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SHAPES TO FILL THE LACK AND LACKS TO FILL THE SHAPE:

FRAMING THE UNFRAMED IN MODERNIST NARRATIVES
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Howard Martin Lindholm

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SHAPES TO FILL THE LACK AND LACKS TO FILL THE SHAPE: FRAMING THE
UNFRAMED IN MODERNIST NARRATIVES

By

Howard Martin Lindholm

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2001

ABSTRACT

SHAPES TO FILL THE LACK AND LACKS TO FILL THE SHAPE:
FRANIING OF THE UNFRAMED IN MODERNIST NARRATIVES

By

Howard Martin Lindholm

Preferring the relativity and fragmentation of the individual perspective to that of
the supraindividual, the Modernist narrator no longer pretends to understand the world in
its entirety. In its dismissal of traditional narrative omniscience, linguistic and
metaphorical certainty and chronology, Modernism reframes the limits of perspective.
My research considers why and how narratives change in response to both philosophical
movements and experience of the modern world; how Modernism subsequently
transforms critical discussions of narrative; and how Modernism redefines the narrative
frame.

The Modernist text signifies a narrative “universe” comprised of multiple
narrative worlds. Each of these worlds is signified by a frame—an oftentimes
fragmented otherness, which the Modernist text sets off and examines as a narrative
window auxiliary to the text’s main diegesis. Modernist literature both creates and
conceals narrative “windows”—frames of speculative possibility based on the disnarrated
gaps generated by stylistic and perceptual variation.

I use the examples of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and
Gertrude Stein to demonstrate the modern text as a convergence of diegetic and
hypodiegetic voices, which questions and complicates the narrative relationship between

a discourse and the events that it recounts. Modernist experimentation relies on the

stylistic exaggeration of the partition between story and discourse. The extremity of this
separation, often compounded by the juxtaposition of multiple hypodiegetic discourses,
fragments and blurs the story to raise questions of narrative validity.

I analyze how the chapter-frames of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying emulate the
contentious relationship between diegetic and hypodiegetic frames. The disnarrated in
Joyce’s Dubliners invites us to apply the suggested fragments of possibility concealed
behind the main diegesis to the incomplete narratives of the characters and events
involved in “off-stage” deaths. In M Joyce challenges his reader to construct
narrative bridges between the chaotic shifting of styles and voices, raising issues of
narrative intelligibility and history. The chapter on Woolf considers how she refines
Joyce’s narrative strategies from stylistic variation of discourse to an interrogation of
language itself as a sufficient framing device of meaning. In the final chapter I examine
how Gertrude Stein adapts the painterly technique and theory of Braque and Picasso to
her verbal portraits and still lifes. In Stein words are freed of their grammatical frames to
disengage them from the lifeless fixity of meaning.

Modernism’s opaque windows of simultaneous discourses, language,
fragmentation, memory and spatial and temporal experimentation defamiliarize and limit
our access to narrative. My research attempts to peer through these windows to
understand how Modernism subverts traditional narrative and requires critical terms that
perhaps have yet to be invented. As each chapter delves into diverse yet interrelated
discussions surrounding the topic of narrative frames, I address how and why Modernism

redefines narrative structures in its attempts to revitalize literature.

Copyright by
HOWARD MARTIN LINDHOLM
2001

For my father who always wanted to see this and my mother who always did.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to my Committee Chair, Dr. Marcia Aldrich, whose untiring
inspiration, support, knowledge, bullwhip and friendship made this dissertation possible.
Throughout my graduate program Marcia was the mast through the storm, a confidant
and mentor who maintained faith in me as both a scholar and a person. May Blinky and
bold colors in juxtaposition always frame the circumference of your life.

No words can measure the comfort and sanity offered by my friends and family.
They frame the disnarrated pronoun in “Happiness is this.” My ever-encouragin g friend
and fellow doctoral candidate, Patty Payette, stuck by my side from the beginning. Laura
Hutchison, so patient with the endless rollercoaster ride, spurned me on when success
seemed impossible. Lastly, without the love and support of my family——Carol Lindholm,

Bill Lindholm and Deanna Bruckman— this dissertation would remain unnarratable.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER ONE

THE JOURNEY OF THE HYPODIEGETIC COFFIN: WILLIAM FAULKNER AND
THE MODERNIST FRAME ...................................................................... 15
CHAPTER TWO

PERHAPS SHE HAD NOT TOLD HIM ALL THE STORY: THE DISNARRATED IN
JAMES JOYCE ..................................................................................... 44
CHAPTER THREE

ULYSSES’ HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF WITH A DIFFERENCE ................... 78
CHAPTER FOUR

HAPPINESS IS THIS: WORDS AS ENIPTY FRAMES IN VIRGINIAWOOLF ........ 109
CHAPTER FIVE

GERTRUDE STEIN FRAMES THE INSTANCE OF THERE BEING MORE ......150
CONCLUSION .................................................................................... 189
WORKS CITED ................................................................................... 196

vii

INTRODUCTION

Critics and historians have mythologized the story of Modernism as much as the
Modemists themselves selectively fictionalized history. Contemporary criticism
inevitably gravitates towards the stylistic and theoretical challenges of Modernist
literature, drafting diagnostic “narratives” to frame Modemism’s disparate threads
according to the perimeters of a decided slant. Still the Modernist narrative experiment
continues to evade comprehensive structural models. Named posthumously over the last
thirty years, Modernism has not "existed" as a collective literary movement for long.
Even now it continues to defy any singular definition as it insists on an uncontainable
plurality. The title of "Modernism" itself raises the question how to discuss something
that by the very nature of its name can never be rooted in time. A key aspect of my
research then is to contemplate ways we might draw a frame around the “story” of
Modernism, and in turn, better understand how contemporary narrative models have
evolved in their treatment of experimental literature. While the strains of Modernism
cannot be brought together easily under one denomination, we can (and must, in order to
progress) make some fair assumptions about its unity as a movement.

Certainly, there is a collective sense of a cultural crisis and a needing to break
from the recent past that begins to ferment in the intellectual circles of the 18905. With
the diverse philosophical deve10pments of Nietzsche, Pater, Hobbes, Hegel, Marx,
Darwin, Hulme, Bradley, James, Bergson, Freud, Dewey, Santayana and Whitehead,
artists and writers begin to reconsider the fixity of internal and external realities, voice,

time, space and history. As I explore in more detail, the nineteenth- and twentieth-

century philosophers’ reassessment of how we frame our spatial, temporal and
psychological experiences of perception and memory stimulates Modemism’s radical
approaches to the narrative. For the Modemists, the realism of their immediate
predecessors had failed to account for the new theoretical “realities” suggested by Marx,
Bergson and Freud. The “negotiations around the family” novels of George Eliot, Jane
Austen and Charles Dickens attempted to provide a holistic explanation to the world,
thereby creating a false sense of continuity. They devised a world simpler than that of its
readers—a world in which character behavior can be predicted and understood. The
Edwardian novel imposed order on the chaotic, using the symbiotic pairing of a fictional
character with an authoritative narrator, who could always step in to summarize, clarify
and “force things to stand still in the clear light of his language.”l
Modernism, on the other hand, is an art Kathe Hamburger regards as
consequent on the dis-establishing of communal reality and conventional
notions of causality, on the destruction of traditional notions of the
wholeness of individual character, on the linguistic chaos that ensues when
public notions of language have been discredited and when all realities
have become subjective fictions.2
Modern fiction seeks the multiplicity of reality—the fragmented inner and external
experience of both the world and ourselves previously neglected by realism. Reality is no
longer described satisfactorily in terms of a chronological linear whole; rather it emanates
from a spatially and temporally fragmented collage of impressions, unfixed and subject to

the inexactitude of memory, narrative selectivity and linguistic ambivalence. The task of

the novelist, according to Virginia Woolf, is “to convey the varying, this unknown and

 

‘ John Mepham, "Mourning and Modernism” (138).
2 Die Logik der Dichtung (27).

uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little
mixture of the alien and external as possible.”3 The modern novel must be able to
dramatize some of those influences which play so large a part in life, yet
have so far escaped the novelist—the power of music, the stimulus of
sight, the effect on us of the shape of trees or the play of color... the
delight of movement... Every moment is the center and meeting-place of
an extraordinary number of perceptions which have not yet been
expressed. Life is always and inevitably much richer than we who try to
express it.4
Seymour Chatrnan’s work on the narrative provides an argumentative starting
point for many of my ideas. In his analysis of the Modernist ellipsis, Chatrnan observes
how detailed chunks of narrative are linked by abrupt spatio-temporal jumps, whereas in
the traditional novel these leaps usually occur between chapters.5 Preferring the relativity
and fragmentation of the individual perspective to that of the supraindividual, the modern
narrator no longer pretends to understand the world in its entirety. The Modernist
dialectical vision finds it much more creatively interesting and feasible to test various
ways in which knowledge of the world can be worded and transmitted, as opposed to
attempts at the actual transfer of this knowledge. Dismissing the limitations of
chronological narrative, Modernism concentrates on a merging of past, present and future
into one continuous moment. We read the modern text “not as a time-sequence but as a
heterogeneous series of perceptions, each catching its moment of intensity without

reference to what lies on the succeeding pages.”6 Its narrative strategy allows the past an

active collateral existence alongside the present, creating a succession of “nows” that

 

3 “Modern Fiction” (212-13).
‘ Woolf, “The Narrow Bridge of Art” (228-29).

5 Stog and Discourse (70).
6 Leon Edel, The Modern Psychological Novel (137).

bends the once stable frames of time and space. Henri Bergson, who plays a prominent
role in my research, proposes the fluidity of time slows or accelerates based on subjective
perception. In many respects Modernism represents a literary application of Bergson’s
philosophy, and one of its most difficult reading challenges is to gauge the wide spectrum
of durational variation its simultaneous narratives create.

One objective of this research is to assess the narrative implications of Virginia
Woolf’s proposed break in human nature from nineteenth-century literature. The change
Woolf describes was perhaps more momentous than Woolf herself could have predicted,
as it transforms not only the next one hundred years of writing but also the methods of
critical reading. My research raises several questions relating to Modemism’s narrative
experimentation. Why and how does narrative change in response to both philosophical
movements and experience of the modern world, and how does the Modernist narrative
subsequently transform critical discussions of narrative, particularly those of over the past
three decades? Why does Modernism, which evolves alongside structuralism, call
attention to its narrative structures more so than any other movement? How do the
Modernists demand a critical language all their own, and why does contemporary
narrative criticism gravitate towards the issues raised by experimental narratives? What
does Modernism teach us about narrative structures through its continuous defiance of
narrative models, both old and new? How does Modernism redefine the narrative frame,
and what new frames might we construct around the diverse strains of the movement
itself?

As contemporary narrative approaches renew themselves in areas such as film and

nonfiction, there is likewise an excellent opportunity to readdress Modernism with the

new narratological tools. This dissertation reexarrrines certain aspects of narratology
itself, surfacing both the potential and the limitations of current terminology. By
reframing some of the newer analytical tools of narrative criticism in the context of
Modernist literature, I test their uses and applicability, while at the same time unearthing
alternate readings of frequently “rea ” texts. There has been a long and rich discussion of
the narrative in the twentieth century (Henry James, Norman Friedman, Wayne Booth,
Todorov, Roland Barthes, Jonathan Culler, Genette), which provides some illumination
of how the Modernist narrative forces the reader to organize, control, define and evaluate
the narrators and narratees. Over the past two decades, narrative theory has made a
promising shift towards the story as a narrative “universe” comprised of multiple
narrative worlds.7 Each of these worlds, I argue, is signified by a “fiame”—an oftentimes
fragmented otherness, which the Modernist text sets off and examines as a narrative
window auxiliary to the text’s main diegesis. While my research demonstrates the
usefulness of Mieke Bal, Gérard Genette, Gerald Prince, Tzvetan Todorov and other
narratologists in revisiting the Modernist narrative, I also argue that narratological
examination of Modernism remains far from exhaustive as both fields of study grow.

I use the canonical examples of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia
Woolf and Gertrude Stein to explore areas of analysis suggested by Bal, Genette and

Prince among others.8 The work of Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf and Stein represents extreme

 

7 See Gérard Genette’s “Boundaries of Narrative” and Mieke Bal’s Narratologie. Though the narrative
frame rarely appears in early critical studies, it has attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent years.
Noteworthy studies in Modernism by Rimmon-Kenan (1983), Ferguson (1988), Doherty (1992) and
Jackson (1994) touch upon similar issues of frames in high Modernism.

3 Bal, Genette and Prince provide much of the theoretical foundation here. Since the majority of their work
focuses on theory rather than literature, my objective is to put some of their ideas into play against a
Modernist background to consider not only their applicability to Modernism, but also the extent to which
the Modernist experiment is responsible for current narrative schools of thought.

and diverse milestones in narrative experimentation. They provide an ultimate example
of not only the many facets of Woolf’ s change in human nature, but also the complex
narrative structures that permeate all creative and critical writing to follow. For each
writer, the modern text becomes a convergence of diegetic and hypodiegetic voices,
which questions and complicates the narrative relationship between a discourse and the
events that it recounts. The advantage inapproaching Modernism through a narrative
analysis is that it allows for a logical and systematic survey of the wide fork the modern
text carves between story and discourse. Though the essence of all creative writing
involves a discourse that frames certain perspective aspects of a story to the exclusion of
others, Modernist experimentation relies on the stylistic exaggeration of the partition
between story and discourse. The extremity of this separation, often compounded by the
juxtaposition of multiple hypodiegetic discourses, fragments and blurs the story to raise
questions of narrative validity—a topic I explore in Chapters Two and Three.

Despite the overabundance of critical coverage devoted to the high Modernists,
discussion of their work remains perpetually incomplete as new theoretical approaches
emerge. This dissertation bridges some of the narratological debates and analytical tools
of the past two decades with the century-long study of Modernism. My limiting myself to
a canonical range of texts stems from not only from their standing as exceptional
examples of narrative experimentation, but also the theoretical spirit behind this research.
To the exclusion of more marginalized texts, I focus on traditional centerpiece works in
hopes of achieving exactly what the Modemists themselves accomplished—that is, to
uncover something new and marginal within the familiar. I look at the heavily-studied

pages of Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway to reveal their narratological frames—their

 

perspective windows into other worlds, apparent not only in Modernism, but throughout
all literary periods and genres. From Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf and Stein, we can learn both
how narrative has evolved over the past century and to what extent criticism has
addressed all the narrative possibilities posed by literature.

As each chapter builds upon its predecessor, Chapter One, “The J oumey of the
Hypodiegetic Coffin: William Faulkner and the Modernist Frame,” lays much of the
theoretical groundwork for the hands-on chapters that follow. I begin with what critics
have defined as two levels of narration—the diegetic or main narrative and the
hypodiegetic or embedded narrative (disjointed secondary narratives deprived of the main
narrative's access to suspense, climax, and the dramatic questions familiar to the classic
narrative). While the purpose of the hypodiegetic level is to advance and thematically
clarify the action of the first, I demonstrate how the hypodiegetic extends beyond a mere
echo of its dominant counterpart to stand as a defamiliarized, somewhat autonomous
voice. Modemism’s drawing attention to the hypodiegetic effectively raises what Shari
Benstock and Bernard Benstock describe as the possibility

that the narration can assume its own directions, seemingly separate
from—even in contradistinction to—that imposed by the teller, that the
subjects of the narration itself (characters) can insert themselves into the
fabric of the telling, warping the fictional woof.9

Faulkner’s As I Lgv Dying provides a superior example of how the struggle
between hypodiegetic voices for diegetic air time affects narrative structures. We learn

from Faulkner how the hypodiegetic must always yield to the narrative that frames it, and

yet it can also acquire a certain degree of independence as the spatial and temporal

 

9 “The Benstock Principle” (1 l).

 

uncertainty of Addie’s soliloquy reveals. I analyze the novel’s structure itself, and how
its chapter-frames emulate the contentious relationship between diegetic and hypodiegetic
frames. Exploring the implications of Addie’s coffin, this chapter also sets up a running
discussion of the Modernist metaphor as an impenetrable if not empty frame—a narrative
void that resurfaces in Joyce, Woolf and Stein.

The second chapter, “Perhaps she had not told him all the story: The Disnarrated
in James Joyce,” applies a relatively new concept in narratology known as the
disnarrated—narrative events which may or may not necessarily happen. Joyce’s
Dubliners draws narrative attention to "purely imagined worlds” or “expressions of
impossibility or unrealized possibility” through narrative defamiliarization and
fragmentation.10 By omitting the unnarratable (certain events, character names, etc.),
Joyce both illuminates and defamiliarizes these sideline narratives, while refusing to
satisfy our narrative expectations. Although the disnarrated may appear in any given text,
its presence, magnified by the complex fragmented views and voices which give way to
multiple narrative possibilities, dominates Modernist literature. Dubliners demonstrates
the disnarrated frequently working as rhythmic device that disrupts the spatial and
temporal fixity of a given narrative. More important, the disnarrated invites us to apply
the suggested fragments of possibility concealed behind the main diegesis to the

incomplete narratives of characters and events.

 

Paul Hernadi's Beyond Genre and Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds discuss the hypodiegetic device in
detail and trace its historical origins.

‘0 See Gerald Prince, “The Disnarrated.” A psychoanalytical (and feminist) variation on the disnarrated is
perhaps Lacan’s idea of the “Other,” which I discuss in more detail in Chapter One.

Perhaps the most convincing manifestation of the disnarrated comes in the
recurring off-stage deaths of characters, which we find throughout Modernism. Death in
Joyce occurs outside of the narrative eye, spatially and temporally defamiliarized, so that
its significant details remain clouded and inaccessible. I discuss the hypodiegetic
surfacing of the dead, their disnarrated “confessions,” and how the living appropriate
their voices despite a narrative disconnection between the living and the dead. Since both
moumer and reader are narratively removed from the actual death-act, they must rely on
secondhand narrative "distortions" of the given event, which in turn open the speculative
windows of the disnarrated. This speculation, of course, raises issues of narrative
veracity, which I test against accounts of Dubliners’ death-acts. The Modernist
disnarrated involves the simultaneous juxtaposition of being and not being, effectively
denying the spatial, temporal and verbal stability needed to fully confirm or reject its
possible worlds.

I extend my ideas on the disnarrated in “Uh/gs] History Repeating Itself with a
Difference.” Joyce’s extensive range of narrative perspectives paradoxically allows all
views to coexist, while at the same time resisting the completion of any given
focalization. Through its juxtaposition of discourses, mm creates gaps in narrative
access that demand the reader participate in an active emplotrnent. Joyce challenges his
reader to construct narrative bridges between the chaotic shifting of styles and voices. I
return to the question of narrative intelligibility—a topic that gains much attention in the

1980s and becomes a central issue with the Modernist text. Lubomr’r Dolezel, Thomas

Pavel and Marie-Laure Ryan have done the most important work and provide some of my
theoretical framework in the discussion of narrative truth in Ulysses.n
The third chapter adds to Gerald Prince’s argument that
Narrative intelligibility is based upon the relationships, in the narrative
universe, between a world designated as real—what is, what was, what
will be, what could be—and more or less adequate representations,
perceptions, and notions of that world.12
Given the fragmentation and disnarrated windows of Modernism, every narrator treads
the line of unreliability. In Joyce we find contradictory evidence both confirming and
denying the events that transpire on Bloomsday. Narrative unreliability in Ulysses also
extends to history itself. Genette suggests the only measure the critic has of historical
truth within a narrative is to locate a second narrative as the source of the first.13 Barbara
Herrnstein Smith provides a workable middle ground between Prince and Genette,
shifting the focus from the narrative to the act of narrating:
The essential fictiveness of novels is not to be discovered in the unreality
of the characters, objects, and events alluded to, but in the reality of the
alludings themselves. In other words, in a novel or tale, it is the act of
reporting events. . .that is fictive.l4
The question of narrative truth remains a complicated and highly debatable topic in
narratological circles. One of my main concerns is to situate my ideas on Modernist

narrative truth and intelligibility in relation to those who have already written on the

subject.

 

” See Dolezel’s “Narrative Semantics,” “Truth and Authenticity in Narrative,” and “Mimesis and Possible
Worlds," Pavel’s “Narrative Domains” and Univers de la fiction. and Ryan’s “Fiction, Non-Factuals and the
Principle of Minimal Departure” and "The Modal Structure of Narrative Universes.”

’2 “The Modal Structure of Narrative Universes” (547).

13“Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative” (759).

1‘ On the Margins of Discourse (29).

10

 

In Chapter Four, “Happiness is this: Words as Empty Frames in Virginia Woolf,”
I analyze Virginia Woolf’ s refinement of Joyce’s narrative strategies. As an analytical
hybrid of the flysses method, Woolf’ 3 work appropriates and questions the narrative
frames set out by Joyce. Using Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse as case studies, I
demonstrate how Woolf rejects Joyce’s stylistic variation of discourse in favor of a
narrative defamiliarized at the molecular level of language itself. As Woolf interrogates
language as a sufficient framing device of meaning, words become frames akin to
Faulkner’s coffin, outlining a void that blocks the communication of one’s inner
experiences to the outer world. Woolf questions how language frames the unnarratable
and wordless ambiguity of emotion, epiphany, memory and duration. I discuss how
voices fail to connect not as a result of Joyce’s shifts in discourse, but as a condition of
the empty frames of words themselves. This idea is then extended to Woof’ s recurring
image of the empty room and the disnarrated frames it suggests. As with Joseph
Conrad’s heart of darkness and Faulkner’s coffin, the room repeatedly demands narrative
attention only to reveal itself as an empty frame.

The chapter also delves into Woolf 8 treatment of duration. Woolf quarrels with
the traditional stability and artificiality of durational laws. N 0 longer a fixed and
unobtrusive narrative structure, duration in Woolf functions as a Bergsonian élan vital
that flows independent of spatial and temporal perimeters. Mrs. Dalloway and ME:
lighthouse allow the past to perpetually flow into the present, which inevitably
complicates the durational and linear aspects of the novel. Woolf’ s durational tinkering
becomes most apparent in her surfacing of memory in installments, based on narrative

need rather than a fixed chronology. As we see in Joyce, the process complicates and to a

11

certain degree empowers the role of the hypodiegetic dead. The simultaneous voices of
past and present narratives consequently blur the distinction between the living and the

dead, and yet there remains a speculative and unnarratable gap between Woolf’ s ghosts
and the dead they represent.

In the final chapter, “Gertrude Stein Frames the Instance of There Being More,” I
move from Modernist fiction to poetry and its relation to Cubism. Here I examine how
Gertrude Stein adapts the painterly technique and theory of Braque and Picasso to her
verbal portraits and still lifes. As Cubism creates new ways of composing spatial and
temporal relations, there is a redefining of the narrative frame in poetry. From Cubism,
Stein learns to abandon imitative attempts at objective reality in favor of portraying
people and objects not as they are seen, but as they are conceived. As Richard Pearce
points out Stein follows the example of the painters in

destroying the unity, fracturing the whole, disrupting the continuity,
breaking the frame, decentering the subject, and shifting the point of
view—to picture a new totality. Images on canvas and in the reader’s
mind would lose coherence. But they would gain new dimensions, new
points of view, new centers of attention, a new sense of inclusiveness, and
a new sense of complex and shifting interrelationships. Unity, that is,
would give way to relationship.15

The development of Stein’s poetry follows the chronological evolution of
Cubism’s two major phases: Analytical and Synthetic. In her portraits, Stein partitions
her subject into sentential and paragraphic cubes, which overlap and build upon one

another to suggest but never fully depict a whole. Similar to Analytical Cubism, Stein

removes concrete details from her portraits, specifically in the form of nouns, to exclude

 

'5 “Virginia Woolf’s Struggle with Author-try” (60).

one from all biographical aspects of her subject’s life. The result is a portrait of
simultaneous and independent sentence-fictions, tenuously held together by the referential
anchor of a title. Stein paints a continuous succession of "nows" in which her subject is
comprised not of a single reality but of a series of virtual repetitions.

With Tender Buttgrs, Stein follows the lead of Synthetic Cubism, refocusing on
language as a palette of objects rather than mimetic signals. By defamiliarizing the
common usage of language, Stein stresses the spatial and visual relationships between
words to redefine word-objects as separate but equally important aspects of language.
The “sudden” objects of Stein’s collage flow in an indecisive temporality, returning my
discussion to issues of duration. The dislocation of one object, one sentence or one
section from another mirrors the disnarrative space between Faulkner’s chapter-frames
and conceals the narrative, spatial and temporal distance between them. As words are
freed of their grammatical frames to disengage them from the lifeless fixity of meaning,
there is a continuous opening and closing of disnarrated windows of possibility.

The broader scope of this dissertation explores how Modernism complicates and
widens the junction between a discourse and the events that it recounts. I analyze ways in
which Modernist literature both creates and conceals narrative “windows”—frames of
speculative possibility based on the disnarrated gaps generated by stylistic and perceptual
variation. As discourse veers away from story, the windows to narrative “truth” become
less transparent. Modemism’s opaque windows of simultaneous discourses, language,
fragmentation, memory and spatial and temporal experimentation defamiliarize and limit
our access to narrative. My research attempts to peer through these windows to

understand how Modernism subverts traditional narrative and requires critical terms that

13

perhaps have yet to be invented. As each chapter delves into diverse yet interrelated
discussions surrounding the topic of narrative frames, I address how and why Modernism

redefines narrative structures in its attempts to revitalize literature.

14

CHAPTER ONE
THE JOURNEY OF THE HYPODIEGETIC COFFIN: WILLIAM FAULKNER
AND THE MODERNIST FRAME

Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish.
-Absalom Absalom!

 

The problem of fragmentation, commonplace in the work of William
Faulkner, raises interesting challenges for narrative models seeking to adjust the critical
frame to accommodate Modernist diversions from the “holistic” works of previous
centuries. As a particularly useful experimental tool, fragmentation addresses the
multiperspective demands of the modern world. The desired effect is that no narrative
stands as complete as it disrupts the hierarchical structure of traditional perspectives. In
Modernism, narratives rise from characters, disembodied voices, the dead and the
inanimate, so that everything in the text may “speak,” and often everything does, placing
the reader in a precarious position as listener. The multivoiced aspect of the modern text
forces the reader to classify and prioritize each voice in an effort to somehow extract or
construct a unified narrative (or perhaps what we call the “main story”) from the reading
experience. By necessity and definition, the modem text is a convergence of narrative
voices; its method is the calculated fragmentation of these voices. And yet what do we
define as a narrational “voice?” Does it have character-like qualities? Must it last for
more than two paragraphs? The answer lies in fragmentation itself, which provides that a
narrative voice may as easily expand the length of a text as it might be reduced to a single

utterance.

15

We might press further to ask how to define the relationship between a discourse
and the events that it recounts when we, as narratees, are presented with an array of
perspectives. Since a written text is comprised of nothing but utterances, our knowledge
of textual events can only come via a narrative account, and because of this, it would be
absurd to dig too far towards the “truth” of any textual event. We can, however, compare
narrative accounts of events and begin to locate their inconsistencies to illuminate the
disorientating effects fragmentation has on narration. Perhaps what follows is the logical
conclusion that, given their narrative contradictions (for one purpose of multivoicedness
is to provide narrative irony), it would be impossible for every voice to constitute an
accurate narrative of the event they recount, and yet Modernism teaches us that narrative
possibility may be as accurate as the omniscient truths of realism. One of the most
interesting aspects of fragmentation is its insistence on the necessity of subjectivity.
Mieke Bal points out that

objective narration is by definition impossible because the linguistic
constraints imposed on narratorial voice and the subjective focalization no
speaker can avoid adopting shape the fabula or the content of the narrative
decisively.l

Another factor of subjectivity emerges in the “narrational choices” inevitably
made by the Modernist in partitioning a narrative. By narrational choice, I call to mind
Thomas Mann’s term aussparen or “setting aside,” which he uses to describe the author’s
role in determining the narrative frames of a text. An author must choose both what
narrative a voice will narrate and how it will be narrated, causing further blurring of

anything we might call objectivity. The groundbreaking work of Ba] and Gerard Genette

provides some guidance to the dualism of Modernist narratives, as both critics distinguish

 

l “The Point of Narratology” (732).

16

between the telling of a story and its point of view (or focalization).2 Narrational choice
decisively establishes a story’s focus. In Modernism the choosing of vocal and visual
frames is complicated in its allowing of infinite, often dissimilar versions of the same
narrative or “story” to coexist simultaneously on the page.

In its resistance to comprehensive critical treatments, Modernist fragmentation
necessitates specific critical terms to describe its structural deviation from traditional
narrative. Despite its popularity as subject matter to various critical schools (feminism,
psychoanalysis, Marxism, deconstructuralism, etc.), the Modernist narrative, I would
argue, resists the sweeping approaches of models that fail to address the terminological
demands of its experiment. Too often these comprehensive models overlook the specific

narrative experimentation that distinguishes and loosely unites the Modernists separate
from other literary movements. In contrast Ba] and Genette, followed by others, focus
not on holistic diagnoses of the Modernist text, but rather on means of describing its
narrative variations. Narratology gives us several useful tools for describing the
Modernist experiment, which I make use of here, and yet Modernism remains extremely
resilient against even these modest treatments. Thus, my twofold aim is to demonstrate
how Modemism commands new narratological terms to describe its break from
traditional narratives, suitably addressed by outmoded models such as Propp’s, and to
interrogate the efficiency of these terms through an examination of texts. In many cases
the Modernist narrative justifies the tools of contemporary narrative theory, while in

Other instances it pleas for terms that have yet to be defined.

,\
Bal ’8 Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative and Genette’s Narrative Discourse include

use 1 examinations of focalization.

 

 

l7

N arratologists have defined two levels of narration—the diegetic (or main)
narrative and the hypodiegetic (or embedded) narrative.3 While narratologists have
devised this paradigm to apply to any text, we will see that it stems from the complex
demands of the Modernist fragmented voice. While the simplest narrative contains these
two levels of narration, the Modernist texts I discuss, by their very nature of questioning

the stability of objectivity, will always contain more than this. Leopold Bloom’s voice

might be designated as the main diegesis of Ulysses as Molly Bloom’s becomes the
hypodiegetic voice, and still we must account for Stephen and the dozens of other voices

that surface throughout the text. We must also consider the moments (often chapter-
Iength) in which hypodiegetic voices seem to usurp the main narrative. For example,
Stephen’s voice repeatedly undermines that of Bloom, forcing a reconsideration of the
novel’s diegetic structure. At times T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land allows the reader to

accept Tiresias as the diegetic narrator. Nevertheless his voice is continually challenged

by the hypodiegetic voices of others. While the purpose of the hypodiegetic level is to

3 I adapt from Mieke Hal’s definition of the embedded narrative:
An embedded unit is by definition subordinate to the unit which embeds it; but it can

acquire relative independence. This is the case when it can be defined as a specimen of a
more or less well—delimited genre. It then has a more or less complete signification. This
is enriched, set off, even radically transformed by its relation with the embedding unit,
but it has absolutely no need of it to be coherent. For example, there are embedded
poems by known poets which are, ultimately and by intermediary of internal attribution,
attributable to a poet outside the text. . .The more independent and complete the hypo-
unit, the more problematic can its relation to the embedding unit become. (“Notes on

Narrative Embedding” 48)

The embedded narrative depends on the diegetic narrative’s
willingness to quote its utterances. And quoting means taking responsibility for the

utterance. In view of this, there is no question of the narrator allowing the second subject
to speak, or even of his lending him voice; he quotes him in his own voice. The first
subject can invent the utterances he quotes. The real or fictional status of the second
subject’s utterances is inscribed in the first discourse; it is thus outside the second
discourse. Selected, interpreted, or even invented, the second subject is in principle
fictive, its discourse fictional in relation to the first subject. (54)

Michail Glowinski (1976) provides a further useful discussion of how the embedded unit

“i ,, . .
ntel‘rupts the dregesrs.

18

advance and thematically clarify the action of the first, I propose that the hypodiegetic
extends beyond a mere echo of its dominant counterpart, that it becomes an integral
aspect of the text that challenges and complicates its companion diegesis. It is the very
challenging and obscuring of narrative unity that defines Modemism’s complex and
fascinating resistance to comprehensive narrative models.

This chapter and the research as a whole demonstrates that a hypodiegetic or
embedded narrative must always yield to the narrative that embeds it, and yet it can
acquire a certain degree of independence. The framed depends on the frarne’s
“willingness” to allow its utterance, and consequently, there is a struggle between the
contained’s signified voice and the container’s quoting of that voice. As a result of the
secondary or filtered utterance, the contained’s voice, being selected, truncated, and

interpreted, becomes a fictive discourse (or “purely imagined world”) in comparison to
the main diegetic container. In Modemism’s narrative competition there is a vying
between the real and the imagined, the framing narrative and the embedded.
Undoubtedly, Joyce’s Dubliners suggests a continual struggle between the main diegesis
and the hypodiegetic narratives it attempts to smother. The inherent difficulty is how to
discern between the two when one begins to resemble the other. We may easily mistake
the imagined for the real and take Gretta Conroy’s “truth” of Furey’s demise as a more
accurate account than Furey or Joyce’s silence on the matter. Further complications arise
when we ask how to uncover that which cannot be represented if the unpresentable can
Only surface by masking itself as the presentable? Certainly, we see the Modernists

empowering the minority or embedded voice, and yet it can never successfully stand on

19

its own. Might the voices of the dead ever hold reign over their own text called
Dubliners, or is it always necessary for the living narratives to breathe life into them?
Given the multi-diegetic nature of Modernism, obstacles interfere with our
discerning the “truth” of a text. For Gerald Prince, truth does not necessarily depend on
the diegetic or hypodiegetic status of the narrator.4 Rather truth, if it can be located at all,
seems to fall under the responsibility of the narratee. And with the concept of the
narratee, we slip into additional complications as the modem text layers narratee upon
narratee. Often the reader is set in the position as a peripheral narratee, receiving the

story not via the original narrator who experiences the event, but as a passed along,

 

inevitably filtered account from a secondary narrator. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness, with its multi-tiered storytelling, exemplifies the entanglements of truth caused
by a filtered narrative. A nebulous “I” recounts Marlow’s account of events, and the
peripheral narratee of reader ends up a blurry three degrees removed from the original
story.

The distancing of the narratee in Conrad’s sea novels predicts and inspires much
of the Modernist narrative experiments to follow. For Conrad, this deliberate separation
forces narrative intelligibility into question so that narratees including the reader are
unable to distinguish between what is and what is perceived. Kurtz’s voice can only be
heard through the filter or “Chinese box” style of Marlow, a method Conrad learns from
Ford Maddox Ford and Henry James, and in a sense it subsequently becomes Marlow’s
own Voice. Like the vague sailors of the “Narcissus,” Kurtz is indistinct, undefined, and

forI‘lless as opposed to Marlow, and yet we are told this is Kurtz’s story. As narratees we

x
Nal‘l'atology. Narrative, and Meaning” (548).

 

20

cannot always tell what a narrator such as Conrad’s nameless “I” omits and includes and
how narrative choices relate to issues of “purely imagined worlds.” Surely we pity the
naiveté of Kurtz’s Intended as Marlow euphemizes the dying last words of Kurtz, but we
must also consider how much each narratee, from the undistinguished (yet privileged
above the reader) narratee of the “I” to last—in-line narratee of the reader, remains in the
dark as to what really happens in the Congo.

To reiterate, the modern text, as a “confluence of narrative motivations which are
equally possible but contradictory,” presents the reader with the question of how
narrative defines the relationship between a discourse and the events that it recounts.5

While there have been successful narratological elucidations of this challenge, classical

narrative models frequently overlook the
alethic potential of narrative, the relations of the narrative text with truth
or falsehood, the nature of the fictional as opposed to the real, the being of
narratively represented worlds.6
Beyond Prince’s valid complaint, critics have also neglected the apparent conflict
between the real and the imagined—a conflict that complicates both plot and role of the
reader as narratee (for it is the narratee who ultimately must “judge” the believability of
What he or she hears). Take for example the death of Michael Furey in “The Dea ,”
Which I explore in Chapter Two. When Furey dies (and, as odd as it may sound to the
sentimental, I must add--if he dies at all), Gretta, Gabriel and the reader can only see a
l"O'Tlanticized depiction of his departure since it is only her narrative which attempts to

\

s .
6 Prince, ibid. (544).

Here Prince uses the term “alethic” to suggest an inherent dichotomy of truth and falsehood in any given
gmafiVe. Narrative always contains truth and its opposite, and yet their distinction is not always apparent.
nee also Barthes (1975, 1976) and Todorov (1970). Prince continues to note that the important

arratOlogical studies (Barthes, Bremond, Greimas. and Todorov) focused on the narrated rather than the

ating, story over discourse (543).

21

explain his disappearance. The hearsay of Furey’s death evokes a practical doubt as to
the circumstances behind his life and death. Furey’s encroaching disnarrated nearly
usurps the grounded reality of the hegemonic narration.
Stepping back from the specifics of Modernism, let us bear in mind Oscar Wilde's
"history" of the distinction between the realistic diegesis and the disnarrated:
Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and
pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is the
first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks
to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes life as part of her rough
material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely
indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself
and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or
ideal treatment. The third stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and
drives Art out into the wilderness. This is the true decadence, and it is
from this that we are now suffering.7
The history of narrative, for Wilde, begins with the purely imagined.8 It continues along
the path through realism, in which the purely imagined embraces the real. Modernism
finds itself in between the newly separated "Art" and "Life" or the purely imagined and
the real. Though it may be banished into the wilderness, the purely imagined does not
disappear. Rather it lives in the disnarrated where it lingers estranged from the real, and
because of this separation, its sporadic, fragmentary appearances disrupt the flow of the
real, Oscar Wilde both justifies the utterance of the disnarrated and designates the "duty"
of Modernism, arguing that "Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in
ft- Ont of life...The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of the beautiful untrue things,

9

is the proper aim of Art."9 I am most concerned with how these “beautiful untrue things’

7\
s \i‘lterag Criticism (176).

9 'b' e some liberty here in changing Wilde’s term ""Art to "narrative."
‘ ‘d. (195).

22

surface and affect the modern text. What gives them voice and how do we discern the
narrative "driven out into the wilderness" from the “truth” of a text?

First, we cannot turn away from the veil of ellipses or truncated narratives within
the Modernist text if we are to get the “whole” story. A narratological approach, as
Prince argues, must do a better job of asking how the Modernists carry the “imagined”
world? Furthermore, to what extent can we say that the disnarrated no longer remains
bound to the narrated? How might we look to the Modernist text as a narratological
demonstration that plot “is a function of the relations between and within worlds in the
global narrative universe?”10 In light of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s claim that the modern
text “pleads for the unpresentable in the presentable itself... that which inquires into new
presentations, not for enjoyment, but better to convey that there is something
unrepresentable,” a narratological approach to Modernism must explore how this
narrative fragmentation widens the text into windows to another universe.11 The
heteroglossiac nature of Modernism builds a lattice around the invisible, a frame around
views unseen and unheard voices absent from all the literature that precedes it, while
undermining attempts to view these interiors as unified system.

