Alternative Paradigms of Literary Realism

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A lt e r nat i v e Pa r a dig m s of Li t e r a ry R e a l i sm

Previous Publication by Don Adams: James Merrill’s Poetic Quest (1997)

PRAISE FOR Alternative Paradigms of Literary Realism by Don Adams “In his judicious study of five under-appreciated modern and contemporary American and British writers, Adams powerfully illuminates not only the individual writers he examines but also the nature of literary reality itself. Demonstrating how allegory, pastoral, and parable are used by modernist writers as an alternative to mimesis, Adams reveals as well the social and political contexts and consequences of such generic choices. Jane Bowles, James Purdy, Ronald Firbank, Henry Green, and Penelope Fitzgerald emerge from this refreshing and probing study as innovative, even revolutionary, writers.” —Claude J. Summers, William E. Stirton Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, University of Michigan-Dearborn and General Editor, glbtq.com “Adams shows how gender and genre are intertwined by establishing patterns of expectations for both human and literary behavior. In this exciting and persuasive study, he demonstrates how misunderstandings of genre-blind readers to the complexities and delights before them. His work will lead us to widen our reading and our tastes and to appreciate works for the richness of their queerness and the depth of their frivolity.” —David Bergman, author of The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture “Arguing against the common confusion of realism with the mimetic, Adams offers an imaginative rethinking of subtly diverse genres within the mode of literary realism. His new readings provide fresh ways of thinking about the often misunderstood fiction of five under-appreciated twentieth-century writers. This thought-provoking, stimulating study is illuminated by literary and intellectual surprises, broadly informed by the author’s critical discussions of allegory, parable, and the pastoral as well as intellectual history.” —Andrew Vogel Ettin, Professor of English, Wake Forest University and author of Literature and the Pastoral “In this inviting, perceptive, stimulating, and highly readable book, Adams leads us to a new appreciation of under-read and under-valued authors: Jane Bowles, James Purdy, Ronald Firbank, Henry Green, and Penelope Fitzgerald. Unlike the great modernists Conrad, Eliot, and James, they refused to curtail and abort the old high forms of allegory, pastoral, and parable to signal the pathos of loss in our vision, thoroughly incommensurable with our mimetic realism. Instead, they created alternative, blended atmospheres that allowed full play to the idealizing forms made commensurable somehow, with the life we live, all at once, in the aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual spheres. While registering the characteristic malaise of their age, these writers, so sensitively analyzed by Adams, subtly save us from being stuck in the sad clichés of transcendental homelessness we have settled for.” —Naomi Lebowitz, Lewin Professor Emerita in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis “The chapter on Penelope Fitzgerald is seminal and timely; it alone makes this book important . . . The scholarly community will benefit from having a serious study of authors whose work has been deemed unfashionable or even incomprehensible by the literary establishment.” —Annette Gilson, Associate Professor of English, Oakland University

Alt e r nat i v e Pa r adigms of Li t e r a ry R e a lism

Don Ada ms

ALTERNATIVE PARADIGMS OF LITERARY REALISM

Copyright © Don Adams, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62186–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Adams, Don, 1964– Alternative paradigms of literary realism / Don Adams. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–62186–2 (alk. paper) 1. Realism in literature. 2. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Bowles, Jane Auer, 1917–1973—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Purdy, James—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Green, Henry, 1905–1974—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Firbank, Ronald, 1886–1926—Criticism and interpretation. 8. Fitzgerald, Penelope—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS374.R37A33 2009 823⬘.910912—dc22

2009018038

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

In Memory of My Mother

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Con t e n t s

Acknowledgments One Two Three Four Five Six

Truth as a Matter of Style: Alternative Paradigms of Literary Realism

ix 1

One is Never Quite Totally in the World: Jane Bowles’ Allegorical Realism

11

Whatever Is, Is Wrong: James Purdy’s Allegorical Realism

45

Some Imaginary Vienna: Ronald Firbank’s Pastoral Realism

75

To Create a Life Which Is Not: Henry Green’s Pastoral-Organic Realism

95

There’s a Providence Not so Far Away from Us: Penelope Fitzgerald’s Parablistic Realism

123

Notes

187

Works Cited

191

Index

197


Ac k now l ed gm e n t s

I would like to thank the following for their attention, encouragement, and advice: Greg Adams, Christy Auston, Rob Cross, Rich Curtis, Walter Delaney, Nancy Durbin, Mattias Eng, Heath Gatlin, Annie Gilson, Craig Goodman, David Hadas, Paul Hart, Joanne Jasin, Maria Jasin, Max Kirsch, Naomi Lebowitz, John Leeds, Amy Letter, Glenn Malone, Jo Beth Mertens, Thien Nguyen, Ly Pham, Scarlett Rooney, Rose Shapiro, Rod Shene, Vicky Stanbury, and Emily Stockard. I also would like to thank my students in Florida and Vietnam. Chapter three was first published as the article: “James Purdy’s Allegories of Love,” from Texas Studies in Literature and Language Volume 50 Issue 1, 1–33. Copyright © 2008 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. Chapter four was first published as the article: “Ronald Firbank’s Radical Pastorals,” from Genre Volume XXXV, Number 1 (Spring 2002), 121–142; reprinted by permission of the University of Oklahoma.


Ch a p t e r O n e Tru t h a s a M at t e r of St y l e: Alt e r nat i v e Pa r adigms of Li t e r a ry R e a lism

This book began as an effort to understand why an author I especially like and admire, the early twentieth-century British novelist Ronald Firbank, has been underappreciated by literary criticism. I started my investigation with the assumption that explicit or implicit sexual prejudice might be to blame, as Firbank’s novels are openly gay. But the critical obtuseness I encountered indicated that there was a more fundamental prejudice at work in the misapprehension of Firbank’s fiction, as even recent critics approaching the author from an explicitly gay-critical viewpoint were prone to misreading and discounting his remarkably deft and subtly attitudinal novels. Then came a revelation. I was reading a recent translation of The Idylls of Theocritus, who is commonly pointed to as the first pastoral poet, while simultaneously preparing to teach one of Firbank’s novels, and I was struck by the remarkable affinity between the two texts. I began to consider in what manner our understanding of Firbank would be altered if we were to think of him as a pastoral writer like Theocritus, rather than as a conventional novelist who is too realistic to be a fantasy writer and too fantastic to be a realist. The results of my investigation into the theory, history, and workings of the pastoral led me to conclude that Firbank had been underappreciated, at least in part, because he has been miscategorized and so misread. To understand what his novels are doing, rather than to criticize them for what they are not, we would need to recover the assumptions, characteristics, and expectations of a neglected literary genre; and to understand why the novels had been so persistently misread as failures of literary realism, we would need to question the exclusion of traditional genres such as pastoral from our contemporary conceptions of realism, and reconsider the nature of the reality that realism purports to represent.

2 / alternative realisms

My illuminating experience reading Firbank as a pastoralist led me to consider whether other writers I liked and admired who had been criticized for being insufficiently or idiosyncratically realistic might be read profitably from the perspective of a traditional genre not normally considered compatible with realism. Subsequent research led to the writing of the four other body chapters in this book, in which I read various underappreciated and/or misunderstood modern and contemporary British and American writers as allegorical realists, pastoral realists, and parable realists. In each case, the effort to understand the writer from the point of view of a traditional genre proved revelatory, leading to fresh critical insights and correcting critical misapprehensions and misinterpretations. The broader issue underlying these revisionary genre-based readings concerns the relationship of literary realism to reality, and our assumptions concerning the nature of reality. Taken as a whole, these essays offer an alternative to mimesis, the dominant theory of literary realism. Mimesis assumes the reality of only that which is materially actual, whereas the alternative realisms considered in this work assume the reality of both actual and virtual, or potential, modes of being. The genres of allegory, pastoral, and parable are particularly apt at embodying and expressing such a dual-natured reality, as they traditionally conceive of the real as being both actual and ideal. Working in and through these genres, the authors discussed in this book have created virtual-potential realities that relate to conventional actuality in existentially complex and ethically challenging ways. We may take Firbank as a case in point. His ingenious generic solution to his predicament as a gay individual and artist in an intensely homophobic early twentieth-century world was to create an idealized pastoral reality in which the intolerant judgments of the actual world have no place, and in which their very absence functions as an implicit criticism of, and complaint regarding, that world. Firbank’s idealized pastoral world without judgment is fully real as potential, but it is only partially actuated in history. For the reader, Firbank’s alternative reality makes an ethical appeal in the form of an existential choice, for we can choose if we want to strive to make his all-tolerant world our own. Each of the authors I consider in this book make some such ethical appeal to the reader in the form of an existential choice. Reality as it is embodied and expressed in their versions of realism is not a finished product, as it is conceived by mimesis, but is an evolving and purposeful creation, in which the reader crucially participates. The alternative realisms these writers practice recognize implicitly that we live simultaneously in two real worlds, the world as given and the world as desired—a condition to which the five authors considered in this study

truth as a matter of style / 3

reacted with different creative strategies. Jane Bowles and James Purdy utilized allegory to create realisms that emphasize the real difference between the world as given and the world as desired. Firbank and Henry Green used pastoral to create realisms in which the given and desired, nature and artifice, are conjoined in one real-ideal world. While Penelope Fitzgerald created parablistic realisms that reveal the world as given to be but the evolving appearance of the world as desired. By insisting upon the reality of both the given actual world and the desired potential world, these writers envisioned alternative worlds for the future, thus fulfilling their most vital existential task as creative artists; for “The future is what artists are,” as Oscar Wilde told us (1100). When, on the contrary, art takes as its avowed ideal and purpose the mere faithful imitation of the world as it is found in actuality, it sinks into “true decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering” (Wilde 978), and from which we continue to suffer. It is a sad irony of literary history that courageous and prophetic writers like Wilde and Firbank should have come to be categorized as decadents, as more recent creative revolutionaries like Purdy and Bowles have been dismissed as mannered eccentrics. Societal prejudice undoubtedly has played a role in the marginalizing and discounting of such vital figures. Less obvious is the aesthetic and theoretical prejudice whereby the writers considered in this book continue to be judged according to the conventional standards and practice of mimetic realism, the assumptions of which their works innately question and oppose. These writers’ works require a new method of reading literary realism, one that is alert to the complex interactivity between actual and potential worlds they creatively envision and express. My task in this book has been to develop alternative genre-based paradigms of literary realism capable of recognizing, and flexible enough to analyze, the multidimensional and participatory realities of such creations. Alternative Realisms Different genres imply different worldviews—in effect, different realities— that are inherent in the genre itself. The mimetic realist genre implies and endorses a single-realm materialist worldview, which implicitly refutes the reality of the nonmaterial virtual-potential realm. The genres in which the authors in this study operate—allegory, pastoral, and parable—function, rather, as implicit critiques of the single-realm materialist paradigm, while endorsing a dual-realm actual-virtual worldview. The manner in which each of the genres expresses such a worldview is particular to its nature. Allegory emphasizes the overall dual-realm nature of reality by focusing on the divide between the actual and the virtual, becoming and being, the


necessary and the ideal. Pastoral envisions a potential world in which the realms on the two sides of the divide are fully connected and in which the human is wholly at home within a meaningful and value-laden natural and real world. And parable instructs the reader in the means and manner by which the connection between the realms is effected and a value-imbued world is created. In accordance with such a progression, this study begins by considering writers of allegory, proceeds to writers of pastoral, and concludes with a writer of parables. Allegorical Realism Allegory emphasizes and expresses what Plato famously referred to as the “real difference” between the necessary and the good (729). In a world in which virtues, values, and ideals are assumed to be ultimately real, allegory is a natural, and even inevitable, mode of creative expression and argumentation. Dante’s Commedia is generally acknowledged as the supreme example in the Western tradition of such an expression. Spenser’s later work The Fairy Queene is the prototypical English allegorical text, but its allegory is negatively affected by the materialist worldview that was already then becoming dominant. The fact that Spenser adopted as his overarching emblem and ideal the actually existent and all-too-human Queen of England, rather than allegorically transforming the incidental human figure into the eternal and transcendent queen of heaven, as does Dante with Beatrice, is indicative of the significant distance in worldview between the two texts. In more modern, materialist-dominant times, in which the reality of anything other than actual physical particulars has been denied, the most arresting allegories have been those in which virtual-potential meanings have taken bodily form as malicious matter and proceeded to terrorize the incredulous human actor, as in Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Carroll’s Alice novels, and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. When the mimetic materialist assumes that meaning may be extracted from the self-evident world of physical particulars as juice is extracted from an orange, he forgets or ignores the fact that meaning is purposefully created relative to viewpoint, and that, as there are an infinity of viewpoints in the universe, so there are an infinity of purposeful and meaningful real worlds. The leg of mutton arising from the serving dish to be introduced to Alice at the end of Through the Looking-Glass, the cockroach that Gregor Samsa wakes up as in The Metamorphosis, and the vulgar body double that Dr. Jekyll meets in the laboratory mirror each serve to remind the self-satisfied modern human actor of the neglected realities of alternative worldviews and of our own metaphysical complexity as body-soul beings. As mimetic materialism is a kind of forgetting of such metaphysical complexity, so allegory is a


mode and method for remembering. Modern allegory works to awaken in us an awareness that we are homesick for the reality of the virtual-potential ideal realm that we have forgotten and/or denied, and to reveal to us that we are sick of our alienated pretend home in the self-evident materialist world that we have mistaken as ultimately and exclusively real. Existential homesickness and alienated sick-of-home-ness are the major themes of the allegorical-realist fiction of the mid-century American writer Jane Bowles, who is the subject of chapter two. As with the work of the other writers in this study, Bowles’ fiction has been in general mishandled by reviewers and critics who have approached it as a conventional mimetic realist text and ignored or overlooked its alternative generic proclivities. When one is alert to the possibility, the allegorical nature and functioning of Bowles’ work, and particularly of her only completed novel Two Serious Ladies, is evident. In my chapter on Bowles, I read her allegorical-realist fiction through the lens of Simone Weil’s metaphysical-realist philosophy. Bowles was deeply influenced by Weil’s thought and life and felt a spiritual and temperamental affinity with the slightly older philosopher. Both writers diagnosed the modern malaise afflicting our age of anxiety as a form of homesickness for a world made meaningful by the real presence of the transcendent, and both understood their lives to be casualties in the service of their unorthodox visions, although only Weil self-consciously insisted upon martyrdom in response. The power and persuasiveness of Bowles’ allegorical-realist envisionings of existential homesickness have long drawn a devoted group of readers and writers to her work, but that work has yet to be given the comprehensive genre-based reading that it calls out for. Although Bowles’ work has many comic elements and characteristics, particularly in the mock-epic Two Serious Ladies, her work as a whole is tragic and her fictive project incomplete. Because of a debilitating stroke before the age of forty, she never was able to finish her hugely ambitious novel Out in the World, in which she sought to meld conventional literary realism with metaphysical allegory in an attempt to transform a backwardlooking mimetic-materialist convention into a prophetic allegorical-realist alternative. The life and career of the contemporary American writer James Purdy, who is the subject of chapter three, was more fortunate than that of Bowles, and his body of work from more than a half century of remarkable productivity has the characteristics and lineaments of a major creative statement. Rightly understood, Purdy’s work has the potential to meaningfully alter our contemporary conventional habits of reading and interpretation. As with the work of Bowles, those conventions have for the most part ill-served Purdy’s fundamentally allegorical work. Occasional critics and the author himself have rightly drawn attention to mythical elements in


Purdy’s work, but, as an overall creative paradigm, myth is inherently conservative and concentrative, whereas Purdy’s work is innately radical and de-territorializing. His fiction, which has a profound power to disturb, has far more in common with the disquieting allegories of Melville than with the mythical lamentations of Faulkner, to which it frequently has been compared. In my essay, I divide Purdy’s allegories into three subcategories of satire, tragedy, and pastoral, and I contend that the general argument of his work moves from a satirical indictment of a self-satisfied and altogether hypocritical and misguided modernity, to a sorrowful lament for the pathetic and tragic victims of such a world, to a pastoral envisioning of an alternative future characterized most forcefully and persuasively by an actuated ideal of brotherly love. Purdy’s later pastorals are both implicitly Christian-religious and explicitly homoerotic. By insisting upon the conjunction of the spiritual and the material in this manner, that work condemns a world destructive of the enlivening and enabling spirit of the law in the service of the judgmental and fundamentalist letter of the law. Throughout his work, Purdy used the figure of the terrorized and at times self-hating homosexual in our modern world as a focal point from which to critique that world. In his later pastorals, he envisioned a potential world in which such hatred is transformed by the redeeming miracle of love. Pastoral Realism The realm of the pastoral has a complex relation to the actual world. It serves as a safe-haven from, and implicit critique of, the prejudices and oppressions of that world, while offering an explicit and idealized alternative in which the love-led individual self is allowed to thrive in accordance with its natural predilections and inclinations. In his prophetic-utopian essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Wilde envisioned the future of man as a pastoral world-future in which human personality finally will emerge as its true self: It will be a marvelous thing—the true personality of man—when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be as wonderful as the personality of a child. (1084)


Wilde prophesied a return to Eden, but in true pastoral fashion he envisioned an improved Eden in which the human is made entirely at home with itself and its environment, and in which mind and body, art and nature, are brought into harmony. The pastoral ideal thus presents us with an existential and creative task that is embodied in the figure of Orpheus playing upon his shepherd’s pipes and bringing harmony into the relation between man and nature. The modern metaphysical philosopher Alfred North Whitehead alluded to this mythic emblem in his compelling description of the relation between art and nature, which is the defining pastoral preoccupation: It is the nature of art to be artificial. But it is its perfection to return to nature, remaining art. In short, art is the education of nature. Thus, in its broadest sense, art is civilization. For civilization is nothing other than the unremitting aim at the major perfections of harmony. (Adventures 271)

The pastoral realm is the imaginative location in which a nature that has been educated by art is envisioned; in this ultimately civilized realm, there is no longer a distinction between desire and need. That such a realm is an ideal makes it no less real; rather it implies that the nature of its reality is as a desired potential that awaits actuation. The existential and artistic task of the pastoral writer is to remind us of the living reality of that desired potential. Under the pastoral paradigm, societal judgment is replaced by individual taste, and morality is made a by-product of desire. The ultimate good in such a realm is the ultimately beautiful, and vice versa. In terms of morality, that which enables an individual’s instinctive desire is deemed good, whereas that which frustrates it is bad. Such an idealized pastoral world is possible only when desire itself has been cleansed of contorting passions that arise from negative emotions. Thus all desires that arise from hatred, such as jealousy, bitterness, anger, and remorse, are excluded from the pastoral realm, while all desires arising from love are allowed and enabled to thrive. As it equally endorses all love-born desires, the pastoral has long served as an imaginative safe-haven for homosexual passion. The pioneering work of Firbank, who is the subject of chapter four, has been neglected at least as much because of its innate, impassioned pastoralism as because of its overt, unashamed homosexuality. By placing his desiring figures within the pastoral realm, Firbank ensured that their desire would be given full play. But at the same time he made his work vulnerable to the approbation of reviewers and critics (continuing to this day) for whom the work fails the ultimate test of mimetic fiction—its world is not the world they know and recognize as their own, although it resembles it closely


enough so as to make them wish to judge it by conventional mimetic fiction standards. Had he been inclined to didactic argument outside of fiction, which he decidedly was not, Firbank might have responded to such misapprehending critics in the manner of Wilde, his idolized precursor, who argued that it is precisely the world as we know it that the prophetic imaginative artist seeks to undermine, overturn, and alter (1100). In several of his titles—Inclinations, Caprice, and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli—Firbank gave fair warning to the reader that his novels are prohibitive of the world’s delimiting judgments and that taste alone is allowed full sway within the pastoral boundaries of their exquisite, authordesigned and purchased, pastel-hued covers. In the pastoral realm, the environmental landscape is not merely a backdrop for the egocentric human actor, but is itself an actor in its own right within the ongoing existential drama of life. In his fiction, mid-twentiethcentury British novelist Henry Green, who is the subject of chapter five, figures reality as an ongoing creative process between humans as living organisms and their enabling and limiting environments. The pastoral effect of such a strategy is to highlight situational context and to de-emphasize individual human will. The human actor is not thereby rendered a passive or merely reactive victim oppressed by his un-chosen environment, as in the literature of the absurd. Rather, the human figure is integrated into a living environment in which every organism is striving to achieve its aesthetic aim of being successfully at home in its world, which is the ultimate pastoral ideal. In this chapter, I employ Whitehead’s revolutionary but neglected philosophy of organism in interpreting Green’s most ambitious and also most pastoral novel, Concluding. In offering a vision of the near future, this novel posits a new fictive paradigm for figuring the relation of the human to the other, a paradigm that emphasizes the ecological nature of the pastoral. In such a paradigm, the world that is most real is the world most able to integrate the real worlds of others within its own reality. The world of Nature, or of God, provides the ultimate ideal of such a comprehensive reality that is able to encompass an infinity of individual real worlds without contortion or oppression. Within the bounds of our knowledge, the human world is privileged in being self-consciously real, and with such privilege comes the responsibility of caring for the real worlds of less comprehensive organisms. In Concluding, Green presents an ethical-pastoral drama in which the hero is the individual most able to accept and care for the real worlds of others, both human and nonhuman, while the villain is the individual most bent upon forcing the worlds of others into the contorting narrow confines of the villain’s own defensive and entirely self-interested worldview. Green’s fictive argument is that the most comprehensive worldview ultimately will win out not because it is more individually powerful but because it is more


attractively and compellingly real—and therefore more like nature itself, the final arbiter of the beautiful, the necessary, and the good, between which, the natural pastoral ideal allows no distinction. Parablistic Realism As allegory emphasizes and expresses a dual-realm world emblematic of the real difference between the necessary and the good, and as the pastoral envisions a potential world in which the two realms of the necessary and the good are made wholly connected, so parable demonstrates the manner in which such connection is effected within our own lives and worlds. The self-consciously providential parablist insists that the text of the world’s actuality be read anew and aright, translating the limited existential into the eternally real. The model is of Christ instructing the disciples to read the spirit of the law through the letter of the law: You have heard of the letter of the law, but I am telling you of the spirit of the law, he repeatedly instructs them. In modern allegory, the virtual realm of meaning and value that has been denied reality by a materialist culture takes bodily form and menaces a spiritually passive and quiescent humankind. Parable, in turn, instructs humankind in the way to become spiritually active by transforming oneself from a passive sufferer of meaning to a creative participant in a value-imbued world. Unlike the allegorist, whose prophetic task is to reveal to all and sundry the forgotten and/or denied reality of an eternal realm of values and ideals, or the pastoralist, whose appealing and beneficent envisioning encompasses all living things, the parablist’s mission is to provide instruction only to the select minority who are spiritually and imaginatively alert, while diverting the multitude with an entertaining story. It is no surprise, then, that the novels of the final author considered in this study, and the subject of chapter six, Penelope Fitzgerald, have been treated by critics and reviewers for the most part as entertaining and diverting novels of manners, rather than as complexly coded moral lessons, as my essay interprets them. When approached as moral and spiritual parables, Fitzgerald’s remarkably subtle novels are revealed as demonstrations for reading experience aright, transforming what merely happens within the ongoing narrative of both text and world into what is providentially meant to be, while simultaneously transfiguring an alienating material world into our natural and spiritual home. Truth as a Matter of Style When the authors considered in this study began to work in and through nonmimetic genres in creating their fictive realities, they were in effect


acknowledging the inherent artifice of all knowing, affirming Wilde’s pronouncement that “truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style” (981). To consider truth a matter of style is to emphasize the limitations and potentialities inherent in any subjective viewpoint, denying both the viability and desirability of an ultimately disinterested objectivity. When, under the influence of the scientific revolution and the Cartesian subjectobject paradigm, such an objectivity came to seem a desirable and reachable ideal, intellectuals in the West began to think of the material realm of actual appearances as the whole of an ultimate and self-evident world. Within such a world, the idea of genre seemed to be artificial and unnecessary, and even a dangerous and willful distortion of things as they really are. Universal materialists were right to suspect genre, for genre, in its insistence upon the contextual, purposeful, and participatory nature of all knowing, exposes the existential flaws in the mimetic paradigm of selfevident reality. Genre tells us that we cannot evade or escape the existential limitations, ethical responsibilities, and creative possibilities inherent in our subjective viewpoints—but, through implication, it also alerts us to the authentic existence of other such viewpoints in our pluralistic universe. The reality of pluralism is the compelling metaphysical meaning of Wilde’s dictum that truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style, a reality that the authors considered in this study vigorously and vividly demonstrated in their alternative generic approaches. The value and function of the alternative paradigms of literary realism these authors created have not been generally recognized by literary criticism. Educated contemporary readers of literature typically are thoughtful and engaged when approaching texts that represent and express the multifarious sociopolitical actualities of our increasingly interrelated world. But all too often these same readers display critical ignorance and imaginative impatience when faced with alternative-genre literary-realist texts that question the self-evident mimetic-materialist nature of reality itself. The failure to understand and engage such texts has political implications, for an author who challenges an age’s prevailing generic paradigm is revealing and critiquing a world’s most basic assumptions regarding itself. There is no more revolutionary aesthetic act.

Ch a p t e r Two O n e i s Ne v e r Q u i t e To ta lly i n t h e Wor ld: Ja n e Bow l e s’ All e g or ic a l R e a l i sm

The work of the mid-twentieth-century American writer Jane Bowles has always had a loyal and appreciative (even a cultish and adoring) readership among writers and artists, but until recently her work has suffered from critical incomprehension and neglect. Contemporary reviewers of the work as it was originally published in the 1940s, and then collected and republished in the 1960s, tended to divide into highly partisan camps, one side arguing that the work was nonsensical, hysterical and discardable, and the other contending that it was writing of the first order and the rare product of genius (Skerl 6–12). Subsequent commentary was similarly skewed, but “tended toward a more consistent affirmation of [Bowles’] literary achievement” (Skerl 13). More recently, trends in gay and lesbian studies, as well as in poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonial criticisms, have opened the way for a more sustained and probing thematic critical appreciation of Bowles’ work. That work has for many years been available in the single-volume collection that Bowles’ husband, the writer and composer Paul Bowles, edited in the 1960s, and then embellished several years later with fragments from unfinished projects. In quantity it seems a meager output—one novel, one play, and a handful of stories, together with various fragments. But in terms of quality and complexity, the work is substantial, as has been attested to by the devotion shown it by several generations of writers, and more recently by the range of criticism that it has begun to attract. Reading that criticism, one is struck by the differing assumptions at work regarding the author’s intent and its results. The essentially allegorical nature of Bowles’ work is such that it is both particularly inviting of, and resistant to, conventional critical interpretation and analysis. Allegorical elements of Bowles’ writing have been remarked upon by critics and reviewers, but the work’s overall allegorical nature has not been recognized, a fact that may be attributed to our contemporary habits of reading, which are


characterized by the assumptions and limitations of mimetic realism, which is itself characterized by our collective assumptions regarding the materialistic nature of reality. Bowles’ work innately and persistently questions these assumptions by both its argument and manner, as I will explain with reference to the work of the twentieth-century French philosopher Simone Weil, a near contemporary with whom Bowles felt a particular affinity. Several perceptive reviews of the original Collected Works brought out in 1966 noted the allegorical nature of the writing, although without explicitly labeling it as such. In his insightful review article for the New York Times, John Ashbery remarked that, although Bowles had attracted a loyal following among established writers, such as Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, Her writing is unrelated to theirs, and in fact it stands alone in contemporary literature, though if one can imagine George Ade and Kafka collaborating on a modern version of Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” one will have a faint idea of the qualities of “Two Serious Ladies” [Bowles’ only completed novel].

Ashbery instinctively and rightly classed Bowles’ work with the covert and overt allegories of Franz Kafka and John Bunyan, as well as with the writing of the classic American humorist George Ade; for Bowles is a remarkable mimic and is spot-on regarding social mannerisms and pretensions. In his 1969 review of the Collected Works for Novel, James Kraft focused on the striking manner of Bowles’ unusual style, which he described as “prosaically flat and yet richly poetic. Everything has its meaning, first for what it is, then for what it is made into, and finally for what it could become” (274). Elsewhere he noted that all her terms hide one face, all her symbols conceal and reveal one image— the movement of life. For this reason none of the endings in her works is satisfactory; nothing neatly finishes. In fact much goes on just as before, or perhaps even worse. (276)

Although neither reviewer labels the writing allegory outright, they are alert to its allegorical allegiances, characteristics, and manner, such as the flat and insistently literalistic surface that points consistently elsewhere—to other meanings and conclusions. (It is worth remembering that the root word of allegory, allos, means “other.”) More recent criticism that is characteristically focused on psychological and sociopolitical contexts and meanings, and which tends to be less interested in and also uncertain of genre designations and traditions, has been consequently less perceptive in recognizing the allegorical nature and import of Bowles’ writing. But critics continue to be drawn—if unwillingly

one is never quite totally in the world / 13

or, perhaps, unwittingly—to the possibility of such a designation, as when Edouard Roditi remarked that Bowles’ “major characters are women whose behavior is often odd, if not hysterical or clearly psychopathic,” who are surrounded by lesser figures that “are likewise rather odd or lead a somewhat marginal or purposeless life with what is generally known as ‘a one-track mind’ ” (188). From the viewpoint of conventional mimetic realism, the eccentric divagations of quest figures embarked upon a pilgrimage that is in essence otherworldly is seemingly irrational (Bowles’ major works are centered upon such figures, as I will explain), as is the obsessive behavior of the “one-track mind” caricatured figures that surround and often accompany them. However, as Angus Fletcher noted in his seminal study of the allegorical mode, “Caricature . . . is allegorical in essence, since it strives for the simplification of single predominant traits. The traits thus isolated are the iconographic ‘meanings’ of each agent” (34). Such figures abound throughout Bowles’ writing, providing much of its humor and instruction. In her 1998 feminist reading of Bowles, Lidia Curti is conscious of an allegorical element in the work, but she does not consider it to be a fitting, or even possible, genre designation: The main tension in [Bowles’] narration comes from the split between the “here and now” and the need to escape everyday life: that is, in the sudden alternating between abstract allegorical situations and minute, realistic details. That is one of the reasons why her works escape strict genre definitions, whether it is autobiography or travel writing. (147)

There is a misleading and, unfortunately, all too typical assumption in this comment regarding the separable “abstract” fictionalizing of allegory, which is, on the contrary, always ultra-materialistic on the literal-textual level, characterized by “minute, realistic details.” Indeed, successful allegory is innately opposed to disembodied abstraction. Curti’s presumption regarding potential nonfiction designations for Bowles’ writing also is curiously off-base, as the fictive nature of the work is nothing if not conspicuous and central to its operation. Curti concludes perceptively, however, that the “difficulties” in Bowles’ work “reside precisely in the unresolved tension between the necessity and yet the impossibility of leaving everyday life” (147). Such, indeed, is the difficulty of allegory in general, and—from an allegorical or spiritual perspective—of life itself. The allegorical perspective is innate in the spiritual perspective considered from the point of view of “otherworldly” ideals and values. Much of the work of Bowles’ contemporary, Simone Weil, is focused upon the relationship between the world “above” and the world “here below.” Weil, who has been fittingly described as a mystical Christian Platonist,


contended that the modern world in general has made the tragic mistake of confusing that which is actual and apparent in the world here below with that which is ultimately real: “Appearance has the completeness of reality, but only as appearance. As anything other than appearance it is error” (Gravity 51). Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, Weil contended, explicitly warns us against the error of judging the things of this world on their own terms, which is to mistake the necessary for the good: Illusions about the things of this world do not concern their existence but their value. The image of the cave refers to values. We only possess shadowy imitations of good. It is also in relation to the good that we are chained down like captives. We accept false values which appear to us and when we think we are acting we are in reality motionless, for we are still confused in the same system of values. (Gravity 51)

Weil’s thinking concerning the existential function of art focused on the work of art’s ability to recognize that we are imprisoned in a system of false values and to reveal an alternative reality that exposes the limitations of our sense perceptions: It is with regard to the assessment of values that our sense-perceptions are unreal, since things are unreal for us as values. But to attribute a false value to an object also takes reality from the perception of the object, because it submerges it in imagination. (Gravity 52)

The highest art, Weil contended, is the product not of imagination but of revelation; by connecting existence to ultimate values, it reveals the reality of the universe (Waiting 107). Katherine Brueck provides a useful gloss of Weil’s thinking concerning the revelatory potential of art, which is all too rarely realized: Art tends by nature to offer as ultimate what is only apparent reality. Only an artistic genius of the highest order can impart a vision of the really real . . . Weil allows for a certain—rare—kind of art which is not detrimental to the auditor or reader in a spiritual sense because it reveals rather than conceals ultimate reality. (36–37)

In terms of fiction, such art requires the double vision of allegory and the devotion of the artist as spiritual seeker. Weil implicitly accounted for the necessity of allegory when she stated that the “reality outside the world” (Anthology 202) may only be indirectly expressed, “But unless it is expressed, it has no existence” (Anthology 204). In his insightful 1989 study of Weil’s philosophy, Peter Winch gave a perceptive analysis of Weil’s practical meaning when she spoke of the


supernatural “reality outside the world” that may help us to understand the functioning of Bowles’ allegorical fiction. Winch contends that Weil’s “supernatural” is not referring to a reality that is antinatural, but that it is a way of regarding and understanding reality that is in opposition of and spiritually superior to our own habitual and limited “natural” viewpoint. He cites these two examples from Weil’s notebooks: If a man describes to me at the same time two opposite sides of a mountain, I know that his position is somewhat higher than the summit. It is impossible to understand and love at the same time both the victors and the vanquished as the Illiad does, except from the place, outside the world, where God’s Wisdom dwells. (199)

God’s wisdom ultimately is beyond our comprehension, Weil contended, but it is not beyond our detection and respect. Indeed that which fundamentally separates human beings from the rest of nature as we know it is our instinct for the supernatural realm of otherworldly values. “At the center of the human heart,” Weil wrote, “is the longing for an absolute good, which is always there and is never appeased by any object in the world”; this longing connects us to the “reality outside the world” (Anthology 202, 204). Few individuals are willing or able to admit of the longing, and fewer still are able to turn their attention and love to the reality that is the object of this desire. Those who are able to do so have an obligation to express their respect for a reality that cannot itself be expressed directly in this world, and in so doing, alert others to its existence. There is no doubt that Jane Bowles felt such an obligation, which she dramatized throughout her fiction. In each of the three works we consider here, which form the major arc of her creative life and thought, there is a central figure on a quest to discover the ultimate reality of the world. The novel Two Serious Ladies is the comic and mock-epic version of this quest; the novella “Camp Cataract” tells the story as a tragedy; and the later, unfinished “Going to Massachusetts” serves as a commentary on both, as well as expresses most explicitly the tremendous sense of obligation that Bowles felt toward her fiction as revelation. “Going to Massachusetts” (Collected Works) is the only one of the three to have been likely directly affected by Bowles’ reading of Weil. Both of the finished works were published before she first read Weil, concerning which Bowles’ fine biographer, Millicent Dillon, relates: When Jane discovered Simone Weil’s writing in the early fifties, she recognized an affinity between Weil’s words and what she herself felt. She would carry Waiting for God around with her and read it every night before she went to sleep. If anyone commented on it, she would deflect it from seriousness by saying, “But I have a sensual side too.” (Life and Work 120)


Bowles’ clever deflection also serves to relate what any sustained reading of Weil reveals, which is the spiritually ecstatic nature of Weil’s remarkably clear and persuasive insights. In several ways, the life and work of Bowles and Weil form mirror images of one another. Weil was socially awkward and personally difficult; she seemed never to have felt at ease or at home in her body, so much so that her death by starvation and overwork appears almost a natural and inevitable ending. Weil’s prolific writing, on the other hand, is remarkably confident and elegant, engaging and brilliant. Jane Bowles, by contrast, was socially magnetic, witty and sophisticated, and rich in both emotion and devotion. She lived a complicated and dramatic social and romantic life, drawing upon seemingly inexhaustible physical and emotional reserves (until a collapse and long illness that led to a pathetically drawn-out death). But the act of writing for Bowles was always, as Truman Capote remarked, “difficult to the point of true pain” (Jane Bowles, Collected Works, viii), and she complained to her husband Paul that it was impossible for her to contribute successfully to intellectual discussions because she had “no opinions really. This is not just neurotic. It is very true” (Letters 146). Despite such telling differences, what Bowles and Weil had in common was an absolute and uncompromising sense of vocation and mission in regard to both their life and work that bordered on the messianic. Simone Weil’s older brother, Andre, who was famous in his own right as a mathematical prodigy and genius, remarked of his sister that “her vocation or role or business in life from a very early age was to be a saint, and from an early age she trained herself quite consciously for that purpose” (qtd. In White 11). Near to her death at the age of thirty-four, Weil wrote to her parents regarding her felt mission in life, and its seeming failure: You think that I have something to give. That is the wrong way to put it. But I too have a sort of growing inner certainty that there is within me a deposit of pure gold which must be handed on. Only I become more and more convinced, by experience and by observing my contemporaries, that there is no one to receive it. (Anthology 30)

In another letter to her parents at the same period she compares herself to the Fool in Lear who, because he is a fool, is unregarded in his pronouncements, although he alone says what is true, “And not satirically or humorously true, but simply the truth. Pure unadulterated truth—luminous, profound, and essential” (Anthology 2). Jane Bowles felt similarly stymied in her effort to communicate her inner vision, but she characteristically blamed this failure more on herself than on others. She remarked to Paul that she felt herself to be cut off from other talented writers of her generation by the moral seriousness with


which she approached the creative task, which exacerbated what she felt to be a fated temperamental isolation that continually turned her creative self against her experiential self in an interrogatory and accusatory manner: When you are capable only of a serious and ponderous approach to writing as I am—I should say solemn perhaps—it is almost more than one can bear to be continuously doubting one’s sincerity which is tantamount to doubting one’s product. As I move along into this writing I think the part I mind the most is this doubt about my entire experience. (Letters 33–34)

The seriousness and solemnity with which Bowles’ approached her writing carried over into her approach to living her life, particularly when it came to making decisions. Her compulsion to agonize over choices and decisions was legendary. “She had no capability of relinquishing choice,” Dillon observes. “She had to choose and to accept the consequences of her choice” (Life and Work 44). Jane’s husband Paul said, “Jane’s worry was that a choice had to be made and every choice was a moral judgment and monumental, even fatal. And that was so even if the choice was between string beans and peas” (qtd. in Dillon, Life and Work 119). Perhaps Tennessee Williams interpreted this character trait most insightfully: “All the indecision was a true and dreadful concern that she might suggest a wrong turn in a world that she had correctly surmised to be so inclined to turn wrongly” (qtd. in Dillon, Life and Work 179). Both Bowles and Weil were particularly focused in both their life and work on the practical and existential choices related to the task of finding or creating a true home in the world, and they both agonized over decisions regarding uprooting and relocation. Weil felt that she had made a terrible personal and ethical mistake by allowing her parents to persuade her to flee the German occupation of France and to relocate in New York. Once there, she used all of her considerable persuasive powers to convince the wartime authorities to allow her to return to Europe, where, in a besieged England, she produced her most substantial single work, The Need for Roots, while slowly working and starving herself to death, away from her protective parents’ watchful eyes. Jane Bowles, whose sense of vocation and mission was much more amorphous than Weil’s, and perhaps therefore harder to fulfill, came to believe late in her life that her decision to follow her husband Paul to North Africa and to settle there permanently had greatly contributed to what she felt to be her failure as a writer. Living in Tangier in the mid-1950s while suffering from the severe writer’s block from which she never entirely recovered, Bowles wrote in her journal, “Death is better than a long murder, the murder of a life,” adding, “I love Tangier, but like a dying person” (qtd. in Dillon, Life and Work 238–239).


