emptiness there: we realised that something was wrong, and agreed to go our separate ways.' 'Oh,' he said with feelings of great awkwardness. 'I am sorry.' 'Not at all, not at all, Chesney. It's fine, it was an agreement! And I have really felt a new life since then. Shortly after that, I used my money to find a humble apartment here in the city, a new wardrobe (as you can see),' she smiled, 'and I support myself in this new life of modest leisure and independence.' 'Well, you seem well,' he smiled, trying not to seem conciliatory. 'Yes. And I expect I know what you're thinking. I remember that you were there, catechised along with Oliver and the rest! And I was not the coolest Christian back then.' It did not matter that Chesney in fact had no recollection of any of this. 'Many times I turned that passage over in my mind.' In his respectful silence she continued, '"What God has united, human beings must not divide. . . It was because you were so hard-hearted, that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but it was not like this from the beginning."' He fixed her with a silent attentiveness. 'I turned it over and over. One day, I found little or no conviction left in my heart, none of that fire I'd felt in younger youth. Perhaps I'd—I've—really been a hypocrite my whole life, not really believing or understanding a thing. I can't decide all that of course, Chesney. Maybe more intelligent folk can! I just have to live my life.' 'Well, Monica, I can't say I've given it much thought.' He paused a little. 'So I can't help you, in that respect. I think that, as long as you are happy. That's a start.' 'Yes. It's a start, isn't it? Well,' she said after a pause, 'I do apologise. I really didn't mean to get on to such serious topics. I still get too intense, you see!' She laughed a little at herself. 'You can take the lady out of her devotion, but not the devotion out of the lady!' 'I suppose that's true,' he said. They spoke of many a pleasant thing as they finished their preprandial wine. He politely refused her offer to have lunch together: he liked to clear his mind before playing, and he wanted to smoke and to think. He also suspected that her expensive tastes, which she thought humble, might well be incompatible with his, which really were humble. But they agreed that, since they were both living in the city, it would be nice to get together every now and then. This was more than fine to Chesney: he liked and admired her, and he genuinely enjoyed the courtesy of older company to the grating heaviness of most of those his own age. There was a start there too of sorts, of something. He was not sure. After a brief lunch, the show came and went, as had so many and as so many would in the future. Melodies, harmonies, and rhythms swam around his mind in their usual way, making the soul to dance. After the music had faded, though yearning for that reflective silence which nursed so much of its magic, he heard instead the cacophony of business and family lunches, of cutlery and plates, and a little, well-meant applause. After a sleepy FICTION | 6
afternoon at home, re-reading parts of the book, he proceeded to the book club. Each month's meeting—the participants being most of them too busy to meet more than monthly—would take place at a different member's house, or more often, given the salaries of young people, at one of their rented apartments. This month he was to Dorothy's. He walked, he rode a train and a bus reading and gazing at the city lights, walking between each, then he walked some more. But when he arrived there, he was surprised. 'It's off,' she said. 'Everyone is ill or busy.' 'Really? Doing what?' 'Well, Brittany had to go to work at short notice; Deidre had an exciting lecture which it was imperative she attend (given only tonight by a great linguistic authority); Vittoria has coronavirus; and Tabitha is driving her younger sister to some school sporting event which, she says, is unmissable.' 'Oh dear,' he said with that sincere glumness which accompanies futility. 'I know,' she said, her hand on the doorframe. 'I do wonder really if anyone read the book. . . You remember it was my suggestion. Is it coincidental that they all cancelled?' 'I am sure they did. It's not a long book, and it was really quite good.' 'You think so?' she said. 'Well, we are here, we have read it; I don't know about you, but I am quite eager to discuss it. Shall we do so, in spite of our paltry numbers?' He responded that it would be a pleasure and, stepping back, she beckoned him in. She prepared a teapot, and they each sat on one of the rented apartment's inexpensive, rather unprepossessing two-seater sofas facing the other, their books laid upon the table at angles perpendicular to the tea-things. 'So,' she smiled, 'what did you think of Archer Seagle?' 'I liked him. I wouldn't ordinarily read a book of short stories. I tend more to novels, as I suppose most people do nowadays, but all these touched or fascinated me, in one way or another. Some stories were very romantic, weren't they? Which I find almost shocking in a modern, literary book, which so often are stuffed with nihilism.' 'Yes, some of the stories were really almost Jane-Austen-esque. It really recalled something of her for me, or perhaps as much the Bronte romances, though he certainly jumps around historical periods much more, even avoiding a specific time or place for some stories, maybe giving only a passing hint as to the period. For all its earnest romance, there's a great playfulness about its invented worlds and languages.' He assented with nods and quiet affirmatives. The conversation continued in this style for a good hour until, satisfied that they had said what they wanted of literature, they spoke of other things. These were irrelevant, but it is the irrelevant which is often the only truly relevant part of what we say. They moved to Chesney's musical work, which was fitting, for his head had been full of songs like that of the mystic is full of theophanies for the greater part of their evening. 'So making music is your job!' 'It is, yes.' 'How wonderful. When I think how most people are stuck doing invoices in offices for meaningless companies, or putting tins on shelves—not there is anything wrong with those——' 'No, they're quite morally neutral!' She smiled at herself. 'I see you see what I mean.' 'Sorry, Dorothy. Forgive my levity: go on.' 'Yes, I suppose I was trying to say that, of all the jobs out there, a musical one must be more wonderful than most.' 'You know, I don't really know. I'm young, I haven't done—haven't had to do, thank God—most jobs. But mine is really humble work. In fact, I'm wrong, calling shelf-stackers and invoice-filler-outers "quite morally neutral" in their work. There is something special, be it in the ordinary sense, about the person who turns up, day after day, to do humble, unflattering work. And, although I don't know whether I succeed in it, I like to approach my job in the same way. Sometimes it feels easy: the diners I play for keep me humble with their talking, clattering, and masticating over what I have carefully studied for years. And—sorry if I'm going on——' 'Not at all!' she said, her elbow on her knee, supporting her brightly responsive mien with her hand, seeming, in her skirt, her unseasonably thick, cable-knit jumper, and winter tights a symbol of perfection, an allegory of contentment. 'I'm very interested! Go on.' 'Okay, thanks. I just wanted to say as well that I am not going on tours or playing great stages, or anything "fancy". It is humble work. But how about you?' FICTION | 7
'Well, I have done shelf-filling, in my teenage years; and invoice-filling-in later in life! In fact, my current job involves filling out invoices.' she laughed. 'So, while I appreciate what you say, and agree with it, I stand by my claim that they lack a certain magic that musical work has. I speak from experience,' she smiled. 'I suppose.' 'Definitely. You mentioned your "careful study" of your work. Even that phrase you used in an ostensibly throwaway way betrays so much of the magic of music, even when it is approached humbly, even when it seems mundane or quotidian.' 'You're not wrong, Dorothy.' A sense hovered that more might be said, but he seemed teetering on the edge of becoming inward and pensive—as twenty-six-year-old jazz-playing pianists are wont betimes to do. She changed the direction of the conversation. 'And what do you play?' 'Jazz piano, mostly. Well, 'jazzy': it's not high jazz. It's mood-music, background.' Fixing him she said, 'Really? I don't know a great deal of jazz. I should like to know it better.' 'I am always happy to educate people in what I think is wonderful music, and too little-known.' 'Well, I have a piano here. Not a fancy one such as you'll be used to playing on. It's a rather mean and shabby electric piano; but, with its quietness and low cost, it's all I can have for now while I'm here.' She gestured around them at the boxy apartment which closed them in. 'You play?' 'Oh well, you know, a little bit. Like many kids, I had some lessons. I did in fact get to grade seven!' 'Ah, well, Dorothy! You're probably better than I am! I bet you practice too?' '"Old habits die hard".' They moved to her piano in the next room. There were not a few books, the shelf by the piano holding a substantial collection of budget scores such as those by Schirmer and Peters, along with some seeming truly wellthumbed with the years, as though they could be heirlooms from a Grandmother or a Grandmother's Mother. 'Play me something,' she said. 'Alright,' he replied, taking the stool. 'You may well know this one.' He began to play the charming set of changes in a bright major mode, a melody entering in after a spell which clambered stepwise up the scale. 'I play it as an instrumental at the restaurant, but really it is a lyrical song.' He sang as best he could,
A country dance was being held in a garden, I felt a bump and heard an 'Oh, beg your pardon!' Suddenly I saw Polkadots and moonbeams All around a pug-nosed dream.
The music started and was I the perplexed one, I held my breath and said, 'May I have the next one?' In my frightened arms, Polkadots and moonbeams Sparkled on a pug-nosed dream.
There were questions in the eyes of other dancers As we floated over the floor. There were questions, but my heart knew all the answers, And perhaps a few things more.
Now, in a cottage built of lilacs and laughter, I know the meaning of the words 'ever after'. And I'll always see Polkadots and moonbeams When I kiss my pug-nosed dream. FICTION | 8
The bright music ebbed into a resplendent silence. 'I don't know it,' she said quietly. 'It's charming.' '"Polkadots and Moonbeams,"' he said. 'A standard, a classic. An old Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey number. Perhaps it's my favourite, in a way: whereas so much of the great jazz songbook is full of a melancholy beauty, this exudes almost only joy.' 'Is it?' she asked. 'Your favourite?' 'No,' he said after a thoughtful moment. 'What is?' Refusing the impulse to say, "Everything Happens To Me," sensing that it would break a spell, he chose another favourite. 'You won't know it,' he said, starting to lay out some chords. 'It's a Portuguese samba.' He added the characteristic rhythm. 'Well, Brazilian Portuguese, that is. Let me give you an idea—though you must forgive my pronunciation of the Portuguese,' he said. Meeting his play, she said, 'Although a renowned scholar of the language myself, I shall try to find the magnanimity to forgive you.' Their laughter rippled softly over the chords. 'Yes, I don't know it—Portuguese—either, but when I heard this song, I fell in love with it; I studied the meaning and the pronunciation of the words, I was so moved by them, even without knowing really what they meant.' Their exchange ending roughly at the same moment as did the first set of chords, he began to outline the melody and sang,
Sonho meu, sonho meu, Vai buscar quem mora longe, sonho meu. Sonho meu, sonho meu, Vai buscar quem mora longe, sonho meu.
Vai mostrar esta saudade, sonho meu, Com a sua liberdade, sonho meu, No meu céu a estrela-guia se perdeu A madrugada fria só me traz melancolia, sonho meu.
Sinto o canto da noite na boca da vento, Fazer a dança des flores no meu pensamento.
Traz a pureza de um samba Sentido, marcado de mágoar de amor Um samba que mexe o corpo da gente O vento vadio embalando a flor, sonho meu.
Sonho meu, sonho meu, Vai buscar quem mora longe, sonho meu. Sonho meu, sonho meu, Vai buscar quem mora longe, sonho meu.
'Marvellous!' she declared. 'Such a little and simple song, and yet there's something truly stirring about it. All the more powerful for its modesty, wouldn't you say?' 'I would. It'll stay with you, if you're like me.' He thought a moment. 'Do you know anything I don't?' 'Well,' she thought. 'How well do you know Schubert?' 'Some of the famous ones I know,' he said, removing himself from the piano bench. 'Singers I've worked with have even made me do jazz arrangements of them!—which rarely work, in my experience. At school I recall having accompanied a couple of people in some of the songs—for recitals and so on.'
FICTION | 9
'Well, this one you may not know; it's a bit more obscure. But funnily enough I was reminded of it as you played me the Brazilian song—how's it called again?' '"Sonho meu".' 'Like that song, it has a beautiful, romantic refrain.' She said slowly, '"Liebe ist ein süßes Licht".' 'Hm. I know Liebe, ist, ein, and Licht. Süßes? 'Sweet,' she smiled as she sat and began to play the first chords. 'Ah,' she stopped. 'I used to have it under the fingers. Could you pass me the score? It's on top of that box, there. Yes, you might want to dust it off a little.' He passed it to her. 'Thanks. It's a duet: piano, soprano, and tenor. I can play and sing a bit, but we won't get the full picture. 'Well, I can sing and read a bit. Shall we try together?' 'Okay.' She smiled at him. 'Let's try.' After her brief pianistic introduction, it fell to him to sing the first strophe,
Liebe ist ein süßes Licht, Liebe ist ein süßes Licht: Wie die Erde strebt zur Sonne Und zu jenen hellen Sternen: In den weitern blauen Fernen Strebt das Herz nach Liebeswonne, strebt das Herz nach Liebeswonne. Denn sie ist ein süßes Licht, denn sie ist ein süßes Licht.
Here the key changed and the rhythm grew choppy. Dorothy sang in a soft soprano voice,
Sie, wie hoch in stiller Feier droben helle Sterne funkeln, Von der Erde fliehn die dunkeln schwermuthsvollen trüben Schleier. Weh mir, wie so trübe fühl' ich tief mich in Gemüthe, Das in Freuden sonst erblüthe, Nun vereinsamt ohne Liebe, nun vereinsamt ohne Liebe.
The refrain recurred, swapping between and overlapping each singer.
Liebe ist ein süßes Licht, Liebe ist ein süßes Licht: Wie die Erde strebt zur Sonne, Und zu jenen hellen Sternen: In den weiten blauen Fernen, Strebt das Herz nach Liebeswonne. Liebe ist ein süßes Licht, Liebe ist ein süßes Licht.
The last chords sank down into brief silence. 'Well,' she said after a moment, 'we won't be selling out all tickets for our performance at Carnegie Hall anytime! But I thought it was lovely myself.' 'We were quite moving, weren't we? Even though I hardly sing classically!' 'Yes, yes, quite, quite beautiful. And very few people sing like that; but you have a good, gentle, mellifluous baritone voice! Do you understand the meaning?' 'I think I get the overall sense, but in the particulars no. What little German I was forced to learn at school, I've really quite forgotten.' 'Oh, a shame! I always did think it a beautiful language. Would you like me to translate some?' 'Please! You know German?' 'No,' she mused as she reached for paper and a pen. 'I also learnt it at school and haven't followed it since. But I know enough usually to interpret most, if not all, of a Schubert song.' A file of her brown hair fell across her face as she leant over the music desk, concentrating on the paper. He gazed as she wrote that sort of round and flowing cursive common among younger ladies. The image made his FICTION | 10
mind err. Contemplating her face and the depth of her eyes, he found a sympathy; but not only that: he felt also a claw on his soul. He couldn't be sure, even on later reflections, whether it were Aphrodite or Eros, Bacchus or Priapus who had been speaking to him in that moment. Perhaps it had been Old Screwtape. Whoever it was, he ignored them, just. Something special was afoot in this simple room. A flower was opening, unfurling its leaves. The aching voice of Chet Baker sounded in his memory uninvited. This isn't just midsummer madness, A passing glow, a moment's gladness. . . 'There.' She handed him the paper with a rough English version. 'Thank you, Dorothy,' he said as he looked the paper over. 'Not at all. How about "Sonho meu" for me?' 'Of course.' He scrawled it in a rough but characterful hand, along with a translation whose spirit was true, if the text philologically dubious. Though it would not have satisfied many a scholar, it would have brought joy to any open heart. He played her a few more songs, and she a few piano pieces for him; but these, though beautiful, would not be remembered in their many future reminiscences of the evening. The hour got late, and they, drunk with talking of beautiful things, wended slowly to her door. He smiled to her there, saying 'Good night' and, with much less of a sense of irony than he had intended, 'Thank you for the heavenly time.' She beamed, replying that he was most welcome. How curious and charming he was, this Irish boy who seemed to carry the great American songbook around with him in his head and under his fingers and on his tongue, who looked like a throwback to the vanished time when those dreamlike songs were first conceived! And yet, for all his thrownbackness, not apparently anything but authentic. Walking away from her door, he saw the evening sky rehearsing its colourful symphonies of that morning— not a mere mechanical repetition, but rather varying and developing in a musical way, a way which was sensible, as intelligible as a page fuliginous with inky letters (like Dorothy's, which lay almost-carelessly crumpled in his jacket's breast pocket, one half of it in an unknown language, the other bearing its translation into something he could understand): yes, laid out like a blanket the evening was, like the day's vespers, plenary with a metanoia and a thanks which were disposed into a gorgeous tapestry, prompted in part by which, he, as he walked away, heard revolving in and delighting his mind a perpetual, Ivesian incongruity, sounding simultaneously a double refrain in different and utterly clashing and contrasting keys, Sonho meu, sonho meu. . . Liebe ist ein süßes Licht, Liebe ist ein süßes Licht. . .