Metaphor provides the Modernist with a window into the purely imagined. When
we think of windows, we envision openings of view from one environment into another.
In Modernism, however, the promise of a view does not always follow the gift of a
window. What lays on the other side of the metaphor is the purely imagined—the
disnarrated world. Oftentimes, the Modernist metaphor seems borne into existence,

attributable to nothing more than the sake of its own being. It is a window not so much

 

'0 “On Narrative Studies and Narrative Genres” (273, my italics).
“ ibid. (105).

23

for showing as for simply being a window, or it is a window constructed to subvert our
expectations of a view. Discussion of how metaphor dislocates itself from its "view"
figures prominently in the following pages. To begin, I ask what access do we have to
the contents of the Modernist window or metaphor. Is there anything behind the opaque
glass, or has metaphor, a thing in itself, been severed completely from its object? J ose’
Ortega y Gasset, quite aware of the Great Divide which was taking place in the Modernist
era, compares the past when "reality was overlaid with metaphors by way of ornament" to
the present in which "the tendency is to eliminate the extrapoetical or real prop and to
'realize' the metaphor, to make it the 'res poetice."'12 "The weapon of poetry," he writes,
turns "against natural things and wounds and murders them.” Ortega y Gasset’s
perceptive realization of metaphor plays an important role in Modernist literature.l3 To
illustrate the previous discussion on narrative modes in Modernism and how metaphor
reveals these modes in conflict, I turn to the fragmented narrative of William Faulkner's
As I Lay Dfl'ng.

Unlike the majority of Modernists, Faulkner does not seriously delve into
narratological experimentation until the middle of his career in the late 1920's. While
Fitzgerald creates an urban wasteland to compare with a mythic American dream and
Hemingway likewise paints a history of a wounded and war-scarred America, Faulkner

discovers an alternate mythology in the South. In what might be called an "antebellum

 

‘2 The Dehumanization of Art (36-37).

’3 The Modemist reconsideration of metaphor owes more to philosopher David Hume than to John Locke.
In contrast to Locke’s attempt to account for all ideas through experience, Hume describes “perceptions of
the mind” between which we construct dubious mental associations. It is the appearances in the mind and
the connections between them, as opposed to the reality of external objects, of which we are conscious.
The problem inherent in these appearances is they “may mimic or copy the perceptions of the senses; but
they never can entirely reach the force and vivacity of the original sentiment.” The translation of

24

myth of lost unity", much of Faulkner’s Modernist mythopoeia focuses on a fragmented
post-Fall in which the postwar South has slipped into decadence. Therefore, the common
struggle of Faulkner’s characters is against change and adaptation. Faulkner believed, as
noted by Cleanth Brooks, that "to isolate the past from the present was to falsify the very
nature of time.”14 It follows then that Faulkner attempts to literally reframe time by
erasing the narratological frames of past and present. The effect this revision has on
narrative "truth" is blurring if not entirely destructive.

As an experimental predecessor to As I Lay Dya'ng, Faulkner's The Sound and the
lirry divides its history into four sections, each independently illuminating and negating
its companion narratives, and each contributing an additional mythology to the
degeneration of the Compsons. Since time becomes both a factor and a non-factor in the
novel, it is interesting to consider the "mobility" that takes place in between each of the
four narratives. In applying the work of Henri Bergson, we see that all change that takes
place in the Compson household (and certainly this is a novel about change) must occur
outside the conscious intellect of the mythmaker.15 Therefore, the "truth-accuracy" of
each of the narratives must be gauged by its level of intuition rather than its intelligence.
In his soliloquy Quentin experiences an epiphanic moment of intuition brought on by the
ticking of his watch:16

There were about a dozen watches in the window, a dozen different hours
and each with the same assertive and contradictory assurance that mine

 

“impressions” into “ideas” demands the “compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing” of the
original perception, thereby creating an unequal metaphoric pairing between the two (I, II).

" American Fiction 1914-1945 (250).

'5 See Bergson’s W.

'6 I use the word “soliloquy” as it is used by narratologists to describe “the technique of representing the
psychic content and process of a character directly from character to reader without the presence of an
author, but with an audience tacitly assumed” (Humphrey 35).

25

had... Contradicting one another. I could hear mine...even though nobody
could see it, even though it could tell nothing if anyone could.17

On the brink of anarchy, the passage evokes Lyotard’s suggestion that once one
has lost narrative (in m all four characters struggle to maintain their narrative), one
loses the ability to define what is true. How can one begin to legitimize what is true or
false, good or bad without the guidance of narrative? How can we "believe" Quentin’s
narrative over that of Benjy, and given Bergson’s doubt of the rational intellect, how can
Quentin himself believe his own perceptions? Alternatively, we might consider
Faulkner’s experiment as one in communal voice, an exercise in narrative equilibrium.
Again this approach in its accepting of all "truths" also undermines the possibility of a
singular history.

Perhaps this question of truth is best explored in Faulkner’s most experimental
novel As I Lay ng‘ng. Like The Sound and the Fun, As I Lay Dyg'ng also deals with
familial love and the question of voice. In both novels characters depend on one another
for identity, often defining themselves through negation (i.e. Darl provides a good
example of the disnarrated. He is because he is not). The Compsons’ individual
narratives cannot stand alone without the referential map of the accompanying narratives.
In other words, self-identity depends on something external to that identity to give it
validation, thereby demonstrating the narrative necessity of the hypodiegetic. With its
fifty-nine soliloquies uttered by fifteen voices, the novel struggles between movement
and stasis, words and deeds. Floyd C. Watkins locates the central relation in question as

the one "between the act and man’s apprehension of the act, between the event and the

 

‘7 The Sound and the Fug (104).

26

"'8 Likewise, Patrick O’Donnell suggests the novel “questions the tenuous

interpretation.
connection between fictional language and the apparent ‘world’ to which it refers?” As
a novel concerned with issues of truth and the many conflicting ways truth is depicted, As
I Lay Dfl'ng demands critical terms to address its “problems of disembodiment, with
disjunctive relationships between character and narration or between bodily self and
conscious identity.”2° Rather than focusing on truth itself, Faulkner illuminates "gaps" in
truth. If truth is a window frame, then Faulkner concentrates on what the frame can and
cannot hold. Narrative gaps often allow us to learn more from what is missing in
Faulkner than from what is present. As we witness a dislocation of words from bodies in
The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying presents a world in which
dialogue is constantly reported and often dislocated by narrative voices
that, while they are careful to record identical dialects differently,
nonetheless seem utterly severed from the peculiar bodily selves that
ostensibly produce them.21
As a composition of nothing but these talking heads, the novel clearly reveals its
largest gaps of white space with a simple browse through the text. The presence of
bodies accompanying these voices would require the omniscient "truth" of a third person,
which then slips into the narrative hierarchy and visual fixity of the traditional text. In
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg. Ohio, which presents a similar yet more accessible
narrative technique, characters as "repositories of the untold" fail to form not only a

coherent and unified Winesburg as a town, but also Winesburg as a text.22 By their own

inability to communicate and the division of their individual scene placements, characters

 

'8 "The Word and the Deed in Faulkner’s Great Novels" (216)

'9 “The Spectral Road: Metaphors of Transference in Faulkner’s As I Lav Dying (270).
2° Eric J. Sundquist. “Death, Grief. Analogous Form: As I Lay Dying” (167)

2‘ Sundquist ibid. (172)

22 Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern American Novel (103).

27

are spatially separated from one another. Without the anchor of a dominant narrative,
each voice in Winesburg, Ohio and As I Lay Dying is partitioned from the others in
"chapter-frames," and we cannot help wondering what disnarrated moments rest in
between the unclear spatial relations between frames. Sundquist notes that
Addie’s speech, as it were logically disengaged from the corporeal self
that could have uttered it, is an extreme example of the way in which the
novel’s other acts of speech should be interpreted—as partially or wholly
detached from the bodily selves that appear to utter them.23
As Addie speaks from an unidentifiable time, purely textual, her companion narratives
also threaten to slip into abstraction dislocated from reality.

One of the reasons Addie is so central to the novel is her unique ability to observe
the gaps in narrative. While many of Faulkner's characters share keen insight into their
individual predicarnents, only Addie is able to articulate the disjointed relationship
between narration and truth. Addie's much-anticipated narrative is ironically a
denunciation of words. When she realizes the gaps between words and deeds, she
perceives the objective correlative of language. Language makes for only a tarnished
rrrirror held up to reality. It fails to frame reality for Addie as she has been “tricked by
words.” Mikhail Bakhtin claims

The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own”
only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent,
when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and
expressive intention... [however] language is not a neutral medium that
passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s
intentions; it is populate—overpopulated—with the intentions of others.24

Words fall short of conveying "truth." Instead they are limited by the subjectivity

of both speaker and listener. Meaning, thus, endures at least two filters as words are

 

7-3 ibid. (167).
7” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (293-4).

28

plucked from the abstract, reframed according to the speaker’s point of view, and then
heard based on the listener’s perspective. Words, however, are Addie’s only means of
attempting to frame what cannot be framed.” For Addie, "Words are no good... words
don’t ever fit even that they are trying to say at.” She complains of Cora’s “high dead
words in time” that “lose even the significance of their dead sound.” Words are dead,
ineffective attempts to substitute the abstract for the real. They are frames themselves
that attempt to fix on meaning, and the act of framing always means to exclude that
which does fall under the frame's borders. She yearns for the “the dark land talking the
voiceless speech," a communication of true experience free from the filters of language.26
This paradox of words makes for a frequent theme in the Modernist canon. The
frustration here is in the attempt to communicate with language: to frame that which
refuses to be framed. For instance, consider this wordless scene from D.H. Lawrence’s
Sons and Lovers:
One evening they were walking down by the canal, and something was
troubling him. She knew she had not got him. All the time he whistled
softly and persistently to himself. She listened, feeling she could learn
more from his whistling than from his speech. It was a sad dissatisfied
tune--a tune that made her feel he would not stay with her. She walked on
in silence. When they came to the swing bridge he sat down on the great
pole, looking at the stars in the water. He was a long way from her. She
had been thinking. (341)
Particularly interesting here is the frustration on both Clara and Paul’s part.

Neither has faith in words to express or frame his feelings. Instead Paul would rather

 

25 F.W.H. Myers’ writings on the failure of language are particularly useful here:
Our vocabulary, based as it is on concrete objects and direct sensations, is refined for the
expression of philosophic thought, still we cannot wonder if our supraliminal manipulation leaves
us with an instrument less and less capable of expressing the growing complexity of our physical
being. -Human Personality (99).

2‘ As I Lay Dying (171, 161, 125).

29

whistle, and the silent Clara, who like Addie distrusts “high dead words,” believes the
tune might shed light where Paul’s speech fails. Modernism teaches us that words
themselves are unsuccessful metaphors. Paul de Man describes this failure of language in
terms of the individual deprived of "not life but the shape and the sense of a world

accessible only in the privatized way of understanding. "27

The unstable relationship
between words and the things they represent is pinpointed by Tzvetan Todorov:
To suppose that words can faithfully account for things is to admit that (1)
‘things’ are there, (2) words are transparent, harmless, without
consequence for what they designate, (3) words and things enter into a
static relation. But none of these implicit propositions is true... One
cannot verbalize with impunity; to name things is to change them.28
While Watkins claims Addie's speech (unlike Darl’s total immersion into the
realm of metaphor) is "one of the most effective rejections of abstraction written in the
early twentieth century," it is at the same time an eloquent justification of the objective
correlative.29 Surely, words are no good to Addie, but they are also her only means of
existence. Without them, without her essential soliloquy, she would disappear from the
novel. In the world of As I Lay Du‘ng words are both everything and nothing. The
problem with the words is that they are simply “shapes to fill a lack,” “shapes that, when
the need for them arises, cannot adequately fill the void left by an accomplished act or

past event.”30

There are no deeds or actions here, merely the words describing them.
Hence, the effect is that we have narration of events but no events themselves. As those
who "know and understand" refrain from speech, they also cease to exist. Despite

language failing Modernism as a metaphor for true experience, it is essential to

 

27 The Rhetoric of Romanticism (81).
28 The Poetics of Prose (93-94).

2’ ibid. (213).

3° Sundquist ibid. (174).

30

establishing identity. It is what Addie requests of Anse, as empty and meaningless as it
may be, that sends her family on an epic wasteland journey, not the words she fails to
utter to him.

Modernism forces critics to reconsider the basic element of narrative—structure.
Paradoxically, Addie determines the center of the novel without being its structural
center. The novel’s title, plot and the Bundrens all focus on Addie, and still her chapter,
and subsequently her voice, do not fall in the structural center of Faulkner’s fifty-nine
soliloquies. Rather her conspicuous rising comes some forty pages after the structural
center of Darl’s voice. Addie’s decentering evokes Simone de Beauvoir’s Other, the
supposed alien and inessential feminine voice divorced from the “traditional” male
narrative body. Accordingly, it seems no surprise that Addie’s immediate companion
voices are the male narratives of Cash and Whitfield, which literally segregate her
chapter from the novel’s other female voices. Faulkner’s empowerment of the feminine
voice grants narrative attention not only to gender-based otherness, but also to a wider
range of previously concealed voices and perspectives. By enabling Addie with speech,
Faulkner complicates the traditional hierarchical relationships between the living and the
dead, the center and the margin, and spatial and temporal laws and uncertainty.

As IQ)! Dying’s focus on Addie’s otherness, while refusing its position as the
novel’s center, demonstrates an incompatibility between the very structures of narrative
and the hypodiegetic voices of Modernism. By no means an unintentional structural error
on the part of Faulkner, the novel’s very experimentation depends on its drawing
attention to Addie’s paradoxical central marginality and the conflicts that arise between

the tradition of structure and hypodiegetic empowerment. Faulkner’s experiment

31

culminates in the offspring voices waking or recovering the “lost” mother voice of Addie
from the dead, achieving the novel’s off-center climax. In a Lacanian sense her
misplacement from the central position between her children’s narratives represents the
Oedipal separation of mother from child, leaving a gap between object and desire,
narrative and narratee. Her voice is recovered, and yet it remains disconnected from its
offspring.

Beginning with Darl's page three first utterance of her name, the cac0phony of
struggling offspring diegeses gives rise to her own hypodiegetic otherness. I define the
voices up to this point as competing main diegeses in that they each share a healthy
balance of the narrative, often enjoying multiple chapters to themselves. Before Addie
speaks, Darl dominates the novel with twelve chapter-frames, followed by Tull's six and
Vardaman's five. Addie, on the other hand, is limited to a single chapter, and thus, we
might call hers a hypodiegetic or secondary narrative to the more frequent narratives. It
remains outside the diegetic frame of her companion narratives, and it is in Addie’s
spatial, temporal, and stylistic otherness that her voice constitutes a center, separated and
distinguished from its companions. Along these lines, it is also worth noting that Cora,
Jewel, Tull, and Anse are all "silenced" by Addie's awakening. None of these characters
speaks again. Likewise, even the dominant Darl is somewhat silenced as he speaks in
only six post-Addie sections. Perhaps it is the resonating of Addie's hypodiegetic
narrative which nearly usurps the main diegesis that explains the quietness of the post-
Addie section of the book.

We can say that given the unique temporal and spatial obscurity of Addie’s

narrative, her chapter is a narrative embedded within the diegetic frame of the novel.

32

Again Mieke Bal would argue that the embedded narrative is by definition subordinate to
the unit which embeds it, depending on the diegetic frame for the degree of its
utterance.31 What is unique about Faulkner’s As I Lay Dn‘ng is its composition of
chapter-encapsulated voices, which makes Bal’s notion that the main diegesis quotes the
embedded in its own voice problematic. Addie is not quoted by anyone. Rather she
temporarily usurps the novel’s narrative, speaking her own unfiltered words, while still
remaining embedded in the main narrative. The “floor” is yielded to what normally
should be a voiceless narrative. She speaks simply because she must to exist. Todorov
agrees that “For characters to be able to live, they must narrate.” The opposite for
Todorov would be that “the blank page is poisoned... The absence of narrative signifies
death.” 32
Faulkner’s use here of prosopopeia—his giving voice to the voiceless—allows the
reader the necessary ability to finally hear Addie. Paul de Man's description of how the
prosopopeic process works is useful in our understanding of Addie’s narrative “birth”:
It is the figure, the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or
voiceless entity, which. . .confers upon [the absent] the power of speech.
Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the
etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or face
(prosopon). . .Our topic deals with the giving and taking away of faces,
with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration.33
Though it comes late in the fortieth chapter, more than a hundred pages after her death,
the "figuration" of Addie’s voice results from the conjuring of her name by the living.

Addie, like Conrad's Kurtz or Joyce's Michael Furey, is empowered with voice when her

family "names" her. It is as if the main narrative relinquishes its power to allow the

 

3' Narratology (48).
’2 ibid. (76, 74).
’3 ibid. (76).

33

hypodiegetic to surface. Again language gives identity, and it is only identity (the quality
of being named) that gives voice to the absent or the dead. It is important to remember
that the dead or absent must rely on another narrator to "name" them into existence. For
example, since she is physically absent from the novel, Addie does not exist until Darl
first mentions her. This is why the main diegetic narrative (the narration of the living)
will always supersede the hypodiegetic narrative (the prosopopeic empowering of the
dead).

Another example of Addie’s prosopopeic empowering is Faulkner’s naming of
Addie in the novel’s title. Both the use of the first person "I" and the title’s action of
dying (something one must be alive to do) gives Addie voice. Certainly this is Darl’s
story as well as that of Vardaman, Cash, and the others, but it is all within the context of
the "I" of Addie. All of their stories occur as the "I" of Addie lay dying. When Addie is
silent and voiceless, she is dead. When she is the empowered hypodiegetic living and
vocal Addie, she is "actively" dying. Her dying continues throughout the course of the
book rather than in a temporal instance. It is not until the end of the book that her
gerundial dying succeeds in becoming an adjectival death. The imperfect rather than
preterit act of dying helps to blur our distinction between life and death, past and present,
and diegetic and hypodiegetic.34

Addie’s appearance also provides a good example of the narrational choice that
detennines the novel’s focus. By choosing who speaks, when they speak, and what they
speak about, Faulkner demonstrates Mann's “setting aside.” Addie is set aside

throughout the novel until she finally speaks. Jewel is also limited to one soliloquy by

 

3" See Sundquist (167) for a discussion of the grammatical possibilities of the book’s title.

34

Faulkner’s narrational choice. By choosing what narrative a voice will narrate and how
they will narrate it, Faulkner creates a world of narrative frames in which certain aspects
of plot are illuminated or framed while others are set aside. The result of partitioning the
novel into narrative frames is the absolute subjectivity in the reiteration of the coffin’s
journey. The chapter-frames contain the subjective narratives of the story, while the
blank space in between these frames contains the unattainable objective truth of the
Bundrens’ journey. Again we must remember that the purpose of the narrative frame, or
any frame for that matter, is to enclose a featured view while at the same time excluding
other views.

One of the reasons I have selected As I Lay Dflng as the leadoff text in this study,
aside from its rich narrative significance, is its recurring theme of frames. As mentioned
previously, Addie’s narrative does not represent the structural center of the novel.
Faulkner describes Addie’s “position in the mosaic of household” as vacant.35 Darl sees
“the gaunt face [of the dying Addie] framed by the window." Then on a literal level,
Addie is suddenly gone, and yet she becomes a “center that no longer holds, that is
defunct and yet lingers in stages of tenuous attachment.” Likewise, the novel works as
frame which "lassos" a collection of inter-related narratives barely held together by a
delicate thematic gravity. The expected center of this frame is conspicuously missing as
with the Modernist window, which refuses a view. Sundquist compares the novel's
tenuously enclosed frame to Addie's teetering between "dying" and "dead." The novel

is simultaneously literal and figurative, just as the body of Addie is neither
exactly corpse nor conscious self. The logic thus presents itself of

 

35 Meriwether and Millgate, Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner (110).

35

speaking of the novel too as a corpse, as a narrative whose form is
continually on the verge of decomposition...36

Even the novel's typography might be considered frame-like. Each chapter is an
enclosed narrative frame partitioned from the others by frames of white space. Michael
Kaufmann writes that “the narrative reflects the fossilizing print that embodies it, a
shaping force but also an encasing one.”37 At times the chapter-frames threaten to
thematically spill into the others, and yet the white space frames of the novel and the lack
of omniscience prevent this from happening. Even in a text such as M in which
voices are not separated by chapter-frames, the voice is separated from others simply
because of the limitations of typography. It is not possible to represent more than one
voice within the same temporal and spatial frame. At minimum a voice requires a single
utterance, and the smallest unit of utterance—the word—can only be shared by one
narrative.

By definition, a shape must always be a frame. Faulkner’s coffin is the container
holding Addie, while on a more abstract level it is also a frame and a metaphor
disconnected from its object. It makes its arduous progress through the narrative,
traveling intact and yet undisclosed. Both reader and Vardaman struggle through ASJ
Lay Dya'ng to catch a morbid glimpse into the coffin. Even the buzzards nose after the
aromatic contents of the coffin and yet still remain detached and unable to get at its
contents. We do so because we cannot help but believe there is something inside the
coffin. How is it that Faulkner compels us to look within the coffin rather than focus on

the dominating rivers and events which surround it? Critic Slavoj Zizek might conceive

 

3‘ ibid. (168).
37 “The Textual Coffin and the Narrative Corpse of As I Lay Dying” (101).

36

of the coffin as the void that the reader futilely desires to fill, and this seems true as both
the reader and As I Lay Dying’s characters futilely try to fill the dislocated metaphors
with meaning.38 It is an impossible attempt to symbolize the real. Each chapter-frame
emulates the structure of the coffin as each narrator is cut off from his or her surrounding
chapters. The book is a stacking of boxed voices doomed as soliloquies. Unable to
interact with one another, each narrative is contained within a coffin frame sealed from
the accessibility or consciousness of its companion narratives. Again it is only Addie who
can see and articulate that words encapsulate each character in a chapter-like coffin.

The history of the coffin also provides an allegory for the Modernist metaphor. If
we apply the Lacanian idea that the signified never fully corresponds to the signifier, we
see that the coffin as a metaphor refuses glimpses into its meanings. Though this
metaphor is painstakingly constructed by its carriers (even Addie’s presence during its
construction seems to render it deserving of our full attention), its true contents (i.e.
meaning of the journey, meaning of Addie) remains concealed throughout the novel,
despite various attempts to disclose as well as destroy its meaning.39 The coffin is what
Lyotard would call a narrative plea for the unpresentable in the presentable, extending
beyond the singularity of an indecipherable metaphor to the Modernist narrative itself. If
each of its metaphors moves through the text sealed off from meaning, the narrative sum
of these metaphors subsequently remains elusive so that the narrative as a whole travels

as an impenetrable coffin, beckoning our drilling futile holes into its contents.

 

38 See Looking Am: An Introduction to Jacgues Lacan Through Popular Culture.

39 Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space supports the idea of the coffin as a two-sided structure
containing an inside and outside. As with metaphor, the coffin by nature provokes our analytical curiosity
as to how its concealed inside corresponds to the visual clues suggested by its outside. Its form alerts us
that it is a container meant to carry something, and yet its signified inside is sealed off from its signifying
outside.

37

The coffin, like the metaphor, is paradoxical. It is “light, yet they move it slowly;
empty, yet they carry it carefully. . Faulkner appropriately chooses a coffin, the
ultimate symbol of death, as a symbol of metaphor. It is as if language itself has died and
can no longer fulfill its role of signifying. In light of this, where do we distinguish
between container and body, the narrated and the event, or metaphor and corresponding
meaning? O'Donnell's concept of "framing" is useful here in relation to the coffin and the
window which frames or conceals Addie's face/view from those either outside or inside
the frame. Furthering the discussion of the filtering aspect of language, we might ask if
language frames an empty vessel of meaning, or do we just not have access to its contents
though there might be meaning there. It seems that similar to the young Vardaman who
bores holes for meaning or Darl who burns down the frame of the barn to destroy the
frame of the coffin, we do not know exactly what it is that is framed, but we know that
something is framed. Faulkner further mystifies the spatial and temporal uncertainty of
Addie’s framing soliloquy in the vague knowledge that something inside the coffin
decomposes throughout the journey. Addie’s physical and narrative being transforms;
the representational frames shift and disrupt our attempts at narratively fixing Addie to a
metaphorical equivalent. Like the coffin, the Modernist metaphor moves in a continuous
state of "decomposition" in which

the act of analogy, transference, and metaphor—the work of language—is
known only by its motion and erosion, which is a kind of failure to mean,
to come to a conclusion.40
Faulkner’s Bergsonian idea of continuous motion, marked by Darl's Molly Bloom-like
"yes yes yes," corresponds with a new journey towards the unreachable destination of

meaning, this of course in the company of the new Mrs. Bundren .

38

Before there was the coffin, there was the idea of the coffin in Tull’s simple
pictogram. The coffin pictogram is a metaphor to be shaped and filled. It is a frame
enclosing the unknown. Barry McCann notes the pressure to interpret placed by the
"viewless" metaphor upon language:

If the pictogram of the coffin expresses the structure of inner/outer or

signified/signifier, then one may understand how the language in As I Lay

11311;ng constantly struggles to ‘fill’ empty words.“
McCann provides an interesting reading of the pictogram idea that aligns each of the six
Bundrens to a side of the coffin. Together they frame the metaphorical emptiness of their
journey. Similarly, the novel’s fifty—eight soliloquies frame the “coffin” of Addie’s
chapter. Stephen Ross seems right when arguing that Tull is unable to utter the verbal
equivalent to the coffin pictogram. Instead he must draw the coffin since there are no
words to describe its implications.42 The pictogram depicts a frame empty of not only
Addie’s corpse, but also language itself. As one of its six sides, Tull remains outside its
linguistic interior. The lack of words for a sensed meaning surfaces again when Addie
remarks: “The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of
a and I could think Anse, couldn’t remember Anse" (165). Again there is no
word for the shape, no definition for the meaning. As a shape, metaphor can only be
represented through language-free expression.

In many ways the reader of Faulkner grapples with metaphor in the same way
Vardaman does. Vardaman's ominous "My mother is a fish" shows how his rudimentary

attempts at metaphor fail to bridge the gap between experience and expression. Rather

than conveying his experience of his dead mother, Vardaman’s metaphor ends up further

 

4° O’Donnell ibid. (277).
‘1 “Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying”: The Coffin Pictogram and the Function of Form” (276).

39

distinguishing the gap between signifier and signified. Failing to illuminate the view
from the frame that connects "mother" to "fish," the supposedly unobtrusive window
glass of "is" becomes an impenetrable obstacle. The metaphor, whose function is to
grapple with the insufficiency of language and convey meaning, ends up merely
reinforcing the frames which separate "mother" from "fish." For Faulkner, the metaphor
becomes simply a pair of "words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam,
swinging and twisting and never touching” (163). Sundquist describes Vardaman’s
linguistic dilemma well:
Words. . .are inadequate not so much because they fail to ‘fit even what
they are trying to say at,’ but because they fail to describe or fill the blank
space that only the act of conceiving the need for a word can make
manifest as irreparably lost or passed. Words are for something we are not
or can no longer be.43
In a sense metaphor dislocated from its object is a creation separated from its creator. A
metaphor without its antecedent loses its meaning and direction. Similarly, the Bundrens
are a family without a mother. They are a creation separated from its creator, a metaphor
removed from object, and hence, they are no longer driven by the shared meaning and
referential direction enjoyed by a metaphor in the company of its "mother" object.
In another example, Addie thinks of Anse’s name until it takes shape, becoming a
vessel, whose contents liquefy and overflow:
I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a
shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold
molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full
and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty

door frame, and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar.
(173)

 

‘2 Fiction’s Inexhaustible Voice: Speech and Writing in Faulkner (118).
‘3 ibid. (175).

40

The passage demonstrates two of my previous points. First, we see Addie’s prosopopeic
act of naming into existence the hypodiegetic voice of Anse. Second, we see a vessel
(metaphor) constructed and filled only to stand empty of contents or meaning. The end
result of this attempt to conjure Arise through metaphor is that Addie no longer
remembers the name of the vessel. Therefore, the vessel is both dislocated from its
framed contents as well as from its source—the name of Anse. It is important that the jar
stands motionless and empty like a door frame for this suggests that once language is
fixed and disallowed to flow like Addie's vision of cold molasses, it no suffices as a
means of expression. What is known in the world of the Bundrens, argues O’Donnell, is
only known because it moves:
The metaphor suggests that the ‘the work’ of language is carried forward
only through the constant slippage, elision, and erosion of Faulkner’s
language, or only by the failure of figures in language to stand still for any
one thing in particular.44
The coffin-metaphor moves throughout the novel until it is finally buried. It is alive and
intriguing, elusive and slippery. As with Addie's jar of molasses, it is vaguely named,
cryptically referring to something signified. The coffin has meaning for its transporters,
and yet when each impedes its movement (Vardaman's holes, Darl's fire), the box shows
itself to be an empty frame.
What Faulkner demonstrates is that characters exist only in their words. Each
narrative remains disjointed from the other narratives not only in its sectioning off as a
chapter but in its narrative truths. A simple comparison of Darl’s version of his mother’s

corpse with Vardaman’s depiction would demonstrate the indeterminacy of truth in the

novel. This is one of the many narratological lessons The Sound and the Fury and As_I

 

‘4 ibid. (272).

41

Lay Dying teach us: that since meaning cannot exist before it is articulated and perceived,
there can never be two identical meanings if their articulations come from two different
sources.” Although Darl is able to read thoughts (and hence corroborate truth), he must
still translate these readings into untrustworthy words so as to narrate them, and thus, his
credibility becomes compromised.
Faulkner closes with the replacing of the old Mrs. Bundren with a new Bundren
mother, a mother who like Addie is voiceless. Her new family symbolically does not
speak to their new mother figure when Anse, appropriately fixed with a new set of teeth
(i.e. empowered by voice, narrative) introduces her as his new wife. The novel fittingly
closes before we hear an exchange of greetings. One narratological treatment of
Faulkner’s refusal to record the family’s response might apply Todorov’s explanation of
absence with respect to words and desire. In his treatment of Benjamin Constant’s
Adolphe, Todorov describes a profound relation between speech and desire:
Both function analogously; words imply the absence of things, just as
desire implies the absence of its object, and these absences are imposed
despite the ‘natural’ necessity of things and of the object of desire. Both
defy the traditional image which represents objects in themselves,
independent of their relation to the person for whom they exist. Both
reach an impasse: that of communication, that of happiness. Words are to
things what desire is to its object.46

By the novel’s end Addie is both physically and spiritually absent from the novel. The

prosopopeic empowering of the dead that we see earlier in the novel comes to a stop.

Upon burial, Addie is no longer the gerundial “dying” but dead and absent. Once she is

buried—once this journey is accomplished—there is no need for prosopopeic words.

Regardless of the Bundren children’s approval, the mother figure is reinstated.

 

‘5 See Tzvetan Todorov’s Literature et Sionification (20).

 

42

Therefore, the absence of a mother figure, which had once made words necessary, is now
fulfilled.

I close here highlighting the significance of Addie’s burial. The irony of her “off-
stage” burial cannot be overemphasized in a novel whose main journey is one towards a
laying to rest. Our absence from the burial is like missing the J oad Family's
disappointing arrival to California in The Grgpes of Wrgfl. Why is it that our
expectations of Addie's burial are left unsatisfied? Certainly this is a novel about the
struggle towards rather than the achieving of a goal, but perhaps we should analyze this
conspicuous omission in terms of narrative expectation. Why is it that the narrative
frame of the text refuses to include this key scene? Faulkner’s omission continues the
narrative emptiness of centers defined in the displacement of Addie’s soliloquy and the
impenetrable journey of the coffin. The burial also evokes a metaphor disconnected from
its meaning, narratively out of view from representation. Faulkner’s deliberate restriction
of our viewing Addie’s burial draws attention to the disnarrated possibilities that arise
through his narrative choices in framing. The following chapter further elaborates on
Faulkner’s decided framing of the novel’s conclusion as it examines how the disnarrated

elements in James Joyce create open-ended narrative possibilities.

 

‘6 The Poetics of Prose (105-6).

43

CHAPTER TWO

PERHAPS SHE HAD NOT TOLD HIM ALL THE STORY: THE DISNARRATED
IN JAMES JOYCE

While the preceding chapter discussed narrative frames and their relation to
metaphor, a reading of James Joyce’s Dubliners and M will further elaborate on the
relationship between Modernism and contemporary narratology by illustrating how the
disnarrated aspects of these works yield glimpses into "purely imagined worlds.” Integral
to the idea of the purely imagined is a sense of the unfamiliar, that which often has no
clear tangible counterpart in the real world. The Modernist text, I propose, defamiliarizes
and disorients the reader through its use of semi-opaque alternative windows of narratives
or what Gerald Prince calls “disnarratives.” Clearly if an alternative narrative lies outside
the “main” narrational world, its view remains inevitably less familiar, less visually
accessible than narratives contained within the diegetic frame of the text. Addie’s
narrative window, as we have seen, glazes over the comforting familiarity of time and
place; its hazy strangeness fails to fit comfortably into the frames of As I Lay Dyjng’s
defined structure. Separated from the spatial and temporal fixity of its companion voices,
her soliloquy raises as many questions as it answers. Its otherness constitutes the
disnarrated, a partially visible narrative window whose framed view prompts our
speculative gap-filling between its fragmented contents.

The early part of the twentieth century sees a strong correspondence between the
Russian Formalist concept of ostranenie or defamiliariziation and the narrative

experimentation of the Western Modernists. Viktor Shklovsky proposes “making

strange” literature to awaken literary critics from their passivity.l The task seemed easy
enough emblazoned in the striking bold letters of a manifesto, but how was the artist to
make new a literature apparently so solidified and commonplace with centuries of
familiarity? In his discussion of Ezra Pound's similar demand for literary renewal, Frank
Lentricchia suggests Modernist experimentation emerges as a self-emancipation from the
Harold Bloomsian “anxiety of influence” of traditional narrative modes. To break from
the stale literary tradition, the Modernist pledges himself to an exercise in Emersonian
self-creation:
In order to kill himself off as an expression of history and simultaneously
re-birth himself as the first man living utterly in the present, a man must
‘go into solitude,’ not only from society but also from his ‘chamber’ --the
place where ‘I read and write,’ where though no one is bodily present, ‘I’
am ‘not solitary,’ because ‘I’ have the unwanted company of all these
represented selves who populate my books. The ‘I’ must therefore be
emptied of everything, including its literary company.2
In its solitude Addie’s soliloquy provides a rich example of Modemism’s ridding
itself of external influence to renew its art. As a lone chapter stripped of reference to
time and space, Addie’s voice represents that of the Modernist himself—the ultimate
singular “I,” separated from the “influence” of its bookend voices. As a result of
Faulkner’s drive towards creative renewal, her narrative refuses to be confined within the
frames of an “expression of history.” Rather Addie is reborn in the gerundial present,
unaffected by the linear histories occurring on either side of her chapter. As a result, her
chapters stands as a defamiliarized renewal of the narrative structures we have come to

know both in the chapters preceding hers and in literary tradition itself. The newness of

Faulkner’s device emanates not from its diegetic empowerment of the dead; it is rather

 

1 Theog of Prose.

2 Modernist Quartet (201).

45

the isolation of the dead from the spatial, temporal, and stylistic expectations of narrative
Faulkner constructs on either side of Addie’s voice.

The Modemist impulse towards renewal implies a re-seeing with fresh twentieth-
century eyes of all that has already been seen. Certainly, Pound makes a concerted effort
towards re-vision in his poetry, while Joyce’s Dubliners, in the tone of the Russian
Forrnalists, marks the author’s first attempts to defamiliarize the ordinary so that subjects
commonly viewed as dull transform into the narratively interesting. In a letter to his
publisher Grant Richards, Joyce writes that he “dares to alter in the presentment, still
more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard.”3 As I discuss in more detail in the
Cubist chapter, Joyce’s technique of deforming the familiar represents a primary
objective of Modernism. Narrative deformations in the Modernist text involve

a progressive fading of that realism which has long been associated with
the novel; language ceases to be what we see through, and becomes what
we see. The novel hangs on that border between the mimetic and the
autotelic species of literature, between an art made by imitating things
outside itself, and an art that is an internally coherent making.4
For Joyce and the Modernists, language itself is deformed, remade to call attention to its
strangeness. In the transformation previously familiar subject matter is reanimated,
retold through a stylistically experimental lens. Thus, the crucial themes of a Modernist
text “are likely to lie not in anything which is explicitly affirmed, but in significances
generated by the way in which the story is told.”5

For Joyce, along with his American counterpart Faulkner, the art of narrative no

longer sustains the reality Oscar Wilde coined “Life.” Realism has become too real, too

 

3 Letters of James Joyce (134).
‘ John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury, ”The Introverted Novel” (401).

5 J. I-Iillis Miller, Fiction and Repgtition (176).

46

dull and removed from the strange and purely imagined. Faulkner responds to mimetic
convention by partitioning what potentially could read as a long-winded realist
pilgrimage into a surreal, fragmented tragicomedy. Imagining As I Lay ng'ng as a
straightforward realist novel, it would teeter upon the sentimental, the epic, and the
clichés of dime store adventure novels. Its title would lose its first person unfixed
peculiarity, perhaps spatially and temporally re-centerin g as The Bundlen FaimJy. Minus
its grisly details, which, like M’ lewdness or Picasso’s violence, helps to define the
Modernist persona, its plot might be a journey we would stumble upon in a nineteenth-
century realist work, and yet Faulkner salvages his subject from the routine by making it
morbidly humorous, strange and ultimately new. To rescue the Bundren family from the
noose of banality, Faulkner does not abandon the realist subject; instead he alters the
narrative presentation of that subject so that it defies the familiar diegetic frames of realist
depiction. The end product is a novel which resembles a nineteenth-century journey in
subject matter, but shares no likeness in how the journey is narratively framed. Similarly,
an initial approach to Joyce’s Dubliners might seem straightforward and realist, if not
partial towards a nineteenth-century sentimentality. Indeed this is not the case at all as
Joyce, like Faulkner, defamiliarizes his realist subject not through absolute abandonment
but through the obscuring glass of his narrative style, a technique fully realized in the
conclusive defarrriliarization of Finnegans Wake.

To disentangle the inevitable correspondence between Joyce and contemporary
narrative approaches, my discussion moves, as J. I-Iillis Miller puts it, “first from

narrative theory to Joyce, then from Joyce to narrative theory.”6 I begin by highlighting

 

6 “From Narrative Theory to Joyce; From Joyce to Narrative Theory” (3).