Going to Massachusetts This recalls a passage in the unfinished manuscript Bowles was working on around that time, “Going to Massachusetts,” which concerns her last, and in some ways most complex and intriguing, woman quest-figure, Bozoe Flanner, who lives with her lover, Janet Murphy, above an automotive repair shop that Janet owns and operates: Because she felt severed from her destiny [Bozoe] clung hard to her daily life with Janet Murphy with a grip that she could not break—though it was her own—and it was not her own will that in the end had finally broken it. Bozoe Flanner loved Janet Murphy and her life in the apartment over the garage with the desperate longing a dying person feels—for grass and the smell of salt water and flowers—But a dying person remembers the smell of the sea and the smell of the flowers when he was not dying—and Bozoe Flanner could not. (qtd. in Dillon, Life and Work 298–299)

In the published portions of the unfinished manuscript concerning Bozoe Flanner’s story that are included in The Collected Works and in Dillon’s biography (A Little Original Sin) (which quotes extensively from unpublished manuscripts), Bozoe is struggling to follow her destiny, which necessitates that she leave the apartment she shares with Janet Murphy and go to Massachusetts. The exact purpose of this journey is meaningfully unstated, but it clearly concerns Bozoe’s quest to make destiny her choice, rather than to be ruled in a passive and reactive manner by necessity. She announces to Janet Murphy regarding her trip to Massachusetts: “I was born to make this voyage—I have never spent a moment of the day or night free from this knowledge.” “Your life is your own Bozoe.” “My life is not my own . . . Have you missed the whole point of my life?” (qtd. in Dillon, Life and Work 298)

In true allegorical fashion, this journey is no ordinary trip, but is freighted with multiple potential meanings. The blatant mundanity of Bozoe’s “journey”—going to Massachusetts—announces its allegorical nature. We are prompted to ask, “What does this trip mean? What does it signify?” Bozoe’s blanket statement that her life is not her own likewise alerts us to her allegorical status as a quest figure. She is in the hands of forces she does not control, and her actions are meaningful in ways that she does not entirely comprehend. All allegory innately examines and expresses the manner in which necessity, acting through force, transforms the living individual into an object of fate. In her most notable foray into literary criticism, Weil wrote


in her essay on The Illiad that “the true hero, the true subject the centre of The Illiad is force . . . it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing” (Anthology 163). There is only one possible counter to necessity, Weil writes, and that is, paradoxically, to choose to obey it, which is both our opportunity and our duty as “thinking creature(s)” (Roots 289). But it is not enough to obey necessity passively, which is to turn oneself into a purely reactive object. Rather “we have to desire that everything that has happened should have happened and nothing else” (Waiting 145). In making her clichéd response to Bozoe’s dilemma—“Your life is your own Bozoe”—Janet Murphy classes herself with the caricatured onetrack-mind minor figures that serve as foils for the existential questers throughout Bowles’ fiction. Janet’s one-track-mind obsession is with her automotive garage business, which represents metonymically the mechanized modern world, which is itself allegorically representative of an allpervading and all-encompassing materialism that has severed modern man from the spiritual realm. In one of the notebooks from which much of her published work is taken, Weil wrote that we have to: Try to expose in precise terms the trap which has made man the slave of his own inventions. How has unconsciousness infiltrated itself into methodical thought and action? . . . We have to rediscover the original pact between the spirit and the world in this very civilization of which we form a part. But it is a task which is beyond our power on account of the shortness of life and the impossibility of collaboration and of succession. This is no reason for not undertaking it. The situation of all of us is comparable to that of Socrates when he was awaiting death in his prison and began to learn to play the lyre . . . At any rate we shall have lived. (Gravity 153)

In the portion of Bozoe Flanner’s story that Paul included in the Collected Works, Bozoe actually does manage to leave the apartment above the garage and take a bus that is bound for Massachusetts, but she disembarks before arriving at her destination, in large part because of a felt ethical obligation to Janet Murphy, as she explains to her in a letter from a roadside inn: It came to me on the bus that it was not time for me to leave you, and that although going to Massachusetts required more courage and strength than I seemed able to muster, I was at the same time being very selfish in going. Selfish because I was thinking in terms of my salvation and not yours. I’m glad I thought of this. It is why I stopped crying and got off the bus . . . I don’t feel that I can allow you to sink into the mire of contentment and happy ambitious enterprise . . . Naturally darling I love you, and I’m afraid that if you don’t start suffering soon God will take some terrible vengeance. It is better for you to offer yourself. Don’t accept social or financial security as your final aim. Or fame in the garage. Fame is unworthy of you; that is, the desire for it. (456–457)


Bozoe is attempting to convince Janet Murphy of her existential dire straits as she lives a life focused solely on materialistic and egoistic pursuits. Self-expressive and haranguing monologue-speeches such as this— some in letters, some in person—are staples of Bowles’ fiction and are one of its most evident allegorical characteristics. Allegorical figures typically present themselves didactically, through both word and deed, and implicitly and explicitly argue for their viewpoint, which—for quest figures— ultimately concerns the pursuit and fulfillment of their destiny. Anything that hinders or thwarts them in that quest is an enemy that must be overcome, including their own nature when it is all too human. Bozoe recognizes that she is a self-thwarted quester, as she explains to Janet Murphy: There is a Bozoe Flanner who goes forth to seek for happiness and glory with a wild uncontrollable greed, with the appetite of a gorilla—an appetite which is even more embarrassing since she has declared to herself the urgency of cultivating her spirit—however much like a bad flower it might be. To seek its shape is what she has declared she would do—declared not only to herself but to her friends. I have always been seeking my spirit, Janet, and yet the more urgently I seek it, the more like a gorilla I seem to behave—an earthbound gross woman, content to gratify base instincts. The fact that I seldom do seem to gratify those instincts doesn’t matter at all . . . (qtd. in Dillon, Life and Work 127)

Bozoe Flanner is caught in the existential (and metaphorical) dilemma whereby her great spiritual longing is represented by and through a bodily appetite. Alone of fictive modes, allegory allows for full expression of this dilemma. Janet Murphy clearly identifies Bozoe’s bodily appetite with her spiritual struggle, as she explains to a friend: Bozoe was thin when I first knew her . . . And she didn’t show any signs that she was going to sit night and day making up problems and worrying about God and asking me questions . . . I’ve kept to the routine. Late Sunday breakfast with popovers and home-made jam. She eats maybe six of them, but with the same solemn expression on her face. (Collected Works 453–454)

Bozoe’s solemn Sunday morning binge may be thought of as a travesty of transubstantiation, as her torpid life of spiritual unease in the apartment above the garage is a travesty of the heroic quest. Bowles’ central quester figures are not in search of happiness as an end in itself—the absence of which, as a motivating factor, may help to explain the confusion and dissatisfaction of readers who are trained by mimetic realism to assume such an object of fulfillment. What these quest figures are seeking is not physical and/or emotional gratification, but spiritual insight and knowledge, and this is what they all, in various manners, receive, with


differing results. (Bozoe’s quest, like the novel in which her story appears, is sadly unfinished.) In his profound study of Baroque German allegory, Walter Benjamin noted that allegory is “devoted” to its characters’ “instruction” rather than to their “happiness” (170), and he remarks that, in this effort, allegory’s much criticized “awkward heavy-handedness . . . is essential” (187). Two Serious Ladies The heavy-handed argument of Bowles’ early and only completed novel, Two Serious Ladies, is obvious from an allegorical perspective, but the general failure of critics to recognize the novel’s allegorical nature and manner has led to a great deal of confusion and misreading. Of course, the novel need not be read allegorically to be enjoyed and, to a certain degree, understood. As Fletcher remarks of allegory in general, “It often has a literal surface that makes good enough sense all by itself,” but it also exhibits and embodies “a structure that lends itself to a secondary reading, or rather, one that becomes stronger when given a secondary meaning as well as a primary meaning” (7). The setting of Two Serious Ladies is a case in point. Although the novel’s first few pages specifically designate the setting as New York City (presumably around the time of the novel’s creation in the early 1940s), the particular neighborhood locations of the various houses and apartments in which scenes are set are unspecified, and following the introduction, the city itself is repeatedly referred to simply and somewhat ominously as “the city.” Similarly a nearby rural island that one of the major characters moves to is referred to merely as “the island,” although it is almost certainly modeled after Staten Island. It is crucial in reading allegories that are more or less naturalistic in manner not to fill in such missing details. Rather the detail’s absence or lack of specific emphasis must be read as being itself meaningful. Being undesignated, the island may be any or every island, which is allegorically significant, as are the repeated references to the generic “city.” Readers who presume Two Serious Ladies to be an eccentric example of mimetic realism—as has been the general critical presumption—are prone to provide the missing naturalistic pieces of the text, and in doing so, to cover over evidence of its allegorical inclinations; for naturalistic details work differently in an allegorical text than in a work of mimetic realism. In an allegory, as Fletcher remarked, “naturalistic detail is ‘cosmic’ universalizing, not accidental as it would be in straight journalism” (199). In a like manner, Benjamin observed that, in allegory, “nature serves the purpose of expressing its meaning, it is the emblematic representation of its sense, and as an allegorical representation it remains irremediably different from its historical realization” (170). In regard to this vital distinction in allegory between historical realization and emblematic representation, Fletcher


remarks that allegory fundamentally “does not accept the world of experience and the senses; it thrives on their overthrow, replacing them with ideas.” In this way, “Allegory departs from mimesis and myth” (323). I suspect that readers who are familiar with Bowles’ obviously idiosyncratic but nevertheless realist-seeming fiction may take exception to my designation of it as allegory, perhaps fearing that to label it as such is to consign it to the waste-heap of outmoded literary genres. That is certainly not my intention. Rather, I am trying to account for the alternative generic nature of the manner in which her fiction operates. Some have attributed Bowles’ idiosyncratic manner to her creative genius, as we have noted, while others have pointed to her seeming ineptness at her craft. More recently the critical tendency has been to interpret Bowles’ seemingly eccentric manner from the point of view of her eccentric social and psychological position as an American-Jewish bisexual alcoholic expatriate, with vaguely Marxist and decidedly feminist views and a somewhat unstable psyche. While many of these thematic and biographical arguments are well-taken, I believe that all such readings of Bowles can be supported and enhanced by a more thorough generic understanding of her writing that will allow us to make sense of a seeming eccentricity that is—from the point of view of allegory—anything but eccentricity. In exploring this issue, it would behoove us to keep in mind Fletcher’s admonition that “allegory is never present as a pure modality” (312). As Northrop Frye observed, all literature, being based upon metaphor, is allegorical in essence, but generically speaking: Within the boundaries of literature we find a kind of sliding scale, ranging from the most explicitly allegorical, consistent with being literature at all, at one extreme, to the most elusive, anti-explicit and anti-allegorical at the other. (Anatomy 91)

Modern fiction has tended to be anti-allegorical in its mimetic and/or mythic prejudices and predilections. Of course there are notable exceptions, such as much of the work of Thomas Pynchon and Samuel Beckett. And there are the explicitly allegorical genres of science fiction and fantasy literature. Writers such as Bowles, however, who are working in the border area where explicit allegory shades into mimetic realism are apt to be misread by being approached from the assumptions informing our reading of mimetic realism rather than of allegory. (One would imagine that a Renaissance reader would approach such a text from the other direction.) As a teenager, Bowles’ favorite writer was Céline (Dillon, Life and Work 26–27), which may give us an indication of where she was coming from genre-wise when, while still in her early twenties, she wrote Two Serious Ladies—which, although not as overtly allegorical as Voyage au Bout de la Nuit, may well be more pervasively so.


Allegorically speaking, Two Serious Ladies is a meditation and discourse on the difference between the spiritually active and spiritually reactive manners of living one’s life—alternatives that it expresses through the life trajectories of two friends who are upper-class society women in New York City. In the first of the novel’s three section, one of the serious ladies, Christina Goering, who had “wanted to be a religious leader” (25) when she was young, is preparing to abandon her gracious family home and inherited wealth in order to pursue her “own little idea of salvation” (28), which involves living a life in which she separates herself from the habitual and comfortable and ventures forth into unknown territory in order to confront her many fears. Her foil as an epic quester in the novel is her friend Mrs. Copperfield, “whose sole object in life was to be happy, although people who had observed her behavior over a period of years would have been surprised to discover that this was all” (40). Both of Bowles’ serious ladies are obsessed with finding and/or making a home in the world in which they may be truly at home and not merely superficially or temporarily so—a home that is in true relation to the world. Allegorically speaking, they are looking for a reality that is (truly) real (and really true). Weil writes in The Need for Roots that our modern malaise of uprootedness and homelessness is symptomatic of a world in which we have lost all sense of the relation between truth and reality: Truth is the radiant manifestation of reality. Truth is not the object of love but reality. To desire truth is to desire direct contact with a piece of reality. To desire contact with a piece of reality is to love. (253)

It is in the search for such contact that Miss Goering makes plans to sell her luxurious family home (in which she habitually exhibits neurotic signs of boredom and anxiety) in order to force herself into an unfamiliar world— very much against the wishes of her recently acquired living companion, Miss Gamelon, whose opposition is one of Miss Goering’s first temptations and challenges in her quest for contact with reality: “Well,” said Miss Gamelon turning around, “you know so little about what you’re doing that it’s a real crime against society that you have property in your hands. Property should be in the hands of people who like it.” “I think,” said Miss Goering, “that I like it more than most people. It gives me a comfortable feeling of safety, as I have explained to you at least a dozen times. However, in order to work out my own little idea of salvation, I really believe that it is necessary for me to live in some more tawdry place and particularly in some place where I was not born.” (28)

The first section of the three-part novel concludes with Miss Goering’s imminent departure and relocation to a small and primitive rented house on an island, of which Miss Goering says: “I remember having visited this


island as a child and always having disliked it because one can smell the glue factories from the mainland even when walking through the woods or across the fields” (33). Another one of Miss Goering’s caricatured tagalong companions, an obese middle-aged man named Arnold (who would seem allegorically to represent gluttony and sloth among other things), suggests: “I am sure that this island has certain advantages too, which you know about, but perhaps you prefer to surprise us with them rather than disappoint us.” “I know of none at the moment,” said Miss Goering. (33)

The mortification of the senses prompted by uncomfortable and uncongenial surroundings certainly makes little or no sense from the point of view of a search for happiness, or at least the avoidance of unhappiness, which had been the acknowledged object of Miss Goering’s way of life in her comfortable family home (25), but it may be very useful as a tool for one’s spiritual growth and enlightenment, as she wisely intuits. In making her move to the island, Miss Goering is unconsciously heeding the admonition of Simone Weil, who wrote in a notebook: It is necessary to uproot oneself. It is necessary not to be “myself,” still less to be “ourselves.” We must be rooted in the absence of place. (Gravity 39)

Weil later qualified herself by noting that “by uprooting oneself one seeks greater reality,” but to be uprooted by others “results in unreality” (Gravity 39). This is the fate that awaits Bowles’ second serious lady, Mrs. Copperfield, who is introduced in the novel’s first section, at which she meets her friend Miss Goering at a cocktail party: “Oh! Christina Goering . . . I’m going away!” “Do you mean,” said Miss Goering, “that you are leaving this party?” “No, I am going on a trip. Wait until I tell you about it. It’s terrible.” (15)

It turns out that Mrs. Copperfield is going on a trip to Panama with her husband, who—in sharp contrast with his wife—is an eager and committed traveler. Mrs. Copperfield says to Miss Goering: “I don’t think I can bear it . . . Really, Miss Goering, it frightens me so much to go.” “I would go anyway,” said Miss Goering. (18)

The second section of the novel is set in Panama and focuses on the story of Mrs. Copperfield. Miss Goering’s story is continued in the novel’s


third section, which draws to a conclusion with a meeting between her and Mrs. Copperfield, in which the two serious ladies’ life choices and trajectories are compared and evaluated. The novel’s ending is punctuated by a final interior soliloquy by Miss Goering following Mrs. Copperfield’s departure. In the structure of the novel, Mrs. Copperfield’s story clearly is subordinate to that of Miss Goering, which implies that Miss Goering is the novel’s chief protagonist or hero, while Mrs. Copperfield is her foil. Criticism of the novel, however, has tended to focus more on the figure of Mrs. Copperfield, and this tendency is particularly pronounced in more recent criticism. I suspect that criticism has gravitated toward Mrs. Copperfield because of the fact that she is presented in a much more conventionally realistic manner than is Miss Goering. Mrs. Copperfield is presented to us from both the outside and the inside; the author has filled in her complex and fascinating psychological portrait in accordance with the norms of psychological realism. Miss Goering, by contrast, and true to her allegorical nature as questing hero, is presented mainly through her words and actions, and through the effects upon, and reactions these produce from, others. From a naturalistic fiction perspective, Miss Goering is neither a deep nor a well-rounded character. In fact, her unexplained eccentricity makes her appear almost antirealistic, the unacknowledged and perhaps unconscious prejudice against which, in a work of perceived mimetic realism, is doubtless at the heart of much of the critics’ historical dissatisfaction with the novel. Nevertheless Miss Goering is clearly designated as the novel’s major protagonist and hero, and the evident contrast between her presentation, character, and behavior and that of Mrs. Copperfield serves as an implicit critique of conventional realism’s assumptions and practices, and of the conventional world such realism represents. Despite their striking differences, Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield are psychologically fundamentally alike in that they both have a tendency to be dominated by their fears. But unlike Miss Goering, Mrs. Copperfield does not launch out to face her fears. Rather she gradually allows herself to become dominated by a need for comfort and consolation, which she finds in Panama in the form of a soft-hearted but hard-nosed female prostitute named, tellingly, Pacifica, and in an ever-increasing dependence on alcohol. When she first arrives in Panama with her husband, Mrs. Copperfield attempts to quell her fears in a reverie that is perhaps the most often quoted passage from the novel, and which is key to its major themes: “Now,” she said to herself, “when people believed in God they carried Him from one place to another. They carried Him through the jungles and across the Arctic Circle. God watched over everybody and all men were brothers. Now there is nothing to carry with you from one place to another, and as

26 / alternative realisms far as I’m concerned, these people might as well be kangaroos; yet somehow there must be someone here who will remind me of something . . . I must try to find a nest in this outlandish place.” (40)

Unlike Bozoe Flanner’s foil, Janet Murphy, Mrs. Copperfield as Miss Goering’s foil recognizes that she is in existential dire straits, but she assumes this to be the universal condition of mankind in the modern world. Unlike Miss Goering, Mrs. Copperfield has no individual plan for her own salvation, and her spiritual unawareness is attested to by the fact that she doesn’t believe that Miss Goering has one either. She said to Miss Goering at the party in section one: “I have the utmost respect for you. I heard my husband say that you had a religious nature one day, and we almost had a very bad fight. Of course he is crazy to say that. You are gloriously unpredictable and you are afraid of no one but yourself. I hate religion in other people.” (15)

Mrs. Copperfield conceives of Miss Goering as a romantic rebel, but not as a spiritual quester, as Miss Goering perceives of herself. Mrs. Copperfield is consciously disbelieving of the ultimate values hailing from what Weil called the reality outside the world, but she nevertheless has a longing for that ultimate good, as Weil contended that all humans have deep inside their hearts. But she is limited by her disbelief to finding that good wholly and solely within the realm of the world here below, where it does not exist, except by implication. When she meets Pacifica and accompanies her to the colorful and disreputable hotel in which the younger woman lives and conducts her prostitution business, Mrs. Copperfield says to the hotel owner, a broadly caricatured British ex-pat widow: “I have a feeling I’m going to nestle right here in this hotel. How would you like that?” “You do what you want to with your own life. That’s my motto. For how long would you want to stay?” “Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. Copperfield. “Do you think I’d have fun here?” “On, no end of fun,” said the proprietess. “Dancing, drinking . . . all the things that are pleasant in this world. You don’t need much money, you know. The men come off the ship with their pockets bulging. I tell you this place is God’s own town, or maybe the Devil’s.” She laughed heartily. (56)

Of course we don’t expect a vision of hell in a work of seeming mimetic realism, but when we read such passages allegorically, we can discern that that is exactly what we are being given.


It is important to realize that the morality implicit and explicit in Two Serious Ladies is not the social-psychological morality we are accustomed to considering in the conventional realist novel, but is an ethical morality, typical of allegory, that is focused upon one’s spiritual motives and being. The contrast between the two systems of morality is telling and is crucial to understanding the novel’s ethical-allegorical argument, which runs counter to conventional realism’s system of social and psychological values. Indeed, from the point of view of contemporary social-psychological morality, Mrs. Copperfield clearly would seem to be the more admirable of the two serious ladies, as she courageously extricates herself from an obviously difficult and conventionally constraining marriage in order to follow her seemingly natural inclinations, committing herself to a socially ostracizing but personally fulfilling lesbian relationship. On the other hand, Miss Goering seems incapable of romantic commitment and of sexualemotional fulfillment, as she takes up and drops a series of would-be and actual lovers and partners, both male and female, while pursuing her “little idea of salvation” with a seeming single-minded selfishness, oblivious to the emotional carnage she is leaving in her wake. But a close reading that is alert to the allegorical argument of the novel reveals that, on the level of psychological motive and spiritual achievement, Mrs. Copperfield’s story traces the trajectory of a descent into a world in which she is no longer capable of individual choice and free will, as she gives herself over entirely to her fears, longings, and obsessions, appropriating the psychologically centered Pacifica in the process as a useful emotional tool. (She tells Miss Goering, “Although I love Pacifica very much, I think it is obvious that I am more important” (198).) Miss Goering, on the other hand, refuses to allow either her many fears or the frustrated and life-defeated characters that are attracted to her to impede her spiritual progress. On the contrary, she abandons these characters precisely at the point at which she is in danger of becoming an enabling component of their spiritually barren and quiescent lives, which is also the point at which she is able to conquer the fear in her psyche that each relationship has represented. For her efforts, Miss Goering is roundly and repeatedly scolded and abused, as when she announces her imminent departure from a clinging male lover, Andy, who would seem to be the allegorical emblem of self-pity, as he mawkishly (and plagiaristically) compares his heart to a young plant released by the warmth of Miss Goering’s love from a covering of ice: “You don’t dare tear up the plant now that you have melted the ice.” “Oh, Andy,” said Miss Goering, “you make me sound so dreadful! I am merely working out something for myself.”

28 / alternative realisms “You have no right to,” said Andy. “You’re not alone in the world. You’ve involved yourself with me!”

When he perceives that his arguments will not change Miss Goering’s decision to depart, Andy resorts to self-righteous abuse, displaying his allegiance to the moral status quo: “You’re crazy,” said Andy. “You’re crazy and monstrous—really. Monstrous. You are committing a monstrous act.” “Well,” said Miss Goering, “perhaps my maneuvers do seem a little strange, but I have thought for a long time now that often, so very often, heroes who believe themselves to be monsters because they are far removed from other men turn around much later and see really monstrous acts being committed in the name of something mediocre.” “Lunatic!” Andy yelled at her . . . “You’re not even a Christian.” (188–189)

Andy’s accusation calls to mind Kierkegaard’s piquant observation that the modern individual who is undergoing a “spiritual trial” will likely be regarded by others as “a very extraordinary sinner,” since “in our time people have no idea at all of spiritual trial” (174). Miss Goering’s progress in her spiritual journey is figured by a move away from childhood into adulthood, beginning with her departure from her safe but suffocating family home and concluding with a scene in which she has achieved a hard-won uprootedness, having been abandoned by her final lover—a gangster whom she feared—on the steps of a restaurant: Miss Goering began to descend the stone steps. The long staircase seemed short to her, like a dream that is remembered long after it has been dreamed. She stood on the street and waited to be overcome with joy and relief. But soon she was aware of a new sadness within herself. Hope, she felt, had discarded a childish form forever. (201)

The image of a no longer childish “Hope” recalls a scene earlier in the novel in which Miss Goering admonishes a young man who is committed to the Marxist social struggle: “You cannot confront men who are still fighting in the dark and all the dragons, with a new future.” “Well, well,” said Dick, “what should I do then?” “Just remember,” said Miss Goering, “that a revolution won is an adult who must kill his childhood once and for all.” “I’ll remember,” said Dick, sneering a bit at Miss Goering. (143)

Parallel to Miss Goering’s figured movement from childhood to adulthood is Mrs. Copperfield’s regression to infancy, a descent that begins with


Mrs. Copperfield’s impulsive departure from an excursion trip with her husband and her hurried return to the “nest” she has found with Pacifica in her seedy hotel. Upon her return to the hotel, Mrs. Copperfield finds to her dismay that Pacifica is neither surprised nor overjoyed to see her. An ensuing quarrel between the hotel’s proprietess and Pacifica sends everyone off to their respective quarters, in which Mrs. Copperfield turns for comfort to a bottle of gin she has ordered to be brought up to her room. As she waits for the gin, she begins to mimic the behavior of a child: “She lay down on the bed, put her knees up, and held onto her ankles with her hands”: “Be gay . . . by gay . . . be gay,” she sang, rocking back and forth on the bed. There was a knock on the door and a man in a striped sweater entered the room without waiting for an answer to his knock. “You ask for a bottle of gin?” he said. “I certainly did—hooray!” . . . “Mrs. Copperfield paid him and he left.” “Now,” she said, jumping off the bed, “now for a little spot of gin to chase my troubles away. There just isn’t any other way that’s as good. At a certain point gin takes everything off your hands and you flop around like a little baby. Tonight I want to be a little baby.” She took a hookerful, and shortly after that another. The third one she drank more slowly. (71)

Early the next morning, after a night of carousing, Mrs. Copperfield accompanies Pacifica to swim in the ocean, at which point she has an experience that precipitates her regression to an infantile state of need and dependency and prompts her decision to abandon her marriage. It is fitting that the precipitating event takes place in the ocean saltwater that suggests amniotic fluid, in which Pacifica (in a telling irony) is attempting to teach Mrs. Copperfield how to swim: Pacifica swam a little further inland. Suddenly she stood up and placed both her hands firmly in the small of Mrs. Copperfield’s back. Mrs. Copperfield felt happy and sick at once. She turned her face and in so doing she brushed Pacifica’s heavy stomach with her cheek. She held on hard to Pacifica’s thigh with the strength of years of sorrow and frustration in her hand. “Don’t leave me,” she called out. (97)

This event is particularly meaningful for Mrs. Copperfield, because it calls to mind a recurrent dream she has in which, to escape a chasing dog, she runs to the top of a hill where she finds a female mannequin “about eight feet high” and dressed in black velvet, with a body “fashioned out of flesh, but without life.” She wraps the mannequin’s arms around her in the fashion of a leading dance partner, at which point they both topple forward and roll down the hill “locked in each other’s arms,” the mannequin’s body acting as a buffer between herself and the “broken bottles and little stones” over which they roll, a fact that gives her “particular satisfaction” (97–98).


In the novel’s last scene, in which Mrs. Copperfield and Miss Goering meet in a restaurant in New York, Pacifica—who has accompanied Mrs. Copperfield back to America and who is dressed significantly, like Mrs. Copperfield, “expensively and in black” (196)—says to Miss Goering: “What a baby your friend is! I can’t leave her for ten minutes because it almost breaks her heart, and she is such a kind and generous woman, with such a beautiful apartment and such beautiful clothes. What can I do with her? She is like a little baby.” (200)

Earlier at the restaurant, while Pacifica was away meeting a boyfriend who wants to marry her, Mrs. Copperfield had explained to Miss Goering why she cannot let this happen: “I can’t live without her, not for a minute, I’d go completely to pieces.” “But you have gone to pieces, or do I misjudge you dreadfully?” “True enough,” said Mrs. Copperfield, bringing her fist down on the table and looking very mean. “I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I’ve wanted to do for years. I know I am as guilty as I can be, but I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring, which, if you remember correctly, I never had before.” Mrs. Copperfield was getting drunk and looking more disagreeable. “I remember,” said Miss Goering, “ that you used to be somewhat shy, but I dare say very courageous. It would take a good deal of courage to live with a man like Mr. Copperfield, whom I gather you are no longer living with. I’ve admired you very much indeed. I am not sure that I do now.” “That makes no difference to me,” said Mrs. Copperfield. “I feel that you have changed anyway and lost your charm. You seem to be stodgy now and less comforting.” (197–198)

Mrs. Copperfield’s need and demand of comfort and her utter dependence on Pacifica is not only unattractive, but is frightening to behold when one realizes the merciless emotional compulsion that is driving her to enslave financially and emotionally another human being. In an essay in which Weil wrote of the potential sacramental nature of human love as “true friendship,” in which “a person consents to view from a certain distance, and without coming any nearer, the very being who is necessary to him as food” (Waiting 135), she noted the distressing tendency of human love to lead, rather, to the enslavement of one or both parties to necessity: “When the attachment of one human being to another is made up of need and nothing else it is a fearful thing. Few things in this world can reach such a degree of ugliness and horror. There is something horrible whenever a human being seeks what is good and only finds necessity” (Waiting 133). Such is the danger, Weil contends, whenever an individual limits the search for the good to the things of this world, which


can only represent the good by implication. Our pure love for one another and our love for the beauty of the world Weil considered to be legitimate and authentic forms of the “implicit” love of God. On the other hand, she contended that different kinds of “vice” such as “the use of drugs, in the literal or metaphorical sense of the word,” are frustrated attempts to perceive God in the beauty of the world: “All such things constitute the search for a state where the beauty of the world will be tangible. The mistake lies precisely in the search for a special state” (Waiting 111). What is necessary, according to Weil, is that we come to understand that the material things of this world exist in a “reflective” allegorical relation to the ultimate values of another realm altogether: “A reflective property does exist in matter which is like a mirror misted over by our breath. We have only to wipe the mirror to read in it symbols inscribed in matter through eternity” (Anthology 249–250). In one of her notebooks, Weil listed “superposed readings” that imply an allegorical understanding of existence: “To read necessity behind sensation, to read order behind necessity, to read God behind order” (Gravity 136). The distance between the things of this world and the world above is “the distance between the necessary and the good” (Gravity 105). When, in our spiritual journey, we arrive at the point at which we can perceive the good in the necessary, we do not thereby annihilate necessity (it is precisely that which cannot be annihilated), but we come to understand that its importance resides entirely in its relation to what it is not. This is the point at which Miss Goering anticipates arriving as her quest concludes at the end of Two Serious Ladies, in which she makes a final internal soliloquy, the allegorical nature of which has misled and befuddled even some of the novel’s most imaginative and perceptive commentators: “Certainly I am nearer to becoming a saint,” reflected Miss Goering, “but is it possible that a part of me hidden from my sight is piling sin upon sin as fast as Mrs. Copperfield?” This latter possibility Miss Goering thought to be of considerable interest but of no great importance. (201)

Ashbery remarked that this conclusion is proof of Miss Goering’s grave “delusion” regarding her own behavior (Ashbery). Carolyn Allen similarly concluded that the ending proves Miss Goering to be “thwarted by her own lack of insight” (26), while Dillon remarked that the ending seems to discount “ending itself” (“Jane Bowles: Experiment as Character” 142). On the contrary, the ending serves as the direct and emphatic summation of the novel’s allegorical argument, for it illustrates that Miss Goering has come to understand the real distance between the necessary and the good. A useful gloss on Miss Goering’s final soliloquy may be found in one of Weil’s touchstone texts, the Bhagavad-Gita. In the pertinent passage,


the god Krishna tells the hero Arjuna that, from the point of view of an achieved enlightenment, one’s sins are no longer important, because karma is no longer operative: When you have reached enlightenment, ignorance will delude you no longer . . . And though you were the foulest of sinners, This knowledge alone would carry you Like a raft over all your sin. The blazing fire turns woods to ashes: The fire of knowledge turns all karmas to ashes. (54–55)

The novel’s conclusion affirms Miss Goering’s hard-won knowledge that, at the end of her quest, the mistakes she has made along the way will be transformed from all too human error into the mysterious will of God. In the meantime, it is the purity of her motive alone that she must attend to, for it leads to enlightenment, from the point of view of which everything else is “of no great importance.” Historically, as Benjamin observed, allegory “established itself most permanently where transitoriness and eternity confronted each other most closely” (224), as in periods of great social, religious, and psychological instability and distress. Such is our present age, according to Weil, who argued that one difficulty of living in a time of existential crisis is that we are so preoccupied with the symptoms of distress that we are unable to perceive their underlying causes: Distress is a culture broth for false problems. It creates obsessions. The way to appease them is not to provide what they insist upon, but to bring about the disappearance of the distress. If a man is thirsty because of a wound in the stomach, drink is not what he requires, but to have his wound cured. (Roots 61)

Weil contended that our failure to recognize the reality of eternal values has resulted in an existential homelessness, of which our modern uprootedness is symptomatic. Our disease is the loss of contact with the good, or God, that is the reality outside of this world; its symptom is our cultural, historical and psychological uprootedness here below, which has become a more or less permanent form of distress. Understood allegorically, uprootedness is a cry for help, but it is one that those who are suffering from being uprooted too often are unable to recognize and interpret. Their distress has blunted their spiritual perception and their reason to the point at which they may not even believe that they are suffering, which is to be in the most desperate of spiritual


straits. Weil makes an analogy between the soul in chronic distress and a hungry child: The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. A child does not stop crying if we suggest to it that perhaps there is no bread. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of the hunger is not a belief, but a certainty. (Waiting 138)

In an age in which chronic spiritual hunger has resulted in a collective disbelief in the hunger’s existence, the allegorist inevitably arises, like a prophet from the wilderness, to dramatize the spiritual plight. The tragedy for the allegorist is that the conditions that created her, and that guarantee her authenticity, are the very conditions that make it likely that she will be ignored and/or misunderstood. The religious allegorist speaks for a world that the world denies. She speaks of the (for her) unbearable absence of the good, or of God. In an anguished outburst in a notebook, Bowles wrote, “Between the pain of being oneself and separated from one’s maker there is one’s maker—One is never quite totally in the world. It is intolerable to be in this world without a myth” (qtd. in Dillon, Life and Work 299). Allegory is significantly not myth; rather it is expressive of the absence of a mythical-religious belief system that is all-pervading and all-encompassing. In its insistence on the distance between the mutable material realm and its eternal meaning, allegory expresses a persistent lament that the necessary should be distant from the good. Weil wrote, “The distance between the necessary and the good is the distance between the creature and the creator” (Gravity 105). Allegory forges a link between the creature and the creator, between the necessary and the good, in a time of distress, which is all the more isolating in that so few are willing or able to recognize the desperate straits they are in. Those melancholy few may find in allegory a certain solace. As Benjamin remarked: “The only pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and it is a powerful one, is allegory” (185). Camp Cataract When one is alert to the possibility of its existence, the allegorical manner and argument of the mock epic Two Serious Ladies is fairly obvious. Such is not the case with the novella or long short story “Camp Cataract,” which Bowles completed following her move to join Paul in North Africa, several years after the publication of the novel; it was the last major work of fiction


she was to complete. As with Two Serious Ladies, an allegorical approach to “Camp Cataract” leads us to a fuller understanding of the work’s means and manner, but the quest theme is more deeply embedded in the story than in the novel. In general, “Camp Cataract” works more in the manner of an extended parable and of a classical tragedy than of a mock epic, and its tone is much more ominous and subdued. We can nevertheless draw crucial parallels between Two Serious Ladies and “Camp Cataract.” Indeed, Kraft noted in his perceptive review of The Collected Works that Bowles writes the same story every time . . . as if she must have a Christina [Goering]-Frieda [Copperfield] contrast in order to construct her sense of reality. Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield are the two warring sides of the female personality. Sometimes Mrs. Bowles makes the two women sisters, as in the story, “Camp Cataract.” (274)

Fletcher noted the tendency of allegory to evolve into symmetrical double plots such as those Bowles employs in her major fiction (184). The double plot endorses the allegorical distinction between the mutable material world and the world of eternal values, and it implicitly embodies and actively expresses the effort to perceive the latter in the former. The double plots of the stories of the two sisters, Sadie and Harriet, run parallel in the first half of “Camp Cataract” and then intersect in the second half, with tragic consequences. Both sisters are suffering from the existential distress of uprootedness masquerading as a life of modern comfort and ease, but they respond to this distress in markedly different manners. The older sister, Harriet, who suffers from periods of nervous collapse that may be in part hereditary, has been advised by a doctor to take summer vacations at a nature camp, where she can relax away from the stress of the crowded city apartment she shares with two sisters and one sister’s husband. Her long-term goal is to move out of the apartment altogether, but she feels that, in order to avoid the appearance of “a bohemian dash for freedom” (362), she must make this move in stages, as she explains to one of the camp employees, a husky woman named Beryl, who has become attached to her: My plan is extremely complicated and from my point of view rather brilliant. First I will come here for several years . . . I don’t know yet exactly how many, but long enough to imitate roots of childhood . . . long enough so that I myself will feel: “Camp Cataract is a habit, Camp Cataract is life. Camp Cataract is not escape.” Escape is unladylike, habit isn’t. As I remove myself gradually from within my family circle and establish myself more and more solidly into Camp Cataract, then at some later date I can start making my sallies into the outside world almost unnoticed. (363)


Harriet acknowledges that her fear of acting in an unladylike manner may seem indicative of a shallow nature, to which she willingly admits, explaining to Beryl: “You may wonder how a woman can be shallow and know it at the same time, but then, this is precisely the tragedy of any person, if he allows himself to be griped” (363). Harriet’s shallowness would seem to protect her from the fate awaiting her unmarried younger sister, Sadie, who is the story’s main protagonist and its covert quest figure. Sadie’s tragic fate is directly related to the fact that she is not consciously aware that she is on a spiritual quest. She is subconsciously aware of an inclination in her nature to venture into “the world” to make contact with a greater reality, but she fights conscious recognition of this inclination by projecting it onto her sister Harriet, whom she correctly suspects of desiring to escape their home together in the city apartment. In the final of a series of letters she writes to Harriet before visiting her at Camp Cataract (which is named for the waterfall that is its major natural feature), Sadie expresses her worry in an overtly guileless manner that seems subconsciously designed to make Harriet feel guilty for wanting to leave home: I wonder of course how you feel about the apartment once you are by the waterfall. Also, I want to put this to you. Knowing that you have an apartment and a loving family must make Camp Cataract quite a different place than it would be if it were all the home and loving you had. There must be wretches like that up there. If you see them be sure to give them loving because they are the lost souls of the earth. I fear nomads. I am afraid of them and afraid for them too. (360)

What Sadie fears most is a nomadic instinct in her own nature that gives the lie to her idol-worship of the sacred family home, which she refers to in her letter to Harriet as “the material proof that our spirits are so wedded that we have but one blessed roof over out heads” (361). After reading the letter aloud to Beryl, Harriet remarks that she despises Sadie’s adoration of the family home, which she takes to be genuine proof of Sadie’s “community spirit” (362). In actuality, as the narrator informs us: Harriet . . . was totally unaware of Sadie’s true nature and had fallen into the trap her sister had instinctively prepared for her, because beyond wearing an apron and simulating the airs of other housewives, Sadie did not possess a community spirit at all . . . Sadie certainly yearned to live in the grown-up world that her parents had established for them when they were children, but in spite of the fact that she had wanted to live in that world with Harriet, and because of Harriet, she did not understand it properly. (368)


As this quotation would seem to support, it is possible to read “Camp Cataract” as being the tortured story of a sister’s incestuous lesbian love for her sibling, but this would be a misreading similar to the interpretation of Two Serious Ladies as the story of Mrs. Copperfield’s successful acknowledgment of her lesbian identity. Rather Sadie’s obsessive attachment to her older sister, like Mrs. Copperfield’s relationship with Pacifica, is symptomatic of a need for comfort and of an unwillingness to embark upon the quest to make contact with an ultimate reality. That the potential romantic nature of Sadie’s obsession is taboo merely classifies it more readily with other “sins” that are in reality effects of a more fundamental cause. As Weil writes, “It is not the pursuit of pleasure and the aversion for efforts which causes sin, but fear of God” (Gravity 58). From the point of view of such an understanding, any behavior that is used to divert one from the quest for God is sinful, no matter what its moral designation in society’s terms. That Sadie’s attachment to Harriet is a distraction from her quest and an obstacle to self-knowledge is made clear in the story’s second half. Against her sister’s wishes and doctor’s orders, Sadie decides to pay a visit to Harriet at Camp Cataract. She has been enticed by the power of her own words in the letter to Harriet to press her case in person: “Would you like it so much by the waterfall if you didn’t know the apartment was here?” she whispered into the dark, and she was thrilled again by the beauty of her own words. “How much more I’ll be able to say when I’m sitting right next to her,” she murmured almost with reverence. “. . . And then we’ll come back here,” she added simply, not in the least startled to discover that the idea of returning with Harriet had been at the root of her plan all along. (375)

Sadie habitually follows her instincts without questioning her motives or considering the likely outcome of her behavior. Rather, “She was passionately concerned only with successfully dissimulating what she really felt” (371). Her defensive effort at dissimulation is so consuming that she is unable to recognize the split between her pretend emotions and her true feelings: “By a self-imposed taboo, awareness of this split was denied her, and she had never reflected upon it” (371). The dislocating journey to Camp Cataract widens the split in Sadie’s psyche, until there comes a final break between her pretend reality in the outer world of others and her interiorized fears and longings. Sadie anticipates the breakdown, but her long years of reactive dissimulation have effectively paralyzed her active will and made her powerless to forestall her doom: She felt that something dreadful might happen, but whatever it was, this disaster was as remotely connected with her as a possible train wreck.

one is never quite totally in the world / 37 “I hope nothing bad happens . . . ” she thought, but she didn’t have much hope in her. (384)

Although Harriet misunderstands Sadie’s motives for wanting her to stay in the family apartment with her, she rightly perceives that Sadie’s trip to Camp Cataract is an assault on her independence, and she utilizes an overnight canoe trip planned for two days hence to minimize her contact with her sister to a brief greeting the evening of her surprise arrival and a planned luncheon the next day. It is while she is waiting to meet Harriet for the luncheon that Sadie’s breakdown occurs. The scene is deftly handled and the first-time reader is likely to be unaware that Sadie has moved from apparent actuality into a delusional realm. Harriet had stipulated that they meet for luncheon by a souvenir booth that stands on a small knoll overlooking the waterfall and the bridge that leads across the chasm to a path behind the cataract. As she waits for Harriet, Sadie becomes increasingly desperate: She feared that if her sister did not arrive shortly some terrible catastrophe would befall them before she had a chance to speak. In truth all desire to convince her sister that she should leave Camp Cataract and return to the apartment had miraculously shriveled away, and with the desire, the words to express it had vanished too. This did not in any way alter her intention of accomplishing her mission; on the contrary, it seemed to her all the more desperately important now that she was almost certain, in her inmost heart, that her trip was already a failure. (391–392)

When Harriet is late arriving, the trip’s failure seems affirmed and Sadie moves into a delusional realm. In the overtly allegorical realm of Sadie’s delusion, the material world through which she has spent her life drifting, as in a dream, becomes overwhelmingly and unbearably meaningful and real. In the delusional world, Sadie’s fears and desires are given material being. The climax of the delusion and of the story arrives when Sadie frantically leads an imagined Harriet into the woods near the waterfall, in which she plans to attempt to convince her sister to return to the family apartment. They stop at a small clearing in the woods, and Harriet says to Sadie, of whom she is being uncharacteristically solicitous: “First I’ll sit down and then you must tell me what’s wrong.” She stepped over to a felled tree whose length blocked the clearing. Its torn roots were shockingly exposed, whereas the upper trunk and branches lay hidden in the surrounding grove. Harriet sat down. Sadie was about to sit next to her when she noticed a dense swarm of flies near the roots. Automatically she stepped toward them. “Why are they here?” she asked herself—then immediately she spotted the cause, an open can of beans some careless person

38 / alternative realisms had deposited in a small hollow at the base of the trunk. She turned away in disgust. (395)

The fallen, uprooted tree with its head “hidden in the surrounding grove” is an image of Sadie’s psychic predicament that she has struggled so hard to hide from herself and others, but which—with her breakdown—has become shockingly exposed. The uprootedness not only exposes her predicament, but also is emblematic of that predicament—of Sadie’s innate feeling of being unconnected to, and un-at-home in, her world. In response to her felt disconnectedness, Sadie has attached herself to her older sister, Harriet, who had shown “great tenderness” toward her during “their childhood together” (393), but who has now begun a self-protective effort to extricate herself from Sadie’s increasingly tight emotional grip. The emotional pressure that Sadie has brought to bear on the already psychically fragile Harriet is attested to by Harriet’s response when she hears from Beryl of Sadie’s surprise visit to Camp Cataract: Harriet buried her head in her lap and burst into tears . . . “I can’t any more,” Harriet sobbed in anguished tones. “I can’t . . . I’m old . . . I’m much too old.” Here she collapsed and sobbed so pitifully that Beryl, wringing her hands in grief, sprang to her side, for she was a most tenderhearted person toward those whom she loved. (382)