FICTION | 11
FULLSKUCK Isaac worthington
It was a little, but poignant, melancholy that steered most of her thoughts. Imagine a world where people were disposed to be endeared by difference, rather than scoffing at it. Imagine. And it wasn’t necessarily that they always pointed difference out, or even poked obvious fun at it. It was worse than that. They’d just quietly notice. A wordless double-take. A strained, sympathetic smile. A split second side-eye, just enough to realise before they carried on with their day. The scar stretched brazenly from her left nostril to her thin misshapen lip below, forever a red pulsating reminder that Dr Delacroix some 34 years ago had not operated on his first cleft palate in a successful fashion. Not only this, but he’d rendered it considerably worse. In fairness, her birth defect was certainly in the top echelons of what medical professionals might consider extreme, and perhaps it was the stress of a more-difficult-than-usual procedure that led to the Doctor overcompensating with his first incision, which sliced so deeply into the skin by the side of her nose that it defiled the muscular operations in her left cheek beyond repair. In actual fact, the real reason why Michael T. Delacroix Dch, DS, the highest scoring medical student at the University of Clambeck, class of ’87, exacted such a low-scoring surgical move on this child’s face, was the peripheral distraction of a very small, faded, but just about see-able mustard stain on the scrubs of a trainee nurse, the waning canary-yellow splotch thereby residing in the dead middle of two Rubenesque tits, which were barely contained in the ill-fitting uniform. In the way strange details in life often seem to connect in odd, peculiar ways, it was the very same split-second peep the Doctor afforded the distraction, a distraction which would defile her face forever, as the public afforded that very same face when she walked past them in the street. Any such movement of her mouth, or a facial expression that was larger than tiny, distorted the entire left side of her face into an uncomfortable contortion. She even consciously avoided words that contained the ‘ee’ sound so as not to have to widen her mouth into the position of saying it, as this mouth shape, something akin to an almost-smile, birthed of her countenance a monster more than it already was. The most used words in the English language containing the ‘ee’ sound are ‘me’ and ‘we’; neither of these being a considerable problem for her to omit from her day to day lexicon given that first of all, her least favourite talking point was herself, and secondly, she was almost always alone. Many years ago she’d uncharacteristically laughed quite candidly at a book she was reading in school, the noise of which accidentally won the attention of her classmates. The twisted face which she was unfortunately inclined to make in order to laugh coaxed audible gasps of disgust from her onlookers. The teacher had scolded the class afterwards, of course, and gone to great lengths to comfort her. But those sharp inhales of breath, those that connoted the true, unmitigated human reaction at witnessing the hideous, the unseen, the ugly, had already been etched into her mind. Whenever she saw something that might’ve made her smile once, those gasps racketed around her skull, and she afforded nothing more than the sad, expressionless face she wore everywhere she went.
*
He ran his hand over the cement groove in between the bricks, a thin film of dust particles collecting on the fingertips of his fore and index, veneering them light grey — not that he would know this latter detail, at least in the way others do. With his other hand, he used a long white stick sort of to drag slowly over the ground in front of him, poking at little indents in the tarmac, tapping his way over ruts and ridges, not so much mapping out a vision in his mind as to where he was stood, but rather purely invested in the joy of feeling. The reluctance of hard FICTION | 12
tarmacadam and then the sudden give of an indentation as he was prodding his feeling stick along the ground in front of him; this was his colour, this was his landscape, this was his delight. Of course, retaining a memory of what obstacle lay where was a necessary skill he had had to develop, being blind. Knowing where things instinctually were was indeed an essential to survive. But to touch, to feel, to slide his fingertips over what others might think inconsequential details, to press all his digits and extremities, his cheek skin and forehead and ear lobes and elbows against all manner of materials the world had to offer, this was elation. People didn’t realise how many consistencies liquid had. Nay, even just water. Of a week, at least once, he’d fill up as many receptacles as he could find in his flat, each with a slightly different temperature of water, and then take it in turns to sink his hands into each one. Ice cold water had this thin, raw, caustic bite, like the temperament of pure brittle frustration, of something starving and gnarled and entirely hellbent on seizing that which trundles before it. When he slipped his fingers into ice cold water he relished this vitriolic ardour, let it seep up his fingers and into his knuckles, which clenched, acrimoniously. Luke-warm water had this agitated tension about it. It was denser no doubt, but had already resigned to its ever cooling fate, the last threads of its warmth dissipating away under stress, thinning down, starving but not starved. He’d sweep his hands through a jug of luke-warm water and become gradually awash with trepidation, not only his body swathed in a looming sense of the inevitable but his mind too. There were hundreds of different temperatures of water, each with their own weight, personality, feeling, story, temperament, world. But his favourite was almost-boiling. Of course he had to sacrifice his skin to clusters of ugly blisters, and because this made it difficult to feel other things for some time, he rarely allowed himself the pleasure of scolding his fingertips off. But on the infrequent special occasions that he did, his mind became aflame with orgasmic rapture. Feeling the thick torrid bulk of almost boiling hot water was like a star exploding inside of his heart, devouring everything around it in hot thunderous ingestations. At least, it used to be like that. In the daytime it was enough to sweep his hands over brickwork, along cold metal fences, over the spines of long-defiled books in libraries, and all the rest of it. It was okay, this mundanity, it served its purpose. It kept him regular. Such was the sobriety of daytime. But at night, the desire to marry his touch to extremes burned great. Like any wild joy, the more one indulges in it the more one becomes desensitised to its returns. The only way to keep reaching that high was to go further and further with it. As of late, he no longer scolded his fingertips in almost-boiling water, nor ran sharpened knives over his palms in order to thumb at the rivulets of hot hand blood that teared out of the self-inflicted grooves. He hadn’t inserted a needle up and under his toenail for months now. He hadn’t knelt on glass until breaking point for even longer than that. Even the eruption of one hundred shards of glass, exploding under the pressure of his cold, naked kneecap and clinging to the thin strip of skin over the bone which became damp with red — even this, with its infinite world of feelings, it just simply wasn’t enough anymore. Everything he touched was the dust-grey of flaking cement between brickwork, and it was about time, he thought, for a rainbow.
*
They hadn’t talked much at the restaurant to begin with. This was fine for them both, for different reasons. They’d met on a dating app, as was the modern proclivity, one specifically for what had been branded as ‘finding love for alternative people’. He swilled the red wine in his mouth, coating his molars with the sticky ruby-coloured coagulant, then his canines, then his incisors, all separately of each other with careful manipulations of his tongue. The thing that played on his mind throughout this procedure was the way the waitress had described the wine quite confidently as ‘muscular’. FICTION | 13
His date; she sat on the other side of the table, perched delicately on the edge of her chair watching him cut his steak with extremely careful precision, twice thinking of how he did it with a surgeon-like attentiveness, and neither of those times was she even remotely minded of her own situation. He could not see her shame, and since she was only aware of it herself by proxy of other people’s disgust, she could not see it either. This man sat across from her, quiet and careful, listening to her little stories, and the monster of her face dissipated away. She giggled, very briefly, for the first time in many years. By the time they finished their respective meals some couple of hours later, she felt as though she knew him intimately even though he had spoken but a few sentences. The big, calm silence that emanated from this well-postured man; she curled up inside of it like a small cat in a pool of afternoon sun. She told her little stories, and he nodded and smiled, and eventually they were walking home, hand in hand, towards his place.
*
They sat on the longer section of his L-shaped couch, she perched diligently with her back parallel to the wall behind, knees together and holding a glass of wine childlike with both hands, he sat turned towards her with one of his legs casually up and crossed over the other. She looked forward, meandering her way through a story with one hundred frivolous details, nervously apologising, nervously laughing and sort of totally on the precipice of what she considered absolute romance. He was listening. Not exactly to the story itself, but to the way her jaw moved, and to the way her lips infrequently smacked when she was about to pronounce a vowel in a certain way. When she occasionally stopped talking for a second, he’d nod, slowly, trying to exact his face into what he felt might be a nice encouraging expression, which as luck would have it, was exactly how she perceived it. Then she’d continue, cutely, chirping away, whilst he listened to the way spittle danced around her mouth, and how there was the tiniest but unmistakable click when she brought the wine glass to her mouth a little too inebriatedly and touched the rim of it to her teeth. She chattered away and all the while his fingertips burned for colour, for something hotter than blisters. “Can I touch your face,” he said quite suddenly. She mistook the brazenness of his request for being endearing. She was almost flattered for a few seconds, until the crashing realisation of her deformed complexion fell once more into her thoughts. “Um,” she began, anxiously, “Well, it’s just… it’s just that… well you see...” “It’s okay,” he interrupted. “It is.” The way she held herself with this extreme apprehension, combined with the slight but manic head-shakes as if a tiny distressed bird, all referred to the fact she was entirely reluctant to honour his wish, but no words accompanied this thought. He brought both his hands carefully, almost animatedly up towards her face. The second he laid them gently on each of her cheeks, her body stopped jittering and instantly relaxed into a state of never before known serenity. Nobody had touched her face since the day it had been ruined. This man, gentle in his every move, rested his palms and fingertips so delicately on her face the way one might hold a million-year-old artefact, or a butterfly. She sat there with her broken face, held, staring into his broken eyes, a warm feeling that she could only possibly assume to be love spilling into every nook of her body like sunbeams. She breathed in deeply. Still. He glided his soft fingertips up her cheekbones, occasionally stopping to prod ever so benevolently at a dimple or blemish, before sliding his thumbs up to her temples, nudging her hair behind the ears, which induced a lightning red flush down her cheeks incidentally the same colour as her huge throbbing scar. He felt the heat of the blush and slowly traced his fingers down the bolt of vermillion, all the way down to her scar. She didn’t try to stop him, FICTION | 14
nor recoil from his imminent discovery, but she closed her eyes as if to wish herself away from this moment. He thumbed the scar lightly, his examinations as light and tender as gossamer. He followed the scar down to her lips, which upon being touched she opened ever so slightly. “You’re perfect,” he said. She opened her eyes again. “Pardon?” she whispered, having perfectly well heard what he had said but high on how it sounded. He smiled and nodded his head. “Your face has many worlds,” he said. “Many colours.” Sedated by the first shred of acceptance afforded to her in a long, sad life, she allowed him to slide his hands back up her face a little too quickly without concern. She merely closed her eyes on instinct, the furthest from alarm a person could be. She was still in the throes of this love as he pressed a little too hard on her eyelids. Then the discomfort cut through the serenity. He was examining the tiniest bit too forcefully. Just as she was about to laugh away his ham-handedness, perhaps put it down to just how in love with her beauty he was, he plunged his thumbs violently into her eyes. Her body recoiled backwards on instinct, her head slamming into the wall behind. Her scream was stifled by the fact he’d quickly manoeuvred on top of her, his palms squeezing violently into her mouth and nose, his thumbs drilling into her now wide-open terrified eyeballs, pushing them back into her skull. They gave a surprising amount of resistance considering how much of his body weight he was leaning into them with, but they slowly gave way. About two inches deep into her eyesockets now, her eyelids closed over the knuckle of his thumb, which tickled him ever so slightly as to coax a smile from his red wine stained teeth. Her arms were well and truly redundant under the might of his frame, and her kicking legs made little difference to the onslaught. He crushed his fat thumbs into the moist, hot recesses of her brain, shoving with all his might, until eventually there was a loud saturated pop, at which, bloodied yellow goop weeped out of her eyesockets and down the back of his hand, viscous, as if spoiled egg-white and menstrual discharge had been gunked together. At the moment of the pop, two distinct things had happened on top of the sudden non-movement of her body. Firstly, whatever taut, mushed glob in her skull had finally given way, sounded much different than a pop inside of her head. Between her ears and amidst the thumbnail-raped cartilage of her puréed eyeballs, the noise had actually sounded like a raspy inhale. And again, in the way strange details in life often seem to connect in odd, peculiar ways, that very sound of air escaping in her head, was, in her last seconds of consciousness, indistinguishable from the gasps made by her classmates all those years ago. The second distinct thing that happened was in his brain. It was devoid of sentiment, feeling, repercussion, affection or anger. Nothing even vaguely close to a thought, never mind a train of thought. Nothing at all, except an exploding rainbow, careering from one end of his imagination to the other, boasting colours the likes of which neither you, nor I, could ever even begin to comprehend.
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CHRISTMAS LETTER Matthew lazenby Dear Friends
Well, what can I say? Probably quite a lot, if previous editions are anything to go by. It’s nearly the end of another year and another Christmas has almost arrived. It’s been a year of two halves and many ups and downs. Lest you haven’t attained a state of consciousness at any point since my last festive epistle, I hereby open with a banal musing upon how the year has seen various pandemic-related restrictions on our daily lives that would not have been foreseeable when lockdown first struck in March 2020, a point in time that is still significantly more recent than my last meaningful personal interaction with you.
It was a disastrous start to the year for us because the January lockdown meant that our planned trip to Uzbekistan to celebrate David’s promotion had to be postponed. However, we turned a negative into a positive (what an apt turn of phrase for these giddyingly unpredictable times!) as the builder was able to come a couple of weeks earlier than scheduled to make a start on our new orangery. The builder in question had had a cancellation from a freelance artist who had naively engaged him to construct a modest wall to enclose his wheely bins, but said artist’s loss of income during the pandemic meant that his savings had to be channelled into preventing his starving to death instead. In order to give something back to this chap, we requested a selection of his original paintings which we will eventually hang in our newly constructed room. When our friends visit after dark for candlelit wine and canapé sessions, the room will be ablaze with the pride of benevolence because the exposure the paintings receive will enable the artist to pay his bills.