47

two useful terms devised by Gerald Prince: the unnarratable and the disnarrated. Prince
distinguishes between the unnarratable, which he defines as that which
according to a given narrative, cannot be narrated or is not worth narrating
either because it transgresses a law (social, authorial, generic, formal) or
because it defies the particular powers of a particular narrator. . .7
and the somewhat more complex disnarrated, which contains
alethic expressions of impossibility or unrealized possibility, deontic
expressions of observed prohibition, epistemic expressions of ignorance,
ontologic expressions of non-existence, purely imagined worlds, desired
worlds, or intended worlds, unfulfilled expectations, unwarranted beliefs,
failed attempts, crushed hopes, suppositions and false calculations, errors
and lies, and so forth.8
Prince and other narratologists make specific and differentiated use of each of these terms
in their workg. However, to simplify terminology and avoid confusion later in the
chapter, I adapt the disnarrated as a modified, more general indication of the
indeterminacy of certain unnarrated events. The term both encompasses and expands
upon the implications of the unnarratable and proves especially fitting to the narrative
experiments of Modernism.
Despite its appearance in any given text, the disnarrated enjoys a distinctive
prevalence in Modernism, highlighted by the movement’s fragmented views and voices
which give way to multiple narrative possibilities. Modernist narrative, more so than any

other genre, insists on our confronting and defining the problematic relationship between

what is said and left unsaid. In this respect Modernism necessitates Prince’s efficient,

 

7 We must remember that one narrator’s unnarratable may easily be another’s narratable. A humorous and
convincing example is Bloom’s moment-by—moment bathroom ritual in the “Calypso” section of Ulysses.
Never would we witness such a scene in Jane Austen.

8 "The Disnarrated” (2-3).

9 Lubomir Dolezel’s Heterocosmica further categorizes the disnarrated into four systems of “modal
constraints” that characterize narrative possibility. Most relevant here is his description of “alethic
constraints” of possibility and impossibility, which determine “the fundamental conditions of fictional
worlds, especially causality, time-space parameters, and the action capacity of persons” (115).

48

albeit seventy years late, critical term. The disnarrated fulfills several important roles in
Modernism, which I explore throughout this dissertation. First, it frequently works as
rhythmic device that disrupts the temporal fixity of a given narrative. Its suggestion of
alternate worlds distracts the reader from the main diegesis, literally slowing the narrative
speed of the text. Again the timelessness of Addie’s interruption provides a powerful
demonstration of my point, as does the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s m
Lighthouse, in which ten years pass within the space of disnarrative brackets. With the
disnarrated the reader is invited to apply the fragmented “hints” of possibility concealed
behind the veil of the main diegesis to the incomplete narratives of characters and events.
As Roland Barthes defines them, the fragmented hints of Modernism suggest narrative
modes of alternate possibility or alternative path openings requiring the reader to
participate in the narrative speculation of their significance.10

The disnarrated allows its reader to delve into the hopes, possible directions,
dreams, and fears of the focalized character. In Joyce’s “Little Cloud” Chandler is
introduced as gazing “out of the office window,” occupied with thoughts “of his meeting
with Gallaher, of Gallaher’s invitation, and of the great city London where Gallaher
lived,” without enlightening the reader as to what these thoughts encompass.11 We are
left to wait for Gallaher’s arrival and in the meantime conjecture as to what Chandler’s
thoughts mean. It should also be noted that the story’s opening with a character peering
out of a window follows a recuning Joycean pattern and signifies the disnarrated

possibilities behind the main diegetic frame. The view through the window, which is

obscured by “a shower of kindly golden dust,” leads Chandler to ponder life and

 

'° “Introduction a l’analyse structural des re’cits” (10)-
” Dubliners (59)

 

49

subsequently feel sad. Again Joyce’s disnarrated refuses to elaborate on Chandler’s
thoughts and how they arrive at sadness. The disnarrated gaps in “Little Cloud”
demonstrate how

every narrative function opens an alternative, a set of possible directions,

and every narrative progresses by following certain directions as opposed

to others: the disnarrated or choices not made, roads not taken,

possibilities not actualized, goals not reached.12

As an outgrowth of narrative fragmentation, the disnarrated enriches the text,
complicating it by allowing its narratives to venture beyond its diegetic parameters.
Perhaps it is this quality of illuminating possible paths that makes a Modernist text far
more realistic than its nineteenth-century counterpart. The multiple possibilities of
Modernism represents a new realism, one that no longer pretends to omnisciently capture
the world, but rather discovers its reality in the collective experience of its narrative trails.
The lesson learned of traditional realism is that the singular perspective of omniscience
disappoints as an adequate frame of all the narrative possibilities of any given “truth.”
Narratologists Marie-Laure Ryan and Mieke Bal offer similar approaches to the

disnarrated, which deserve mention here. Ryan applies the term “virtually embedded
narratives” to describe a narrative produced in a character's mind, which may or may not
correspond to the main diegesis external to that mind.13 Bal characterizes the
complication of disnarrated signals within the text as “the problem of the discourse in the
discourse.” In her study of Wuthering Heights, Bal explains that a diegetic “interruption”

must satisfy certain conditions to constitute an embedded narrative. First, the embedded

relationship must be perceptible to the analytical reader. Simply put—if it is not there, it

 

‘2 Prince ibid. (5).
‘3 “Embedded Narratives" (319-40).

50

is not there. Again much of Modemism’s experimental intensity relies on its antagonistic
announcing of its embedded narratives. Second, the hierarchical relationship between
diegesis and embedded narrative often falls under the guise of “the master-servant
relation, the one and the many, the whole and the parts, the valid and the useless, the
important and the futile, subject and object, container and contained.”14 In its constant
juxtaposition between traditional diegetic frames and narrative otherness, Modernism
questions and destabilizes Bal’s hierarchical relationships, further fragmenting the
diegetic frame as the hypodiegetic gains narrative strength. Bal’s third criterion requires
that the two narratives must somehow belong to the same narrational universe. In
Joyce’s case the city of Dublin would constitute the narrational universe that contains the
orbiting diegetic and hypodiegetic satellites of the individual stories.

Bal’s definition provides a helpful evocation of the frame image. Consider the
main diegesis as a frame (within another frame of the text as a whole) which contains all
the elements of the focalized narrative. The disnarrated lurks both within and outside of
the diegetic frame, and yet since it cannot stand intelligibly on its own, it must always
somehow intersect with the main frame that retains a tenuous hold on it. The disnarrated,
however, still enjoys some narrative flexibility in its relation to the diegesis. Its location
and the degree to which its narrative voice extends—whether its utterable length stretches
across a whole chapter or confines itself to a simple word—varies with each Modernist
experiment. In _Ihfisps alone Joyce explores a whole range of embedded endurance. As
Bal suggests and the Modernists demonstrate, the diegesis is “enriched, set off, even

radically transformed by its relation with the embedding unit.”‘5

 

14 “Notes on Narrative Embedding” (4344).
‘5 ibid. (48).

51

Before I delve further into the disnarrated features in Joyce, we will benefit from

more clarification of the aspects of the main diegesis. Seymour Chatman and Roland

Barthes both use the term kernel to describe textual elements that are “logically essential

to the narrative action and cannot be eliminated without destroying its causal-

chronological coherence.”16 Kernels stand in opposition to disnarrated satellites, which

are somewhat dispensable to the narrative. To exemplify how a story can be broken

down into its narrative kernels, Chatman simplifies Joyce’s “Eveline” as such:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.

One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play...
Now she was going to go away... to leave her home.

Was that wise?

She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall.

Out of a maze of distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to show her

what was her duty.

7.

8.

She felt [Frank] seize her hand.

No! No! No!17

Though we do not have to accept Chatman’s dissection, his example nicely

illustrates the functional differences between the main diegesis and the disnarrated.18 The

story’s kernels focus on Eveline’s thinking about doing things rather than actually doing

them, thereby suggesting a wealth of disnarrative possibilities that exist in between

Chatrnan’s eight narrative turns. As a story of reflection rather than action, “Eveline”

 

'6 See Prince, Dictionary of Narratology (48).
'7 “New Ways of Analyzing Narrative Structures” (6).

52

prioritizes the disnarrated over narrative certainty.19 Throughout the story, Eveline and
the reader try to “weigh each side of the question” that her reflections raise. Joyce
distinguishes her possible paths with a recurring pattern of actions Eveline “was about” to
do. Since we do not witness the transpiring of theses possible actions, her future remains
concealed behind disnarrative speculation. The story closes with Eveline giving Frank
“no sign of love or farewell or recognition,” analogous to the narrative’s refusing closure
to the reflective paths of possibility evoked by its disnarrated.

Gerald Prince’s observation that “narrative accommodates the real as well as the
fictional, lying and error as well as truth” seems particularly fitting to Joyce’s work.20
The experimental development from Dubliners to Ulysses demands a narratological
analysis as we witness an increasing resistance to conventional narrative structures.

From the example of Joyce, we can also gain a better understanding of Gerald Prince’s
ideas because the Joyce repeatedly blurs the distinction between the unnarratable and the
disnarrated. Frequently Joyce either truncates or omits altogether the unnarratable so that
it actually transforms into the disnarrated. With the subtle suggestion or omission of the
unnarratable (certain events, character names, etc.), Joyce in effect highlights and
defamiliarizes these sideline narratives, bringing them to diegetic attention while refusing
to satisfy our narrative expectations. Readers are invited to ponder the text’s suggested

disnarrated possibilities and to fill in the narrative frame’s gaps with speculative readings.

What distinguishes the Joycean narrative is its insistence

 

'8 Both Jonathan Culler and Roland Barthes disagree with Chatrnan’s approach. Culler, taking a response
theory stance, argues that the determination of kernels is subject to the cultural background of the reader
(135). Barthes confers that we must consider each reader’s own “language of plot. "

‘9 Trevor L. Williams’ Marxist-feminist essay “Resistance to Paralysis in Dubliners” deserves mention here
as it argues that though Eveline ironically maintains linguistic ownership of the story’s title, she is denied a
voice and therefore denied subjectivity (441).

2° “Narratology, Narrative, and Meaning” (54S).

53

upon the ability to conceive and manipulate hypothetical worlds or states
of affairs and the freedom to reject various models of intelligibility, of
coherence and significance, various norms, conventions or codes for
world- and fiction-making.21

Prince’s description of the deforming actions “conceive” and “manipulate”
pinpoints the stylistic and theoretical approach that sets Joyce apart from the realist. The
J oycean method conceives the possibility of other narrative worlds, manipulating through
narrative suggestion the extent to which narratees may wander through these worlds. The
narrative complexity of the J oycean text derives from its rejecting the full development of
these suggested worlds into diegeses of their own. Joyce chooses not to name characters,
delve into their thoughts, or describe their actions, and while this choice may stem
partially from a desire for publishable brevity, it also indicates a decisive move towards
the defamiliarization of the Russian Forrnalists and Ezra Pound.

Typographically, Dubliners does not proclaim itself “strange” the way the visual
texts of As I Lay Dying, Ulysses, In Our Time, or Qahp do, and still it subverts the
diegetic tradition by more subtle means. As a loose unity of stories, the collection
paradoxically refuses to be partitioned into freestanding texts, or counterwise to be fully

unified as a whole.22 As with Tender Buttons, WinesburaOhio, Cane, In Our Time and

Go Down Moses, Dubliners suggests a genre incongruent with the traditional categories

 

of short story, novel or poetry. It is a "synergistic fiction," composed of simultaneous
and somewhat independent fictions, which, unified under the frame of a title, work

together (while retaining their autonomy) to provide a greater effect than the sum of their

 

21 - .
1brd. (6).

22 Of course the stories were first serialized separately. They are also often anthologized individually, but

together within the frame of a title, their intertextuality form a more cohesive albeit fragmented frame of

Dublin.

54

individual actions. Joyce’s loosely linked fictions, each bordered by the frame of a
chapter, create a partitioned and fragmented Dublin. The collection resembles a
multiperspective Cubist portrait, incomplete and yet multidimensional, whose narrative
windows threaten to open into territory outside the borders of the title Dubliners.

One spillover effect of its fragile frames comes in the resurfacing of various
characters in mss_es_ so that the two texts fall together within a larger even less unified
Dublin frame, both encompassing and independent of the smaller Dublins of the two
books. As I explain below, Dubliners frames the hypodiegetic narratives of Mrs. Sinico,
Hynes, and Parnell. 'In _Iflygggs Joyce resurfaces these characters, further silencing and
marginalizing their fragmented narratives. Thus, Joyce complicates the disnarrated on
two fronts. First, narrative gaps within each text obscure the “true” story behind each
figure. Second, the intertextual cross-referencing between the texts’ characters further
dilutes their hypodiegetics. With I_Jl_yss_£s’ additional information, or rather speculation,
that Mrs. Sinico dies by accident, the disnarrated events surrounding her death, initially
fostered by Dubliners, become less accessible. Mrs. Sinico’s subsequent appearance in
we; represents an alternate framing of her narrative that further obscures rather than
illuminates the cause of her death.

The shape of a frame as an image plays a significant role in Modernism. As
Faulkner evokes the image of the coffin frame, Joyce draws our attention to the
geometric form of the gnomon within the first paragraph of Dubliners. Although most
critical discussions center on its primary definition as a sundial’s pointer, I am more

concerned with its second more abstract connotation: the geometric form which is left of

55

a parallelogram after a similar parallelogram is removed containing one of its comers.23

As Harold Bloom describes, the shape extracted resembles a drunken letter L:

/~2/

Joyce’s gnomon corresponds to Faulkner’s coffin in both its six-sided frame and

 

its curious imbalance and incompletion. As a frame, it likewise confines the journey of
an indeterminate metaphor disconnected from its object so that we know the Dubliners
frame “means” something, but its metaphors refuse to satisfy our attempts to bore holes
into its significance. As Faulkner’s coffin treks through the novel refusing to reveal its
contents, Joyce’s gnomon makes its arduous progress through Dubliners, traveling intact
and yet undisclosed of the “meaning-space” that unifies the individual stories. In is;
Lay Dyh'ng each voice is typographically and narratively partitioned off from the others,
drawing attention and speculation to the disnarrated events and voices that fall in between
Faulkner’s chapter-frames. With Joyce, the suggested and literal space between each
story also illuminates the disnarrated, offering its reader glimpses into the unsaid
narrative possibilities of Dublin. Following the intertextual signals between stories, the
reader is invited to make disnarrative connections between the unwritten spatial and
temporal gaps that separate them. The disnarrated represents a frame left unconstructed

for the reader to build.

 

23 I have paraphrased Philip Herring’s definition in Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle (3).

56

Joyce’s recuning placement of characters either peering in or out of windows
furnishes a telling analogy to the narratee’s perceptive position in relation to the
disnarrated. Dubliners opens with a boy outside peering into a window frame; the novel
closes with Gabriel Conroy inside gazing out a window. Both characters follow an
epiphanic event (Father Flynn and Michael Furey’s deaths) with an attempt to “see” some
metaphorical equivalent beyond the window glass, but both views are hindered by the
disnarrated distortion of that view, manifested in paralysis and snow. “Araby” and
"Eveline" likewise open with windows peering into the disnarrated. The disappointed
boy in “Araby,” standing below a lighted window, “could see so little,” his senses seem
to “desire to veil themselves,’ while Eveline stares out of a window, glazed with “the
odour of dusty cretonne.” In much the same way Joyce’s narratee-readers sit on either
side of a window seeking the disnarrated meaning behind the epiphanic clues buried
within the narrative. Narratees, both characters and reader, recognize from the partially
obstructed view a meaning behind the narrative hints that have drawn them to this
window, and yet the narrative refuses access to the view. We are abandoned by the
diegesis to write the disnarrated it conceals.

The disnarrated often surfaces in what might be called Dubliners’ silent "death-
acts"—specifically those hypodiegetic narratives of characters' literal death which surface
only in fragmented forms and remain partially stifled by the main diegesis. Joyce
repeatedly creates disjointed secondary narratives deprived of the main narrative's access
to suspense, climax, and the dramatic questions familiar to the classic narrative. There is,

as Gerald Doherty puts it, “a paralyzing appropriation” of hypodiegetic narratives by the

57

diegesis which disallows their full utterance.24 With this marked distancing, if not
defamiliarizing, of the actual act of dying, death is displaced from its familiar function as
the culmination of plot—an ironic stylistic twist considering death constitutes a
predominant theme throughout the collection.25 To achieve the distancing and obscuring
of a death scene, Joyce plants the kernel of death as a spoken act (i.e. He told me she
died) rather than a literal depiction of the scene. Death occurs in Joyce and throughout
Modernism, and yet it is seldom presented as a narrative event. Rather the Modernist text
concerns itself with the disnarrated effects of death on the living—how mourning
subjectively fills in the unnarratable gaps between the living and the dead.

In every case death in Dubliners occurs "offstage," spatially and temporally
removed from the mourners who must “write” its narrative. In spite of any narrative
expectations established by the literary tradition, Joyce’s deaths remain curiously out of
view of the narrative eye. The impact of death comes through its narrative absence as
opposed to its traditional depiction as a climatic kernel. Since the moumer (along with
the reader) is never present at the death-act, he or she must rely on secondhand narrative
"distortions" of the given event. In addition to the survivors within the text, we learn of
death only after the incident has occurred. Father Flynn, Parnell, Mrs. Sinico, and
Michael Furey, to name a few, all die like Addie Bundren outside the time and setting of
their framing stories so that the circumstances behind their departures remain shrouded in

mystery, removed from narrative accessibility. Often the death-acts are recounted in a

 

2‘ "Undercover Stories: Hypodiegetic Narration in James Joyce’s Dubliners" (37).

25 John Mepham’s "Mourning and Modernism" examines the absence of death (or of death serving as a
work’s closing action), in contrast to the distinct presence of mourning in Virginia Woolf. His essay
equally applies to Woolt’s Modernist contemporaries, especially Joyce.

58

matter-of-fact tone by nameless sources unfamiliar and unreliable to our main characters,
who must in turn both mourn and interpret the event at which they were not present.

In several instances we hear about characters’ deaths only in passing, either
through an obituary or by word-of-mouth as if their hypodiegetic narratives emerge by
mere accident. Although we can safely assume that the offstage deaths do occur since the
deceased fail to reappear, we can never be sure of the circumstances behind the death-act
since the main diegesis defamiliarizes the death through its disallowing of both its own
characters and the reader to bear witness to these seemingly key events.26 This is not to
say death is not important in Joyce. On the contrary, the absence of the death-act as a
narrative kernel intensifies the significance of death as the Joycean story explores how
characters construct subjective, if not inaccurate, narratives to frame the inaccessible
losses they mourn. The devaluing of death-acts causes what Richard Terdiman calls “a
lack of solidin that in our ordinary understanding makes an event the fact it is.”27
Mourners and readers alike cannot easily dismiss the uncertain narrative of death because
Joyce complicates its absence by planting contradictory disnarrative hints that encourage
our curiosity and speculation.

The opening line of "The Sisters," the first line of Dubliners, sets an atmosphere
of death as Joyce introduces the living Father Flynn as having "no hope for him this time:
it was the third stroke." Flynn dies at some undisclosed point before, during or after the

boy’s study of “the lighted square of window,” which leads the boy to the disnarrated

 

2‘ Though Joyce’s offstage death characterizes a Modernist strategy of defamiliarization, it is not
necessarily a new device. Shakespeare’s conspicuous refusal to “show” Ophelia’s death suggests an equal
disnarrative quality. As often the case in Shakespeare, the “truth” of characters’ deaths in Joyce may only
be established through their narrative absence. All other circumstances surrounding their deaths remains

speculative.
2 “The Depreciation of the Event” (138).

59

speculation, “If he was dead,” that dominates the rest of the story.28 Like the opening
scene of As I Lay Dyh'ng, in which Darl watches the construction of his mother’s coffin
only to give way to the voice of Cora, the secondary narrative of Flynn’s death opens the
collection, then is quickly re-submerged and upstaged by the main and "living" diegesis
of the nameless boy, paralyzed by that death. As with Addie, the ghost of Flynn,
however, continues the act of “dying,” hovering in the background and pitting the untold
fragments of his hypodiegetic narrative against the living's own narrative of Flynn’s life
and death. Certainly Flynn's recurring haunting of the boy suggests a disnarrated story
wanting to be told: "It murmured; and I understood that it desired to confess something"
(3). In a similar moment from “An Encounter,” the boy narratee to the old man’s
monologue thinks to himself that something “seemed to plead with me that I should
understand him” (18). Both narratees within and outside the text sit as frustrated
listeners, left to speculate from the fragmented evidence of its existence as to what the
speaker’s confession might be. Hence, the disnarrated surfaces as the narrative
stimulation to hypothesize.

In the larger Modernist paradigm Flynn’s ghost represents the partially tangible
disnarrated standing between presence and absence, affirmation and denial. The
Modernist disnarrated hinges on the simultaneous juxtaposition of being and not being,
effectively negating the spatial, temporal and verbal stability needed to fully confirm or
reject the suggested possible worlds of its narrative. The inbetween world of the
disnarrated, like “the reflection of candles on the darkened blind” of a window, both

invites and resists our penetrating its interior so that we recognize Flynn’s constant

presence only to perceive the narrative absence of his story. Aware of Flynn’s

 

73 My italics.

60

paradoxical presence/absence, his mourners do not speak as they gaze “at the empty
fireplace,” 3 disnarrated void which frames the unspeakable significance of their
mourning. The “silence [takes] possession of the little room” as Eliza stops “suddenly as
if to listen” to Flynn’s disnarrated confession.

Like Addie’s contempt for words as “lacks to fit the shape” or the failure of
metaphorical language I later explore in Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, Flynn’s
confession is wordless, unreachable through the frames of verbal representation. There is
“no sound in the house” despite narrative prompts that Flynn’s mourners should “extract
meaning from his unfinished sentences.” His coffin, like that of Addie, sits within the
larger diegetic frame of the room embedded as an impenetrable narrative to its viewers.
Old Cotter, along with the others, can only respond to Flynn’s disnarrated through
speculation fragmented by wordless ellipses: “’I have my own theory about it,’ he said.
‘I think it was one of those... peculiar cases... But it’s hard to say. . . ’” (2). As I further
elaborate in the next chapter on Woolf, the disnarrated resides in the unutterable ellipses
of the living’s attempts to linguistically account for its presence. The ellipsis visually
signals the simultaneous presence and absence of the disnarrated. Despite the
inaccessibility of the disnarrated, the Modernist text persistently draws narrative attention
to its existence, diegetically empowering the unnarratable to take up the narrative time
and space indicated by the empty presence of ellipses.

Exiles, Dubliners (“The Dea ”), Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake all close with one

 

character’s confession to another followed by the confessor’s falling asleep. The absent

confessor leaves the listener awake to ponder the disnarrated meaning of the confession.29

 

 

29 David G. Wright’s essay “Interactive Stories in Dubliners” elaborates on this pattern.

61

Early in Dubliners Joyce establishes the theme as Flynn’s dies (a consummate state of
sleep) before he is able to complete his story. The boy’s subsequent assumptions about
Flynn’s disnarrated initiates an emerging pattern, in which whenever a listener questions
a storyteller’s narrative, the latter either dies (Flynn, Mrs. Sinico) or falls asleep (Gretta
or Bloom in Ms) before he or she can complete their narrative. The confessor
abandons the listener to narrate the rest of the story.

The relationship between the confessor’s initial unfinished construction of the
disnarrated frame and the listener’s subsequent filling in of that frame corresponds to
Mieke Bal’s idea of the container-contained, which describes the narrative exchange
between embedded narratives and the main diegesis. For Bal, an embedded narrative
depends on the diegetic frame’s containment to define its narrative boundaries. Upon
Flynn’s death the boy’s narrative contains the incomplete hypodiegetic frame of Flynn.
Since the dead priest’s confession remains unfinished, his narrative is embedded within
the boy’s futile narrative to utter its meaning. Flynn’s voice exists as a separate though
inaccessible hypodiegetic that depends on the boy’s diegetic privilege for further
expression. The image of the voiceless dead as a simultaneously present and absent
narrative that relies on the living to contain or frame its utterance recurs throughout
Dubliners and extends to the more complex narratives of Mes. The ghost of Stephen
Dedalus’s mother, for example, rises “silently... mute reproachful.” In one sense the
recurring appearance of her ghost personifies Stephen’s restless past and overbearing
guilt. As much as he tries to banish the ghost, he is unable to deny the hypodiegetic
surfacing of its unutterable narrative. Like Father Flynn and Addie, Stephen’s mother

remains both hypodiegtically present and absent throughout the novel. Accompanied by

62

a voiceless choir of virgins and confessors, her ghost lingers as a speechless confessor,
leaving both Stephen and the reader to decipher her meaning.

Joyce’s concurrent suggestion and arrest of secondary voices defines much of the
Modernist narrative experiment and necessitates narratological terms to account for its
deviation from traditional narrative structures. More than any other literary genre, the
Modernist text derives its complexity and richness from a juxtaposition of diegetic with
hypodiegetic voices that allows the suggestion of oftentimes conflicting disnarrated
possibilities.30 In As I Lay Dying Faulkner’s stylistic denial of the traditional story's plot
and conclusion disallows Addie’s voice to continue beyond her hypodiegetic frame.
Limited to a single fragmented soliloquy, her narrative is truncated, unfulfilled and
defamiliarized as with the strange unknowable confession of Flynn. What complicates
the novel is its insistence that Addie has something to say, and yet there are no words to
satisfy her disnarrated confession brought to our attention. Throughout Dubliners Joyce
continues a similar pattern of evoking secondary narratives only to stop them short of
their full realization. What is most important here is the effect the fragmentation of
secondary narratives has on the narratee—both listener within the text and reader outside
the text. Since neither Flynn’s young friend nor the reader can ventriloquize a narrative
that remains elusive, both are left to fill in the gaps suggested by Flynn’s disnarrative. To
borrow from J oycean imagery, the failed conclusion of the hypodiegetic essentially
“paralyzes” the narratee between the secondhand accounts of the living and the semi-

spoken prosopopeic "truths" of the dead, creating what Paul de Man warns is the

 

3° Certainly the more radical experiments of the postmodern genre further partition narrative into
conflicting diegetic and hypodiegetic voices. I have, however, omitted these experiments as they represent
secondary developments based on the narrative lessons learned from Modernist experimentation.

63

latent threat that inhabits prosopopeia, namely that [of] making death

speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token,

that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death.31

After Dubliners opens with two stories of straightforward first person narrative,
the narrative shifts in “Araby” demand our sharper attention. As the third frame of
Dubliners’ youth cycle, the narrative voice narrows from a removed omniscience to a
collective “We” and finally to a lonesome “1.” Joyce has not accidentally overlooked the
transformation of perspective; rather he diminishes the narrative voice from omniscience
to a fragmented subjectivity in unison with the narrator’s growing sense of isolation.
Again Joyce defamiliarizes the reader through a dissatisfaction of narrative expectations.
As “Araby” suggests, the more passive the narration is, the more active the reader must
be in “deciphering” the meanings of the text, and even the singular voice which closes the
story refuses to lend much help in this decoding. The diminishing perspective from
“We” to “I” indicates a narrative withering of the diegetic view in favor of a subjective
disnarrated. Joyce reduces the narrative eye from the opening scene’s minimal yet
sufficient light of “feeble lanterns” to the “completely dark” hall of the bazaar that closes
the story. Perhaps the wider perspective of the story’s initial “We” may have satisfied
narrative expectations as to what the boy’s visit to the bazaar means, but Joyce has
already narrowed our access to his narrative by the time his disnarrated epiphany occurs.
In choosing October 6, 1902, the anniversary of Pamell's death, as the setting for

his attack on contemporary Irish politics in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," Joyce

splits his narrative into two conflicting voices: that of the present and living against the

continuous interruption of the past. Although the idea of Parnell governs the entire scene,

 

3’ Wm (78).

dominating the men's conversation, cynicism, and mutual distrust, the dead leader’s
narrative appears only in fragments. The scene is unpleasantly dim except for the
dwindling presence of fire (fireplace, cigarettes), flickering with the past glory of the
increasingly obscure Parnell. The hypodiegetic narrative of Parnell surfaces for brief
moments, literally illuminating the story, for instance, when Mr. O'Connor lights a
cigarette throwing light on the ivy leaf in his lapel. Like the ghost of Flynn, the wake of
Parnell is unspoken, incomplete, inadequately voiced by the disnarrative patchwork of
the sycophantic Hynes and O’Connor. The living’s inadequate containment of Parnell,
who is now disnarratively “united with Erin’s heroes of the past,” evokes Friedrich
Nietzsche’s point that the “religion of the historical power... over and over again turns
into a naked admiration of success, and leads to idolatry of the actual.”32 As narratees the
gathered Dubliners listen to Mr. Hynes' ode to the dead Parnell, which is a "fine piece of
writing." As fine as it may be, it is still a piece of writing, a constructed narrative that
reflects its author's virtual narrative of the absent Parnell rather than the hypodiegetic
reality of his life and death. Hyne’s ode describes the fallen leader in disnarrated terms:
Pamell’s principal actions being the narratively incomplete verb forms “would have,’
“dreamed” and “strove.” The “truth” of Parnell has “faded into impalpability through
death, through absence,” and the story’s irony rests in the moumer’s contradictory
attempts to account for the indefinable space between Pamell’s presence and absence. 33
Even characters such as Henchy and Lyons, who choose to disregard Parnell,

cannot refrain from filling in Pamell’s fragmented narrative. In a struggle between the

living and the dead, the diegetic and the hypodiegetic, Mr. Henchy refuses to allow

 

32 See UntimelLMeditations (263).
33 Ulysses (240).

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Pamell’s spirit into the room: he "snuffed vigorously" and "spat so copiously that he
nearly put out the fire which uttered a hissing protest" (109). And if at times the main
narrative appears on the brink of yielding to the demands of the hypodiegetic narrative, it
is only temporary as the former is quick to reassert its dominance: "’Pamell,’ said Mr.
Henchy, ’rs dea ’" (116). Later in Ulysses, the disnarrated of Pamell’s ghost rises only to
be silenced by Hynes’ lamentation that “Parnell will never come again” (143). In place
of what we might call Pamell’s “confession,” his living adversaries write alternate
disnarratives, less flattering than the equally “written” nostalgic memories of his
supporters. His opponents’ narratives, which emphasize his adultery, are perhaps as
fabricated as any positive narrative that monumentalizes him. As with the case of Flynn,
the secondhand memories of Parnell, whose death-act remains distant from those framing
his narrative, make a poor substitute for the dead leader’s inaccessible revelation.

In "A Painful Case" Duffy is haunted and unmasked by Mrs. Sinico's suicide four
years after their acquaintance. Once again the death-act occurs far removed in time and
space from its retelling. Despite this distance Duffy’s self-assured indifference proves
vulnerable to the lingering hypodiegetic dead as the story closes with his confession of
guilt and remorse.34 As Mrs. Sinico’s death is revealed through an obituary far removed
from the actual event, Joyce denies both Duffy and the reader direct access to the pivotal
death scene though it is key to our full understanding of the story’s kernels. The
dispassionate news article well cites the necessary “death-evidence” we, as narratees,

require to believe the event has transpired.35 However, the specific circumstances behind

 

3‘ Douwe Fokkema and Elrud Ibsch’s Modernist Conjectures contains an interesting analysis of this story
(55).
35 Mary Lowe-Evans, “Who Killed Mrs. Sinico?” (396).

66

the event occur outside the narrative eye of the story, thereby producing the purely
imagined worlds of conjecture.36 In a similar scene from “The Sisters,” an unemotional
card pinned to the drapery door “persuades” the boy that Flynn is dead, thus prompting
him to speculate through the rest of the story. In 1% Bloom glances at a
unique advertisement to cause passers to stop and wonder. . . with all
extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient
terms not exceeding the span of causal vision. (848)
Joyce indicates the “reminiscences of a human subject suffering” evoked by an envelope
addressed “To My Dear Son Leopold” (853). In each case Joyce proves that even the
“just the facts” straightforwardness of reportage treads the narrow pane of the
disnarrative window and remains subject to conjecture.

Fragrnentary suggestions of Mrs. Sinico’s narrative emerge when Duffy senses
moments he seems "to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his." Upon
completing the obituary, he gazes out the window, a framed view of the disnarrated, and
his memory begins “to wander” as “the light failed.” Asking himself, "Why had he
withheld life from her," he confirms the subordinate relationship between the main
diegesis and the secondary narrative. Mrs. Sinico's death narrative falls silent,
paraphrased and truncated in the shadow of Duffy’s main diegesis. As Flynn’s mourners
sit in a silent room, Duffy waits “for some minutes listening... and [can] hear nothing”
(102). Since Duffy does not have access to Mrs. Sinico's hypodiegetic narrative, he can

only speculate as to the reasons behind her death based on his role as narratee to the

secondary account of the event. As Duffy evokes “alternately the two images in which

 

3" Suzanne Katz Hyman proposes that the news report is written in euphernistic and vague code phrases as a
way of saying sorta voce that which cannot be uttered aloud. “The language of the newspaper,” she writes,
“seems, like all of the language in the story, inadequate to the job it has to do” (117).

67

he now conceived her,” his guilt stems not from the true event—for the cunning Joyce
refuses to do more than crack open that narrative window—but from his own disnarrated
version, which in turn egotistically rules her death a suicide”7

Joyce, however, carefully points out that Duffy “began to doubt the reality of
what memory told him.” Later in “The Dead” Gretta also writes her own perceived
reasons behind Michael Furey's death ("I think he died for me"), a death reported to her
after the fact, and her choice of the unsure verb “think” mirrors Duffy’s self-doubt in
speculation. Duffy watches a train disappear as its engine reiterates “the syllables of her
name.” In a similar passage from “Araby,” the young boy hears the “syllables of the
word Araby,” which cast a disnarrated “Eastern enchantrnent” over their listener,
reminding us of the boy’s dream in “The Sisters” in which he travels "very far away, in
some land where the customs were strange—in Persia" (5). The disnarrated meaning of
the bazaar remains distanced from the boy, leaving him “burned with anguish and anger”
akin to Duffy’s final lament that “he was alone.” In both cases the disnarrated fragments
of Mrs. Sinico’s death or the inaccessible Araby entice their listener to speculate and fill
in the “perfectly silent” narratives these hypodiegetics evoke.

The final story, “The Dead,” provides the most culminate examination of the
problematic relationship between the diegetic living and the hypodiegetic dead. Gabriel's
speech, much like the obituaries and odes in the earlier stories, summons a fragmented
resurrection of the dead in its romantic comparison of the dead present with a living but

virtual past:

 

37 Ulysses subsequently provides us with death-evidence contrary to that of Duffy, thereby complicating

and further obscuring the truth. Bloom asks if Stephen knew Mrs. Sinico who was “accidentally” killed at
Sydney Parade station (815).

68

Listening tonight to the names of all those great singers of the past it
seemed to me, I must confess, that we were living in a less spacious age...
And if they are gone beyond recall, let us hope, at least, that in gatherings
such as this we shall still speak of them. .. still cherish in our hearts the
memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not
willingly let die. (183)

Similar to Virginia Woolf’ s designation of a pseudo “All Souls Day” as the date
for Mrs. Dallowgy’s resurrection of the dead, Joyce ties the Christmas Day of the
Epiphany to mark their return. The hypodiegetic narratives of Michael Furey, Gabriel's
mother, the two Patrick Morkans among others all rise from the dead to challenge the
story’s diegetic frame. As mythologized monuments of the dead they represent, ghosts
illuminate an unresolved past and the paralytic attempts of the living to narratively
retrieve that history. Throughout “The Dead” and the collection as a whole, the living
blur the line between memory and obsession in their inevitable recreation rather than
recollection of the deceased. The living summon the dead through the speculative stories
and fragmented songs that dominate the Day of the Epiphany. In the previous stories the
epiphanies suggested by Flynn, the Araby, Mrs. Sinico, and Parnell all remain narratively
inaccessible to their narratees. Here the epiphanic meaning of the dead haunts the
Morkan home and demands center stage as the story’s title dictates. The epiphany lurks
as a similar present absence, its meaning narratively validated and yet unattainable
beyond disnarrated speculation. Once recreated, the dead become disnarrated entities,
framed outside the diegesis, separate from both past and present. They reside in the
purely imagined as fusions of fact and fiction, memory and creation.

As the story develops, we recognize that despite his resurrecting speech, Gabriel

ironically denies the memory of the dead. Like Henchy in “Ivy Day” who wards off the

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rising hypodiegetic of Parnell, Gabriel refuses to relinquish the narrative floor to the dead
that haunt the room:
Our path through life is strewn with many such sad memories: and were
we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on
bravely with our work among the living... Therefore, I will not linger on
the past. I will not let any gloomy moralizing intrude upon us here
tonight. (184)
When Gabriel enters the Morkan house, he vigorously scrapes the snow from his shoes as
if to distance himself from the dead’s snowy narrative, which will dominate the story’s
conclusion.

As a book reviewer, Gabriel critiques stories rather than writes them, a further
indication of his distancing himself from the disnarrated stories of the dead. He is
confined to the realm of language, which my chapter on Virginia Woolf demonstrates as
inaccessible to the purely imagined worlds of the disnarrated. His “restless eyes” avert
the disnarrated behind the “cab windows rattling” in contrast to the “slow eyes” of Julia
Morkan and Mary Jane. Unlike the speech-giving Gabriel, the two women reside in
disnarrated realm of music, which encompasses the dead in both its evocation of past
singers and its uncontainable fluidity. The dead-like Julia Morkan and inarticulate Mary
Jane remain silent throughout much of the story, their voices heard only when they
perform a prosopopeic singing of the dead’s "old songs.” At times when the diegesis of
dialogue is silenced by “distant music” or stories, the hypodiegetic dead seem on the
verge of overcoming the main diegesis. And yet Gabriel, the son of a Morkan sister who
“had no musical talent,” cannot listen while Mary Jane plays “to the hushed drawing-

room.” Unwilling to relinquish diegetic space to the music of the dead, he waits for the

end of the piece with “resentment... in his heart,” and still his eyes and thoughts begin to

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“wander,” surfacing disnarrated memories of his dead mother and his engagement to
Gretta (167-8).