It is Beryl’s tenderhearted relationship to Harriet that is symbolized by the open can of beans in the hollow at the base of the tree’s exposed roots, for when Sadie first met Beryl upon arrival at the camp’s lodge, Beryl was spooning “some beans out of a can she was holding” (378). Beryl’s obvious attachment to Harriet, and Harriet’s obvious collusion with and dependence upon Beryl, seems to have affirmed Sadie’s sense of dislocation and abandonment, further prompting her breakdown—exposing her uprootedness. Harriet is no doubt justified in her fear of Sadie’s neediness, for the severity of Sadie’s alienation in the world makes her a danger to those close to her, as well as to herself. As Weil wrote in The Need For Roots: Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed, for it is a self-propagating one. For people who are really uprooted there remain only two possible sorts of behavior: either to fall into a spiritual lethargy resembling death . . . or to hurl themselves into some form of activity necessarily designed to uproot, often by the most violent methods, those who are not yet uprooted, or only partly so. (47)

Harriet’s psychic instability as well as her admitted shallowness and the effort she plans to “imitate roots” through her stays at Camp Cataract


would seem to indicate that she is already partially uprooted. But her guarded and hostile attitude toward Sadie when they first meet at the camp lodge indicates that she will not willingly give up her effort to find a new connection to reality in and through her periods away from home. In any case, Sadie’s journey away from the family apartment to Camp Cataract seems to have broken the spell of sacredness that she had cast over the apartment in relation to herself, the effect being that she has been set mentally and spiritually adrift, exhibiting signs of the spiritual lethargy that will lead to her delusion and death. The pilgrimage that Sadie unknowingly embarks upon when she sets off for Camp Cataract is more than a death march, however. It is also an awakening out of the self-induced slumber of her life of anxious dissimulation in the family apartment. The shock of awakening into an awareness of her state of uprootedness ultimately proves too much for Sadie’s fragile mental being, but that she is able to achieve such a state of awareness is nevertheless a spiritual triumph. In her delusional scene with Harriet in the pine grove, the awakening is figured as a painful birth: She could no longer postpone telling Harriet why she had come . . . She opened her mouth to speak and doubled over, clutching at her stomach as though an animal were devouring her. Sweat beaded her forehead and she planted her feet wide apart on the ground as if this animal would be born. Though her vision was barred with pain, she saw Harriet’s tear-filled eyes searching hers. “Let’s not go back to the apartment,” Sadie said, hearing her own words as they issued not from her mouth but from a pit in the ground. “Let’s not go back there . . . let’s you and me go out in the world . . . just the two of us.” A second before covering her face to hide her shame Sadie glimpsed Harriet’s eyes, impossibly close to her own, their pupils pointed with a hatred such as she had never seen before. It seemed to Sadie that it was taking an eternity for her sister to leave. “Go away . . . go away . . . or I’ll suffocate.” She was moaning the words over and over again, her face buried deep in her hands . . . At last she heard Harriet’s footsteps on the dry branches . . . Sadie knew then that this agony she was suffering was itself the dreaded voyage into the world—the very voyage that she had always feared Harriet would make. That she herself was making it instead of Harriet did not affect her certainty that this was it. (396)

By virtue of her revelation, Sadie reverses roles with Harriet, whose suffocating shallowness is representative of a pretend reality the spiritually awakened Sadie can no longer endure. Sadie’s awakening into a knowledge of her fundamental uprootedness is extended to include an awareness of the uprootedness of the country


and culture in general when she returns to the souvenir stand (in actuality she had never left it, and the scene in the forest had been a delusion) where she looks closely for the first time at the souvenir seller, who is an Irish-American man dressed up to resemble an American Indian war chief, complete with headdress and face paint: “She stared intently at his Irish blue eyes, so oddly light in his brick-colored face. What was it? She was tormented by the sight of an incongruity she couldn’t name” (398). Sadie’s delusional response is to try to hide the Indian chief along with herself behind the waterfall, where his face loses “any trace of the incongruity that had shocked her so before. The foaming waters were beautiful to see. Sadie stepped forward, holding her hand out to the Indian” (399).1 There seems little doubt that we are meant to understand that Sadie kills herself, although the Indian who accompanied her behind the waterfall was a figment of her delusion. It is in fact the souvenir seller dressed as an Indian who tells Harriet and Beryl that a “middle-aged woman” had “lit out for the bridge” that crosses the cataract “about fifteen minutes ago,” just past the time that Harriet, who was twenty minutes late arriving, had been scheduled to meet her sister (400–401). Harriet sends Beryl to look behind the waterfall for Sadie, and the story ends with Beryl’s return alone: When Beryl returned her face was dead white; she stared at Harriet in silence, and even when Harriet finally grabbed hold of her shoulders and shook her hard, she would not say anything. (401)

Sadie’s suicide presents a challenge for interpretation that is similar in some ways to the challenge presented by the premature end of Bowles’ writing life and by Weil’s self-starvation. Each of these “unnatural” endings is in the form of a repudiation rather than a culmination. That Sadie’s breakdown is referred to as “the dreaded voyage into the world” implies that the world she had been living in was not the real world, and her refusal to return to it is a denial of its ultimate reality. Fictively, the world of her delusion is more intensely real than the world that precedes and follows it. In Sadie’s delusional world, every image stands out and her own words and behavior become overtly meaningful. One might say that such a world— like the experience of the mystic—is too real for normal human comfort, and yet, from the point of view of such a world, the mere world of habitual appearances may seem too fake—too unreal—to endure. Sadie’s plunge into the cataract is emblematic of an unwillingness to return to living a life on the surface level of appearances. Such an understanding emphasizes the allegorical nature of the story, the manner in which it is an extended parable regarding the life of the undying spirit in relation to mutable everyday


reality, and a cautionary tale regarding the paralysis of the questing spirit in the materialistic modern world. By story’s end, we discover that the story’s title, “Camp Cataract,” is emblematic of its theme and method. The story may seem to be about the deception of appearances, but it is actually about being blind to their allegorical reality. In that sense, the story is also implicitly a critique of the modern conventions of fictive realism. The typical modern realistic fiction creates meaning by the use of symbolically weighted passages surrounded by the scenery of the conventionally real. We may consider Paul Bowles’ use of the titular symbol in The Sheltering Sky as an example of such use. The title symbol operates ironically in the novel for the most part, questioning self-deluding assumptions regarding the goodness of life and the purpose of fate. Although the symbol may seem to speak of radical doubt, its use by the author is actually quite didactically certain, and this certainty is reinforced by the conventional-realism manner in which the title enters the narrative as a theme and symbol during a conversation between the novel’s central figures, Port and Kit, a couple obviously modeled upon Paul and Jane: “You know,” said Port . . . “the sky here’s very strange. I have often the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind.” Kit shuddered slightly as she said: “From what’s behind?” “Yes.” “But what is behind?” Her voice was very small. “Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.” (101)

Ominous in its ironic symbolism, the sheltering sky as an operative idea is nevertheless embedded wholly and securely within the boundaries of the conventional realism of the text. The sky as symbol questions the ultimate meaning and purpose of reality, but it does not question that reality as a given. The real world in this novel, and throughout Paul Bowles’ fiction, is oppressive in its obvious and seemingly ultimate appearance. When one seeks to get “beyond” that appearance to some deeper or virtual or ideal meaning, we find that there is no there there. The sheltering sky is all too encompassing; we are imprisoned in a meaningless world. The bitter implication of such fiction is that life is neither a divine comedy nor an ennobling tragedy, but an all too actual farce. By contrast, the existential angst implicit in “Camp Cataract,” and in Jane Bowles’ fiction in general, seems to stem from the author’s worried certainty that reality, rightly perceived and understood, is innately, intensely, and even overwhelmingly meaningful. That is the terrifying discovery that Sadie makes through her “delusion,” the meaningful reality of which is so unbearable that she rushes behind the cataract—“literally” taking shelter in


blindness—and then plunges into its “depths.” The words are put in quotation marks, of course, to indicate that they are not to be trusted, which is the import of this story as regards habitual reality and its representations in conventional fictive realism. Indeed, no small part of the felt tragedy of this story is its absolute certainty of its own failure, and of the more general failure of fiction, and even of language itself, to support Sadie in her “dreaded voyage into the world.” Sadie’s abrupt withdrawal from the world of appearances is mirrored by the story’s own refusal of conclusion with the patheticprophetic gesture of a character “who would not say anything.” The realm that Sadie enters when she plunges into the cataract escapes encapsulation in representation. It can only be pointed to. Sadie’s suicidal leap, Weil’s self-starvation, and Bowles’ prematurely ended writing life are all indirect expressions, gesturing toward the unrepresentable. To understand Sadie’s suicide, we have to understand its blanket repudiation of the habitually real. To understand Weil’s self-starvation, we have to “read” it as a martyrdom. Much has been written on and debated concerning Weil’s starvation-suicide. Several commentators have noted that her death was the product not only of a lack of sustenance, but of months of emotional strain and intellectual overwork. The writing that Weil produced in the final year of her life in England, including what is probably her masterwork, The Need for Roots, is profoundly lucid and poignant. The last half of that work, in particular, as Weil summarizes the history of Western civilization and explains the various ways in which we have gone astray in our thinking and our being, is a remarkable culmination in the form of a repudiation. If we think of Weil in terms of her vocation as a saint, then we must read her life, as well as her work, allegorically, as Naomi Lebowitz reads the life and work of Kierkegaard in her illuminating Kierkegaard: A Life of Allegory, in which she observed that “Kierkegaard’s actual death on the street seems accidental; he represents himself as one who ‘historically died of a mortal disease, but poetically died of longing for eternity’ ” (6). The crucial allegorical distinction between historical and poetical interpretations of Weil’s death can allow us to see the triumph in the tragedy of her life’s abrupt conclusion. The drawn-out conclusion of Bowles’ writing life is both sad and exasperating. Following the completion of “Camp Cataract” and of one final story, “A Stick of Green Candy,” and before a stroke at the remarkably young age of thirty-nine put an effective end to her creative output, Bowles had struggled to overcome a writing block that became more and more disabling. (Read in the context of Bowles’ writing life, Bozoe Flanner’s struggles with and final failure to go to Massachusetts appear all the more poignant.) Paul Bowles felt that his wife’s writing block resulted from her


effort to handle too much material at once and her unwillingness to rely upon the inherited conventions of fiction: I used to talk to Jane by the hour about writing. I’d say to her, “Just for the first page, say she comes in, sees this, does that.” And she’d say, “No, no, no. That’s your way, not my way. I’ve got to do it my way and my way is more difficult than yours.” “But why do you want it to be so difficult?” I’d ask her. “What don’t you make it simpler? Leave the difficulties for the later scenes?” No, it all had to be difficult from the first paragraph in order for her to have respect for it. “Well, it would be easier the other way,” I’d say, and she’d say, “I know,” but she wasn’t interested in making it easier . . . She couldn’t use the hammer and the nails that were there. She had to manufacture her own hammer and all the nails. She was a combination of enormous egotism and deep modesty at the same time. (qtd. in Dillon, Life and Work 253–254)

Bowles’ allegorical inclinations would seem to have prevented her from using the fictive tools of mimetic realism in a ready-made fashion. Rather it was exactly such conventions that she was challenging in her remarkably original work, which does indeed operate in a conventional manner, but one that has been neglected for the most part by criticism of contemporary fiction. In the long unfinished novel tentatively titled “Out in the World,” upon which Bowles worked for years, she was apparently attempting to push forward with her effort to use allegory to reinvent fictive realism in a manner that would connect the everyday material world to the world of eternal values. Jane told Paul that, for this novel, she had in mind something of the quality of Balzac, the creation of a world of sensory and realistic detail. But in addition she wanted her characters to be representative, each of them to represent an abstraction, almost in the sense of a morality play. (Dillon, Life and Work 192)

Given Sadie’s life-shattering, reality-questioning experience with her “voyage into the world” in “Camp Cataract,” we may have some notion of the revolutionary—and revelationary—implications of a work titled “Out in the World.” It is an unfinished project that speaks volumes.


Ch a p t e r Th r e e Wh at e v e r Is, Is Wrong: Ja m e s P u r dy’s All e g or ic a l R e a l i sm

The work of the contemporary American author James Purdy always has evoked strong response. Early on—in the late 1940s and early 1950s—the response from editors and publishers was almost entirely negative, even hostile, as Purdy himself humorously and ruefully related in this 1984 autobiographical sketch: In my twenties, I began sending out my completed stories to magazines . . . My stories were always returned with angry, peevish, indignant rejections from the New York slick magazines, and they earned, if possible, even more hostile comments from the little magazines. All editors were insistent that I would never be a published writer. (Purdy “Autobiographical Sketch”)

In 1956, when he was forty-two years old, Purdy—spurred by “a kind of psychic impulse”—sent a privately published collection of his fiction to Dame Edith Sitwell, whom he did not know. In what must have seemed to the unknown author a more or less miraculous letter of reply, Sitwell declared Purdy “a writer of genius” and offered to introduce his work to a commercial publisher in England, who soon published it to critical acclaim (Purdy “Autobiographical Sketch”). American publishers then competed for the right to publish the work that they had spurned earlier, and Purdy found himself, for a period of several years and novels, a critical, if not a financial, success as an author. But he was not to remain in the media and critical establishments’ good graces for long, as he relates: Despite all this acclaim coming to me out of total obscurity, I soon realized that if my life up to then had been a series of pitched battles, it was to be in the future a kind of endless open warfare. Neither the kind of publishers I had nor the press stood wholeheartedly behind me . . . In general, too,

46 / alternative realisms I found the so-called literary establishment parochial and studiedly insensitive to the kind of writing I was engaged in, completely taken up with trends and ratings and sales, and prostrate before their true God, Mammon. (Purdy “Autobiographical Sketch”)

As Purdy continued to write novels that not only failed to adhere to, but also lampooned and satirized, contemporary taste and habits of reading, his work came more and more to be overlooked and dismissed by the publishing and reviewing powers that be, as well as by the literary-critical establishment. Manifest and latent homophobia no doubt lies at the root of much of the neglect of, and hostility to, Purdy’s fiction, which persistently refused to adhere to any brand of political correctness, for which Purdy claimed total contempt: “What they call politically acceptable I call philistinism and stupidity” (Lane “Interview”). Indeed, more recently, as the author complained, it was the gay literary-critical establishment that found most to object to in his work, which—as the author acerbically noted—does not always portray gays as “well-behaved bourgeoisie” (Lane “Interview”). The relationship of bigotry and homophobia to Purdy’s literary reception is a topic that I will return to at the end of this chapter. But first I want to explore the possibility of a more pervasive and generic cause for critical misunderstanding of, and negativity in response to, Purdy’s work—and that is the failure of readers and critics to recognize the allegorical nature of Purdy’s fictionalizing, and to alter their critical assumptions and habits of reading in order to get that work to work for them in an enlightening and rewarding fashion. Purdy himself noted in his 1993 interview with Christopher Lane that the “misreading” of him has been “almost total”: Even some of the good reviews don’t understand what I’m writing. I think intellectuals are the worst sinners because they want everything clear and life is not clear. Actually I think my books are very clear, but they don’t get it because they come with preconceived notions as to what fiction should be and what political correctness should be. (Lane “Interview”)

One of Purdy’s best readers, the English critic Tony Tanner, concurred with Purdy’s assessment regarding the misreading and misunderstanding of his work on the part of critics: “Purdy has never, it seems to me, been done justice by the leading contemporary critics, and one reason, it may be, is that they simply don’t know how to read his work properly” (“Elijah Thrush” 62–63). Tanner went on to postulate that, although we naturally look for the “relevance” to our lives of what we are reading, there is no reason to assume that such relevance will be fictively “direct,” in a recognizably realistic or naturalistic manner (“Elijah Thrush” 63).

whatever is, is wrong / 47

As Angus Fletcher commented in his influential study of the allegorical mode, “The criterion of realism is wasted on the theory of allegory” (198). In contrast to the recognizable and reliable fictive plane of conventional mimetic realism, the “literal surface” of the allegorical narrative is innately unstable, which prevents the reader from entering the fiction’s imagined reality in a self-forgetful or escapist manner. The allegorical narrative displays a radical ambivalence, suggesting “a peculiar doubleness of intention” (Fletcher 7), which leads us to question the reality of the world of the text, and the world of its reader. The world as presented in allegory appears paradoxically supra-real and unreal at once, as our personified emotions, values, and instincts confront us directly in the text—implying that one of our worlds is fake. Tanner remarked that, in Purdy’s fiction, “people and things both are and are not there” (City 85), noting that “the question of what is real remains ambiguous” (City 107). Prior to the Enlightenment and its concomitant dissociation of sensibility, in which “words lost the battle to ‘things’ and language disappeared as a potent force for shaping man’s sense of the cosmos” (Quilligan 157), allegory had worked to keep the real richly ambiguous. By contrast, our more narrow contemporary conceptions of allegory tend to deny the mode this power of ambiguity. In a perceptive monograph on Purdy published in 1976, British critic Stephen Adams noted the “Christian existentialist” philosophic basis of Purdy’s work, which he claimed to be “responsible for that elusive manner in which highly individualized characters seem inseparably involved in some mythological drama or mystery play” (9). Then he adds, “This is not to suggest we are presented with dimly veiled allegories” (10). Tanner likewise is quick to point out that Purdy’s remarkably and self-consciously allegorical novel, I am Elijah Thrush, “is a book which devours its own allegories” (“Elijah Thursh” 64). Both critics seem wary of labeling Purdy an outright allegorist, implying that to do so would be to consign him to the realm of the intellectually narrow and second rate. But perhaps it is our understanding of allegory that is at fault. In an ambitious, post-structuralist-influenced reevaluation of the allegorical mode published in 1979, a few years after Adams’ and Tanner’s comments, Maureen Quilligan put forward the argument that it is our modern understanding of allegory that is constrictive and simpleminded—whereas allegory is innately and richly multiple-minded: The “other” named by the term allos in the world “allegory” is not some other hovering above the words of the text, but the possibility of an otherness, a polysemy, inherent in the very words on the page; allegory therefore names the fact that language can signify many things at once . . . What is radical about this redefinition is the slight but fundamental shift in emphasis away from our traditional insistence on allegory’s distinction between

48 / alternative realisms word said and meaning meant, to the simultaneity of the process of signifying multiple meanings. (28)

In order to understand this multiple-signifying process in allegory, Quilligan argues, we must rid ourselves of the notion that allegory proceeds on two simple, clear, and distinct levels—one of material things and one of abstract meanings—and pay close attention, rather, to the literal, horizontal, accreting, “interconnecting and criss-crossing” surface of the text (28). Indeed, as Quilligan observed, it is the mimetic realist mode of writing and reading that tends to take place on two distinct levels, as the reader translates the words on the page into “metaphorical” scenes of fictive reality in the mind’s eye (67).1 By contrast, self-conscious allegory, with its insistence upon the horizontal surface of the text (where does a literal character like the Knight of Holiness, or the Queen of Hearts, exist if not on the page?), refuses to allow us to engage our negative capability and to sink into, or drift away into, the world of fiction. Rather, allegory is constantly reminding us of our precarious position—and thus of our culpability and responsibility—as readers of signifying texts. It is in our face, quite literally. Our failure to read allegory successfully—to allow ourselves to be engaged by its innate and insistent questioning of our assumptions of the nature of reality and meaning—is thus not only an aesthetic, but an ethical failure, and the allegorical text does not hesitate to tell us so. Allegory refuses to provide us with a recognizable world in which we are at home within our assumed values and identities. Rather, allegory insistently questions both world and identity, and turns those questions on us as readers. Quilligan commented, “The final focus of any allegory is its reader, and . . . the real ‘action’ of any allegory is the reader’s learning to read the text properly” (24), which—with such an interactive text—is necessarily to learn to read ourselves as well. But that requires that we first admit that we do not fully know or possess ourselves, and that we are never, finally, knowable, or own-able, as selves. And this we generally are reluctant to admit, as Purdy’s troubled reception history would seem to indicate: The critics seem to think there is such a thing as rational behavior. They haven’t read history, I guess, which is a collection of lunacies. We contradict ourselves every day. Life is contradictory. What we are one day, we’re not the next. (Purdy, Lane “Interview”)

Purdy’s fictive effort to express our contradictory world and selves through allegory, and Quilligan’s effort to teach us to read allegory as an innately interactive and necessarily ambiguous signifying text, are related to the


efforts of contemporary theoretical scientists and philosophers to make improved models of our world and knowledge—models that allow for the shared, relational reality of any subject and object, and that admit of their own contingency. As historian John Lukacs argued recently in At the End of an Age, with “the affirmation of the Uncertainty and Indeterminacy principle” of physics, and the failure of the effort to create a “Unified Theory” of mathematics to account for all of reality—which, in any case, would explain reality only in the self-limited terms of mathematics itself—both the theoretical scientist and his close cousin, the metaphysical-epistemic philosopher, have had to come to grips with the fact that “the important question is no longer what he knows but how he knows it” (95–96). Lukacs concluded: We must recognize . . . that our concepts of matter, and of the universe, are models. A model is man-made, dependent upon its inventor. More important: the model cannot, and must not, be mistaken for reality. (113)

The ethical and epistemic advantage of allegory as a fictive mode is that it does not run the risk of being mistaken for conventional reality. Rather, like the self-qualifying models of matter Lukacs considers, allegory calls the nature of reality itself into question. With allegory’s focus upon the literal text (its tendency toward personification of abstractions, its elaborate framing devices, its self-conscious symmetries and repetitions, and its persistent play with words and images, among other things), it insists upon its own existence as a contingent artifact, and on its limitations as a language. By extension, it alerts us to the uncertainty innate in all sign systems, and in knowledge itself. In the modern Western world, allegory first came into serious disrepute with the Reformation, and its focus upon the literal—in the sense of historically accurate and interpretatively transparent—truth of scripture. Martin Luther declared unequivocally, “I hate allegories” (qtd. in Whitman 3). This period also saw the arising of modern science and its claims for a singleness of certainty in truth. It is worth remembering that, before Galileo was charged with heresy and threatened with excommunication, the Vatican had given him the option of publishing his solar-centric model of the universe with the caveat that it was only one possible alternative (Barfield 50). Allegorical interpretation of the world and its texts has tended to flourish in periods in which the conditions, values, and assumptions of the everyday real world have been called into question. As Jon Whitman recently wrote: “The turn to allegorical interpretation repeatedly marks civilizations trying to keep—or in danger of losing—their intellectual


and spiritual equilibrium” (4). Our modern world, in which the onceprivileged truth of science has come to be understood to be conditional, along with all other truths, and in which the technologically enabled merging of cultures with radically different histories and value structures has created ongoing sociopolitical and epistemic crisis, is certainly such a civilization, and it therefore should be no surprise that allegoresis (the allegorical interpretation of privileged texts) has come to the fore with the post-structuralist emphasis upon the slippages, contradictions, and complexities of sign systems. However, as contemporary allegorical theorists are quick to point out, the habits and skills associated with a sophisticated critical allegoresis—by which, for example, the plot of a Jane Austen novel may be interpreted as evoking (unwittingly, perhaps) the domestic societal tensions created by British Imperial colonization—are not generally useful for reading allegories that are created as such. Indeed, as Northrop Frye famously contended, the allegorizing literary critic may well resent the creative allegorist’s control over the matter of interpretation (Anatomy 90). Allegory requires of its reader that he or she adopt the position of the student, as an initiate into the text’s mysteries. As Quilligan noted, “Readers of allegory, unlike allegorical critics, read an allegory by learning how to read it” (227). For today’s typical politically engaged literary critic, submitting oneself to the text’s tutorial may well seem a dereliction of duty. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Purdy’s best critics have been those of an earlier generation—such as Adams, Tanner, and Bettina Schwarzchild— who were willing to trace the complexities of the text’s symbol systems and argument in a careful and subtle descriptive fashion, without an overt philosophic or political argument of their own. On the other hand, Purdy has been more or less ignored by near-contemporary practitioners of deconstruction, and by those with various Marxist-influenced political agendas. The irony is that Purdy’s allegorical texts are radically deconstructive of their own fictionalizing, as well as being innately revolutionary in their implicit and explicit political argument. Purdy’s rich texts are in need of a sustained critical analysis focused on the workings of the allegorical arguments in each and throughout—a comprehensive and systematic symbolic analysis as ambitious and thorough as Frye’s reading of Blake. (There is the danger, of course, that such a currently unpopular critical project would not be able to see its way past the editorial board and into print.) Early Purdy critics such as Tanner, Schwarzchild, and Adams laid the groundwork for such an analysis in their work of three decades and more ago, but there is much that remains to be examined and understood. We have only begun to detect the full range of symbolic complexity in Purdy’s novels, and have yet to comprehend the multiple implications of their allegorical nature, which Purdy


himself pointed out (Baldanza 566). I do not pretend to complete a comprehensive allegorical analysis within the limits of this chapter. Rather, in what follows I seek to point out various allegorical elements and strains in Purdy’s texts that may contribute to such an analysis in the future. To the untutored reader, Purdy’s allegorical novels do not necessarily appear to announce themselves as such, since they bear a naturalistic veneer, as the author himself explained: My writing is both realistic and symbolic. The outer texture is realistic, but the actual story has a symbolic, almost mythic quality. The characters are being moved by forces, which they don’t understand. (Purdy “Artistic Statement”)

Unlike the allegorical subgenres of fantasy, science fiction, and Western, Purdy’s fictions take place in an American world that is often very similar to our own, but with meaningful differences; and his narratives are likewise similar to but different from the narratives of conventional mimetic fiction. A distinction must be made between the type of allegorical fiction that Purdy created, which has a “realistic veneer” but is symbolic through and through, and the contemporary hybrid genre of naturalistic-symbolism that is sometimes referred to as allegory. We might take as an example of the latter the well-known fiction of Flannery O’Connor, a writer with whom Purdy has been much compared. I would argue that O’Connor’s fiction is typically only partially allegorical. In the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” for instance, the character of the Misfit, and to some extent the character of the grandmother, are clearly meant to be interpreted in an allegorical-symbolic fashion; and indeed, the interchange between them, at the conclusion of which the grandmother identifies the Misfit as her son, and is then killed by him, is the thematic and symbolic heart of the story. The other characters and scenes in the story act as a naturalistic setup and environment for the symbolic climax and its theological-metaphysical argument. (We may recall that O’Connor described herself as a religious writer who felt bound to couch her message in the guise of naturalistic fiction in order to deliver it to a skeptical public.) Although O’Connor’s fiction is remarkable for the didactic concision of her symbolic argument, the convention of embedding key symbolic passages within naturalistic narratives is, as we know, fairly common practice in modern and contemporary fiction. The reader or teacher who has mastered the art of locating and interpreting such key symbolic passages within otherwise largely naturalistic texts may well be flummoxed, however, when confronted with a wholehearted allegorical text, in which every character, scene, and setting


seems to invite symbolic interpretation and understanding. In such a text, there is no knowing where to begin and end the interpretive reading task. Indeed, the critic seeking to interpret an allegorical text may do well to recall the King of Hearts’ pointed reading instruction to the White Rabbit in Wonderland: “Begin at the beginning . . . and go on till you come to the end: then stop” (113). A full-fledged allegory such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a useful analogy to keep in mind when approaching Purdy’s less obviously allegorical fiction. For Purdy’s fictive world is—like Wonderland—a world apart. But unlike Carroll, Purdy does not provide the reader with a narrative transitional device (a fall down a rabbit hole or step through a mirror) to let us know that we have entered an allegorical realm. Purdy’s texts provide us with ample clues, however, if we know how to recognize and to read them. Consider the introduction to one of Purdy’s most overtly allegorical novels, I am Elijah Thrush: Millicent De Frayne, who was young in 1913, the sole possessor of an immense oil fortune, languished of an incurable ailment, her willful, hopeless love for Elijah Thrush, “the mime, poet, painter of art nouveau, who, after ruining the lives of countless men and women,” was finally himself in love, “incorrectly, if not indecently,” with his great grandson. (1)

The extravagance and ambivalence of this opening sentence (which seems to sum up the story so as to discard of it at once) serves as a clue to the novitiate reader that he is entering a realm that is other than the ordinary, although it may seem to be familiar, as in a dream. This dreamlike quality is fostered by the digressive, de-centered sentence structure, which serves to throw the reader off his balance, plunging him headlong into a fictive landscape in which normal perspectives of reality do not seem to apply. As Fletcher noted, one chief identifying characteristic of allegory is “the lack of that perspective which would create a mimetic world” (171). The hyperbolic language—“immense,” “incurable,” “hopeless,” “countless”—contributes to the reader’s disorientation by insisting upon the un-circumscribable nature of the subject matter, and of its larger-thanlife, demi-god-like figures. Purdy’s characters habitually tend toward the archetypal, but the major figures in this novel, and in the earlier novel, Malcolm, are overtly so. Malcolm is in the form of a quest, with elements of mock-epic and picaresque, whereas I am Elijah Thrush is characterized by the overt theatricality and symmetrical stasis of the masque. One basis of the action is the running argument and endless jockeying for position between the eternal feminine and eternal masculine principles, embodied in the two major figures of the text. We may witness a sample interchange between them,


as Millicent De Frayne interrupts one of Elijah Thrush’s infamous privatetheatre one-man performances (in which he plays variations on the masculine ideal—Narcissus to Priapus), prompting an outraged response from the legendary “mime”: “Damned old bag of bones, stomping in like this in the midst of my most fatiguing number . . . Ladies and gentlemen, this common whore here, kept out of jail only by her wealth, which she never earned a dime of, has been persecuting me since the turn of the century. (In his anger he always gave away his age, though professionally he listed himself always as twentyeight.) She has the breath of a tribe of cannibals and about as much beauty as an overage anteater, and yet she flatters herself that I am hopelessly enamored of her . . .” “On the other hand, this wicked mountebank,” Millicent De Frayne began her rejoinder, “has corrupted his own great-grandson, and there is not a young person in this audience tonight whom he has not either corrupted or will ruin and corrupt. I am begging you therefore to run as you would for your lives, run indeed as if the whole edifice were in flames . . .” (50)

Millicent De Frayne’s inherited wealth from oil points to her archetypal role as Mother Earth—the “common whore” and cannibalistic “old bag of bones”—as Elijah Thrush’s inveterate corruption of youth is indicative of the primordial Priapic urge. The continual bickering between them, and their inventive plotting against one another, give shape to this oddly hilarious and nightmarish novel (that reads like a long night at the circus), creating a repetitive symmetry and rhythm that is essentially ritualistic in nature. For at the heart of allegory lies the symmetrical archetypal ritual as ordering principle, as opposed to the naturalistic novel’s principle of narrative development (Fletcher 66–67). When I teach Purdy’s novels to my literature students, I ask them to attend to the text’s ritualistic and archetypal symbol structure, in lieu of searching for the standard plot progression and character development— the futile search for which will lead only to frustration with an allegorical text. In a telling anecdote, Purdy related the seemingly unlikely event of being invited to give a reading at the conservative Christian institution, Oral Roberts University: I thought it must be a mistake. I went, and the first book I saw them reading was I am Elijah Thrush. They think these books are like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or Spenser’s Faerie Queene, religious allegory. That’s what they saw me doing. I couldn’t get over it. (Canning 17)

Purdy’s surprise is understandable, as his allegorical fiction is not in the least dogmatically religious, as the Oral Roberts’ students seemed to be inclined to interpret it. That being said, however, I can vouch for the fact


that the successful allegorical reading approach of the Oral Roberts students is similar to the success that Purdy’s novels have proved in my classroom once the students learn to stop looking for the “direct relevance” to their world that they are used to finding in contemporary mimetic fiction, and begin searching, rather, for a meaning and relevance in the text, and in themselves and their world, that is other than the obvious. Such meaning need not, of course, be of a doctrinal religious nature, but it will have an ethical import, as all allegory serves to instruct us to examine our lives and behavior, and to question our assumptions. When we seek to understand an allegory’s symbol system, the characters’ names are a good place to start. Fletcher remarks that “the magic of names . . . more than any other linguistic phenomenon dominates the allegorical work” (294). Purdy’s names are typically unlikely and eccentric, and yet strangely fitting and familiar, like something forgotten. He relished elaborate, humorous, outlandish, and archaic names perhaps as much as did Firbank, with whom he had much in common as a creator. Purdy’s quaintly historic and eccentric names—Eustace Chisholm, Abner Blossom, Estel Blanc, Vance DeLake, Eloisa Brace, Nora Bythewaite—may evince a pastoral nostalgia for a lost America, but they also serve, in their verbal distinctiveness, as descriptions, rather than simply as signifiers. They are significant artifacts in and of themselves—clues to a virtual world of potential meanings that is hidden in the everyday. The more time we spend with Purdy’s willful, unpredictable characters, the more their evocative names (which are often purposeful and meaningful in and of themselves: “Claire” sees all too clearly, “Parkhearst” signals the end of pastoral innocence: park hearse, etc.) come to seem, paradoxically, empty and hollow. They are sieves through which the character is poured, and at the end of the story it is the name alone that remains, like a relic or ruin—which is how we first encounter them. Allegory is adroit at creating this impression of movement within stasis, questioning the ideal of progress, in art as in life. As if to emphasize the instability and artificiality of identity even further, Purdy habitually refers to his characters, and they refer to one another, by descriptive or working titles. So Elijah Thrush is repeatedly referred to as “the mime,” while other Purdy characters are called “the scissors grinder,” “the little man,” “the horse tender,” “the great woman,” “the thespian,” et cetera. Such designations emphasize a character’s generic position in a social and/or archetypal setting and hierarchy, while calling into question his or her particular identity and individuality—seeming less a mask hiding an essential inner self than a heraldic device proclaiming one’s spectral social and psychological presence. These dramatic epithets are particularly fitting for characters remarkable for their overt theatricality of speech and gesture (recalling their


morality play ancestors). Purdy’s allegorical characters tend to inhabit the surface setting of a more or less naturalistic reality in his novels as though it were a stage. But their speech and gestures point insistently elsewhere, toward a realm of metaphorical potential-in-meaning. It is a mistake to conceive of this “other” realm to which allegories refer as a world of final ideas fixed in abstract stasis. Rather it is a realm of radical signification, in which potential meanings coexist and coincide, as on the other side of Alice’s mirror. It is the virtual realm hidden “within plain sight” within the actual, like the poor peasant who is a natural-born king.2 In an excellent recent overview of Purdy’s work and career, contemporary novelist Matthew Stadler traced the development of the theatrical element in Purdy’s fiction, beginning with the publication of Eustace Chisholm and the Works in 1967. Stadler contended that, in the succeeding novels Purdy published in the 1970s, his work evolved from simply suggesting a critique of naturalism to becoming a fully functioning alternative to it. In the world of these novels authentic being is achieved through fidelity to an obscure, prefigured script—a logic of the cosmos that is beyond us and is embedded in real speech. (9)

Stadler’s argument regarding “real speech” echoes a contention by Walter Benjamin that “allegory . . . is not a playful illustrative technique, but a form of expression, just as speech is expression, and, indeed, just as writing is” (162). Benjamin further argued that allegory “is the form in which man’s subjection to nature is most obvious” (166). Allegories tell us that we are fated to speak our temperamentally prefigured scripts in a world whose ultimate meaning is beyond us. Stadler contended that Purdy’s novels evolved from an eccentric naturalism into the “theater of real speech” as a result of the author’s observation and hatred of the consumer society in which we live, which has polluted our shared language to the point at which authentic speech has become nearly impossible. Stadler concluded: Purdy’s conjuring of a kind of neo-Greek theater of American speech was a brilliant maneuver, the only way forward at a time when a great deal of imaginative writing had become subsumed within the rhetoric of consumerism. (8)

Again, Stadler’s observation echoes that of Benjamin, when he explained that the allegorical Baroque German Trauerspiel (“sorrow play”) sought to propel its audience into a richly ambiguous speech world, in which the living are subject to signifying nature’s “mysterious instruction,” and from which we normally are separated by the world of human history understood


as the history of progress. The story triumphalist history tells us presumes to put borders around our world through the commodification of human life into beginning and end, cause and effect, cliché and stereotype. By the means of such narratives, history attempts, in effect, to overcome “signifying nature” by submitting our chaotic and multiplicitous experience to the censor of a narrow and linear rationality (Benjamin 170–171). By contrast, Benjamin argued, allegory demonstrates the failure of history as a self-limiting and redeeming story, and displays the triumph of nature as a mysteriously ramifying world of meaning—and it does so by insisting upon the materiality and contingency of existence within an inescapable world of time as failed history. With its emphasis on the limits of signification, allegory will not allow us to forget that we are fated to live among the signifying ruins of time, including that of our own bodies. And yet we are alive and not dead, as allegory also seeks to remind us through its focus on its own bodily existence as a text. In that sense, allegory is innately celebratory, even when the story it tells is not. As George Steiner wrote in his insightful introduction to Benjamin’s posthumously published monograph: “The Trauerspiel is counter-transcendental; it celebrates the immanence of existence even where this existence is passed in torment” (16). It is only when allegory tends toward the wholly immaterial abstract—as, for instance, in the ascetic, metaphysical strain of Romanticism that may be seen running variously through Shelley, Swinburne, Stevens, and Ashbery—that it becomes entirely dependent upon the transcendent and its negative theology. Having lost its vital connection to the material world, the non-allegorical abstraction is consigned to the melancholy half-life of signs that have forgotten that they are existent and contingent things. In allegory, by contrast, abstractions are embodied within material existence. Full-fledged allegorists such as Dante, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, James Merrill, and Purdy, are world-affirming materialists in practice, whatever their psychic, religious or temperamental allegiance. Purdy’s materialism is evident in his insistent focus on his characters’ bodiliness, particularly in regards to eating; the characters are typically ravenous, bolting their food, smacking their lips, and gulping their drinks. They are also prone to spitting when they speak, emphasizing the bodily impulse of the intellect and the innate physicality of language. The oft-noted violence in Purdy’s work is itself overtly bodily and anti-sensationalistic, steadfastly refusing the mind’s abstracting pornographic voyeuristic fantasies of the body. Purdy’s wrenching, unflinching portrayals of physical violence are much more disturbing than the stylized Hollywood version, or even than the violence in O’Connor’s fiction. O’Connor’s violence is didactically allegorical in nature, and is in the service of a transcendent


moral theme; whereas Purdy’s violence and fiction is radically allegorical in its amoral and ritualistic nature.3 Purdy’s radical allegorical figures are condemned to have the experience but miss the meaning, and they tell us that this is the actual condition of life for all of us. His allegorical novels dramatize the unappeasable anxiety prompted by existence, bespeaking an innate ambivalence in the nature of things, which prevents a consoling certainty and closure (Fletcher 330). Benjamin noted, “It is as something incomplete and imperfect that objects stare out from their allegorical structure” (186). Such “objects” remind us of our own provisionality. Purdy’s allegorical characters are intensely immanent beings bearing potentially unlimited meaning, the persistent paradox of which makes them appear simultaneously willful and determined, like figures in myth. Rare among modern writers, Purdy used myth to powerful effect. He manages this by constantly shifting focus from the mundane banalities of day-to-day living to the ultramundane intercessions of fate and temperament, so that a character is made to seem alternately real and supra-real, human and godlike. Fletcher remarks, “The allegorical agent is not quite human, and not quite godlike, but shares something of both states” (61). From certain viewpoints, Millicent De Frayne appears a pathetic and bitter old woman whose decades-long unrequited love has made her all too human in her inventive vindictiveness: “Our only task, of course, remains, to grind Elijah Thrush to powder” (93). But she is, as well, the immensely resourceful Eternal Feminine, relentlessly feeding off of men; Elijah Thrush even accuses her of drinking the harvested “milk” of young men’s semen in her determined effort to stay young and active. The aging “great woman” of enormous wealth and power, who feels herself to be, nevertheless, the hapless victim of a historical phallocentric family structure, society, and culture, is a staple allegorical figure throughout Purdy’s fiction, in which she is variously portrayed as vituperative, helpless, indignant, despondent, selfless, merciless, incredulous, outraged, enraged, and exhausted. Regarding such searing, searching portrayals, Tanner concluded, “Purdy is . . . one of the few American writers who seem to understand women” (“Elijah Thrush” 65). Purdy also understood men in their narcissistic, egoistic, self-willed abusiveness and vulnerability. Elijah Thrush’s infatuation with his great-grandson is as purely heartfelt, wrong-headed, and self-lacerating as any pastoral complaint. Although we are not prone to identifying with allegorical figures in a self-forgetful, egoistic manner, we are, nevertheless, frequently disturbed by the implication of their behavior and circumstance in regards to our own lives and fates, upon which they seem both commentary and prophecy. In this sense, our relationship to allegorical figures is innately antagonistic.