Although our dreams of haggling over dried fruit in the Chorsu Bazaar have been dashed until next year, we managed to snatch a fortnight in Crete in early July. We had a splendid and much-needed break, with perfect weather and some beautifully lazy days by the pool at our friend’s villa. It was the first time we’d flown since Britain left the EU back in January. We voted for Brexit in 2016 but thankfully our movement in Europe remains unrestricted owing to our tenuously qualifying for Irish passports. It would have made a less relaxing experience all round if our holiday had been strangled by extra bureaucracy and we had missed out on the opportunity to stick two merry fingers up at the queues of people in the ‘outside the EU’ queue at the airport. It is difficult to understand why the ending of free movement is such a big deal when neither of us has had any desire to live in mainland Europe since our days working as tour guides in Barcelona with no limit on our travelling opportunities. Most of our other holidays this year have been based at our house in the Cotswolds when it’s not been in use by paying guests. It’s a shame we have to rent it out but sadly we can’t afford not to!
In between our holidays, in September we had a medicinal skiing trip in Montgenèvre. Well, it was medicinal for the first couple of days until David lost his balance atop one of the slopes and managed to descend 1200 m on his backside. He sustained two broken ankles en route before both his progress and fertility were discontinued by one of the area’s beautiful deciduous trees winding up enveloped by his scrotum. The young lady at the top of the slope insisted that she hadn’t pushed him, which we entirely believe because she was an artist who had shown great interest and approval when David told her of the aforementioned exposure we had bestowed upon the painter of the canvasses in our orangery.
We enjoyed a stunning performance of Madam Butterfly at the Grand Opera House with our local MP, Graham, and his wife Elizabeth. Regrettably there was a degree of unrest when David somehow dropped his binoculars over the edge of the box and inflicted mild brain damage upon one of the occupants of the cheaper seats beneath. The left-wing press had a field day the next morning, trying to spin the incident out as our beloved MP having deliberately dropped the optical missile so as to do a bit of a cheeky culling of one or two less well-off members of society. A storm in a teacup really but who’d have guessed that a night at the opera could institute such scandal!
You will remember from our letter last year that we had been considering replacing our smaller Jaguar. In April we decided it was time to trade it in — an emotional goodbye after two years of its faithfully transporting Saul and Ethel to and from school at the beginning and end of each term. We had known for a while that the speed bumps at our local Waitrose were going to necessitate the purchase of a four-wheel-drive vehicle and so we took the plunge and obtained a plug-in hybrid Range Rover. Like most first-time electric-car owners, we had our concerns! Would the charging infrastructure be adequate? Would the vehicle catch fire? Would it make it to the ethical sturgeon farm and back without the battery going flat? We didn’t initially have an electric-car charging point at home (the FICTION | 16
Georgians were a touch short-sighted with regard both to environmental concerns and the notion of the motorcar when our villa was built!) and so we had to charge the car using a cable stretching out of the music room window. This worked reasonably well until David tried to set off with the vehicle still plugged in and nearly managed to take the Steinway with him as if it were a sort of musical caravan. It certainly served him right for setting sail under the influence of three bottles of Château Lafite!
Along with many of our friends at the golf club, we are delighted that the wealthiest people in society are now the ones with an environmental moral highground in the vehicular department after years of being lambasted for driving high-polluting luxury cars that used a quantity of fuel that only we could afford. Now that some of the most ostentatious vehicles on the market are now practically carbon neutral, it’s jolly good to see the tables of selfrighteousness having finally turned. The Range Rover is beautifully made and extremely spacious, which is just as well because we got home late from a charity ball in October and our electric gates refused to open, forcing us to sleep in the car in our formal attire until the engineer could be summoned the next morning.
August saw David’s eagerly-awaited fiftieth birthday party extravaganza. You won’t have been aware of the existence of this event but it was wonderful for him to spend the day surrounded by the ninety-five people who mean the most to him. We were extremely lucky to have the sun beating down on our paddock all day while our smiling catering team served the hungry guests with various gastronomic delights that were, almost without exception, covered in some form of jus. If you’re interested in seeing the cake along with blockbuster footage of the many invited guests getting dazzlingly shitfaced on the abundance of Tattinger that we pissed around the lawn like tap water, you can view a comprehensive selection of multimedia from the event by following the link overleaf.
Saul and Ethel have had another excellent year and profit from the wide range of opportunities available to them at Finbourne School. Saul has just passed his Grade 8 cello with distinction and in July was crowned Finbourne Archery Champion, so he is obviously a natural with two types of bow! This will be his GCSE year and so you can expect a good deal of academic bragging in the post next Christmas. Ethel starred as Juliet in the Finbourne performance of Romeo and Juliet in May. There were three performances throughout the week. The evening Prince Charles and Camilla attended just happened to be Ethel’s birthday and there was a surprise after-show party for her, attended by the entire cast, staff and the royal couple themselves. It was jolly fortunate that we’d planned the family meal at Pizza Express (at which we happened to spot Prince Andrew – a regular haunt of his it turns out!) for the following evening.
Clarence the cockapoo continues to bring us a huge amount of joy and we’ve become good friends with Alicia, the lady who walks him twice each day, takes care of his grooming needs and takes him to the vet when required. He disgraced himself when we had some bridge club friends round last month – there was suddenly a loud and suspicious munching sound coming from the corner of the orangery and we all looked round to the sight of Clarence polishing off one of the unhung paintings! Still, everyone saw the funny side and we all agreed it to be a relief that we’d only paid for the item in exposure.
When hospitality reopened as restrictions eased, we were delighted to be able to return to eating out at our favourite restaurants. The Lamb’s Garter, where we’ve been regulars since 2008, was glad to welcome us back and serve us their usual succulent steaks. Hopefully you’re sitting down to read this: Victoria and Saul were devastated on our visit in early August to find that the establishment had run out of tarte tatin. After some deliberation and some considerable bravery, they opted respectively for crème brulee and key lime pie.
Work has been difficult this year but we have adapted to circumstances along with our heroic colleagues. Victoria has managed to teach her swimming lessons via Zoom. David’s work has been particularly stressful, with his having to work from home at the beginning of the year like everyone else, although somehow everything’s harder when you’re rich. The latter half of the year has involved a lot of travel both within the UK and abroad. One does worry about the loneliness he must feel when spending half his life in hotels but he courageously does it without complaint and his PA, Debbie, always seems glad to keep him company on these long-distance jaunts.
Our faithful and long-serving gardener, Frank, finally decided to hang his hoe up in September at the age of ninetysix. We’d hoped he’d keep going a few more years but his overall task efficiency was becoming untenably hampered by his zimmer-frame getting stuck in the mud. In his place we now have Mario, a significantly younger model whose chiselled biceps make light work of fertilising Victoria’s vegetable patch. We’re glad still to have Maya, our loyal cleaner who comes a couple of times a week and keeps Maple House spick and span. She’s Greek Orthodox and so celebrates Christmas on 7th January when our own celebrations have died down. The house FICTION | 17
descends into squalor for the first week of the year as we usually lose her for a whole week! We usually receive a Christmas card in early January containing a lengthy missive regaling us with all her family’s news from the past year. It can be hard to feign interest but we try our best!
Even though we’ve been prospering abundantly in all areas of our borderline-unrealistically pampered existences over the last twelve months, we’re aware that many of our friends and family have found this second pandemicridden year to be extremely difficult. If 2021 has not been a good one for you, you’re in our thoughts and prayers.
Wishing you a merry Christmas and a happy and healthier 2022, David, Victoria, Saul and Ethel*
*We are all referred to throughout in the third person to keep you wondering who’s actually writing the letter. You probably think it’s Victoria but you also can’t feel certain that we’re not employing the services of a ghost writer.
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ESSAYS
Lord Jim and Hegel’s Lord/Bondsman Dialectic Jonathan gill
In this article I hope to illuminate the key conflict of the titular character of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim by placing the novel in dialogue with Hegel’s famous lord/bondsman dialectic. Perhaps it is tempting to think there is only a verbal resemblance between “Lord” Jim and Hegel’s lord/bondsman (Herrschaft und Knechtschaft). But Conrad – never one shy to invest his narratives with metaphysical purport – couches the very process by which Jim becomes a lord in dialectical tension. Conrad’s language starts to resemble Hegel’s at crucial moments not owing to any semantic happenstance but because both writers are responding to the same experiential situation. I have two objectives for this article. First, I propose to analyze the incongruity between Jim’s idealized self and the reality of his situation using Hegelian dialectics to illuminate what is happening there in Conrad’s text. Doing so will tacitly accomplish my secondary objective, which is to suggest the insufficiency of the paradigm by which the Hegelian dialectic is most commonly encountered in schools and universities. This paradigm claims that the dialectic follows a movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. Doing so miscasts Hegel’s idea of the constructive power of negation as an initial idea (“thesis”) encountering an opposing idea (“antithesis”).This is not a wholly false way of conceptualizing Hegel, but the application tends to be rather contrived and stilted. Rather, what we need to do is to think of the individual steps of the Hegelian dialectic as perspectives or viewpoints. One begins with a fairly crude perspective that tries to make sense of reality. But the perspective will not match the totality of reality, and so as one goes about one’s life inhabiting this perspective, cracks begin to form that indicate the limits of the perspective. When these cracks accumulate to the point where the perspective is no longer tenable, one reaches a broader and deeper perspective on reality, a perspective able to account for the limitations of the prior viewpoint. That is the movement of the Hegelian dialectic. And when we rethink the dialectic in terms of perspectives and limits, the applicability of Hegel to literary analysis should prove more intuitive and versatile. The defining event in Jim’s life as a young adult is when he abandons the sinking ship the Patna at night, sneaking into a lifeboat with some of the crew while the majority of the passengers sleep. Only later does Jim find out that the ship did not in fact sink, and this event leaves Jim a reputation for abandoning ship that follows him at every odd-job he takes. While on the lifeboat, abandoning the Patna, Jim listens as the others coordinate their stories for when they land, creating a fictionalized narrative that would absolve them of guilt. This strikes Jim as something that trivializes the deaths of those aboard (he at the time unknowing that no deaths have transpired). Jim recounts these incidents years later to Marlow (the character from whose perspective most of the narrative is told), and as he does so, Jim endeavors to have Marlow understand that he was not like the others aboard that lifeboat. Marlow tells us, “He [Jim] discovered at once a desire that I should not confound him with his partners in – in crime, let us call it. He was not one of them; he was altogether of another sort. I gave no sign of dissent” (Ch. 7). Jim is claiming that his sense of guilt regarding the fabricated story his companions coordinate
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distinguishes him from them on a moral level. However, Marlow instantly sees through Jim’s insistence, but thinks it tactful not to call attention to Jim’s distinction without a difference: I had no intention, for the sake of barren truth, to rob [Jim] of the smallest particle of any saving grace that would come in his way. I didn’t know how much of it he believed himself. I didn’t know what he was playing up to – if he was playing up to anything at all – and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge. (Ch. 7) Jim projects an idealized version of himself, a Jim of moral refinement if not of action; and this projection creates a gulf between the ideal Jim and the reality of his doings, a “grim shadow of self-knowledge” that he in varying degrees of awareness struggles to dispel. As the novel continues, the incongruity between the ideal and the real will grow to mythic proportions. Jim is offered a position at a trading post in the remote (and fictional) island of Patusan. When he first arrives, the islanders are at the mercy of a feud between political factions. Over the next two years, Jim is able to stifle the conflict, bringing Patusan a relative degree of stability. This earns him an increasingly reverent status among the islanders. To an extent, Jim becomes his idealized self – hero and protector of the natives. Yet this idealization is still a limited and crafted picture of the situation, for his status as protector is embedded within a set of troubling and intricate colonial and racial dynamics which complicate and condition his lordship. Chapter 24 wavers between two timeframes: Jim’s initial arrival at Patusan and Marlow retracing Jim’s footsteps as he visits Jim two years later. Marlow is the second white man the islanders have ever seen; one of the inhabitants tells Marlow of “Tuan Jim” – Lord Jim – and Marlow notes that the man speaks of Jim with a “strange mixture of familiarity and awe” (Ch. 24). Conrad is thinking in dialectical terms here: “familiarity and awe” mark Jim’s status on the island as one characterized through juxtaposition. Jim is a foreigner, but he has settled in Patusan and become ‘one of’ the residents. Or in the mythopoetic thinking of the novel, Jim is the one who has crossed from the domain of the ocean (his previous profession as a sailor) into the domain of the land (Patusan), lending him a unique intermediary status. Ocean and land mark the second juxtaposition by which Jim’s presence on Patusan is characterized. Jim quite literally turns his back on the ocean as he heads inland: “At the first bend he lost sight of the sea with its labouring waves for ever rising, sinking, and vanishing to rise again – the very image of struggling mankind – and faced the immovable forests rooted deep in the soil, soaring towards the sunshine, everlasting in the shadowy might of their tradition, like life itself” (Ch. 24). Conrad is many things, but subtle with symbolism he is not: the sea is “the very image of struggling mankind”, which Jim has departed from for good. The image of survival in struggle: environmental and social conflicts which inevitably arise and characterize the lifespan of man. Jim now faces (again, literally) “immovable forests … everlasting in the shadowy might of their tradition”; these are trees whose roots stretch deeper than history, whose topmost points promise the possibility of transcending earthly ESSAYS | 2
existence. Jim is becoming less of a human and more of an archetype, allowing him to actualize the idealized self he has long struggled to believe in. His archetypal transformation is encompassed in the title he earns, Tuan or Lord. Jim becomes protector and patriarch of the island: “he loved to see people go to sleep under his eyes, confident in the security of tomorrow” (Ch. 24). Jim boasts, “Look at these houses; there’s not one where I am not trusted. Jove! I told you I would hang on. Ask any man, woman, or child …” (Ch.24). He takes the utmost pride and sense of identity in his newfound role. This is the ideal Jim, and the perspective by which he looks upon the things and people of Patusan renders in terms of him, for they are dependent on him for their continued subsistence in peace. Later, two years after Jim’s arrival, Marlow retraces his voyage, hearing in hushed tones what Jim has accomplished. The primary reason for Marlow’s visit is to transfer official ownership of the trading post to Jim himself, in recognition of his accomplishments. Jim puts up a modest, if perfunctory, argument that he cannot accept such a gift. But Marlow tells us: He had to give in to my arguments, because all his conquests, the trust, the fame, the friendships, the love – all these things that made him master had made him a captive, too. He looked with an owner’s eye at the peace of the evening, at the river, at the houses, at the everlasting life of the forests, at the life of the old mankind, at the secrets of the land, at the pride of his own heart; but it was they that possessed him and made him their own to the innermost thought, to the slightest stir of blood, to his last breath. (Ch. 24) It is in the repose of this evening where ideal and real struggle; Jim looks upon Patusan “with an owner’s eye”, content to play the kindly protector. But everything “that made him master had made him a captive, too.” The people and the land itself resist Jim’s claims of ownership, pushing back in their own manner. Jim’s dreams stand upon a bedrock more primordial than his aspirations and ideals. That primordiality irrupts into the picture, and the cracks therein revealed get to the essence of Hegelian dialectics. Hegel’s lord/bondsman dialectic has proven to be by far the most well-known from The Phenomenology of Spirit. For Hegel, the lord/bondsman dialectic comes about when the state of consciousness transitions into selfconsciousness. Consciousness is a subject perceiving and obtaining knowledge about an object, appropriating the world around him as he represents objects in the world to himself and defines those objects in terms of himself. At the level of consciousness, the subject believes his representative powers to be unlimited. This state of affairs is challenged, however, when the subject encounters not a mere object but another conscious subject who can make the same claims to universal representative power. Hegel writes (in Michael Inwood’s translation), “What is other for [self-consciousness] is as an unessential object, marked with the character of the negative. But the other is also a self-consciousness; an individual comes face to face with an individual” (¶186).