Gretta’s character contrasts significantly with Gabriel as she willingly rekindles
her past. Despite Gabriel’s warning her to wear galoshes because of the weather, Gretta
insists on walking in the snow without them, a feat impossible for her husband. Her
fragmented memory of Michael Furey, evoked through D'Arcy's song, sculpts a mythic
figure or virtual reality of her lost love. As Gretta embraces the disnarrated of her dead
lover, Gabriel stands "in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase." He does not
recognize the woman "standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also" (189).
As a disnarrated window with a partial view, D’Arcy’s song “The Lass of Aughrim”
paraphrases Gretta’s relationship with Michael. The narrative, however, is incomplete,
fragmented into three lines as Gretta cannot remember the title and D’Arcy forgets the
words.38 In a similar scene from “Clay,” Maria sings the disnarratively titled “I Dreamt
that I Dwelt.” Midway through her performance of “one of the old songs,” she
inadvertently sings the first verse twice:

I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls

With vassals and serfs at my side,

And of all who assembled within those walls
That I was the hope and the pride

I had riches too great to count, could boast
Of a high ancestral name,

But I also dreamt, which pleased me most,
That you loved me still the same. (92)

Analogous to D’Arcy’s song, Mary’s musical narrative is fragmented by both her

inability to sing or “write” the second verse and its disnarrative dream of possibility.

 

38 Wright, ibid. (289).

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What we learn of Michael Furey depends on Gretta’s distant account of his
narrative. In M we listen as Molly gets the details of her courtship with Bloom
wrong: “how he kissed me under the Moorish wall” (933). Here the “tru ” of Michael’s
hypodiegetic narrative is lost, rendered inactive and silent by the dominant, living and
fictionalized narrative of Gretta. His fragmented story is deprived of Gretta's narrative
access to suspense and climax so that her narrative of Michael is just that—hers—a
narrative based on what she merely "hears" from Michael's people. Both Gabriel and the
reader subsequently listen to the circumstances behind Michael's death-act via narrative
filters tainted by time, distance, and subjectivity. Along with Gabriel, we must wonder,
“perhaps she had not told him all the story” (201). Although Joyce does not provide
concrete evidence either supporting or refuting Gretta’s story, our estimate of its accuracy
hinges on her inconclusive thinking Michael dies for her. We must remember that even
the story’s title conceals the circumstances behind Michael’s death-act, focusing our
attention on the ambiguous dead as opposed to the specific event of his dying.

The speculative disnarrated that encompasses Michael’s death-act correlates to
David G. Wright’s argument that meaning in Dubliners

owes much to the gap between what the characters know and what we
know (or can discover). This discrepancy in turn depends on the hermetic
confinement of the major characters to a single story each and on our
access to literary contexts.39
As narratees to not only Gretta’s narrative account but to all the textual disnarrated
elements of Dubliners, we arrive at “The Dead” aware of the simultaneous presence and

absence of the inaccessible dead. We have learned as do the Dubliners themselves to

ponder and question the meaning concealed behind the disnarrated. Perhaps Gabriel’s

 

39 ibid. (285).

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reflections on Romeo and Juliet prompted by Mary Jane’s song most closely exemplifies
Wright’s point. Certainly as privileged narratees, Gabriel and all readers of Shakespeare
recognize the tragedy in Romeo’s misreading of the disnarrated truth behind J uliet’s
sleep. Joyce, however, complicates the disnarrated of Michael’s Romeo-esque death as
all narratees to the event, from Gretta to Gabriel to the reader, remain disconnected from
its reality. Since Dubliners supplies frequent narrative suggestions of the fragmented
possibility behind its death-acts, our knowledge does extend beyond that of Gabriel.
Still, we do not enjoy Shakespeare’s omniscient view. From the disnarrated, we know to
question accounts of the dead, but Joyce refuses the answers necessary to fully grasp their
meaning. We witness narrative filtering while we are subjected to it ourselves as distant
narratees.

Although this narrative filtering is not necessarily a Modernist invention, the
modern text relies on its development and manipulation as a defamiliarizing tool that
brings to light the disnarrated possibilities of a story. It allows the fragmented
juxtaposition of multiple perspectives, highlighting some views while concealing others.
As a crucial precursor to Modernism, Joseph Conrad uses multiple narrative layers to
distance and disorientate his narratees from events key to the text. In the final scene of
his narrative in LIe_art of Darkness, Marlow delivers his infamous lie to Kurtz’s Intended:

‘The last word be pronounced was--your name.’

I heard a light sigh and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an
exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of
unspeakable pain. 'I knew it--I was sure!‘ . . . She knew. She was sure. I
heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me
that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens
would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall

for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz
that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But

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I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark -- too dark
altogether... (75-76)

Conrad demonstrates how easily a narratee is mislead by the disnarrated of the dead. By
sparing her the truth, Marlow literally changes the truth. But we must remember that as
narratees removed from the actual event we too may be subject to narrative inaccuracies.

Perhaps Marlow is unable to tell the truth even if he wanted to, considering he
himself struggles to grasp Kurtz’s message. Kurtz’s final utterance of “The horror! The
horror!” creates a metaphor akin to Faulkner’s coffin, a box containing the unnarratable
meaning of his epiphany. Marlow plays Vardaman to Kurtz’s box in his unsuccessful
attempt to bore holes into its contents. As a frame Conrad’s heart image holds the
unspecified, dark and abstract contents of Kurtz’s epiphany. Its viewer senses its
presence but cannot concretely define its meaning. Twice removed from Kurtz’s
narrative, the Intended now has the death-evidence for her own disnarrative of the silent
Kurtz. It is not difficult to imagine Gretta in a similar scene during which she would be
spared “the horror” of Michael Furey’s demise.

Gabriel’s story of the "late lamented" Patrick Morkan and his horse Johnny
further exemplifies a Conradian filtering of narratives. Again our narrator is not present
at the event of which he speaks, and yet he is solely responsible for the lost narrative.
The lesson learned in the embedded and truncated story of the endlessly circling horse
varies with each narratee so that by the time Morkan’s story reaches us, we can no longer
gauge its accuracy or significance. There is a suggestion of uncertainty in Gabriel’s brief
account as he needs to be corrected as to where Morkan lived. Gabriel also claims he
“can’t understand the horse.” The tale of Morkan causes its listeners to burst into

laughter, which is interrupted by a knock before the listeners may comment on the story’s

74

significance. As narratees even further removed from Patrick Morkan’s hypodiegetic
narrative, we must formulate our own meanings, our own virtual and conflicting
narratives independent of the actual event.
I want to return to the closing scene of H_e_art of Da_r__kness, which suggests a
disnarrated extending beyond the frames of its text:
The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil
waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under
an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
(76 )
Here the fluid imagery of a river trailing into an unseen darkness stands outside of
Marlow’s narrative frame and suggests the purely imagined worlds of the disnarrated.
The “uttermost ends” of the disnarrated meaning behind Marlow’s story remain
concealed in darkness from the unnamed crewman’s perspective. The crewman’s
exterior narrative, which frames Marlow’s frame of Kurtz, cannot penetrate its own
innermost hypodiegetic heart. He senses a window to Kurtz has been partially opened,
and yet a “black bank of clouds” obscures its view.
Likewise, two of Joyce’s stories, “A Painful Case” and “The Dead,” end with a
fluidity into an indefinable world that extends beyond diegetic accessibility:
Beyond the river he saw a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station,
like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness, obstinately
and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still he heard in his ears
the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her name.
(102)
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was
falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling

softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the
dark mutinous Shannon waves. (202-3)

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Both stories close in a metaphorical darkness with their main characters sensing the
impenetrable disnarrated view before them. As with the crewman’s twice-removed
framing of Kurtz’s narrative, Duffy and Gabriel remain alienated from the disnarrated
heart of Mrs. Sinico and Michael Furey. For Duffy, the disnarrated meaning of his
experience passes slowly into darkness, whereas Gabriel’s epiphany is obscured by snow,
a metaphor that reveals the bond between the living and the dead, while withholding the
meaning of that connection.

Conrad’s Under Western Eves, which shares a comparable snow motif with “The
Dead,” reiterates the disnarrated that occupies the impenetrable space between the living
and the dead. After his vision of Haldin's ghost, Razumov experiences a snow epiphany
similar to that of Gabriel, in which the disnarrated of the immeasurable dead blankets all
markers of time:

Under the sumptuous immensity of the sky, the snow covered the endless
forests, the frozen rivers, the plains of an immense country, obliterating
the landmarks, the accidents of the ground, levelling everything under its
uniform whiteness, like a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an
inconceivable history. (78).
Razumov faces the “monstrous blank page” of Haldin’s death; its “whiteness” remains
unwritten and inaccessible. On his way home from his unsuccessful meeting with
Ziemianitch, Razumov rationalizes his decision to report Haldin's crime to Prince K—.
His Gabriel—like logic, however, easily turns to terror as he envisions Haldin's ghost lying
in the snow "stretched on his back right across his path... solid, distinct, real, with
inverted hands over his eyes...The snow round him was untrodden" (81). Haldin’s eyes

are concealed as Michael’s voice is silenced; their “untrodden” narratives stand as

impassable obstacles in the paths of their mourners. The snow in Under Western Eves

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and “The Dead,” like Gerald's snowy death in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, joins the
living with the dead, the diegetic with the disnarrated without defining the metaphorical
relationship between the two.

By the time Michael’s story reaches Gabriel and he recognizes the snowscape
outside the window, Gabriel senses a meaning behind it, but he is unable to discern
exactly what it is:

Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell
the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend,
their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out
into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had
one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling. (202)
The disnarrated behind the dead surfaces in indecipherable “forms,” as Michael’s
narrative “dissolves and dwindles” with each subsequent narrative filter. The metaphor
of Michael’s death-act has been so far distanced and defamiliarized that its meaning is
filtered out. Unable to understand or accept Gretta’s resurrection of the dead, Gabriel
longs to be "master of her strange mood" (196). He remains disconnected from the
meaning of Gretta’s confession, watching her sleep "as though he and she had never lived
together as man and wife" (201). Like Bloom and Molly, they lay together in bed, yet
remain apart. The snow has not unified the couple; rather it has further alienated one
narrative filter from another. As the next chapter on _Iflysse_s explores, the living’s history

of the dead proves to be a fragmented and fabricated disnarrative bridge, a refraining of

truth subject to the inaccurate focalization of memory.

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CHAPTER THREE

ULYSSES’ HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF WITH A DIFFERENCE

When Stephen Dedalus of A Pomit of the Artist as a Young Man warns that
Ireland must "let the dead bury the dead," or "the dead will bury the living," he indirectly
alludes to the Modernist text as a battleground between tradition and an unknown literary
future. Perturbed by an “anxiety of influence” while impelled by Ezra Pound’s manifesto
of renewal, the Modernist experiment is one of rethinking the possibilities and limitations
of the diegetic frame. Modernism represents a struggle for the appropriation of language
through a measured assault on the diegesis of literary history—that “nightmare from
which [the Modernists are] trying to wake”—and yet in its attack, it inevitably summons
and reaffirms aspects of that tradition. Modernism must draw attention to the narrative
tradition, encompass and rewrite its stylistic and theoretical history, to illuminate and
dismiss it as an inefficient frame. Luborrn’r Dolezel distinguishes three types of modern
rewriting of traditional narrative modes that define the Modernist and postmodern
relationship to tradition:

transposition preserves the design and the main story of the protoworld
but locates them in a different temporal or spatial setting;

expansion extends the scope of the protoworld by filling its gaps,
constructing a prehistory or posthistory, and so on;

displacement constructs an essentially different version of the protoworld,
redesigning its structure.1

Though Modernism engages in all three types of rewriting, I am most concerned

with its calculated displacement of traditional narrative modes as this third mode best

 

1 Heterocosmica (206-226).

78

embodies the ambivalent yet irrefutable correspondence between the two literatures. The
complexity of the Modernist narrative stems from its alignment with tradition through the
rewriting of “traditional” worlds, juxtaposed with the paradoxical rejection of those
worlds through the same act of reconstruction.

Displacement, or what James Joyce calls “deformations in the presentment,”
involves the concurrent retelling and reconstruction of the protoworld.2 As an especially
rich demonstration of Dolezel’s displacement, the success of The Rainbow depends on
D.H. Lawrence’s compulsion to both “devise what was practically a new language in
order to express his altered conception of man... and radically modify the novel form in
order to express his altered perception of society."3 To construct the “earth's new
architecture,” Lawrence must sweep away the “old, brittle corruption of houses and
factories” of traditional realism (548). With its quasi-biblical language the first half of
the novel reframes the book of Genesis, displacing traditional generational history
through a refocusing on the neglected (and forbidden) topics of feminism, sexuality,
education and industrial scorn.

Inevitably The Rainbow’s thinly veiled sexuality resulted in the novel’s being
banned. What its censors failed to see is how Lawrence’s ambiguous religious language
disengages sexuality from the frames of an obscene penny novel, and correspondingly
liberates a biblical dialect from the confines of the pulpit. Thus, both language and
subject matter are renewed so that we recognize Thembow’s simultaneous alignment

and disagreement with the traditional narratives of generational history. In her rejection

 

2 Letters of James Joyce (134).

3 Scott Sanders, DH. Lawrence (211).

79

of the false comforts of religion and marriage, the practicality of industry and education,
and popular causes such as feminism, war, and nationalism, Ursula laments
I have no father nor mother nor lover, I have no allocated place in the
world of things, I do not belong to Beldover nor to Nottingham nor to
England nor to this world, they none of them exist, I am trammeled and
entangled in them, but they are unreal. I must break out of it. (545)
Her statement reflects the strained relationship between Modernism and the influence of
tradition. Despite tradition’s entangling of its successors, it represents an absent father to
the bastard son of Modernism. Ursula and Modernism must break from their “allocated
place in the world of things,” and still neither may fully do so given the trarnmels of
tradition that bind them.

To paraphrase Gerald Doherty, Lawrence’s hypodiegetic idiom and subject matter
struggle to usurp control of the diegesis from the traditional narrative symmetry of
fiction.4 Whether or not the usurpation succeeds is less important than the skirmish itself,
as it is here that Modernist writing emerges separate from the rewriting modes of
Dolezel’s transposition and expansion. One need only revisit M to witness and
ultimately partake in the simultaneous merging and conflict between tradition and
experimentation. The complexity and richness of Joyce’s novel hinge on the violent
collision between the old and the new, the traditional and the revolutionary, epic alliance
and modern disconnection, and the “rules” of fiction and narrative experimentation. The
paradox of flyssgs is its retracing of narrative “histories” while at the same time
reframing their truth. As Lawrence reframes biblical structures, Joyce transposes and

expands a vast range of traditional narratives, only to displace them in a recontextualized

and defamiliarized frame.

 

4 "Undercover Stories: Hypodiegetic Narration in James Joyce’s Dubliners" (37).

 

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Before I address the impact Joyce’s stylistic and linguistic displacement has on
contemporary approaches to narrative, some preliminary commentary on the novel’s
narrative techniques and subsequent reading challenges will map the developmental
midland between the cautiously Modernist Dubliners and the linguistic extremism of
Finnegans Wake. The narrative evolution from Dubliners to m moves towards a
breaking of “the tyrannical hold of the all-powerful author over the credulous reader” that
characterizes nineteenth-century literature.S Narrative complexities arise when discourse
veers away from story, a divergence that constitutes the norm rather than the exception in
Modernism. Certainly the basis of all fictional narratives is a forked road between story
and discourse; Modernism, however, exploits this distance, widening the narrative space
between the two to the extent that they no longer run parallel paths. In a traditional sense
not much occurs in the plot of M, but its nine hundred pages of discourse—the
telling of that story—would have us believe otherwise. As a barrage of hypodiegetic
digressions, the discourse of M, like Tristram Shandy’s spending a year to write the
first day of his life, overwhelms the main diegesis, often blurring if not destroying it
altogether. Consequently, the Modernist straying of discourse, so prevalent in the
disorienting descriptiveness of Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Worn_en in Love or Djuna
Barnes’ N i ghtwood, has a defamiliarizing effect on language so that words begin to
screen off the very world they seek to represent.

As with Faulkner’s The Soufiand the Fury and As I Lay Dya'ng or Jean

Toomer’s Cane, Ulysses partitions its narratives into chapter-frames. Of course, Joyce’s

sections are not visually separated by the white space so prominent in Faulkner and

 

5 Declan Kiberd, “Introduction.” Ulysses (xxxiii).

81

Toomer. Instead Joyce isolates each chapter-frame by way of abrupt stylistic variations
so that the only way the narrative can progress from one section to the next is for both
narrative and reader to endure the constant filtering of style. Narrative perspectives shift
along a wide spectrum of point of view, from a restricted and insular range of vision to an
overabundance of details. With each stylistic displacement the narrative is reframed and
refocused as a separate yet interdependent perspective. Again we must keep in mind that
by definition a frame outlines one view to the exclusion of others, and with each shift a
disnarrated gap emerges outside the new perspective frame. As Joyce moves through a
dizzying panorama of views distorted by pastiche, parody and imitation, there is no room
amid the novel’s plurality for a sole controlling perspective. It is as if M, like
Homer’s Proteus, changes its narrative shape at will to prevent capture by a holistic
frame.

Within the novel’s opening pages we witness a narrative usurpation, that of a
fragmented polyphonic narrative seizing control from the traditional authorial voice so
familiar to the controlled realism of the previous century. Thus, early on we cannot
speak of a single narrative, but rather of several perspectives, each temporarily framing
the story with its own distinct slant. The novel showcases then abandons a diverse series
of narrative methods, lifting the curtain on those mechanics once carefully concealed by
the realists to unveil an inevitable artificiality of literature. Incessantly calling attention
to the act of narration, Joyce reveals how a story is “deformed” based on the manipulated
limitations and possibilities of its discourse. Once a story is framed by discourse, it
inevitably succumbs to the artificial construction of narrative choice, forfeiting the purity

of its objective truth. What makes Joyce’s work crucial to contemporary narrative

82

models is its constant exploitation and widening of the fork that steers discourse away
from story. As readers of Ulysags, we stand in the middle of that narrative fork,
attempting to reconcile the densely layered stray of discourse with the inaccessible
disnarrated story of Bloomsday.

The challenges put forth by M have unquestionably changed the way critics
approach literature. Joyce’s eighty-year old work is particularly essential as a starting
point in a discussion of contemporary narrative theory as it invariably demands a
reconsideration of how we talk about narrative. J. Hillis Miller speaks of critics, who in
their effort to interpret Joyce, have been “driven to give up the models for the reading of
narrative developed for those apparently simpler earlier fictions.”6 With all its
questioning of literary form, Ma demands no less than a new critical terminology.7
What for instance is to be done with the “Ithaca” section in which we can no longer
recognize narrative as a familiar and accessible genre, or how can we begin to describe in
narrative terms the linguistic collage of “Oxen of the Sun?” 8 Joyce himself seemed hard-
pressed to summarize the episode’s linguistic history in literary terms:

A nineparted episode without divisions introduced by a Sallustian-
Tacitean prelude... then by way of earliest English alliterative and
monosyllabic and Anglo-Saxon ...then by way of Mandeville. .. then
Malory. .. then the Elizabethan chronicle style. . .then a passage solemn, as
of Milton, Taylor, Hooker, followed by a choppy Latin-gossipy bit, style
of Burton-Browne, then a passage Bunyanesque. .. after a diarystyle bit

Pepys-Evelyn. .. and so on through Defoe-Swift and Steele-Addison-
Steme and Landor-Pater-Newman until it ends in a frightful jumble of

 

6 “From Narrative Theory to Joyce; From Joyce to Narrative Theory” (4).

7 Most notable, Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds and Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction, followed by
Frank K. Stanzel’s “Second Thoughts on Narrative Situations in the Novel: Towards a ‘Grammar of
Fiction’” and Gerald Prince’s Dictiona_ry of Narratology undertake this challenge of defining a terminology
suitable to the literary developments of Modernism. An early precursor to these works is Kathe
Hamburger’s Die Logik der Dichtumg (1957), which to some degree predicts the terminology work of the
19703 and 19805.

8 Richard Ellmann, ibid. (145).

83

Pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken
doggerel.9

Frequently acknowledged as the most impenetrable episode of the book, “Oxen of the
Sun” acquires its difficulty from the obscuring linguistic filters Joyce heaps into a soon-
to-be-abandoned pile of dead frames. The effect here, more than anywhere else in
Elm, is that story is smothered by an increasingly opaque discourse.

Given its divergence from realism, flys_s_e_§ necessitates new critical models in
place of those that simply do not “fit” the Modernist experiment. In response to the
demand, contemporary narrative approaches aim to help “liberate critics of Joyce for a
fuller recognition of the joyous heterogeneity of his work.”10 Narrative theory addresses
the multiperspective nature of Modernism with the useful term focalization: the decided
point of view from which narrated events are depicted. Gérard Genette's groundbreaking
essay "Discourse du récit" distinguishes between the telling of a story and the focus or
point of view of a story. For Genette, focalization indicates the separation of “the
question who sees and the question who speaks (203).“

In general terms a narrative falls under one of three types of focalization:

external focalization (“the narrator says less than the character knows”)

internal focalization (“the narrator says only what a given character
knows”)

zero focalization (“the narrator knows more than the character, or more
exactly, says more than any of the characters know”).12

 

9 Letters (13940).

‘° Miller, ibid. (4).

n The question “who speaks” becomes a central issue in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s demonstration of the
text as polyvocal. See Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.

’2 Narrative Discourse (189).

84

Already we see how complicated the tracking of Joyce’s use of focalization in _Iflyssfi
would be as all three types appear in the text, along with hybrid variations unaccounted
for in Genette’s model. To make matters more perplexing, Joyce will at times switch
focalization mid-sentence so that our sense of speaker and perspective is suddenly
undermined.

Mieke Bal’s work makes significant refinements to Genette’s term, describing
narratives as focalized by someone and on someone or something.13 Focalization,
therefore, indicates the relationship between a focalizer or perceiver and the focalized or
perceived. Bal extends her theory of focalization in De theorie van vertellen en verhalen
and "Notes on Narrative Embedding," partitioning narrative into three components: the
narrator who delivers the linguistic signs that signify the narrative, the focalization or
point of view, and the actual story events which occur. Here Bal provides a useful
schema in which the focalization of a narrative is designated by the perspective
relationship between narrator, focalizer, and actor (or character involved in a narrative
action):

1. X relates that Y sees that Z does (N¢F¢A, “He was in deep
mourning, she could see.")

2. X relates that X sees that Y does (N=F¢A, ”The last night Pa was
boosed he was standing on the landing there”)

3. X relates that X sees that X does (N=F=A, “I said yes I will Yes.”)

4. X relates that Y sees that Y does (N¢F=A, “Mr. Bloom moved
forward raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about that”)

5. X relates that Y sees that X does (F¢N=A, “He looked away from
me. He knows”)14

 

’3 Narratology (29).
‘4 “Notes on Narrative Embedding” (45). My parenthetical examples from Ulvsses.

 

85

Though all five of Bal’s situations appear in flygsgs, the degree to which her
schema accommodates Joyce’s narrative is somewhat limited since we often find
focalized shifts within fragments much smaller than chapters or even sentences.
Moreover, we find focalized situations that refuse to fall within any of the five categories.
As Bal herself notes, her schema does not take into consideration narrative embedding,
which for Joyce is central to the novel’s complex polyphonic layering. As a cumbersome
application, Bal’s categories are much easier applied to larger sections of the text than to
the micro-focalizations of Joyce. Bal attempts to resolve the issue by looking at changes
in focalization in the smallest fragments of narrative, using two non-Modernists works,

Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Collette’s The Cat, as examples. Still, Bal’s subjects do

 

not contain the narrative complexities found in Modernism, and the daunting narrative

history task of applying a focalization model to minutely fragmented narratives such as

those found in Ulysses or in Modernist poetry (i.e. Pound and Eliot) seems all but

impossible.

In her examination of Joyce’s “Eveline,” Ann Jefferson exemplifies the difficulty

in dissecting a passage to locate the source of its voices:
Who is the source of the sentence ‘One time there used to be a field there
in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children’
(36)? It could be the narrator, but it could also be Eveline. And since it
could be either it could also be both: each word has what Voloshinov calls
a ‘double intonation’... and this duality makes it impossible to read the
passage as the record of an actual voice, narrator’s or character’s.15

As an evolution from Dubliners’ simple ambiguities in voice, Ulysses maximizes the

narrative technique of FID or free indirect discourse (representation of a character’s

 

’5 “The Place of Free Indirect Discourse in the Poetics of Fiction: With Examples from Joyce’s ‘Eveline’”
(41).

86

thoughts and speech minus tag clauses such as “he said”) often to the extent that we can
no longer connect a voice to its speaker. Joyce and the Modernists learn the strategic
value of FID from Henry James, whose “The Art of Fiction” bridges the stylistic gap
between the Victorian and the modern. In both criticism and fiction James advocates a
more direct representation of character perspective, laying the stylistic foundations for
stream of consciousness. With Ulysses Joyce’s extends FID’s potential beyond the
difficulties discovered in Jefferson’s treatment of Dubliners.

The Modernist fascination with narrative shifts and diegetic fragmentation also
demands critical accommodation for the alethic questions it raises. Though we have
terms to describe narrative shifts in perspective, there remains the challenge of narrative
veracity as Gerald Prince notes:

One frequently finds in a narrative several narrators and many characters.
One can even find more than one diegesis, each representing a distinct
factual world. .. But one may also, on the contrary, be unable to discern
any such factual world so that any certainty as to what is, what has been,
or what could be proves impossible. Thus... the veracity of everything
that is presented—through a narrator or character—is called into
question.“5
As the ultimate Modernist demonstration of contradictory discourses, Ulysses
“substitute[s] the instance of discourse for the instance of reality (or of the referent)”l7
Therefore, as Hugh Kenner observes, progressing through the novel
no longer do we see the foreground postures directly, in order to see past
them perhaps to Homer. Our immediate awareness is now of screens of

language, through or past which it is not easy to see. The language is what
we now confront. . . 18

 

'6 “Narratology, Narrative, and Meaning” (549).

‘7 Roland Barthes. “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” (145).

'8 Joyce’s Voices (41).

See also Robert E. Scholes’ Structuralism in Literature, which views the “extreme” experiments of modern
literature as “works with a narrative base. . .upon which so many non-narrative elements have been erected
that the work’s narrative quality is severely attenuated for the sake of other qualities” (95).

87

Elm brings to our attention its own “writing,” which in the realist text is invisible to
reader perception as long as the work maintains the illusion of either objective time or
single-perspective subjectivity. In traditional narratives the writing remains hidden “as
long as literature maintain[s] a totalitarian ideology of the referent, or more commonly
speaking, as long as literature [is] realistic,” whereas Joyce demands that we see his
mechanics and the contradictions they contain to ultimately question textual reality.19
Ul_ys_se_s’ constant juxtaposition of styles demonstrates

how much is left unsaid by any: in rendering any aspect of the world, it

misses out on many others. So Joyce can show that each is as limited as

the other.20
With these limitations on narrative access, the reader, shaken from a nineteenth-century
passivity, must carry the “burden of emplotrnent.”21 Joyce challenges his reader to build
narrative bridges between the gaps created by the unending juxtaposition of styles and
voices. As Dubliners calls upon the reader to consider the silent space between its
stories, Ms assigns the difficult task of unifying and framing its diegetic fragments
into the epic novel it suggests and yet refuses to adhere to. Certainly the burden of
emplotrnent calls upon further discourse writing and consequently, further digressions
from the disnarrated story so that though our gap-filling may pave over some
informational voids, it may also widen the fork between story and discourse. Therefore,

we can understand how the necessity and feasibility of such an undertaking remains

debatable in critical circles.

 

‘9 Kenner, ibid. (145).
2° Kiberd, ibid. (xlvii).
2' Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (77).

88

As a proponent of our obligation to “write,” Wolfgang Iser maintains that the
9822

reading of fiction requires “a filling in of informational gaps, reinventing its story.
Luborrn’r Dolezel, on the other hand, views narrational gaps as the distinguishing mark of

fiction. By writing over the informational gaps in fiction, the reader would deny the

alethic potential of narrative, forcing the work into "the uniform structure of the

complete, Camapian world. "23 For Dolezel the filling of gaps undermines the author’s
strategy of showing and hiding narrative information so fundamental to Modernist
writing. Perhaps a median between these two arguments is the best approach to m.
In our instinctual quest to unify the text, we are compelled by discrepancies between the
novel’s assorted discourses to make narrative connections between the gaps. However,

the text’s uncompromising fragmentation resists our construction of an absolute frame, as

its gaps remain too wide to bridge with any level of certainty.
Another aspect of Joyce’s stylistic collage is its transcending the limitations of a
singular discourse by opening multiple peepholes into the story’s opaque window. By
j uxtaposing simultaneous discourses, each limited and yet distinct in their narrative
access to story, Joyce creates a novel far more realist than his nineteenth-century

Predecessors’ attempts to capture diverse often contradictory fictional perspectives.24

Akin to the seemingly incongruent lines of a Cubist portrait, the very nature of the

M’ narrative plurality moves closer to reality than straight realism in that it mimics

the multiperspectiveness of human experience.25 In defiance of painterly omniscience,

\
22
23 \The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (207).

24 \Heterocosmica (171).
am thinking here of Emile Zola’s objective narrator or Gustave Flaubert’s “invisible" narrator yielding

t
2? ghe perspective of his characters.
ee Chapter 5, which further addresses this aspect of Modernism.

 

89

Braque and Picasso extract a whole portrait from the simultaneous presentation of
fragmented perspectives. Though the portrait may not resemble its sitter, it surpasses
traditional portraiture in its capturing the multiple spatial and temporal possibilities of the
person. Likewise, I_Jl_ys_s_§ as a collective whole resists meaninglessness despite its
oftentimes disharmonious juxtaposition and undermining of narrative modes. Perhaps
the digression of Joyce’s discourses do not “resemble” the disnarrated story to be
portrayed, but they suggest instead a Cubist recognition of all the possible interpretive
paths that connect discourse to story.

As a referential anchor, the title of the Cubist portrait instructs its viewer to
construct the relationship between the named sitter and the painting’s disparate
perspectives of the implied person. Joyce also demands an exercise in synthesis, forcing
his reader into the role of a quasi-historian, who with the jigsaw pieces of a thousand
different puzzles must assemble ngsis’ histories or perspectives into a cohesive whole.
As the Cubist portrait disorients our spatial and temporal notions of perspective, _Ulyasga

derives much of its complexity from its emphatic questioning of narrative access to
reality. With a sly lacing of textual evidence to suggest both proof and disproof of the
novel’s possible histories, Ma allows its reader to synthesize its discourses not into
What is, but rather what might be. The endurance of Joyce’s work then emanates from its
Paradoxical allowance of both everything and nothing in our interpretive case building.
J()yce’s multiple discourses methodically fragment, blur, embellish and dispute the story

so that the true history of what really happens on Bloomsday remains elusive and

artificially reconstructed.

9O

Throughout the day Bloom ponders the meaning of parallax, while the novel
demonstrates the phenomenon on a narrative level.26 By definition parallax indicates the
apparent positional shift of a foreground object in relation to its background as the
observer’s location changes. The continuous motion of characters in m,
complicated by the displacement of the narrative eye, creates an ever—changing parallactic
view. The perspective shift allows alternate often conflicting positions to coexist in the
narrative landscape. Thus, narrative parallax allows a beautiful heroine and a
gentlemanly admirer to visually coexist with the crippled Gerty and a masturbating
Bloom.

Ironically, myssis accounts for nearly every moment of June 16, and yet we
cannot help but notice informational gaps in the story created by frequent narrative shifts
in style and voice. Consider what insights of Bloom we lose with the transition from the
free indirect thoughts of “Hades” to the windy rhetoric of “Aeolus.” Deprived of the
“Calypso,” “Lotus-eaters,” and “Hades” chapters’ narrative access to Bloom’s thoughts,

we must read between the journalistic lines of “Aeolus” to recover the Bloom we have
come to know. In his diagram of the novel’s structure, Joyce designates the techniques
0f the first three Bloom chapters as “narrative (mature),” “narcissism,” and “incubism.”
All three indicate a narrative style accessible to Bloom’s perspective, whereas the
“enthymemic” technique of “Aeolus,” entails a detached rhetoric based on probabilities
in Which assumptions and conclusions are not expressed but implied. In “Aeolus”
B100m’s internal voice of the previous chapters is replaced by an extemalized

perspective, limited to the surface view of his dialogue and actions. No longer granted

 

26\
0 See Bernard Benstock’s Narrative Con/Texts in Ulysses and Hugh Kenner’s Ulysses for more discussion
the topic of parallax.

91

access to Bloom’s perspective, we must surmise what remains narratively unsaid based
on the suggested and disnarrated “probabilities” implied by the new detached narration.

It is not until later in the novel that we return to Bloom’s inner voice to hear his
perspective on the noontime gathering at the newspaper. Though Bloom’s reflections
come only hours after the actual event, we as narratees must question the accuracy of his
narrative since “Aeolus” disallows our full presence in the newsroom. It is important that
Bloom, like “The Nameless One” in “Eumaeus” who retells the what occurs earlier in
“Cyclops,” is also narratively removed from the event in that he retells his inner thoughts
later in the day rather than utters them in the moment.

In addition to the narrative gaps they expose, the novel’s abrupt stylistic shifts
result in a temporal misalignment that redefines traditional modes of depiction. Again
the story spans a single day in June; the discourse, however, dismisses any sense of a
twenty-four hour time frame, instead disorienting our sense of time. As we move
towards the abstruse final third of the book, “The Nostos,” Joyce intensifies the distortion

of time, relieving it of its traditional function as a referential frame. In the “Nausicaa”
episode the narrative shift to a Victorian parody exemplifies how Joyce slows and
disrupts the faster temporal pace established by the previous “Cyclops” chapter. In what
Jche describes as a “namby-pamby jammy marrnalady drawersy” style, Gerty's narrative
SWirls with fanciful cliches, its discourse often pausing to smell the flowers.27
“Nausicaams lofty romantic language literally slows time so that Bloom’s two hours
Spent at the strand in Sandymount seem much longer than the previous three spent in the

pub_ Despite the mid-chapter shift to Bloom’s “faster” perspective, there are still hints at

:\

92

a temporal halting of narrative. Breaking his concentration from the erotic interchange
with Gerty, Bloom finds his watch has stopped. He ponders how wristwatches are
“always going wrong” and then slows the narrative himself with a digressive reflection
on the laws of time. It is not until the end of the chapter that time seems to return as
Bloom suddenly realizes it “must be near nine,” confirmed by the chiming clock in a
nearby priest’s house.

The scientific objectivity and itemization of “Ithaca” creates an interesting
slowing if not stopping of the narrative time established in the previous “Eumaeus”
chapter. As an antithesis to the journalistic brevity, which speeds up time in “Aeolus,”
“Ithaca” dismisses any correspondence to the novel’s plot time. Though the chapter
refers to nearly every science imaginable—if not ones we have yet to imagine—
astronomy is undoubtedly the field of choice. “Ithaca” adheres to the temporal laws of
astronomy only to defy the laws of narrative, generating “an unrestrained quality, as if the
world has exploded the boundaries place on it by perception itself in wanting to declare

its own independent truth.”28 Within three queries the chapter’s spatial and temporal
frames shift, moving from the seemingly fixed setting of Bloom’s garden to the
macrocosmic, then to the rrricroatomic.29 The result is an Einsteinian incertitude—a free
ran ge of possible mobility, from the infinite to the infinitesimal, that not only allows
Bloom and Stephen to transform into their celestial birth-stars, but also affects the
movement of words on the page.
The abstraction of the chapter’s astronomy pemrits words and sentences to

r e Verse upon themselves and shift towards contradiction, microscopically demonstrating

.2N8\

29 Alan David Perlis, “The Newtonian Nightmare in Ulysses” (194).
% (819-20).

93

how the novel’s narrative styles intersect and negate one another. Frequently a word or
phrase is coupled with its opposite (“Everyman” and “Noman”), pointing the sentence in
multiple and indeterminate directions. When “Ithaca” asks, “What would render such
return irrational,” the cryptic response states, “An unsatisfactory equation between an
exodus and return in time through reversible space and an exodus and return in space
through irreversible time” (858). The answer shifts both forwards and backwards as the
words “exodus,” “return,” “time,” “space,” “reversible” and “irreversible” eclipse and
negate each other.

The sentence’s movement renders the answer both all meaningful and
meaningless in the same instant. Throughout “Ithaca" Joyce reminds us of the multiple
possible directions of any given element. The door through which Bloom and Stephen
exit becomes the entrance for the cat. Bloom rests “N.W. by W.” opposite to Molly’s
“S.E. by E.” In response to what state of rest or motion Bloom and Molly lay, we are

told they are both

At rest relatively to themselves and to each other. In motion being each
and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the
proper perpetual movement of the earth through the everchangin g tracks

of neverchanging space. (870)
As a precursor to concurrent linguistics of Finnegans Wake, the sentence expands and

cOntracts from the separation and collision of its words. Though the sentence is perhaps
astronomically accurate, its spatial and temporal frames fade into an abstraction
incompatible with traditional narratives.
Joyce also warps the temporal frames of reference necessary to gauge the
epi Sode’s duration so that the scene begins at two in the morning, but we are unsure what

t1 the it pours into the “Penelope” chapter. What we do know from Joyce is that “Ithaca”

94

is “in reality the end as ‘Penelope’ has no beginning, middle or end;” however, the
chapter’s temporal abstraction, which prepares us for “Penelope”’s ultimate timelessness,
resists conclusion.30 The final key questions of where and when, necessary to establish
the spatial and temporal boundaries of the chapter, are asked but left unanswered. The
orbital stream between Molly’s morning negation and night affirmation raises the
question of whether Ulysses can conclude at all. René Girard’s claim that a novel’s
conclusion “must be considered as a successful effort to overcome the inability to

conclu ” would suggest that “Ithaca” represents Joyce’s effort to resolve a novel that
has no resolution. If the chapter is to be considered the narrative end of the book, then
the answer to its final question of “where?” comes in the indefinite yet halting closure of
a full stop. Astronomy then becomes all the more appropriate to the end of Ulysses as its
perpetual and inconclusive questioning of the universe simulates the novel’s disnarrated
conclusion.

Despite its scientific precision and concern with astronomical time, “Ithaca”
represents one of Joyce’s most extreme examples of discourse straying from story. With
narrative reduced to an objective question and answer format, our access to the scene

depends on the detached and formal relationship between the inquiring narratee and the

answering narrator. We may still locate the conventional narrative questions of who,
What, when and where beneath chapter’s scientific rhetoric, which allow the narrative to
move forward. Still, the strict objectivity and specificity of the process focus on narrative

details seemingly irrelevant to conventional depictions of time and place. When Joyce

VVIites that he was "struggling with the acidities of Ithaca—a mathematico-astronomico-

\
30
Letters (1:172-73).

95

physico-mechanico—geometrico-chemico sublimation of Bloom and Stephen," he
indicates the difficulties that arise in applying a sciencese to the very human scene of
Bloom and Stephen's union. Ironically “Ithaca” denies narrative access to what is
perhaps the novel’s most tender scene. The hardness of its cathechismal format and
astronomical jargon draws attention to the disnarrated gaps that require our fictional
paving to establish meaning beyond the chapter’s impenetrable language.