They threaten us with their embodiment of mysterious knowledge. It is almost as though we are being spoken about in the most familiar of terms in our very presence by strangers with unseen power over us, but they are speaking in a language that we understand imperfectly. As readers of allegory, we, too, have the experience but miss the meaning—becoming in effect, allegorical figures in our own right. There are two methods by which an author can work to prevent readers from ego-identifying with fictional characters. He can overexplain them, exhaustively accounting for their behavior from contradictory viewpoints, until they become, in effect, explained away, as Samuel Beckett remarked of Proust’s characters; or he can decline to explain them at all, which was more often Purdy’s method. Purdy as narrator does not presume to be responsible for his characters or to direct their behavior. He likewise refuses to account for or to question their behavior. Rather, he seems as much at the mercy of their whim as do we, giving his novels the feel of extended improvisations and works in progress. The world of the wandering and meandering plots in these novels is crucially bounded, however, by the unalterable limits of the characters’ temperaments as they collide with their fated circumstance. Fletcher noted that allegory’s assent to and endorsement of “cosmic notions of fate and personal fortune . . . allows its creators a maximum of wish-fulfillment with a maximum of restraint” (69). Purdy’s characters seem apt to do almost anything at all, except be other than themselves in a world other than their own. In fictive terms, we might say that they are constrained by the genre in which they find themselves and by the mood it endorses—which also served as limits on their author. Like his characters and his readers, the allegorical author is figured as a fallible and contingent initiate into the mysteries of existence. In allegorical poetry, the author typically dramatizes his role as pilgrim and initiate—as do Dante, Blake, and Merrill. In Purdy’s novels, the author’s initiate role is evident in the meandering of the narrative’s unpredictable plotline within the unalterable confines of its mood and genre—like the movements of an animal in a cage. It is as though the narrative were inscribing the path of an ongoing criminal investigation or scientific experiment. The solution is implicit in the question—in the discovery of the crime, or posing of the problem to be solved: the nature of the story to be told—but the means by which one solves the crime or problem (the way in which one tells the story) is yet to be determined. Purdy’s novels proceed inductively, progressing by digressing, tracing a trajectory that seems the product of no merely conscious fashioning. In response to a question regarding his thematic intentions in a particular novel, Purdy remarked, “I don’t think I’m that conscious of what I’m


doing. I’m dealing so deep down with the subject that it’s hard for me to comment” (Lane “Interview”). In his refusal to account for his own or his characters’ behavior, Purdy is vigorously anti psychoanalytic, which is not to say that his novels are un-psychological. On the contrary, they are charting new psychological waters, refusing to be self-limited by the boundaries of the known and recognized, allowing themselves to be guided by the instinctive divagations of human nature within the determined confines of the same. Fletcher contended that allegories, which, in their insistent digressions, perpetually flout the innate story arc of naturalism, tend, rather to “resolve themselves into either of two basic forms,” which he labels “battle and progress” (151). The progress of allegories is not the causal progression of naturalistic narrative development, but is the ritualistic progress of the quest, in which the protagonist is an actor in a plot that is fated, but the reasons for and causes of which remain unknown to him (Fletcher 151–153). The “battle” form, by contrast, proceeds in a serial and repetitive fashion, as a variation on a theme, which the text appears to be expounding and dissecting through its compulsive digressions (Fletcher 156–159). Purdy’s allegorical novels proceed variously by the progress and the battle form, and by a mixture of the two. The picaresque and mock-epic Malcolm, for instance, clearly functions in the progress form, but there are recurring battles throughout. Likewise, I am Elijah Thrush, which is dominated by the serial battle scenes between Elijah and Millicent, also tells the story of the progress of the narrator, Albert Peggs, into Elijah’s heir and replacement in his one-man show. None of Purdy’s novels are what one would regard as typically plotdriven or character-driven, which are naturalistic, non-allegorical structuring traits. (As readers, it does not occur to us to wish for a happy ending or to long for an improvement in these characters. We are not in a position to make such judgments regarding their selves and lives.) Rather Purdy’s novels are driven by the characters’ unpredictable temperaments in the grip of uncontrollable circumstances. The relationship of a character’s temperament to his circumstances determines whether his fate is good or bad, but he cannot alter either. Rather it is the reader who is being prompted to alter his behavior and understanding in response to the text’s mysterious instruction. It is interesting to note that Gilles Deleuze, for whom the nature of allegory was a central aesthetic preoccupation, remarked that “all of Kafka’s works could be entitled ‘Description of a Combat’ ” (Essays 132). To one extent or another, the same could be said of Purdy’s novels, which progress always by opposition, sometimes between the archetypal characters themselves, and sometimes between the characters and their fated


circumstance. For Deleuze, such repetitive and persistent combat is not the existential quagmire it might seem. Rather it is a means for moving away from and out of a self-proclaimedly progressive world that is all too often mired in cliché and judgment concerning the false absolutes of good and evil. Deleuze concluded: No one develops through judgment, but through a combat that implies no judgment . . . Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence . . . It is not a question of judging other existing beings, but of sensing whether they agree or disagree with us, whether they bring forces to us . . . As Spinoza had said, it is a problem of love and hate and not judgment. (Essays 135)

For Spinoza, each individual’s human nature is his destiny. The challenge is not to alter one’s nature—to change oneself from evil to good, et cetera—but to alter one’s world so that one’s nature can thrive. Human nature admits of no judgment—no limit—but itself. It loves what enables its fulfillment and hates what hinders it. Our loves and hates act instinctively, without thought or hesitation, and by so doing determine our fate. So it is that we each carry our fates within us: our temperamental loves and hates are godlike in regards to ourselves. These gods lie dormant until they are brought to life by our encountered circumstances. Like allegorical figures, we are an empty shell at one moment, and the embodiment of a god the next. According to the model of reality outlined by Spinoza and Deleuze (which is implicitly endorsed by the allegorical mode), human consciousness is primarily an onlooker to the ongoing drama of our fated lives. As Deleuze commented, “Consciousness is by nature the locus of an illusion. Its nature is such that it registers effects, but it knows nothing of causes” (Spinoza 19). Spinoza describes the relationship of fate to consciousness in terms of body and mind: “The body can, by virtue of the laws of its own nature, do many things at which the mind is astonished” (167). The mind as consciousness consoles itself, however, by explaining the innate workings of the body in its own terms—pretending to choose what it has no choice but to endure. The fictions with which consciousness consoles itself by claiming control of that which is determined come at a high social and psychological price, however. Intolerance, oppression, self-reproach, and misery result from the misconception that we consciously choose and affect that which is fated. Allegory acts as a corrective to the illusions of consciousness by dramatizing the experience of being at the mercy of powers (within or without of us) that are beyond our conscious selves. As viewed through allegory, Nature is ultimately mysterious, as Benjamin insisted, but it is beyond


reproof—as nothing that is, is unnatural. Rather, nature serves as a reproof against human prejudice—against the inclination to judge and to be judged. Benjamin wrote in his conclusion, “There is no evil in the world. It arises in man himself, with the desire for knowledge, or rather for judgment” (233). Allegory demonstrates the manner in which our all too human judgment all too often fails us. Purdy demonstrated his allegorical proclivities when he told Christopher Lane: “I think I’ll always be—I hate to say this, I hate to categorize myself—but I guess I’ll always be a revolutionary. Whatever is, is wrong” (16).4 Although we cannot control our loves and hates, we can work to create a world in which our loves are given the opportunity to thrive and our hates are disempowered. Purdy’s novels are constructive in this sense. They are destructive as well, as they attempt to dismantle the false gods that so often serve to spoil our lives. In order to understand the profound political argument in Purdy’s texts, we need to understand the different ways in which they work both to destroy and to create through allegory. For discussion’s sake, we may divide the allegorical-political argument of Purdy’s novels into three broad rhetorical categories with generic affiliations. These categories and genres are meant to be suggestive, rather than definitive or exhaustive. The novels (1) critique the world we live in, (2) lament the world’s casualties, and (3) envision a better world of the future. The novels that are dominated by a critique of our world and its false gods are satirical in nature, the novels engaged in a lament of our failed world’s casualties are allegorical tragedies (I will explain the term), while the novels that attempt to envision a better world of the future function as pastoral romances. Not all of Purdy’s novels fit easily into this schema, but most of them do. In any case, my purpose in surveying the whole of Purdy’s fiction in this broad manner is to demonstrate the remarkably various uses to which he turned his allegorical talent, and to trace the general shape and argument of his work in regards to his allegorical means and methods. All of Purdy’s novels are satirical to one degree or another—although they tended to become less bitingly so as his career developed. It might be instructive to begin a discussion of the satirical element in Purdy’s work with a telling quotation from his revealing interview with Christopher Lane, in which he expounded upon his view of our American world of the present: It is a culture that despises the soul. Everything is money, conformity, fashion, shallowness, cruelty; it’s a great, great cruel society. And now it’s very sick because these children are killing one another. No one is doing anything about the real problems. We have a government that’s totally corrupt and television is a great bleeding rectum spewing filth which is poisoning everyone. (Lane “Interview”)


The concluding metaphor is meaningfully disturbing. Through the dramatization of such hyperbole in his satires and tragedies, Purdy attempted to call attention to the grisly symptoms of our world’s various sicknesses, and to prompt us to consider possible cures. He proved himself a profound symptomatologist, revealing society’s illness through the misery and dysfunction of its individuals. Thus the social sicknesses of homophobia and consumerism, and the psychological-existential sickness of nihilism, all are diagnosed through the dramatized anatomy of individuals suffering from these maladies—and who make others suffer as well. Purdy’s disturbing allegorical anatomies of social and psychological illness are apt to be misread by readers unfamiliar with the workings of allegory, who may be prone to consider that an author’s choice of material is an endorsement of its worldview. On the contrary, Purdy’s allegorical satires and tragedies serve as an indictment of reality as his characters experience it, and as his readers all too often know it. His vivid depiction of abuse and dysfunction demonstrates the manner in which each illness acts as its own scourge, and his woebegone characters are made to seem like figures in Dante’s Hell, compulsively pursuing their self-styled punishment. The most bitter and searching of Purdy’s satires is his 1964 novel, Cabot Wright Begins, which the author referred to as “a book about how awful America is” (Canning 36). The novel focuses on consumerism and its attendant evils. The central consumer in the novel is the “serial rapist” Cabot Wright himself, who is a victim of what Anarchist theorist Raoul Vaneigem diagnosed as “survival sickness” (19), which is to live a life so hemmed in by convention and safety, as a cog in the marketplace mechanism, that one no longer feels oneself to be alive at all. The insidious nature of survival sickness is such that most attempts to become more alive and healthy serve simply to worsen the disease, as one becomes a more thoroughly invested and enabled consumer. So it is that Cabot’s visit to a quack therapist (where his treatment for “tiredness” consists, tellingly, of being hung on a padded sort of fishhook) further awakens the animal instincts in his body and psyche while intensifying his mental stupor. The therapist’s success at engaging Cabot’s animal-instinct mechanism, while effectively paralyzing his conscious will, ushers the patient into the final stages of survival sickness, in which he is no longer responsible for his actions, or emotionally invested in his desires, having become a sexual machine, mimicking the obsessive-compulsive motions of the consuming marketplace. His eventual arrest and incarceration come as a release: When the police began their so-called brutality on him, and prison finished what they had started, not only his membrum virile went from “At-tention!” to “Pa-rade rest!” to “At ease!” but the bite which had been so long,

whatever is, is wrong / 63 the huge false-teeth which Business America fastened at his jugular was off. (195)

The sensational raping spree of Cabot Wright, who was a privileged son and Wall Street golden boy, is only the purported center of a novel that is, in a broader sense, concerned with the failure of various framing characters to complete a novel based upon his story. This writing project is finally undone by the “Goethe” of publishers, who—after consulting the bookreviewing powers that be (close parodies of actual literary arbiters of the 1960s)—declares the work unpublishable, since “rape” is no longer “in,” and “it’s the age of the black faggot and fellatio” (203). The failure of the story to conform to the “taste” of the age is a suitable conclusion for a novel in which consumption is satirized—a novel that, as well, seems to consume its own project as a fictive endeavor, concluding with the declaration, “I won’t be a writer in a place and time like the present” (228). This dialogue is in the mouth of the inset novel’s failed author, but it serves to question the very enterprise of the artist in a consumerist world. Is there any way in such a context for an author to avoid becoming another user among users—fictively digesting material for the reader’s further consumption? This novel says no. There is no escape. One is implicated in the consumerist society simply by the fact that one exists in it. But the allegorical text isn’t content with implicating the author in his user status. It also insists upon the reader’s culpability. The allegorical import of the elaborate framing device, whereby a novel about Cabot Wright is being produced even as the novel that tells his story is being devoured by its reader, reminds us of our role in the manipulative consuming machinery of the marketplace. Our awareness of our role as readers in the text makes us aware, by analogy, of our role as users in the world. This may be painful solace, but it is solace nonetheless, as it alerts us to the fact that we have a hand—however minor—in controlling both text and world. We are potentially made better persons by such knowledge. Humbled by our conviction as users, we may become more thoughtful in our actions, and more tolerant in our thinking and behavior. Purdy’s satirical novels compile damning testimony of a using world—a world everywhere opposed to the Golden Rule of treating others as one would like to be treated oneself. The effect of such satires—of Cabot Wright Begins, I am Elijah Thrush, and Malcolm in particular, but also of the satirical element in the other, primarily non-satirical novels—is generally comic, but it is a bitter humor. One repeated object of conventional satire is the notion of identity as a stable possession and natural right. Rather, identities in Purdy’s satires are presented as improvised tools that we use against one another in our quest for power and control, and as


life-rafts upon which we blithely float through the years in a spiritual torpor and mental stupor. Purdy’s satires attempt to jolt us out of our daze. So it is that the protagonists in the three overtly satirical novels are made to undergo acute identity crises that make them question their assumptions regarding self and world. At the end of Cabot Wright Begins, the title character writes a letter to the author who had failed to make a novel out of his story, in which he asks, “Do You think there’s a Chance for Me if I ever Find out who I is?” He declares that he is about to leave New York on a journey “with myself and in search of same” (228). That is to say—he is finally about to begin, having discovered—through the help of his hack biographer, who had enabled him to see himself “all in one piece together like a movie”—that heretofore he had been on autopilot, following the script that his society and family had given him, which he had accepted without question (194). Now he has decided “to take up disguises for a while, I think harmless ones. Think I may be a preacher further South or maybe some kind of a quack healer” (194). Cabot Wright has discovered the truth of Wilde’s dictum (endorsed by allegory) that masks are truths, or the closest thing that we have to them, and he is off to spread the word to those who, like his former self, are unable to hear anything other than a sales pitch. The title character’s escape from his own story is a spark of hope at the end of a dark and bitter novel, and reminds us that allegories, by putting frames around themselves, point both to the positive and the negative ramifications of the limits of fiction, of reason, and of identity. The satirical I am Elijah Thrush, by contrast, ends with a vision of fictive imprisonment, as the narrator becomes trapped in his subject matter upon the withdrawal of the subject himself. Near the novel’s conclusion, Elijah Thrush, the famous mime and one-man-show, and the subject of the “paid memoirist” narrator, Albert Peggs, is kidnapped and forcibly betrothed by his obsessed fan and backer, Millicent De Frayne. The aged thespian’s final injunction to his memoirist is a plea that he keep his oneman-show running: “Assume my name if you like, anything . . . Carry on my work” (136–137). The novel concludes with Albert Pegg’s pronouncement to the waiting theatre audience (and to the reader): “I am . . . Elijah Thrush” (138). Albert had earlier complained that he had been made to feel increasingly “unlike [him]self” since first coming into contact with the archetypal pair of Thrush and De Frayne (45), whose hyperbolic and archaic language gradually replaced his own (106). Elijah Thrush himself expresses a doubt as to his identity as a result of his unending battle with his archetypal coeval, Millicent De Frayne: “Are you listening to me, Albert? Oh, you are so distant lately. Now see here. Am I, do you attend me, am I, Albert, really her?” (101).


Such questions and doubts prompt us as readers to wonder whether we might also be in danger of losing our identities as a result of our relationship with these characters and their world. All fiction asks of us that we temporarily suspend our identity in order to invest ourselves imaginatively in the world of the text. Allegory, however, goes one step further, questioning the reality of our assumed identities by aggressively obscuring the line between fact and fiction. I am Elijah Thrush functions as a virtual onslaught on, and critique of, the very notion of an innate or essential, “real,” self. In its seemingly endlessly resourceful mannerisms, it, rather, emphasizes the eccentricity of identity, which is presented as innately improvisational and perpetually provisional in nature. With its elaborately interactive theatricality, and its implicit denial of the “inwardness” of its allegorical characters, who are nothing if not obvious—although their allegorical meaning, of course, is not (what depth these surfaces have!)—the novel also serves to call into question the “individual” as a valid, or even useful, epistemic category. Are we all not, rather, multiplicities and assemblages, networks and connections, masks and disguises? By undermining the assumptions of individual identity and autonomy, Purdy insisted that we consider ourselves both in relation to our shaping environments and to our innate and instinctive desires—life’s great “givens.” In his allegorical tragedies—among which I would include 63: Dream Palace, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, Jeremy’s Version, The House of the Solitary Maggot, Narrow Rooms, and On Glory’s Course—Purdy further demonstrated that we are both more and less than the autonomous individual actors we habitually assume ourselves to be. The implicit contention of Purdy’s tragic novels is that the forgotten, hidden gods remain active in our lives, determining our fate. We come face to face with a god when we experience an element in our nature—an instinct, inclination, propensity or drive—that is beyond our control. When in the grips of such a desire or drive, we are in the hands of destiny. The ruling deity in Purdy’s house of fiction is Eros, the god to which even other gods are eventually subject. In one way or another, each of Purdy’s novels may be read as an allegory of love. In the face of love, we cannot reason the need, but must act as compelled, or suffer the consequences. The central figures in Purdy’s tragic novels are typically the victims of a fate or desire they refuse to accept. In a homophobic society and world, it is perhaps inevitable that these victims are sometimes those who are unwilling to accept a homosexual desire, which they, nevertheless, are unable to deny. Caught in between their instinctive desire and their conscious will, these tortured characters self-destruct. In Eustace Chisholm and the Works, a young man who has always thought of himself as straight suddenly finds himself hopelessly in love with another man. He is so outraged by this state


of affairs that he prompts his own gruesome and violent death (by disemboweling) at the hands of a sadistic army superior—himself driven by a relentless desire for the tortured soldier—rather than allow himself to pursue fulfillment of his desire. A similarly grisly punishment (of being crucified on a barn door) is prepared for himself by a young man in Narrow Rooms who cannot endure the fact that his love for a former classmate has put him at another man’s mercy. Such examples of failed homosexual attachments may have made Purdy an unfit spokesperson for politically correct gay literature and liberation—these violent and self-destructive figures are far from being “well-behaved bourgeoisie”—and yet the intense engagement with hatred of self and other endeavored by Purdy’s work is an overwhelmingly damning portrait of a homophobic (“well-behaved bourgeoisie”) society, whose most pitiable victims are those society members unable to root out the collective hatred in themselves so as to pursue their individual happiness. The self-destructive protagonists in these dark and painful novels are in no way conventional tragic heroes. Their suffering neither ennobles nor enlightens them, nor us (except in obverse fashion). Rather they are like the suffering figures Benjamin described in the allegorical Trauerspiel— victims of history. Benjamin distinguished the allegorical tragedy of the Baroque from conventional symbolic tragedy by pointing out that, in return for the hero’s suffering, the symbolic tragedy insists upon the ethical superiority of the human protagonist, who is rewarded in his misery by a fleeting recognition of hierarchical order, as time intersects with eternity in the transcendent symbolic moment of his ritual sacrifice. By means of this sacrifice, the world is made wholly (if briefly) meaningful, and the suffering human is posited as experientially superior to the changeless gods. Faced with such knowledge, the tragic hero is stunned into silence, and the weary audience goes home saddened but gratified: redeemed (Benjamin 18). Tragic allegory, by contrast, portrays a world characterized by “torrential prolixity” (Steiner 17), in which suffering is the very condition of life, and is the only knowable meaning of time itself, which is otherwise an abstraction signifying one knows not what. This is the site of negative allegory, which inhabits an immanent, historical plane, in which time is not arrested in a transcendent moment of achieved recognition, but stretches limitlessly backwards and forwards, as its weary figures proceed from past ruin to future ruin in the slow burn of decay (Benjamin 177–178). Benjamin’s reading of Baroque German allegory may help us to understand several idiosyncratic features of Purdy’s modern novels, which likewise display a “torrential prolixity”—an unusual characteristic in the minimalist-inclined world of contemporary literary fiction. Purdy’s larger-than-life allegorical figures habitually embark on long speeches and


extended harangues and complaints, while occupying immense ruined and decaying houses with endlessly meandering hallways, innumerable rooms, and vast vistas. Taking our clue from Benjamin, we may interpret the profuse verbiage and proliferating scenery in these novels as being representative of time as history, which is the prison in which we all are inmates, from the point of view of the life-weary and the world-hating. With no reprieve possible, such tragically fated figures see themselves as being already as good as dead—the living dead—and they inhabit the allegorically haunted world as ghosts, experiencing a suffering existence, the meaning of which they can only guess. This is the hallucinatory limbo state in which we first encounter the ghoulish couple in Purdy’s first allegorical and tragic novel, 63: Dream Palace: “Why are we dead anyhow?” Parkhearst said, bored with the necessity of returning to this daily statement. “Is it because of our losing the people we loved or because the people we found were damned?” He laughed. One never mentioned the “real” things like this at Grainger’s, and here Parkhearst had done it, and nothing happened. Instead, Grainger listened as though hearing some two or three notes of an alto sax she recalled from the concerts she gave at her home. “This is the first time you said you were, Parkhearst. Dead,” she said in her clearest voice. He sat looking like a small rock that has been worked on by a swift but careless hammer. (122)

There is a crushing ennui and unrelenting gloom pervading 63: Dream Palace and other of Purdy’s tragedies. (There is a great deal of humor as well in these novels, as in all of Purdy’s work; but the mood of gloom prevails. Indeed, as in Shakespeare’s tragedies, the humor serves to deepen the darkness of the mood.) The lost figures in these novels are not so much in hopeless situations as they make every situation in which they find themselves hopeless by means of their self-ignorance and self-hatred—the origin of which, however, is often traceable to their stubborn and tragic adherence to the false values of the failed world in which they live. “Myself am Hell” might be their motto: they carry their doom with them and the ruined world is made to mirror their sorrow. These characters are obviously culpable, and yet childishly innocent. They don’t know why they act and feel as they do, and are bitter mysteries to themselves, as is the case with the murderous Fenton Riddleway in 63: Dream Palace: He wanted desperately to be rid of Claire and even as he had this feeling he felt more love and pity for him than ever before. As he sat there gazing at Claire, he knew he loved him more than any other being. He was almost

68 / alternative realisms sure that he would never feel such tenderness for any other person. And then this tenderness would be followed by fury and hatred and loathing, so that he was afraid he would do something violent, would strike the sick boy down and harm him. (164–165)

It is remarkable that, even when giving us such a clear foreshadowing, Purdy does not appear to be forcing his narrative hand. If his tragic characters are determined, it is not by their author so much as by their frustrated lives and desires, which pursue their own narrative logic of revenge. The grim conclusions to Purdy’s tragic novels include several of the most harrowing scenes I am aware of in modern literature—scenes of an intense physical and psychological violence that are truly painful to read. In such passages and novels, Purdy seems to have taken up the challenge laid down by one of his chief precursors, Oscar Wilde, who contended that, in terms of our understanding of the human psyche, literature has never allowed itself to become morbid enough (1055). In and through his tragic novels, Purdy pushed downwards into the depths of the human psyche— encountering gods and monsters—while holding tight to his allegorical lifeline. Steiner remarked of the capacity of allegory to venture into psychic realms that are generally unendurable: Only allegory, in that it makes substance totally significant, totally representative of ulterior meanings and, therefore, ‘unreal’ in itself, can render bearable an authentic perception of the infernal. (20)

When I taught Purdy’s late story, “Brawith,” which renders the remarkably graphic death of a young man from the lingering effects of nauseating war wounds, my undergraduate literature students insisted that it was both unrealistic (“that wouldn’t happen”) and altogether too real for comfort in its intense physicality. They had discovered the paradox that is allegorical signification. Purdy’s allegorical novels chart the psychological netherworld beyond the boundaries of rational causation and conscious motive, revealing details of the human situation and truths regarding our nature that we might prefer not to know or own.5 It is a sad commentary on the state of our literary sophistication in regards to reading contemporary allegory that Purdy’s painfully revealing tragic-allegorical novels were received by many reviewers as sensationalistic sadomasochistic romps. (One might try to imagine a contemporary medieval Italian critic making such a charge regarding Dante’s Inferno.) On the contrary, as Paul Binding points out in his insightful introduction to Eustace Chisholm and the Works: “The combination of nervous rhythm and classical precision in the writing should tell any sensitive reader that Purdy too is horrified by the violence he is depicting” (v–vi). Although


sometimes truly awful (in the old sense of the world—inspiring awe), these tragic novels are paradoxically affirmative in that they demonstrate that love is stronger than we are. So it is that Fenton Riddleway’s effort to be rid of his past life and self through the murder of his younger brother is doomed to be a failure, for Claire is fated to be his one true love, and will continue even in death to provide the meaning to his life, as love will ever do. Purdy’s tragic novels serve as excruciating and humbling testimony to the fact that, although we may go so far, even, as to kill others and ourselves in our effort to be rid of love, it is love (and its perversion: hatred) that determines our lives and selves. Purdy’s tragic novels were written, for the most part, in the middle period of his career, as his early work is dominated by the satires, and as the pastoral romances occupied his late period. These period boundaries are not fixed; the satirical and topical I am Elijah Thrush, for instance, was published in between the tragic historical novels, Eustace Chisholm and the Works and Jeremy’s Version; and the grim tragedy of Narrow Rooms was published directly after the pastoral romance of In a Shallow Grave, which is also dark, but darkly comic and hopeful. Purdy’s first three novels established the generic structures he would work with throughout his career: 63: Dream Palace is a tragedy, Malcolm is a satire, and The Nephew is a pastoral. Taken together, they function as a thematic overture to a remarkably rich and varied career in fiction. A rhetorical logic of argument is implicit in the progression from satire to tragedy to pastoral romance, as I suggested at the beginning of this section: the satires highlight the world’s failures, the tragedies lament its victims, and the pastoral romances posit a better world of the future. The theme of identity remains constant throughout and is tied in Purdy’s work to the issue of sexuality in general, and of homosexuality in particular. The attack in the satires on the assumption of an essentiality of identity is followed in the tragedies with an evocation of the sorrow and pain caused by an unwillingness to allow one’s natural instincts to find expression through an enabling version of the social and psychological self—the effect being that natural and ennobling love is perverted into the scourge of a demeaning and demented self-hatred. The pastoral romances, in turn, portray figures who are typically psychologically and sexually various and ambiguous, refusing to limit themselves through an adherence to societal roles and stereotypes. This refusal is paralleled by the author’s refusal to allow the effect of inhibiting societal strictures to ruin his pastoral characters’ lives. The later romances of In a Shallow Grave, Garments the Living Wear, and Out with the Stars all take place behind the pastoral boundary, which ensures that whatever the reality of the world “out there,” these figures will be allowed


to pursue their desires unhindered by anything other than the natural failure of those desires to ensure response from the beloved, and of the ability of the desiring figure to remain constant in his emotion. For Eros is the most elusive of spirits, as Purdy’s romantic protagonists testify. I emphasize the pastoral nature of these late romances not only because of the traditional affiliation of the pastoral mode with homosexual desire, and because of the novels’ many pastoral elements and references, but also because of the utopian nature of pastoral-allegorical argument, which the novels demonstrate. Wolfgang Iser noted in his study of pastoral romance that “the artificial pastoral foreground relates simultaneously to an ideal state and to a historical world, but always in such a way that the latter is refracted as the reorganization of the former. The historical world also appears both as what it is and what it ought to be” (48). Iser points out the innate revolutionary and utopian political nature of pastoral artifice, which implicitly condemns the world as we know it, while explicitly envisioning a better world of the future. The allegorical “double-vision” of the pastoral ensures that the historical world is not denied in favor of some never-land; rather it is present in the felt vulnerability of the pastoral realm and landscape. The vulnerability of Garnet Montrose, the first-person war-veteran narrator of In a Shallow Grave, the first of Purdy’s late romances, is made all too evident by his unhealed wounds from Vietnam: When I was blown up, all my veins and arteries moved from the inside where they belong to the outside so that as the army doc put it, I have been turned inside out in all respects. (73)

Garnet’s war wounds are such that he almost literally wears his heart on his sleeve, and he is so “touchy” that his flesh “all falls away at the slightest pressure, exposing the bones” (30). An allegorical-pastoral figure par excellence, Garnet is fittingly and humorously preoccupied with writing love letters to his old high school sweetheart, who lives conveniently just down the road. As letter messenger and general go-between, he employs a beautiful young wayfarer, Potter Daventry, whose origins on a sheepfarm, “hillbilly, sort of goat voice” (36), and remarkable talent with the mouth-organ—“He made it sound almost like a flute” (96)—alert us to his pastoral-allegorical allegiance with the Great God Pan. Garnet himself gradually becomes convinced of Daventry’s immortal origins, “When he played the harmonica I knew he was not human,” and concludes, “I knew then there was god, and that Daventry had been sent for me, and I knew also he would leave me . . . but he wished me to be left in a safe quiet place” (97). The difficulty is that Garnet, like the forlorn shepherd in Virgil’s Ninth Eclogue, is about to be forced off of his land, which, like


the fields and forests of Arcadia, border the ocean. Through the intercession of a last-supper-like ceremony in which he sheds and shares his blood, Daventry miraculously saves the property (healing Garnet’s worst wounds in the process), and then is promptly killed by a “terrible wind” that freakishly returns this unlikely “will-o’-the wist” spirit to the landscape from which he first emerged: “He was mashed into that tree as though he belonged in it, and his arms was stretched out as if he would enfold me” (128). Purdy called In a Shallow Grave a “religious” novel (Canning 18). In the character of Potter Daventry, he links the figures of the Good Shepherd, Christ, and the Great God Pan in a strangely moving union that revivifies the mythical-allegorical image of both. In a Shallow Grave is also a homosexual (or at least homosocial) coming out novel, as the love of Garnet and his young black servant and friend, Quintus, is enabled by the god-in-life figure of Daventry. Frye noted that, in Shakespeare’s comedies and romances, a transformation in the protagonists’ identity that results in a transformation in society (from one of intolerance to one of acceptance) is enabled “by an Eros figure who brings about the comic conclusion” (A Natural Perspective 82). There is an enabling Eros figure such as Potter Daventry in each of Purdy’s late romances. The progress of love in these novels is opposed by oppressive elements in the world at large, which are overcome in miraculous fashion with semidivine aid. In In a Shallow Grave, Garnet, Daventry, and Quintus must contend with the inherited history of racial divide and hatred, as well as with the lingering ravages of war, class distinctions and the threatening state apparatus; while in Garments the Living Wear, the scourge of AIDS threatens the life and happiness of the central gay couple—until it is banished (at least temporarily) by the Prospero of that magic-filled novel, Mr. Hennings—a fabulously wealthy and powerful international financier, who also is politically revolutionary and sexually ambidextrous, and is crowding one hundred years of age. At one point in a narrative that is punctuated by theatrical speeches, tearful confessions, and bitter harangues, Mr. Hennings delivers an impromptu oration to a gay audience mobilized by the AIDS epidemic, in which he identifies the disease as yet another manifestation of oppression of homosexuals: “We, of all people, cannot now be dismayed for long by the virus of pest or plague. We have too intimately known the virus of the power of state and church, directed against us and aided by the venal and coprophagous press and hoi polloi of the mob!” (65). In the novel Out with the Stars, it is a vengeful heterosexuality itself—in the figure of a pair of jealous wives—that threatens the happiness and fulfillment of homosexually and artistically inclined figures. Out with the Stars is perhaps Purdy’s most tender novel (rivaled in sentiment only by the remarkably poised and poignant early pastoral The


Nephew). It is the novel in which Purdy represents most directly the fertile relationship between love and art, a thematic pastoral mainstay. The young composer Val Sturgis cannot salvage either of his two doomed love affairs, but he can make beautiful song of them, proving himself the natural heir of Theocritus’s lovelorn Cyclops, “So Polyphemus shepherded his love by singing / And found more relief than if he had paid out gold” (93). The novel serves as an affecting pastoral elegy for one of Purdy’s early friends and supporters, the novelist and photographer Carl Van Vechten (figured as “the leading hedonist of his day” (110)), who—early on in his long career of championing gay artists of genius on the literary margins—succeeded in arranging for the publication in America of the work of Firbank—a pioneering gay pastoral novelist whose humorous influence may be detected in Purdy’s late work, particularly in the most outrageously mannered of the novels, Garments the Living Wear. (On the brink of a riot, one of the novel’s Firbankian characters “found an old bottle of V.S.O.P. brandy and put just a few drops on his tongue, and a dash more on his temples” (124).) Out With the Stars also serves as an homage to the great gay composer and cultural catalyst, Virgil Thomson—another friend of the author and champion of his work. In its multiple figurings of the individual as artist, Out With the Stars serves as an extended improvisation on a favorite pastoral theme, while functioning as a complex meditation on the role of the gay artist in contemporary society. In its various openly affectionate but also critically acute portraits of the gifted artist in battle with an uncomprehending, bigoted, distracted, and superstitious society, Out with the Stars shines a discerning light backwards on the often psychologically difficult and painful novels that came before, and serves as a fictive explanation and accounting for the whole of Purdy’s art, and for the artist in general, in his natural and necessarily antagonistic relationship with the world around him. The pastoral has long been a refuge and tool of gay artists, serving, as it does, as an implicit critique of an oppressing world, without engaging in an outright argument. Equally as important, however, it allows the artist to imagine a world that is different from the reality we know, without indulging in the pyrrhic victory of wish-fulfillment. Rather, in typical allegorical fashion, the pastoral qualifies its vision by admitting the presence of the oppressing other, although that other is not allowed to triumph. The pastoral does not tell us that its version of reality is life as it is, but, rather, life as it might or ought to be. The presence of death in the pastoral realm—et in Arcadia ego (I also am in Arcadia)—is a vivid reminder of the mutability of all such visions of the triumph of the pastoral virtues of friendship, art, and love. Each of Purdy’s pastoral romances is centered upon the death of one or more of its key figures. The persistent presence of death serves to


enhance the preciousness of life itself. It also works to prevent a giving way to sentimentality. In his remarks on the conclusions to Shakespeare’s comedies and romances, Frye distinguished between a regressive and infantilizing sentimentality, which leads us back to our “subjective childhoods,” and a pastoral-romantic envisioning, “where the return is not to childhood but to a state of innocence symbolized by childhood” that looks forward to a world to come (A Natural Perspective 132). Frye noted that Shakespeare’s comedies and late romances always conclude with such a vision, in which they invite us to participate (A Natural Perspective 159). Quilligan further observed that allegories work in a manner similar to the social resolutions of comedy, in both of which “the language of the work of art manage[s] to involve its audience with its vision” (289). Both allegory and comedy conclude by reaching out to us as reader and audience, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) urging us to change our lives and to transform out world: “What is presented to us must be possessed by us,” as Frye remarked (A Natural Perspective 159). The lesson of Purdy’s allegorical pastorals, and of his allegorical fiction in general, is that, while we cannot change our nature, we can change our world. The implications of allegory are both humbling and enabling. With its emphasis upon the ultimate provisionality and fictionality of all language and knowledge, it insists that we are not in ultimate control of our existence; and yet, paradoxically, by demonstrating the complex uses of language, and the power of fictive models, it demonstrates the potential of language and power of knowledge for shaping our world. Allegory thus works both to disenchant and to re-enable. Historians and theorists of allegory in the West note that its first golden age as a critical tool (allegoresis) coincided with the demise of myth as religion, when the Greek myths came to be interpreted in the language of philosophy, psychology, and science (Whitman 9–10). The demise of myth as religion—as natural reality, we might say—also saw the development of allegory as a fictive form, with the creation of the pastoral, the mode that first “thematizes the act of fictionalizing, enabling literary fictionality to be perceived” (Iser 24). The mannered pastoral proclaims its artificiality, calling attention to its fictional status. The demise of the pastoral, and of allegory in general, in the West coincided with the establishment of science as certain truth, and with the Reformation’s insistence upon the transparent and singular, literal and historical truth of scripture. Iser observed: “It seems plausible that pastoral poetry lost its place of importance at the moment when the function of literary fictionality no longer needed to be exhibited” (24–25). As we emerge slowly and painfully from the enchantment of science as certain


truth—which the committed allegorist William Blake famously labeled “Newton’s Sleep”—and struggle to throw off the stultifying superstitions of fundamentalism, it is perhaps inevitable that allegory has begun to reemerge as a fictive mode and method—one that endorses a pluralistic approach to both text and world. In the political and social realm of today, the debate between a fundamentalist essentialism and an allegorical pluralism is being played out most explicitly in terms of human sexual desire and individual identity. Purdy’s focus upon these issues places his fiction at the crux of this debate, and it is his very relevance to these most painful and problematic of contemporary arguments, I believe, that has relegated his work to the literary and cultural margins in our time, but which will ensure its survival as a central body of texts in our future.

Ch a p t e r Fou r S om e I m ag i na ry Vi e n na: Rona ld Fi r ba n k’s Pa stor a l R e a lism

Modernist novelist Ronald Firbank has proved an elusive subject for literary criticism. One recent commentator aptly noted that past critics have often seemed to think that the “frivolity” of Firbank’s fiction “supports a surface so slight it cannot withstand the rigor of critical reading” (Lane, “Re/Orientations” 176–177). E. M. Forster set the tone for such a response when he wrote that the task of critically analyzing Firbank’s fiction is akin to breaking a butterfly upon a wheel (109). Our usual habits of reading certainly have not prepared us to consider Firbank in a critical fashion. The questions that we are accustomed to ask of naturalistic mimetic fiction are lost on him. We have traditionally looked for a novel’s argument in its narrative progress, character development, and authorial exposition. Firbank’s narratives progress in an almost arbitrary manner, in which reliance on plot is reduced to a minimum; his characters are finished at conception, and although they are continually striking psychologically revealing poses, they do not analyze themselves or seek to make of the reader a confessor; while Firbank as author absolutely refuses to adopt a self-conscious and subjective manner, avoiding nearly all commentary on the material he is presenting, and inviting none from the reader, who is consequently forced to swallow Firbank’s novels whole, or not at all. Firbank’s refusal to struggle with the material in his fiction and to implicate the reader in that struggle make him an iconoclastic Modernist and may help to account for the tendency of earlier literary critics to dismiss his work as marginal, or to react to that work in a hostile manner. The tone of Anthony Powell’s 1961 “Introduction” to The Complete Ronald Firbank is indicative of the temporization and condescension with which critics past mid-century were inclined to approach this elusive author: “It would be a mistake to claim too much. Ronald Firbank’s range is limited; his narrative devious; his characterisation stylised” (11).


More favorable early criticism was focused upon Firbank’s innovations in narrative technique. Among the next generation of English novelists, writers as diverse as Powell, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Henry Green pointed to Firbank as an early and crucial influence. Evelyn Waugh’s first novels owe an especial debt to Firbank’s perfection of a peculiarly modernist brand of comic concision. With his characteristic critical acuity, V. S. Pritchett summed up the matter of the far-reaching influence of Firbank’s shorthand narrative manner: It is a simple fact that technically Firbank cleared dead wood out of the English novel, in one or two convulsive laughs . . . If narrative and speech have speeded up, if we can swing out of one episode into another, without an awful grinding of literary gears, if we can safely let characters speak for themselves and then fail to keep up a conversation, if we can create an emotion by describing something else, it is in part due to Firbank’s frantic driving. (545)

Firbank’s reputation reached its qualified height with the full-blown success of his literary inheritors (stylistically speaking) in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1949 literary arbiter Edmund Wilson pronounced of Firbank that “he was one of the finest English writers of his period and one of those most likely to become a classic” (486). That remains to be seen. As for now, “In official academic studies of modernism, Firbank has no standing” (227), as critic Robert Caserio recently lamented. In the last several years, however, the tide may have begun to turn in the author’s favor, as critics working in and around Gay and Lesbian studies have sought to rescue Firbank from critical neglect. Firbank was a pioneering homosexual novelist who courageously fashioned unapologetic novels around unabashed homosexual characters in the teens and twenties, when the English-speaking literary world was still recoiling from the Oscar Wilde scandal. And he is perhaps unique among English writers of his period in his insistence on treating homosexuality as merely another facet of the social carnival. This is one of the several ways in which he is surprisingly similar to his French contemporary, Marcel Proust. The quality and usefulness of more recent approaches to Firbank (which are within the purview, generally, of Gay and Lesbian studies, but influenced by a variety of contemporary theoretical schools) is highly mixed. In several disheartening cases, Firbank is made the victim of narrowminded standards of contemporary critical correctness. In one account he is accused of being an immature homosexual, a pederast incapable of adult love (Kopelson),1 and in another he is labeled a racist, an unwitting expositor of his class, ethnicity, and time (Lane, “Re/Orientations” 183–184).

some imaginary vienna / 77

Future generations of critics and readers will—one hopes—regard with appropriate irony such examples of critical intolerance wielded in the service of equality and inclusion. More imaginative critical analysis has made substantive contributions to our contemporary understanding of this neglected novelist. In a useful essay, Jonathan Goldman considered Firbank’s trademark “frivolity” from a deconstructionist perspective as a prime example of the inherent elusiveness at play in any language, but most provokingly in that employed by imaginative literature (292). From a related sociopolitical viewpoint, William Lane Clark contended that Firbank’s “camp” fiction attempts to elude all trace of societal restrictiveness and definition by refusing to admit of a distinction between society’s key organizing principles of respectability and degeneracy (137).2 Both Goldman and Clark emphasize manners in which Firbank frustrates attempts at traditional interpretation and ascription of meaning. Yet both manage to pin the Firbankian butterfly (154)—in Clark’s clever rendition of the Forster metaphor—by looking for alternative contexts in which Firbank’s various refusals of meaning may be usefully situated and interpreted. In what follows, I pursue a similar policy of recontextualization by attempting to understand Firbank outside of the standard fictional models and genres. Most modern fiction can be categorized as belonging in one fashion or another to our inherited tradition of mimetic realism, which is in many respects a fictional variation on the original epic model supplied by classical and Biblical traditions. In the ancient world another tradition arose in direct response and opposition to the dominant epic model: the pastoral. It is to this alternative and opposing pastoral tradition that Firbank’s fiction most truly belongs, and it is within the context of its principles and practice that his novels attain their fullest and most resonant meaning. In order to appreciate Firbank’s success and significance as a novelist, we have to resurrect the conventions, limitations, and expectations of a neglected literary mode. Firbank and the Pastoral Mode: “Do What Thou Wilt Is Here the Law” The aspects of Firbank’s novels that are most confusing and off-putting to contemporary readers and critics are pastoral in nature. His focus on the incidentals of landscape, atmosphere, and scenery; and his persistent inattention to the traditional novelistic elements of plot and character are indicative of the pastoral’s programmatic debunking of epic values and conventions.