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The two subjects engage in “a life-and-death combat” (¶187), where each is fighting for recognition from the other of his or her ability to represent the objective world. The victor of this struggle becomes the lord; the loser, the bondsman. However, victory destroys the very recognition that the lord fought for, for he has won it through coercion, and any recognition obtained thus can never be genuine recognition. Forcing it from the bondsman has destroyed the validity of the recognition. The lord has power over the bondsman, but it is a hollowed-out power. For the bondsman, things are different. His defeat has him realize that his claims to representation are limited. Moreover, he realizes that the lord is likewise limited in his representational power. The twist in the lord/bondsman dialectic is that the bondsman is the one who emerges with a true grasp of what self-consciousness means: having a limited point of view by which one appropriates and represents the outer objective world. A claim to universal representative power is a fictitious claim, and yet this is precisely the claim that the lord persists in making. The lord’s ability to maintain his fiction is dependent on his position of power over the bondsman, and that unstable dependence grants the bondsman a kind of power of his own. Jim has fought for his lordship in Patusan, using force to establish a semblance of peace and stability on the island. Jim is now afforded the means to live out his idealized aspirations from his youth, holding the role of protector and patriarch of the community. Yet subtending his claims to these roles is his fraught status as colonizer. Jim has to impose his idealized version of himself upon the reality of Patusan, but the two are incongruent. This incongruency acquires the specifically Hegelian language of dialectics. I have quoted this passage already, but it is worth revisiting: all these things that made him master had made him a captive, too. He looked with an owner’s eye at the peace of the evening, at the river, at the houses, at the everlasting life of the forests, at the life of the old mankind, at the secrets of the land, at the pride of his own heart; but it was they that possessed him and made him their own to the innermost thought, to the slightest stir of blood, to his last breath. Jim views Patusan through an idealized perspective, “an owner’s eye”, but the fissures in this perspective creep through. His claims to ownership are met with “the everlasting life of the forests”, “the life of the old mankind”, “the secrets of the land”. There is a primordial history and mystery to the land in excess of its lord’s attempts to confine it and define it by his own measure. Just as Hegel’s lord persists in an increasingly fictitious claim of universal, univocal access to the truth of the objective world, Lord Jim wrestles with the land in an ontological and epistemological struggle for dominion over it. The moment where Jim claims mastery is the point where he becomes “captive”, “possessed … to the innermost thought” by the land. In a now-famous summary of the lord/bondsman dialectic by Hegel-expositor Jean Hyppolite, the dialectic “consists essentially in showing that the truth of the master reveals that he is the slave, and that the slave is revealed to be the master of the master.” Jim is captive because he is lord, and Patusan reveals itself as “the master of the master” as it asserts its vastness and ancestral existence. ESSAYS | 4
The moment in Lord Jim that I began with was Jim on a lifeboat, vying to maintain an idealized version of himself that is essentially different from the others who had abandoned ship. This results in an incongruity between ideal and real that sets the stage for the dialectical tensions of Jim’s new life at the trading post of Patusan. His ideal self, lord and protector of Patusan, must continuously suppress the challenges that the mysteries of the land pose to his lordship in order to maintain his fiction. And the brittle façade of his ideal cracks against the perduring secrets of the land.
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Thinking Through Time: Narrative Ethics in David B’s Epileptic DEBARATI CHOUDHURY
When David is five and Jean Christophe seven, Jean Christophe has his first epileptic fit. David, who does not understand what epilepsy is at this point, thinks that his brother has been carried away by a storm (9). It is this image – the internal ‘storm’ contorting his brother’s body – that remains in David’s memory. As an adult, he strives to come up with a visual metaphor to represent his brother’s epilepsy and comes up with a dragon. This metaphor, more than a metaphor for epilepsy (290), visually turns into a metaphor for time snaking back on itself. What is at stake in this visual metaphor, therefore, is futurity. Epileptic was first published in French in six volumes over eight years (the English version was not serialised and was published as a complete book in 2005) (Expanding Art 73). This is crucial to understanding how visual registers change across Epileptic to signify different cognitive states of the adult David. Chris Ware, in an interview with Hillary Chute, said that his drawings changed not only according to his mental states but his physical states as well (Outside the Box 233). Drawings are therefore extremely subjective, and bespeak mental states, even corporeal states, more directly than written works do – this implies that cognition is as much a conscious process as an unconscious one. We employ interpretative frameworks to comprehend our lives without necessarily deliberating on them. In other words, we do not always choose interpretative frameworks to understand events but these frameworks seize us. Therefore, the act of choosing a narrative, which is a conscious process, is an ethical act. However, as Tilmann Habermas writes of events that are repeatedly narrated, “Narrativizing a memory leads to three main effects: increasing the memory’s survival by rendering the narrated version more stable to the detriment of others, assimilating memories to preexisting schemata, and shaping the memory by integrating others’ responses” (229). Working through the impulse to settle for a ‘stable’ version is an ethical act. I would argue that the dragon metaphor that we come across in the text functions as a kind of schemata and renders the complex story of Jean Christophe’s illness and his relationship with his brother in reductive terms – the ‘epilepsy’ dragon steals into their family and gradually takes over Jean Christophe so much that Jean Christophe becomes a dragon-monster who threatens the family, and especially David, for much of the book. Susan Sontag has already warned us of the possible dangers of thinking of illnesses in terms of metaphor because it “puts the onus of the disease on the patient” (47) and metaphors of illness come to attach moral connotations to the primarily physical condition of an illness. This is exactly how David comes to see his brother’s illness – as a moral threat. However, we should also keep in mind that the original text in French was published serially and if we are to heed to Habermas’s conclusions about how memories and emotions evolve through retellings, we come to perceive the gradual change in the visual registers towards the end. For Habermas, to be able to narrativise certain disturbing life events takes very long (which can explain the six years that David B. took to finish his project) and can be ‘accommodated’ (238) only through repetition. The cases that Habermas studies show distinct changes ESSAYS | 6
across retellings and it is only the later phase that is “marked by more reflective evaluations” and takes into account “external perspectives” (237). Since Epileptic is an autobiographical project, the evolution of the visual register also signifies evolution of the self and cognition. Though David B. is perhaps the closest to David in the last part of the book (340–61), the troubled expression of his brother’s life and his own life points to the artistic struggle that David B. has had to go through to arrive at this part the way it is. David B. always of course has more knowledge of himself than David does, but this distance is threatened once he starts his narrative. He is more distant from his childhood self and we have verbal captions indicating this. He can narrate his childhood from the vantage point of adulthood without getting overwhelmed by those experiences. However, by the time Epileptic reaches its Paris episodes (276–319), it is hard to say if there is a large gap between David B. and David. Retrospection becomes as troubling as witnessing, and the tortured visuals of the Paris episodes suggest so. He keeps seeing himself in his brother’s image and his selfhood and sanity are as threatened as his brother’s. Therefore, the ethics of representation in Epileptic lie in coming up with alternative narratives or rather revising conventional narratives to have a somewhat coherent sense of the self and to see his brother as he really is – vulnerable because of his illness and, more significantly, a friend who comes across as a stranger to David. If David’s experiences have been extremely repetitive in nature, his brother’s have been more so – almost all of Jean Christophe’s endeavours end in epileptic fits. In an interview with Brian Evenson, about his Incidents in the Night 2, David B. says, “I preferred to bring my brother into play, as a way of giving him a life that he’d never had, undoubtedly. He too was an avid reader, and he would have patronized bookstores to his heart’s content if his illness had permitted him to do so” (“Catalogue” 43). We do not see so much of this impulse in Epileptic until in the epilogue but what is important is David B.’s search for a narrative that would allow his brother alternative ways of living beyond Epileptic. It is not until the final volume that David comes to a better understanding of himself and his brother by exorcising the dragon metaphor which eventually marks the crisis of representation in the text. I will argue that the ‘face’ of his brother in the last instalment is not just significant in terms of representation, but it also allows David/David B. to offer an alternative narrative to his brother, however limp, and thus comes to signify the text’s ethics. The face allows him to revise his visual register to lend both his and his brother’s lives a sense of futurity. The element of contingency that the future bears is necessary to conceive of alternative ways to live. Therefore, futurity, in entailing possibilities, renders the anticipation of other ways to live an ethical act. I will draw on Emmanuel Levinas’s theory of “the face of the other” in which we see the complete alterity of the other to show how David comes to see his being as different from that of his brother. Levinas’s theory of alterity also challenges our inclination to understand the ‘other’ through our narratives and our assumption that we can successfully read other minds. However, Levinas’s concept of alterity is couched in traumatic terms and, according to him, complete alterity is non-narratable. Bakhtin’s theory of “outsideness” explores the ethics and need for representing the other in more conceivable terms. I will also employ Bakhtin’s theory of the “grotesque body” to
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show how David B imagines futurity in terms of the grotesque body and reimagines the epileptic body – visually – as a cosmic ‘grotesque’ body. Though the dragon is primarily associated with David and Jean Christophe, it also indicates David B.’s failure of imagination as an adult. Therefore, thinking beyond the dragon imagery becomes an imperative for David B.’s evolution as an artist and his coming up with an alternative narrative where the dragon does not become time always coiling back on itself. The dragon makes the issue of who is speaking, David or David B., more complex. It is hard to say if David B. looks back on his past and uses the dragon metaphor from the vantage point of the time of narration or if the dragon is an experiential metaphor that primarily stands for the time of experiencing. Since cognition is never an isolated process, there are no definitive ways of telling the experiencing David from David B. The dragon can be seen as traces of his experiences of the past – maybe he did not come up with the dragon metaphor then, but he experienced his life and thought of his brother’s life in extremely debilitating temporal terms (as the coiled dragon as a visual metaphor of time indicates throughout the text). In conflating the dragon with the brother and to some extent with himself during his early adult years, David is the furthest from David B. In these volumes, the verbal captions of the narrator, David B., are absent for the most part, suggesting that David B. has as little insight into that period of his life as David did/does – or that he simply fails to identify with that older self. The extremely tortured drawing style of that period suggests that David B. chooses to focalise through David rather than through David B., though the division between them is never clearly delineated. One of the specificities of narration in the comics medium and particularly of autobiographical comics is the problem of ‘who is the speaker’ because the visual track and the verbal track might be focalised through different narrators which can be further complicated by styles of drawing. Autobiographical narration issues from a kind of gestalt of the conscious and unconscious of cognition; and the curious case of drawing which is a kind of embodied cognition makes it doubly difficult to separate the implicit and explicit elements in the self’s narration. One reason why it is hard to associate the dragon with a specific time period – past or present – is because visual tracks have few deictic markers, unlike verbal tracks. Finding a style is always processual and whether the surreal drawings of Epileptic are something that the narrating David B. arrives at or David, the experiencing self, comes up with, is hard to determine. This is more so because David starts drawing from a very early age and both his mother and his teacher think that his drawings are disturbing. Even as a four-year-old, the war drawings that David comes up with are surreal and are not very different from the surrealist style of Epileptic as a whole. For my analysis, I will treat the dragon as primarily focalised through the experiencing self at various points. The implications of the imagery keep changing; I think the changes are a result of the vantage point of the narrating self. For instance, for child David it is merely a presence which he gets past because as a child David does not see his brother’s epilepsy as debilitating like he comes to see as he grows older.
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Fig. 1 (Epileptic 51) Jean Christophe is associated with the dragon for the first time in fig. 1 and the dragon’s body stretches across the three panels of the first strip invoking a sense of inescapability and circularity. If epilepsy is a trap for Jean Christophe, then all the other discourses that try to reduce him to an ‘epileptic’ are also traps and they, like the dragon, come to dictate Jean Christophe’s life. Each panel seen on its own does not evoke the sense of inescapability that all three panels, seen at once, do. The individual panels seem to represent visually the captions and also to establish rhythmically Jean Christophe’s daily routine. These panels when viewed individually suggest that for Jean Christophe time moves forward in a linear fashion with each moment depicting different activities: playing, eating and reading. However, when all the panels are viewed together the irony becomes evident. All the panels viewed together show that Jean Christophe is trapped in a loop and the larger panel at the end of the page completes the irony. The verbal caption says that Jean Christophe “is no longer on medication” and it seems that he has emerged victorious (fig. 1). However, this victory is short-lived, as the image and the panel indicate. The dragon is no longer represented across different panels but is shown in one panel stretched across the third strip. If panels spatially represent time in comics, then the lack of usual pattern (as seen in the rest of the page) suggests a change in temporal representation. The illness/dragon in this panel becomes the terrain on which Jean Christophe stands, seemingly victorious. The smaller panels generate a sense of moving forward in time that the single large panel does not. The ESSAYS | 9
larger last panel visually suggests a kind of timelessness as though Jean Christophe has forever vanquished his epilepsy. The whole page however creates a different effect: the first strip and the last panel (which is also the last strip) seen together, result in the dragon’s body visually connecting to form a loop, and evokes the same sense of inescapability that the first strip does. Later on, the dragon does not merely surround Jean Christophe (52) but pierces through him; the caption for this panel, which says, “everyone has come here with a disease, the disease of a close one, in search of escape,” places Jean’s illness in line with other illnesses, or rather the objectifying gaze of the macrobiotic discourse (like other totalising discourses) that prescribes the same cure for everyone (as seen in the image where everyone eats from the same macrobiotic bowl) even though the illnesses depicted (signified by different dragons) are different.