“Ithaca” opens with the question, “What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen
follow returning?” The geographically precise response describes them as first “starting
united. . . at a normal walking pace.” In the same sentence they slow to a “reduced” and
“relaxed” pace (776). Despite the disnarrated suggestion that their slowing indicates a
growing intimacy, what actually occurs during this walk remains linguistically
inaccessible. In place of traditional narrative, subtle clues prompt us to imagine the
significance of Bloom and Stephen’s interaction which the discourse cannot frame. In his
diagram Joyce lists the motif organ of “Ithaca” as “skeleton,” suggesting the narrative as
a rigid unfilled frame that relies on hard facts to the exclusion of traditional narrative

flesh. Outside the frame of J oyce’s chosen technique linger the disnarrated warmth,
emotion, and imagery of the Bloom’s union with Stephen. We know exactly what books
occupy Bloom’s house or how Stephen sits in angular terms, and still the episode’s
SCience refuses to frame our “human” needs for narrative feeling, imagery, and temporal
certainty.
The disnarrated also emerges as My amplifies the marginal and subtle
whi Spers of Dubliners to an overbearing cacophony of hypodiegetic voices. Early in the

noVel we become aware of repetitive refrains seemingly disconnected from their

96

 

referential bodies. Hypodiegetic fragments of ancient Greek, poems, popular songs,
news clippings and voices of the dead all surface to tear wholes in the novel’s diegetic
seams. The interruptions of hypodiegetic narratives increase as the novel moves towards
a more stylized and sophisticated experimentation so that one can no longer ignore the
diegetic threat these hypodiegetic intrusions pose. As in Dubliners the dead in mysaaa
are constantly present and illustrate the strongest of these narrative interruptions to the
diegesis. As two of the most convincing examples of the prosopopeic relationship
between the diegetic and hypodiegetic, “Hades” and “Circe” further extend Dubliners’
preoccupation with the dead’s surfacing to challenge the living.

In "Hades" Paddy Di gnam's funeral sets the stage for Bloom’s reluctant journey
into the world of dead, a painful voyage that culminates with “Circe”’s ultimate
confrontation with the novel’s hypodiegetic ghosts. Stepping into the funeral-bound
carriage, Bloom sits “in the vacant place" between the living and the disnarrated dead.
Paddy's mourners pass the terrified living—the Gabriels and Stephens of Dublin—that
roam the streets and whose narratives remain silent in face of the usurping dead.

Recalling Father Flynn’s mourners who sit speechless by his coffin, Bloom and the others
all wait, and “nothing [is] said.” Their carriage "rattles swiftly along Bessington street...
Over the stones,” transforming into a coffin, a box that frames the living apart from the
dead (121). As they near the cemetery, the living narratives give way to the hypodiegetic
riSing of the dead. Bloom’s son appears. Prompted by a “tiny coffin” that flashes by.
The face of a dwarf “mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy's" detracts both Bloom’s and
the narrative’s attention from the moumers’ conversation. Rudy’s hypodiegetic

temporarily disrupts the scene’s diegetic focus on the here and now of the funeral

97

procession (119). Bloom’s disturbing vision of his dead son summons a parade of ghosts
including the recently departed Paddy and the monumentalized Parnell, who "some
say...is not in the grave at all" (143).

As the funeral procession continues, the hypodiegetic dead increasingly dominate
the scene. The dead seem to lead the living, demanding the living “obey them in the
grave.” Their narratives loiter just out of reach of the living’s attempts to frame them,
confirmed by the coffin’s arriving to the cemetery minutes before the mourners:

Coffin now. Got here before us, dead as he is...First the stiff: then the
friends of the stiff...All walked after...Always in front of us. (127-30)

Bloom’s interesting phrase “coffin now” indicates the inaccessibility of the dead’s true
narrative. As Addie’s voice exists in an indefinite now, narratively detached from her
companion voices, Paddy’s hypodiegetic is contained in an impenetrable and timeless
coffin that eludes the living’s narrative attempts to understand its meaning. As with the
dead in Dubliners, each apparition represents a temporary halt to the living’s narrative.
The living pause as if to hear the unspoken confession or meaning of the dead, and yet
that hypodiegetic remains silent despite its being brought to narrative attention. With the
rise of his father’s ghost, Bloom equates his death to the offstage demise of a donkey:
"Never see a dead one, they say. Shame of death. They hide. Also poor papa went
away" (139). Since the act of death is hidden from narrative view, it remains inaccessibly
transfixed in the realm of the disnarrated. As a consequence, the ghosts of the dead roam
as entities detached from the living figures they represent. Though ghosts evoke a sense
of the lost narratives of the dead, they stand, like the act of death itself, as silent obstacles

between the living and the dead. Ghosts beckon the living to contemplate the dead while

98

 

refusing to verbally define the epiphanic snow that falls between them—that unutterable
bond which unites the past with the present and the dead with the living.

“Circe” handles the dead in a somewhat different manner. Much of the chapter’s
spatial and temporal difficulty comes from an influx of both living and dead voices,
disembodied to defarrriliarize all we have come to know in Elm. Comparing the
surroundings in the opening episodes of the novel or “Wandering Rocks” to the setting in
latter scenes such as “Oxen of the Sun” or “Circe,” we find that the narrative strategies in
the early sections firmly establish our sense of spatial relations, whereas the clouded
discourse of the latter chapters undermine any spatial stability. Even with its stage
directions, “Circe” refuses to incarnate its talking heads to satisfy a narrative need for
spatial familiarity. Given the scene’s reliance on hallucination, one is never able to
determine exactly the physical reality of Bloom and Stephen’s surroundings. As Richard
Ellmann explains, “Faith in reality, particularly ideas of space and time, gradually
becomes undermined and destroyed” in “Circe,” and it is not until we arrive at the precise
descriptions of “Ithaca” that spatial relations are somewhat reestablished. 3’

Entering nighttown’s streets, which form an "uncobbled tramsiding set with
skeleton tracks. . .and danger signals," we no longer enjoy the comfort of a fictional
narrative and the spatial and temporal stability its perspective provides (561). The
episode takes place late at night when darkness, sleep, dreams and death fuse into a
disnarrated world of simultaneous fact and fiction. “Circe” confuses past, present and
future, blurring the definitive and traditional narrative boundaries that separate the living

from the dead and undermining narrative time with a timeless durational flow: "But

 

3' Ulysses on the Liffey (145).

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tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then tomorrow as
now was be past yester" (631).

Joyce’s play format empowers both everyone and everything—from Shakespeare
to the gramophone—with the power to speak. Since reality is set aside from the start, the
dramatic pastiche of “Circe” allows a lengthy parade of the novel’s familiar voices,
creating a sense of déja vu for Bloom, Stephen and reader alike. The episode resurfaces
nearly every character who either appears or is mentioned earlier in the novel. Once
characters reappear in nighttown’s heart of darkness, they are “reperforrn ”in a
different light. The chapter blurs the distinction between “monumentalized” ghosts
(Parnell, Byron, Moses, Arnold, Shakespeare), fictional ghosts (Robinson Crusoe,
Sherlock Holmes and Rip Van Winkle) and “intimate” ghosts such as Paddy Dignam,
Bloom's father and son, and Stephen's mother.

Aided by a hallucinatory surrealism, Joyce’s dramatic strategy empowers the
previously unheard voices diegetic air time disallowed within the earlier chapters. We
witness the disnarrated “other” histories of characters—those unspoken, unconscious
alternate truths, diegetically invisible during daylight and consciousness. Given the
chapter’s distortional recycling of the previous chapters, the only way to advance through
“Circe” is by “constantly retracing one’s steps?”2 For Bloom and Stephen, déja vu
comes in the form of the dream epiphany, a surreal backward tunneling "to reform, to
retrieve the memory of the past." (587). As we see in Dubliners, to reform and retrieve
signify conflicting exercises, the former being inevitable and the latter proving

impossible. Thus, the déj‘a vu of “Circe” entails the recovery of alternate truths (or at

 

32 Daniel Ferrer, “’Circe,’ Regret and Regression” (229).

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least an undermining of the truths we have come to know). Bloom and Stephen’s
retracing represents a “history repeating itself with a difference,” a tunneling that both
discovers and questions the history of Bloomsday laid out in the previous chapters.
Bloom's ghosts shift between the bewitching and the repulsive, illuminating his
previously disnarrated desires and anxieties. The appearances of Rudolph and Ellen
Bloom suggest Bloom’s unnarratable guilt and inadequacy as a father, while the recurring
vision of Molly in Turkish costume hints at the disnarrated possibility of marital
reconciliation. When Paddy Dignam reappears, he transcends the silent ghost that
embodied an unnarratable meaning in “Hades.” Suddenly empowered with a voice,
Dignam is reperforrned as an alternate truth of the dead man. Proclairrring, "Bloom, I am
Paddy Dignam's spirit. List, list, 0 list," the ghost no longer signifies Paddy alone, but
also links Paddy to the ghost of King Hamlet. Still the relationship between Paddy and
King Hamlet remains concealed as the narratee Bloom has yet to recover the initial
connection between the ghost and the disnarrated dead it represents. The return of
Stephen’s mother provides another example of the disnarrated dead. Unlike her past
tense and silent haunting of “Telemachus,” Stephen’s mother reappears in the present,
empowered by voice. She actively “rises stark through the floor...,” and despite
Stephen’s Gabriel Conroy-like attempts to banish her hypodiegetic ("Non serviaml...No!
No! No!”), she finally speaks. Given a voice, she forgives her son, but even now as
Stephen demands she tell him the word, “the word known to all men,” she does not
answer. Her confession remains unnarratable, confirming that the speaking ghosts of
“Circe” complicate the dead by illuminating new disnarrative possibilities, while they

continue to deny full access to the dead’s lost narratives.

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Paradoxically, the episode’s recurrent refrains lull the reader into familiarity only
to have that “knowledge” undermined by its surrealist reframing of those voices.
Through its mass of ghosts and allusions, the episode’s “humbugging and delutbering”
returns the reader not only to prior events of the book, but also to historical events and
figure outside the text, giving birth to new meanings from old relics. The episode even
goes so far as to rattle the Mg: Homeric alignment, marking one of the novel’s
weakest parallels to the epic. Through an incessant recycling and recreation, M
debunks the very history it writes. It re-characterizes familiar figures in “Circe,” recycles
for the sake of irony the clichés in “Nausicaa,” remaps Dublin in the collage of
“Wandering Rocks,” and rewrites the Homeric epic. The lesson taught by M is that
“history is a tale like any other;” it is formulated based on narrative choice and exclusion
(30).

If the mythologized and strengthened ghosts of the past often fail to resemble the
actual people they represent, how can the historian-reader deduce a truth based on this
discrepancy? The answer, it seems, is that an accurate “reading” of the myth is all but an
impossible task. Instead we see in the example of Molly’s ghost lovers that her
summoning signifies an inability to personify her ideal love rather than actual figures
from her past. For Molly, the ideal resides in no one person, in neither past nor future,
but rather somewhere in the disnarrated gap between past and present, truth and fiction.
Molly’s “history” is inevitably ambiguous because she must rely on two imperfect tools:
her memory and language. Another broken watch marks the temporal indeterminacy of

her history-writing: "I never know what time it is even that watch he gave me never

seems to go properly" (884).

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Particularly striking in the Modernist work, ambiguous narration based on
ambiguous language return us back to the questions of possibility taken up in the
previous chapter. Undoubtedly, Modernism, more so than any other genre, lends itself to
debates on historicity and fictional truths.” In possible worlds theory, developed in the
sixties to address possibility in the humanities, and later in Gerald Prince’s idea of the
disnarrated, fictional possibility calls for an examination of suggested and nonnarrated
elements of a text in order to reassess its narrative boundaries.” History for the
Modernist—both fictional and external to the text—is always a recreation of the present,
dependent on the subjective narrative eye of the historian. Frederick J. Hoffman
elaborates on the particularly Modernist tendency to recreate history:

Positively, the new movement sought to create literary history in its own
image, that is, it deliberately sought to rewrite the story. . .in values known
only to the twentieth century. Every age, of course, remakes history in its
own image, but the special mark of these iconoclasts was a refusal of
historical importance as a canon of judgment.35
On the issue of history and possibility, Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative makes a
convincing case that a fictional narrative alienates itself from the historical narrative,
creating “imaginary worlds” (64). For Ricoeur, the present reenacts history so that “what

might have been... includes both the potentialities of the ‘real’ past and the ‘unreal’

possibilities of pure fiction” (14).36

 

33 At first glance, this phrase “fictional truths” may appear an oxymoron. Thomas Pavel, however,
differentiates “fictional” as contained within a work of fiction and “fictitious” as untrue (18).

3" Umberto Eco’s The Limits of Integpretation and The Role of the Rem, and Possible Worlds in
Humanities Arts and Sciences edited by Sture Allén provide the most convincing applications of the theory
to literature.

35 “Introduction.” William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism (121-22).

36 In addition to Ricouer, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen’s Truth Fiction and Literature, and
David Lewis’ article "Truth in Fiction" also provide important contemplations on fictional truth.

 

 

103

M itself addresses the idea of historical reenactment and its relation to
reality. In the “Nestor” episode Stephen quizzes his students on Pyrrhus, reducing the
specifics of his life to difficult to memorize names, places, and dates. As a historian,
Stephen’s retelling of Pyrrhus’ hypodiegetic history is twice filtered via Plutarch, if not
more filters considering intermediary translations. Stephen, himself aware of narrative
filtering and the subsequent effect it has on historical possibility, wonders

Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not
been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded
them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities
they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never
were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of
the wind.

--Tell us a story, sir.

--Oh, do, sir, a ghoststory. (30)

Perhaps it is no coincidence that history here is quickly supplanted with a ghost
story. The voice of Pyrrhus like that of Shakespeare in “Circe” is reduced to a “paralytic
rage,” dependent on the living to patch the holes of his hypodiegetic narrative (672). As
with the Parnellites in “Ivy Day,” Stephen stands guilty of "vulturing the dead,” searching
for "something lost in a past life." For Stephen, who distrusts the “aquacities of thought
and language,” history distorts reality rather than reproduces it. In place of history his
preferred medium of poetry rejects all pretensions of capturing the actual in favor of an
inner vision of the world (785). Poetry unlike history does not proclaim itself historically
accurate; rather it revels in its artifice and the refrarning and defarrriliarizing of our
perceptions of the real world.

In the “Eumaeus” episode we witness several fragmented hypodiegetics as

various storytellers layer incomplete tales one upon the other creating theatrical illusion.

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Shari Benstock and Bernard Benstock provide a good description of the defamiliarization
and limitations of perspective that characterizes the scene in the cabman’s shelter:
The camera’s eye never allows us to view the entire scene at once or
enumerate the characters present. Nor are most of them clearly defined
individuals, and like the metamorphosing dog in Circe they change
identities throughout... they are shrouded in mystery. . .37
History in “Eumaeus” and M as a whole consists of the “fabrications” and
“spinning yarns” of competing hypodiegetic voices (735). Joyce is careful to point out
that the circulating tales are “highly unlikely” and lacking “even a shadow of truth”
(753). In each of the cabmen’s stories, the narratee (both textual listeners and readers) is
severed from the historical seed of any given story so that the tale’s significance hides
behind a disnarrated veil. Again we are reminded of the narrative filters in Conrad that
result in narratees left disconnected from Kurtz’s original story.

Joyce himself, Declan Kiberd tells us, was “anxious to rebuke ancient heroism”
and its false claims of authenticity.38 As Joyce was well aware, historicity depends on the
narrative choices of the storyteller:

The historical narrator arbitrarily selects from the immense,
undifferentiated flood of past events those few thatarijudged significant,
1nterprets them, and assrgns them causal relatronshrps.
Mieke Bal would agree, maintaining that the hypodiegetic, which results from the
retelling of an event, is inherently fictive due to its selected, interpreted, or fragmented
status (54). Historical events, from the life of Paddy Di gnam to the Boer War, depend on

the filtering of a narrator, who in turn is limited by both perspective and the tools of

language. Thus, the truth-accuracy of these recounted events can never be measured.

 

37 Who’s He When H_e’s at Home: A James Joyce Directog (37).
3” ibid. (xxv).
39 Thomas G. Schrand, “Authority and Catechesis: Narrative and Knowledge in Ulysses” (212).

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The act of writing history occurs in “a retrospective kind arrangement” so that the reality
sought surfaces only as “a kind of dream” (757). It invents what Bergson calls a
“retroactive truth,” subject to the perspective distance of time and space.40

Since the past becomes a fabricated fantasy, its unattainable truth is easily
disregarded and replaced by the false comforts of belief. William James regards a
memory as “only an object imagined in the past (usually very completely imagined there)
to which the emotion of belief adheres.”41 Bloom constructs his own history as he wishes
to return to a romanticized homeland he has never seen, along with a son and orientalized
wife he has never known. Sirrrilarly, Molly fantasizes about past lovers, confusing them
with present ones. Her sense-making process of the past illustrates James’ determination
of the gap between mind and action. Given that reality is always the moment of vision
before intellectualization takes place, a mental return to that reality is intrinsically
unrealizable.

In some respects the appropriation of _Iflyags’ hypodiegetic voices evokes the
myth of Echo. Cursed with the inability to create her own utterances, Echo is limited to
mimicking the expressions of others. She wastes away, diminished to a disembodied
voice in the forest after Narcissus rejects her. Similarly the fragmented voices of history
depend on the main diegesis to “mimic” their narratives. The fragments of literature,
song, and contemporary culture that Joyce pastes into the text are disembodied and
diminished as mirrricked hypodiegetics. Their utterances depend on the perspective

frame of Ulysses, which in turn truncates those narratives and distorts their original

“history.” Again Bal reminds us that the more independent and complete the

 

‘° mm (22).
'1 The Principles of Psychology (652).

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hypodiegetic voice is, the more problematic its relation to the main diegesis will be."2
Her explanation helps to account for the difficulty in meshing Joyce’s fondness for
fragmented quoting with the main diegesis. As voices external to the text, Joyce’s
digressions refuse to remain in place within the diegetic frame, and yet they depend on
that frame for context. They often seem strange and inaccessible because they are agents
of a new focalization (that of [_Jlflas) excised from their original focalizing texts.
Therefore, Joyce’s intertextual styling results in an overlapping frarne-effect; the
borrowed hypodiegetic remains meaningful in its original frame (i.e. Yeats’ “Who Goes
with Fergus,” Harry B. Norris’ song “Those Lovely Seaside Girls,” dental ad from Q;
Irish Times) while taking on new meanings within its new frame.

Besides its comic irony, Joyce’s juxtaposition of contemporary Dublin with the
mythic setting of Homer exemplifies an inseparable bond between past and present.
More important, Elm demands a reconsideration of historicity and its relation to
narrative. It is this tenuous relationship between history and reality which allows an
unlikely “false faint” Bloom to walk in the heroic shoes of Odysseus (678). The bond,
infinitely affirmed in "Penelope"'s final “yes,” extends to the living and the dead, the
present and the past, linked yet separated by an irreparability of the past that disallows an
objective analysis of history. The burden of Stephen, Bloom and Molly's historical and
personal pasts becomes our own burden of emplotrnent in its inaccessibility. We must
assemble the Echo-like fragments of _Lflypgaa’ utterances into further frames of meaning,
writing the story of Bloomsday as narratees to a linguistically opaque history. In the
following chapter, I look how Virginia Woolf responds to the Joycean narrative frame.

By refocusing on the disnarrated windows of language itself, Woolf moves beyond the

 

42“Notes on Narrative Embedding” (48)-

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narrative gaps imposed by Joyce’s stylistic shifts, to expose language’s inefficiency as a

frame for the unnarratable.

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CHAPTER FOUR

HAPPINESS IS THIS: WORDS AS EMPTY FRAMES IN VIRGINIA WOOLF

In the previous two chapters we have seen how the Joycean utterance in its
fragmentation and conversely, the disnarrated in its silence, open multiple frames of
possibility that demand theoretical reconsideration of our notions of narrative and its
relation to historical truth. Preceding with Joyce provides an intentional and strategic
segue way into my discussion of Virginia Woolf as much of the narrative
experimentation we find in M is in turn played out, mimicked, questioned, parodied
and refrarned in Woolf’ s post-_Iflys_se_s novels. I begin with a look at the often
controversial Joycean aspects in Woolf’ 5 work, particularly those found in Mrs.
Dalloway, to explore how her own individual style emerges from the black hole of Joyce
to further advance the Modernist narrative experiment. Both influenced by and critical of
Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway represents an analytical hybrid of Joyce’s novel that suggests a
narratological “history repeating itself with a difference” as it appropriates and questions
the narrative frames set out by Joyce.

Once the narrative connection between Joyce and Woolf is analyzed, I then delve
into Woolf’ s own treatment of frames, particularly with regard to narrative issues of
duration, verbal miscommunication and the empty frameworks that characterize her
Modernist novels. Mrs. Dalloway demonstrates a Modernist quarrel with the stability,
artificiality, and simply, the acknowledgment of duration, which the nineteenth-century
novel conveniently accepts as a fixed and unobtrusive narrative structure. In its tinkering
with the expected stability of time and space, the Modernist acknowledgment and

questioning of duration lays much of the stylistic groundwork for postmodern

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experimentation and new critical structures created to account for temporal and spatial
variation in literature.

In Woolf language itself becomes a frame, outlining an emptiness that blocks the
communication of one’s inner experiences to the outer world. In examining the narrative
styles of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, this chapter establishes the uniqueness of
Woolf’s use of frames in her interrogation of language as a sufficient framing device of
meaning. Empty linguistic frames dominate the communication efforts between Woolf’s
characters. Their frequent and consequential reoccurrence in turn encompasses the
structure of Woolf’ s novels as whole. As the Joycean frame suggests the disnarrated
“purely imagined worlds” it might contain, the empty Woolfian frame functions at both
the verbal and the novel’s structural levels, further complicating the narrative void as it
replaces disnarrative possibility with a wordless emptiness. Whereas Joyce calls upon his
narratees, both within and outside the text, to speculate on the disnarrated possibilities
enclosed within the frame, Woolf answers the questions for us with a silent void that
disallows any linguistic speculation as to what has been narratively omitted. In the
previous section we see how Joyce reinvents narrative, defamiliarizing the expected
patterns, styles, and subject matter typical of realism. In Woolf much of Joyce’s stylistic
ostranenie is imitated, questioned, and refined. As one of the best and most discussed
examples of this correspondence, the following of firm—sea with Mrs. Dalloway reveals
Woolf stylistically adapting and complicating many of the narrative cues set out by
Joyce. With these cues, Woolf learns new narrative methods of framing her own difficult
to structure work. Woolf’s stylistic process creates not a replica of HILSSE but a

refrarning of its narrative possibilities. One especially interesting correspondence

llO

between Joyce and Woolf is Woolf’ s addressing of the narratological windows opened by
Joyce’s work.
Beginning with Wyndham Lewis’s original attack on Mrs. lglloway, which

acrimoniously insists the novel contains “exact and puerile copies of scenes” from

M, the debate over Joyce’s influence on Woolf is long and unresolved.1 While I do
not intend to take up sides in this dispute, I propose here that though the Joycean qualities
in Woolf cannot be disregarded, the subsequent narrative of Mrs. Dalloway extends
beyond a mere reworking of _Iflyisg and represents a critical reading of Joyce that refines
the narratological models she found both useful and problematic in his work. Although
Joyce’s displacement of perspective concurs with Woolf’ s Modernist sensibility, Woolf
disagrees with the chosen method of narrative diversity. For Woolf, renovation of
traditional narrative requires a refocusing not on the fragmentation that results from the
juxtaposition of stylized discourses, but rather on ways a singular discourse reveals
narrative gaps. In contrast to the large frames cast by Joyce’s varied discourses, Woolf
promotes the subtler method of a more or less unified diegesis that draws attention to the
smaller disnarrated frames of language. A reassessment of spatial, temporal, and
psychological perception must permeate the atomic level of narrative itself. It must

examine not simply narrative style but individual words and their impact on narrative

 

' “Virginia Woolf” (138).

Molly Host article “The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs. Dalloway” gives a good overview of the
controversy. Lewis followed by William Jenkins, Hugh Kenner, William York Tindall, and Kelly
Anspaugh have all criticized the obvious similarities between Woolf and Joyce, varying in degree from
Anspaugh’s accusation of plagiarism to Tindall’s softer claim of Woolt’s primary indebtedness to Joyce
(203). In defense of Woolf, Gerald L. Bruns, Gian Biagio Conte, Carolyn Heilbrun, Bruce Clarke, and
Molly Hoff explain this correspondence as a “metamorphic recycling” into “newly imagined combinations”
(Clarke 32). Hoff argues that Woolf’ s critics “miss the actual parody and introduce irrelevancies that
inspire accusations of plagiarism.” Rather than simple mimicry, Woolf “paraphrases, parodies, and
burlesques” which draws our attention to the comic discrepancies between the parodied text and its new
context (187-88).

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meaning. For Woolf, the most important question the modern novel should ask is not
how traditional narratives reveal disnarrated gaps when set against each other, but how
traditional language, as the building blocks of narrative, frames the unnarratable—the
wordless ambiguity of emotion, epiphany, memory and duration.

Too often Woolf is cited as a vehement, if not jealous, critic of Joyce when much
of her nonfiction writing reveals a contradictory respect for his work. Though far more
generous in her earlier praise for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Woolf does
respond positively to the installments of mm she had been reading. In spite of the
frequently quoted jabs she makes at her Irish counterpart, Woolf also declares Joyce the
most notable of her contemporaries in attempting

to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what
interests and moves [him], even if to do so [he] must discard most of the

conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist.2

Woolf’ s critical writing never fully acknowledges her indebtedness to Joyce, and
yet her reading of M unquestionably influences her writing which undergoes
profound stylistic changes both during and after her encounter with Joyce’s novel.
During the years between 1919’s Night and Day and 1922’s Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s style
makes an abrupt shift from the metonymy of straightforward realism towards the
nonrepresentational narrative experimentation she would maturate in Mrs. Dalloway, lo
the Igghthouse and The Waves. It is no coincidence that Joyce’s M was serialized
from April 1918 until December 1920 in The Little Review. Frustrated with the Wellsian
custom to verbally represent the “solidity” of life, Woolf finds in the multiperspective

density of Ulysses “how much of life is excluded or ignored” from that stale nineteenth-

 

2
“Modern Fiction” (213).

112

century tradition.3 Woolf, who had been struggling with the structure of Mrs. Dalloway,
learns from Joyce new methods of narratively framing time, voice, and the “varying...
unknown and uncircumscribed spirit,” which seemed to elude realist convention. Given
her intention with Mrs. Dalloway to “exarrrine for a moment an ordinary mind on an

ordinary day,” Ulysses demonstrates narrative ways to reject the metonymy of realism in

favor of the metaphoric.4

Among Mrs. Dalloway’s many nods to Joyce, the most obvious are its day-long
time span occurring in mid-June, its sense of monumentalism and Homeric parallelism
attached to the ordinary, its polyphonic fragmentation and access to inner thoughts and
the resultant density presented to the reader, its dual and tenuously connected diegeses of
Clarissa and Septimus, and its blurring of the past with the present. William D. Jenkins,
among others, has tracked extensively the correspondence between Mrs. Dalloway and

Ulysses, linking Septimus to Stephen and Clarissa to Bloom and Molly in a subtle

Homeric structure.5 In support of Jenkins, Harvena Richter points out that early
manuscript versions of the novel had Septimus Smith originally named Stephen Smith

and Sally Seton as Molly, though we must remember that Woolf’s father’s name was also

Stephen.6

 

3
ibid. (215).
One explanation put forth by Nancy Topping Bazin is that the Modernists, particularly DH. Lawrence and
Woolf, recognize “male” writing as realistic, representational and empirical, whereas “female” writing
concerns itself with the poetic, the nonrepresentational, and spiritual and experiential unity. The male
manifests itself in terms of “metonymic relations (contiguous associations in time and place)” as opposed to
the female’s “metaphorical relations (associations of identity and substitution).” The Modernist seeks to
“build a narrative structure and language that enacts male and female modes and explores the problematics
of balancing them in a dynamic whole.” (See Teresa L. Ebert’s “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Ideology:
Language and Perception in Mrs. Dalloway” 153-4).

5 ibid. (212).
6 “Virginia Woolf and the Belittling of Ulysses” (515).
“The Ulysses Connection: Clarissa Dalloway’s Bloomsday” (306).

113

Undoubtedly, flyiseihad been on Woolf’ s mind during her writing process, and
yet the genius and originality of her work rest not in the simplicity of inspired mimicry,
but rather in its questioning, parodying, and ultimate revision of the _Iflyisgs approach to
narrative. Set side by side, the two novels invite a rich intertextual comparison in that

they reveal “a marked difference in what each could imagine transpiring in an ordinary

mind on an ordinary day in J une.”7 The end product of Mrs. Dalloway then is not that we

have two versions of Ulysses, but rather “the simultaneous presence of two different

realities,” two narrative directions befitting to the multiperspectiveness of Modernism.8
In some respects the stylistic intertextuality of Mrs. Dalloway appropriates UbLses in the
same manner the latter initially overtakes Homer and every other literary figure it
conjures up. If Elm swallows the whole of literature through a fragmented
summoning of its history, then Mrs. Dalloway, the larger whale as chronological descent
dictates, in turn swallows I_Jl_y_s_sg and all the literary plankton caught in the Joycean net.
In spite of its brevity next to M, the chrestomathy of Mrs. Dalloway includes
Joyce’s novel and thus, inevitably encompasses it and all that it contains.

As Joyce teaches us, literary conjuration lifts the borrowed reference from its
original text and renders it hypodiegetic and inherently altered as either parody or simple
incompleteness in the new textual frame which cites it. Molly Hoff argues that Woolf’ s
critics mistakenly reduce the issue of Joycean influence to simple unaltered transference,
the equivalent of accusing Joyce of merely adapting Homer. These critics overlook the
fact that Mrs. Dafloway represents not only a parodic appropriation of @228 including

its Homeric sources, but also a literary chrestomathy that extends far beyond Joyce to

 

7
Maria DiBattista, “Joyce, Woolf and the Modern Mind” (102).

114

include “at least 600 [non-Joycean] paraphrases and parodies that share the [Modernist]

rhetoric of dis-membering and re-membering” characteristic of Ulysses.9 Woolf adopts
the Joycean method of appropriation, only to extend his “joke” of referentiality by further

swallowing the history of literature, which now includes the recently conjured Joyce

himself.lo

Aspects of Woolf’s J oycean revision often reveal themselves in subtle yet
significant variations. Unlike m, in which there is an incessant usurpation of the
narrator’s voice, Mrs. Dgloway enjoys the continuous and more traditional presence of a
narrator who acts as a fusion of all the novel’s voices. Narratively-speaking then, M

Dalloway is more unified than its predecessor Ulysses, owing to what Seymour Chatman

. . . . ,,ll . .
would call its “neutrallzed 1ndlrect free style. Woolf does not attempt to mrmlc
Joyce’s stream of consciousness. Rather she reports characters’ thoughts with
introductory tag clauses such as “she thought” in an effort to “keep control of the story as

it progresses, to retain not only her directive power over the material but her ability to

emphasize the unifying factor.”12 Woolf’s unity, however, is frequently compromised by
the recurring narrative fragmentation created by ellipses, communicative gaps, and

durational tampering.

 

8
9 Gian Biagio Conte, The Rhetoric of Woolf Imitation (23-24).
lo‘The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs. Igllowav” (187-88).

Despite its significant bearing on Woolf‘s writing, I have purposely omitted T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
of 1922 from this equation for the purpose of maintaining a narratological focus on the genre of fiction.
Woolf certainly adapts aspects of Eliot’s method in her prose. Stylistically we see Eliot’s fragmentation of
time, space, and voices in Woolf. Thematically, we see Eliot’s empty city frames, the disnarrated dead, and
the miscommunications between man and woman of “A Game of Chess” in all Woolt‘s post-Waste Land
work. As a poetic counterpart to Ulysse , The Waste Land also lays the groundwork of this literary
“swallowing” or referentiality subsequently taken up by Woolf in prose and Ezra Pound in poetry.

H Stomapd Discogge (206).

‘2 David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (70).

115

The striking similarity between Woolf’ 3 description of the royal motorcade’s
procession through the streets of London and Joyce’s “Wandering Rocks” episode
exemplifies how Woolf stylistically adapts her J oycean influence. Both sections use the
seemingly random event of an object progressing in real time across a city-space to
demonstrate the simultaneity of the multiperspective realities which encounter it. Woolf,
however, breaks from the Joycean mold by removing Ulys_se;s’ insistent nineteen
partitions that separate characters from one another and fragment Dublin into a cubist
cityscape. Instead Woolf attempts “to take the frame from the picture” so that voices

intersect in a temporal and spatial simultaneity that refuses the traditional fixity of the

novel.13 As a whole, Mrs. Dalloway dismisses chapter breaks, signifying a rejection of
Joyce’s segregations in style, voice, time and space, in favor of a fluidity and unity
between the polyphonic perspectives that make up the novel. In her breaking of the
“hierarchic order of grammar, space, time, logic, and literary convention,” Woolf
removes the chapter-frames of Faulkner and Joyce to allow voices and perspectives to
spill into one another.” Without chapters to frame scenes of action as fixed in time and
space, Woolf moves closer to capturing Henri Bergson’s e’lan vital—the constant life
force of change and becoming that flows independent of spatial and temporal perimeters.
From a narratological standpoint, the missing borders of chapters indicates
Woolf’ 8 concern with duration, an issue on her mind from the start as the novel’s original
title of The Hours reveals. Of particular relevance to Woolf and the Modernists,
narratologist Giinther Miiller defines two useful terms: Erza'hlte Zeit (“story time” or the

time span covered by events in the story that is told) and Erzahlzeit (discourse time, the

 

'3 R.L Chambers, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (7).

116

time taken to represent these events).15 One of the most experimental aspects of _Misy
Dalloway is its discrepancy between the Erza’hlte Zeit and Erza'hlzeit so that, as with
_I_Jl_y_s§e_§, the novel’s story time covers a single day while its discourse time slows,
accelerates, and stops independent of our notions of real time. Gérard Genette has
already noted the difficulty in measuring textual duration, suggesting that perhaps the

only true gauge of duration would be the time it takes to actually read the text, and of

course, measuring this would depend on the individual reader.16 True experience of time
then depends not on the clock but rather on a fluidity which can slow or accelerate based
on individual perception. Consider for example Woolf’s description of an hour as a
subjective experience in Orlando:
An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be
stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an
hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one
second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and
time in the rrrind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller
investigation. (91)

In the Modernist text the difficulty of durational measurement is compounded by
the narrative manipulations of time and space we have already witnessed in Faulkner and
Joyce. Richard Pearce describes the Modernist technique as

stretch[ing] the sentence, or the basic narrative unit, to include
grammatical gaps, physical gaps, narrative intrusions, conflations of

experiences and possible experiences, leaps in time and space, leaps from
the mental to the physical world—and individual images that suddenly

 

" Richard Pearce, “Virginia Woolf's Struggle with Author-ity” (73).

15

See Miiller’s Morphologische Poetik which treats the subject of duration in Mrs. Dalloway far more
extensively than I do here. A.A. Mendilow’s Time and the Novel and Gérard Genette’s Figures of Literary
Discourse propose varied but similar definitions of the two types of literary time.

'6 See Figures 111 (77-182).

117

transform 7themselves, succeed one another helter skelter, [and] fail to
1
coalesce.

One of Woolf’ s own durational devices is her notorious use of ellipses, which in wasting
no space on narrative duration effectively accelerate textual speed. As with the gaps
between voices in Faulkner or the space between styles in Joyce, we might consider what
time and space textual acceleration skims over. What purely imagined worlds do
Woolf’s ellipses suggest? Since we simply cannot measure the absence of time and
space, the disnarrated hidden behind the ellipses remains elusive, its linearity undefined.
More important, the mere suggestion of a disnarrative presence again reminds us of the
opaque windows of possibility opened by Modernist fragmentation.

In its abstract independence from clock time, Miiller’s Erzc'ihlzeit suggests
Bergson’s distinction between quantitative clock time and experienced time, which he
refers to as duration. Paradoxically, duration is timelessness. It moves like Woolf” s
ellipses across time and space from one point to another, and yet we can never accurately
measure that distance. It blurs chapter breaks, fuses voices together, and allows the past
to blur into the present through the constant intrusion of memory. In “A Sketch of the
Past” Woolf describes the linguistic difficulty of representing duration:

One must get the feeling of everything approaching and then disappearing,
getting large, getting small, passing at different rates of speed. .. That is
what is indescribable, that is what makes all images too static, for no
sooner has one said this was so, than it was past and altered. (79)

Since it is continuously flowing, duration can only be perceived when partitioned into

moments or snapshots, those images Woolf refers to as static and altered.

 

17
ibid. (71).

118

The distorting mirror of Miss La Trobe’s play in Between the Acts delivers a
fragmented view of the audience akin to Stephen Dedalus’s cracked looking glass. The
mirror captures a moment from the durational flow of the play, emphasizing the
disnarrated remains of what has been omitted from the portrayal. As a frame, the mirror
captures only fragments of that which it represents, drawing speculative attention to the
disnarrated which the frame cannot contain. And yet in Bergsonian terms the mirror
reflection represents moments excised from the duration of history (“Each declaimed
some phrase or fragment from their parts”); hence, it may provide only a fragmented
view as it fails to frame the fluidity of experience. The audience see themselves “not
whole by any means, but at any rate sitting still,” since all the mirror reveals of
themselves are “scraps, orts and fragments” (134-36).

Throughout Woolf’ 5 experimental novels we find what Georges Poulet describes

in Marcel Proust as “a moment totally deprived of any connection with the rest of

duration, a moment suspended in itself.”18 Leery of the false stability of traditional
linearity and cause and effect, Woolf accesses these “moments of being” through
installments independent of the “unnatural” narrative method of chronology. Shlomith
Rimmon-Kenan explains that strict chronological succession for the Modernist
can only be found in stories with a singleline or even with a single
character. The minute there is more than one character, events may

become simultaneous and the story is often multilinear rather than
unilinear. Strict linear chronology, then, is neither natural nor an actual

characteristic of most stories.
The natural response in Mrs. Dirlloway is an attempt to represent a past that

perpetually flows into its present. Adhering to a Bergsonian virtual coexistence, the

 

8
1 “Proustian Space” (99).

119

process inevitably complicates the durational and linear aspects of the novel. The
perpetual flow of duration becomes most apparent in Woolf’s treatment of memory as the
past surfaces in installments, based on narrative need rather than a fixed chronology.
Narratively speaking, the past does not necessarily follow a linear path to the present.
Instead it surfaces as “indescribable pauses” of “moments” of memory in seemingly
random fragments, independent of linear and temporal perspective.