The earliest pastoral writers in the classical tradition, the third-century BC Greek Alexandrian poets working in the shadow of Homer and Sophocles, attempted to open up a new field of imaginative endeavor. The Alexandrian poets, of which Theocritus, the purported progenitor of the pastoral, is the most famous, were creating in an acutely selfconscious literary atmosphere. The famous Alexandrian library of Ptolemy Philadelphus was busy at that time gathering together and cataloguing all of the surviving Greek texts from Homer onwards. In the illuminating “Introduction” to his translations of Theocritus’ Idylls, contemporary English poet Robert Wells comments, “The Alexandrian poets face the problem of what to select from the past with great deliberateness. In making their choices they concentrate on narrowly literary goals and avoid giving an explicit moral or philosophical dimension to their writing” (22). Theocritus, like his older model and contemporary, Callimachus—and his late heir, Firbank—“likes to come at his subject from unexpected and constantly varying directions, to surprise by little refinements of style, to break up a narrative by passing lightly over the main action and making much of lesser incidents, to keep the reader always conscious of a process of selection, of a taste that veers away from the grand, the hackneyed and the popular” (Wells 38). It is instructive to compare Wells’ translation of a Theocritan “Idyll” to a passages from a Firbank novel. Consider the playfully offhand manner in which Theocritus handles the dialogue between two herdsmen, Battus and Corydon, in “Idyll Four” (I have added quotation marks in keeping with the comparison to modern fiction): “Corydon, who do these cows belong to? Philondas?” “They’re Ageon’s herd. He gave me them to graze.” “And perhaps at dusk you milk them on the quiet?” “The old man watches and brings their calves to suck.” “So their master has disappeared! Where’s he gone?” “To Olympia, with Milon. Didn’t you know?” “The Games! Since when has he been keen on sport?” “They say he’s a proper Heracles in the ring.” “And I’m a Pollux! or so my mother says.” “He went off with his dumb-bells and twenty sheep.” “Rabid wolves in the fold would have done less harm.” “Listen to the cows lowing. They miss their master.” “Poor beasts! The worse for them if he’s neglectful.” “It’s pitiful! They haven’t the heart to graze.” (69–70)

This is the idyll’s introductory passage, and it is typical of Theocritus’s allusive, and elusive, manner that we begin in the middle, as it were, of an established scene and relationship.


Firbank’s narratives routinely proceed in a similarly breezy fashion, as in this dialogue between two society matrons in Caprice: “You must have been out to supper.” “It’s true I had. Oh, it was a merry meal.” “Who gave it?” “Dore Davis did: to meet her betrothed—Sir Francis Four.” “What’s he like?” “Don’t ask me. It makes one tired to look at him.” “Was it a party?” “Nothing but literary-people with their Beatrices . . . My dear the scum! Half-way through supper Dore got her revolver out and began shooting the glass drops off her chandelier.” “I should like to see her trousseau,” Mrs. Sixsmith sighed. “It isn’t up to much. Anything good she sells—on account of bailiffs.” (392)

Both writers create a world through allusion and implication in which tone is all-important and characters and actions are reduced to vehicles for the maintaining of a mood or attitude. What is being said, and by whom, is less important than the manner in which one is speaking, and the atmosphere created. Pritchett’s concise and insightful characterization of Firbank’s novels aptly describes Theocritus’ Idylls as well, “The comedy is in the inconsequence; the poetry in the evanescence; the tragedy in the chill of loneliness and desolation which will suddenly strike in a random word” (546). In the Theocritus passage, any sense of tragedy is comically consigned to the masterless cows; but the simple cowherds seem genuinely to sympathize with the animals’ feelings of dislocation and neglect. In the Firbank passage a sense of the tragic is evident in Mrs. Sixsmith’s hopeless sighing as she enviously imagines the obviously upper-class (though momentarily impoverished) bride’s trousseau. In both writers, the tragedies of life are noted, but not dwelt upon. The famous lightheartedness of the pastoral might be thought of as consolation for a sense of the tragic in life that, far from being imperfect or undeveloped, is all too keenly felt. Although the pastoral is characteristically lighthearted, it is not unserious. Rather it is implicitly striving to undermine the overly serious and moralistic in the service of individual temperament and freedom. The pursuit of unfettered desires is the object and occupation of all legitimate pastoral figures. In times of societal repression (and what society is not repressive, in one form or another?), the pastoral is inevitably resurrected as a means for giving life to individual dreams and desires. Firbank, who was a homosexual in a time when, following the Wilde scandal, it was not safe to be so openly, either in life or art, found in the


pastoral an imaginative safe haven in which to create his own—or a temperamental character’s—version of heaven. In one novel, an aging lesbian “biographer” courts a vapid but alluring teenage girl as they travel through Greece together. In another an “eccentric” Spanish cardinal is in pursuit of an elusive and all-too-worldly altar-boy. In a novel set on a fictionalized Caribbean island, a native country woman moves to the capital in order to pursue her dream of entering polite European society. And in yet another, a bored society woman in London pursues sainthood—or at least the appearance of it—by arranging to place her larger-than-life portrait in an impoverished rural cathedral’s stained-glass window. In the world of the pastoral every wayward temperament is allowed to pursue its desire, although not always successfully. Firbank’s overwhelming desire was to be a successful novelist, but the novels he created were considered unmarketable by English publishers. Except for one late novel published at their own expense by Brentano’s in America (at the helpful suggestion of Carl Van Vechten, that great champion of literary margins), Firbank was forced to underwrite each of his novel’s publication, a state of affairs that he found both demoralizing and demeaning. But his inherited wealth, and the novels’ lack of popular success, served to assure his creative freedom. Firbank’s fiction is proof of the pastoral’s enduring appeal. Recent theorists have argued persuasively that the pastoral should be recognized as one of the universal “types of literature—like tragedy, comedy, novel, romance, satire, and elegy—which have generic-sounding names but which are more inclusive and general than genres proper” (Alpers 46). They contend that the pastoral is an undying mode of literature (the term I have been using), which takes on different characteristics in different times and cultures. Despite these “different images and nomenclature,” the “relationships and values” of the pastoral remain constant (Ettin 69). In whatever manifestation, the pastoral is an attitude toward life that favors freedom over responsibility, leisure over labor, retirement over engagement, desire over sublimation, friendship over family, the past over the future, and art above all. At its heart, the pastoral has a vision of an idealized past world, which is sometimes labeled The Golden Age, Arcadia, or Eden. It is significantly different from a future utopian world, and is dreamed of by a different type of temperament, as W. H. Auden explains in this useful distinction: The psychological difference between the Arcadian dreamer and the Utopian dreamer is that the backward-looking Arcadian knows that his expulsion from Eden is an irrevocable fact and that his dream, therefore, is a wish-dream which cannot become real . . . The forward-looking Utopian, on the other hand, necessarily believes that his New Jerusalem is a dream which ought to be realized. (Dyer’s Hand 410)


Unlike the hardworking Utopian, the pastoral Arcadian does not hold himself responsible for the realization of his dream. His only responsibility is to do what he pleases, to follow the natural course of his desire, and to make no demands on others that are not directly related to the pursuit of his desire. Anything that hinders an individual’s pursuit of pleasure is a snake in his garden, and spells the end of Eden-Arcadia. In the actual world, the pastoral is all too often a dream-fiction, as Auden points out. However, the pastoral is frequently employed by writers in a quasi-utopian manner as a wishful reminder of where they have been (in their dreams), and where they would like to be again, in reality, if the world somehow (here the pure pastoralist is at a loss) could be made different. Although the practical efforts required to actually change the world are beyond the (pure) pastoralist’s will and ability, his task is still a vital one, as he strives to keep alive the dream of innocent pleasure.3 In the pastoral realm, there are no artificial restrictions against desire. That is its primary appeal for the homosexual such as Firbank in a repressive heterosexual society. It offers an imaginative safe haven, a place where one may be entirely at home in one’s natural or chosen identity. Anything, such as labor, family ties, or social responsibility, that would impinge on the pleasure of mere being is restricted from this world. The creation and appreciation of art, which is perfectly useless and free, together with the pursuit of sexual pleasure for pleasure’s sake (never for procreation, which leads to responsibility), are the primary occupations of traditional pastoral figures, who spend the majority of their time in various states of contemplative repose, “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade,” as Marvell famously put it (101). The assumptions and conditions of the modern world work to discredit traditional pastoral values. Our modern obsessions with scientific progress, social improvement, and provable fact run counter to the inclinations of the pastoral toward a retreat into a world of private imagination, in which there is no distinction to be made between reality and artifice. The dominant literary mode of the last two centuries, naturalistic mimesis, reflects our interest in the actual and the natural, which we collectively assume to be true, and our distrust of the artificial, which has become synonymous with fake, false. Our insistence on the presence of a provable, or at least likely, reality in our most highly valued literature serves to limit authors who would be taken seriously to portrayals of demonstrable experience. Such writers are necessarily naturalistic, and it could be argued that within the canon of accepted major novelists of the last two hundred years, there are no primarily nonnaturalistic authors. The pastoral writer, who is committed to creating visions of artificial innocence in implicit opposition to our


knowledge of experience, is automatically excluded, and branded unserious, self-indulgent, and negligible. Firbank has suffered more than most other writers from our time’s inclination toward mimetic naturalism in literature because his work is more wholly and purely pastoral. As might be expected, his most ardent literary defenders have been those writers and critics who have taken exception to modern literature’s dominance by naturalistic mimesis In her enormous, eccentric, and enlightening biography, Brigid Brophy argued that Firbank “is the novelist who freed fiction from naturalism, or to be exact, freed it again in the twentieth century” (xiv). Early in his career, Waugh likewise contended that Firbank’s antinaturalism enabled him to be “the first quite modern writer to solve for himself . . . the aesthetic problem of representation in fiction; to achieve, that is to say, a new, balanced interrelation of subject and form” in which one need not adhere to the naturalistic novel idea of a “succession of events in an arbitrarily limited period of time” (qtd. in Brophy 98). The pastoral “illusion” of time as “unending duration” (Ettin 141) inevitably undermines the naturalistic notion of the relationship of time to cause and effect. Firbank’s pure pastoralism separates him, as well, from most other homosexual writers of the past century, who tended to employ the pastoral mode in a more or less implicit polemical fashion by including a pastoral inset or viewpoint in an otherwise naturalistic work. I am thinking of writers like Forster, Willa Cather, James Merrill, and Elizabeth Bishop. Forster’s Italy, Cather’s western prairie, Merrill’s Sandover, and Bishop’s Brazil are all privileged spaces to which one withdraws in memory and imagination, and which serve to upbraid the modern world at large for its self-serving notion of material and spiritual progress linked. For each of these writers, the withdrawal to the privileged pastoral space or viewpoint takes place within the context of the work itself, thereby highlighting the disparity between the pastoral ideal and the locations we actually inhabit day in and day out, both in fact and fiction. With Firbank’s fiction, by contrast, we enter the pastoral realm as we enter the novel and remain there until the novel is complete. Brophy contends that “Firbank’s is a single fictional world, of which each of his fictions is a fragment” (207). Although there is a tendency in his novels to move from the city to the country, or vice versa, with a coinciding moral implicit in the choice—the country being a better choice for the pastoral than the city—it is nevertheless the case that all of his fiction inhabits what Firbank himself described as “some imaginary Vienna” (qtd. in Brophy 569). In his Paris Review interview, Auden commented that Firbank was one of his favorite modern novelists because he deals “with Eden” (265), the Christian mythic pastoral realm. He elaborated in a critical essay in which


he defined Eden as “a past world in which the contradictions of the present world have not yet arisen” (409). Earlier in the century, Forster had contended that Firbank belongs to the “ fin de siecle, as it used to be called . . . to the nineties and the Yellow Book” (112), thus consigning Firbank’s fictional world to the boundaries of a passing age in literature and art. Auden was the more perceptive in seeing that Firbank uses all historical material in the service of the re-creation of that great and good place that is our childhood and mythic home, as well as the location of our cultural origins. In his diffident “Introduction” to The Complete Ronald Firbank, Powell wondered why Firbank “should continue to be reprinted, when all kind of apparently worthier figures sink into oblivion?” He concluded that Firbank’s “daydream is a more popular one than might on the surface be expected” (10)—providing an insightful answer to his begrudging question. The pastoral daydream seems to be a part of our very nature. In his historical study of Bucolic poetry, David Halperin argues that the pastoral as an imaginative locus “has existed from time immemorial—it was not invented” (85). Auden’s definition of Eden as a place “where its inhabitants may do whatever they like to do; the motto over its gate is ‘Do what thou wilt is here the Law’ ” (Dyer’s Hand 409) is useful in understanding the enduring appeal of the pastoral mode in literature, particularly to those whose innate desires are denied by society at large, such as homosexuals in the modern world. By tradition, the pastoral mode has offered a haven to homosexual desire. Ettin commented that, in the Greek and Latin pastorals written and inspired by Theocritus and Virgil, “homosexual romantic and erotic relationships . . . are usually accepted as if they were normative, or at least quite as normal as heterosexual” (148–149). Poggioli, likewise, observed that the pastoral mode arises inevitably as a protest from those “excluded from the privileges of free love” (61). In his fictional world, Firbank proves himself an ardent exponent of free love in refusing to distinguish between needs and desires. “Reason not the need” might be the humorously self-serving motto of his pastoral figures. At the same time, Firbank recognizes that desire, given free reign, has a pronounced tendency to enslave, so that we may be never less free than when doing exactly as we please. No less than Proust, though in a far different manner, Firbank gives us in his fiction an elaborately detailed anatomy of human desire. Society’s narrowing prejudices and laws, which serve to limit the free operation of desire, are necessarily kept outside of the boundary of his work. Although Firbank’s fiction as a whole serves as a protest against discrimination and oppression, it does not address such issues directly. True to the cowherd nature of the pastoral, the novelist avoids a fight, although he is full of complaints.


While adhering to the conventions and spirit of the pastoral mode in refusing to make explicit his argument against oppression and limitation, Firbank is in danger of being misread by the modern reader who is unacquainted with the pastoral mode of implicit argumentation. It is the modern reader’s failure to recognize Firbank’s passionate but implicit argument that is at least partially responsible for the neglect of novels that are as wise and comprehensive in their appraisal of human desire—in its endless variety of manifestations and frustrations—as any body of work of the century. Firbank’s Pastoral Daydreams: “Just Because I Want So Much, It’s Extraordinary How Little I Require” The pastoral daydream, like all dreams, tends to be both wish-fulfilling and anxiety-laden. While it is true that individuals in the pastoral are free to pursue their desires wherever they may lead them, it is also the case that most love affairs in the pastoral realm are unrequited. In Inclinations, Firbank presents us with the story of the love of an older woman for a younger woman, who—true to pastoral form—is barely more than a child, at fifteen. Still, she is quite old enough to break her lover’s heart in using her to her own ends of getting out of the house and finding a husband. The older woman, the “Biographer” Geraldine O’Brookomore, is preparing to travel to Greece in order to pursue research on her latest subject (all of whom tend to resemble herself), when she is accosted by the irrepressible Mabel Collins: “What would I not give,” she said, “to go with you!” Slightly startled, Miss O’Brookomore took from a cardboard box a cigarette. “Supposing . . .” “ . . . supposing?” “Supposing—I only say ‘supposing’—supposing you were to accompany me to Greece . . .” Sparkling, Miss Collins rose. “Only at the thought,” she cried, “I could clap my feet in the air.” The Biographer considered her. Dark against the brilliance. “My chief amusement,” she explained, “has always been to exchange ideas with someone. And to receive new ones in return.” (208)

It doesn’t take long, however, for Miss O’Brookomore to discover that Mabel Collins has very few ideas of her own, although she is more than willing to offer an endless patter of inanities. On the train to Marseilles, for instance: Miss Collins covered her face with a soiled suede glove. “Another tunnel!”

some imaginary vienna / 85 “You should really rest, Mab. You’ll arrive so tired.” “I’m that already. But I won’t lean back—for fear of contracting something . . . infectious.” “Some day, dear, I may arrange your sayings in a wreath . . .” “Our coachman once—” “No, please—I’m altogether incurious.” (220–221)

But Miss O’Brookomore is, nevertheless, entirely smitten with her young companion, who also manages to incite the interest of a “Count Pastorelli” on the boat to Athens. Miss O’Brookomore warns, “Take my word for it . . . he’s not so pastoral as he sounds” (222) and her pronouncement is proven true as the Count proceeds to press that most unpastoral of arrangements—marriage—upon a foolish and susceptible, but entirely self-interested Mabel Collins. The Count pursues the two women on their travels throughout Greece: to Parnassos, which is “literally overrun” with sheepdogs (231); to Arcady, where the “food is vile” (245) and where the “continual singing of the cicadas require some excluding” (266); to Delphi, where Miss O’Brookomore is “all veins and moods, whims and foibles” (271); and finally to Olympia, which is “nothing but cliques and coteries” (277), and from whence the Count at last succeeds in making off with Mabel Collins. Miss O’Brookomore responds with a lament that wholly constitutes chapter twenty: “Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel!” (290)

In her anguish, Miss O’Brookomore has forgotten her pseudo-pastoral advice to Mabel that it is best in life to be “an Indifferentist” (273). On the contrary, Miss O’Brookomore has allowed herself to become enamored of a foolish girl whom she cannot even bring herself to respect, and whose company she can barely tolerate. The free operation of desire in the pastoral realm would often seem to amount to possessing the absolute liberty to be one’s own worst enemy. Miss O’Brookomore pays the emotional price for a pastoral devotion to the pursuit of her desires. Although she is made miserable by her frustrated desire, Firbank qualifies her sadness in the second half of the novel, which is set in the decaying country house owned by Mabel’s family, in which the various inhabitants lead trivial lives in the service of keeping up suburban appearances. “What is it?” “Nothing. In the afternoon the yew-trees turn quite blue.” “The quietness . . . You can almost hear the clouds go by.” “Let’s all lie down on the grass as if we were dead.” “It’s too hot for rough games.” (303)


Miss O’Brookomore’s love for Mabel had been wholly unsuitable according to society’s standards—Mabel’s mother comments, “Had I known what sort of a woman she was! But living as we do one never hears a thing.” (300)—but it had been nevertheless a true and ardent emotion, as expressive as any shepherd’s complaint. Mabel, on the other hand, has devoted herself to a life devoid of significant emotional attachment, suitable or not. The emotionally frigid, decidedly unpastoral nature of her marriage of appearances to Count Pastorelli is enforced in the closing scenes of the novel, in which she receives word of his rare visit to her and her family. “O-o-o-o-o-o-h!” “It’s her ladyship’s cry.” “You’d think Great Pan was dead again—at least.” “Very likely it’s her husband’s handwriting that affects her.” (327)

Even Great Pan, that uninhibited pastoral deity, is no match for the sterile vacuity of a suburban Edwardian drawing room, as Firbank’s contemporary Forster illustrated repeatedly in his novels and stories. In his highly idiosyncratic and humorously subversive manner, Firbank is no less an enemy of the ever-encroaching malady of the quotidian. For Firbank, all sexual preferences are equally enslaving and enlightening. What we know of ourselves, we know through desire. His insistence on the self-determining quality of desire allows him to escape the trap that Michel Foucault, among others, identified as the modern compulsion to search for the truth of the self in one’s innermost sexuality (69). Firbank’s refusal to delve below the surface of his characters’ words and actions in search of motives and complexes is a refusal to play the game of essentials that is at the heart of the modern mania with uncovering the truth of sexuality. For Firbank, appearance is essence. Powell remarked that Firbank’s fiction is “almost absolutely uninhibited” (12), which is perhaps another way of saying that Firbank does not distinguish between appearance and essence, between desire and necessity. Firbank presents a world in which one’s desire is the ground of one’s being. What one wants is the very thing, and the only thing, that one has. This has long been recognized as a Proustian dictum, but it is Firbankian as well. Although all desires are enslaving, some are less painful than others. Firbank in his fiction is repeatedly drawn to the pastoral desire for retirement and retreat. His particular affection is reserved for those characters who, having been frustrated and abused by the world at large, have chosen to withdraw into a private world that is more amenable, if less engaging. In his first published novel, Vainglory, we are given a cast of characters in various stages of retreat. There is Lord Susan, who “was sick, so everyone said,


of the world at three-and-twenty” (6); and Mrs. Henedge, a Bishop’s widow, who seems to have “deserted this century for—she had hardly settled which” (6), and who ends by retreating into the arms of the Church of Rome. Then there is the actress, Miss Compostella, who complains that “the effort to look more or less like one’s photograph is becoming such a strain,” and who longs “to go away somewhere and be ugly quietly for a week” (18–19). But the major figure of the novel is the politician’s wife, Mrs. Shamefoot (Firbank’s names are always telling), who, having been more or less abandoned by her husband in favor of his career, has adopted as the goal of her aimless existence the erection of a “commemorative window to herself” in a rural cathedral. “Mentally, perhaps, she was already three parts glass . . . It was the Egyptian sighing for his pyramid, of course” (20). She models her life, in a loose way, on that of a locally celebrated sixteenth-century figure, Mrs. Cresswell, who “no doubt . . . would have been canonised, but for an unfortunate remark . . . ‘If we are all a part of God . . . then God must indeed be horrible’ ” (95). The quasi-saint committed to posterity a “somewhat saturnine little song” that is adopted as the novel’s anthem: “I am disgusted with Love. I find it exceedingly disappointing, Mine is a nature that cries for more ethereal things, Banal passions fail to stir me. I am disgusted with Love.” “How heavenly she is!” “Such an amusing rhythm—” “I do so enjoy the bypaths,” Mrs. Shamefoot said, “of poetry. Isn’t there any more?” “No I believe that’s all.” “Of course her words condemn her.” “But that she should have arrived at a state of repugnance, possibly, is something.” (77)

Firbank’s characters, having been driven to a state of repugnance by experience of the world at large, seek to transform their disgust into a state of resigned acceptance in a self-fashioned retreat—even to the extreme retreat of a prematurely posthumous existence in stained glass. By the novel’s conclusion, Mrs. Shamefoot is safely memorialized and leading a hermit’s life within sight of her own radiant image. She responds to a rare visitor’s query concerning her loneliness with a piece of well-earned pastoral wisdom: “You wonder I can isolate myself so completely. Dear Georgia, just because I want so much, it’s extraordinary how little I require” (199). The pastoral is concerned with reducing life to the essentials of our individual existence in time and space. Firbank’s characters are well-suited


to the task of looking past worldly success and failure to the essential loneliness of existence. His cast of wealthy widows, figurehead royalty, decadent clerics, and desultory artists possesses the leisure of having nothing better to do than to ponder the state of their souls while pursuing their whimsical desires. Not infrequently, they are compelled to criticize life itself: “She made excursions into three different religions. And she always came back dissatisfied and grumbling.” “The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.” (Three More Novels 101) “I agree with V. G. F.,” the Hon. Lionel Limpness murmured, fondling meditatively his “Charlie Chaplin” moustache—“Life ought not to be.” “It’s a mistake to bother oneself over matters that can’t be remedied.” (Five Novels 43)

Literature has rarely, if ever, handled existential angst with such a light touch. By reducing life to its essentials, and banning all possibility of worldly achievement, the pastoral inevitably becomes fixated on the two great givens of existence, sex and death. Firbank’s novels are full of memento mori. Firbank’s own health was always precarious. In his affecting tribute to Firbank, Osbert Sitwell recalled that, in the novelist’s final years before dying at the age of thirty-nine, “the sable angel of death ever hung over him” (xxviii). Two of the novels, Caprice and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, actually conclude with the death of their major figures. Cardinal Pirelli was Firbank’s last completed novel, and we can find throughout it, if we choose, premonitions of the author’s imminent death. The Cardinal is the only masculine character in Firbank to receive book-length attention, and he is—of all Firbank’s characters—the one most likely to linger as a personage in the reader’s imagination. His death at the novel’s conclusion is the furthest Firbank came in his fiction to portraying a tragic view of existence, perhaps in anticipation of his own untimely end. The reader’s sense of the tragic at novel’s end is the inevitable product of the sudden demise of a fully realized fictional character. In his well-defined individuality, Cardinal Pirelli is a Firbankian anomaly. The novelist’s characters tend to blend together. This is partially the effect of Firbank’s capacity and propensity for portraying his figures through quick-sketch caricatures. An aging stage-actress in Caprice is given to us in a few bold strokes: Mrs. Mary was large and robust, with commanding features and an upright carriage. She had a Redfern gown of “navy” blue stuff infinitely laced.

some imaginary vienna / 89 One white long hand, curved and jewelled, clung as if paralysed above her breast. (371)

The hand, of course, gives her away. Another hand, in Vainglory, tells us all that we need to know about Lady Georgia: She stretched out a hand, listlessly towards a red, colossal rose. So many talismans for happiness fettered her arms! She could hardly move but the jingling of some crystal ball, or the swaying of some malachite pig, reminded her of the fact that she was unhappy. (7)

Lady Georgia, like all of Firbank’s characters, is a finished product, the sum of her experience. These characters do not develop, but unfold, like a flower. They serve to illustrate that personality is destiny: What you see is what you get. I would suggest that Firbank refuses to allow his characters to develop in the conventional novelistic manner because of his unwillingness to allow the figure of the human ego to eclipse his larger, pastoral themes of the vanity of all human wishes and the fleeting-ness of our time on earth. Psychologically, we cannot resist identifying with the striving ego, and the conventional mimetic-naturalist novel obligingly gives us endless opportunities to experience the ego-hero’s quest for self-fulfillment. Firbank chooses to diminish the figure of the ego in his work by placing his characters in situations where they will neither need, nor be able, to strive for conventional fulfillments; and by focusing, rather, on the worlds of weather, landscape, and art that surround them. The central figure in The Flower Beneath the Foot, the future “Saint” Laura de Nazianzi, writes tellingly in her memoirs, “It was about my eighteenth year that I conquered my Ego” (Two Novels 8). Even Cardinal Pirelli, whom Firbank presents to us in greater psychological and realistic detail than any other figure, is diminished in his egoism—and contentedly so—in favor of the world at large. As the novel progresses, he is driven to retreat to his idyllic country residence in order to plan a defense of his unconventional ecclesiasticism, which he is to present to the Pope in Rome. But in such a pastoral setting, he finds himself in no mood for a fight: A sigh escaped him. Divided by tranquil vineyards and orange-gardens from the malice and vindictiveness of men it was difficult to experience emotions other than of forgiveness and love. “Come, dears, and kiss me,” he murmured, closing consentingly his eyes. (320)


Firbank can risk the unpastoral plotline of an upcoming heresy trial in Rome because he knows that his Cardinal will not live that long. We may sense as much in the course of our reading from various foreshadowings, as when the Cardinal’s serving-boy, and the object of his affection, says: “Last night, I’ll tell you, sir, I thought I heard old ‘Wanda’ on the wind.” “Old Wanda, boy?” “She rings for deaths, sir.” “Nonsense, child; your little ears could never hear as far.” (326)

But the child proves correct in his prophecy, for even little ears are attuned to this particular bell. Earlier in the novel, the “Superintendent-of the-Palace” distinguishes between the various church bells of the cathedral city: They were sounding Matteo now, a little bell with a passionate voice. “The pet!” Madame Poco paused to listen. She had her “favourites” among the bells, and Matteo was one of them. Passiaflora, too—but Anna, a light slithery bell, “like a housemaid in hysterics,” offended her ear by lack of tone; Sebastian, a complaining, excitable bell, was scarcely better,—“a fretful lover!” She preferred old “Wanda” the Death-bell, a trifle monotonous, and fanatical perhaps, but “interesting,” and opening up vistas to varied thought and speculation. (312)

For the pastoral writer, it is death that gives life its achingly transient value, and all pastorals are implicitly, and often quite explicitly, elegiac in nature. Cardinal Pirelli’s death is fittingly bucolic. He is in amorous pursuit of the young serving-boy when he drops dead in the heart of the cathedral: Now that the ache of life, with its fevers, passions, doubts, its routine, vulgarity, and boredom, was over, his serene, unclouded face was a marvelment to behold. Very great distinction and sweetness was visible there, together with much nobility, and love, all magnified and commingled. (341–342)

In the pastoral realm, death is both friend and enemy. It alone has the power to cure the ache of life, but in so doing it gives the lie to the cherished pastoral illusion of time as unending duration. It is only natural that a devoted pastoralist such as Firbank would be obsessed with that in the face of which his every creation is thrown, like stones in the ocean. Sitwell recalled that Firbank was “always impressed by the moral of the tombstone-shop opposite” his favorite hangout of the Café Royal. Dark inscriptions could be read on them, expressive of morbid hopes or fears, while, after any riot at the Café, when one or two people had been

some imaginary vienna / 91 forcibly requested by the giant in charge of such procedure to leave the premises, they could be seen ricocheting across the road towards these graveyard paraphernalia, or standing, staring in return at the uniformed figure against this ominous and inevitable background. “It ought to be a warning to us all” Ronald would remark as he watched such scenes. (xxvi)

Deaths are scattered throughout Firbank’s novels: sudden deaths and slow deaths, violent deaths and welcome deaths. It is the felt presence and fear of death that may help to account for one of the most conspicuous oddities of Firbank’s fiction, the propensity of his characters to indulge in sadomasochistic behavior. (An obsession with sadomasochism is another notable similarity between Firbank and Proust.) One old dowager says to another in Valmouth, “May a woman know, dear, . . . when she may receive her drubbing?” (192). And when a visitor arrives at the house, the butler accounts for his employer’s tardiness in receiving her by announcing, “The mistress, I presume, is with the scourge” (163). Such behavior in such a setting is primarily talismanic, a way to ward off evil and strife; but it also serves as a reminder to Firbank’s leisurely figures, in the midst of their plush lives, of the inevitable end of life. While self-abuse may be a neurotic response to the ever-present threat of death, Firbank’s characters spend much more of their time and energy engaged in avid appreciations of life. They are instinctual idolaters, particularly of one another. The heroine of The Flower Beneath the Foot anticipates an upcoming assignation with an impromptu paean: “What, what a dearest!” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi sighed beneath her breath. And all along the almost countless corridors as far as her bedroom door she repeated again and again: “What, what a dearest!” (Five Novels 7)

While in Valmouth, a “Negress” masseuse confesses: I have known what love is, I! . . . Dair are often days ven I can neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, ven my fingers hab no strength at all (massage den is quite impossible)—I am able only to groan and groan and groan—ah, my darling! (178)

Carried too far, romantic appreciations are, of course, one of the most exquisite forms of self-abuse. It is perhaps more prudent—and certainly less taxing—to be an admirer of the landscape, “The turquoise tenderness of the sky drew from her heart a happy coo” (Valmouth 217); or of a personality, “ ‘I always admired her,’ Lady Parvula remarked, ‘you’d almost say she was a man’ ” (Valmouth 179); or of a work of art, “ ‘Certainly I adore his work,’ Mrs. Asp admitted.


‘He pounces on those mysterious half-things . . . and sometimes he fixes them!’ ” (Vainglory 22). Much of what might be labeled the camp element in Firbank’s work is tied to his characters’ rarefied appreciations of personality, landscape, and art. Although there is a certain amount of “bitchiness” involved in their discriminations—“‘Do you think her as graceful as she passes for?’ . . . ‘Graceful?’ . . . ‘No, really! She’s like a sack of coals’ ” (Vainglory 31)—it is temperamental behavior in the service of taste. Susan Sontag’s comment that “Camp is a tender feeling” that “nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles” (292) is apposite to Firbank, whom she cites as one of her examples (278). Some of the most insightful and useful contemporary notice of Firbank is focused on the element in his work of camp,4 which Jonathan Dollimore has cited as being situated—in a way similar to the pastoral—“at the point of emergence of the artificial from the real,” where it serves to remind us that all “desire is culturally relative” (312). Firbank’s pointedly eccentric figures and milieus serve the same purpose. Firbank’s Pastoral Politics: “No One Knows What My Political Opinions Are; I Don’t Myself ” Firbank’s novels are an implicit sustained and passionate condemnation of moral bigotry. His constant undermining of willfulness and seriousness is itself a serious and willful endeavor to keep intolerance and oppression at bay. His novels are not unmoral (on the contrary), but they recognize that to deal with conventional moral concepts at all is to play on society’s terms, and that society inevitably serves to constrict the free play of individual desire. The pure pastoralist, who is devoted to the absolute liberty of individual desire, is forced to abjure all ties to conventional morality,5 and even to conventional notions of reality. Firbank’s reaction to the “Great War” is instructive. Sitwell wrote in his memoir that Firbank failed to summon up any enthusiasm whatever over the . . . war, protesting that for his part he had always found the Germans “most polite.” In fact “that awful persecution” was the phrase which it was most often his wont to use in alluding in after years to the first World War. (xii)

Firbank’s pronouncement recognizes implicitly that all wars are righteous, just as no wars are just. They are endured as other oppressions are endured, because one has no choice. Firbank’s response to the war was the most constructive one available: [The war] had deprived him of all outside interests, until finally ennui forced him to write the book of which he had talked for so long. These

some imaginary vienna / 93 volumes were, therefore, far more truly than any others in the English language, the product of the war. He was in the best, the least boring, sense a “war writer.” (Sitwell xii–xiii)

Sitwell is one of the few commentators to avoid condescending to his subject. Firbank would appear to act as an imaginative litmus test for critics: Those who react without prejudice or condescension pass. Few have. Perhaps the most glaring offender is Forster, whose repeated pleas for imaginative tolerance in his essays and novels make his misreading of Firbank particularly disappointing. Speaking of “fantasy writers” in general, and of Firbank in particular, Forster pronounced: there is only one quality that they all share in common: the absence of a soul . . . there is nothing to be saved or damned, their modish ecclesiasticism and rural magic bears no relation to philosophic truth. (111)

This criticism is echoed with variations by most of Firbank’s early commentators. His fiction is accused of lacking a soul, or of having a “sense of Evil” that is “imperfect” (Jones xviii), or of embodying “some fundamental malformation” (E. Wilson 265). It would be tempting to dismiss such accusations by placing them under the heading of homophobia—tempting, but misleading. For it is not Firbank’s homosexuality, or even the homosexuality of his characters, that is at issue so much as his unwillingness to label as wrong or evil any behavior at all. It is his novels’ pure pastoralism, their refusal even to acknowledge the moral discriminations of the conventional real world, that is at the heart of the critics’ dissatisfaction with them.6 Such readers seem to believe that to accede to Firbank’s vision—to imaginatively occupy his imaginary Viennas—would be to lose touch with reality itself, the fear of which is so primal as to prompt even a tolerant and imaginative intelligence such as Forster’s into a reactionary position. But homophobia no doubt does play a role in defining the reality such readers adhere to. One is reminded of David Bergman’s poignant contention that “the challenge of the gay writer [is] to convert the heterosexual tragedy of gay life into a homosexual comedy” (209). Brophy argues that Firbank’s “minor” status as a novelist is directly tied to the evident influence on his work of Wilde, whose notorious and tortured posttrial figure seems the very embodiment of a culture’s fear and intolerance, and of its insistence on treating the homosexual as a tragic figure, which, throughout his fiction, Firbank refuses to do: Firbank is judged a minor artist by those who still don’t dare recognize Wilde as major aesthete. Firbank’s posthumous reputation has been

94 / alternative realisms damaged, as his life was, by his post-debacle climate. As the debacle becomes more distant, anti-homosexual spirit and fear do not vanish. Often they are merely muted into condescension, much as the puritanical critical reaction “disgusting” has been translated into “boring.” (Brophy 251)

Brophy contends that our culture’s very concept of artistic “goodness” was “damaged” by the Wilde trial “as deeply as the unjust condemnation of Socrates wounded ‘the good’ in its moral meaning” (xiv). I would extend her argument to add that this damage to our collective cultural aesthetic has particularly affected our readings of pastoral literature, which, because of its implicit mode of argumentation, offered a much-needed safe haven to earlier homosexual writers such as Firbank— but one that has turned, in this day of open debate, into an unwitting prison of silence. We must learn as critics and readers to make explicit to ourselves the implicit arguments of pastoral texts (Wilde’s “fairy” tales are a good example), so that they, too, may be entered into the debate. In the highly politicized climate of contemporary criticism and culture, it is all too easy to dismiss a writer like Firbank as politically suspect and/ or naive. His novels would appear to claim political immunity, implicitly declaring, in the words of the Queen from The Flower Beneath the Foot: “No one knows what my political opinions are; I don’t myself” (87). With our heightened contemporary political awareness, we should be alert to the fact that such seeming ignorance of the world-as-given may well be—in the hands of a master of pastoral obliquity—a cunningly effective strategy in one’s ongoing battle within and against it.

Ch a p t e r Fi v e To Cr e at e a Li f e Wh ic h Is Not: H e n ry Gr e e n ’s Pa stor a l- O rg a n ic R e a l i sm

What’s in a name? When the name is Henry Green, there is a great deal. When the young British aristocrat Henry Yorke chose the pen-name Henry Green at the beginning of his novelistic career in the 1920s, he was in effect announcing and describing both his theme and method. Green’s effort to remake the modern novel resulted in a pastoral-organic realism that approaches and presents human beings in social situations as organisms in environments. In making a fiction in which self-fashioning characters evolve and progress through creative interaction with their changing environments, Green himself was creatively evolving the realist novel beyond the inherited convention in which a godlike omniscient narrator directs his characters’ thoughts and behaviors—a convention that seemed to Green “as dead as the Dodo” (Surviving 164). Green’s pastoral-organic realism expresses a reality alternative to that represented by traditional mimetic fiction. Indeed, Green took exception to the very notion of fiction as representation. Rather, he contended that fiction’s business is to create what does not yet exist: “The purpose of the novelist is to create in the mind of the reader life which is not, which is non-representational” (Surviving 142). The ultimate quality of the work of art, he said, is “to be alive. To have a real life of its own” (Surviving 241). In his function of bringing this life into existence, the artist does indeed play a godlike role, but the artist’s feat is merely an especially self-conscious variety of the behavior we all exhibit in our daily lives, for to Green, creative becoming is the very nature of existence. In that sense, we are all innately creative artists, as Green demonstrates throughout his fiction—a fact noted by Eudora Welty: In each novel, the characters within its world are busy, no matter what happens, making a world—with the hands perhaps, but certainly with the

96 / alternative realisms emotions; something will get positively pulled into shape, patched together, to hold on to against time and death. (18)

In their effort to fashion protective and enabling habitations within their environments, Green’s pastoral characters (like us) are no different from any other animals—or more correctly, any other organism. Perceptive critics of Green, of which there have been a remarkably high percentage among the relatively few who have written about him, have aptly noted the environmental and organic qualities of Green’s fictionmaking. In a recent critical monograph on Green, Oddvar Holmesland used organic metaphors to describe Green’s novels and their relations to the reader: Green’s convictions “lodge” and “sprout” in his arrangement of traditional narrative line or plot. Meaning arises through the reader’s response to the “life” of the novel. (26) [quotation marks as in text]

Michael North likewise emphasized the living nature of Green’s fiction in his 1984 study of Green, in which he contended that “the expression of life as a present participle is both [Green’s] method and his theme” (55). North elaborated that “Green believes the self is . . . an activity, and not the simple acceptance of a state,” the creative result being that, for Green, “every individual’s most basic work is the work of fiction” (62). Fiction-making in North’s persuasive reading of Green’s work is the interactive engagement, creation, enjoyment, and defense of one’s environment. Green’s understanding of the creative, constructive impulse at work in all of life results in a remarkably democratic portrayal of a large variety of individuals in society. That is not to say that Green puts forth any simple notion of innate equality. On the contrary, the very fact that we all operate as organisms in environments, attempting to manipulate our worlds to further our creative ends, puts us all in intense competition with one another and makes of each of us an elitist of the self in its particular inhabited world. On the other hand, we are social creatures and perhaps the one inclination that is even stronger than our instinct for getting ahead is our tendency to draw together. Much of the acute social commentary and also remarkable humor of Green’s work results from his overt awareness of this contradictory state of affairs in human nature, a contradiction that is a defining preoccupation of the pastoral, as is evident in the work of Firbank, who is one of Green’s most important pastoral-fiction forbearers and an obvious influence. Angus Wilson observed in a retrospective 1983 article that, although Green is often classed with and compared to his exact contemporary and

to create a life which is not / 97

friend Evelyn Waugh, his true relations and the “far more important influences on Green were Virginia Woolf and Ronald Firbank,” with both of whom he shared an acute sensitivity to the delicate and complex emotional, psychological, and social environments we inhabit, in alert response to which our lives are both thrilling and terrifying: Like Mrs. Woolf, he walked on the thinnest of ice, on the cliff-edge of despair; and as with her also, the fear-haunted journey was made wonderful by momentary visions of life’s beauties, of humanity transcendent. Like Firbank, he transformed his desperate tight-rope walk into a wonderful ballet of dancing words. Yet beside him Mrs. Woolf seems locked in herself and Firbank isolated from his fellow-men in shrill defiance. Green’s vision was always of a shared human love. (384–385)

True to such a communal, environmental, and pastoral vision, Green actively resisted the high Modernist tendency to operate from a privileged and circumscribed subjective viewpoint, as noted by Edward Stokes, one of Green’s earliest and most perceptive commentators: Generally Green achieves his startling authenticity, as well as his illusion of objectivity and withdrawal and the variety of his works as a whole, not by putting himself behind the eyes and inside the mind of single characters, but by, in each novel, immersing himself in a different condition of life, a different pattern and texture of experience, and making that condition of life and that texture of experience concrete and alive through his unfailingly accurate dialogue and his extraordinarily flexible and resourceful narrative and descriptive prose. (26)