Fig. 2 (Epileptic 10) Fig. 2 evokes the same sense of circularity that the epilepsy dragon generates. The first panel which dominates the spatial layout of the page evokes a sense of stasis despite the dizzy circle of doctors. The circle seems to induce motion only to underscore the motionlessness of Jean Christophe and his parents, at the centre. Right below the large upper panel, there are three smaller panels (more in keeping with the text’s general arthrology) which depict Jean Christophe’s visits to three different doctors. Where the first panel depicts motionlessness for the family, the smaller panels seem to increase the pace of their lives. On the same page therefore, a tension is created between motion and stagnancy. However, this tension is illusory because Jean Christophe’s life hurtles from one cure to another only to return to his seizures. Thus, every movement forward only pushes the family backwards. The text takes on a performative aspect in this and suggests that the repeated failures are partly responsible for Jean Christophe’s wobbly sense of identity. He is constantly interpellated by several discourses that make him
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hopeful but ostracize him in the end. The constant subjection to pre-scripted narratives of cure threatens his subjectivity. Indeed, what seems to be the most threatened in the family’s mad quest for cures is Jean Christophe’s selfhood which remains stuck in his childhood, largely because of the lack of alternative narratives. For David B therefore, the ethics of telling his brother’s story lies to a certain extent in restoring his brother’s personhood, which he can only do from the outside because he can see his brother in a way that his brother himself cannot see. Drawn in by the war narratives that occupy so much of his childhood, David often has fantasies about defeating his brother’s epilepsy. Even though he admits that the rest of the family is lost, he fails to see himself as lost. He views himself as a warrior (163–4) who can shield himself against his brother’s encroaching illness. The dragon is both his way of understanding the illness and his way of imposing a familiar narrative on his relation to the illness/dragon. In thinking that he has defeated the disease physically, he is mistaken. Because his illness/his trauma resides in his mind, it is not a bodily threat that he is scared of, though he imagines the illness that way. On page 164, the panel showing his armour-clad self cuts into the frames of the panels below it (one showing the dragon and the other showing David having an imaginary epileptic fit). Since the first panel continues downwards into the other two panels, it dominates the page layout, indicating that he has defeated the dragon. He thinks he has tamed the ghosts of past failed “cures” which still haunt his sister (164). This narrative of victory is countered on the very next page, which shows that the dragon is lodged in the contours of his brain (165), just as his sister imagines epilepsy (“foreword”) as a seed. Uprooting a seed that is fixed in the brain is far more difficult than cutting up a dragon that is exterior to the self. His armour does not work because he has interiorised the dragon as much as he has conflated his brother with epilepsy (fig. 3). Time and again the visual likeness between his brother’s contorted body and the dragon’s sinuous shape reinforces this conflation that is largely in David’s head.
Fig. 3 (Epileptic 189) Throughout the text, David’s selfhood is threatened by his brother’s presence and, though he thinks he has defeated epilepsy, he later realises that his trauma is not epilepsy but rather his brother’s identity merging with the dragon of epilepsy and his guilt about not being able to help his brother or find a companion in him. He repeatedly portrays his brother as monstrous (212, 256, 261, 265, 271), as one who threatens his existence and turns him into a ghost. His brother is synonymous with death-in-life for him (313). Midway through the book, his armour returns – and this time, not against the dragon but his brother, who is barely recognisable as a person – and his brother’s body frames him and his mother (270). ESSAYS | 11
The warrior narrative, imagining his brother as a threatening monster, imagining himself as epileptic: all these are David’s limited narratives to reduce his brother to someone or rather something that is more comprehensible. Epilepsy as a condition marks an epistemological crisis (there is no definite explanation as to why a person develops epilepsy) and this in itself is an assault on the totalising impulse of reductive discourses of medicine. David’s discourses, where he vacillates between seeing his brother as helpless and monstrous, are reductive narratives too. Perhaps these narratives are easy to visualise; but for ethical representation, to proffer genuinely an alternative narrative for his brother, he has to take huge leaps of imagination which he can do only in the last part of the text (340–61), especially in the epilogue (355–61). Perhaps the tortured drawings of the past volumes are cathartic and all the darkness and hurt materialised on the pages, psychologically and visually, help him to see what he can do and what his brother cannot – tell a story that does not border on delusion. When he tries to think as his brother, what he does for the most part of the book, his empathy fails and his cognition is threatened. According to H. Porter Abbott, what scares us about madness is the madman’s unreadability (18) and the reminder ‘that there is an unknown country that we shall never get to despite all the stories we tell ourselves to make us think we can’ (26). Though epilepsy is not madness, it engenders symptoms that are not easily determinable. It is only when David can think of a narrative for his brother from outside that he can expiate his own guilt and free himself from the existential loop he is caught up in. Herein, Levinas’s theory of the face as complete alterity and Bakhtin’s theory of ‘outsideness’ become helpful as analytical frameworks. For Levinas, the face of the ‘Other’ stands for irreducible alterity. It is in the face of the other that we encounter what is completely other to us and the existence of this face challenges our attempts to reduce the ‘Other’. For Levinas, the “face of the other” stands for the “infinitely foreign” and cannot be seen as the beginning of knowledge, but of self-consciousness. Selfhood begins with one’s primal response to this foreign face and recognising the ‘Other’ as completely foreign to the self, not as a means of ostracising the ‘Other’ but as a way of acknowledging that our cognition and narratives are always limited: there is always something that is bound to escape comprehension and for Levinas it is the ‘helpless’ and utterly foreign face of the other. In the ‘faceto-face’ encounter with the other (“Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity” 59), we recognise the absolute responsibility we bear to the ‘other’ when “through the nakedness and destitution of his defenceless eyes, he forbids murder and paralyzes my impetuous freedom…” (“Transcendence and Height” 61). By freedom Levinas also means our freedom to narrativize in order to familiarise and systematise what evades comprehension. In this, Levinas’s theory comes close to what Abbott says about madness and the challenges it poses to cognition. For Levinas, “face is pure experience, conceptless experience” (“Philosophy” 59); Levinas never goes beyond this moment of ‘pure experience’, the moment of encounter. But what happens after the encounter with alterity? What if the ‘other’ is incapable of forming his or her own narratives and needs our narratives? The infinite foreignness of the ‘Other’ would be too atomistic a view of human existence. The ‘other’ might escape comprehension, but in couching the ‘Other’ in purely phenomenological terms, Levinas resists any impulse to represent the ‘Other’, though he himself represents infinite alterity as feminine ESSAYS | 12
(Levinas Reader 48). The inadequacy of the metaphor is not my concern here, but what Levinas’s inadequacy of metaphor suggests is: even when something escapes comprehension, our basic impulse to make sense of the world does not cease. Moreover, ethics lie not in simplifying this comprehension through reductive narratives, but in finding alternative narratives to accommodate alterity in a way that does not reduce the ‘other’ but which does not completely estrange the other either. Seeing the other as ‘infinitely’ incomprehensible curbs the possibility of interpersonal relations and, despite recognising the responsibility to the ‘other’, it would spell dangers for our close interpersonal relations. The way David needs to respond to his brother’s ‘otherness’ is not the same as he needs to respond ethically to a stranger. As Epileptic makes it clear, even in cases of close interpersonal relations, it is not possible to comprehend the ‘other’. However, responding to the ‘other’ is an imperative and for that, revising the way we make sense of the ‘other’ is an imperative as well. Bakhtin’s theory of ‘outsideness’ both considers the foreignness of the other and suggests a possibility for ethically representing this foreignness. For Bakhtin, “Only the other’s action is capable of being artistically understood and shaped by me [i.e., from without, from my position as a spectator], whereas from within myself my own action does not yield… to artistic shaping and consummation” (Bakhtin qtd. in Emerson 650). The ‘other’ can respond to me the way I cannot respond to myself, similarly, I can respond to the ‘other’ the way the other cannot. Therefore, a vantage point that is not ours gives our existence an added dimension. It is not simply a matter of comprehension but acknowledging the need for the ‘other’. Perhaps it also has ontological connotations: since we are social beings we cannot exist without the ‘ratification’ of the ‘other’. This ratification need not be understood in antagonistic terms, but the ‘other’s’ existence makes the self’s existence a reality and also a possibility. Moreover, Bakhtin’s idea of ‘outsideness’ is grounded in the idea of the body in space, specifically the body in pain, as Caryl Emerson points out: Taken alone, my body and I are only a shifting, hurting, partial entity. But you can help me to feel whole. Although I am trapped and mute within my own body, you can supplement me … And when I think about myself in your picture of me (that is, from the “outside in” rather than from the “inside out”), … I am whole. In your eyes I do not have to hurt, because I have become, for a moment, your image of me, and you are not subject to my hurt (651).
Since bodily pain is an extremely individualized experience and it is impossible to understand the hurt of another person, the other’s pain can be cast in terms of absolute alterity. To a certain degree, this complete alterity is common to most bodily experiences, and it is the body of the ‘other’ that we first encounter; in Levinas’s theory: the other’s face. Yet, it is the pain of the ‘other’s’ body that is the least accessible to us, something that Sontag reminds us too and it is this physical hurt that is the sufferer’s alone that makes the metaphor as affront to the sufferer’s corporeality. The one on the outside can conceive of a narrative of me when I, in my hurt, cannot. Therefore, “outsideness” of the other sets up a meaningful distance between the self and the other and allows the other to proffer possibilities and potentialities that the self cannot imagine.
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In Epileptic, Jean Christophe’s cognitive abilities, because of his repeated seizures and bodily hurt, keep dwindling (191) so much so that he can no longer draw what he could draw as a ten- year old (20). After his faceto- face encounter with Jean Christophe (a dream that is represented to explore questions of ethics), David B. deliberates on the aesthetic needs to reimagine his brother’s life visually. He does so by imagining his brother’s body as the Bakhtinian grotesque body which is a cosmic body and allows him to conceive of both time and space and time as cosmic, infinite rather than recoiling. He also reimagines a space where they could be together without being strangers: their long-lost world of childhood. But the narrative David B. devises is not one of regret or loss but one of possibilities as their childhood world merges with cosmic space. One of the possibilities is, of course, reforging their companionship. At this point David B. can think of the future in terms of the past (the time Jean Christophe longs to go back to the most) without imagining time as recursive (361).
Fig. 5 (Epileptic 1)
Fig. 6 (Epileptic 340) How David perceives his brother’s body in the beginning (Epileptic 1) and how his face- to- face encounter with his brother forces him to face up to his brother’s otherness is reflected in the difference between the two, almost similar, encounters (figures 5 and 6) he has with his brother. In the first encounter (fig. 5), David B. fails to see his brother even in human terms re-invoking the monster metaphor that once took hold of his imagination. I insist on David B. rather than David, because this encounter takes place very close to the time David B. first ESSAYS | 14
conceived of Epileptic (1996); moreover, this encounter happens when they are already adults and yet retains the same dread that David felt years ago in his brother’s presence (314). This complicates the idea of focalisation right at the beginning (since the first episode of the text) and raises the question: does adult David or David B. feel the same dread as young David does? However, the very next episode transports the story to their childhood when David and Jean Christophe are still the closest of friends. This hurried shift back to their childhood suggests that David B. looks back on their childhood (like his brother) to have some semblance of stability and to go back to the time when he could make still make sense of his brother. The first adult encounter is also Epileptic’s first episode and its depiction suggests that David, even in 1994 (fig. 5), perceives his brother as a threat to his selfhood. It takes him over three hundred pages to have a similar encounter and to see his brother as a defenceless ‘other’ whose physical appearance at this point comes as a shock – both to the readers and to David B (fig. 6). After the first episode of 1994, this is the first time we see Jean Christophe’s bloated and severely crisscrossed body. The suddenness of this appearance points up David’s sudden encounter with alterity and also foregrounds the force of this encounter. This encounter changes the course of David/ David B’s narrative entirely. In the second panel of the second strip (fig. 5), Jean Christophe’s dark animal-like silhouette overshadows David’s presence. In the second encounter, Jean Christophe, instead of being a threatening presence, is subjected to both David’s and the readers’ gaze (fig. 6). The representation of the brother in the second encounter is matter-of-fact and has lost all the stylised dark shades of the previous representation.
Fig. 7 (Epileptic 341)
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The brother’s face is an important motif in David’s representation but what occasions this change? Repeated narration over a significant period of time and working through certain experiences that have a markedly emotional core is important indeed – but changing morals is not simply a matter of time or chance or an unconscious process but involves conscious reflection and will. His brother’s face (fig. 7.) becomes an occasion for David to respond to his brother ethically: to see his brother as he really is (something David refused to do earlier because of his guilt or in favouring aesthetic complexity relinquished his responsibility of seeing his brother’s hurt) and also to explore his selfhood as distinct (though not unrelated) from his brother’s. But more importantly, he comes to the realisation that in his own representations, his brother has no agency and hence he bears a moral responsibility to represent his brother as someone whose suffering he cannot appropriate. Though he realises that he can no longer connect to his brother the way he did when they were children, he also realises this earlier drawings of his brother as a monster had very little do with his brother’s experiential reality since his brother has been way too sick for very long. In this splash (fig. 7), he comes to view his several selves together. He also sees his brother’s childhood self on this terrain. This splash, through the captions, represents their entire history in short and he views his brother’s face from different points of the terrain. Though the brother’s face is static in this, his mouth is open. Moreover, the splash fails to contain the brother’s face unlike other representations of his brother’s face (Epileptic 70, 71) which are centrally located in the panel, surrounded by doctors and pipes and the dragon only to reinforce his subject position. In this panel, we see the brother’s face in a different light and also as a different space. This splash disrupts the regular panel structure of the earlier part of the text and comes as a shock to the readers because it is so sudden. As readers, like David, we are forced to reorient ourselves with regard to the representation of the brother. This is also the last time we see the dragon and though the dragon forms his brother’s eyebrows, it does not ensnare the brother or evoke the feeling of being stuck in time as it did in the earlier parts of the text. The disappearance of the dragon at this point signifies David’s changing view of time and David B’s evolution as an artist. This is the section of the book (340–61) where the gap between David and David B. is the least as David B. is closest to David in time in this section and also ‘thinking through time’ has allowed him to rethink his representations in several ways. This closing of gap between the experiencing self and the narrating self can be seen as both unconscious (the drawings in this section are less tortured) and deliberate (as in the epilogue, which is neither a dream nor an actual episode from either of the brothers’ lives but a direct address to the brother).