As a theory of memory, Woolf’ s narrative treatment of the past mirrors Henri
Bergson’s definition of remembering. In Midland Memory Bergson describes the act
of remembering as fragmented and independent of the false constructions of chronology.
It is based on the needs of the present rather than the artificial linear structures
characteristic of traditional narratives:

Consciousness, then, illurrrines, at each moment in time, that immediate
part of the past which, impending over the future, seeks to realize and to
associate with it. Solely preoccupied in thus determining an undetermined
future, consciousness may shed a little of its light on those of our states,
more remote in the past, which can be usefully combined with our present
state, that is to say, with our immediate past: the rest remains in the dark.
(194)
Accordingly, Woolf’s “tunnelling’ method is more “natural” than a Dickensian
chronological faithfulness in that it partitions the past into moments based on
psychological need rather than a false linearity. A traditional chronological structure
might narrate that
First all of Monday happened.
Then all of Tuesday happened,

followed by all of Wednesday.
Finally, all of Thursday happened.

 

l9
Narrative Fiction: Contemwrm Poetics ( 16-17).

120

A Bergsonian-Woolfian structure, however, rrright reorganize the narrative around what
is needed of these events now:

Lunch on Wednesday happened.

Then Monday ’5 dinner happened,

followed by Monday ’5 breakfast.

Finally, Tuesday’s lunch happened.

Well exemplified in novels such as Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, and The Sound

and the Fug, the particularly Modernist effect of a seemingly random summoning of the
past represents a deconstruction of the temporal and spatial relations the realist novel

relies on to account for causality. As Susan Dick notes, "the achronological memories of

the characters function as a second tier of narrative which develops in tandem with the

chronological action of the present."20 Therefore, we have two discourse times to speak
of, durationally independent not only of each other but also of the story time spanning
their events.

Concurrent past and present narratives consequently blur the distinction between
the living and the dead. As Woolf’ s narrative carves installments into the past, the
specious present ceases to move forward until it is swallowed up in its own hindsight.
Clarissa's day turns like Bloomsday in a luminous halo. It is a durational circle during
which the dead and stagnant present are overshadowed by the vitality of the past, a life
force represented by the overpowering presence of memory and regret that dominates
much of the characters’ thoughts during the day. In Ma Molly Bloom’s romanticized
and outshining past rises in her thoughts to compare with her present. The ghosts of
Clarissa’s past also return to measure her present life with the one she has mythologized.

J. Hillis Miller suggests the single day in June represents a sort of All Souls Day during

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which Peter, Sally, and the other “ghosts” return from the dead, summoned by Clarissa’s

party.21 The living and the dead versions of these characters arrive to challenge one

another, exemplified in the continuous meeting between the “living” (those present on
this day in 1923 such as Clarissa) and the “dead” (those ghosts of both the deceased such

as Evans and the lingering memories of what a person once was such as the young Peter

of Bourton as opposed to the rrriddle-aged Peter). 22 It is a meeting of two diegeses—the
past with the present and the living with the dead—during which there is a narrative
struggle for control.

Miller points out the conspicuousness of a purposely deleted lyric from the
Strauss song sung by the battered old woman. Woolf goes so far as to quote the song in

full with the exception of a single line that Miller argues provides a cleverly buried key to

the novel: "One day in the year is free to the dea ."23 If the line represents a key to our
understanding of the novel, its omission, like Joyce’s disnarrated fragments, complicates
our reading as the outlining frame of the rest of the song draws attention to the
unresolved fragmented narrative of the dead within it. The line’s absence leaves a gap in
the song’s narrative, dividing the song into two halves with the defamiliarized suggestion
of an unnarratable dead in its middle. Woolf” s framed omission fulfills two functions.
First, it defines the dead as personifications of the past, “free” to haunt the living on this

chosen day. By merely eluding to this line rather than stating it explicitly, Woolf in a

 

20
21 "The Tunnelling Process: Some Aspects of Virginia Woolfs Use of Memory and the Past" (187).
22 "Mrs. Dallowa : Repetition as the Raising of the Dead" (90).

To clarify, I use “living” to suggest the characters in the present (Clarissa on this mid-June day in 1923)
and the dead to suggest ghosts of both the deceased (Evans) and the lingering memories of what a person
once was (the young Peter of Bourton as opposed to the middle-aged Peter).

23
ibid. (92-93).

122

sense emulates the living’s inability to do more than speculate and hence, mythologize
and empower the past, given its disnarrative absence. The speculative and unspeakable
gap in the song divides the past from the present and suggests an irreparability of the past
that rises, strengthened like the wordless Michael Furey, to virtually paralyze the living.
The second function of Woolf’ s omission is the gap mimics the Modernist text itself.
Just as the missing line constitutes a wordless emptiness in the song’s center, the
Modernist text also often contains a void in its structural middle. This structural void will
have particular relevance to the empty center of the “Time Passes” section in Mt;
Lighthouse.

Empowered by the living’s distortional act of remembering and the temporal and
spatial freedoms of duration, the dead and absent on this All Saints Day are mythologized
and reincarnated as entities independent of past and present realities. I am reminded here

of the novels of Joseph Conrad, for whom Woolf reserves her “unconditional

gratitude.”24 Conrad also renews a Romantic concern with the simultaneous existence of
past, present and future in which the living and the dead seem to coexist. In his preface
to The Ni er of the "Narcissus", he writes that it is the artist’s duty to appeal
to solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in
hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all
humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn. (4)
Conrad adheres to this artistic duty in The Nigger of the "Narcissus", as well as m:

wdow-Line, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes, all of which

contain characters who dangerously tread the Gretta Conroy line between memory and

 

24
“Modern Fiction” (208).

123

recreation. As personifications of memory, the dead rise as empowered and independent
entities, molded of fact and fiction, memory and creation.

In The Nigger of the "Narcissus" the ship’s crew is haunted by the “the undying
murmur of folly, regret, and hope exhaled by the crowds of the anxious earth” (121). The
new captain in The Shadow-Line blames his troubles on a mythologized variation of his
dead predecessor: “It was the fault of the 'old man'—the late captain—ambushed down
there under the sea with some evil intention" (263). In the same light we may recall how
the memory-distortions of Parnell in Dubliners and um create a romanticized
monument larger than the living man they are supposedly based on, or how Duffy’s
mourning for Mrs. Sinico and Stephen’s for his mother rouse disnarrated ghosts so
overwhelming that their mourners are paralyzed with an unspeakable guilt. In M_rs_.
Dalloway Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus also obsessively rewrite their pasts so that their
ghosts haunt them throughout the day.

Besides mourning, sleep provides an interesting catalyst in the reanimation of the
dead. Obsessed with the impending death of Wait, the sailors of the Narcissus sleep in
beds like "graves tenanted by uneasy corpses” as their raincoats swing above "lively and
disquieting like reckless ghosts of decapitated seamen dancing in a tempest" (60, 42). In
sleep Molly Bloom (and we might also guess this of Gretta Conroy) returns to her past,
surfacing the ghosts of a lost youth and sexuality. Time and reality become
immeasurable in the “Penelope” section as Molly confuses her life’s chronology through
snapshots of its duration. Her past, however, is repeatedly romanticized in contrast to her
bleak depiction of her present. Clarissa naps her way back to her mythologized days at

Bourton of the early nineties. Sleep allows her the ultimate unification of past with

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present, but it also blurs both to distortion. Just as she hopes in vain that her guests will
"remember her party," she yearns, out of a growing fear of old age and death, to
remember, immortalize, if not relive her past, when in truth she rewrites it with the

mythologizing ink of nostalgia and romance. Despite her efforts, she cannot hear

“even... an echo of her old emotion.”25
Peter also returns to the past via sleep: "The past he had been dreaming of. It was

Bourton that summer" (88). In a dream he is haunted by the ghost of Clarissa
accompanied by the disnarrated hope of what might have been before she married and he
ventured to India. In contrast to Clarissa, his dreams of Bourton lead him to a logical
appreciation of the past rather than a mourning for its irrecoverability. Rather than
lamenting an irretrievable romanticized past and the inevitable mortality that stands in its
place—both causes of paralysis for Clarissa—Peter refuses to give in to the dead present
life characteristic of Clarissa. Similar to Stephen Dedalus’ “Non serviam,” Peter
banishes the memories which haunt him: "No! No! he cried. She is not dead! I am not
old, he cried, and marched up Whitehall" (75). As with Peter, it is not until Conrad’s
Singleton reluctantly accepts the irrepressibility of the past and the inevitability of his
own death that he is able to carry out his duties on board the Narcissus:

He had never given a thought to his mortal self... And like a man bound

treacherously while he sleeps, he woke up fettered by the long chain of

disregarded years. He had to take up at once the burden of all his

existence, and found it almost too heavy for his strength. (74)

The case of Septimus is somewhat different in that it is his lunacy rather than

sleep that conjures up the dead. Psychologically unable to function in the present,

 

2
5 Mrs. Dalloway (51).

125

Septimus is forced to live in the past, in the world of the dead. It is a perpetual stroll
through Joyce’s nighttown where the ghost of Evans haunts his every step:

Look, the unseen bade him, the voice which now communicated with

him...Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who lay like a

coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun... (37)
Accompanied by the same snow that binds Joyce’s Gabriel and DH. Lawrence’s Gerald
Crich with the dead, the ghost of Evans represents the regret and irreparability of the past
that Bourton symbolizes for Clarissa and Peter. Unlike Clarissa, who in Woolf’s final
drafts of the novel, chooses to remain alive, the doomed Septimus opts for suicide as the
ultimate gesture towards immortality and eternal unity with the past. The act of throwing
himself through a window frame evokes the image of a passing through to a disnarrated
world, a joining of the diegetic present with the hypodiegetic past. Wondering “why not
enter in,” Septimus takes a figurative leap into the gap of the dead which divides the old
battered woman’s song (42). But before I delve further into the implications of
Septimus’s passing through a disnarrative window, I want to first address Woolf’ s
concern with verbal communication.

Whereas Joyce stresses a hypodiegetic struggle between voices for “air time” in a
polyphonic narrative, Woolf is instead preoccupied with language’s insufficiency to
articulate experience and meaning and to unite the dispersed voices which constitute her
novels. In the Introduction, I note the recurring Modernist struggle with the slipperiness
of language. Here I want to focus on Woolf’ s particular exploration of the frustrated
lives of people incapable of reaching one another beyond the superficiality of “public”

talk. How can words frame the elusive “symbol of something which has soared beyond

seeking and questing and knocking of words together and has become all spirit,

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disembodied, ghostly?” (42). In terms of linguistic referentiality, language thwarts access
to private emotion and wordless vision and meaning, disallowing the possibility of
framing these experiences in utteral terms so that in their alienation from language these
experiences become the disnarrated. Meaning, as Harold Pinter later writes in defense of
The Birthday Party, “begins in the words, in the action... and ends nowhere.” Meaning
which is “resolved, parceled, labeled and ready for export” between the inefficient frames
of language “is dead, impertinent—and meaningless.”

In Joyce voices are truncated and regulated to the half-spoken world of the
hypodiegetic. In Woolf language itself fiagrnents and frames diegetic voices separate
from one another so that their solitude resembles the disconnected voice-chapters of A_sl
Lay Du’ng. With some caution I distinguish between Joyce’s hypodiegetic and Woolf’ s
diegetic voices to indicate the multitude of vocal fragments in Joyce compared to the
relatively small number in Woolf. Of course we can track the hypodiegetic in Woolf as it
is undoubtedly present, but what is more distinguishing in Woolf’ s work are the
seemingly privileged diegetic voices which, in spite of enjoying as much air time as they
desire, still suffer the same narrative fragmentation and disnarrated silence endured by
Joyce’s hypodiegetic narratives. Throughout Mrsgrgoway language is a problematic
medium through which characters struggle to connect with one another and frame their
experiences with the fragility of words. Often we witness characters failing to express
their inner meanings with unfitting words; in other cases we find ellipses where all
attempts at verbal referentiality have ceased, and only space may bridge the

communicative void. Maria DiBattista describes the linguistic translation from the

127

private to the public as one in which meaning is somehow compromised or lost along the
way:

The acknowledged conventionality of social discourse creates a common
ground of exchange in which private utterance is translated into a public

speech that may not express the speaker’s thoughts...

One of the advantages of Woolf’s interior monologue is that we are able to
appreciate the vast difference between what a character thinks and what he or she says.
We are able “to go deeper, beneath what people [say]” (184). Take for example
Septimus's visions which do not appear insane at all when observed as unspoken

thoughts, but become unintelligible spurts of lunacy once verbalized. His tragedy is that

"he cannot finally favor and communicate the explosive immediacy of such visions."27 In
Between the Acts Lucy Swithin, a character whose thoughts are as equally profound and
ignored as those of Septimus, laments the uselessness of language in articulating these
visions:

“We haven't the words - we haven't the words,” Mrs. Swithin protested.
“Behind the eyes; not on the lips; that's all.” (44)

Even in death, Septimus is misunderstood as Dr. Holmes, a supposed professional in
“reading” others, declares the dead Septimus a coward when his final thoughts brim with
courage.

In Clarissa’s husband we find another telling example of an inability to frame
meaning through language. The superficial friendship between Richard and Hugh is just
one of many communication-free public relationships in which neither party articulates

what he feels. In Richard’s public language Hugh is a friend, whereas the private frames

 

26
27 Vir inia Wooll‘s Ma'or Novels (89).
Lucio Ruotolo, "Mrs. Dalloway: The Unguarded Moment” (146).

128

him as “an intolerable ass.” After parting with Hugh, Richard decides to take Clarissa
flowers and to tell her he loves her “in so many words.” He wants to speak of “this
feeling about her... [that] they never spoke of... not for years.” He laments his inability
to communicate as “the greatest mistake in the world. . . a thousand pities never to say
what one feels,” and yet a “time comes when it can’t be said.” Once he arrives “bearing
his flowers like a weapon,” he is unable to articulate the words. Instead he settles for a
mere grasp of her hand: "Happiness is this he thought" (173-76, my italics). And yet
there are no words for Richard’s this. His inability to say the words marks a linguistic
incapability to pinpoint his emotion. Flipped around as a palindrome, Richard’s thoughts
might read something like a telling passage from Woolf’ s diary: “The wordless are the
happy” (315). There is no linguistic signifier for his signified experience. In its place
stands the inefficient nothingness of a pronoun.

Though they have not seen each other in five years, Clarissa and Peter do not talk
about anything beyond the superficiality of their public lives, and yet both certainly yearn
to communicate their mutual love for one another. Even Peter's tearful breakdown fails
to break through the barriers between them. His emotional display fails to convey to
Clarissa the true meaning of his misery as he then spends the rest of the afternoon feeling
entirely misunderstood. Clarissa, for whom “words meant absolutely nothing,” also fails
in her desire to express her love to Sally, who makes a surprise appearance at her party.
Throughout the day Clarissa daydreams of the first love she has not seen in years, but
when they finally meet she hardly spends a moment with her. Again both characters
desire understanding, and still both are unable to accomplish it because of their

untranslatable thoughts.

129

Woolf’s insertion of interruptions further hampers the communication efforts
between characters. In the Joyce chapters I describe characters slipping into a post-
confessional sleep or death before the narratee to the confession can respond, thereby
producing a disnarrative effect. Similarly, Woolf inserts narrative interruptions in
conversation immediately before a mutual understanding between two characters can be
reached. To further hinder Richard’s inability to verbalize his feelings, he is interrupted
by Clarissa's irritation at having to invite her cousin to her party. Her complaints literally
silence Richard. Peter's attempts to articulate to Clarissa the same “I love you” as
Richard are thwarted twice by interruptions during the day: first when he initially visits
and Elizabeth enters the room, and later at the party when Clarissa abandons him to
accompany the Prime Minister. Ironically, it is the very party Clarissa had hoped would
unite her guests that serves as one of the constant interruptions that impedes that
connection.

Only the interruption of Septimus's suicide achieves a wordless understanding and
unity between characters, previously unattainable in the world of public language and
parties. After his leap his wife "ran to the window, she saw; she understood.” The doctor
Rezia had entrusted to help her husband proves to be the evil man Septimus had feared all
along as she sees "the large outline of his body dark against the window." In an echo of
To the Lighthouse’s James, who upon finally “seeing” the lighthouse asks “That was the
Lighthouse, was it,” it finally occurs to Rezia, "So that was Dr. Holmes" (228). As if

possessed by the ghost of her husband, she now understands what Septimus could not

utter, and she too has no words for her new understanding. The silence of death, in

130

contrast to the empty sound of words, allows characters to “see” themselves, the victim
and others, as if for the first time.

When Clarissa hears of Septimus’s suicide, the two seemingly unconnected story
lines merge as she has a vision of her own mortality. Although we witness Septimus’s
leap, Clarissa experiences his pivotal death as an offstage disnarrative, which encourages
her to speculate on the significance of this interruption. She thinks, “In the middle of my
party, here’s death.” In a room without words, she watches the mirror image of an old
woman across the way “quite quietly, going to bed alone” as “the clock began striking.”
Empathizing with Septimus's solution, “She did not pity him. . . she felt somehow very
like him.” Mimicking Septimus, Clarissa peers out the window to the unnarratable
wordless meaning that awaits on the other side of the frame. She realizes that

death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of
reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew them
apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death. (279-
83)

And with her new comprehension of an unreachable center—a void akin to the
omitted Strauss lyric—Clarissa undergoes a transformation, a sort of death, which
subsequently affects and unifies the characters downstairs. With his wife symbolically
absent from the room, the “widower” Richard finally "comprehends" his daughter,
suddenly "realiz[ing] that it was his Elizabeth,” that he is "proud of his daughter... and he
had not meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her" (296). With Clarissa's "death"
Peter and Sally recognize for the first time how closely bound they are to one another.

Most important, Peter finally realizes the new Clarissa at the novel's close: "It is Clarissa,

he said. For there she was." Clarissa both "is" and "was" in Peter's final vision. For the

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moment, the past is recaptured in the present, and he “comprehends” without language
both the Clarissa of Bourton and the Clarissa of London as one immortal whole.

To the Lighthouse further builds upon the concerns with language and unity that
we see in Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf extends a pattern of linguistic nrisconnection as
characters' thoughts, journeying from the private mind to the public world, lose their
meaning. In translation these inner worlds are framed as insufficient words, or often they
fail to turn into words at all. To emphasize the translational interception, Woolf further
destabilizes the tradition of narrative omniscience she questions in Mrs. Dalloway,
undermining narrative singularity and predicting the polyphonic of The Waves.28 In
dismissing the artificiality and confident articulations of a nineteenth-century metonymy,
Woolf in effect isolates her characters as a condition of their inability to linguistically
connect with both their inner unspoken experiences as well as those companion voices
with which they attempt to communicate. A frame separates characters from both their
wordless inner world they seek to express and the linguistic external world they yearn to
contact. Without the help of an all-seeing, all-articulating voice to simplify these inner
experiences into the frames of language, the characters remain verbally alienated from
the metaphorical representations of those experiences necessary to communicate.

Woolf’ s contemporary E.M. Forster provides a helpful example of the Modernist
linguistic void in A Passage to India. There is a wordless unknown quality, a Conradian
metaphor of the heart of darkness disconnected from its meaning, which resides in the
Marabar Caves and demands our speculative attention. On one level Forster’s characters

fail to understand the concealed “darkness” of the caves as a consequence of their diverse

 

28 . . . . .
See Erich Auerbach’s seminal chapter on Woolf 1n M1mesrs for further d15cussron of narrators.

 

132

ethnicities, cultures and genders, and yet beyond these restraints, they fail to comprehend
simply as a matter of the human condition. Aziz and Fielding fail to unite not only
because of their ethnic separation. More important, they remain detached as a condition
of the solipsistic “distance” between one mind and another. In a Bakhtinian sense,
Forster’s characters suffer a continuum of difference without resolution between two
experiential frames.

Early on To the Lighthouse isolates the guests at the Ramsays' summer home so
that its enclosing walls-hold the characters together as inefficiently as the collapsing
frame of the title As I Lay Dying unifies its disparate chapter-voices. As the audience
members of Between the Acts sit "too close, yet not close enough," the physical closeness
of frequent dining and the long conversations affords no intimacy between the Ramsays’
guests. Typically, perceptions in the Modernist polynarrative tend to vary greatly
between each character, and with Woolf’ s “trying on everyone's shoes” to allow glimpses
of both the characters' self-perceptions and their views of each other, it soon becomes
apparent that these characters linguistically fail to connect with one another beyond the
light political conversations that characterize their meals together. As with their
predecessors the Dalloways, the Ramsays fail to articulate their inner worlds, not due to a
lack of sensing those worlds but rather from the restrictive inadequacy of language to
represent the unrepresentable. They seek and fall short of finding Between the Acts’ cry
for a "center. Something to bring [them] all together" (144). In the final pages of the
“Window” section, Mrs. Ramsay suffers the same disconnection as Richard Dalloway

when she wants to tell her husband she loves him: "But she could not do it; she could not

133

say it. "29 She is deprived of the verbal bailing out of an omniscient narrator. Instead the
Modernist narrator, purposely rendered powerless in response to a false realist
omniscience, simply states that Mrs. Ramsay, and likewise the narrator, cannot express
her feelings.

The inability to bridge the gap between two minds extends to artistic attempts at
communication. Mr. Ramsay has failed as a philosopher, a calling dependent on one’s
ability to express ideas through words. The misguided trajectory of language leaves him
unable to directly verbalize his misery with a world that refuses to understand his unheard
theories. Rather he succumbs to the wordless impotence of mere sighs in hopes of being
understood. The “inscrutable” Mr. Carmichael likewise fails as a poet. His work is
hardly mentioned in the first two sections, and Woolf does not comment on its bearing on
others, which suggests the words Carmichael uses to convey his inner world to the outer
world fall short of their mark. Communication failure disallows the “message” of Lily
Briscoe’s completed painting to be viewed by the reader. Lily’s inability to finish her
painting in the opening section emanates from the impossibility of conceiving a
representative image for her thoughts. In the third section of the novel, a distressed Lily,
with thoughts similar to TS. Eliot’s Four Quarrtets (“Words strain/Crack and sometimes
break under the burden”), is unable to find the terms to sympathize with Mr. Ramsay:

And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that
broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. “About life, about
death; about Mrs. Ramsay” --no, she thought, one could say nothing to
nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words

fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low...how could one
express in words these emotions of the body? (192-93)

 

29 To the Lighthouse (132).

134

Echoing Septimus, Lily seems the most aware that words represent sterile and
ineffective snapshots of duration that fail to provide a mutual understanding. She
recognizes the futility in Mrs. Ramsay’s “making of the moment something permanent”
(175). How can words suffice to capture the élan vital of one’s experiences when they
merely freeze a moment that has already moved on into the next? Throughout the novel
Lily’s inner thoughts reveal a concern over her inability to find an "intimacy itself”:

For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on

tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to man, but

intimacy itself, which is knowledge... (58)
She Wonders, “Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment
of intimacy? This is knowledge? Aren’t things spoilt then. .. by saying them? (186).
Knowledge resides in the realm of language, tenuously fixed between the frames of
words. Unity, on the other hand, is something unspoken, understood rather than known
and free from the metonymic inefficiency of words. For Lily, even marriage, the ultimate
representation of unity, is undesirable owing to its artificial fixity between the frames of
language. Marriage is simply a word forged to bridge the insurmountable gap between
two separate entities. In lieu of language, Lily, like the Modernist painters, seeks images
to bridge the gap, an endeavor constantly thwarted by both the verbal interruptions of
onlookers and her own lack of confidence which dominates her inner voice. For the
painter who “can’t paint, can’t write... the great revelation had never come” (173, 175).

Driven by an urge to overcome the disconnection between disparate minds, Mrs.

Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay work as unifiers with the “duty” of bringing people together

to establish a unity of understanding. Each strives “to combine, to create,” to ultimately

135

frame those disparate voices around them.30 The irony of their impulsive drive towards
contact and communication is that the closest these unifiers come to materialization of
their desired connection occurs during moments in which they experience freedom and
detachment from others. Paradoxically, Woolf allows characters to experience human
bonding only through a disengagement and distance from those with whom they desire
unity. As we have seen in Mrs. Dallowa , the necessary disassociation often comes in
the form of death, or as in the case of To the Lighthouse, it is death coupled with the
passage of time that allows the characters a previously unattainable yet typically silent
understanding of one another.

Mrs. Ramsay, in many respects a doppelganger of Mrs. Dalloway, unsuccessfully
attempts to unify those around her. Whereas Clarissa desires harmony amongst her upper
class friends, Mrs. Ramsay concerns herself with the arrangement of perfect marriages,
both literal and figurative, as if to indirectly revive her own dead relationship with her
husband. Unity, however, does not come to Mrs. Ramsay until her own life is sacrificed
much as Clarissa’s epiphanic “death” and absence from the party unite her guests.
Similar to Big Ben which towers over Clarissa, the lighthouse provides an unforgettable
beacon of Mrs. Ramsay’s mortality. Beaming light into her eyes, the lighthouse marks
her for death. Recalling the final stroke of Joyce’s Flynn, the beam is "the last of three,
which was her stroke.” The constantly present sea surrounds the beacon of mortality like
the snow in “The Dead.” It seems to "outlast by a million years...the gazer" and suggests
the ubiquitous dead and the past that contains them. Each ebb and tide of the sea’s

immutable roaring voice reminds its listener of an inevitable mortality:

 

3° Mrs. Dalloway (185).

136

Clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their
questions "Will you fade? Will you perish?"—scarcely disturbed the
peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they
asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain. (142)
Fragments of the disnarrated sea of the dead echo throughout the novel, particularly as
the living sleep: "Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep)" (155).
Only moments before Mrs. Ramsay's death, the dead "tempt the sleeper from his bed to
seek an answer.” Confronting the dead, the anonymous sleeper asks the sea, "Will I
perish," only to be answered in a wordless affirmative as Mrs. Ramsay dies "rather
suddenly the night before."
Contrary to the dramatic, catalytic death of Septimus, which takes place near the
end of Mrs. Dgloway, Mrs. Ramsay's death occurs quite uneventfully, bracketed in the
middle of the novel. Her death separates the opening and closing sections for

comparison, pitting the ghost of Mrs. Ramsay against the living person it represents.

While the dead dominate much of Woolfs work, death itself is seldom incorporated into

the plot and never functions as the end of a Woolfian novel.“ In The Waves we learn of
Percival’s offstage ’death only through the other characters' reactions to it. Io_th_e
Lighthouse also conceals its deaths as Mrs. Ramsay, Prue and Andrew all die within
small interruptive parentheses in the "Time Passes” section. What we get is the before
and after, with death as the catalyst for change rather than the result of it. Woolf’s non-
depiction of death recalls Marcel Proust’s seven-volume Air recherche du temps perdu.
in which its approximately twenty-four deaths “provoke so little suspense before they

arrive, produce so little agitation in their passing, and cause so little significant alteration

 

31 John Mepham, "Mourning and Modernism” (149).

137

, . 32 . - . 9 u.
in the manner of tellrng.” Rlchard Terdiman describes Proust 8 patterns of
deformations” to the narrative tradition that deflate and defanriliarize the “expected”
narrative kernels of nineteenth-century fiction:
Whereas in the Realist paradigm [death] events were treated as centers of
intensity around which the story naturally organized itself, accentuating
their passion, their drama, their inherent vigor, Proust arranges these. . . to

diminish the energy they would otherwise radiate. Their animation is
diffused, sapped, hidden or otherwise denied wherever it threatens to

irrupt into the center focus of the narration.33
With Proust and Joyce, Woolf refuses the narrative space traditionally allotted to the
death-act, consequently creating the disnarrated quality of death. Rather she concerns
herself with the effects of death on the living—a mourning which allows the coexistence
and comparison of the living Mrs. Ramsay with her mythologized or rrrisremembered
ghost.

In Faulkner and Joyce the disnarrated deaths of Addie, Flynn, Mrs. Sinico and
Michael Furey leave their mourners to narratively distort the connection between past and
present. In To the Lighthouse all the surviving characters undergo change as a result of
Mrs. Ramsay's death, or more specifically, in reaction to her ghost's constant presence.

In contrast to the ineffectual living Mrs. Ramsay of the “Window” section, her ghost
haunts all those who knew her. Lily in particular struggles with the looming reminder of
Mrs. Ramsay: "Wherever she happened to be...the vision would come to her" (196). Mrs.
Ramsay’s ghost is empowered when Lily supplants memory with myth as she recreates
rather than recalls Mrs. Ramsay. The ghost in the window causes Lily to literally re-

frame “the glow, the rhapsody. .. the most supreme bliss” of Mrs. Ramsay. She employs

 

:2 Richard Terdiman, “The Depreciation 0f the Event” (136)
3
ibid. (137)

138

“one way of knowing people... to outline” (164, 210). When Mrs. Ramsay appears in the
same position as she had been in the opening section, Mrs. Ramsay is monumentalized
rather than remembered. The new Mrs. Ramsay is “faint... unreal. .. amazingly pure and
exciting” (176). No longer the Mrs. Ramsay of the first section, she roams as a separate
entity, meshed of both is and was. She signifies the blur between fiction and memory in
the mind of the painter.
Just as Peter denies the “ghost” of Clarissa or Mr. Henchy silences Parnell, Lily
tries in vain to deny her possession by the hovering spirit:
Oh the dead! she murmured, one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one
had even a little contempt for them. They are at our mercy. Mrs. Ramsay
has faded and gone, she thought. (189)
As she continues painting, further tunnelling into the world of the dead, she believes "she
could stand up to Mrs. Ramsay." But Lily’s feeling of independence soon fades as she
realizes she had felt "so safe, thinking of her." In a sense Mrs. Ramsay is a "ghost, air,
nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night,"
but suddenly Lily comprehends that she has become the plaything to the “extraordinary
unreality” of the overpowering monument she has built. Carrying its “silent,
uncommunicative” disnarrative like the spirit of Michael Furey, the ghost overpowers
Lily, leaving her immobilized and inactive. There is “nothing, nothing—nothing that she
could express at all” (159). Her paralysis is
all Mrs. Ramsay's doing. Here was Lily, at forty-four, wasting her time,
unable to do a thing, standing there, playing at painting, playing at the one
thing one did not play, and it was all Mrs. Ramsay's fault. (163)
With this revelation Lily admits to an unbreakable bond with the dead Mrs.

Ramsay. She too sails to the lighthouse, resurrecting Mrs. Ramsay and giving her a

139

strength she did not have during life. But as Lily nears the lighthouse and the completion
of her painting, she also comes to understand that her mythological memory differs from
the true Mrs. Ramsay. As with Peter of Mrs. Dalloway, she is able to reconcile the past
with the present. The moment of full Lily’s recollection, of acknowledgment of the two
Mrs. Ramsays, allows her to begin the process of forgetting so longed for by Clarissa
Dalloway. She does “not want Mrs. Ramsay now” as “phrases came.. . visions came”
(208). All the living Mrs. Ramsay's attempts to find her a husband have failed. When
the dead are the most present in the final section of the novel, Lily finds herself unified
with another for the first time. Paradoxically, Lily and Mr. Ramsay do not reach an
understanding through physical neamess or words, but just the opposite, as Lily realizes
they "had been thinking the same things and he had answered her without her asking him
anything" (224). The ghost of Mrs. Ramsay unites Lily with Mr. Ramsay both despite
and because of the sea which separates them. Lily’s feelings for the distant Mr. Ramsay
“change as he sailed further and further across the bay.” They still "perish, each alone,"
but a silent understanding, unachievable without Mrs. Ramsay's death, is finally
accomplished. Artistic self-expression also becomes possible with death and the passage
of time. Mr. Carmichael the once ineffectual poet has become a success because “people
said” the war, as an ultimate presence of death, “had revived their interest in poetry"
(147). Mr. Ramsay seems to regain his confidence in philosophy as he returns to reading
profusely and once again espousing his personal theories. And of course, Lily is finally
able to realize her artistic vision, painting a single swipe down the canvas simultaneous

with Mr. Ramsay's arrival to the lighthouse.

140

The unifying effect of Mrs. Ramsay’s death allows her family to complete the
previously promised trip to the lighthouse. In mythological terms the crossing of water

suggests a journey to the land of the dead, and signifies here Mr. Ramsay’s coming to

terms with his wife's death.34 The “painful” and “exhausting” journey to the lighthouse,
the provider of guiding light to ships at sea, takes place ten years later and represents for
Ramsay a recollection and more important, a dismissal of his wife’s ghost. His process
of mourning and reconciliation refuses to be defined by the frames of language. Woolf
must rely on the disconnected metaphor of the lighthouse to suggest a pathway to the
unification of the Ramsay family, which, akin to Clarissa’s vision of death moments
before rejoining her party, can only be described in terms of its completion (Peter’s
“There she was” or Lily’s “He has landed”). The limitations of language disallow
Woolf’s showing us Lily’s completed painting. Lily herself expects her finished painting
to end up in an attic, never to be seen. Her message, like Kurtz’s final words, the
presence of Godot or Hamlet’s soliloquy in Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead, has
been expressed and yet lost in translation.

At first Cam and James refuse to participate in their father's summoning of the
dead. They want no part in these "rites he [goes] through for his own pleasure in memory
of dead people" (179). But as the boat sails deeper into the past, they too must confront
the dead. Cam looks at the shore

as if the people there had fallen asleep...were free like smoke, were free to
come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought. (184)

Upon reaching the lighthouse-beacon of memory, past fuses with present, and the

characters are refrarned as a union. Again Woolf has no words to adequately frame the

 

34 Douwe Fokkema and Elrud Ibsch, Modernist Conjectures (122).

141

transformation, and its occurrence may only be suggested through simple gestures. The
once tongue-tied Mr. Ramsay finds the words to praise his bitter son. James, who
remembers his father saying, "You won't be able to go to the lighthouse,” sees the
lighthouse up close for the first time, wondering, "that was the Lighthouse, was it? N o,
the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other was the
lighthouse too" (201). His arrival at the lighthouse indicates a joining of past with
present, thereby allowing James to unite his previously mythologized interpretation of the
lighthouse with the real thing. At last he “sees” the lighthouse much as Lily finally
envisions her painting, and yet its significance still remains elusive beyond the subtle
signals that an understanding has taken place.

Mr. Ramsay’s arrival at the lighthouse coincides with Lily’s painterly vision as
both have bridged the gap between the first and third sections of the novel. Significantly,
To the Lighthouse does not end with Lily stating, “The painting is finished.” Rather she

claims she has had her vision, opening a gap between Lily’s conception and her

painting.35 Both characters have their vision, and still, as with Conrad’s heart of
darkness, there is no sense of completion as there are no words to convey what these
epiphanies mean. Conrad’s durational Thames continues to flow beyond the frames of
words just as the sea surrounding the lighthouse eludes verbal fixity.

In closing I want to return now to the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse.
In the appropriately titled “Caves” section which makes up the middle of Forster’s _A
Passage to India, the darkness of the Marabar Caves and the narrative that depicts them

conceal “something unspeakable.” As a key kernel to the plot, the truth of Aziz’s

 

35
Cheryl Mares. “Reading Proust: Woolf and the Painter’s Perspective” (77).

142

supposed sexual assault of Adela remains shrouded in narrative darkness. Similarly, the
conspicuous middle section of To the Lighthouse constitutes a hole at the very center of
the novel, undermining the narrative unity of the text as a whole. We have seen that
death for the Modemists is often evoked not as an event but as an absence so that
Woolf’s ”Time Passes” section conceals deaths narratively significant to the plot. The
center of DH. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, for example, strips a character’s significant
death of its narrativity. Lawrence portrays Tom Brangwen’s drowning in terms of
passivity and darkness:
In the utter darkness, the unconscious, drowning body was rolled along,
the waters pouring, washing, filling in the place... And the unconscious,
drowning body was washed along in the black, swirling darkness,
passively. (290)
Near the center of Womren in Love there is another drowning. Rather than narrate
Diana Crich’s death, Lawrence fills the absence with “a heavy booming noise of a great
body of water falling solidly all the time.” It occupies “the whole of the night” so that
“everything was drowned within it, drowned and lost” (251). Lawrence’s imagery of
filling or replacing the emptiness of the absent death-act with the murkiness of water
coincides with Woolf’s own description of Mrs. Ramsay’s death. In the “Time Passes”
section a “flood” and “profusion of darkness creep[s] in at keyholes and crevices [so that]
there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say ‘This is he’ or
‘This is she’”(137-38).
As Forster describes the dark Marabar caves as containing “little to see, and no
eye to see it,” the empty center of To the Lighthouse frames an unnarratable View akin to

a jigsaw puzzle missing pieces vital to its total picture. What is left is the void that so

often appears in the Modernist narrative structure. As the impenetrable coffin travels

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through As I Lay Dying, the “Time Passes” section journeys between the first and third

chapters, all the while refusing us glimpses into its metaphoric contents.36 As with
Addie’s soliloquy, it remains independent of its bookend “voices,” unfixed in time and
space despite the durational promise of its title. Woolf inserts what she calls a “zone of

silence in the middle of every art,” in which the text as a narrative frame may only outline

or suggest the opaque contents of its meaning.37 Even Woolf’ 8 title evokes the image of
a narrative gap, unbound by the realist perimeters of time and space. Had the novel’s title
been simply The Lighthouse, we would have a sense of an object spatially and temporally
fixed as a textual frame encompassing the novel’s diegesis. The title of M
lighthouse, however, disrupts the novel’s potential centeredness so that, as with title of
As I Lay Dying, the text is refrarned around the temporal and spatial uncertainties that
fall between the qualities of being and not being at the lighthouse.

As with Faulkner and Joyce, it is the mystery that occurs in between the fixed
poles of realism which interests Woolf most. Jonathan Culler regards, “the problem of

the frame—of the distinction between inside and outside and of the structure of the

border” as “decisive for aesthetics in general.”38 The “Time Passes” section exemplifies
an in between state not only literally as the characters “freeze” between the first section’s
failed journey and the final section’s completion of that journey, but structurally as
narrative itself seems to stop. Here Woolf follows through on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
narrative threat to stop time altogether when Gatsby nearly knocks a clock off a mantle in

the structural center of The Great GaLSby. By no means is Mrs. Ramsay’s death

 

3

3: Pearce, ibid. (174).