Green as author immerses himself so thoroughly in the various environments of his novels as to disappear into them, as John Updike noted when remarking upon Green’s dual tendencies toward “authorial invisibility and a universal empathy” (Surviving x). Stokes likewise remarked that “there is seldom a passage in Henry Green’s novels which one can isolate from its context and assert that in it the author is identifiably present” (25). Welty goes even further, “You never see Henry Green, he takes up no space as the author” (26). Stokes’ comment regarding the “startling authenticity” of Green’s fiction brings up the larger issue of the nature of realism, and of the real, as experienced in the modern world. It is the thesis of this chapter that Green’s fiction is emblematic and reflective of a general paradigm shift in modern thought and life regarding our understanding of the real, in which the idea of organisms in networks of relations has come to be understood as being more fundamentally real than the idea of isolable primary substances


characterized by secondary attributes. This paradigm shift has been most persuasively and completely put forth in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, a philosophy that Whitehead was formulating and expounding at the same time as Henry Green was beginning his career in fiction. Green and Whitehead are unlikely contemporaries in creativity. As a metaphysical philosopher, Whitehead was a late bloomer, publishing his major work in his sixties and seventies, after retiring from his university career in science and education in London and taking up a position as professor of philosophy at Harvard. Green, on the other hand, was precocious as a writer of fiction, publishing his first, remarkably mature, novel while still at university, and publishing his second—a masterpiece in which his strikingly original voice and method are fully operative—at the tender age of twenty-four. The result is that the two writers, though more than forty years apart in age, were active contemporaries during the period in the 1920s and 1930s in which Whitehead at Harvard was formulating his revolutionary cosmology while Green in London was recreating the modern novel. (One also notes, sadly, that Whitehead and Green share the distinction of being relatively undervalued and overlooked in the respective subject areas to which they so brilliantly contributed.) There is no indication that Whitehead and Green were aware of one another’s activities. Whitehead was led to his revisionist metaphysics not by the Modernist movements in art and literature, but by his observation of discoveries and internalization of new theories in physics and biology, while Green’s experimental fiction seems to have originated in the discrepancy he discerned between human behavior as presented in fiction and as keenly observed in the world around him. Unlike his older brother, Gerald Yorke, who had a lifelong connoisseur’s interest in history, philosophy, comparative religions, and the occult (and who has his own notoriety in these areas), Henry Green’s hobbies were fiction and sport—indicative of his main interest, which was human nature in action: that is, human nature as revealed by human relations and human behavior. The most fundamental connection between the work of Whitehead and Green is their shared belief that the world as envisioned in the dominant practice of their respective areas of philosophy and fiction is not the world as experienced in everyday life, so that a new paradigm was required that would realign the theory of reality with the reality of lived experience. Whitehead claimed that “the ultimate appeal” of any thought system is to “naïve experience” (Science 89), and he said of his philosophy of organism that it was “an attempt, with the minimum of critical adjustment, to return to the conceptions of the ‘vulgar’ ” (Process 88). On a similar note, Welty stressed that Green’s work is remarkable for its effort and ability to speak of and for all of us, observing that it operates “from within the


labyrinth of every life” (20), and “touches uncommonly close to the quick of experience” (22). In making his remarkably flexible fiction responsive to experience, Green (like Firbank) dismantled the traditional “conventions of the novel,” doing “away with scaffolding, with one prop after another” (Welty 20). In doing so, Green “both solved and set up a fair number of problems in the novel” (Welty 24), considering which, Welty concluded that Green in his fiction was consistently and persistently working toward a new future for the novel: From the first his best . . . stood for experiment and must continue to stand for this . . . it will not be on Henry Green’s head if the novel for its life does not look to its own future rather than to its past. (28)

As with Green in fiction, Whitehead in philosophy was attempting to clear ground and to make a new way forward: “Whitehead saw himself clearly as standing at the end of one era and at the beginning of the new one” (Whitehead’s Philosophy xvi). And again as with Green, Whitehead perceived that the key to a reenvisioning of reality was to conceive of it as being composed of living organisms in changing environments. Writing in 1925, he noted, “The science of living organisms is only now coming to a growth adequate to impress its conceptions upon philosophy” (Science 41). When we thoroughly consider the implications of this science, Whitehead contended, we come to understand “that our whole experience is composed out of our relationship to the rest of things, and of the formation of new relationships constitutive of things to come” (Modes 31). In such a world, “the reality is the process” (Science 72), and not the isolated individual substance arrested in an instant of time, as Newtonian science conceived of the ultimate nature of the real—a conception that Whitehead repeatedly criticized for its inherent limitations in regards to understanding reality as it is actually experienced: The notion of the self-contained particle of matter, self-sufficient within its local habitation, is an abstraction. Now an abstraction is nothing else than the omission of part of the truth. The abstraction is well-founded when the conclusion drawn from it is not vitiated by the omitted truth. (Science 138)

Whitehead argued that the scientific conception of real substances localizable in space and time is true and useful as long as it recognizes the limitations of its assumptions and the narrowness of its observed realities. But when early modern philosophy generalized from that conception, contending that anything that is not measurable at an instant of time is not fundamentally real, it created a gulf between our theoretical conception of the


real and reality as it is experienced, in which “process, activity, and change are the matter of fact. At an instant there is nothing” (Science 146). Whitehead saw his philosophy as contributing toward a revision of our conception of the real, “in which the scientific scheme is recast, and founded upon the ultimate concept of organism” (Science 66). An organism exists in interactive relationship with its environment; when it is taken out of its environment—arrested in time and space for the sake of measurement—it no longer exists as itself, as an operative organism. Moreover, Whitehead stressed that any organism’s environment is always temporal as well as spatial, so that we must resist the urge to define an organism by its extension in space alone: The man adds another day to his life, and the earth adds another millennium to the period of its existence. But until the death of the man and the destruction of the earth, there is no determinate nexus which in an unqualified sense is either the man or the earth. (Adventures 204)

The organism exists within its environment as “a structure of evolving processes” (Science 72). This being the case, Whitehead contended that “we must start with the event as the ultimate unit of natural occurrence” (Science 103) rather than with the isolable substance. Whitehead’s emphasis on the “vulgar” conceptions of an organism’s environmental and existential context implicitly aligns his philosophy with pastoral envisioning, as he himself observed in his writings on aesthetics (Adventures 271). Modern philosophy, following Descartes, made the mistake of taking the isolable substance—including ourselves—as the concrete reality to which events happened. Subjects were conceived as being essentially separate from their objective experience; they were subjected to experience in and through the course of events. Whitehead’s philosophy, on the other hand, conceives of the subject as an interactive creation arising from the ongoing process of events, which are the real actualities: The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject that then encounters a datum, and then reacts to the datum. The philosophy of organism presupposes a datum that is met with feelings, and progressively attains the unity of a subject. (Process 179)

In Whitehead’s conception, all organisms are in some degree unified subjects—that is the very basis of their being classed as organisms— although some subjects are more unified than others. This conception annihilates the Cartesian distinction between the human subject and the rest of nature, including one’s own body, which is made up of a myriad of subjective organisms. Rather, all of nature is composed of organisms


progressively attaining the unity of subjects (Nature as a whole, or God, is the most comprehensive of such organisms). Self-conscious humans, being aware of this unity and acting upon this awareness, are more unified than other subjects we observe in our environments, but the difference is one of degree rather than of kind, and the analogy may be extended up the ladder of comprehensiveness to divinity itself, of which we form a part and the essence of which we share. Moreover, according to Whitehead’s conception of subjectivity, we relate to ourselves as subjects to objects, in an interactive and environmental manner. What we conceive of as our isolable individual identities is in reality a linked series of events that Whitehead calls “a society.” Events occur and then pass away, but societies endure as a continuing series of these events. According to this conception, the self that is coming into being relates to the self already in existence as to an objective other; it is a part of the “datum that is met with feelings and progressively attains the unity of a subject” (Process 179). Once the subject is evolved, however, it then automatically turns into an object in the datum that leads to the arising of a new subject. The two major changes that Whitehead worked on the idea of ourselves and other beings as individuals is to conceive of an individual as a series of events—that is, as an ongoing process within a changing environment—and to conceive of the individual as a society made up of the continuing, evolving amalgamation of this series, with “an essential character, whereby it is the society that it is, and [with] accidental qualities which vary as circumstances alter” (Adventures 204). The process philosopher and theologian Charles Hartshorne, whose own work is self-admittedly a continuation and elaboration of several of Whitehead’s key conceptions regarding the nature of the real, contended that Whitehead’s conception of reality as being composed of an interactive network of societies is perhaps even more crucial as a reconfiguration of our understanding than is his conception of reality as being composed of organisms in environments: Whitehead seems to be the only philosopher to note the universality of societies in the cosmos, at all levels; also, and best of all, he is the first to see that what is called an individual in common life (and much philosophy) can only be understood as a form of sequence of particular actualities socially inheriting common quality from antecedent numbers; and that personality itself is a special temporally linear cause of such social—that is sympathetic—inheritance. (37)

Whitehead’s insight that “the real actual things that endure are all societies” (Adventures 204) with recognizable and evolving characteristics helps to explain the manner in which a nation, college, company, or family, like


a virus, animal, or plant, has a personality analogous in crucial respects to that of a human individual. Indeed, all such natural societies are far more analogous to one another than are any of them to a man-made machine, which has long been our mechanical fallback metaphor for explaining the manner in which groups of organisms—be it social networks, animal species, or human bodies—live and work. Whitehead’s contention, in effect, is that the pathetic fallacy is not a fallacy at all, but an acute analogy. Indeed he praised the Romantic poets for their “intuitive refusal seriously to accept the abstract materialism of science” (Science 86). Newtonian science flouted human intuition by contending that the reality of events was the reality of measurable isolated substances at an instant of time. Whitehead countered that such substances are in effect abstractions from reality. When the interactive and environmental “event” is considered as the most basic constituent of reality, it becomes clear that the standard of measurement that may be usefully applied to it is necessarily relative and subjective: “ ‘Value’ is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event” (Science 93). In order to emphasize the subjective and relative nature of “the event,” Whitehead often refers to it as “an occasion of experience.” Whitehead’s further insight is that, because of its fundamental subjectivity, reality is most comprehensively conceived of as a process with aesthetic ends and means: The sense of external reality—that is to say, the sense of being one actuality in a world of actualities—is the gift of aesthetic significance. This experience claims a relevance beyond the finite immediacy of any one occasion of experience. (Modes 121)

Whitehead agrees with Wilde in making the argument that taste— aesthetic significance—is absolutely fundamental; to return to the parlance of the vulgar: there is no accounting for taste. Aesthetic significance arises from the process of life. To understand this process is to comprehend the primacy of the aesthetic in characterizing reality: “The characteristics of life are absolute self-enjoyment, creativity, activity, aim” (Modes 152). Whitehead insisted that evolution itself is best understood in aesthetic terms, lamenting that, in our understanding of the evolutionary processes of life, we have overemphasized the survival-of-the-fittest aspect that is most analogous to a machine age and have underemphasized the more fundamental creative aspect, which directs evolution to the end not merely of survival, but of self-enjoyment—a pastoral ideal (Science 111). When looked at from this perspective, the evolutionary process of actuality may be seen to be analogous not so much to a war machine (the survival of the fittest), as it is to a work of art that is always in progress. Whitehead


explained this crucial refiguring of the standard evolutionary paradigm in a passage that is key to understanding the relation of his philosophical system to Green’s fiction: Actuality is in its essence composition. Power is the compulsion of composition. Every other type of composition is a halfway stage in the attainment of actuality. The final actuality has the unity of power. The essence of power is the drive towards aesthetic worth for its own sake. All power is derivative from the fact of composition attaining worth for itself. There is no other fact. Power and importance are aspects of this fact. It constitutes the drive of the universe. (Modes 119)

Whitehead implicitly critiques the abstract notion of “will to power” by asserting that, in the ultimate sense, power is always a means to an aesthetic end and never an end in itself. Elsewhere Whitehead argues that the modern failure to understand the subordinate relation of power to aesthetic aim and worth results in a failure to comprehend the nature of divinity and our relation to it (Process 407–413); it is the failure of the fallen angels. In the remainder of this essay, I will apply Whitehead’s philosophical— and implicitly pastoral—reenvisioning of the nature of the real in an analysis of the pastoral-organic literary realism practiced by Green in his most complex and comprehensive novel, and his own personal favorite among his books (Treglown 182), Concluding. I will focus on four of Whitehead’s key revisionary concepts discussed above: 1, the concept of the individual as an evolving creation arising from the ongoing process of events; 2, the concept of reality as a creative process, “of composition attaining worth for itself” (Modes 119); 3, the concept of process as being “the very essence of real actuality—that is, of the completely real” (Adventures 274); 4, the concept of reality as an interactive network of societies, each of which has “an essential character, whereby it is the society that it is, and [with] accidental qualities which vary as circumstances alter” (Adventures 204).

The Individual As an Evolving Creation In his Paris Review interview, Green was asked whether “a writer should work toward development of a particular style,” to which he responded: He can’t do anything else. His style is himself, and we are all of us changing every day—developing we hope! We leave our marks behind us like a snail. (Surviving 245)


It is through the examination of such marks that we know what we know about ourselves and others, which is not very much Green contended in his 1950 essay for the BBC’s The Listener, “A Novelist to his Readers,” in which he argued against the convention whereby a novelist takes it upon himself to explain his characters to his readers; rather the characters should be allowed to explain themselves, through their actions, expressions, and behavior, certainly, but particularly through their own words, in their dialogue: The kind of action which dialogue is, is held up while the writer, who has no business with the story he is writing, intrudes like a Greek chorus to underline his meaning. It is as if husband and wife were alone in the living room, and a voice came out of a corner of the ceiling to tell them what both were like, or what the other felt. And do we know, in life, what other people are really like? I very much doubt it. We certainly don’t know what other people are thinking and feeling. How then can the novelist be so sure? (Surviving 139)

Green’s remarkable contention that the novelist “has no business with the story he is writing” is indicative of his absolute opposition to the idea and practice of fiction as didactic argument and/or ego-enhancement, both of which, he implied, are only obstacles to the creator’s ultimate task, which is “to create a life which is not” (Surviving 136). Later in the essay, Green stressed the primary and revelatory role of the carefully observant creative act, “It is only by an aggregate of words over a period followed by an action, that we obtain, in life, a glimmering of what is going on in someone or even in ourselves” (Surviving 141). Bruce Bassoff contended in his 1975 monograph on Green that “The English empirical tradition accounts in particular for the epistemological reticence in Green” (33), his sense that “the novel should not violate the privacy of human inwardness” (39). Whatever its source, Green’s reticence when it comes to making assumptions about and for his characters is remarkable. Welty remarked of Green’s respectful and scrupulous handling of his characters that “he explains none, exploits none” (17). Green’s biographer, Jeremy Treglown, noted that Green’s self-effacing handling of his characters was reflected in his own personal relations, commenting that Green “was receptive to other people to a point where he almost ceased to have an existence of his own” (118). Treglown cites the novelist Anthony Powell, Green’s exact contemporary and lifelong friend (they met at Eton), who said of Green: He was a very very complicated and tricky person. And although we knew each other so well, of all the people I’ve ever known, I really never got to the bottom of him. (qtd. in Treglown 72)


Green’s handling of characters argues implicitly that we never get to the bottom of anyone or of anything, and that the effort to do so is both futile and self-deceiving. Such a conviction, for Green, is far from being a cause for despondency or despair. As with Whitehead in his philosophy, Green in his fiction demonstrates that the carefully observed processes of life itself argue against such notions of certainty and closure. The wish for such would seem to Green to seek an easy way out of the difficult but enthralling labor of creation, which is the basic business of life in all of its myriad manifestations. From the point of view of Green’s complex, subtle, delicate, enigmatic, and evolving characterizations, conventional realist novelists seem not only too certain of their fictive creations, but above all, all too impatient in bringing those creations to life. When asked in the Paris Review interview about his method for the handling of a novel’s structure, Green responded tellingly: As to plotting or thinking ahead, I don’t in a novel. I let it come page by page, one a day, and carry it in my head. When I say carry I mean the proportions—that is, the length. This is the exhaustion of creating. Towards the end of the book your head is literally bursting. But try and write out a scheme and you will only depart from it. My way you have a chance to get something living. (Surviving 243)

Again the idea of a living organism is seen to be central to Green’s theme and method. Carrying the book in his head is obviously analogous to a pregnant woman’s carrying of a child, and the notion of the head bursting recalls the birth of Athena—goddess of wisdom—from the forehead of Zeus. Green’s pastoral-organic characters come to life in and through interactive relationships with their enabling, enveloping, limiting, and inhibiting environments, of which they are both part and product. When asked whether he began writing with a certain character or rather with a certain situation in mind, Green responded, “Situation every time” (Surviving 242). Beginning with such a premise is analogous to Whitehead’s assertion that the philosopher must begin with an event in process, and not with an isolated substance, in order to express and represent the actual nature of reality. As Whitehead contended that, out of the process of events, a subject arises—which, having developed, becomes a part of the datum from which a new subject is born—so Green’s characters both evolve out of and devolve into their situational environments. The main character in the futuristic world of Concluding is Mr. Rock (we never learn his Christian name), a seventy-five-year-old retired scientist who made an unnamed great scientific discovery as a young man, and who,


as a reward from the “State,” has been given for life the habitation of a worker’s cottage on the pastoral grounds of a country estate outside of London that has been transformed into an Institute for the training of young female bureaucrats destined for employment in the all-encompassing state apparatus. Rock’s thirty-five-year-old granddaughter Elizabeth is living with him in his cottage while she recuperates from a nervous breakdown brought on from overwork in the state bureaucracy, a collapse that seems to have been hastened and complicated by an affair she is having with Sebastian, a younger man who teaches economics at the Institute and lives with the other Institute employees and their 300 students in the transformed mansion. Rock’s nemesis in the story, which takes place during one summer day and evening in the near future, is the principal of the girl’s school, Miss Edge, who covets his cottage for the uses of the school and its staff. Edge is particularly interested in the results of an election held the previous day, in which Mr. Rock had been a candidate for admission into an honorary society that includes among its potential benefits free room and board for life at a designated retirement facility. On the day in which the novel takes place, the Institute’s habitual routine is complicated not only by the impending news of Rock’s election (we never find out its outcome), but by the fact that two of the Institute’s teenage students have gone missing overnight (one is later found—while one remains missing at novel’s end), an emergency that threatens cancellation of the evening’s planned dance in annual and traditional celebration of the Institute’s founding. More disturbingly for Edge, the students’ absconding leads to the potential calamity of an official state enquiry and investigation. Rock, who is old friends with one of the state’s functionaries responsible for education and who feels a grandfatherly concern for the students at the Institute, is a potential danger to Edge’s efforts to contain the damage (that is, knowledge) of the children’s absconding, and his granddaughter attempts to head off Rock’s interference, fearing that Edge will in turn retaliate against her lover, who is under the principal’s direct supervision. This brief summary gives little indication of the richness of the novel’s texture. Indeed the analogy of a tapestry in progress is entirely apt to Green’s densely woven fiction-making. The two characters most thoroughly enmeshed in and revealed by the novel’s tapestry are Rock and Edge, who are also the only two figures with overtly emblematic names, indicating not only their primacy in the story’s complex allegory, but also their intricate relation to one another within that framework. As one would anticipate from their names, Rock is the story’s central figure, while Edge is peripheral to him. Temperamentally the names are fitting as well, as Rock is a solid and dependable figure, while Edge is anxious and high-strung—edgy.


There is no point in the novel when Rock is other than a sympathetic figure, although he sometimes seems noble and wise, and other times selfpitying and pathetic—a contradictory characterization that is typical of pastoral figures. Because old age has made him partially deaf and blind, he sometimes seems very much at the mercy of those with more keen senses around him. But he also employs his debilities strategically to gain sympathy for himself and to attack and satirize his enemies. The one who seems to know Rock best is his doted-upon granddaughter, Elizabeth, who is also the chief chink in his armor in his fight with Edge, since he is devoted to Elizabeth and is determined to provide a home for her with himself (which would not be a possibility in the state’s retirement home for honorees). Although he has legal right to the Institute’s cottage for life, the legal rights of those he chooses to share it with are less certain, and his granddaughter has complicated matters by involving herself romantically with one of the Institute employees. Elizabeth seems certain, however, of her grandfather’s superior strategic skills in his fight with Edge for possession of the cottage and the say-so over who gets to live in it. She says to her lover, who fears that Rock will be outmaneuvered by Edge, that her grandfather “has forgotten more of [Edge’s] twists and turns than you’ll ever learn” (38), and the novel’s delightful and surprising conclusion, in which Edge shamelessly and hilariously makes a proposal of marriage to Rock in a bid to eliminate once and for all the troublesome anomaly of his singular nonbureaucratic position at the Institute (by making him a peripheral part of its structure through alliance with its head) proves Elizabeth correct—at least for the time being. Edge is, on the surface (if one can speak of such things with Green’s characters, and particularly of one so designated), far less sympathetic than Rock. However, by novel’s end we feel that, if we do not understand Edge ultimately (none of Green’s characters may be so understood), we nevertheless understand her behavior and motivations, and such understanding amounts to empathy, if not to sympathy, since we cannot in all self-respect finally approve of her behavior or admire her motives. For unlike Rock, who is led to put up a fight for his cottage by the love of his granddaughter and spoiled animals pets, and by his affection for the place itself and his life there, Edge’s desire for the cottage arises out of a neurotic need to be in direct bureaucratic control of every aspect of her environment. In terms of the novel’s overt allegory, Edge is the pastoral boundary itself, as she represents the feared and hated world at large that is ever the enemy of the amenable pastoral retreat. Although we may judge Edge negatively, Green himself does not do so, at least not overtly, for judgment curtails understanding, and the whole of Green’s critical effort in his creations is bent upon understanding.


The important thing for Green is to comprehend characters’ working motives—the end to which their behavior is aimed—because then their means become understandable within a reasonable framework. Green’s novels imply that to understand a human’s fundamental essence—that which makes one desire one thing and not another—is beyond our capacity, even in regards to ourselves. Whitehead likewise argued that the essence of all being is a mystery that is the province of God’s own creative effort; what we know of ourselves and of others is similar to what we know of God, which is not their essence but their immanence. God’s immanence is the actual world in its “aesthetic order” (Whitehead, Religion 101). It is the existence of that all-pervading order that makes it possible for us to understand a person’s behavior once his/her motives have been deduced from it. The creativity is in the means; the ends are a given. Green’s disinterested effort at understanding humans in their intricate ends and means does indeed align him with the empirical tradition with its impassioned search for the truth of reality through dispassionate analysis of same. In his scrupulous observation of and passionate evocation of the aesthetic order of the created world, and in his absolute refusal to pass judgment upon it, Green displays an implicitly devotional attitude toward that order, and to Nature as an immanent-transcendent deity. Interestingly, one of Green’s ex-lovers cited by his biographer, Emma Tennant, claimed that it was Green’s very skepticism that enabled his singular creative achievement: He was too clear-sighted to have any religion. He wasn’t going to have any communism or any fascism or any God or anything at all. That was a cruel fate for him. But if he hadn’t had that complete lack of belief in things, he wouldn’t have been able to write those books with their extraordinary poetic distance, because something sentimental would have got into the writing. It’s because he didn’t that the writing lives. (qtd. in Treglown 253)

One could argue, of course, that the things that Green refused to believe in are all false idols of one sort or another, and that, in declining to bow down to them—to engage in special pleading in and through his work—he was creating in good faith. In any case, it is notable that, in making her appreciation, Tennant refers to the living quality of the writing while praising its poetic distance, highlighting the combination of intense engagement and respectful reticence we have already discussed in Green’s relationship to his work. Whitehead makes an intriguingly similar observation regarding God’s creative relation to the world at the conclusion of his great cosmological statement, Process and Reality, in which he argues that God in his


creative role does not bend the world to his will so much as he persuades the world into an existence that is true to his creative vision: God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it; or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness. (Process 408)

There is a parallel between Whitehead’s essentially pastoral conception of God as both good shepherd and creative artist and Green’s description of himself patiently nurturing a novel into existence. Certainly there is a great deal in the world of Green’s fiction, as in the world at large, that is not true or beautiful or good. But with the exception of the traumatized novel Caught, written during and concerning the firebombing of London during World War II, none of Green’s novels succumb to negative attitudes and emotions. On the contrary, Green is a thoroughgoing Romantic, as has been noted by many critics. His signal achievement is to be both Romantic and realist at once, which he manages by demonstrating the manner in which we work to fashion the reality we inhabit through creative manipulation of our environments so that they are pleasing to us. In that sense, we are all of us Romantic-realists, as is every organism. Reality As a Creative Process The difference between Rock and Edge is a difference of creative vision—a difference of taste. Edge’s vision is limited by its defensive egoism, which leads her to try to appropriate her environment as a possession and expression of her self. The chief vulnerability of such a vision is its very defensiveness, for Edge fears fear itself, and her entire creative effort is aimed at making herself invulnerable to weakness. Rock’s vision, by contrast, is characterized chiefly by his pastoral devotion to his granddaughter and to his animals, and by extension, to his whole environment. The girls at the institute sense Rock’s pastoral care and respond with easy and generous affection. Their relationship to Edge by contrast is fraught with anxiety stemming, naturally enough, from her administrative control over their lives—but more worrisomely, from her ego-driven demand of not only obedience, but of devoted subservience—for she is an instinctual dictator. Concluding offers a remarkably subtle and sophisticated analysis of power relations in human interaction. In this, it is not different from any of Green’s novels, all of which offer such penetrating analysis. But


Concluding differs in its scope by making one of its concerns the operation of the “State” as a power player. Crucially, Green conceives of such power as being not inhuman but all too human. The instinct for authoritarianism is seen to arise from a human fear ultimately of nature itself in its creative and fertile profusion. In the novel, Edge, who is habitually referred to as a spinster by her detractors and proves to be in general afraid of and/or disdainful of nonhuman animals, is contrasted to the doting grandfather and pet-owner Rock. Edge instinctively aligns herself with the authority of the State, while Rock, in true pastoral fashion, looks upon the state bureaucracy as a menace, which he strains to remain free of, declining even to open or read his mail, much of which references (or so he believes) his service to the state through his scientific discovery (Concluding 27). In an essay published in 1990, Mark Facknitz argued that Concluding presents us with “two kinds of order,” his descriptions of which are in some ways analogous to the distinction I have been making between Edge and Rock: Human order is willful and tenuous; nature’s order is unmediated and absolute. We fool ourselves by conflating the two, Green says, for while we can impose meaning upon nature, such impositions cannot alter the fabric of nature but only our perception of it, while the changes that nature imposes on us are organic and irrevocable. (Academic Search Premier)

Facknitz’s point is well taken regarding the supremacy of the natural order as expressed in Green’s novel, but he is too absolute in his distinction between the natural and human orders both in the novel and in the world. For human order is a subset of the natural order; to conceive of it as entirely separate and distinct is to make the mistake upon which Edge bases her defensive and self-defeating approach to life, and to consider that our human “impositions cannot alter the fabric of nature” is to ignore, among other things, the many species with their own forms of natural order that have been crowded out of existence by such human impositions. One might argue that Facknitz is contrasting human thought with natural fact, but human thought is nothing if not natural fact in its own right. I worry the point because it seems to me that Facknitz’s error epitomizes the humanistic and dualistic error that Green is contending against throughout his fiction, and which Whitehead attempted to correct through his philosophy of organism. Rock lives in harmony with nature because he understands that he is a part of nature, and that nature is a part of him. His understanding gives him the ultimate advantage in his fight against


Edge, for even if he loses the battle for his cottage he has won the war by virtue of his felt at-home-ness in the world, whereas Edge’s war is already lost no matter how many battles she wins; for she cannot make a safe home for herself within nature by going against nature. Rather every home for Edge will be a fortress in which she is imprisoned by her anxieties and fears, while Edge’s every home is made a pastoral garden by virtue of his impassioned care of and for the world. Process As the Essence of the Completely Real The different conceptions of reality embodied by Rock and Edge are made explicit in their attitudes towards process and change. For Edge, change is to be fought on principle, for it is indicative of a lack of control; whereas for Rock, change is something to be not only acquiesced in, but celebrated and appreciated in its own right. Much of the great humor of Concluding revolves around Edge’s neurotic fear of and attempts to prohibit and control change, while much of its poetic beauty is related to Rock’s receptive pastoral response to the ever-changing world of nature in which he and his live and thrive. For Edge, civilization as embodied by bureaucratic efficiency and institutional rigidity is always under attack by nature in process, which is represented throughout the novel by symbols and situations concerning sex and death. The missing student Mary is associated with both, the fear being that she has run off because of a budding romance or an unwanted pregnancy, or else that she has been the victim of some foul play. Every symbolic indication in the novel would seem to support the romantic explanation, but for Edge, sex and death are interchangeable—the one leads to the other, and vice versa. During the day’s luncheon, Edge is discombobulated by the sense that a dead body lay under the massed “pyre” of flowering branches that have been gathered for decorating the hall for the evening’s dance; and when, during the process of decoration, the student helpers discover at the bottom of the pile of flowering branches “a rabbity Rag Doll dressed gaily in miniature Institute pajamas, painted with a grotesque caricature of Mary’s features on its own flat face,” the symbolic weight of the situation is too much for Edge, who “straightaway fainted” (117). Later she attempts to explain the reaction by saying, “How foolish of me . . . I thought it was a . . . a dead rabbit,” she said in anticlimax, voicing the secret, known throughout the Institute, that she had a terror of rabbits dead. “And then I did realize, only too late, too late.” A tear began to roll from each of her blue, old eyes. “I’ll never forgive myself,” she ended, in a small voice and a hiccup. (118)


What is unforgivable for Edge is that, by fainting, she has called attention to her fears of sex and death (which she unwittingly confirms by reference to the dead rabbit), unintentionally admitting her weakness and vulnerability, even to herself. Ultimately she cannot forgive herself for being a part of nature. In such a passage Green demonstrates the life-hatred that lies behind Edge’s defensive bureaucratic posture. And yet, with his reference to “her blue, old eyes” and her “small voice,” he expresses implicit sympathy for one who should be old without being wise, and allows us to acknowledge that the ultimate and inevitable victim of Edge’s repressive regime is herself, for others may escape or evade the punishments meted out by her harsh judgment against life, but she herself will not. Parallel to Edge’s implacable judgment against herself is Rock’s instinct for self-pity as he considers the inevitable end of life to which old age is delivering him. It is self-sympathy that protects him from the spell that Edge attempts to cast upon him with her strategic offer of marriage, during which he is “contemplating his own death with disinterest” (202), the “vast distance of his final cold, cold preoccupation” (203) shielding him from Edge’s entirely self-interested machinations. Rock’s ability to contemplate even “his own death with disinterest” is proof of his absolute faith in life and of his assent that what will be will be. More crucially, however, it is proof that he is able to relate to himself as to an “other,” a sharer of the space-time environment—which is something that Edge is absolutely incapable of. On the contrary, Edge’s attitude toward her environment is one of ownership and of ego-enlargement, as North noted: Edge spends so much time gazing out of the window of her sanctum onto the grounds because the institute is her mirror, the huge glass in which she sees her own personality reflected. (171)

Edge’s egoistic wealth of self makes her lonely and vulnerable in a way that Rock, in his shared world of others within space and time, is not. Edge’s vision of her self as extended in space to include all that she surveys makes her particularly vulnerable to time. She may be safe for an instant, but the next instant may rob her of that safety. This explains the paranoia with which she reacts to any unforeseen change of habit at the Institute and the hostility with which she meets any suggestion of alteration, as well as her neurotic impulse to tuck all structural and personal loose ends into her bureaucratic web. Edge’s vision is of a static world of Newtonian order in which a god (in this case Edge herself, acting on behalf of the “State”) sets in motion a clockwork machine world, in the maintenance and care of which any further creative impulse is actively opposed. Only one personality is allowed expression in such a system, but it is an


expression that the system itself curtails once it is set in motion. One is reminded of Oscar Wilde’s observation that the system of private property ownership is most damaging to the owners themselves, whose personalities are enslaved—possessed—by their possessions (1083). In his fictional anatomy of Edge’s ways and means, Green may be seen to be making an implicit argument against the type of conventional realist fiction that operates dually as the self-enhancing expression of its creator’s ego and as the willful appropriation of the “real” world into the mimetic text. Green demonstrates the manner in which such ego-fulfillment results in an enslavement by and to the conventionally real, as Edge’s individual will is inevitably enveloped by her bureaucratic machinery, whose will she is in essence obeying in seeking to nullify the anomaly of Rock by aligning him with the bureaucracy through marriage to its chief. She herself realizes the absurdity of the marriage proposal from a personal viewpoint: What a desperate expedient to gain possession of a cottage, she laughed to herself, almost completely out of control. She must be mad. But then, oh well what harm was there? Things would all come out in the wash, be utterly forgotten come daylight. (202–203)

Rock views Edge’s marriage proposal with contempt, considering that “the suggestion, from every point of view except Edge’s own . . . was tantamount to an insult offered by the woman” (209) and determining to keep secret the “ludicrous development” (209). From the point of view of his continuing battle with Edge, it is no doubt best that Rock conceives of the proposal as an insult and acts accordingly. But in terms of self-respect, there is no one of whom the proposal is more insulting than of Edge herself, who demonstrates by the proposal her absolute cravenness in regards to her bureaucratic position. Her intuitive awareness of her subservience makes her both bitter and dangerous, as Rock is well aware. Rock’s well-tended individual self-respect, by contrast, may be seen to be a defense of Green’s own particular brand of pastoral-organic, antimimetic fiction-making. When one conceives of oneself as a part of nature, and of nature as a part of oneself, one’s individual wealth requires no augmentation. So Green’s creative ego requires no flattering reflection or willful defense, and neither does his pastoral-organic realism provide an egoistic escape or opportunity for ego-inflation for the reader. If one reads Green’s fiction in search of an escape from or weapon against an unsatisfactory world, or as praise of a particular version of a satisfactory reality, one is bound to be disappointed. Green’s refusal to choose sides in and through his fiction, to load the dice in favor of one character or another (even Edge is softened and humanized by novel’s end), or of one outcome


or another (the plot of Concluding significantly does not conclude), opens his work up to criticism by partisan players, as Treglown aptly noted: It is a vulnerable kind of art, one that calls on the reader’s understanding in more than the obvious ways and that has no ready answer to pedantry or plain instinctive dislike. (161)

In its vulnerable posture, Green’s pastoral-organic fiction resembles Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, which likewise refuses to defend its insights against partisan attack. In the work of both Green and Whitehead, the argument is wholly implicit in the observation and insight. If both writers fail to engage the status quo directly, it is because they both are questioning the assumptions underlying the conventional understanding of reality in their respective areas. More subtly, both writers demonstrate the manner in which the status quo is a judgment upon itself; they accomplish this critique by way of an implicit argument that does indeed call upon the reader’s understanding “in more than the obvious ways.” The refusal of Green’s novels to conclude in conventional manners is a chief hallmark of his pastoral-organic realism. Welty remarked of Green’s novels that, “when after moving you as they do they come to an end, they do not (I think) release you like the more orthodox novels and like the greatest novels” (22). If a novel like Concluding is great, and I think it is, it is in a manner that is new to the novel convention, one that challenges the life-logic of plotted conclusions. We may recall Whitehead’s assertion that, as long as an organism such as a man or the earth is alive in space and time, “there is no determinate nexus which in an unqualified sense is either the man or the earth” (Adventures 204). The same may be said of the life brought forth in a novel of pastoral-organic realism. Green himself humorously commented that, if a novel is really good, you can’t stop its living. Indeed, once the thing is printed, you simply cannot strangle it, as you could a child, by putting your hands round its little wet neck. (Surviving 241)

The Proust biographer George Painter commented upon the paradoxical refusal of Concluding to conclude in the reader’s mind with novel’s end, “Concluding is unforgettable, and not the least of its ambiguous charms is that the reader will never know just what it is he is unable to forget” (qtd. in Treglown 187). Green’s ability to create characters’ lives and worlds that continue after their stories end was noted by Stokes, who remarked that Green’s characters “are more like actual human beings than like most fictional characters” (30).


Reality As an Interactive Network of Societies The deft and complex manner by which Green transmits his characters into the world of the reader is indicative of a general dismantling in his novels of the conventional demarcations between interior and exterior worlds. Welty remarked of Green’s fiction that There is no need to say whether such writing is of the exterior or interior world . . . What the poet, and he is this, has found most explicit about life was clear to him before the line between the exterior and interior was ever invented. (26)

Green’s effort to comprehend life through fiction as a layered series of intersecting worlds nested within and about one another allows him to move past the Modernist impasse between objective reality and subjective desire by which, as Georg Lukács so convincingly argued in his seminal book Realism in our Time, either “human activity is, a priori, rendered impotent and robbed of meaning” (36), or else the “writer identifies what is necessarily a subjective experience with reality as such, thus giving a distorted picture of reality as a whole” (51). Concluding is Green’s supreme achievement in creating real-world complexity that evades the exterior-interior conundrum. North referred to the novel as “the most extreme example of Green’s belief that the exterior world is not necessarily an objective truth but can be as subject to personal desires as the interior world” (180). As persuasive as is North’s argument “that an individual achieves self-creation” in Green’s fiction “by concocting, from whatever trash is available, a narrative to inhabit” (195), his contention that “Green shows that self-knowledge is fiction,” would appear to align Green with a postmodern paradigm of a survival-of-the-fittest fictionmaking world that seems to me a distortion of Green’s pastoral-organic realism. The postmodern paradigm contends that reality is the label given to the most powerful fiction in a world of competing fictions—a world in which truth is necessarily relative to one’s fictive viewpoint. Green’s organic realism, by contrast, argues that there are many realities, all of which are “compositions” (to borrow Whitehead’s key term), but that the truest reality is the most comprehensive, regardless of its power of compulsion in any particular circumstance. The competition between Rock and Edge is more than just a duel between competing fictions; it is a demonstration that the more comprehensive composition ultimately carries the day. Green affirms the winner by naming the mansion that is the novel’s setting “Petra” (Rock), and not Edge (205). The allegorical significance of these names may be considered in various ways. One might think of the Rock as being an emblem of the universe


itself, which Einstein famously considered to be finite but unbounded, like the surface of a sphere, such as the Earth, which has no edges—or rather, on which every edge, such as the edge of a continent or mountain range, is only a relative boundary in the bigger-picture scheme of things. Edge’s fixation on maintaining un-breached the defensive boundaries of her territory and power (even her body is unbreached sexually speaking, as the novel repeatedly stresses) is thus seen in the novel’s narrative to be a relative and small-minded vision of the nature of reality, and of the reality of nature, which is continuous: unbounded. “Rock” also obviously is emblematic of a Christian worldview, with the allusion to Christ’s statement that his church would be founded upon this “rock,” in reference to the disciple Peter (King James Version Matthew 16: 18). Although Green clearly is not an orthodox writer, Concluding may be seen to have many allusions to a Christian worldview, particularly in its contrasting of the caring and nurturing pastoral figure of Rock to the dogmatic and dictatorial Edge, who is like the Pharisees of the Gospels in her devotion to the letter of the law and in the self-righteous puritanical bent of her figure. As the Pharisees plotted against Christ and his disciples, so Edge schemes against Rock and his household as she searches for a way to maneuver them from the cottage on “her” grounds—their very presence in which seems to her a blasphemy in the face of her all-governing bureaucracy. At the Founder’s Day dance near the novel’s end, as she and her governing partner Miss Baker look down at the whirling figures from the dais upon which they are seated, like Queens upon thrones, Edge is avidly pursuing the obsessive theme of Rock and his granddaughter in their cottage, when Baker—who habitually attempts to temper Edge’s potentially self-endangering fanaticism—tries to get her off of the subject: “Now shall we postpone all this until tomorrow?” “Very well,” Edge agreed, content on the whole to let things slide this night of nights, “But I must mention one thing, Baker,” she added, as a last gesture, and in a rising voice, as thought to yell defiance. “They can go too far,” she shouted under the music, but kept her face expressionless. It was like a prisoner, confined with others to a workshop in which talk is forbidden, and who has learned to scream defiance as an unheard ventriloquist beneath the deafening mechanical hammers. “They can outstretch themselves,” (she was working herself up), “there is a Limit, and this,” when, at that precise moment, the music stopped dead into a sighing silence, “this Rock” she continued, and could only go on in a great voice, heard throughout the Hall, “upon which our Institute is Built,” she answered and beamed at the Students. “My dear, magnificent,” Miss Baker approved, in praise of the recovery. (185–186)


The humorous implication is that this “Rock” is not at all limited and cannot go too far by definition, since it is the very ground upon which all arguments are made and all values are judged. When we pay close attention to the subtle and complex allegory emblematized by the chief characters’ names, by novel’s end it almost seems as though Rock were God’s or Nature’s representative (the novel’s allegorical logic implicitly endorses Spinoza’s—and Whitehead’s—cosmological conception of God and Nature as interchangeable terms) who is mercifully appearing before us in the form of a wise old retired scientist and grandfather to point a moral concerning the right relationship between ourselves and our environment, as the fanatical Edge is being given to us as a cautionary tale demonstrating the faulty reasoning whereby we have come to conceive of ourselves as apart and estranged from Nature, to which we in fact wholly belong. For as well as making a political argument concerning the self-defeating nature of tyranny, and a psychological argument concerning the isolation created by fear, and a spiritual argument concerning the supremacy of love, and a biological argument concerning the fundamental character of interactive process, and an aesthetic argument concerning the limits of representation and the autonomy of organic creation, Green in this most complex and comprehensive of his novels is making an ecological argument concerning the role of the human in the natural world. These various arguments are nested within and about one another in interactive motion, like a series of waves rolling through a body of water, only to break upon the shore in a conclusion that never finishes concluding. The logic of argument that they create is incredibly complex and yet harmonious withal, like that of a supreme lyric poem or a piece of music, as Stokes first noted in his insightful monograph (20). The novel itself suggests its own shape as that of a spiral, which is emblematic of a harmony between linear time (narrative) and circular nature (symbolism), and is in another sense representative of the earth in its elliptical orbit about the sun, which is itself in motion as the universe expands outward. One might also think of the electron clouds orbiting the nucleus of an atom in motion. In his 1982 study of Green, Rod Mengham noted Green’s use of metaphor and simile “to jump from one level to another—transposing the characteristics of one level onto another—so that men, women, and children are given the attributes of animals, vegetables, and minerals; and vice versa” (184). This metaphorical level jump might be thought of, metaphorically, as an electron’s quantum leap from one orbit to another, further emphasizing Green’s attention to natural processes, and the process of the natural, in his fiction-making.