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Fig. 8 (Epileptic 349)
Fig. 9 (Epileptic 350) The face is also connected to the carnivalesque subtext of the text and aligns with the fantastical nature of its drawings. The fantastic representations of the text lend themselves to another Bakhtinian reading: “the fantastic … serves not for positive embodiment of truth, but as a mode for searching after truth, provoking it, and most important ‘testing it’” (Problems 114). This splash does not indicate that David has finally reached the truth but allows him to test several versions of his own ‘truths’/narratives. Ethics lies in David’s indeterminate stance at the moment and not in moral absolutism. Though the face is not the most significant part of the grotesque body as defined by Bakhtin, we should read this rotund face (with Jean Christophe’s mouth open) in the context of the splash that ends the text (361) and the spread (figures 8 and 9 make a double page spread) that depicts the brother’s prophecies. Moreover, the open mouth is an important aspect of the Bakhtinian oeuvre – for Bakhtin it is one of the many orifices of the grotesque body that connects the internal to the external world and through which the body “outgrows its own self” (Rabelais 317). The spread (figures 8 and 9 together) is surreal, cosmic and historical- three categories of images that litter the text. In this image the recto side of the spread juxtaposes the brother’s death with
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his brother’s preaching. The dead rotund body falling from the sky also resembles the grotesque body in that it merges with the surroundings and becomes a continuation of the cosmic world of the verso page. Of the compactness of the comics page, W. J. T. Mitchell says: “what is specific, if not unique, to comics… is the possibility of seeing the whole thing as a unified, synchronic structure” (284). Though the spread forgoes the panel structure and depicts a continuous image, the frenzy unleashed on the page makes evident its cosmic and organic quality only when viewed at once — every corner of the panel depicts a separate image in a different time frame and results in a “synchronic” meaning only when seen as a whole. If we think back on the spread, this is the only instance when his brother freely romps around the page in the cosmic settings, beyond his static representations. The brother travels across the cosmos to preach to the Chinese soldiers in a historical moment. The shift in the brother’s position is anti-clockwise (if we start on the top right of the recto page and come back to the middle of the page where the brother’s dead body falls after a round of the verso page) could also mean that David visually extricates his brother out of the linear flow of time, sets him against the clock and places him in a place where all time fuses. The spread replacing the regular panel structure reinforces the feeling of timelessness – not in the manner timelessness was depicted earlier in the text – but as cosmic timelessness.
Fig 10 (Epileptic 361) However, it is only the visual register of the epilogue that truly generates a feeling of peace. The epilogue is very different from the rest of the text in its line patterns and in the style of drawing which is much simplistic ESSAYS | 18
(359) and returns to the childhood drawings of David and Jean Christophe (19–20) – the surreal and oppressive aspect of earlier episodes is attenuated, the panels are not framed – there is an overall sense of release, especially in the last splash (fig. 10). This splash with no panel frames is the least cluttered of the text’s otherwise dense representations. In the splash, the brother is a tiny figure and he blends with the sun re-evoking the grotesque body: “the grotesque body is cosmic and universal. It stresses elements common to the entire cosmos… it is directly related to the sun and the stars… This body can merge with various natural phenomena… It can fill the entire universe” (Rabelais 318). For David, his brother embodies both life and death, not death-in-life as he once did (Epileptic 314). Moreover, this splash comes right after he likens his brother’s face to the face of death (360) in one of the panels. However, several other faces fleeting across his brother’s face (in the other panels of the page) suggest he can relate to his brother only in metaphysical terms – this realisation also allows David B. to contemplate death without dread. Death in a way is futurity but more than that, death is the point of regeneration for the Bakhtinian grotesque body – the grotesque body never dies and the circularity this suggests is not inimical to the notion of time, but rather engenders the idea of eternal change (infinite possibilities).
The epilogue is not an autobiographical episode and it is not narrated as a story – it is addressed directly to his brother – this is David B’s final offering to his brother: an alternative narrative that reimagines a future in terms of their shared childhood. Epileptic is also a narrative of profound loss: the loss of childhood. Both Jean Christophe’s and David’s childhoods are cut short by epilepsy and the totalising discourses of cure. Quite fittingly then, he imagines an ending that returns them back to their childhood. This is hardly a closure but after the dizzy expressionism of the rest of the text the last splash restores a sense of order to both their lives – childhood and eternity merge and as an act of narrative expiation Jean Christophe is set free.
Bibliography Abbott H. Potter. “What Does It Mean to Be Mad? Diagnosis, Narrative, Science, and the DSM”. The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories. Edited by Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, pp. 17–29 B., David. Epileptic. L’Association/Jonathan Cape, 2005. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Indiana University Press, 1984. “‘Catalog of an Impossible Library’: A Conversation with David B., By.” World Literature Today, 25 Feb. 2016 Chute, Hillary L. Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists. 2014.
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Emerson, C. “Shklovsky’s Ostranenie, Bakhtin’s Vnenakhodimost (How Distance Serves and Aesthetic of Arousal Differently from an Aesthetics Based on Pain).” Poetics Today, vol. 26, no. 4, Jan. 2005, pp. 637–664., Groensteen, Thierry. Expanding Art Of Comics: Ten Modern Masterpieces. Translated by Ann Miller. University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Habermas, Tilmann. “Working through by Narrating Experiences Repeatedly.” Emotion and Narrative (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction), Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 225–55. Lèvinas, Emmanuel. “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity." Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986, pp. 47–60 Lèvinas, Emmanuel. “Transcendence and Height.” Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Indiana University Press, 1996, pp. 11–30 Lèvinas, Emmanuel, and Hand Sèan. The Levinas Reader. Blackwell, 2009. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Comics as Media: Afterword.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 40, no. 3, 2014, pp. 255–65 Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. Farrar, Straus, Giroux
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The ‘Soporific Effect’ of Limes: Lime and the Evocation of Lost Memory in Elizabeth Bowen’s To The North. Iliana gutch marinov
In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, lime blossom plays an important role in the author’s radical experimentation with the malleability of memory. In a famous scene, ‘the taste of the piece of madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea’ causes an involuntary memory to appear before the narrator, of his childhood days spent at his country home in Combray (Marcel Proust, p. 50). Recollecting her own youth in The Mulberry Tree, Elizabeth Bowen depicts an ‘idyllic’ memory of her school days spent at Downe House. In the memory, a garden ‘with lime trees … looked very beautiful in the evening light’. However, later in the essay, Bowen states that ‘Memory is, as Proust has it, so oblique and selective that no doubt I see my school days through a subjective haze’ (Elizabeth Bowen, p. 58). Memory, according to Bowen, has transmutative power, and as time passes, bygone experiences metamorphose in the human mind. Reminiscing thus becomes a regenerative act. In Bowen’s work, limes enable a character to return to a lost past or long-forgotten memory. With a primary focus on To The North, this essay will explore the significance of lime as a phantasmagorical object-symbol in Bowen’s work. Through a study of Proustian memory, it will determine what limes may communicate about the female characters’ desire to remember. It will first examine limes at Pauline’s school in relation to ideas of motherhood. It will then discuss Pauline, Emmeline, and Cecilia’s encounters with the lime tree and lime tea during their visits to Farraways. This will inform the ways in which the three characters are positioned in relation to their pasts, and reveal memory as a vehicle through which their subliminal desires may be explored. Lime trees are prevalent in the world of Bowen’s fictional girls’ schools, and these references act as a reminder that writing about a childhood involves a constant search for oblique memories. In To The North, ‘limes’ are ‘drooping over the wall … at the … gates’ of the boarding school of Pauline, an orphan left under the guardianship of her uncle, Julian. This makes the school look ‘pleasant enough’ to Cecilia, who is accompanying Julian for a visit. Having ‘never seen a girls’ school’ before, Cecilia, running up to the visit, had been excited. However, upon first sight of the school gates, despite Julian’s reminder of ‘how much she wanted to see a girls’ school … Cecilia would not go in’ (Bowen, p. 73). Visible to Cecilia as she approaches, the limes protrude over the school wall, providing her with the first glimpse of what it may be like inside. The overhanging lime trees traverse the boundary between the school and the outside world. In this way, they provide a visible indication to Cecilia that she will be entering into a space both physically and psychologically foreign to her. For Cecilia, crossing the gates will mark a psychic transition into the
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unknown. In this way, the drooping limes act as a reminder to Cecilia that she is as yet unfamiliar with the maternal world, contained by the school gates and wall. The limes hanging over the wall make themselves apparent to the outside world, thus appearing bold and transgressive to Cecilia. ‘Drooping’ from their weight, the lime trees are heavy and overburdened, and thus emblematic of reproduction. An overt symbol of parenthood, the limes allude to the transition Cecilia will undertake in the novel, from an urbane young widow to Julian’s fiancé, and to the maternal responsibility she will later feel towards Pauline. However, for Cecilia, this vision arrives prematurely, as the bodily matter of motherhood transmitted onto the limes leaves her with a desire to retreat. Instead, Cecilia longs for ‘the cool road’, which provides a refuge from the boarding school and its imposing limes (Bowen, p. 77). The road is a liminal space, in which Cecilia can occupy a state of transience. Here, Cecilia hangs in suspension, away from present time and the hypothetical future which is manifested before her. To Cecilia, the limes outside the girl’s school represent a state of permanence that threatens her mobility. Later, the limes take their departure from the boarding school, transported by Pauline to Farraways in a ‘bottle of lime juice’. When Lady Waters, a friend of Julian’s, hears that ‘Pauline had nowhere to go for the half term exeat, she invited the orphan to Farraways’, her country home. Pauline, both ‘alarmed but elated by the invitation’, sets off ‘across country by motor coach’ with ‘the school matron’. However, the matron alights when the coach reaches Cirencester, and Pauline continues on to Farraways alone. Left with nothing but ‘a moist parcel of turbot, a bottle of lime juice’ and ‘a tin of cheese biscuits from the ‘Cirencester grocer’s’, Pauline ‘felt more of an orphan than ever’ (Bowen, p. 150). As the matron, a substitutive maternal figure, alights, Pauline is reminded of what she is lacking. The journey becomes a metaphor for the state of orphanhood – solitary and transient, with substitute mother-figures eventually departing. The objects at her feet adopt a melancholy air, embodying the mood of the last part of her journey to Farraways. The limes at the boarding school are the only indication of limes as fruit in the novel. Therefore, the fact that Pauline is able to bring juice bears significance. Not only do the limes take on a different physical form, their meaning changes through their association with Pauline. Having previously established the significance of limes as a symbol of motherhood, Pauline’s lime juice may be regarded as a symbol of her desire to locate a mother figure. Pauline brings this gift to Farraways, indicating that the country house represents a space where she can attempt to establish a sense of a coherent past. During Pauline’s stay at Farraways, Cecilia also comes for a visit, and they meet for the second time. When Pauline encounters Cecilia at Farraways, she recalls a schoolfriend’s remark, made after Cecilia’s visit to her school, saying that ‘she must be engaged’, else Julian ‘would never compromise her by bringing her’. This thought causes Pauline to ‘blush … into her lime juice’ (Bowen, pp. 77 & 154). Having been made into juice, the limes at Pauline’s school are ready for consumption. As limes represent the same thing to both characters, Pauline, realising Cecilia’s unmarried status, is reminded that she is not a maternal figure, and her embarrassment is projected into the juice. ESSAYS | 22
Pauline’s lime juice communicates her anxiety surrounding having to determine the nature of her relationship with Cecilia. However, Pauline’s act, albeit causing her to be ashamed, may be regarded as assertive. Often portrayed as abject – a ‘ghost’-like child who is ‘controlled … by a committee of relatives’ – here Pauline acts as an agent, attempting to establish a new familial structure through the search for a mother figure (Bowen, p. 33). At Farraways, Pauline also desires to locate her family in the past, through accessing a lost memory of her deceased parents. While Cecilia sees limes at the entrance to Pauline’s girl’s school, at Farraways, Pauline notices that a ‘large lime dripped on to a lawn … before the front door’ (Bowen, p. 151). Positioned at the entrance, the limes determine the symbolic significance that each location holds. They also signify a threshold, indicating that the characters are about to undergo transformation after entering the space. However, at Farraways, the limes are no longer visceral but immaterial. Hugh Haughton remarks that it is ‘ironic’ that Farraways is ‘not too far away’; however, although geographically near, psychologically, it is distant (Haughton, p. ix). ‘Dripping’ as opposed to ‘drooping’, the liquidity of the lime outside Farraways evokes a fluid dream-scape, and creates a film behind which the house is situated. The physical world dematerialises as Pauline approaches the house, to be replaced by a world that is shifting and subjective. This indicates that Pauline is about to enter an alternate realm of consciousness accessed through memory, and to communicate with a distant past. Farraways, along with many other country houses depicted by Bowen, operates much like a dream or memory. For Bowen, whose family were members of the ‘Big House’ society of the Irish Protestant elite, country houses possessed a deep historicity and were embedded in her memory. As the culture declined, and Bowen decided to sell her own house, Bowen’s Court, in 1959, she kept the ‘Big House’ phenomenon alive by inscribing it into literary memory. In her fiction, country homes are deeply rooted in the past, and often adopt traits of the subliminal unconscious.
Figure 1. Bowen’s Court, County Cork, Ireland, 1960. Photograph, Government of Ireland National Monuments Service.