38 Woolf, Collected Essays Vol. 2 (236).
On Deconstruction (173).

144

insignificant; the conspicuousness of its parenthetical occurrence outside the main
diegesis and outside the frames of time and space defamiliarizes our realist expectations
of death as a narrative kernel. For Woolf the gap indicates
the moment of importance came not here but there; so that if a writer were
a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he

must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon
convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love

interest or catastrophe in the accepted style...
In place of narrative description, there is a void indicating the disnarrated behind “a

wavering and momentary stained window” so that in a sense the death-act is brought to

our attention through its demands that we hypothesize its omitted details.40

In Woolf” s novels narrative gaps are frequently represented in terms of an empty
room. Needless to say, the purpose of a room, like a coffin or a frame, serves to contain
persons or objects, and yet more often than not we find Woolf’ 8 rooms empty. Even the
titles of two of Woolf’s main works, Jacob’s Room and A Room of One’s Own, focus
our attention on the image of the room. In both cases the room represents an empty
frame: Jacob’s Room evokes an empty room missing its dead inhabitant Jacob, whereas
A Room of One’s Own suggests a room unfilled because it is absent altogether,
unattainable to the would-be writers seeking its framing comfort. Robert Kiely’s analysis
of Jacob’s Room captures the disnarrated quality of Woolf’ 8 rooms and directly applies

to rooms throughout her work: “By being permitted to see the imposition of design so

clearly, we feel free to imagine both the life it delirrrits and the life that escapes it?“l

 

:: “Modern Fiction” (212).
1 Marcel Proust as quoted in Georges Poulet's “Proustian Space” (100).
4

“Jacob’s Room and “Roger Fry": Two Studies in Still Life” (154).

145

Despite their emptiness, these room-frames often appear animated and transitory
as if inhabited by some unspoken possible world. Similar to the empty Ramsay house, J.
Hillis Miller’s lyric of the roaming dead absent from the old woman’s song, or the
pulsating unknown of the Congo’s heart of darkness, Jacob’s empty room is alive and
fluid. Woolf describes movement in the room, independent of the characters, time and
space outside its frame:

Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers
in the jar shift. One fiber in the wicker arm—chair creaks, though no one

sits there.
In a similar scene from The Waves, Bernard peers into the room that awaits Percival’s
arrival:
This is the place to which he is coming. This is the table at which he will
sit... Already the room, with its swing doors, its tables heaped with fruit,
with cold joints, wears the wavering, unreal appearance of a place where
one waits expecting something to happen. Things quiver as if not yet in
being. The blankness of the white table-cloth glares. (88-89)
We also find at the structural center of Between the Acts a barn which Woolf thrice
reminds us is empty, and still a shaft of light slopes to the floor, paper roses droop from
the rafters, and “all these eyes, expanding and narrowing from different angles and
edges” (76).
An interesting consequence of the seemingly independent, intangible room-frame
is that the room comes to represent the unifier’s inability to frame the dispersed
fragments of their external world. Mrs. Dalloway hopes to fill her house with party

guests who will “stay”, and Miss La Trobe of Between the Acts desires a full audience

contained within a frame of nicely arranged folding chairs. Mrs. Ramsay wants life to

 

42 Jacob’s Room (176).

146

“stand still here” with all the rooms in her guesthouse furnished and “filled with life.”

And yet as subject to the void that Slavoj Zizek argues we make futile attempts to fill, she

. . , ”43
finds the empty drawrn g room steps “flourish round a center of complete emptrness.

Even Lily’s “white and uncompromising” canvas seems to “rebuke her with its cold
stare” as it “floats” out of her reach. In Between the A_g§ Mrs. Sands enters the empty
barn, failing to see the butterflies, mice, cat that had moments before animated its
interior.

Woolf’ s depiction of empty rooms lends itself to my topic in the final chapter in
its verbal attempts to recreate the abstraction of modern art. We can trace Woolf’s
interest in aligning her words with the medium of painting to the stories written between
1917 and 1921. Several experimental pieces reflect a concern with the aesthetics of art
and provide Woolf the verbal canvas to explore what she learned from Roger Fry.
During this period, stories such as “The Mark on the Wall,” “Kew Gardens,” “The
Evening Party,” and “Blue & Green” mark Woolf’s initial “post-impressionist

explorations of perception, representation, fiction-making, and the aesthetic of experience

itself” that she develops further in To the Lighthouse.44 “Blue & Green”, for example,
takes its cue from Wassily Kandinsky’s compositions in its use of color to express
emotion and character. The sketch represents a verbal painting akin to Gertrude Stein’s
Tender Buttons, which paradoxically moves towards writing free from the instability of

linguistic metaphor. Fry appreciated Woolfs experiments, arguing that Woolf was the

 

43 Looking Am: An Introduction to Jacgues Lacan Through Popular Culture (144, 193)
44

Panthea Reid Broughton, “The Blasphemy of Art: Fry’s Aesthetics and Woolf’s Non- ‘Literary’ Stories”
(37).

147

only writer “who uses language as a medium of art, who makes the very texture of words

have a meaning and quality almost apart from what you are talking about.45

Although Woolf is certainly not alone in her artistic transfer between mediums,
the stripping of language (and narrative) of superfluous and misaligned referentiality in
her earlier sketches provides valuable insight into her treatment of art and frameworks in
the more developed novels. “Kew Gardens” opens with characters reduced to simple
abstract shapes blurred into the objectivist flowers of the garden. Nameless, featureless
“figures of men and women straggle past” the gardens, diminished in the presence of the
objective and animated flowers, much as Mrs. Ramsay becomes a parenthetical
abstraction within the “living” empty guesthouse. The objectivist experimentation of
“Kew Gardens,” while never sustained in her longer works, predicts much of Woolf’s
artistic concerns in the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse. In a telling passage
from her diary, Woolf describes the challenges she faced in composing the middle
section:

I cannot make it out—here is the most difficult abstract piece of writing—
I have to give an empty house, no people’s characte6rs, the passage of time,

all eyeless and featureless with nothing to cling to.
With a Hardy-esque setting aside of Mrs. Ramsay’s death in favor of an objectivist
portrait of an empty house, Woolf frames an emptiness that threatens to release its
tenuous hold as center between the two subjective sections on either side.
Norman Friedman provides an interesting description of the novel’s structure as a

tripartite model of consciousness consisting first of a subject, second of an object, and

 

: Frances Spalding. Ro er F : Art and Life (212)-
Digg April 18. 1926.

148

third of a balance between the two.“ Certainly, the voiceless disinterest of “Time
Passes” presents a sharp contrast with “The Window” section’s polyphonic subjectivity.
It stands parallel to Lily’s abstract line, between the past and the present, the living Mrs.
Ramsay and her ghost, and refuses to answer either side’s subjective pleas for unity.
Instead it offers the dangerously experimental void of an empty room. As with the
concurrent objectivist experiments in painting and poetry of the time, the middle section
demonstrates an emptying of the novel of all that does not directly represent the Ramsay
home. Similar to Lily’s unseen work, it is a Modernist painting that frees itself of
metonymic attempts to capture human beings and disregards the temporal and spatial
limitations of realism. We shall see how Woolf’ s verbal experiment is taken one step

further in the poetry of Gertrude Stein.

 

47
“The Waters of Annihilation: Double Vision in To the Lighthouse (61).

149

CHAPTER FIVE
GERTRUDE STEIN FRAMES THE IN STANCE OF THERE BEING MORE

The instance of there being more is an instance of more.
-Tend_er Button_§

Besides its designation as the year of Virginia Woolf’ s pronounced change in
human nature, 1910 also marks a year of deaths. Nineteenth-century icons Leo Tolstoy,
Mark Twain, William James, Henri Rousseau, and Edward VII all die in 1910. The
publication of EM. Forster’s Howard’s End that year bids a nostalgic farewell to the
holistic realism of the Edwardian arts. The previous year witnesses several “births” as
Ezra Pound is first introduced to the “School of Images,” Gertrude Stein publishes _Throe;
Lflea, Cubism and Futurism peak while Fauvism withers, Matisse paints “The Dance,”
Kandinsky pushes color towards abstraction, and Freud gives his influential lectures in
America. In 1910 the “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” Exhibition, showcasing nine
Picasso works, visits London, while in Paris Picasso begins his important portraits of
Ambroise Vollard and Wilhelm Uhde, Braque paints his first oval work, “Woman with a
Mandolin,” and Stein, inspired by Cubism’s re-vision of human nature, embarks on what
was to be a lifelong experiment in verbal portraiture.l The transformation of the visual
arts is both prescient and resultant of Woolf’ s declared shift in humanity. With its new
theoretical and stylistic approaches to perspective, Cubism, in particular, permeates all

the sister arts and plays a key role in defining much of twentieth-century aesthetics.

 

' Picasso’s aesthetic influence on Stein commences when the two first meet in 1905. That year Stein sits
for the first of over eighty sittings for Picasso’s portrait of the writer.

150

Human nature responds to a world increasingly chaotic and unlivable in its
urbanization, industrialization, and mechanized dehumanization. For the Modernist, the
question is how to describe, comprehend and frame the modern world’s fragmentation,
movement and diversity. The linguistic and imagistic frames that had served the
Romantics and Realists so well could no longer adequately translate the modern world’s
previously unsaid or unseen hypodiegetic otherness. To adapt and subscribe to the
external world of the early 19008, the arts require more accurate, self-challenging
methods to interpret its fragmented chaos onto canvas or paper. According to José
Ortega y Gasset, the task for painters and poets alike is "not to paint something altogether
different from a man. .. but to paint a man who resembles a man as little as possible."2
To paint a man, the artist must paint a new man never seen before, but who has always
existed despite his being diegetically ignored by the tradition of painting.

The challenge to paint a new man demands a stylistic and theoretical break from
all previous depictions of a man. According to Henri Bergson, the artistic mind must

do violence to itself... reverse the operation by which it habitually
thinks... in a way it will attain to fluid concepts, capable of following
reality in all its sinuosities and of adopting the very moment of the inward
life of things.3
As the experimental novels of Virginia Woolf demonstrate, perception of reality is
inextricably linked to the fluidity of memories and experiences of the past, which are
simultaneously present in the individual consciousness. Thus, Modemism’s relationship

with the past is somewhat contradictory as it attempts to capture the wholeness of its

subject— its past, present and future—while evading traditional depictions of that

 

2 The Dehumanization of Art (22-23).
3 An Introduction to Metaphysics (51).

151

subject. In Cubism the reconfiguration of perception translates into a fixation on the
temporality of a subject, in which time and space can never be measured since they
continuously pour into one another. At the same time Cubism concentrates solely on that
particular subject, dismissing the influence of all traditional versions of the subject so that
an old subject (portraits, still lifes) is renewed and recategorized independent of its
painterly history. Through rapid cutting, disruption of spatial and temporal forms,
repetition, mechanization of the human form, cityscapes and geometrical abstraction,
Cubism fragments and rebuilds volume on the flat canvas so that what is normally seen
sequentially now appears as simultaneous perspectives.

Traditionally the picture frame separates its enclosed scene from the real world.
Cézanne, followed by Matisse, Braque and Picasso, manipulates spatial relations to allow
a pictorial scene to spill outside the frame into our world, and yet the same reorganization
of the object’s spatial values distorts and defamiliarizes the scene so that it gains an
independence unrecognizable as congruent with the real world. The Cubists extend
Cézanne’s experimentation to the fragmentation of time, space, motion and humans
themselves to reorientate as an abstract unfamiliar whole—a totality of vision. Based on
shards of spatial and temporal possibility, the collective impression appears mobile and
independent of both its enclosing frame and the real world outside it. Perceiving an
irreconcilable discrepancy between representation and the object represented, James
Joyce’s depiction of Bloomsday wears the artifice of storytelling on its sleeve. Similarly,
Cubism abandons imitative attempts at objective reality in favor of painting objects not as

they are seen, but as they are conceived.

152

Whereas the art of realism dissembles its own method to conceal its creative
devices, Modernism uses its art to call attention to its form." The painting no longer
purports to be a mirror image of the represented object, nor does the Cubist-inspired
poem claim a metaphoric grip on the signified. Rather the painting and the poem
represent a Cézannean commitment “to conception—that is to say, invention—as the

”5 The object is

heart of painting, to the exclusion of everything related to execuu'on.
deprioritized as an abstract conception, independent of the external world and
inextricably built into and conscious of its own material form. Form takes on a
significance greater than the suggested object itself. Clement Greenberg describes the
function of the poet or artist as an attempt
to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms. ..
something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or
originals. . In turning his attention away from subject matter of common
experience, the poet or artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft.”
Content is recreated, if not depreciated, by the prioritizing of form so that its meaning is
inextricably enmeshed within the form that holds it.

My method of establishing the narratological link between Cubism and Modernist
poetry follows the chronological development of Braque and Picasso to show how poetry
develops in tandem to the two major yet short-lived phases (Analytical and Synthetic) of
Cubism. As we have seen, the Modernist novelists redefine narrative frames in light of

the aesthetic pressures of modernity. This final chapter explores Gertrude Stein’s poetic

response to Cubism and how the Cubist-poetic frame restructures visual and linguistic

 

" Clement Greenberg. “Modernist Painting” (6).
5 William Rubin, Picasso and Brague ( l6).
6 Art and Culture (6).

153

perceptions of narrative.7 Cubism represents a collaborative act between Braque and
Picasso, which is perhaps stronger than any other pairing in the history of art.8 Equally
important is the correspondence between painting and poetry accurately defined by
Wallace Stevens:
.. .in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not
disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting... are, in
their measure, a compensation for what has been lost.9
To demonstrate the overlapping of stylistic and theoretical frames between Modernisms, I
focus here on how the Cubist disbelief in traditional painterly methods widens into an
artistic partnership with the poets, leading both painter and poet to mutually explore the
disnarrative possibilities which have been lost from their perspective mediums.

The linguistically treacherous journey from Gertrude Stein’s early portraits to
Tend_er Buttohs reveals a stylistic development synchronous with the evolving concerns
of Braque and Picasso. In the first phase of Cubism, the two painters analyze and
reinterpret spatial relations on a flat canvas, often using portraiture to emphasize the

violent effect such reassembling of shapes and planes has upon the subject. Deeply

influenced by the Cubist experiments, Stein applies Braque and Picasso’s aesthetical tests

 

7 Joseph Frank’s early groundbreaking essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1946) highlights the
correspondence between the visual arts and literature, proposing that the “new” literature requires
“synchronic” reading similar to that used with the visual arts. There have been extensive studies of Cubist
literature (cf. Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Clement Greenberg, John Golding, Charles Altieri, Bonnie
Costello, Wendy Steiner, and Walter Pater). None however take a decidedly narratological approach to the
subject. Critics Norman Bryson (1981, 1983, 1984) and Ernst van Alphen (1988) have made significant
contributions to the linking of narratology to the arts, but neither address the narratological implications of
Cubism. Suzanne Ferguson’s non-traditional poetry-painting model, “composed of static moments which
we interpret as meaningful by ‘filling in the gaps,”’ comes the closest to a narratological treatment of
Cubist literature (“’Spots of time’: Representations of Narrative in Modern Poems and Paintings,” 186).

8 Perhaps the strongest illustration of the partnership between Braque and Picasso is their mutual refusal to
sign the front of their paintings, thereby depersonalizing their creations in “hope of an anonymous art”
(Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake. Life with Picasso 75).

9 The Necessm Angel (120).

154

to her own verbal portraits, creating a synonymous poetry both inspired by and creatively
independent of the visual arts. As Cubism progresses, refocusing on the synthetic
possibilities of papiers collés and collage and removing all signifiers of humanity to
reconsider the placement and texture of materials on a flat surface, Stein likewise
abandons portraiture temporarily for the collage technique of Tender Buttons.

Stein is certainly not the only poet influenced by the Cubists. Guillaume
Apollinaire, Blais Cendrars, TS. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore,
Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, H.D., e.e. cummings, and Mina Loy all
incorporate Cubist aesthetics into their work. I have limited my focus to Stein’s portraits
and Tender Button_s as her experiments most closely and successfully adhere to the
evolution of Cubism and best illustrate the narratological problems and solutions inherent
in a Cubist framing of poetics. Other poets address the influence of Cubism in their
work, but Stein wholeheartedly subscribes to its practice, verbally simulating Cubism in
both theory and technique. With the aid of Braque’s and Picasso’s paintings, we can
better understand the stylistic and analytical aims of Stein’s poetry as her work
reciprocally illuminates potential readings of Cubism.

The first phase of Cubism known as Analytic begins in 1909 and lasts until its
experimental prospects are exhausted in 1912.10 During the early years of Cubism,
Braque and Picasso “analyze” objects from different perspectives, defarrriliarizing spatial
and volumetric relations to go beyond a mere re-seeing of objects to a reinterpretation of
the space that the objects inhabit.ll Most striking of these visual experiments are the

portraits, which seldom resemble the human figure, much less the actual person specified

 

1° The shift to Synthetic Cubism is not necessarily the end of the Analytical phase. Mondrian continues the
experiments of Braque and Picasso, pressing abstraction further towards absolute nonrepresentation.

155

in the painting’s title. Ortega y Gasset, whose influential The Dehumanization of Art
calls for the systematic defarrriliarization and complication of artistic perception, sums up
the Cubist shift in perspective:
A traditional painter painting a portrait claims to have gotten hold of the
real person when, in truth and at best, he has set down on his canvas a
schematic selection, arbitrarily decided on by his mind, from the
innumerable traits that make a living person. What if a painter... decided
to paint not the real person but his idea, his pattern, of that person? (91)
In Picasso’s “Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler” and Braque’s “Le Portugais,”
recogrrizability is all but destroyed as several angles of perspective coexist
simultaneously on a flat surface. Picasso describes the traditional portrait as “a sum of
additions” in contrast to Cubism’s preference for “a sum of destructions.” Picasso paints

”12 The sitter’s reality,

a picture only to destroy it, so that “in the end... nothing is lost.
once restricted to two-dimensional inaccuracy, now emanates from the multiperspective
coexistence of all his or her narrative possibilities, defined in a spatial and temporal
uncertainty.

In Modernist novels we have seen the polyphonic text as comprised of several
hypodiegetic narratives competing for narrative air time. Braque and Picasso also
fragment their subjects into hypodiegetic glimpses to allow an unstable coexistence of
multiple perspectives on the canvas. In both portraits the subject is literally taken apart to
be rebuilt in accordance to the two-dimensional flat canvas that must contain them. We
can still recognize Kahnweiler’s head, hands, eyes and torso, and yet Picasso’s

overlapping planes undermine the traditional cohesion we expect of portraiture. From

Braque’s portrait of the emigrant, we enjoy even less of a cohesive vision of the

 

1' Clement Greenberg’s "Modernist Painting" discusses in depth the spatial concerns in the new arts.
‘2 Quoted in Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, Artists on Art (419).

156

portrayed subject. The face of the emigrant is lost behind a chaotic intersection of planes
and stenciled lettering; the latter addition of letters indicates Braque’s beginning to
experiment with collage. Braque’s portrait is a “rendering at once more economical and
synoptic than sight,” capturing not a stagnate snapshot but a fluctuating and mobile idea
of the emigrant.13

In a narratological sense the strategies the Cubists use to represent simultaneous
perspectives deconstruct the temporal and spatial “narrative” of the Realist painting, a
disruption inevitably problematic to critical linear models of narrative (i.e. Propp and
Genette). Braque’s and Picasso’s development as Cubists depends on a turning against
their own talent of pictorial storytelling.” The refrarned visual narrative withdraws from
the pictorial storytelling in paintings such as Géricault’s “Le Radeau de la Medusa” and
Waterhouse’s “The Lady of Shallot.” In its refusal to evoke “readable” narrative
imagery, the Cubist painting offers the modern poets new approaches to narrative-free
linguistic representation. The multiplicity of perspectives in the Cubist portrait
complicates Mieke Bal’s idea of double focalization, in which a work might contain the
simultaneous presentation or View of two or more focalizers.15 The problem inherent in
Bal’s “double” is its implication of equality, which fails to address the hierarchical
questions of foregrounding, fragmentation and suggestive abstraction characteristic of the
Modernist portrait. Perhaps a more accurate description of Cubism’s

multiperspectiveness might argue that, as with Joyce’s fragmented hypodiegetic voices,

 

‘3 Rubin. ibid. (17).
‘4 Rubin, ibid. (16).
‘5 De thegie van vert‘ellen en verhalen (119).

157

one perspective is embedded within the other so that some angles of the portrayed are
visually lessened or truncated to allow others to surface on the flat plane.

In place of a traditional linearity that fossilizes a single perspective within
chronological time, Cubism creates an almost circular visual narrative that moves
independent of chronological time and space. It is the painterly equivalent to Molly
Bloom’s dream-soliloquy, during which her imagination disregards time and space and
allows all realities an equal presence in her mind. The multiple dimensions of the Cubist
portrait allow the simultaneous movement of past, present and future across the canvas.
Gertrude Stein learns from the seemingly illogical visual simultaneity of the Cubist
canvas alternative narrative possibilities to an Aristotelian linearity. As the role of the
painter and his craft undergo dramatic changes in the first decade of the twentieth
century, so does the position of the Analytical poet.

Traditionally, we have relied on the “static art of painting to represent narratives,
and the temporal... art of poetry to represent a pictorial scene.”16 With Cubism these
conditions no longer apply. Modernist painting refuses to adhere to the tradition of
narrative depiction, and in turn, the poetry that mimics Cubism no longer represents a
visual scene. Charles Altieri describes how the new painterly methods of the Europeans
affect language and redefine the role of poetry:

Painting's ways of composing spatial relations could allow new
conjunctions among the complex attitudes language can carry, and the
pressure of those conjunctions could make demands on the composing

intelligence that would force it to explore an ethos compatible with the
powers cultivated by the art. (288)

 

1" Suzanne Ferguson, ibid. (186).

158

 

If [1

WP

111'

16

If the painter could rearrange planes on a canvas to restore a Bergsonian élan vital to
representation, then the poet could redistribute words on paper to counter Woolf” 8 change
in human nature.

As the painters analyze the shapes of simultaneous elements that elude the
temporal structures of visual depiction, Stein also begins at the molecular level of her
art—with the noun—confimring Apollinaire’s assertion that “. . .geometry is to the plastic
arts what grammar is to the art of the writer.”17 Stein separates her subject into sentential
and paragraphic cubes, which overlap and build upon one another to suggest but never

fully depict a whole, an experiment we see explored in prose with the abstract chant-like :

 

repetition of Three Lives and The Making of Americans.18 Stein's deliberate omission of
concrete details from her portraits, specifically in the form of nouns, excludes one from
all biographical aspects of her subject's life. Like the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé
before her, Stein uses antirepresentational language to refocus the portrait on its linguistic
structure rather than the metaphorical meaning of the sum of its parts. Stein “evacuates
all the circumstantial elements of conventional narrative and focuses purely on the matter
at hand—language?”
As Stein’s first of over a hundred and thirty portraits, “Ada” demonstrates many

of the Cubist characteristics that would dominate her lifelong experimentation in verbal

portraiture. Barely alluding to its real-life subject, Alice B. Toklas, the portrait of Ada is

 

'7 I_h_e Cubist Painters—Ayeathetic Meditations (12).

'8 While the scope of this chapter does not address the actual spatial placement of words in the Modernist
work, it should be noted that experiments in the literal shaping of words on the page were fairly common,
most dramatically in the typography of the Dadaist publications or the Vorticist manifestos. In poetry
Apollinaire, W.C. Williams, e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore. and Ezra Pound all experimented with
Cubist-inspired spatial arrangements of their work.

‘9 Michael Edward Kaufmann, “Gertrude Stein’s Re-Vision of Language and Print in Tender

Buttons” (450).

 

 

159

 

complicated and blurred as the narrative eye focuses on things other than the subject
herself. The first three paragraphs concentrate on Ada’s brother, Barnes Colhard,
narratively covering a broken engagement, a subsequent marriage and his death before
his sister appears. We are not told until the portrait’s final three paragraphic cubes that
this sister is indeed the same person as the Ada named in the title. By deferring Ada’s
section until the end of the narrative, Stein decenters her subject to the same effect as
Faulkner’s displacement of Addie. Ada almost becomes background scenery to the
foregrounded mode of depiction. Her face, lost in Stein’s generic use of “she,” remains

fragmented and partially concealed behind a disnarrated window. Though it is her

 

portrait, just as As I Lay Dying belongs to Addie , Ada’s narrative is truncated and
rendered hypodiegetic by the insistent presence of the alternate narrative planes of her
brother, father, mother and “every one.” Like Addie, Stein’s Ada appears in between the
other narratives, her hypodiegetic often anchoring sentences that are actually about
someone else: “The daughter did not like them to live with them and she did not like
them to die with them.”

Temporally, Stein deconstructs narrative expectations as Barnes Colhard’s life
ends before his sister’s appearance, and yet Ada is later seen taking care of her brother.
Our only sense of time comes from the shifting of character-planes between an indefinite
past tense (“Then Barnes fell in love”) to the last paragraph’s gerundial continuity of
action (“She was telling someone”). The latter grammatical construction would predict
Stein’s complete abandonment of temporality in the portraits to follow. As we shall see
in the later portraits, Stein’s gerund represents the continuous action, a Cubist multiplicity

of possible moments of being that defies the narrative limitations of time and space.

160

 

What distinguishes “Ada” from the later portraits is its traditional narrative structure. As
diffuse as Ada’s portrait may be, we can still follow the dim flicker of plot development.
Despite the piece’s vague chronological order, we can also recognize a beginning, middle
and end to Ada’s story—a comfort Stein would soon remove from the continuous present
of subsequent portraits.

Illustrative of the simplistic lines of Cubism, Stein strips the portrait’s sentences
of facts, preferring instead nondescript “flat” words such as “it” “thing,” “one,”
“something” and “sometimes.” The effect is to suggest rather than verbally pinpoint her
subject so that in the sentence “He had a sister who also was successful enough in being
one being living,” the narrative implications of Ada’s success remain speculative. In her
essay "Poetry and Grammar," Stein asks: "A noun is the name of anything, why after a
thing is named write about it?" (209). The crafted response is a new nounless grammar
that requires that “Ada” begins with the ambiguous “Bernard Colhard does not say he
would not do it but he did not do it.” What it is that Colhard does not do remains
undefined, and for Stein, unimportant. Stein further develops her lexicon of simplicity in
subsequent portraits to ultimately celebrate the existence of unfamiliar sentences such as
“A and the.”

In “Ada” Stein further disrupts our expectations of portraiture by limiting to a
bare minimum the mention of the subject's name in the portrait’s body. In the portraits
that follow “Ada,” Stein removes referential names altogether. Just as Braque and
Picasso often signify the portrayed through nothing more concrete than the title’s naming

of that person, the vague narratives of Stein’s post-Ada portraits are impossible to match

up with their supposed sitters without the guidance of a title. Frequently, the Modernist

161

 

 

title functions as the sole contextual grounding for a work, exemplified in titles such as
Map, @318, and Winesburg. Ohio. Each title serves as a contextual canvas that
frames the stylistic and thematic deviations of its contents. In more extreme cases the
title itself becomes nonreferential as in the "nontitles" of Joyce’s Work in Progrgess or
Wallace Stevens’ Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction. Both titles suggest the works they
frame have not and may never reach completion or referential grounding.
The title of Stein’s poetic portraits holds together the body of simultaneous and
independent sentence-fictions. Despite their perceptual autonomy, the synergistic
fictions work together to produce a collective perspective greater than the sum of their
individual actions. Specific titles such as “Cézanne” and “Matisse” establish a previously
absent metaphoric bridge between abstraction and the real living person. They lend a
sense of immediacy to the portrait or what Wendy Steiner calls a “rendering present,”
which Stein begins to experiment with in the final paragraph of “Ada.”20 For Stein, the
specificity of a title furnishes a contextual anchor, a revelatory contrast to the unfixed
mobility of the portrait itself:
The strange thing about the realization of existence is that like a train
moving there is no realization of it moving if it does not move against
somethinzg and so that is what a generation does it shows that moving is
exrstln g.

Without the specificity of a title, there would be no measure to realize or gauge the

fluidity of the portrait, and the poem-painting would diffuse into a meaningless

abstraction, stripped of any referential or visual familiarity.

 

2° E_xa_ct Resemblance to Exact Resemblance (29).
2‘ “Portraits and Repetitions” (165).

162

Two of Stein’s most famous portraits, “Matisse” and “Picasso,” demonstrate a
stronger aligmnent with Analytical Cubism, surpassing the preliminary Cubism of “Ada”
in both style and subject matter. Published by photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who himself
had created the photographic equivalent to Cubist portraiture, taking a succession of
photos of a subject from several different angles, the portraits represent severely chiseled
multi-impressions of the two artists. In “Matisse” Stein depicts the painter from at least
three different perspectives, each fragmented and perceptually autonomous. Stein
juxtaposes our view of Matisse between what “one was quite certain” of, what “some
said of him” and what “he certainly was,” allowing multiple angles of the painter to
coexist, clash and overlap on the canvas. With the deliberate omission of concrete
details, specifically in the form of descriptive nouns, Stein effectively excludes all
biographical aspects of Matisse's life and work. Matisse “was clearly telling something”
and “was a great man,” but Stein refuses to narrate what it is he tells or why he is great
(15). His disnarrated is indicated by Stein’s exclusion of the concrete antecedents we

’9 “

have come to expect of a traditional narrative. We witness Matisse “trying, suffering,”
“expressing” and “telling,” and despite the lack of a referential noun attached to these
vague gerunds, the portrait develops narrationally. Matisse’s efforts evolve from the
suffering involved in trying to express to the greatness of clearly telling.

Unlike “Ada” which clarifies its characters with occasional narrring, the portrait of
Matisse, with its nonspecific pronouns, remains undefined and vague. As with Picasso’s
Kahnweiler, we are entitled to mere glimpses, incomplete angles of the artist, discernible

only in our careful tracking of the actions of “he.” Stein fails not only to mention her

subject's name but also to specify the painterly work for which he is known, so that a

163

reader unfamiliar with Matisse might just as well interpret the "he" that was "greatly
expressing something struggling" as a musician, poet, politician or athlete. If Stein
addresses little of the Matisse we know from traditional biographies, what exactly does
she "portray"? How do we move from the familiarity of the portrait’s title to the
unspecified description it frames? By omitting the narrative details necessary to fix
Matisse’s portrait, Stein encompasses the Joycean everything and nothing of the artist, a
simultaneous duality that depends on the breaking down of fixed narrative laws.

Despite its elusiveness, “Matisse” succeeds as a literal counterpart to a Cubist
portrait in its circular patterning of sentences that create not only audible but visual
impressions, more akin to the painter’s work than to his biography. Stein uses a select
group of words to describe Matisse's struggle towards expression (“greatness of
struggling which was not clear expression”) and exploits all the linguistic possibilities the
phrase suggests. As Matisse struggles to express, so do Stein’s words, shifting their
hierarchies from one sentence to the next in a struggle for expression. With the rhythmic
repetition of two key gerunds, "struggling" and "expressing," Stein focuses on the
continuous act of the artist’s productivity rather than on the particulars of his life. Stein’s
Matisse paints throughout the portrait as each line represents a brushstroke. What may be
significant and singular about Matisse is his struggle to express and the expression of
these struggles. Stein's juxtaposition of the terms "certainty" and "something" both
confirms the value of Matisse's art, while it undermines a traditional notion of fixed
meaning. Matisse's work certainly means something, but that something, in all its

greatness, remains uncertain.

164

 

 

As a captured still life, Stein’s sentence intimates a single frame of film that turns
slowly on a strip, generating the illusion of movement while retaining its autonomous
stillness. Stein herself likens her word-portraits to the of craft of cinema:

The making of a portrait of any one is as they are existing and as they are
existing has nothing to do with remembering any one or anything. .. I was
doing what the cinema was doing, I was making a continuous succession
of the statement of what that person was until I had not many things but
one thing.22
Though Stein’s medium, like film, must illuminate its snapshots in a linear succession,
our perception of Matisse is complicated given the stills’ simultaneous presence and
spatial closeness on paper. Similar to Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird,” the portrait unravels one visual angle after another. By omitting the visual
stanza breaks used by Stevens, Stein blurs our view of Matisse so that its fragmented
perspectives paradoxically demand independent space while at the same time melding
into a collective impression.

The ironic uncertainty in Stein’s frequent assertion that Matisse “had been trying
to be certain” is carried over to the portrait of Picasso. Like “Matisse,” “Picasso”
involves a recurring play on the word “certainty,” as a constant reminder that there is no
certainty to speak of in the Modernist portrait. In As I Lay Dying each chapter-frame
represents a conflicting pull of discourse thatlilluminates the disnarrated discrepancies
between perspectives. Stein’s two portraits constrict this diegetic struggle to the sentence
level. Each sentence stands as a sentential frame, stretching “certainty” to meet its own

grammatical and expressive needs regardless of how its bookend sentences treat the

word. The persistent evolution of certainty undermines the grammatical and logical

 

22 “Portraits and Repetitions” (175-77).

165

fixity of “meaning,” which consequently wavers between “solid,” “struggling” and
“clear.” As Matisse is “expressing,” Picasso is “working” throughout the portrait. In a
puzzling simultaneity, the artist is both “certainly working” and “not ever completely
working,” producing an uncertain “something having completely a real meaning”
(17,19).

The uncertainty of Stein’s wordplay appeals to a Cubist distrust of referential
fixity. For Braque and Picasso, true perception of reality emanates not from stagnation
but from the depiction of movement. In the philosopher Pascal’s characterization of
reality as a continual shift between deceptive fixities, we see the theoretical seeds of
Cubism’s concern with perception:

We are floating in a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly,

blown to and fro; whenever we think we have a fixed point to which we

can cling... it shifts and leaves us behind... Nothing stands still for us.23
William James' crucial study The Principles of Psvcholggy advances Pascal’s phenomena
to the gap between mind and action. Unattainable as a wholly apprehensible entity,
reality must be approached through the pragmatic assumption that order (if it can exist at
all) is always in the making, always moving like Faulkner’s coffin, one step beyond one's
conscious perception. James describes the "specious present" as a continuous succession
of "nows" in which the individual is comprised not of a single reality but of a series of
virtual repetitions. With James in mind, Stein’s second portrait of Picasso verbally
reproduces the simultaneous movement captured in Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude

Descending a Staircase, No. 2” so that the portrait’s reality consists of

Now.
Not now.

 

23 Pensées (92).

166

And now.
Now. (21).

It is interesting that Stein, as if dissatisfied with her first attempt to capture the
artist, decides to write a second portrait of Picasso, calling it “If I Told Him: A
Completed Portrait of Picasso.” With the addition of the “completed” portrait, Stein’s
rendering of Picasso still evades the confines of perceptual farrriliarity, and yet it reminds
us of the many painterly variations the Cubists would create on a single subject.
Although the second portrait takes up more page space than the first, it is visually more

abbreviated and simplified in sentence structure. In the second portrait Picasso no longer

 

works, but is instead reduced to a passive “He is as he is.” Stein introduces Napoleon, l
recognizable as a historical figure and yet indecipherable in his relation to the portrayed

artist. Our only clue to the two figures’ connection rests in Stein’s repetition of “exact

99 6‘

resemblance, exactly” and the simile “as.” Stein justifies her comparison in a simple

“For this is so. Because” (22).
I want to return to Stein’s enigmatic practice of repetition. In the second portrait
of Picasso, Stein writes:

Exactly do they do.

First exactly.

Exactly to they do too.

First exactly.

And first exactly.

Exactly do they do.

And first exactly and exactly.

And do they do,

At first exactly and first exactly and do they do. .. (22).

On first reading the passage appears to simply repeat two phrases, and yet a closer
examination reveals subtle variations between each line. Stein’s slight alterations

represent a poetic version of Joyce’s “history repeating itself with a difference.” In

167

 

Ulysses Stephen Dedalus recalls Aristotle’s definition of movement as “an actuality of
the possible as possible.” History then is a movement of simultaneous frames as its
reality consists of the sum of its own narrative possibilities. Distinguishing the poet’s
function from that of the historian, Aristotle specifies the former’s purpose as
to describe not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might
happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary. The
distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and
the other verse. . . it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing
that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is
something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its
statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history
are singulars.24
The advantage the poet (or painter) has over the historian is that the former may
imagine a variety of historical possibilities, whereas the latter must focus on a single
possibility—the one event which occurs. For Aristotle, these imagined possibilities are
as real as the one realized possibility. The repetition with a difference in Stein’s poetic
portraits reflects a grammatical exploration of all possible occurrences that resists the
prioritization of one “truth” over another. If reality is a multifaceted and mobile
collaboration of possibility, then Stein must inevitably answer the statement “Let me
recite what history teaches,” with the simple open-ended “History teaches” (25). There is
no fixed signifier to replace the vague “what” of the first statement. In place of “what” in
the history equation is an unspoken space, which suggests both infinite possibility and
nothingness behind the disnarrative window of history.

Perhaps Stein’s repetition suggests a method of locating the rhythmic "truths" of

the personality and the present. In the appropriately titled "The Gradual Making of m

 

2‘ The Bas_ic Works of Aristotle (1463-64).

168

Making of Americans,” Stein discusses how repetition aids in the poetic locating of the

"rhythm of personality." During her study of portraiture, she began
to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same
thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again
until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and
fall and tell all that there was inside them, not so much by the words they
said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and
words endlessly the same and endlessly different. (14)

Stein’s sole concern is “the immediate experience with the ‘moving’ subject. . . for this

does not lead to any conclusions.”25

The portrait of Cézanne then is an exercise in the
“making of never of stop,” as the painter “nearly did nearly did and nearly did.” By these
same terms, “Picasso” inevitably must allow the movements of “also and so and so and
also” to coexist without conclusion. The deferral of Addie’s and Ada’s narratives also
emanates from a need for incompletion implied in the decentering of their perspectives.
The “continuous present” of Stein’s portraits corresponds with Bergson's
argument of simultaneism. For Bergson, the present includes both past and future, and
states and events beyond the speaker can be presented as if they were in
simultaneous interpenetration, independent of any single source of
perception or observation.26
In Bergson’s example of Zeno's paradox, one cannot progress forward in understanding if
one stops to rationalize. We do not perceive reality as a linear succession of detached
conscious states. Rather it is a continuous flow, an eternal beginning of the here and
now. Stein’s repetition of similar sentences taps into the flow of simultaneity and echoes

Kandinsky’s observation

the apt use of a word (in its poetical sense), its repetition, twice, three
times, or ever more frequently, according to the need of the poem, will not

 

25 Steiner, ibid. (45).
26 Christopher Butler, Early Modernism (158).

169

only tend to intensify the internal structure but also bring out unsuspected
spiritual properties in the word itself. . . Frequent repetition of a word...
deprives the word of its external reference. (34)

Stein writes about Cézanne: “In this way a mouth is a mouth. In this way if in as
a mouth if in as a mouth where, if in as a mouth where and there” (11). The first line
suggests a realist portrait in which the object of the mouth is directly represented by its
mimetic equivalent. The second line however breaks down the spatial and temporal
conditions implied in the metaphoric stability of the first line’s “is.” Now the mouth may
or not be (“11), moves inwards (“in”), moves parallel to its signified object (“as”),
disappears (“where”) and pauses momentarily on the canvas (“there”). The object
literally slides across the page refusing to fix itself to straightforward representation. In
the portrait Cézanne “nearly did nearly did and nearly did.” Here Stein not only suggests
the artist’s nearly accomplishing yet falling short of the desired Cubist aesthetic of
Braque and Picasso, she also demonstrates that aesthetic for us. Analogous to three
incomplete outlines of a Picasso face, the three near conclusions shift back towards
indeterminacy before they can be fixed as recognizable narrative endings.