One of the most arresting natural and metaphorical leaps in Concluding occurs when Rock and his granddaughter Elizabeth are walking up to the mansion in the evening to attend the Founder’s Day dance, at which Rock is anticipating a continuation of his battle with Edge over the cottage, while Elizabeth is attempting to convince her grandfather to find a way to enable her to live in the cottage together with both him and her potential future husband, a cohabitation which goes against the State’s housing policies as well as against Rock’s inclinations. Their anxious discussions regarding their future home(s) is concluding as they near the mansion, when a flock of starlings suddenly descends upon the trees around them for their nightly roost. The passage is remarkable both for its beauty and its symbolic poignance and is quoted at some length: Then as they came to where the trees ended, and blackbirds, before roosting, began to give the alarm in earnest, some first starlings flew out of the sky . . . After which these birds came in hundreds, then suddenly by legion, black and blunt against faint rose. They swarmed above the lonely elm, they circled a hundred feet above, until the leader, followed by ever greater numbers, in one broad spiral led the way down and so, as they descended, through falling dusk in a soft roar, they made, as they had at dawn, a huge sea shell that stood proud to a moon which, flat sovereign red gold, was already poised full faced to a dying world. Once the starlings had settled in that tree they one and all burst out singing. Then there were more, even higher dots against paler pink, and these, in their turn, began to circle up above, scything the air, and to swoop down through a thickening curve in the enormous echo of blood, or of the sea, until all was black above that black elm, as the first mass of starlings left while these others settled, and there was a huge volume of singing. Then a third concourse came out of the west, and as the first birds swarmed upon the nearest beech these late comers stopped out of dusk in a crash of air to take that elm, to send the last arrivals out, which trebled the singing . . . The starlings flew around a little and then, as sky faded fast, the moon paled to brilliance, and this moment was over, that singing drooped, then finished, as every bird was home. “I’m glad I had that once more,” Mr. Rock said aloud. (148–149)

The passage sums up the novel in several ways, not the least of which is its humorous and poetic naturalizing of the struggle for a home, as the succeeding waves of birds dislodge earlier arrivals from their roosts. In one sense, the birds’ singing may be thought of as an enormous argument, as the discombobulated flocks jostle for position. But the line “and there was a huge volume of singing” is decidedly biblical in its cadence and phrasing and calls to mind, rather, the chorus of hosannas about God’s throne when


every soul has been called home. Might the singing be both argument and praise, and might the one be the other in Nature’s or God’s ear? (The ear is another symbolic spiral that is operative throughout the novel, as is the whirling gossip it attends to.) Green’s working title for the novel was “Dying” (Mengham 187), which is emphasized in the passage above by the blood-like red of the moon and sky, the apt setting for the day’s Armageddon-ish last stand. And yet the spiraling flocks of starlings, in their “enormous echo of blood, or of the sea” emphasize continuity and repetition, and make an analogy as well with the waltzing couples at the coming dance, whose reflections in the polished floor moved “backwards and forwards, in and out again as each pair swung round under chandeliers” (263). Green’s focus on the moving reflections emphasizes, paradoxically, the materiality of the dancers themselves, their object-ness in a world of other objects. As usual with Green, such dehumanization is comforting rather than threatening, but it is also a poignant reminder of the mutability of all things. We are living, and therefore we are dying. And yet to have lived is to have changed the essential character of things, by however infinitesimal an amount, which makes our brief lives a part of the permanency of the world. Whitehead wrote in Process and Reality that individual creativity is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity . . . The many become one, and are increased by one. (25–26)

We contribute our individual change through our creativity—that is, through our living—for to Whitehead, as to Green, living and creation are synonymous. Being is in essence creative becoming, one implication of which is that the past is always present in the future. The past is the material with which the future is made, so that we can say of Green’s world, as of Proust’s, that nothing is ever lost—and that is why Concluding is more apt as a title than “Dying.” For dying is not something that is done; rather “living” is the creative activity of dying. “Concluding,” by contrast, implies both an ongoing process and a stage or state within that process. Green said of his title that it “could be double-barreled i.e. in the sense of ‘ending,’ but also in the sense of ‘drawing inferences’ ” (qtd. in Treglown 184). For the human, self-conscious thought is a part of our creative contribution to the world, but it is only a part. The much larger category is mind or mentality itself, which is something we share with all of nature, in which there is no such thing as “passive matter” (Whitehead, Modes 115) devoid of subjective experience. Our own bodies as individual organisms


are “the basis of our emotional and purposive experience,” and yet in the history of thought, “the unity of man and his body is taken for granted” (Whitehead, Modes 114), resulting in the faulty reasoning whereby early modern science and philosophy could conceive of the human as different in essence from the rest of nature. Rock’s congenial and respectful relations with his animal pets indicates an awareness of the mentality at work in nonhuman nature, as when he observes his pet goose Ted, “staring, head to one side, with a single eye” into a fog bank “beyond which, at some clear height, Mr. Rock knew now there must be a flight of birds fast winging, Ted knows where he thought” (3). In their efforts to counter the isolating, nature-alienating tendencies of a dualistic scientific humanism that conceived of the self-conscious human as different in kind from the rest of nature, both Whitehead and Green strived to emphasize and investigate the living, evolving environments to which the human both contributes and belongs. Green said that his goal with his novels was to create “a life . . . which can live in people who are alive” (Surviving 136), emphasizing the innate and intrinsic relation of the living organism to its living environment. As Whitehead argued, “There is no such thing as absolute solitariness. Each entity requires its environment” (Religion 132). By focusing upon the relationship between an individual subject and its necessary, shaping, interactive and enabling environment, Green and Whitehead in their differing venues were attempting to make the human at home again in nature, which—in generic terms—is an innately pastoral endeavor. Updike noted the pastoral communality of Green’s world-envisioning when he commented that Green’s “effort is to create” throughout his fiction “a field of characters, mingled with their environment, like small creatures coming and going in a meadow” (Surviving x), thus emphasizing the ecological nature of Green’s pastoral creations. The pastoral mode is most operative in Concluding, which presents us with an endangered world within a pastoral boundary, to step outside of which—as has the missing student Mary—is to be lost indeed. Rock is this favored world’s prototypical pastoral figure as Edge is the representative of the threatening world outside—her name labeling her as the pastoral boundary itself in its defensive posture, as we have noted. To rid oneself permanently of the threat of the other is impossible; Rock and Edge cannot marry, but neither can they leave one another alone entirely; the pastoral—like civilization itself—is necessarily under threat of change. The crucial question is the attitude that one adopts to this threat. Edge gives way to paranoia and hysteria, taking egoistic refuge within the selfdefeating ideals of invincibility and invulnerability. Rock’s humble and congenial pastoral response, by contrast, accepts the vulnerability as a given


and prizes the precious threatened environment accordingly. The pastoralist pointedly refuses to adopt an aggressive posture in regards to danger, which is to internalize the threat. Rather he strives to be at home creatively within and amidst the danger. Such a creative, nonaggressive approach to change, Whitehead argued, is at the heart of the success of life itself: In the history of the world, the prize has not gone to those species which specialized in methods of violence, or even in defensive armor . . . There is something in the ready use of force which defeats its own object. Its main defect is that it bars cooperation. Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants. The Gospel of Force is incompatible with a social life. By force, I mean antagonism in its most general sense. (Science 206)

“An environment of friends” is intrinsic to the pastoral vision embodied by Rock in his attitude and relations, as the “Gospel of Force” may be thought of as the self-defeating creed of Edge and her state bureaucracy. Whitehead goes on to argue that the modern “pessimism over the future of the world comes from a confusion between civilization and security” and that, in general, “the great ages have been unstable ages” (Science 207). Green’s creative advance upon his pessimistic, world-critiquing Modernist forbearers was to meet the tremendous instability of our age with an engaging civility in and through his ever-flexible, observant and inventive pastoral-organic realism. With its scrupulous good manners toward character and reader, and its imaginative and generous observation of, and interaction with, the environment as a whole, Green’s fiction offers us the pastoral value of civility itself as a best hope and guide for the happy future of ourselves and our environments.


Ch a p t e r Si x Th e r e ’s a Prov i de nc e Not s o Fa r Away f rom Us: P e n e lope Fi tz g e r a ld’s Pa r a bl i st ic R e a l i sm

Whatever there is to know, That we shall know one day

The unlikely Indian summer career of the late English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald is good news for slow starters. She published her first novel, a mystery, in 1977, when she was sixty years old. Eight more novels were to follow before she died in 2000 at the age of eighty-three. What is most remarkable about her career in fiction, however, is not that it began so late, but that it developed so quickly, in entirely unpredictable ways. John Bayley has written, “In a cool modest way Fitzgerald was an experimenter, never repeating the same kind of novel twice” (ix). Although Fitzgerald made a new start and developed a fresh approach to the fictive project with each of her nine novels, a decided thematic, aesthetic and moral progression may be traced in and through them. For Fitzgerald is first and foremost a moralist, which is not to say that she is a master of scruples in the manner of Henry James, or a connoisseur of human nature, like Jane Austen—the latter of whom, in particular, she greatly admired (Lubow). Rather Fitzgerald is a moralist in the philosophical and spiritual manner of D. H. Lawrence—to whom she declared herself “devoted” (Basbanes)—a moralist in a time of existential anxiety, ethical uncertainty, and intellectual drift, whose fiction attempts to address itself to the perceived crisis. With a few qualified exceptions, the moral approach is not the manner in which Fitzgerald’s work has been considered and appreciated by the reviewers and critics. The absence of the moral element in contemporary critical discourse is certainly not a new or surprising phenomenon, and Fitzgerald herself contributed to critical incomprehension and misunderstanding concerning her work and its motives by writing in parables that are designed to hide their purpose and meaning from the unsuspecting. She was an intensely spiritual writer addressing a largely skeptical audience, to whom she communicated in subtle parables that grew increasingly


complex and profound as her fiction and its moral message developed. With most novelists, it is a mistake to speak of the works’ “message,” but with a moralist such as Fitzgerald, such a discussion is necessary for understanding the full range of implications of her ambitious and broadly ramifying fictive project. It is the nature of a parable to hide its secret in plain sight so that only those readers who approach it with the right attitude will be able to discern its meaning. Christ himself explained the rhetorical logic of the parable when questioned by his disciples regarding his use of them in speaking to the multitude. His response is complex and, as it is key to our argument, it will be quoted at some length: And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand . . . For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. (Matthew 13: 10–13, 15)

The implication is that revelation only comes to those who are prepared to receive it, a message that is reinforced at the end of the chapter in which Jesus is ill-received as a prophet when he returns to his home country, whereupon the Gospel writer concludes: “And he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief” (Matthew 13: 58). Fitzgerald was all too aware of the aesthetic and rhetorical challenge of delivering her message of faith and belief (which is not at all a simple or conventional one, as we shall see) to a contemporary audience of skeptical literalists. In a 1990 interview concerning her penultimate novel, The Gate of Angels, which is arguably her masterpiece, as well as being her most explicitly religious work, she commented, “I still haven’t put down in any of my books what I really believe. I’m ashamed of myself—but it would require so much courage. People think that sort of thing is ridiculous these days, don’t they?” (Heller). In this instance, our own skepticism is called for as we remind ourselves of Lawrence’s admonition to trust the tale and not the teller; for Fitzgerald’s novels are clearly demonstrative of her beliefs and values when they are read aright, and teaching us to read

there’s a providence not so far away / 125

them aright—and to read our experience and world in general aright—is a large part of their purpose. Certainly the very idea of reading aright is apposite to the concept of the parable, which requires for comprehension that one consciously put the literal text alongside its metaphorical meaning (the word “parable” is derived from a word implying comparison between two objects). The parable’s naturalistic narrative must be made to correspond to a spiritual and metaphysical meaning in order for the parable to fulfill its purpose as a work of instruction. The creation of correspondences between text and meaning requires an engaged and responsive interaction with the text, which is a manner of reading that is unfamiliar to those accustomed to the challenges associated with and the pleasures derived from the more passive consumption of the text that is the appropriate reading manner for mimetic fiction. In order to read Fitzgerald’s parables aright, we also must reconsider the nature of the parable form itself, which has come to seem quaint, conventional, simple-minded, and obvious. When we think of Jesus’s parables, for example, it may well seem that their meaning is all too clear. But that is because, through interpretation, the spiritual meaning of these narratives has been tied to the naturalistic events of the story so completely as to seem to derive naturally from them. However, a reader from a different historical and cultural tradition and background could not be expected to perceive this seeming obviousness of meaning. And indeed contemporary readers in the Western tradition who are unfamiliar with the JudeoChristian background (the vast majority of contemporary readers, judging from my students) will not readily perceive that the parable of the prodigal son, for example, is a story of spiritual renewal and salvation. They are more likely to read the story in a Freudian manner as the working out of an Oedipal family romance or in a Marxist manner as the story of an unfair distribution of wealth. They might even interpret the story as a genderbending feminist tale of an over-indulged wayward son who is unfairly privileged over a dutiful stay-at-home daughter. Or perhaps the prodigal son is gay. If contemporary students were given the story of the prodigal son devoid of all context and tradition and asked to interpret it critically, they would be more likely to come up with these culturalist interpretations than they would be to read the story as a metaphor of spiritual awakening and a meditation on the nature of divine love. The purpose of this digression is to point out the difficult task facing the contemporary novelist for whom spiritual and moral concerns are paramount. When, in an interview, Fitzgerald was asked about the reflection in the work of her feminist and political beliefs, she replied that she hoped her work reflected, rather, her spiritual beliefs (Byatt xii). When I refer to


Fitzgerald as a writer of parables, I mean that her fiction has spiritual and moral implications that are central and integral to their meaning, and that a reading of the work that does not take into account the moral and spiritual is missing the point in the same manner in which a reading of Dante’s Commedia that focuses on the naturalistic elements of plot, setting, and character development has missed the point and purpose of the text. Of course Dante is a self-announced allegorist and a reader who ignores the allegorical means and method in his poem is willfully deceived. Readers who fail to recognize the parables in Fitzgerald’s fiction, by contrast, have been unprepared by contemporary culture and training to perceive that these seemingly naturalistic texts require interactive metaphorical interpretations in order for them to come into their own. Seeing such a text, most contemporary readers see not, and hearing they hear not, and neither do they understand. Such basic incomprehension is, I think, key to understanding the hostility and condescension with which Fitzgerald’s work has on occasion been treated by reviewers. Ian Samson, for instance, writing in Salmagundi soon after Fitzgerald’s death in 2000, offered this dismissive, yet telling assessment: Because Fitzgerald possesses such a fluency—because her work enunciates so clearly—it is possible to assume that she is saying something when she is saying very little. Hers is the effect of the don and the priest; the ability to suggest that there is a drama, a momentum in even the most insignificant daily routine or detail. (Samson)

To make us perceive such a drama and momentum, operating on a separate spiritual and metaphysical plane is certainly the desired effect of the parable. Although Samson obviously does not much care for Fitzgerald’s work, he is alert to its metaphysical implications: One cannot help but think that all the memorials and praise for Fitzgerald— with all their talk of ease and her eye for detail—do her a grievous disservice. Her work is actually much stranger and darker; it gives one just that sense of waste that is given by life itself. (Samson)

I agree with the observation but reject the limited interpretation. To read Fitzgerald’s work according to its intentions, one must look beyond the alltoo-human tragedy to the divine comedy of which it is a part. In an essay on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Fitzgerald observed that, in order to understand the novel’s moral argument, we must be able to perceive that, hidden within the narrative’s “vast complications,” created, at least in part, by Dorothea’s unfortunate decisions and failed aspirations,


is the quiet but “incalculably diffusive” influence of a kindhearted individual, whose good intentions and generous actions tip the balance of the novel from human tragedy to divine comedy. As Fitzgerald observed: We have actually seen the effect of Dorothea’s being on those around her, in her generous gift to Lydgate . . . her yet more generous visit to Rosamund. On these “unhistoric” acts in an undistinguished town in the Midlands, the growing good of the world may partly depend. We must believe this if we can. (Afterlife 23)

As is made obvious here, in her essays and reviews, Fitzgerald’s moral argument and sentiment is far from being hidden. For our purposes in this essay, a working distinction must be made between parable and allegory. A traditional allegory typically has multiple meanings and operates in the imaginative space between probabilistic naturalism and the idealized emblematic. A parable, by contrast, traditionally has a fairly simple (but not simplistic) moral and spiritual meaning that is exemplified by a story that is wholly or almost wholly naturalistic and probable. Although Fitzgerald’s later work has a pronounced tendency toward the idealized emblematic of classic allegory, she is primarily a writer of naturalistic stories with moral and spiritual meanings—that is, of parables. Indeed, her insistence upon naturalism in her work is integral to its argument, as is her insistence upon the primacy of moral values in interpreting experience. One further distinction between the parable and the allegory is that the parable is pointedly instructive (to those with ears to hear), whereas the allegory is broadly revelatory. The parable is a demonstration; the allegory is a revelation. As Fitzgerald’s work developed, its naturalistic narrative broadened out into complex and resonant allegories with multiple implications—a development that is indicative of the author’s own moral progress as a creator and of her growing trust in, and expectations of, her readers. However, the pointed purpose of the work as a moral demonstration remains paramount, which is to say that the allegorical elements of the later work are employed in the service of the parable’s instruction. In addition to the authors already discussed in this study under the rubric of modern allegory, I would suggest Franz Kafka as a prototypical modern allegorist, whereas Flannery O’Connor and in some respects D. H. Lawrence would be more clearly writers of modern parables. Although Fitzgerald is more subtle and reticent in making her moral arguments than are either O’Connor or Lawrence, she shares with these writers a tendency to repeat moral points and to demonstrate spiritual values in and through naturalistic narratives. I realize, of course, that I am culpable of stretching


the concept of the parable in adapting it as a generic category of use in analyzing modern literature. My defense is that we must use all of the traditional generic categories at our disposal in teaching ourselves to read in a particularly assertive and interactive metaphorical manner to which we have become unaccustomed. Although we are all too practiced these days at interpreting literature culturally, in sociological, psychological, political, and economic manners, we have lost the instinct for interpreting literature metaphorically in terms of its correspondence with a spiritual or metaphysical realm that is on an entirely different plane from our everyday world. To consign our interpretation of a spiritual writer like Fitzgerald to the usual cultural categories is to miss the main thrust of her work, which is to direct our attention to what traditionally has been referred to as the realm of eternal verities—the reality of which, in contemporary intellectual discourse, at least, has become so suspect as to make a direct reference to it tantamount to a claim for one’s own irrelevance—a condition that no doubt contributed to Fitzgerald’s choice of the indirect method, which offered the added benefit of suiting her subtle and clever intellect. Fitzgerald’s condensed novels have philosophical, as well as spiritual, implications that are integral to our understanding of them. Those who believe in the reality of eternal verities may be categorized under two broad philosophical schools—that of idealism and that of philosophical realism (also known as metaphysical realism). They are excluded from the third broad philosophical category of nominalism, which is reserved for those who believe in the reality only of the things of this world, and which has been the dominant school of philosophy of the modern age, under which most contemporary schools fall. Idealists, by contrast to nominalists, believe in the reality only of the eternal verities, or universals, as they traditionally have been called. Philosophical realists have a foot in both camps, believing both in the reality of the eternal verities or universals and in the reality of the things of this world—the particulars or actualizations of the existent. In other words, philosophical realists believe in the reality of both mind and matter, and of soul and body—as well as in the reality of both generals and particulars, potentialities and actualities (Feibleman 3–10). This is the philosophical school to which Fitzgerald decidedly belongs, as we shall demonstrate. Christian dogma has vacillated over the centuries between the idealist and philosophical realist positions, but with the ascendance of a materialistic nominalism, emblematized by Descartes’ hypothesis that the human soul is housed in the pineal gland, the Church took more and more the opposing idealist position that it is the material body in its material world that is the illusion, a mere blip in the mind of God, as Descartes’ soul is


a mere nodule in the matter of the body. The difficulty for the idealists, of course, is that the body in its world clearly exists—and the manner in which it does so was becoming more evident with each thrilling scientific advance in the run-up to our modern age—whereas the reality of God is a matter of faith, which requires a different sort of evidence—or, rather, a different kind of interpretation of the evidence given. When the discussion began to focus, irrationally, on the existence, rather than the reality, of God, the metaphysical and religious argument had already been lost. The realm of the eternal verities had vanished from sight. It is the argument of this essay that Fitzgerald’s fiction is a sustained attempt to reconnect us with that realm and to encourage us to believe not in its existence, but in its reality, and to understand the implications of that reality for our lives and world. The distinction I am making between the existent and the real is borrowed from perhaps the greatest of American philosophers, the nineteenth-century polymath Charles Peirce, who adopted as his life’s aim the effort to unify all knowledge, and in the process to correct what he felt to be the erroneous perception of an ultimate incommensurability between scientific fact and religious or spiritual truth. To insist upon such an incommensurability, Peirce argued, is to confuse the existent and the real, a confusion that he addressed directly in discussing the question of his belief in the existence of God, to which he responded by first altering the terms of the question: I will . . . take the liberty of substituting “reality” for “existence” . . . I myself always use exist in its strict sense of “react with the other like things in the environment.” Of course, in that sense, it would be fetishism to say that God “exists.” The word “reality,” on the contrary, is used in ordinary parlance in its correct philosophical sense . . . I define the real as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to be, or ever will have thought them to be . . . the real thing’s characters will remain absolutely untouched . . . So, then, the question being whether I believe in the reality of God, I answer, Yes. I further opine that pretty nearly everybody more or less believes this, including many of the scientific men of my generation who are accustomed to think the belief is entirely unfounded. (Collected Papers 6.494–495)

Peirce goes on to argue that the concept of God is a necessarily vague concept that is made untenable when it is made too precise—as by speaking of the “existence” of God, or of God’s “nature” (Collected Papers 6.494). Elsewhere he insists that vagueness has a reality of its own that is too easily discounted by the nominalists with their narrow-minded and skeptical belief only in precise and measurable particulars (Writings 300).


Peirce’s conception of the “real” is likewise vague in that it requires that we acknowledge a perpetual uncertainty in our understanding of it: There is nothing to prevent our knowing outward things as they really are, and it is most likely that we do thus know them in numberless cases, although we can never be absolutely certain of doing so in any special case. (Collected Papers 5.311)

Although we cannot say with absolute certainty what the real is in any particular case, we can make educated assumptions and assertions concerning it—and the making of such is, for Peirce, the very business of the scientist, for whom the cardinal sin is an assumption of absolute certainty of knowledge, which closes off investigation. Peirce further contended that the practice of science assumes the reality of the real, the understanding of which is the goal of science, and indeed of all knowledge (Writings 47). In the sense of reality as something to be investigated and understood, science and religion (together with philosophy and art) are reading from the same book of nature, although they use different methods to interpret it. Peirce’s argument against nominalism is that it makes “the human mind the author rather than the reader and interpreter of the ‘book of nature’ ” (Raposa 20), which is to become a fetishist of the human mind—that is, a humanist; or a reactionary post-humanist—that is, a deconstructionist. In practice, Peirce argued—both in scientific practice and in the manner in which we live our daily lives—we assume a meaningful reality that is apart from ourselves and to which we, in the bigger picture, belong and contribute; such an assumption amounts to an unexpressed belief. But in theory we have come to base our understanding of reality, and thus our conscious values and beliefs, on our limited perceptions—Descartes’ famous cogito, “I think therefore I am” is emblematic of this viewpoint and its limitations (who would think to doubt such a thing?)—and this has led to a schism in our world between practice and theory that Peirce hoped to mend by his invention of the pragmatic philosophical method, by which he sought to reground human understanding on our actual practice rather than on our theoretical inventions and allegiances. “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts,” Peirce admonished (Writings 229). The sentiment and argument of Fitzgerald’s fiction is entirely consonant with this admonition. In her later novels, in which her moral argument is most explicit, she presents us with repeated scenarios in which characters are made miserable and come to grief by doubting in their heads what they do not doubt in their hearts. This “coming to grief” is the narrative first stage of the repeated and evolving parable of her novels, the complementary and concluding second stage of which is the movement into recognition


and correction. The two narrative movements are exemplified in the parable of the prodigal, who first squanders his inheritance in riotous living, to the point at which he is reduced to living with the pigs he is tending, whereupon he swallows his pride, admits his error, and returns home, where he is received by his forgiving father with open arms (Luke 15: 11–32). The movements are parallel to the archetypal epic narrative arc of a journey into the underworld and return home. The crucial difference in the parable, however, is that the transformative event is a personal moral awakening. In Fitzgerald’s last novel, The Blue Flower, which is based upon the life of the early German Romantic poet and philosopher, Novalis, this awakening is a spiritual envisioning—a mystical moment, or rather series of moments, of revelation. The moral and mystical transformations that Fitzgerald’s characters undergo are explicitly occasioned by chance. It is the prevalence of the element of chance throughout her fiction that first led me to consider it in relation to the philosophy of Peirce, who is the hero of Ian Hacking’s compelling 1990 study, The Taming of Chance: “Peirce positively asserted that the world is irreducibly chancy. The universal laws that are the glory of natural science are a by-product of the workings of chance” (Hacking 11). What makes Peirce so apposite to Fitzgerald’s implicitly religious fiction (she was in practice a Roman Catholic (Wolfe 17)) is the fact that, although he demonstrated the manner in which indeterminacy is fundamental to the workings of the world, he was nevertheless a committed believer in divine providence, and he argued persistently that the seeming contradiction between a world in which chance is, and will always be, primary and a world that is divinely providential—“a great symbol of God’s purpose, working out its conclusions in living realities” (Collected Papers 5.119)—is a misunderstanding of the dual nature of reality, a confusion of the everyday existent and the ultimately real. For Peirce, chance is the necessarily primary characteristic of a growing, changing, and evolving world. Chance would only be annulled in a perfectly static world—an unliving world. God, for Peirce, is intimately involved with this evolving world; he not only created it, but he is creating and, crucially, perfecting it (Collected Papers 1.615). For Peirce, the concept of a finished and unchanging God is a false idol that was the creation of a world enamored of mechanical laws of physics operating in clockwork fashion. A living and evolving world, by contrast, requires the concept of a living and evolving God, although one whose purpose we cannot in this life hope to know. The question for Peirce is not whether the world is changing and evolving; the question is changing how and evolving into what? We do not need to know God’s purpose in order to answer these questions with a necessarily qualified reasonable certainty; rather we can rely on our observations and intuition (which Peirce—like


Fitzgerald—considered to be superior to conscious reasoning, a condensed form of logic (Collected Papers 1.672)), both of which told Peirce that the world is becoming more ordered and reasonable and that the means by which this is being accomplished is love, which he sometimes referred to as “evolutionary love” (Collected Papers 6.295), emphasizing its integral role in the progress of organic creation. Although Fitzgerald makes no reference in her work to Peirce, his concerns and preoccupations concerning science and religion, reason and intuition, chance and order—including the power of love to make sense of the chaos of our lives (and of human history itself)—are very much her own, as the reading of her work that we are embarked upon will demonstrate. The intuited affinity between Fitzgerald and Peirce is also supported by her late interest in the work of Novalis, who was a key figure in the “Jena Circle” of early German Romanticism. Peirce was clearly influenced by this movement of thought, as has been generally noted, and as he himself acknowledged (Writings 339). When one reads Peirce’s voluminous work side by side with the remarkably like-minded but fragmentary production of Novalis, who died at the age of twenty-eight, it almost seems that Peirce is expanding upon and systematizing Novalis’s prescient intuitions regarding our evolving understanding of the nature of reality, of God, and of ourselves. We will, in any case, draw upon the work of both of these revolutionary thinkers in our analysis of Fitzgerald’s quietly revolutionary fiction, to which we now turn. We will focus our discussion of Fitzgerald’s fiction on two main topics that have been introduced above and are summarized briefly below, which we will take in turn: 1. Two Metaphysical Levels of Reality First, we will consider the overall manner in which the two metaphysical levels of reality—which may be labeled variously as the eternal and the existent, the general and the particular, and the potential and the actual— operate in and through Fitzgerald’s fiction. 2. Evolutionary Love Second, we will consider the occasions in which the two metaphysical levels of reality are brought into contact with one another in Fitzgerald’s later novels. These events have a dual effect on the characters, overwhelming them with the complexities of experience, leading to the disintegration of their personalities, while simultaneously prompting them to progress through love to greater knowledge of and integration with a providential reality.

Two Metaphysical Levels of Reality The idea of two metaphysical levels of reality is implicit throughout Fitzgerald’s fiction, but it is an idea that developed from the earlier work,


in which it is a central thematic preoccupation in more or less conventional narratives, to the later work—the last four novels and the later stories—in which it evolved into a key structuring device that altered the very form of the fiction. Since the idea of two metaphysical levels of reality is key to understanding the nature and scope of Fitzgerald’s fictive project, we will consider the evolution of this idea in her work in some detail. The Golden Child Fitzgerald’s first novel, published in 1977, The Golden Child, was an erudite, humorous, and carefully constructed mystery set in contemporary times at the British Museum in London. The novel is remarkable as a first fiction for its certainty of voice and manner and for the directness of its various biases—in favor of the enthusiastic amateur, and against the snobbish connoisseur; in favor of the lower and middle-class self-made individual, and against the entitled aristocrat; in favor of the commonsensical and good-hearted artisan, and against the rarefied and bad-natured intellectual. What is obvious about the late-starting, sixty-year-old author of The Golden Child is that she is extremely clever and intelligent, quietly self-confident, and morally committed—one might even say morally obsessed. What is also obvious is that she has a bit of a chip on her shoulder (in reaction, perhaps, to the life conditions that necessitated such a late start as a novelist) and a tendency toward sentimentality in her regard for the downtrodden whose cause she champions. When the novel’s mystery is solved, we are not surprised to find that it is the unlikable connoisseurs and spoiled aristocrats—the museum administrative elite—who have committed the various crimes, attempting to frame in the process the good-natured, generous-spirited, and humorously hapless mid-level bureaucrat-hero, Waring Smith. For an author such as Fitzgerald with a keen moral discrimination, the caricatured villains and heroes of The Golden Child are easy pickings—so much so that one is led to wonder whether a more subtle argument is at work, perhaps implicit in the genre itself. The mystery convention works innately on two levels, that of the confused mystery itself and that of its rational solution; together the two may be thought of as implying the two metaphysical levels of reality, that of the haphazard everyday existent and that of the ultimately reasonable eternal or ideal. Certainly the mystery stories of a religiously minded writer such as G. K. Chesterton, for example, or of Fitzgerald’s uncle, the famous Roman Catholic convert priest and mystery author, Ronald Knox, are very consciously creating such metaphysical implications. In that spirit they are functioning allegorically. In these writers’ work, the mystery’s ultimately reasonable solution is a moral


judgment upon the haphazard mutable world and a metaphysical correction to our habitually confused understanding. The highly mannered mystery genre, like the genres of science fiction and fantasy, lends itself to moralistic allegorical argumentation. Fitzgerald’s fictive inclination, however, is to write subtle naturalistic parables that patiently and quietly instruct, rather than to create allegorical arguments that overtly convict. Moreover, in her most characteristic work, she is concerned with demonstrating the manner in which the two realms of the eternal and the mutable may be connected in and through our natural lives, whereas allegory’s focus is on the fundamental and ultimate discontinuity between the two levels. (In Kafka’s allegories, for instance, plot and character development lead insidiously to an inevitable impasse, signifying ultimate metaphysical discontinuity.) When genre allegory is used as an overt moral instrument, it serves to garner the attention and upbraid the conscience of the great unwashed (we might think of the original Star Trek series as an allegorical critique of violence in general and of the Vietnam War in particular), whereas the parable serves as an entertaining distraction to the multitude, while secretively instructing the elect concerning the means to their salvation. In Fitzgerald’s later fiction, in which her coyly instructive parables are most fully developed, she repeatedly demonstrates the manner in which the eternal world is reached in and through the naturalistic material world, which is transformed in the process into a symbol of eternity and of God’s providence. The transformative agent is chance, the providential meaning of which is grace. In the allegorical mystery genre, however, no such transformation—or we might say, rather, no such redemption— takes place. Which is all to say that The Golden Child was, for Fitzgerald, somewhat of a false start, for she was working against her temperamental and fictive inclinations. In any case, with the publication of this generic mystery novel, her concern with the two metaphysical levels of reality was established, however tentatively, and in future work she would move on to the naturalistic novel of moral instruction that she eventually would make her own. The Bookshop Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Bookshop, is a naturalistic and moralistic novel of manners, similar in some ways to the novels of Jane Austen and of Fitzgerald’s habitually undervalued contemporary, Barbara Pym, whom she admired (Afterlife 276). It is also in part autobiographical, as are the three novels that follow it. It is similar to The Golden Child in that there


are clear villains, who are again among the upper-class elite, or allied with them, and who maliciously victimize the novel’s hard-put middle-class main figure, Florence Green. The novel’s primary villain, Mrs. Gamart, is a thoroughly self-deceived hypocrite who self-consciously adheres to the purest of motives, as the Austenian narrator informs us: “She always acted in the way she felt to be right. She did not know that morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct” (100). The socially strictured “morality” that is obviously referred to in this circumstance is not the enlightened spiritual morality of which I speak in regards to Fitzgerald’s fiction, which is, rather, the morality of which Whitehead spoke when he noted that “morality of outlook is inseparably conjoined with generality of outlook” (Process 19), and which Novalis referred to when he defined the “moral sense” as “the sense for unity . . . the sense for harmony” (Notes 61). Such a morality is generous and inclusive, rather than judgmental and exclusive, and it is represented in Fitzgerald’s novel by Florence Green’s persistent good-heartedness amid hardship and attack. We may find evidence of this in her kind behavior toward Mrs. Gamart’s henpecked and complicitous husband when he makes a surprise appearance at Florence’s bookshop (from which his wife is maneuvering to evict her) following the sudden death of a mutual friend: Florence Green did not feel much like helping him. He had not been in the shop for some months, and she presumed that he had been acting under orders. Then she relented, knowing that he had come on a kind impulse. In the end, she valued kindness above everything. “You don’t want a book, do you?” “Not exactly. I just came in to say ‘A good man gone.’ ” (118)

Although Florence eventually loses her bookshop and feels compelled to leave the town to which she had perhaps prematurely retired following her husband’s death in the city, she is the undoubted hero of this deft moral tale because of her “kind heart,” which, the narrator warns us at the novel’s beginning, “is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation” (7). Certainly by “the world’s” standards, Violet Gamart wins her duel with Florence Green, ousting the latter from her bookshop to make way for an “arts centre” (26) (which seems destined to be of use chiefly as a venue for the buoying up of Mrs. Gamart’s inflated ego). But by the standards of “the heart,” Florence Green has persevered and, in staying true to her kindhearted motives and intentions, she has even triumphed, offering a martyr’s rebuke to Mrs. Gamart’s specious moral values. Two books that Florence Green takes with her from her abandoned stock on her ignominious retreat from the town “that had not wanted a


bookshop” (123) are volumes from the significantly slow-selling Everyman series, Ruskin’s Unto this Last and Bunyan’s Grace Abounding: Each had its old bookmarker in it, Everyman I will be thy guide in thy most need to go by thy side, and the Ruskin also had a pressed gentian, quite colourless. The book must have gone, perhaps fifty years before, to Switzerland in springtime. (123)

The anonymous morality-play quotation printed on the marker, and from which the book series takes its name, hearkens back to a time in which literature offered itself explicitly and implicitly as a moral guide to every man—in which John Bunyan could be the author of works that were both literary and religious classics. The preserved Swiss gentian in the Ruskin likewise points backwards, to the Romantic movement and its great sense of mission in reading nature itself as a universal morality play, a complex yet everywhere evident symbol of God’s purpose. With these various literary references at the conclusion of A Bookshop, Fitzgerald is attempting to instruct us in the necessity of such interpretive elasticity by providing us clear indications that what we are being given are moral parables, the understanding of which requires that we translate the everyday material existent into the language of spiritual values. The text by Ruskin is a case in point. In the series of four essays that comprise Unto this Last, Ruskin decried the mid-nineteenth-century selfserving capitalistic economic philosophy that claimed the making of a profit to be an innate moral good, regardless of the manner in which the profit was made, at what cost of human happiness or misery, the latter of which Ruskin referred to as “the far-reaching ruin” of which material wealth is so often “the gilded index” (Ruskin). Ruskin wrote: It is impossible to conclude of any given mass of acquired wealth, merely by the fact of its existence, whether it signifies good or evil to the nation in the midst of which it exists. Its real value depends on the moral sign attached to it, just as sternly as that of a mathematical quantity depends on the algebraical sign attached to it. (Ruskin)

The economic “science” that would consider the creation of wealth in a disinterested empiricist manner, apart from its moral value—its value to the human soul—Ruskin argues, is tantamount to “a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons” (Ruskin). For Ruskin, the soul, and the ideal or spiritual plane on which it exists, are operative realities and a system of economics that does not take them into account is unrealistic—“deficient . . . in applicability”—no matter how “admirable” its “reasoning” (Ruskin).


In The Bookshop, the names of the major figures have their own moral values—one of which is clearly related to the science of economy. The principle antagonist is Violet Gamart, which, with minor manipulation, may be translated into “violent mart,” aptly symbolizing Mrs. Gamart’s take-noprisoners behavior in manipulating the failure of Florence Green’s bookshop enterprise. An accomplished system manipulator, Mrs. Gamart manages to arrange for the bookshop’s demise without allowing any trace to remain of her personal responsibility for the outcome. Florence Green’s name, by contrast, clearly aligns her with generous nature itself and its remarkable instinct for regeneration and renewal, no matter how thwarted and oppressed. In what is perhaps the most perceptive critical essay yet produced of Fitzgerald’s fiction, Tess Lewis contended that “The Bookshop is Fitzgerald’s darkest novel and contains her most malevolent characters” (Lewis). I concur with this observation and would add that it is—with the possible exception of The Golden Child—her most moralistic (as distinguished from moral) novel, in which good and evil are most clearly identified and opposed. Such a clear opposition is in fact a potential danger to the writer with a moral passion, as it leads all too easily to a self-righteous narrowmindedness. The fiction of a modern parable writer such as Flannery O’Connor constantly courts and flouts just such a danger, as do the novels of Fitzgerald’s friend and contemporary Muriel Spark. O’Connor’s and Sparks’ intensely ironic creative temperaments are at home with fictive structures that are morally overdetermined, but as we read further into Fitzgerald’s fiction, we will find that such overt moralism is uncongenial to her more meditative and even mystical talent and genius. In regards to that later, major work, The Bookshop seems most significant, perhaps, as an instructive journey down a road that will not again be taken. Offshore Perhaps sensing the aesthetic and spiritual danger of the temptation of an overtly moralistic fiction of heroes and villains, Fitzgerald in her next work, Offshore, turned her keen, discriminating moral vision on the aspect of her own life history that would seem least to bear scrutiny, the story of her, by all accounts, difficult and strained marriage. The felt confession running throughout Offshore makes this novel her most approachable and, in some respects, most conventional in terms of the subgenre of autobiographical naturalism that has become one of the dominant modes in contemporary fiction. But in several other senses, this novel and the two semiautobiographical novels that follow it, Human Voices and At Freddie’s, are decided departures from the dominant mimetic modes of contemporary fiction; for they do not have clearly delineated plots, with beginnings


middles and ends, or obvious main figures. And they conclude without coming to a conclusion in regards to the various fragmented plotlines that have been established and characters’ lives into which we as readers have been drawn. Wendy Lesser noted simply that, in these and later Fitzgerald novels, “the narrative contract has been broken” (109). But if one convention has been abandoned—that of the conventional mimetic novel in which we ego-identify with a main character’s narrative progress—another has been created in its place, one in which we are given multiple characters in complex fictive situations full of narrative uncertainties and incompletions. As Lewis observed, Fitzgerald’s later novels “are woven from the accidents of her characters’ lives. Incidents and incidentals rather than formal plots or tidy story lines govern the books” (Lewis), which may lead us to question whether the narratives are “governed” at all in the traditional sense. The answer is both “yes” and “no,” and is related to our theme of the two metaphysical levels. The answer is clearly “yes” in that Fitzgerald as narrator knows where her novels are headed, as she told interviewer Nicholas Basbanes: I have made a rule for myself: I don’t start [a novel] until I have my title, my first paragraph, and my last paragraph. I can’t choose the ending as I go along. I’ve got to have that before I can begin to write. (Basbanes)

But the answer is “no” in that the novels do not conclude in the usual sense, and often indeed leave the reader with more questions than answers regarding the fates of the characters and their lives. Such open-ended endings are more “true to life” than are complete conclusions; for our own lives’ stories typically do not entirely conclude with tidy narrative completions, but are in large measure open-ended and continuous. And if one thinks of a conclusion as an ending to a story that makes sense of the story that it ends, then death itself must be considered an ending rather than a conclusion, from our mundane point of view. By refusing to conclude the stories of her characters’ lives, Fitzgerald implicitly requires that we as readers step in to do so, to our own satisfaction, thus emphasizing the continuity of community implied by the creative process. At the same time, she leads us to ask in what way—from what viewpoint and in whose eyes—the completed stories of our own lives may be meaningfully concluded, and in doing this, she points us toward a realm of meaning, and of being, that is obscure to us, but the reality of which is implied by our own experience. In her introduction to L. H. Myers’ profound mystical trilogy, The Root and the Flower, Fitzgerald noted that “the story never yields a conclusion. ‘There is no illusory sense of understanding,’ Myers said, ‘on the realization of what is’ ” (Afterlife 228). Our limits


of understanding do not preclude, however, an awareness of what lies beyond those limits, as Fitzgerald wrote, “Myers has shown that though there are limits to human will, there are none to human vision” (Afterlife 228), and she concludes her introduction with the assertion that Myers’ “strange masterpiece . . . brought back the aspect of eternity to the English novel” (Afterlife 229). Fitzgerald’s own fiction continues in that tradition by operating on two metaphysical levels, that of human will and that of human vision. The former is explicit, the latter more often implicit. Lesser observed a “skewed relationship to the passage of time” in Fitzgerald’s fiction that we may take to be an indication of the two levels in interactive operation: It is as if there were two entirely separate time schemes: the one chronicled by the words on the page, which end abruptly and resolutely fail to give us everything; and then the other one around or behind or between these words, which is filled with the richness of the characters’ inner lives, their histories before we met them, their fates after they leave us, and a million other things we can only imagine. In Fitzgerald’s work, these two timelines have no predictable relation to each other. It is not as if one comes after the other, or stands in for the other. We are given only one of them directly, in the author’s words, and yet the sense of both of them is equally strong. (Lesser 111–112)

Lesser concludes provocatively that the operation of this skewed time sense in Fitzgerald’s fiction seems to her evidence of Fitzgerald’s disbelief in God: I have gathered from various sources that Fitzgerald is considered, or has considered herself to be, a religious writer, a religious person. However, I would not have supposed it from reading her novels. To me they are the work of a pure agnostic. And by this I mean not just someone who feels we can’t ever know that God exists, but also someone whose God, if he did exist, would never be able fully to know us. (Lesser 123)