The sense of a lost past, or one that is rapidly slipping away, pervades Farraways. Cecilia and Julian debate whether or not the place is a ‘morgue’; but, nonetheless, there remains a sense that the house’s past is still very ESSAYS | 23
much alive (Bowen, p. 153). When Lady Waters is showing Pauline her bedroom, it is described as follows: ‘The window looked over the porch; through looped muslin curtains the lime breathed in, sweet and damp’ (Bowen, p. 150). Here, the anthropomorphic lime infiltrates the room, filling it with its scent. This time, it is not Pauline communicating vicariously through the lime juice, but the lime itself that becomes the agent of communication. From this emerges a further function of the lime – it acts as a catalyst for involuntary memory. The breath of the lime tree creates a sensory experience, as the occupant of the room is exposed to its ‘sweetness’ and feels its ‘damp’. In Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, it is the narrator’s exposure to the taste and smell of the madeleine dipped in tea that prompts the return of his memory. This is because ‘taste and smell … remain for a long time … amid the ruins of the rest; and bear without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory’ (Proust, p. 50). Therefore, Pauline’s sensory exposure to the lime may cause an earlier memory to manifest itself. Additionally, the bedroom is a place in which Pauline may access the subconscious through sleep. The narrator from In Search of Lost Time is able to regain lost memory through sleep; it is ‘while sleeping’ that he can ‘effortlessly return … to a forever vanished period of his life’ (Proust, p. 8). This suggests that Pauline’s encounter with her lost memory may happen overnight. As the inside space of the bedroom commingles with the aura of the lime from outside, the internal and external spaces intertwine. In this way, the opposing spaces merge, as the external world – determined by speech, action, and the motions of everyday life – and the internal world – determined by thought, dream and memory – combine. Again, a border is traversed by the lime, as the blurring of the division between external and internal reveals that the two opposing spaces are inextricably interlinked. Subsequently, the lime at Farraways becomes an object which enables subliminal human activity to surface. Yet, the intangible presence of this lime tree, significantly differing from the limes outside the school, makes it seem to exist not in the palpable time of the present, but as a haunting from the past. Described by the headmistress as a ‘psychologically interesting … dream-child’, Pauline herself often appears to be haunted. Marked by the trauma of loss, she makes Julian feel as though ‘the disheartening density of Proust was superimposed for him on a clear page of Wodehouse’ (Bowen, p. 34). Descending into Julian’s agreeable life, Pauline is reduced to a palimpsestic superimposition of a difficult thought or idea. She is a weighty reminder of lost relations and, in this way, to her existing relatives, Pauline is intrinsically bound to the past. Consequently, Pauline herself is capable of haunting – a spectral presence in Julian’s flat that ‘hardly seemed to exist’ (Bowen, p. 34). In the physical world, Pauline embodies little but a ghost and a memory. However, Pauline’s absence in the material world enables her to be present in a different plane. Upon entering Farraways, a space as shifting and immaterial as herself, Pauline is able to enter into a dream-state and encounter her lost past. Considering this, the lime juice she brings may not in fact be a gift for Cecilia or Lady Waters, but alludes to an attempted communication with her lost parents by memories accessed through dreaming. As the lime breathes in to her room at Farraways, Pauline feels their presence. ESSAYS | 24
Having discussed Pauline’s encounter with limes at Farraways, it is possible to establish that limes at the country house enable characters to be transported back to a past memory. This is also experienced by Emmeline, also an orphan ‘from childhood’, and the sister of Cecilia’s late husband Henry (Bowen, p. 11). Regarded by male characters as ‘transparent’, ‘translucent’, or ‘passive’, Emmeline also possesses a hauntedness (Bowen, p. 135). Out on the lawn at Farraways, drinking lime tea under the lime tree, she enters into a reverie, which allows her a moment of deep introspection: Emmeline, leaning back in her long chair, looked up through the lime … Looking back at the house she saw through the open windows rooms undiscovered in shadow, empty and kind. The departure of Lady Waters with her plaintive interesting party had reassured house and garden, in which a native conventional spirit crept out to inhabit the rooms and alleys, shaking away the decades with their mounting petulance like creases out of a full silk skirt … Here Emmeline, step-child of her uneasy century, thought she would like to live. Here – as though waking in a house over an estuary to a presence, a dazzling reflection: the tide full in – she had woken happy. But already a vague expectation of Monday and Tuesday filled her; looking out from the shade of the lime, already she saw the house with its white window-frames like some image of childhood, unaccountably dear but remote. (Bowen, p. 61)
The lime tea makes Emmeline sleepy, having what the Vicar describes as ‘a soporific effect’ (Bowen, p. 62). Emmeline enters a reverie, in which the house transforms before her, coaxing out a ‘native conventional spirit’ as it comes to life. ‘Shaking away the decades’, for a moment it emerges from the past and co-exists with Emmeline in the same temporality. The inviting image of the house, almost palpable to Emmeline, causes her to reflect that it would be a place ‘she would like to live’. The ‘soporific effect’ of the lime allows Emmeline to be transported to a realm of imaginative desire that enables her to envisage a future. Therefore, the lime tea acts as an elixir that makes the consumer drowsy, and causes the house, ‘appearing like some image of childhood, unaccountably dear but remote’, to take the form of a childhood memory. The lime-tea-induced reverie disrupts chronological time, and a distant past becomes part of Emmeline’s vision of what she wants for her future. In Emmeline’s imagination, the house, a figment of the past, is brought into the present with a vividness that is almost tangible. However, after contemplating the mundanity of the upcoming week, Farraways retreats before her, residing yet again in the past. In this passage, the function of the lime tree is again significant. Nels C. Pearson suggests that trees in Bowen’s work partially obscure the ‘Big House’ to create a ‘profusion of darkness’. But the house is ‘never fully absorbed’: rather, ‘the Big House survives the mists of synchronic time, reasserting itself as the half-realized entity it already was: a “reservoir of obscurity.”’ (Pearson, pp. 329–30). For Emmeline, situated under the shadow cast by the lime, the house changes form, shifting from lucidity to opacity as she looks on. From her vantage point, Farraways is an abstract and rapidly changing image. Rather than being the ‘soporific effect’ of lime tea, Emmeline is able to view the true essence of Farraways, in the full glory of its illusiveness, from under the shade of the lime.
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Emmeline’s act of ‘looking up’ or ‘out’ from the lime initiates her changing view of the house. After looking up through the lime for the second time, the image of the house becomes a past memory. The lime tree thus acts as the medium through which Emmeline’s thoughts are projected onto the house. Therefore, more than a mere obscurity, they house reflects Emmeline’s changing states of mind. In The Heat of The Day, the term ‘soporific’ is used to describe Morris Mount itself. This country house stands ‘outside the present’, allowing it to become Roderick, its inheritor’s, ‘hub for imaginary life’ (Bowen, p. 60). Bowen’s country houses are a figment of past memory, giving them an otherworldliness that enables characters to lead an imaginary life within them. However, for Emmeline, the ‘step-child of her uneasy century’, imagining a future in a country house is too difficult a task. Uprooted from her past, Emmeline’s struggle to situate herself in the modern world contributes to her tragic end. It has been made evident that the lime at Farraways acts as a vehicle to convey Emmeline’s imaginative thought. After drinking lime tea, the house transforms into a childhood memory. Limes allow Emmeline and Pauline to access past memories, which they seek in pursuit of the fulfilment of their desires. However, to Emmeline, the lime tree takes on an ominous air, obscuring her view of the house. In this way, it functions as a symbol forecasting her fate. Later in the novel, Emmeline’s destiny is again encoded in the lime trees which she sees during a trip to Paris. Here, the lime trees obstruct her line of view. Looking out from the ‘balustrades’ at St Cloud, ‘an unpierceable wall of lime-trees’ gives her ‘no sense of an eminence’ (Bowen, p. 141). Towering above her, they diminish her by creating a wall. Eventually, while ‘leaning on the balustrade’ Emmeline and Markie are able to see ‘over the tops of the limes’. However, they only see a ‘hazy glare coming up from the Seine’ (Bowen, p. 143). The trip to Paris had not gone as expected, and their shared vision is enshrouded with a hazy disillusionment. Emmeline, longing to be away from Paris and back in London, imagines instead the benevolent lime at Farraways, ‘showering shadow on to a lawn with Cecilia sitting’ (Bowen, p. 142). Meanwhile, Cecilia is spending the weekend at Farraways. One evening, Cecilia stands out on the porch, under the window of the room in which Pauline slept, and looks out at the lime: Above, the dark sky changed a little; something stirring behind the clouds shed a faint line of silver about the lime-tree. Cecilia looked up: while not a drop fell in the heavy darkness the clouds were in conflict, disturbed; light ran between like a messenger. Somewhere, clear of the earth’s shadow, the radiant full moon received the whole smile of the sun. Clouds hid from the earth at this bridal moment her lovely neighbour, while to the clouds alone was communicated her ecstasy… Clouds closed in; … only the lime and a wet path silver for less than a moment had known of the moon’s rising. The tree and path faded; cloudbound while the tide of light swept the heavens, earth less than suspected the moon’s perfection and ardour. (Bowen, pp. 170–71)
Although the clouds attempt to obfuscate, the ethereal light from the moon pierces through, giving the lime tree an iridescent glow. Despite their attempt to conceal the ‘ecstasy’ of the ‘bridal moment’ between the moon and the sun, the ‘lime tree’ and ‘silver path’ communicate the ‘moon’s rising’. The vision reminds Cecilia of Emmeline, who ESSAYS | 26
often wears dresses of silver and green, the colour of the moon and lime, and she muses that ‘perhaps there is a moon in Paris’ (Bowen, p. 171). However, the ‘bridal moment’ Cecilia witnesses does not belong to Emmeline’s future, but to her own. This imagery thus also serves as a metaphor for the future of the relationship between the two women. For Cecilia, there is a momentary sense of clarity before the clouds close in. However, the moment is fleeting, obscure from where she is positioned. This momentary bridal union is therefore not only a premonition of Cecilia’s future with Julian, but also a symbol of the precarity of her relationship with Emmeline. Juxtaposed, Emmeline and Cecilia’s visions of lime trees cause each woman to feel a closeness with the other. However, simultaneously in that vision, they are determining their individual futures, a process which causes them to become separated. This realisation creates a separation anxiety, causing each woman to imagine the other. It may be said that Cecilia’s view of the lime at Farraways, representing her future with Pauline and Julian, gives her a sense of security, while Emmeline, knowing she will not marry Markie, is filled with a sense of the unknown. Their visions, however, do not fall along the binary of positive and negative. The clouds in Cecilia’s vision, much like the haze in Emmeline’s, fill her with unrest. This compounding of their visions conveys two things: firstly, that although it is possible to infer superficially which woman’s future is tragic and which is stable, on a more profound level, this remains indeterminable; secondly, that each woman’s vision of the lime tree conveys a myriad of meanings, evokes a plurality of emotional tonalities, and is a meditation on multiple aspects of their lives. With the latter reading, it is possible to propose a further interpretation of the lime at Farraways. In Cecilia’s vision, the lime tree transmits the light of the moon between the sky and the earth. In this way, it also acts as a bridge, connecting the earthly with the ethereal. The esoteric image centres around the moon, a symbol that is traditionally female. The moon rises, getting further from the earth, and the lime tree is the only witness. Lime thus enables female characters to transcend, and to experience, events which occur outside of the known world. In this way, limes reveal Emmeline and Pauline’s consistent attempts to transcend the present moment in order to actualise their desires. For Pauline, the effects of lime are ambiguous, but through them she expresses a desire to establish contact with her deceased parents. For Cecilia, limes are initially daunting; however, with her altering perspective, they undergo a transformation. For Emmeline, limes express a desire to live in the past, and cloud her view of the future. In To The North, limes are polymorphic, changing their form with each human subject they encounter. In this way, the limes in To The North differ from the characters they interact with. Limes alter with the seasons, and appear in many forms. Conversely, the characters possess a child-like naïveté, and, paradoxically, although they are constantly in motion, they find it difficult to progress. When describing her own experience of childhood during wartime, Bowen writes that ‘the world seemed to be bound up in a tragic attack of adolescence and there seemed to be no reason why we should ever grow up’ (Bowen, p. 52). In To The North, Bowen’s female characters who grow ESSAYS | 27
up around death are suspended in time, appearing spectral and dream-like in form. Through limes, they are searching out the ability to be rooted in the past, and to come of age. For the memories that the limes evoke, this is not the case. The narrator from In Search of Lost Time does not recognise the lime-blossom in the ‘infusion’ that his Aunt drinks at Combray because ‘the drying of the stems had curved them … as if a painter had arranged them’, and the leaves had ‘changed their aspect’. The ‘artificial preparation’ of the lime-blossoms gives him ‘the pleasure of realizing that there were actually stems of real limeblossoms’. The narrator goes on to observe that the lime-blossoms that were used to infuse his Aunt’s tea are ‘altered precisely because they were not duplicates but themselves, and because they had aged’ (Proust, p. 54; my emphasis). Protean with the passage of time, the lime-blossom at Combray is more than a mere imitation – it has a traceable past. This gives it the same quality as Bowen’s literary evocations of her own memories, demonstrated by her ‘idyllic’ depictions of Downe House in The Mulberry Tree (Bowen, p. 58). Although changed beyond recognition, or susceptible to decay, Bowen’s literary memories still contain a fondness associated with the Proustian ‘pleasure of realization’ (Proust, p. 54). In To The North, limes uncover the female characters’ subconscious pasts and hold a lens up to their visions of the future. Bowen’s references to limes therefore indicate a search for coherence, located through the exploration and reinscription of memory. Furthermore, limes play an important role in Bowen’s own imagined past. In Bowen’s Court, she describes the ‘soporific lime walk’ at Doneraile Court, along which ‘Raleigh, Spenser and Sydney’ would stroll (Bowen, pp. 6–7). Lime trees are thereby woven into Bowen’s literary memory, and their ‘soporific effect’ causes a dream-like process of remembering. Throughout Bowen’s work, limes are intrinsically connected to facets of the past, and to the obfuscation or elucidation of memories. They change with the seasons, and appear in the form of blossom, trees, leaves, or tea. The colour lime-green is painted on walls, or worn on dresses; in short, lime is ubiquitous in her writing. Additionally, limes are consistently connected to a character’s lost past. However, they reveal that although this past gives an air of stability, it is in truth shifting and unstable. Emmeline’s failure to establish coherence through locating a long-lost past demonstrates that the foundations of memory itself are ephemeral and contingent.
The original version of this piece was written as part of a Master’s degree in Modern and Contemporary Literature.
Bibliography Bowen, Elizabeth, To The North (London: Penguin, 2016). ––––, Bowen’s Court (Cork: The Collin’s Press, 1998). ––––, The Heat of the Day (London: Penguin, 1998). ESSAYS | 28
––––, The Mulberry Tree (Downe House) in Greene, Graham ed. The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (London: Jonathon Cape, 2002), pp. 45-59. Haughton, Hugh, ‘Introduction’ in To The North (London: Penguin, 2016), pp. ix–xxi. Nels C. Pearson, ‘Elizabeth Bowen and the New Cosmopolitanism’, in Twentieth-Century Literature, 56, 3, (Autumn 2010), pp. 318–40. Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1, The Way by Swann’s, trans. Lydia Davis, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Penguin, 2002).
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Discourse, Figura: from the Male Gaze of the Vita Nuova to the Eternal Gaze of the Divina Commedia vlad condrin toma
My aim in this essay will be to describe the evolution of Dante’s discourse in relation to his theory of vision. Specifically, I will be looking at how Medieval and Ancient theories of vision may or may not have acted as sources of inspiration for the poet. As my title suggests, I will also deal with the topic from a contemporary perspective. I will engage with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure in combination with Eric Auerbach’s essay Figura. In order to narrow the scope of my research I have decided to focus on the concept of the gaze and its use in relation to Beatrice as female figure and ‘figura’ in both the Vita Nuova and the Divina Commedia. There is, in my view, a deeper connection between Dante’s theory of vision and the encyclopaedic world-view which derived from it. It is no longer a vision directed towards future progress but a total and all-encompassing ‘theory of everything’. Dante’s poetic intuition brought him very close to a modern understanding of the world as seen through God’s ‘eternal gaze’.