Although Stein continues to compose portraits throughout her career, her Cubist
counterparts soon move away from an Analytical approach to painting. Increasingly
weary of the potential in a Bergsonian shifting of objects across the canvas, Cubism
begins to refocus its attention on the actual materials involved in painting. During the
second wave of Modernist painting known as Synthetic Cubism, spanning the short

period between 1912 and World War I, Braque and Picasso begin placing arbitrary

elements together on the canvas, shifting from human subjects to defamiliarized objects

170

 

that force the picture even closer to absolute independence of the external world.” The
form of the object within the painting, however, is not absolute or fixed. Rather it is seen
in terms of its relation to the other forms that coexist both beside and within its space and
to its original context. Abandoning the sharp lines of portraiture, Braque and Picasso
reinterpret and “synthesize” naturalistic forms and materials (i.e. still lifes and
traditionally non-painterly textures such as cardboard, newspaper, glass, tin and wood)
into a collage defamiliarized from its metaphoric connection to the perceived world. The
canvas itself becomes an object, a fragmented disnarrated window upon which other
material objects are synthesized to further conceal its view.

To understand Cubism’s reevaluation of how objects and people appear on the
canvas, we must first consider the influential style of Cézanne. As Henry J arnes and
Joseph Conrad construct the stylistic bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, Cézanne links Impressionism to Cubism. In 1899 Conrad was writing H_earfli
Darkness, while Cézanne worked on his seminal “The Bathers,” which deals with the
problem of temporal and spatial relations by distorting traditional appearances with
geometrical cones and planes—a dilemma further addressed in Cubist portraiture. As a
precursor to Synthetic Cubism, the Cézannean still life removes people and social
relationships from the narrative frame, balancing creation and decreation in its move
towards abstraction. For Cézanne, the artist must discover the value, weight and volume

of the individual image.

 

27 I have simplified Douglas Cooper’s definition in The Cubist Epoch. Cooper defines the early phase of
Cubism as beginning in late 1906 and ending in summer of 1910, followed by a “high” phase lasting from
1910 until winter of 1912, and a late phase which ends with the outbreak of war in 1914 (13-14).

171

Ironically, Cézanne’s still lifes are anything but still. As we see the rooms in
Woolf as animated frames of transition despite their lack of inhabitants, Cézanne’s still
lifes move with an élan vital that allows tables to tip forwards and misshapen apples to
threaten to fall to the floor. Inspired by Cézanne’s overlapping planes of passage, a
practice which allows contours to bleed into adjacent areas of the painting, Synthetic
Cubism extends this overlapping to materials other than traditional oils. Cezanne forces
the third dimension into the second because “art must convey the pulse of duration by
means of constantly changing elements and appearances.”28 As a condition of Cézanne’s
method, objects must not represent their external world counterparts, but exist as entities
independent of realistic connotations. As Rainer Maria Rilke points out, the viewing
experience of a Cézannean still life requires our abandonment of metaphorical tampering
with its objects:

something that takes place among the colors. . . one has to leave them
alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves.
Their intercourse: this is the whole of the painting. (75)

The intercourse between colors is complicated by Braque and Picasso, who
extend the Cézannean method beyond the palette to elements previously ignored by
painters. Synthetic Cubism declares that fine art no longer demands fine materials.29
Along with their varied use of unorthodox materials, Braque and Picasso increasingly

rely on stenciled letters and numbers to complicate the narrative—canvas. Despite their

recognizability as letters, numbers or in some cases complete words, the stenciled letters

 

2" Quoted in Gaeton Picon, Modern Painting (76).

29 In Modernist writing e.e. cummings’ sampling from the traditionally low brow world of advertising or
Langston Hughes’ borrowing from jazz provide some of the more extreme poetic translations of this idea.
In art Marcel Duchamp would further eliminate fine materials from fine art with his infamous ready-mades.
Braque and Picasso’s mistrust of traditional materials also predicts the postmodern kitsch of Andy Warhol
and the Beat Poets.

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seem strange, indecipherable and uprooted from their original alphabetical frame. They
stand as objects, defarrriliarized, functionally redefined and stripped of linguistic
reference so that they work to visually rather than verbally advance the painting’s
narrative. Stenciled lettering encompasses the Cubist painting’s demand that we read its
canvas on two narrative levels. We must first consider it as a synthesis of unfamiliarly
structured objects before we can discuss the familiar objects which it contains. For
Braque and Picasso, a fragment of cardboard or newspaper removed from its original
diegetic frame assumes a new hypodiegetic significance paradoxically synthesized and
discordant with its companion materials. The narrative effect of the pasted fragment
reminds the viewer of its original diegetic context (i.e. Le Journal or a sliver of wood),
while its placement aside the strange bedfellows of other materials defines a painterly
diegesis independent of the external world.

The linguistic translation of Synthetic Cubism defines much of Modernist poetry
as all the high Modernist poets incorporate variations of collage into their work. In
contrast to Stein’s more literal translation of Cubism, TS. Eliot and Ezra Pound favor a
papiers collés approach to poetry, in which external materials of the same class (other
texts) are pasted or embedded into the poem.30 Between and behind their copious
overlapping references, the canvases of Eliot’s The Waste_La_ilg and Pound’s The Cantos
frame materials transplanted from external sources. Cut, pasted and synthesized lines

from John Lyly or Ovid become fragments in the whole of The Wasrte Lfld and Iha

 

30 While papiers collés and collage are often used as interchangeable terms, I purposely use papiers collés
in this case to emphasize Eliot and Pound’s choice of sinrilarly classifiable materials cut from other literary
texts. In the early phase of papiers collés, Braque and Picasso work with paper materials of similar
textures, constituting a collage. multifragmented in structure, and yet it is not a true collage of contrasting
materials. Pound’s later addition of Chinese ideograms in The Cantos better defines a true poetic collage as
they represent visual objects or textures discordant with the “readable” textures of English.

173

 

Cm while intertextually evoking the external whole of their parent narratives. In
Synthetic Cubism the more diverse the materials forced to share a canvas, the more
apparent the dual function of the fragment becomes. In poetry the seemingly
irreconcilability of dissimilar textual references demands our own work as synthesists.
We must see Eliot’s and Pound’s canvas both as a cohesive whole and as a series of
texture/textual interruptions across the flat frame of the poem.

As Mieke Bal has demonstrated, the more independent and complete the framed
is, the more complex its relationship to the frame will be, and the more noticeable its
“interruptions” become. The metalepsis of the cited text represents the intrusion of one
diegesis into another, one plane crossing another. As a papiers collés work seems to spill
beyond its frames, evoking the external diegeses of its materials’ origins, the quoting
poem, with the dual frames of its embedded elements, creates a tenuous relationship
between materials and canvas. For Picasso, the fragmented material in its new frame is
in a sense revived and reintroduced as independent of its previous world:

If a piece of newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us something to
think about in connection with both newspapers and bottles, too. The
displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not made and
where it retains, in a measure, its strangeness.”1
Eliot and Pound’s poetic counterpart to Picasso’s “strangeness” is a metamorphic
recycling of external texts into a new universe of meaning. Despite the poets’ adoption

of material transplantation, their work represents a limited synthesism in its reluctance to

wean itself from the traditional sources Braque and Picasso leave behind.32

 

3' Quoted in Gilot and Lake, ibid. (77).

32 Although the poetry of Eliot and Pound evokes Synthetic techniques, we cannot say it fully corresponds
to papiers collés. The painterly counterpart to Eliot and Pound would require fragmentary images from the
long history of painting (i.e. the eye of Mona Lisa or the wing of one Cimabue's angels) pasted and re-

174

In contrast Stein’s adoption of Synthetic Cubism breaks from the formality of
intertextual metalepsis and represents a more direct attempt to translate the painterly
techniques of Cubism to language. While The Making of Americans, Three Lives, and
the portraits parallel Analytical Cubism in their favoring the simultaneous presentation of
a human figure over traditional narrative, Stein's Tender Button_s signifies an inspired
shift with the Modernist painters from multiperspective portraiture to still life and
collage. As a collection of still lifes, Tender Buttons creates a Cubist verbalization of
generic “things,” much as Picasso and Braque reinterpret common everyday objects

found in their studios. Several critics have argued that Stein ultimately disappoints in her

 

attempt to interpret the experiments of Synthetic Cubism with language, suggesting her
poetry fails to distinguish between the malleability of the painter’s tools and the poet’s
words.33 Conversely, Michael Edward Kaufmann defends Tender Buttfl as “neither a
collection of verbal Cubist still lifes nor an exposing of the nonsense of structure in
language.” Rather Stein wants to redefine the canvas-frame of language and “subvert the
non-sense that language after centuries of encasement in print has become” (448).
Kaufmann is right in the sense that Stein reanimates language by redefining its
grammatical and referential laws, but we cannot overlook the many levels on which
Tender Button_s succeeds as a verbal counterpart to Synthetic Cubism.

Purposely colorless in their lack of nouns and adjectives, Stein’s portraits focus
on the limitations of language, whereas Tender Buttons tends to rediscover the individual

interest and attraction of the word. In contrast to Wallace Stevens’ use of an exotic

 

performed on the canvas. Of course the Cubists do not do this; instead they opt for nondescript generic
materials, translated more accurately in Stein as flat and nonreferential nouns.

33 John Malcolm Brinnin, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Hoffman, Norman Weinstein, and Wendy Steiner
have all described Stein’s writing as a flawed attempt to directly transfer the tenets of Cubism to poetry.

175

vocabulary or Pound’s sampling of other languages, Stein approaches the problem of the
stale word through the objectification of language, renewing her materials by refocusing
on language as a palette of objects rather than mimetic signals. Through the
defarrriliarization and deprioritization of a word’s common usage, Tender Buttorg
emphasizes the spatial and visual relationships between words to redefine word-objects
as separate but equally important aspects of language. In defense of its elusiveness,
Tender Buttons’ primary goal does not appear to be the accurate translation of its chosen
objects, but rather to suggest visual and rhythmic experiences of them through a collage
of disjointed object-sentences. With Braque and Picasso pasting seemingly incompatible
material shapes on the canvas, we can begin to understand how Stein restructures the
materials of language to re-synthesize verbal objects on the page.

In the spirit of Mallarmé, Stein recognizes that words must be freed of their
grammatical frames to disengage them from the lifeless fixity of meaning. Nouns
become important in themselves, regardless of their context within the work or their
relation to other words. Like Picasso’s cardboard square that preserves its
“cardboardness” while partaking in a picture of a glass bottle, each word in Stein retains
its material separateness as it contributes to the picture as a whole. William Carlos
Williams, whose Cubism tends to favor fragmentation of the line and subsequently the
image, commends Stein as having “completely unlinked [words] from their former

”34 It is Tender Buttons’ very challenge to the primacy 0f

relationships to the sentence.
linguistic assumptions and intelligibility and the "attempt to manifest the arbitrariness of

such discourse that makes [it] so densely significant, so paradoxically rhetorical, a long

 

3" Selected Essays (116).

176

and sustained piece of lyrical persuasion."35 Persuasion represents the most difficult of
Cubist challenges as a fragmented material must convince its viewer of both its visible
context outside the work (a bullfighting advertisement) and its invisible function within
the synthesized whole (the base of a fruit dish). Again the painting’s title functions as a
referential anchor that persuades the viewer to connect the seemingly disparate elements
to their implied subject. At the same time the Cubists grant visual access to the elements’
original material context despite their synthesis on the canvas.

In Synthetic Cubism’s absence of time, there is a decided focus on space.
Similarly, Tender Buttons displaces narrative time with restructured spatial relationships
defined by word placement, section titles, section breaks and white space. In its soft
undefined roundness Stein’s title evokes the spatial uncertainty of the oval canvases used
by Braque and Picasso in the latter years of Analytical Cubism. For the Cubists, the oval
canvas removes the hard edges of the frame, creating a spatial roundness independent of
the limitations of comers. The lack of comers frees the narrative frame of a work,
nudging the painting beyond the physical and diegetic boundaries of Cézanne’s passage.
Stein also draws narrative attention to the tactile qualities of her objects. Her buttons are
round, indefinite in size and number, and “tender,” giving way to the spatial push from
planes both within and outside the text. Their fragile narrative frames overlap and bleed
into one another, complicating our view as narratees.

In “Mildred’s Umbrella” Stein argues that a cause with no curve means a great
loss; hence, her buttons must inevitably avoid the restricted singularity of linear

alignment. Characteristic of a Synthetic work, there is an élan vital movement between

 

35 Neal Schmitz, “The Difference of Her Likeness: Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation” (119).

177

buttons that allows materials to narratively flow into one another and to spill into the
external world. Tender Buttoria opens with a singular fragment of material, “a kind,” and
ends with the multiplicity and flow of “a fountain,” guiding our experience of the text in
a flow from the singular enclosed frames of “Objects” to the uncertain open canvases of
“Rooms.”

Stein uses collage—a "synthesis or building up of separate objects on the picture
plane, whose relationships could be. .. intriguingly defamiliarizing"—to unify a distinct
collection of unrelated objects without blanketing her synthesis with referential
meaning.36 What follows is that a “box is made sometimes... and to see to it neatly and
to have the holes stopped up makes it necessary to use paper.” In defiance of prevalent
critical arguments that Stein's objects are unified because they work as sexual metaphors,
Stein's own explanation for Tender Button_s entails the simple Cubist and Objectivist
presentation of an object stripped of its mimetic restraints:

I for a time did not make portraits because as I was trying to live in
looking, and looking was not mixing itself up with remembering I wished
to reduce to its minimum listening and talking. In Tender Buttons, I
described anything. .37

For Stein’s objects to become metaphors, one requires memory, a referential
sense of temporal meaning beyond the signifier. Memory involves a “reading” exercise
that conflicts with the objective independence demanded in Stein’s “no reason to say that

there was a time” (13). Returning to Bergson’s theory of duration, we find the nucleus of

Modernist reality as the continuous flow of experience:

 

3” See Butler’s discussion on collage, ibid. (167-71).
37 Lecgrgs in America (189)

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Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious state
assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its
present states from its former states. .. form[ing] both the past and the
present into an organic whole?8
To adopt meaning external to the text, Stein’s objects must invoke the temporal act of
remembering or halting the duration of their presence. In other words, the object must be
“stopped” with a memory-metaphor to be pinpointed as a Woolfian moment of being, and
as we learn from Woolf, the fossilization of language, or in this case the object, into a
framed meaning slips into historical inaccuracy. It is a narrative that fails to capture the
durational truth of the fixed object. Altemately Stein depicts the “sudden spoon” as “the
same in no size,” spatially and temporally immeasurable. As a collage of “sudden”
objects flowing in an indecisive temporality, Tender Buttorfi proves to be a “a whole
dividing time,” a crafted “wound in the [narrative] decision,” refusing the deceptive fixity
of measured time (12).

The text works on two concurrent, seemingly paradoxical narrative levels that
rationalize, “The instance of there being more is an instance of more.” Objects retain
their instance, while partaking in the larger frame of their relationships with other
instances. The more moments of being, the more accurately the collage captures the
durational flow of its objects. Like Cézanne’s paradoxical harmony which allows an
object’s singularity to coincide with its bleeding into another, they stand alone and yet

work together not necessarily to create a unified and meaningful whole, but, in Stein's

own words, to compose a work in which "one thing was an important as another thing,

 

3“ Time and Free Will (100)

179

Each part is as important as the whole."39 Together the parts comprise a durational
“more,” unhindered by spatial and temporal frames.

Perhaps Stein's objects are not as randomly selected as they may seem,
considering Spinoza’s claims that individuality is an illusion and that everything is
defined by the system it belongs to. The objects, it might be said, are unified merely
because Stein chooses to unify them into the system of Tender Buttona, just as Braque
and Picasso randomly select one fragment of material over another. As transplanted
materials of duration, every object, every word or scrap of tissue paper belongs—their
randomness justified as a collective selection of duration that “propounds its own
conception of reality”?0 In their singularity the objects raise “a question of sudden rises,”
while together they make “readiness and eyesight and likeness and a stool” (12). Like
glass in a Synthetic still life, Stein’s objects are “broken” and “mended” to show “the
whole element of angels and orders” (1 1).

Predicting Zukofsky's Objectivism, Stein presents her objects as they sound and
look (as unfamiliar and seemingly impossible as that may be) and not as what they
represent. Tender Buttons is an extended demonstration that “a rose is a rose is a rose.”
Each “rose” represents no vague etemality such as love but the individualism and
independence of a single rose, while retaining a physical and grammatical connection to
its companion roses. Rather than speaking for an object, which might support a proposed
sexual or any other metaphor extraneous to the object's world, Stein realizes the still life

of an object must itself be contained before its moving metaphorical life can be "painted."

As with Faulkner’s impenetrable coffin metaphor, objects must be stripped of meaning to

 

39 Quoted in Jayne L. Walker, The Makino of a Modernist (13).
‘° Harold Rosenberg, “The Cubist Epoch” (162).

 

180

be experienced in their present and pure form. When asked how she feels about modern
art, Stein replies with the deceptively simplistic, “I like to look at it... The other parts of
it interest me much less.”41

Stein’s still lifes stand resistant to interpretation. In her rejection of traditional
depiction with its metaphorical luggage, Stein favors the almost stream-of-consciousness
impressions of her objects. Marianne DeKoven accurately defines Stein’s experimental
writing as

the obstruction of normal reading [which] prevents us from interpreting

the writing to form coherent, single, whole, closed ordered, finite sensible

meanings."2
In Synthetic Cubism a fragment of newspaper may become a bottle or cardboard torn
from a box forms the three-dimensional base of a guitar. Stein’s canvas likewise distorts
its object-impressions by dislocating words from their meanings and placing them in new
and often illogical grammatical situations, allowing elephants to be beaten with candy,
coffee to be broken into pieces, and cup and saucer to hurt. As a collage of conflicting
impressions, Tender Buttons, like Ulysses’ juxtaposition of discourses, “shows the
disorder [and] more likeness than anything else” (46).

In a second description of the process, Stein explains how the juxtaposition of
seemingly arbitrary objects “interrupts” our common experience of them and creates new
sensory relationships that are complicated with variation and repetition:

If comparing a piece that is a size that is recognised as not a size but a
piece, comparing a piece with what is not recognised but what is used as it
is held by holding, comparing these two comes to be repeated. Suppose
they are put together, suppose that there is an interruption, supposing that
beginning again they are not changed as to position, suppose all this and

suppose that any five two of whom are not separating suppose that the five
are not consumed. Is there an exchange, is there a resemblance to the sky

 

”1 Lectures in America (82).
42 A Different Language (5).

181

which is admitted to be there and the stars which can be seen. Is there.
That was a question. There was no certainty. (45-46)

Stein’s question of method, “Is it possible to suggest more to replace that thing,”
corresponds to Kandinsky’s position that “The question ‘what?’ disappears from art; only
the question ‘how?’ remains” (8). In Analytical Cubism the viewer of a painting might
commonly ask what the configuration of lines and angles represents. Synthetic Cubism
no longer asks what a picture contains, but how diverse elements on a canvas synthesize,
interrupt and defarrriliarize our perceptions of them. Given its seemingly anarchic verbal
relationships, Tender Buttons raises the question of how the text remains coherently and
structurally intact when its objects stretch the limits of physical and grammatical unity.
How do we account for the stylistic changes from the colorful and partitioned "Objects"
section to the prosaic obscurity of "Rooms"? What beyond a Bergsonian exercise in
duration or a Cubist randomness unifies the three seemingly incongruent sections?
Perhaps the glue of the text’s unity rests between Stein's sections, in the unspoken
disnarrative canvas between objects and sections. In his seminal Of Grammatology
Jacques Derrida proposes that it is in the section called the "end of the book" that writing
begins. It is here in the speculative and unspoken narrative of the text where writing
should be endlessly open, creative and shifting. For Stein, spatial and stylistic shifts
occur within margins wider than the nearly invisible chapter borders of Joyce, within the
blank canvas between the stillness of her pasted objects. Tender Buttons’ dislocation of
one object, one sentence or one section from another mirrors the disnarrative space
between Faulkner’s chapter-frames, which unify the novel’s disparate hypodiegetic

voices while concealing the narrative, spatial and temporal distance between them.

182

Structurally, Stein’s collage hints at an organized system of three independent yet
overlapping frames. Objects, food and rooms are arranged into their perspective
diegeses—an “elegant use of foliage and grace and a little piece of white cloth and oil”—
separated by the guiding titles Braque and Picasso apply to contextually frame their
works. Richard Bridgman suggests that the book’s tripartite structure represents three
frames of reference: objects represent things outside us, food represents what we take in,
and rooms represent what frames us. In a Cubist sense each section evokes a spatial
reorientation of the reader that resituates the narrative frame from three possible angles.
The object stanza of “A Box” implies the necessity of the text’s tripartite structure: “A
custom which is necessary when a box is used and taken is that there are three which
have different connections” (6). Later, Stein further builds in justification for her
structure: “Within the cut and slender joint alone, with sudden equals and no more than
three... so then the best example is all together” (1 1).

In “Objects,” the first of Tender Buttons’ “joint” connections, materials move
externally and independently of both each other and their viewer. Stein visually separates
objects into brief stanzas partitioned by bold-cased titles and pronounced white space.
Displaced items such as coffee, water or candy seem at first glance more appropriate in
the “Food” collage, and yet Stein strips the foods of their internalizing characteristic to
re-envision them as inedible objects belonging to the external “Objects” category. With
the introduction of “Food” objects move inward, almost closer together and dependent
upon our internalizing of their “burst of mixed music.” Visually, the style shifts from the

brief frames of singular “Objects” to the longer, less interrupted blocks of sensory food

183

experience. The longer the stanzas become, the longer we are able to sustain and
internalize a single metaphorical experience

In the third grouping we too become objects within the enclosing frames of
rooms. There are no separating titles or stanza breaks to partition objects and allow our
escape from the flow of sensory experience. Since we can no longer pause at the canvas
space between pasted objects, it becomes increasingly difficult to extemalize our
perceptions of Stein’s individual rooms. Instead the view is contained within a sustained
spatial and temporal moment of the section’s frame as a whole: “Explaining darkening
and expecting relating is all of a piece” (43). Opposed to Woolf’ s centering of empty
rooms, Stein’s placement of rooms as the final third of the text resembles Faulkner’s
resituating of Addie’s soliloquy in its defiance of structural expectations. Like Addie’s
prosopopeic narrative awakening, “Rooms” constitutes both “a whole centre and a
border,” in which “any change was in the ends of the centre.”

Stein’s rooms share with those in Woolf the characteristic of a framed
emptiness. As the “tender and true that makes no width,” the rooms seem spatially
undefined, their contents unclear. Stein reiterates Woolf’ s discovery in the “Time
Passes” section that it is “not very likely that there is a centre,” or at least there is no
narrative access to this center. Similar to Faulkner’s coffin and Woolf’ 5 rooms, which
function as empty metaphoric frames containing the unutterable, Stein’s rooms “act so
that there is no use in a centre.” We believe that they hold something, and yet “. . .that
settlement [is] not condensed” for our understanding. Rather “the author of all that is in
there behind the door” prompts viewers towards a disnarrative speculation of what

remains unsaid (43).

184

The true center of Tender Buttrm falls in “Roast Beef.” Beginning “in the
inside,” the piece extends to four pages during which the reader is invited to “search a
neglect.” The disnarrated neglect, constituted in the piece’s “cloudiness,” “opposition to
consideration,” “please no name,” and “a sentence of vagueness,” remains impenetrable
since “there is no memory, there is no clear collection” to unify Stein’s hypodiegetic
fragments (24). It seems no coincidence that these lines fall in the structural center of
Tender Buttoris, recalling the empty centers of Conrad, Lawrence and Woolf. As a
center, rnimetically “neglected by being all in size,” it tenuously holds the disparate
elements of the text. Perhaps the line “two and two are not a middle” alerts us to the
second section’s emptiness as a center. In Synthetic Cubism Braque and Picasso describe
the picture as a tableau-object, lacking the hierarchical structure implied by a center.
Each fragmented material shares a visual equality. Similarly, no one of Stein’s objects
commands status as a privileged center over its companions.

In a short description of a windowless room as “A willow and no window, wide
place stranger, a wideness makes an active center,” Stein captures the disnarrated quality
of Modernism (52). Since there is no narrative window to peer through, only a
disnarrative idea of a window, the Modernist work is hypodiegetically widened and
requiring of our active speculation into its strangeness. From its opening object, "A
Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass," Tender Buttons begins an exercise in defamiliarizing the
windows of the ordinary to discover the individuality of external objects and their
relation to one another: "All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The
difference is spreading" (9). Stein unifies her objects both in spite of and because of their

not being ordinary. First, we are presented with the recognizable image of a see-through

185

glass container, and yet it is soon blinded of its narrative view. In its defarrriliarized
context the carafe becomes an opaque glass window, concealing, like Faulkner’s coffin or
Conrad’s heart of darkness, the disnarrated significance behind its frame.

Later in “A Seltzer Bottle” Stein repeatedly plays with the word “suppose,”
encouraging our disnarrative contemplation of the bottle’s impenetrable silver
discoloration. No interpretative “handling” of the bottle as a frame will reveal its
disnarrated contents in which “the message is mixed. .. not final and sufficient and
substitut ” (8). Its obstructed window suggests “a sign of more in not mentioned.” For
Stein and the Modernists, the disnarrated behind a glazed window enriches the text,
illuminating narrative possibilities beyond the main diegesis:

No eye-glasses are rotten, no window is useless and yet if air will not

come in there is a speech ready, there always is and there is no dimness,

not a bit of it. (45).
What complicates the disnarrated is Stein’s continuous opening and closing of windows
of possibility. Objects mean one thing in a sentence, only to become something else in
the next. In its original diegetic frame, nickel, Stein tells us, is “originally rid of a cover.”
Once transplanted or “guided guided away” like the Cubists’ cut and pasted materials to
Stein’s canvas, it “weakens an hour,” temporally defying its familiar context and
changing so “there is no search” for its disnarrative origins. Its fixed interpretation is
“unwelcome,” and as soon as we begin to focus on its handsome and convincing glitter,
Stein refocuses the stanza on the new strangeness of mercy and medicine, asserting that
“a single image is not splendor” and “a single charm is doubtful.”

I want to conclude with a look at a recurring grammatical structure in Tender

Buttons that exemplifies how Stein both creates disnarrated windows and ultimately

186

achieves a verbal equivalent to Synthetic Cubism. Throughout the collage Stein uses the
simple metaphoric equation of connecting two dissimilar words with “is,” “is not,”
“makes” or “means.” By linking seemingly unconnectable objects (“A shawl is a hat and
hurt and a red balloon. . .”), Stein offers an alternate solution to Virginia Woolf’s empty-
ended linguistic metaphors (“Happiness is this”). Although Stein often utilizes the
Woolfian empty pronoun as a metaphor, she never reverts to the narrative silence of
Woolf. Rather, as Picasso forces newspaper to become the arms holding a guitar, Stein
insists upon a verbal equivalent to each object, stretching the boundaries of metaphorical
coherence (“A little lace makes boils”) and as result, refreshing her fragmented materials
in their new context.

While the commonplace grammatical structure of “one thing is another” occurs in
all poetry, Stein’s couplings do more than simply bind commonly incongruous objects.
The connectors represent the canvas space between objects upon which the Synthetic
Cubists would draw or paint to visually link or define their pasted materials. The
insertion of deceptively innocuous verb forms such as “is” or “making” emulates
Braque’s drawing of a fruit-dish over pasted strips of wallpaper. Stein “draws” in
between her pasted objects, linking and redefining them in their new relationships. By no
means flat or colorless, Stein’s “inbetween” writing plays a key role in the
defamiliarization of her objects and suggests “that there can be a different whiteness to a
wall.” Like the canvas that allows the coexistence of paper and wood, Stein’s metaphoric
linking allows items to remain visually and referentially distinct despite their

metaphorical overlapping. The canvas of writing, of which we catch mere glimpses

between its pasted objects, provides the necessary grammatical frame to hold “a

187

receptacle and a symbol.” Between objects Stein’s drawing forms the Cubist “line [that]
even makes no more,” framing the disnarrated possibility shared between two dissimilar

narratives (25).

188

CONCLUSION

In 1967 a recent spectator at Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party wrote the
playwright, reproaching Pinter for not doing his job. According to the letter, Pinter
should have revealed the identity of the play’s two ominous visitors, the background of
Stanley and most important, whether all the characters were supposed to be normal.
Pinter’s telling reply was that since he could not understand the letter, the inquirer must
first answer who she was, where did she come from and was she supposed to be normal.
What the exchange between viewer and playwright reveals is the ambivalent relationship
between the narratee and narrator that complicates the unwritten space between story and
discourse. Though Pinter’s play comes decades after Modernism, his work confirms the
lasting influence of Modemism’s narrative devices. Pinter and the postrnodernists
continue to fragment discourse, refusing to tell the whole story, which creates for
narratees, both within and outside the text, the disnarrated ambiguity cited by Pinter’s
critic. And yet, as we have seen with the Modernists, it is this very narrative uncertainty
that enriches the text with simultaneous worlds of possibility. In some respects the less
we know, the more we learn through our speculative emplotrnent in between the text’s
disnarrated gaps.

Our readings of Modernism, and subsequently of the postmodernism that the
emulates it, remain limitless as it conveys a varying range of possibility rather than the
restrictions of realist absolutes. Modern fiction penetrates the fragmented inner and
external experience of both the world and ourselves—perspective realms previously

neglected by realism. Reality, as Bergson and the Modernists see it, evades the confines

189

of chronological linearity and the whole of the individual; rather it must be accessed
through a spatially and temporally defiant collage of impressions, fragmented by the
ambiguities of memory, narrative selectivity and linguistic inadequacy. As the
Modernists demonstrate, literary renewal through experimentation relies on the stylistic
exaggeration of the fork between story and discourse. The separation, often compounded
by the juxtaposition of multiple hypodiegetic discourses, fragments and blurs the story,
opening the windows of disnarrated possibility.

My research has explored and refined the applications of the disnarrated to
Modernism. The role of the disnarrated in Modernist literature cannot be underestimated,
and there remains much to be discovered of its function and impact on modern narratives.
I have shown how the disnarrated disrupts the spatial and temporal fixity of narrative,
distorting the traditional frames of perception. As it suggests alternate worlds of
possibility, the disnarrated distracts the reader from the main diegesis, refocusing our
attention on the interruptive surfacing of hypodiegetics. In Faulkner and Joyce we see
the struggle between hypodiegetic voices for diegetic air time. Though the Modernist
hypodiegetic inevitably yields to the narrative that frames it, these alternate voices also
acquire a certain degree of independence in their spatial and temporal otherness.
Modernism, unlike any other literary movement, depends on our active deciphering of the
fragmented “hints” of possibility concealed behind the main diegesis. Consequently,
Modernism raises unavoidable questions of historicity and fictional truths as it presents
contradictory evidence, both confirming and denying narrative possibility. What we

learn from Modernist fragmentation and the disnarrated worlds it creates is that history,

190

 

both fictional and external to the text, depends on the subjective narrative eye of the
historian, and thus, always entails a recreation of the present.

I have also raised the issue of the metaphorical void that characterizes the
Modernist work. Conrad’s heart of darkness, Faulkner’s coffin, and Woolf’s and Stein’s
rooms represent metaphorical frames of emptiness that constitute structural centers of the
text. Despite their emptiness, these metaphor-frames often appear animated and
transitory as if inhabited by some unspoken possible world. We journey into Conrad’s
heart of darkness, only to find its contents inaccessible. Faulkner’s coffin travels
throughout the novel, constantly demanding the attention of its observers while
disallowing the carving of peepholes into its meaning. Woolf’ 8 empty rooms occupy the
center of her novels, seeming to have internal lives of their own despite Woolf’s
disallowing characters and readers to occupy their frames. In each case the empty
metaphorical frame represents an impossible attempt to symbolize the real. The
Modernist illuminates these framed voids, revealing a narrative inability to frame what
cannot be contained.

Another complication of Modernist metaphor my work has addressed is the
inefficiency of language as a meaningful frame. In The Birthday Party Pinter introduces
the same empty metaphors of his Modernist predecessors. McCann twice performs the
strange ritual of ripping sheets. Both times he insists that Stanley (and the audience)
must "Mind that," thus, giving the act a symbolic yet indecipherable weight. Like
Conrad’s heart of darkness, Faulkner’s coffin, Joyce’s death-acts and Woolf’ 8 rooms,
McCann’s ritual demands narrative attention, and still there is no referential equivalent to

its suggested meaning. Despite McCann’s performing the act “all the time,” it is, as

191

Goldberg says, "without a solitary point.” The meaning of his actions remains concealed
behind the same disnarrative window that frames Vladimir and Estragon’s pointless
waiting for Godot.

I have demonstrated how language becomes the molecular frame of both meaning
and meaninglessness in Woolf and Stein. In Pinter’s plays, words that would perhaps
enlighten his confused audience remain unspoken, and when characters do speak, no one
seems to understand each other. Goldberg and McCann’s long assault of empty language
systematically bullies Stanley into silence. The meaning of their interrogation remains
elusive to both Stanley and the audience so that we have no words to frame its
significance. In a similar moment from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstem
Are Dead, Rosencrantz can only respond to Hamlet’s ambiguous soliloquy with “Half of
what he said meant something else, and the other half didn’t mean anything at all” (57).
And still, as Guildenstem laments, insufficient words are “all we have to go on.” J. Hillis
Miller seems most accurate when he describes words in the modern text as tending to be

in one way or another double antithetical words, neither this nor that, but
both/and, though one cannot logically have both/and. No narrative line
has a clearly identifiable beginning or end, and the line in between wavers,
vibrates, and pulverizes itself when the reader tries to pin it down and
make it stay still so it can be followed through as a definite trajectory with
a definite meaning. One consequence of current narrative theory, at least
of the so-called deconstructive sort, has been in various ways to put in
question the concept of organic unity or wholeness which has been the
central assumption guiding much interpretation of fiction. In place of
wholeness has been put the hypothesis of heterogeneity, indeterminacy, or

open-endedness.l

Just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstem, like their audience, are “kept intrigued

 

' “From Narrative Theory to Joyce; From Joyce to Narrative Theory” (3)

192

without ever quite being enlightened,” we have seen how the Modernists use
fragmentation and ellipses to draw attention to what cannot be said. Faulkner and Joyce
open linguistic gaps in voice and style to defy the “trajectory” of meaning we expect of
narrative. Woolf uses empty pronouns and ellipses to single out the inaccessibility of
emotion. Stein further undermines metaphorical meaning with an antirepresentational
language to emphasizes words as nothing more than objects defined by the spatial and
visual relationships between them.

We do not know what happens to Pinter’s Stanley, nor do we witness the hanging
of Rosencrantz and Guildenstem. Their off-stage fates echo the Modernist death, which
occurs outside of the narrative eye, spatially and temporally defarrriliarized, so that their
narrative details remain inaccessible. Guidenstem argues

You can’t act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it
happen—it’s not gasps and blood and falling about—that isn’t what makes
it death. It’s just a man failing to reappear. .. that’s the only thing that’s
real... an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering
weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death. (84)
All we truly know of Rosencrantz, Guildenstem, Hamlet, Ophelia, Stanley, Michael
Furey or Mrs. Ramsay is that they disappear from the narrative stage. I have
demonstrated how the ghosts of the dead surface hypodiegetically encompassing
disnarrated “confessions,” which the living appropriate despite their narrative
disconnection from the dead. The living must rely on secondhand narrative "distortions"
of death, which open subsequent windows of speculation. Death in the modern text
defamiliarizes our realist expectations of narrative kernels as it becomes a conspicuous

parenthetical occurrence, outside the main diegesis and the frames of time and space.

In Stein’s work death is not only absent, but also virtually nonexistent. As Stein

193

and the Cubists fragment and rebuild their subjects so that what is traditionally seen
sequentially now appears as simultaneous perspectives, the portraits represent the
ultimate anti-elegiac capturing of their sitters. Given the succession of nows, there is no
conclusion to character. Though the artist Cézanne is dead by the time Stein portrays
him, his death remains a narrative impossibility. The multiperspective coexistence of all
Cézanne’s narrative possibilities creates a spatial and temporal uncertainty that disallows
the certain closure of death. In some respects Stein’s characters represent the ghosts we
find in Joyce and Woolf. They also hover as disnarrated possibilities outside the
narrative borders of time and space, and yet Stein further complicates their haunting
presence by orrritting all narrative allusion to the death-act. Death cannot take place in
Stein’s work as it would compromise the élan vital of language and perspective she
seeks.

While the strains of Modernism cannot be easily brought together under one
denomination, its narrative experimentation distinguishes it as a somewhat unified
movement separate from other literatures. Modernist narrative, more so than any other
genre, insists on our confronting and defining the problematic relationship between what
is said and left unsaid. It demands our assessment of the widening partition between
story and discourse. Despite my work on Modernist narrative, what still remains unsaid
and worth further exploration is how the disnarrated functions in other realms of
Modernism. For example, how do Jean Toomer, N ella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston
create a disnarrated otherness based on ethnic diversity? How do women writers such as
Djuna Barnes, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, H.D. or Marianne Moore frame the

disnarrated in relation to the male writers? How do Modernist poets besides Stein

194

reconstruct the narrative frame? How do the postrnodemists refine the Modernist frame,
drawing even further attention to the disnarrated?

We have seen how the Modernist narrative, in its quest for literary renewal,
evades comprehensive structural models. Its experimentation amplifies the narrative gap
between story and discourse to fragment and blur our perception as narratees. Faulkner’s
hypodiegetic voices, Joyce’s stylistic variation, Woolf’ s linguistic uncertainty and Stein’s
verbal objectification all reframe perception, destabilizing the previous boundaries of
duration, memory, language and historicity. Like Stephen Dedalus with his ashplant,
Modernism strikes the chandelier of narrative causing “time’s livid final flame” to leap.
As narratees, we stand amid “the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass

”2 We are challenged to reframe the broken scaffolding of

and toppling masonry.
narrative, to “wrangle round the whowhat brawlaltogether” raised by Modemism’s
insistence on “a lot not knowing” (686). But before we can arrive at Stein’s observation
that a painting is finished “because it has a frame,” we must follow Modemism’s lead and

begin to construct new narrative boundaries. Only then do we begin to frame the

unframed.

 

2 Ulysses (683).

195

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