Another relevant thread to pursue would be that of the relationship between Dante and Giotto. This is relevant to this topic because of the relationship between painting, literature and artistic representation, especially considering the importance of ‘perspective’. The Commedia has been compared to a gothic cathedral and even inspired artists such as Michelangelo in the painting of Biblical scenes. However, the important relationship is that between Giotto and Dante, who may or may not have met each other in Padua. Regardless, both changed the artistic style of their time and place, and they share a special relationship in terms of the originality of their creation. The Vita Nuova offers a passage which, in my opinion, opens an entirely new dimension in terms of understanding how Dante perfected this artistic vision: When the day came that a year was completed since my lady had become a citizen of eternal life, I was thinking of her as I sat drawing an angel on some wooden boards. As I worked, I turned my head and saw standing beside me certain men to whom respect was due. […] Then, when they had gone, I returned to my work of drawing figures of angels. (VN, 87–8) In her notes, Barbara Reynolds explains that “His work seems to have been an extensive composition of figures of angels for he is drawing on several boards. It may have been intended for a church” (VN, 118). In an essay bearing the suggestive title Giotto’s Figures, William Tronzo explains that: All of these images, however, are drawn with the same firm outline, almost as if they were indexical – like the Acheropita – of essentially the whole figure or groups of figures – that is to say, of coherent and eminently usable entities – that betrays the intention to record the model as closely as possible. This is the figure as an armature. (Tronzo, 70) ESSAYS | 30
The writing of the Vita Nova is merely a ‘drawing’ or a ‘sketch’ preparing us for an even higher representation. In my opinion, there is a strong connection between this work and the Comedy. It is almost as if this small book prepares what will follow but also is somehow there at the end of the Divine Comedy as well. The vast book of Dante’s memory is, much like the Arena Chapel in Padua, an extremely complex hermeneutical system, constantly hiding and revealing itself to itself and to others. The existence of God cannot be separated from discourse, and a meditation upon a divine ‘point-of-view’ or ‘perspective’ becomes the philosopher’s main task. But the poet’s gaze differs fundamentally from that of the philosopher. According to David Michael Levin: It is inherent in the nature of the perceptual Gestalt that the being of the ground, the ontological event of its field-dimensional presencing, is radically different from the being of the figure – different from that (figurative being) which presences within its allowing. However, for both rationalism and empiricism, schools of thought which re-present perception as an act of re-presentation, the nature of the field or ground is either ignored, since its being, its presencing, cannot be mastered, cannot be totalized and reified, or else it is turned into another figure, another object, another (vorhanden or zuhanden) being. (Levin, 174) What is interesting about the Vita Nuova is the fact that the relationship between history and fiction is blurred to the point where the background becomes just as important as the figure. Beatrice is gradually transformed into an angelic creature. She is a drawing on a wooden board, waiting to stand out and to be filled with colour and volume. What we are witnessing is the birth of Beatrice as a ‘figura’: After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision in which I saw things which made me decide to write no more of this blessed one until I could do so more worthily. And to this end I apply myself as much as I can, as she indeed knows. Thus, if it shall please Him by whom all things live that my life continue for a few years, I hope to compose concerning her what has never been written of any woman. (VN, 99) The metaphysician chooses to look at the centre of things, whereas the poet moves closer and closer to the periphery. In the Vita Nuova, Beatrice is a beautiful female figure, a body. She appeals to the bodily senses. Everything in this book is meant to capture the image of the beloved in a single frame. There is, however, a deeper purpose at work here. Mysterious things started happening to the character, who underwent a transformative process, a preparation for something higher. Each apparition was perfectly timed to reflect a higher cosmic order. The male gaze entered into dialogue with the beloved’s gaze, which forced him into hiding and withdrawal. In the solitude of his room, the poet began to think about the object of his desire. A process of trans-figuration is described, one in which the character is initiated into a higher world of perception. If, at the beginning, the book followed the common pattern adopted by the love-poetry of the period, a sudden shift took place shortly after. We are no longer confronted with the devouring male gaze which objectifies the female, the major focus now becomes that of purifying the senses in preparation for a higher vision of the divine.
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The Inferno is a site of dis-figuration, a place that shocks the senses and forces the hero of the narrative into a new type of sensory activity. If, in the Vita Nuova, the poet’s experience of falling in love and going through certain stages of initiation was familiar to a Christian audience, the Inferno is meant to emphasize the ‘presence of absence’. The absent figure is that of Beatrice: “when you are before her sweet ray whose lovely eye sees all, from her you will know the journey of your life.” (Inferno X, 130–2) Virgil acts as the guide who teaches Dante how to strengthen his perception in preparation for what he is about to see. If in the other parts of the Comedy the gaze is free to roam and to explore the realms of Purgatory and Paradise, in Hell everything is very tightly controlled and supervised. Dante-character becomes an almost child-like figure in need of constant ‘adult’ supervision. The main characteristic in terms of vision is that this is a moment in which the gaze must adapt itself to new surroundings. After Dante wakes up his eye is rested, prepared to gaze fixedly so that it may know the place where it might be (Inferno IV, 4– 6). It is interesting to note here how falling asleep is meant to bring us closer to the idea that what is taking place is not just a simple adventure with a hero like Aeneas or Odysseus. The narrative is that of a Christian dream-vision similar to the blinding of Saint Paul. However, it is not that type of experience either. The uniqueness of the Comedy stems from the fact that it is self-referential. It is a perfectly ordered and coherent system which mirrors reality and interacts with it while at the same time preserving and guarding its separateness. There is also another interesting relationship that is opened up here between the writer and the reader of the text: “O vengeance of God, how much must you be feared by everyone who reads what was made manifest to my eyes!” (Inferno XIV, 16–18). Words become iconographic mediators pointing to a transcendental experience directly experienced by the author through his eyes. The encounter with Medusa is fundamental for the understanding of Dante’s ideas about the male and female gaze. In her article, Dante and the Gorgon within, Margaret Nossel Mansfield argues that it is not of primary importance to determine whether Dante knew Theseus or Hercules as the hero of this successful foray, for both men were interpreted by the medieval and later commentators as figurae Christi. Padoan shows that Bernardus Silvestris and Coluccio Salutati, among others, saw in the tale of Theseus liberating Thebes an echo of Christ redeeming the human race. Moreover, Hercules was perhaps the Classical hero most commonly interpreted as the Savior. (Mansfield, 156) A parallel could be drawn here between the blinding of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus and the symbolic ‘blinding’ of Dante on the road to the city of Dis. Both experiences are shocking encounters with the power of God. According to Brittany Wilson, Men are the ones who exercise the power of sight, and men are the ones who correspondingly have this power taken away. When this occurs, they are effectively “feminized,” for they are descending to the level of women, who do not exercise the right to “gaze” in the first place. (Wilson, 379) We have already seen how powerless Dante-personaggio is when confronted with Virgil’s authority. However, the Medusa episode is a moment in which Virgil is powerless as well and the danger is real. Medusa’s absence and her
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potential arrival is in complete opposition to the absence of Beatrice. Whereas Beatrice is a figure of divine beauty, Medusa is a dis-figured pagan daemon threatening to turn Dante into stone: Dante's terror, then, is so overwhelming here that there is a real danger that a Medusa will take shape in his own soul, bringing intellectual blindness to the truth, loss of the light of conversion. (Mansfield, 148) In her essay on Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s ‘Aspecta Medusa’, Medusa’s Gaze and the Aesthetics of Fascination, Sibylle Baumbach expands on the metamorphosis and change from beautiful woman to monstrous creature thus: Taking into account, however, that Medusa can only be beheld in reflection and that representations of her are always already second-order mimeses, the question arises whether the “thing itself” does exist or whether Rossetti’s image merely lures us into the illusion of Medusa’s existence outside representation. For how can we be sure of her ‘being’ if she cannot be perceived? As Thomas Albrecht has noted, the Gorgon can be regarded as “a figure for representation” (2009, 15). (Baumbach, 228) It is certainly not surprising that the Inferno does not contain many references to sight or vision. However, even in this realm of shadows there are plenty of interesting moments in which vision is emphasized: The multitude of people and their strange wounds had so inebriated my eyes that they longed to stay and weep. (Inferno XXIX, 1–3) Purgatory is a site of pre-figuration and it is here that Dante will be reunited with Beatrice, “she who will be a light between the truth” and the intellect (Purgatorio VI, 44–5). It is also the place where Dante begins to “delight” his eyes again. (Purgatorio I, 19). The ascent is meant to educate him “in spiritual sight and insight” (Lynch, 152) and “The dominant note in Dante’s experience as a seer in Purgatory is the perception of images. For example, it is only in Purgatory that Dante dreams” (Tavoni, 74). We will focus on two aspects present in the Purgatorio, two important moments which will allow us to clarify how the shift from the male gaze to the divine gaze is performed. The first element I am interested in looking at is the meeting between Dante and the manuscript illuminator Oderisi. This is a crucial moment for the understanding of Dante’s poetics. He meets a man whose occupation it is to link images to language. Another important detail is the relationship between Dante and Giotto. Both of them are changing their respective artistic fields. The perspective is now shifting from the two-dimensional surface of a book’s page to the fresco which will gradually open up a new dimension. This is also what the Divine Comedy achieves. Each Canto adds a new dimension to the narrative and the space that is explored is very clearly delineated and defined. Dante’s literature is the culmination of an ‘invisible’ work of art that has its foundations in the faculty of imagination. We might cautiously suggest that it offers us insight into Dante’s phenomenology of perception. A good example of how he achieves this is the description he gives of the carvings in Canto X: “The angel who came to earth with the decree of peace, for many ESSAYS | 33
years bewailed with tears, which opened Heaven after its long prohibition, appeared before us so truly, carved there in his gentle bearing, that he did not seem a silent image.” (Purgatorio X, 34–8). Jean-Francois Lyotard offers a very good description of what the passage taken from Purgatorio X achieves: Then I move from sight to vision, from the world to the phantasy, and the responsibility of the constitution of the object, of the vis-à-vis, first assigned to the gaze of discourse is transferred and given over to the fulfilment of desire. Simultaneously, the figure finds itself displaced: no longer simply the image of presence or of representation, but form of the mise en scene, form of the discourse itself, and more profoundly still, phantasmatic matrix. (Lyotard, 15) “Veduta on a Fragment of the ‘History’ of Desire,” the second chapter in Discourse, Figure, offers many interesting avenues of research for the phenomenologist interested in understanding the European Middle Ages. Of special interest are the sections in which a ‘figural interpretation of reality’ is mentioned. This is precisely the code used by Dante in this scene from the Purgatory. Aware of us as readers, Dante is describing the image of an angel. I am prepared to argue that between the angels he was drawing in the Vita Nuova and this one a few things have certainly changed. There is still the same language, the same type of discourse is used. The difference now is that this is a much more ambitious description of something we are still frustrated by for not being able to see. This is the supreme pride of the artist as mediator between our gaze and the object targeted by it. Like Giotto, Dante is trying to provide us with a window to God. In order to be able to reach as many people as possible he has chosen a simple language. The style Dante is using is still very similar to the byzantine two-dimensional art used to depict Christian figures. The only major difference is that some of them are beginning to come to life: It follows that the painter, the illuminator, the maker of images must construct the figure as a message, that is, as a set of signifying elements whose nature (the lexicon) and rules of construction (the syntax) are defined in a code with which ‘the image reader’ is already familiar. To see will be to hear, like reading – the ‘reading’ of those who cannot read. (Lyotard, 170) Any religious text seeks to address as many people as possible. Perhaps this is the power that the Comedy still has going in its favour: it is using a very strong ‘code’, a concatenation of Pagan and Christian symbols that are still very much alive in today’s European culture. Thus, there is a certain ‘familiarity’ we have with the text without ever having read it: The earthly event is thus a historically real prophecy, or figura, of a part of a divine reality that will occur in the future and that will at that point be perfected in all its immediacy. Yet this reality is not only in the future. Rather, it is always present in the sight of God and in the Beyond. The revealed and true reality is always and eternally present there, beyond time. (Auerbach, 111) Lyotard also draws inspiration from the idea of God’s gaze when he writes that “God is the pure ubiquitous gaze that pierces the system of oppositions, instituting the textual without shadow and three-dimensional form, while we are plunged in difference.” (Lyotard, 178) ESSAYS | 34
One of the other interesting elements in Purgatorio is the dream of the siren in Canto XIX. This is, in fact, a continuation of the male gaze we have familiarized ourselves with in the Vita Nuova. The fact that the gaze occurs in a dream is already a sign that something has been repressed and that Dante, the dreamer, is no longer controlled by his fleshly desire on a conscious level. The mountain can also be viewed as a phallic symbol in psychoanalytical terms and it is interesting to look at how the unconscious is stimulated by the ascent. During day-time he climbs the mountain and during night-time he descends into the deepest recesses of his soul. The dreamer is tempted by a siren with a vague identity. Her beauty is actually an illusion: Just before dawn – at the hour in which dreams were believed to be prophetic (see Purg. IX, 13–18) – Dante sees in his sleep a stammering, cross-eyed, crippled, and sickly woman, who becomes erect and beautiful under his gaze, “com’amor vuol” (just as love desires; Purg. XIX, 7–15). She sings sweetly, proclaiming herself a siren capable of satisfying her lovers completely, the one who turned Ulysses off his course. Then suddenly another woman appears, described as “santa e presta” (holy and quick; V, 26), who indignantly scolds Virgilio for permitting her rival’s intrusion. At this point, Virgilio (although there is some controversy as to who is the agent here – it could also be the holy lady herself) rips the Siren’s clothes off, revealing her “ventre” (belly, but also uterus, and, metonymically, genitals; V, 32). A “puzzo” or stench is emitted, which wakes the sleeper. (Holmes, 58) An interesting parallel is drawn by Durling and Martinez (319) who compare lines 29–33 of Canto XIX to Perseus killing the Medusa. The “mirror-like shield” helped the Greek avoid the female’s gaze. This can be contrasted with “Truly now my words shall be naked, as far as shall be fitting to uncover them to your untutored sight.” (Purgatorio XXXIII, 100–1) which brings us closer to the literal non-figurative and unmediated speech of God. In the Notes to Canto XXXIII of Purgatorio, Durling and Martinez offer a quote from the Bible which fits the purpose of our argument: Hear my words: if there be among you a prophet of the Lord, I will appear to him in a vision, or I will speak to him in a dream. But it is not so with my servant Moses, who is most faithful in all my house: for I speak to him mouth to mouth: and plainly, and not by riddles and figures doth he see the Lord. (Num. 12. 6–8) (580) This special relationship between speech and gaze will become increasingly important in Paradiso, a con-figuration that provides the richest source of material for vision-related topics.
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DRANGERS EDWIN BLACK is a writer of ghost stories based in Sheffield. His novelette, Lights Over Cithaeron, was serialised for Sheffield Live in early 2020 and is available on Amazon. You can follow him on Twitter at @EdwinBeatnik DEBARATI CHOUDHURY is currently reading for a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) degree in English at the University of Delhi, India. CHARLES EAGER is a poet and teacher living in Italy. JOHN GEDIMINAS KNIGHT MMus is a freelance composer with an interest in speech-sounds and storytelling. MATTHEW LAZENBY has a BA (Hons) from the University of Leeds and is a receiver of the Archbishop’s Certificate in Church Music. ADAM LEE has a Bachelor’s degree in History from the University of Lancaster, and identifies himself with the tradition of English Romanticism. ILIANA GUTCH MARINOV has a Bachelor’s from the University of Leeds where she read Russian and English. She is currently studying for a Master’s Degree in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture. MIKHAIL MUYINGO has a Bachelor’s degree in English and Russian Civilisation and is currently an MPhil student in Comparative Literature at the University of Cambridge. ALBA RODRIGUEZ has a Bachelor’s degree in English Philology from the University of Oviedo and a Master’s in American Literature and Culture from the University of Leeds. VLAD TOMA specialised in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the Universities of Leeds and York. ISAAC WORTHINGTON currently resides in Oslo, Norway. He has a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of Leeds, and is studying for a Master’s in the Philosophy of Education. © 2021 Copyright of individual pieces remains with the contributors. This journal publishes international poetry in English, critical essays, and short fiction. Submissions are welcome and should be sent to our email address: drangjournal@gmail.com