Given Lesser’s acute observation regarding the operation of the “two time schemes” in Fitzgerald’s fiction and her knowledge that Fitzgerald considered herself to be a religious writer, it is remarkable that she is unable to put the two together in a way that would lead her to perceive the manner in which these two timelines imply two sightlines, one limited and the other limitless, one existential and one eternal. Rather Lesser’s interpretative obtuseness (like that of Samson) would seem to offer a pointed demonstration of the effectiveness of the parable form in extending its instructive message only to those available to receive it, without overtly excluding


those who are not. It is as though Fitzgerald were saying with her fiction: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” (Matthew 11: 15) The sense of the separate operation of the two timelines in Fitzgerald’s fiction increases with each novel, to the point at which, in her last novel, The Blue Flower, “It almost seems as if the events had all happened simultaneously” as Acocella perceptively observed (432). The Blue Flower is composed of short chapters that are almost tableau-like in their mixture of narrative and stasis. It is the most mannered of Fitzgerald’s novels. In general, Fitzgerald’s fiction becomes more meaningfully mannered, and the characters more provocatively emblematic, as the novels progress. The progress of her fiction in this sense is, at the same time, a dismantlement of naturalistic narrative convention. But she is not destroying the elements of that convention in a modernist or postmodernist object lesson in deconstructive aesthetics. Rather she is separating and rearranging the elements so that we are made to look at the convention, and the reality it represents, with new eyes. By deconstructing and reconstructing the traditional time sense that is the foundation for conventional plot operation in the naturalistic novel, Fitzgerald makes available modes of plot progression alternative to the usual cause-and-effect method. In particular, she allows chance a crucial constructive role in the creative progress of her fictive world. In a conventional naturalistic novel, chance is typically, of course, the enemy of the rational progress of the main character in his/her narrative. We will discuss the key functioning of chance in Fitzgerald’s fiction in the next section. But before doing so, we will first examine the manner in which that fiction deconstructs and reconstructs the “character” concepts of individuality, personality, and identity in accordance with the idea of the two metaphysical levels. The most conventional protagonists in Fitzgerald’s novels are Waring Smith in The Golden Child and Florence Green in The Bookshop. Beginning with Offshore, Fitzgerald’s characters become less conventional, and even less realistic, but more real. An intriguing distinction between the realistic and the real in Fitzgerald’s work was made by Richard Eder in his review of Fitzgerald’s biography of her father and his brothers, The Knox Brothers: The figures in the biography offer foreshadowing hints of some of those in her novels . . . Yet they are far less real. Reality was a realm that Fitzgerald, after decades of silent struggle with the all-too-real, was climbing toward. She found it most comically, radiantly and unaccountably in her imagination. (Eder “Penelope Fitzgerald”)

Part of the problem with bringing figures in a nonfiction work alive is that they are “all-too-real,” too actual; they are bounded by actual fact and circumstance, and their future is determined. Fitzgerald herself noted this limitation when reviewing a biography of Virginia Woolf, in which she


observed that, “Reading a good biography means thinking of unfulfilled conditionals” (Afterlife 205). The key word is “unfulfilled”—that which didn’t and can never now happen: dead potential. But reality as we experience it, and as the good biographer must strive to recreate it, is a combination of the living actual and the living potential. The potential future is an active part of our present, as fully as is the ramifying past. In fact it could be said that the future is more active than the past, since it is that on which we are focused. This is no doubt one of the things that Novalis had in mind when he wrote: “We are more closely united with the invisible, than with the visible” (Notes 251) and that Peirce was considering when he insisted that the “real” is made up not only of real particulars (such as a stone) and real generals (such as the hardness of a stone), but also of “real vagues, and especially real possibilities” (Writings 300). In Fitzgerald’s novels from Offshore forward, real vagues and real possibilities become as operative as real actuals and real generals. Indeed Offshore may be said to be about the at times overwhelming reality of possibilities. The characters who live on the Thames barges, which are moored to the banks of the tidal river, the movements of which make them sometimes afloat and sometimes aground, are all characterized by their inability and/or unwillingness to make crucial life decisions—which is the topic of a key conversation between the novel’s most central figure, Nenna, and her best friend, a homosexual prostitute named Maurice who lives on the neighboring barge. Nenna is considering whether to move to shore, and also whether to make a visit to her estranged husband, who is living in a northern suburb: “I can’t make up my mind.” “You shouldn’t do it at all.” “Why not, Maurice?” “Why should you think it’s a good thing to do? Why should it make you any happier? There isn’t one kind of happiness, there’s all kinds. Decision is torment for anyone with imagination. When you decide, you multiply the things you might have done and now never can.” (46–47)

Given such ambivalence, it might be consoling to think that one’s fate is—at least in part—out of one’s hands, as Nenna’s sister suggests when attempting to convince Nenna, who is originally from Canada, to move with her two children back to her home country, where she can live with her sister Louise and her husband Joel until she gets back on her feet: “Joel is of one mind with me about this. I mean of course about yourself and the little girls, the possibility of your returning to Halifax.” “It’s the first you’ve ever even mentioned this, Louise.” “But I’ve been thinking about it, Nenna, and praying. Joel isn’t a Catholic, as you know, but he’s told me that he believes there’s a Providence not so far

142 / alternative realisms away from us, really just above our heads if we could see it, that wants things to be the way they’re eventually going. Now that idea appeals to me.” (112)

It is an idea that appealed to Fitzgerald as well and which she attempted to give her readers a sense of in her construction of fiction in which potential and possibility, in the form of an ideal to be approached, play such a crucial role. The Short Fiction In his review of Fitzgerald’s posthumously published book of short stories, Eder—who is one of Fitzgerald’s most perceptive commentators— observed the everyday effect of potential and possibility as alternative realities in Fitzgerald’s fiction, noting that In several of the best [of the stories], the main account is hollowed out by the vague counterstory of a secondary figure—someone marginal, unconsidered, powerless. It isn’t a matter of the worm turning; it is a metaphysical transaction more than a moral one. Our lives are not the shapes we give them. Our stories don’t quite belong to us. (Eder “Rough-Hewn Lives”)

Fitzgerald’s later fiction often has the unnerving effect of unsolved mysteries or mystic runes. One of the most compelling and memorable of Fitzgerald’s stories that is “hollowed out” by a counterstory is “Desideratus,” which progresses in the fated manner of the fairy-tale, with the simple clarity of a dream vision. John Bayley noted that Fitzgerald’s “novels don’t have plots, but they give a wonderful illusion of having them, by keeping the reader glued to the page in anticipation of what’s to come” (xi). He concluded that the combination in Fitzgerald’s fiction’s of heightened anticipation amid perpetual unfulfillment creates in a sense the old atmosphere of fantasy and fairy-tale, brought up to date here and with its species of strangeness never far away and yet always strictly and beautifully down to earth. (Bayley xiii–xiv)

“Desideratus” could almost be a fairy-tale—it is certainly the closest of Fitzgerald’s fictions to being one—but it is too “beautifully down to earth” for that. For one thing it is set in a very particular time, 1674, as we know from the date on a coin that is at the heart of the story, and not in the vaguely mythic past, as is typical of fairy tales. Also the story is too selfconsciously instructional, although the implications of that instruction are far from certain. The story begins: Jack Digby’s mother never gave him anything. Perhaps, as a poor woman, she had nothing to give, or perhaps she was not sure how to divide anything

there’s a providence not so far away / 143 among the nine children. His godmother, Mrs. Piercy, the poulterer’s wife, did give him something, a keepsake in the form of a gilt medal. The date on it was September 12, 1663, which happened to be Jack’s birthday, although by the time she gave it to him he was eleven years old. On the back there was the figure of an angel and a motto, Desideratus [“desired one”], which perhaps didn’t fit the case too well, since Mrs. Digby could have done with fewer, rather than more, children. However, it had taken the godmother’s fancy. (Means of Escape 37)

When Jack tells his godmother that he is very happy to have “something of which he could say, This is my own,” she “answers, though not with much conviction, that he mustn’t set too much importance on earthly possessions” (Means of Escape 38). Jack carries the medal about with him everywhere and eventually, inevitably, loses it, but tracks it down to a spot, overlooking a “great house” in a valley, where he had once rested while on a cross-country errand. When he returns to the spot and fortunately finds the medal, the winter frosts have buried it beneath “greenish ice as clear as glass . . . at the depth of perhaps twelve inches” (Means of Escape 39). Having nothing with him with which to break the ice, Jack leaves the medal in its frozen puddle, returning a week later, after the spring thaw has set in. But he is too late; his medal and its frozen puddle are both gone. Jack surmises that the melting ice must have carried the medal into an earthenware drain that runs down the side of the hill and into the stableyards of the great house, to which he descends. Finding no one about in the yard, Jack knocks at the door of the house and is admitted by the family tutor, who tells Jack, oddly enough, that the owner of the house is childless. When Jack eventually is taken to meet the house’s owner, Mr. Jonas, he is immediately presented with a quandary: “I daresay you would rather have a sum of money . . . than whatever it is you have lost” (Means of Escape 43). When Jack hesitates to answer, Mr. Jonas leads him into the “dark upper floors” (Means of Escape 43) of the house and into a room in which a boy, who may or may not be dead, is lying, and in whose “cold as ice” hand Jack finds his lost medal. The story concludes: [Jack] quite often wondered how much money Mr. Jonas would in fact have offered him, if he had had the sense to accept it. Anyone who has ever been poor—even if not as poor as Jack Digby—will sympathize with him in this matter. (Means of Escape 46)

This is by far the most allegorical of Fitzgerald’s short fictions, as almost every detail in the remarkably condensed story is potentially telling. But the wry conclusion, by grounding the story in its naturalistic life drama, and offering an overt but uncertain interpretive turn, pulls the story back into the generic sphere of the parable.


But what are we to learn from it? I think that the story seeks to demonstrate the weighty reality of unfulfilled potential. The figure of the perhaps dead boy is emblematic of the life choice that was not taken but that continues to ramify nevertheless as possibility in a life in which the luxury of choice is all too scarce. The story is so powerfully resonant because it speaks to such unmade choices in the life histories of all of us—for who has not said to oneself, “If only I had . . .” This story, like all of Fitzgerald’s best fiction, attempts to expand our vision of reality and to emphasize that, although we may live our daily lives enmeshed in our material worlds, a part of us is looking elsewhere and desires exactly that which we do not have, but which, by desiring, we nevertheless in some measure paradoxically possess. Perhaps it is desire itself, then, that is the ultimate reality, in both life and art. As Novalis wrote in his uncanny Romantic encyclopedia, “Idealism is nothing but genuine empiricism” (Notes 402), which the artist demonstrates by “represent[ing] the unrepresentable” (Werke 2: 840)— proving himself, in that sense, a superior realist to the scientist, who limits his knowledge to the given. But in making the assumption that the given is inherently meaningful, scientists are no less idealists than are artists, as Thomas Carlyle pointed out in his influential essay on Novalis, in which he considered the hypocrisy implicit in a narrowly materialistic empiricism: Curious it is . . . to observe how these Common-sense Philosophers, men who brag chiefly of their irrefragable logic, and keep watch and ward, as if this were their special trade, against ‘Mysticism’ and ‘Visionary Theories,’ are themselves obliged to base their whole system on Mysticism, and a theory; on Faith, in short, and that of a very comprehensive kind; the Faith, namely, either that man’s Senses are themselves Divine, or that they afford not only an honest but a literal representation of the workings of some Divinity. So true is it that for these men also, all knowledge of the visible rests on belief of the invisible, and derives its first meaning and certainty therefrom! (Carlyle 115)

Fitzgerald will develop this critique of the irrational theoretical pretensions of practical science in The Gate of Angels and will press it home in The Blue Flower—the two novels that triumphantly complete her career in moral and metaphysical instruction through fictive parable. These final two novels, and the two that precede it, Innocence and The Beginning of Spring, are all generically distinct works of historical romance, which may lead us to think that they are more stylistically mannered and less realistic than are Fitzgerald’s earlier, semiautobiographical fictions. Certainly they are more mannered than the earlier work, but the reality of these final four novels is paradoxically more acute—more real—than that


of Fitzgerald’s autobiographical fiction, for these novels are more successful at representing the unrepresentable, uniting the invisible with the visible. It is the strikingly illuminated imagined historical worlds of these novels to which Eder is referring when he observed that Fitzgerald found reality “unaccountably in her imagination” rather than in her “all-too-real” life experience (Eder “Rough-Hewn Lives”). Immediately preceding the final historical-romance quartet in the chronology of her works are Fitzgerald’s most overtly argumentative novels, Human Voices and At Freddie’s, which prepare the way for Fitzgerald’s entrance into the world of the non-autobiographical imagination by offering a sustained critique of personality as a stable and isolable entity, and of fact as truth. In both Human Voices and At Freddie’s, it is the novels’ settings and their fictive arguments that are in a sense the main characters. In Human Voices the setting is the Broadcasting House hub of the wartime (WWII) BBC, and the argument concerns the interrelated, social nature of individual personality; while At Freddie’s is set in a school for young actors in post-WWII London, and the argument is a critique of a modern world that has chosen power over truth as a conscious ideal. Human Voices At Broadcasting House, people are referred to by their functions and titles; thus Sam Brooks, the Recorded Programmes Director, is known as RPD, while his counterpart, Jeff Haggard, the Director of Programme Planning, is referred to as DPP. (One gets the sense that Fitzgerald got a kick out of riffing on the ubiquitous company initials, BBC). RPD has a number of young women assistants, known as JTA’s, Junior Temporary Assistants, of whom he demands complete loyalty and, more crucially, sympathy. For RPD is a man both obsessed with his job and horribly overworked— the former contributing to the latter. His JTA’s seem to be almost interchangeable to him until one of them falls in love with him and changes his life. When love overtakes him, RPD abruptly quits the corporation and becomes, one presumes, a real person and not simply a set of initials. But we can only assume, for the novel ends with the revelation of his falling in love. Before he falls in love, RPD’s most significant relationship is his symbiotic professional relationship with Jeff Haggard, also known as DPP, who protects his vulnerable, obsessive colleague from corporation politics and makes his professional life in many unacknowledged ways possible: Their long relationship looked like an addiction—a weakness for the weak on Jeff ’s part—of a response to the appeal for protection made by the

146 / alternative realisms defenseless and single-minded. Of course, if this appeal were to fail entirely, the human race would have difficulty in reproducing itself. (151)

Another parasitical character in the book is a half-French JTA, Lise, who is compelled to quit her job when she becomes pregnant (she is unmarried), thus putting her in a position in which she must rely on the kindness of relative strangers, a position with which she is well acquainted: Lise had always felt that she was particularly unlucky, and furthermore that being unlucky was a sufficient contribution to the world’s work. Other people, therefore, had to deal with the consequences. (250)

Neither RPD nor Lise are villainous. After The Bookshop, there will be no more egoistic villains in Fitzgerald’s fiction. Rather they are needy in ways to which others respond with generosity, for everyone has needs, and one such need is to be needed by others. The implication throughout Human Voices is that people in their complex personalities and interactive relations are really little different from societies, nations, corporations and families, which have personalities and relations of their own, with their own strengths and weaknesses. DPP is reminded of this when his friend Mac (an American broadcaster who is surely based on Edward R. Murrow) advises him that he is doing a disservice to his corporation and country by making himself so useful in a crisis: “You take on the hell of a lot too much of this advice and assistance. You’re weakening these people. In times like these we’ve got to forgo luxuries and that includes the obligation to help others. Probably you ought to be doing something totally else.” (177)

A corporation musician who has been separated by the war from his orchestra likewise complains that the BBC is itself weakening the will of the British people by pretending to tell them the truth, which, he complains, is only contingent, “The opposite could also be true” (229), to which his practical respondent replies, “There isn’t anything at all that mightn’t be otherwise . . . How can they find anything to broadcast that’s got to be true, and couldn’t be anything else?” He gestured towards the piano. “We couldn’t put out music all day!” “Music and silence.” (229)

Speaking a nonverbal language, music is incapable of lying. Words, however, cannot stop themselves from doing so, and as what we know of


ourselves we know in and through language, we must accept that our own personalities and identities are necessarily unstable—contingent truth. At Freddie’s The concept of contingent truth is at the center of the decentered novel, At Freddie’s, which is based on and in the Temple School of drama for youth known as “Freddie’s.” The school’s unofficial motto hangs in a banner in the office and over the head of Freddie herself, the school’s proprietess: The words upon it, written in foot-high letters and scrolled with gilt, read NAUGHT SHALL MAKE US RUE IF ENGLAND TO ITSELF DO REST BUT TRUE. They were the closing lines of King John and the canvas had hung above the proscenium of the Old Vic for the production of 1917. (17)

The irony in this most ironic of Fitzgerald’s novel is that Freddie herself, although known as a stalwart—even legendary—supporter of the English stage (of Shakespeare in particular), and who “countenanced” for her young charges “No TV work, no film work, no modeling” (14), is not concerned with truth, but with power. At the novel’s end, she proves her allegiance by announcing plans to transform “Freddie’s” into a drama school that trains children for television commercials. As she tells a potential financial backer, “It’s my duty, you know, to take my school where the power is” (157). The foil to Freddie’s entirely flexible, self-interested identity is a young teacher at the school, Pierce Carroll, who had no ability to make himself seem better or other than he was. He could only be himself, and that not very successfully. Meeting Carroll for a second time . . . one wouldn’t recall having seen him before. (21)

Pierce falls in love with his fellow teacher at the school, Hannah Graves, who herself falls in love with an aging character actor, Boney Lewis, who— although lazy and alcoholic—is so adept at his craft, that he “had never yet given . . . a disappointing performance” (82). Although Pierce makes such a poor impression and is not very appealing to Hannah romantically, she recognizes that he possesses a “stubborn incorruptible intensity . . . which she could never hope to come near” (92). At Freddie’s, which was published in 1982, is a parable about the ascendance of the ideal of power over the ideal of truth, and in this sense it is a satire of a contemporary, postmodern society content to let advertising dictate the reality it calls its own. It also operates as a critique of


a post-structuralist intelligentsia obsessed with manipulations of language as a symbol system, one for which the Shakespearean dictum, “The truest poetry is the most feigning” (As You Like It, III.iii.15–17) means not that, as all language is feigning, we must search beyond it for truth; but that, as all language is feigning, we can forget the search for truth (which is always, in any case, contingent) and content ourselves with attempts to feign most successfully, and to critique others in their less successful attempts. The unforgivable sin from such a viewpoint is to assume that language may be meaningful in any way other than a linguistic manner—that it may point beyond itself to a nonlinguistic truth or reality. As Humpty Dumpty—a protoptypical post-structuralist—says to a skeptical Alice, when it comes to one’s struggles with language and meaning, it is merely a question of “which is to be master” (188): that is, a question of power. Along these lines, a contemporary critic of postmodernism, Robert Cummings Neville, has commented of Charles Peirce that he would have thought the postmodernist critique of logocentrism a wickedness, not because of its complaints about rationalism—reason always needs polishing—but because of its substitution of the problematic of power for that of truth. (52)

At Freddie’s is Fitzgerald’s fictive rebuke to such a substitution, and as such it is perhaps her most negative and even despairing novel, although it is a satirical comedy. In her review of E. M. Delafield’s Thank Heaven Fasting, Fitzgerald contended, “We must accept that comedy is crueler than tragedy,” and then proceeded to note the manner in which Delafield “removed what might be called the extenuating circumstances” from under and around her main character until that character is left with but one excuse for her behavior, “In a conforming society, she is a conformist. Her claim to sympathy is only that” (Afterlife 193). Fitzgerald is somewhat more generous in her implied condemnation of Freddie in her decision to sell out to television and of Hannah in her choice of Boney over Pierce. For neither Freddie nor Hannah are given good choices (Freddie’s school is perpetually on the brink of financial ruin, and Pierce is a hopelessly unattractive lover), but the choices they do make are nevertheless, significantly, the most convenient ones—those that conform most comfortably with a conforming world. It might be noted in this respect that Pierce is from a “black Protestant”— that is, a nonconformist—family. Although he is as hapless as a teacher as he is as a lover, he nevertheless is adopted as a kind of surrogate parent by the drama school’s most brilliant student, Jonathan, who is a nonconformist himself, refusing to put himself forward as an actor—as the other


students instinctively do—and seeming uninterested in general in getting the world’s attention. Rather Jonathan, secreting himself and watching the world as a passing show, appeared to have learned something so important that his whole time was taken up in considering it. (35)

In his method of acting, Jonathan is a nonconformist as well: When he was told to imagine himself let us say as a young prince, his attention withdrew. He felt the compulsion to pretend to be someone else, but in quite a different manner. Jonathan was born to be one of those actors who work from the outside inwards. To them, the surface is not superficial. He didn’t want to know what it felt like to be desperate enough to jump from a wall, he wanted to know what someone looked like when they did. (74)

I think that we are meant to understand this as a defense and explanation of Fitzgerald’s own artistic method, which became less interior and psychological and more evidential and materialistic as she progressed from novel to novel. In her final four major fictions in particular, there is a feeling that the novel’s setting and circumstance in some manner produces or perhaps evolves its characters and plot. The depth-model privileging of the interior over the exterior world that was the hallmark of modernist novelists such as James and Woolf has been undone in Fitzgerald’s later fiction. The effect is to make the material “surface” world more mysterious and more complex. The mystery of life in these novels lies on its surface and not in its depths, and the key to understanding that life lies in our manner of interpretation of the given. In these mannered novels, it is almost as though we had returned to the two-dimensional world and viewpoint of pre-Renaissance representational painting, in which the very lack of depth leads us to “read” the painting metaphorically. The missing dimension implies other dimensions entirely. As Lesser wrote of Fitzgerald’s method, “What she gives us on the page, she manages to suggest, is only a small part of what is really there” (122). This is not to say that Fitzgerald offers no psychological description of or insight into her characters. She is not a “new novelist” in that manner. Rather she makes her characters’ psyches only one among many elements reverberating with meaning, and she demonstrates that a character’s understanding of his own psyche may be as faulty and incomplete as his understanding of other people and of his exterior world circumstance. In that sense, her characters no more “own” themselves than they own their world. By refusing to privilege the psychological viewpoint, Fitzgerald also works to prevent us as readers from ego-identifying with her characters,


and thus enables those characters to operate in an emblematic fashion that is unavailable to more naturalistic figures that are bounded by and in their all-too-real worlds. The figure of Jonathan at the conclusion of At Freddie’s is a case in point. He is rehearsing for an upcoming role in King John in which the young prince he is to play jumps in desperation from a high prison wall and is killed by the fall. “[Jonathan’s] object was to get so used to the jump that he could do it without thinking, and exactly the same every time” (160). To that end, one evening before his opening performance, Jonathan drags some rotten crates from the nearby market into the tiny walled garden behind the Temple School, and climbs upon them to reach the top of the garden wall for his practice jumps. The complication is that he has been inadvertently locked out of the school building and won’t be able to get back in until morning. Also it has begun to snow. Still he had other resources. Although it would take a certain amount of nerve, there was nothing to stop him jumping down on the street side and getting out that way. The drop was a good bit longer, though, than the one he was doing at present, down into the middle of the yard . . . Meanwhile he went on climbing and jumping, again and again, into the darkness. (160)

The parallel with the death of the young prince in King John may lead us to suspect that Jonathan dies at the end of the novel, and that was the implication Fitzgerald said that she was meaning to give, although she realized that many readers missed it. “I tried to make it clearer, but that seemed to spoil it, so I left it,” she told Acocella. “To that extent the book’s a failure” (qtd. in Acocella 429). Once again I believe that we would do best to trust the tale rather than the teller. For Jonathan to die for certain at the end of the novel would be to spoil the emblem he creates of art itself in its unending effort to represent the unrepresentable—to jump from the page into life, via the reader—thus demonstrating the ever-ramifying reality of the purely potential. Acocella perceptively observed of Fitzgerald’s later novels that they “cease to end like novels, with a tying up; they end like poems, with a culminating image” (Acocella 428). Samson likewise remarked that Fitzgerald’s “interminable endings” offer neither “an escape” nor a “resolution,” but seem rather almost “a Mobius strip; the eternal return. Forever England” (Samson). Once again Samson offers keen insights despite his obvious distaste (“Forever England” is strictly gratuitous); in this instance, he alerts us to the manner in which Fitzgerald’s endings attempt to represent the unrepresentable eternal realm of a boundless forever-after. In that realm, Jonathan never stops jumping off of his wall.


In Jonathan’s all-too-real world, however, from which the novel releases him by concluding when and as it does, something is bound to happen to stop his repetitions, and chances are—given the rotten crates, the snow falling, the high wall, and the play’s foreshadowing—that Jonathan will somehow die from a fall. The entire weight of the novel is poised upon that possibility, but as a perfectly placed fulcrum point can bear the weight of the world, so the ending of the novel bears the weight of the future so that it does not come down in any particular direction. Jonathan’s death, like our own, keeps never coming; its arrival is certain amid uncertainty—a matter of chance, of probability. Unless we hasten the ending, our deaths, like our births, are—from our perspective—fortuitous. Novalis wrote: “The individual is individualized by one single chance event alone, that is, his birth” (Werke 3: 441). Evolutionary Love According to our inflexible and literalistic modern way of thinking, chance and providence cannot exist together in a changing world. The prevailing opinion is that change is either entirely chaotic and arbitrary or entirely determined and predestined: evolution or creationism; take your pick. Like Peirce, who first conceived of a metaphysical-materialist system in which chance-driven evolution and divine providence may both be operative and true, Fitzgerald clearly believed in the reality of both. In her final four historical-romance novels, she attempted to demonstrate the workings of such a world, and in order to do so, she created novels in which we as readers are compelled to make interpretive choices that have metaphysical and existential implications—novels that read us as thoroughly as we are able to read them. In Fitzgerald’s final four novels, we embark upon a different fictive terrain from the one that we have been negotiating in her earlier work. It is not simply that these novels are based upon historical times and places rather than on the author’s autobiographical experience. I mentioned earlier in reference to Fitzgerald’s first novel, The Golden Child, that this latestarting author seemed to have a bit of a chip on her shoulder regarding a hard-using world and also a tendency toward sentimentality in regards to those who are downtrodden. After The Bookshop, Fitzgerald ceased to separate her characters into obvious heroes and villains, but there remains a sense in all of the autobiographically based work that she is engaged in a kind of fictive special pleading—that her hand is on the scale in weighing the ethical arguments for and against her characters and in determining their fates. As both a storyteller and a metaphysical-moralist in these novels, Fitzgerald seems to be picking and choosing.


But in the final four historical-romance novels, Fitzgerald exhibits a moral and fictive maturity that is evidenced by the fact that her characters no longer seem parts of an argument— characters in an all-too-human story—that is not of their making or choosing. Rather they seem selfdetermined actors in a morality play in which there is no felt separation between the argument and its characters, for these characters in their lives are the argument itself. They are both products and creators of their world, and their fate, although irreducibly chancy, is determined in large part by what they make of their changing circumstances; in each of these novels, the characters are free to choose in that regard. This is all to say that these final four novels give us the feeling of life itself, in its combination of restrictiveness and possibility, of routine habit and chance alteration. As existential actors, the main characters in these novels are engaged in determining their fates in a vigorously interactive manner unavailable to Fitzgerald’s earlier characters, and their fates are likewise more meaningful—more real—because they have been chosen rather than endured. But what these characters have to choose from has been determined for them (as for us) by luck or fate, which—in these novels—is almost synonymous with history. For each of these novels is set at or near particularly fraught historical turning points in which the characters awaken to find themselves, and the implications arising from which they are, to various degrees, alert. As a series in a historical quartet, the novels work backwards in time from a post-WWII Italy in which the last vestiges of the European feudal order are being undone, to a prerevolutionary Russia in which that order is just barely hanging on, to a pre-WWI England in which Cambridge scientists are dismantling the atomic basis of the regular and predictable Newtonian material universe, and then back a century to the Romantic response to that deterministic universe, which began the long modern lament over the painful schism between what the thoughtful educated individual believed in his heart and thought in his head. In her final four novels, Fitzgerald offers no less than an anatomy and diagnosis of sickened modernity itself, complete with a regimen for beginning a return to health. In order to understand Fitzgerald’s argumentative project with these novels, we have to interpret them as parables of the spiritually ailing modern world, the most telling symptom of which is the split between heart and head that has come to seem an intrinsic element of the human condition. Lawrence’s alarm at this heart-head split seems to have drawn Fitzgerald’s attention and devotion to his prophetic work, by means of which she found her way to the fragmented writing of Novalis (Basbanes), who was likewise obsessed with the heart-head estrangement in modern thought and being, and who devoted his mercurial life to saving that marriage. Fitzgerald’s final novel, The Blue Flower, might almost


be thought of as a meditation on Novalis’s figure as a would-be modernday Messiah of holistic thought and being, as her “Russian” novel, The Beginning of Spring, might be thought of as variations on a theme of spiritual renewal and societal revolution by Tolstoy (and an implicit critique of the violent political revolution it unwittingly in part inspired). In any case, it is to the prophetic tradition of Novalis, Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Lawrence that Fitzgerald’s final fiction most fittingly, if coyly and complexly, belongs. When we look at the work of writers of fictive parables, we find that a central argument is repeated in an obsessive variation on a theme. In O’Connor, for instance, the theme is the reality of evil (and good) in the world, which she addresses by way of arguments concerned with the damning effects of moral complacency. In Lawrence, the theme is the heart-head split, which he addresses by way of arguments concerned with the sickened and perverted nature of modern sexuality. In Fitzgerald, the dominant theme is likewise the heart-head split, which she treats as a modern-day malady for which there is only one cure—the miraculous power of love. In her final four novels, Fitzgerald takes up this argument with the certainty of a prophet who has found her message. When we look back at her career from the vantage point of these novels’ prophetic argument, it almost seems that everything up to the point of these novels’ creation was a prelude and a preparation. Lewis observed of this crucial shift in Fitzgerald’s fiction: Most of her early works feature infatuations tangential to the main story lines. But with her sixth novel, Innocence, love becomes not only the dominant theme of her novels, but also their catalyzing force. The story of Novalis’s transforming love for Sophie von Kuhn in The Blue Flower is a natural culmination of this progression in Fitzgerald’s fiction. (Lewis)

The transformative love affairs at the heart of these final four novels are far more than mere romantic story lines. They imply a revolution in the main characters’ envisioning and understanding of reality that has profound spiritual implications. Fitzgerald had written in her joint biography of her father and his brothers that her uncle, Ronald Knox, the convert Roman Catholic priest, “in his struggles to bring home to his hearers . . . the Proof of the Supreme Excellency of God,” spoke of the “pull of human love, which points to something beyond it” (Knox Brothers 215). Just so, the romantic love affairs in these four novels lead the main figures—and us as willing readers—to a vision of reality that peers beyond the everyday existential toward the realm of the eternal and ideal, linking the visible with the invisible. It is the heart that guides the head to this envisioning of the divine, as Peirce pointed out: “As to God, open you eyes—and


your heart, which is also a perceptive organ—and you see him” (Writings 377–378). Using her instructive method of fictive parable, Fitzgerald leads her select group of willing readers toward a vision of the all-embracing love of which Novalis was speaking when he wrote that “love is the ideal of every endeavor” (Notes 835), “the final goal of world history—the One of the universe” (Notes 50), an idea that he borrowed from Spinoza—whom he famously characterized as a God-intoxicated man—and who contended that, as a stronger emotion eventually overwhelms a weaker one, so love— the strongest of all emotions, and so of all known forces—inevitably is destined to conquer all. Peirce took up this theme in his effort to correct what he felt to be modernity’s self-serving “survival-of-the fittest” model of evolution, which he labeled the “Gospel of Greed,” by replacing it with an “apapistic” or lovecentered model of evolution that is based upon the idea of infinite growth, which he felt to be nature’s dominant characteristic—the fight for survival being a subordinate effect (Writings 350). Peirce further argued that that which appears as infinite growth in the organic material realm is experienced as eternal love in the spiritual realm (Writings 376). The tie between the two realms—that which links us inextricably to both material nature and the spiritual divine—is the heart’s “emotion,” which Peirce defined compellingly as “incomprehensible thought.” “That,” he explained, “is why the highest truths can only be felt” (qtd. in Raposa 58). The argument that positive emotion is both spiritually and logically superior to everyday understanding is a conviction that Peirce shared with Novalis, and is a contention that is repeatedly endorsed by Fitzgerald’s instructive demonstrations in her final four novels. Peirce labeled his infinite-growth model of reality “evolutionary love,” and noted that it was in accord with “the Gospel of Christ [which] says that progress comes from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his neighbors” (Writings 363). Tolstoy, whose life and thought informs Fitzgerald’s second of her last four novels, The Beginning of Spring, echoed Peirce’s sentiment when he wrote, “ All men live not by care for themselves, but by love” (“The Kingdom of God is Within You”), and he prophesied that the “law of love”: will in due time emerge and makes its way to general recognition, and the nonsense that has obscured it will disappear of itself, and with it will go the evil from which humanity now suffers. (“A Letter to a Hindu”)

Tolstoy contended that humanity in general in the modern period is going through a painful period of growth similar to the transition from adolescence to adulthood, in which the discombobulated individual, like the


prodigal son in the parable, “loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction . . . Such a condition,” he concluded, “may last a long time” (“A Letter to a Hindu”). The idea of living in a painful period of interregnum is the main theme operating in the first of Fitzgerald’s final four novels, Innocence. The second novel in the series, The Beginning of Spring, continues that theme, while further emphasizing that we are saved by what we cannot control or imagine. In the third novel, The Gate of Angels, Fitzgerald broadens her argument by considering the manner in which what appears to be chaos may in fact be a higher system of greater order that has not yet been recognized and understood. In The Blue Flower, she concludes her extended argument by demonstrating that, in order to feel at home again in the world, we must learn how to participate in making the world meaningful and real by reading the everyday existent as signs of the eternal. Fitzgerald thus fittingly completed her career as a novelist with an explicit rationale for, and demonstration of, the method of fictive parable that she gradually developed and perfected. Innocence In each of her final four novels, there is a historical figure or group of figures who have challenged conventional notions of reality. In Innocence, it is the Italian Marxist agitator and theorist, Antonino Gramsci, whose famous comment in his prison notebook regarding the crisis of modernity might be thought of as the pattern in the carpet of this densely woven novel: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (“Prison Notebooks”). In such a world, the novel’s central figure is, fittingly, a neurologist, a medical specialist defined in the novel as one who “treats pain whose origin is not clearly traceable” (47). This character’s name, Salvatore (“savior”), is likewise meaningful in a novel in which he is referred to as both “a miracle worker” (141) and “an Angel of Healing” (133)—a novel in which one of the main settings is an apartment on “via Limbo” (179) occupied by an aging do-gooder named Maddalena, after Mary Magdalene, the follower of Jesus significant for being both present at his crucifixion and among the first to witness the resurrection. True to her namesake, Maddalena is sympathetically committed to caring for the dying and the newly born, and she underwrites a philanthropic “Refuge for the Unwanted” that offers shelter for the infirm aged and for infant orphans, and which is located in via Sansepolcro—the street of the holy sepulcher (14–15). These few observations give us a sense of the complex metaphorical nature of these final four novels, the manner


in which they are historically, allegorically, and even archetypally coded and resonant. Salvatore falls in love with a young woman named Chiara—meaning light—an uncertain teenager just out of finishing school who has a disturbing “tendency to fragment, often against her will, into other existences,” and “who could not escape from the unsettling vision of other points of view, the point of view of every living creature, all defensible” (39). When she meets Salvatore at a musical concert, she feels focused for the first time in her life: “When Salvatore had spoken to her all these distractions had settled . . . No more wear and tear of the heart” (39); she has found her salvation. The effect of Chiara on Salvatore when they are first introduced by one of his patients is no less profound: “My dear child, I want you to meet Dr. Rinaldi, no, Dr. Salvatore Rossini, no, Rossi, who is doing me so much good.” Chiara gave the doctor her hand. “You enjoyed the Brahms?” he asked. She looked at him politely, but in wonder. “Of course not.” Perhaps we might agree about everything, Salvatore thought. No one ever agrees with me, but she might. (32)

At the same time that he is thinking this, however, he is noticing that Chiara is wearing a sparkling diamond necklace and his instinctive class resentment (he is from a peasant family), which was perhaps piqued by his upper-class patient’s failure to remember his name, wells up in him, setting itself against his innate attraction to Chiara. “He felt deeply irritated. He had an intimation he was lost” (32). Let us review the overt allegory for a moment: a character named Salvatore, or “savior,” feels himself to be “lost” upon meeting “Chiara” who is destined to be the light of his life. We could perhaps say that he has been blinded by love, like Saul on the road to Damascus. And how is this lost man to be found again? His name offers the clue; he must create his own salvation; the physician must heal himself. This will involve coming to terms with his class resentment, certainly, but most importantly it will necessitate that he learn to trust his heart to guide his head, rather than the other way around—the heart being the superior sensory organ when it comes to life’s most crucial decisions. This proves very difficult for Salvatore, who became a physician in the first place in response to a visit as a child with his communist father to the ailing Gramsci in the hospital in which he was being imprisoned while suffering the advanced stages of tuberculosis (the fascist government would not allow him to be treated).


Salvatore’s decision to be a rational, scientific, and practical physician was a form of instinctive rebellion against the impassioned politics that led to Gramsci’s premature death and to his father’s frustration and unhappiness, as well as to his impatience with the superstitious village Catholicism of his peasant mother. After meeting Chiara, Salvatore’s first instinct is, like Jonah, to run away from his fate. His self-chosen life-project significantly is not to fall in love and become entangled in an unsuitable attachment, but “to reform mankind’s prejudices by scientific means” (52). Nevertheless, his romantic fate rises to greet him everywhere he goes, as he manages to interpret even offhand remarks of perfect strangers as direct references to his repressed love for Chiara. In doing so, Salvatore repeatedly tries the patience of his best friend and colleague, Gentillini (who proves gentle indeed in response), with whom he invents arguments that enable him to vent his frustration, while, “with the obstinacy of the lost,” he manages every topic so that it will “lead him back to the same starting point” of Chiara, as when he asked with a show of cold rationality why there should ever be even the slightest probability that he should ever meet this young woman again. “But surely it could be arranged without much difficulty?” said Gentillini. “You might—” “I don’t choose that it should be a matter of arrangement!” Then Salvatore broke off, and abruptly held out his hand. “Think of me as a cripple, if you like, don’t turn away from me, take my hand.” (53)

Salvatore’s refusal to make arrangements to meet Chiara again—his insistence upon forcing chance or fate to bring them back together—is in effect a demand to see a sign or miracle, like the healing of the lame. In this instance, the miracle is provided by Chiara herself, who searches him out at his workplace, only to be run off by an outraged Salvatore who demands, “What do you mean by coming here like this?” When, in response, Chiara “made off quick as a shadow,” he shouted after her, “Come back! I’m saying what I don’t mean!” (71). With this play of light and shadow and the allegorical names of the main figures, Fitzgerald seems to be echoing the words of Jesus to his disciples that “he that believeth not is condemned already . . . And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light” (John 3: 18–19). Salvatore is self-condemned by his rejection of Chiara’s love and of his love for Chiara. Even after he and Chiara are married, Salvatore continues to make their life intermittently overcast by interpreting actions and situations in ways that cast doubt upon Chiara’s love for him. Her miscarriage of a child for “no


assignable reason” (194) seems to him a judgment upon their misguided and failed marriage. In the larger allegorical argument of the novel, the miscarriage is emblematic of the failure of the new world to be born, which is complicated by the unwillingness or inability of the old world to die. Salvatore’s refusal to let go of his class hatred and of his knee-jerk faith in a narrow scientific rationalism is symptomatic of the old world’s tenacity. One of the novel’s most humorous and intriguing characters declares, however, that it is precisely Salvatore’s rejection of what is valuable and precious in the old world of communal village life that is making him miserable. Sannazzaro was the best friend of Salvatore’s dead father, and, like him, an ardent disciple of Gramsci, who declared that it was the duty of intellectuals to remain in or return to the place in which they were born in order to help and guide the people. When Salvatore returns to Mazzata, the small rural village in the South of Italy in which he was born and raised, with the purpose of selling his small inherited plot of land there in order to raise money to buy a house in Florence for himself and his new wife, Sannazzaro attempts to dissuade him: Hear me out. Don’t cut yourself off from Mazzata. Once you’ve sold your inheritance you’ll be quite adrift . . . As an intellectual your place is here . . . The future for which Nino [Gramsci] suffered and died is impossible without human preparation. That was what your father expected of you. He had other sons, but you are the one he chose. (120–121)

Salvatore, the chosen son, rejects Sannazzaro’s prophetic admonition and sells his land, but the loan he requires to complete the purchase of a house, and which is due him from his hospital in Florence, is unforthcoming, so that he and Chiara are reduced to living in a characterless suburban apartment, in which Chiara miscarries. They are adrift indeed and they function in their displacement as a further symptom of the new world that is unable to be born. Like an Old Testament prophet, however, Sannazzaro does not give up easily, and having heard that the land Salvatore sold is to be put again on the market, he travels to Florence and arrives unannounced at Chiara’s family home, La Ricordanza (meaning “memory”), where he finds Maddalena, Chiara’s aunt, whom he attempts to persuade to convince Salvatore to repurchase his inheritance. Sannazzaro, watching her minutely, said, “He has to make his career in Florence, that’s not in dispute. But there’s a sickness and craziness about him because he has cut himself off from the place where he was born. In reality, although he’s not able to admit it, he can’t be happy without his piece of land in Mazzata.” (203)


When Maddalena asks why he is telling this to her instead of to Salvatore, he says that he already tried to persuade him, but to no effect. “He must have known that what I was saying was true, but he couldn’t listen.” “Why couldn’t he listen?” “Because he is unable to diagnose himself.” (203)

Sannazzaro’s own diagnosis takes on greater weight in the novel’s allegorical argument when we realize that he shares a family name with Jacapo Sannazzaro, the author of the first pastoral romance, the sixteenth-century Italian Arcadia, the influence of which served to revive in modern Europe the pastoral form invented by Theocritus with his Idylls and made famous by Virgil in his Eclogues. This telling linkage recalls, as well, the pastoral “good shepherd” role of Salvatore’s own namesake, while emphasizing the progression of that figure into the quasi-religious lovelorn swain of the pastoral romance—thus reinforcing our interpretation of romantic love in Fitzgerald’s later novels as being emblematic of divine love, and of romantic desire as being expressive of a desire for union with the divine. This interpretation is also endorsed, as we have seen, by the characters’ allegorical names, characteristics, and behavior. Sannazzaro, who does indeed serve as a kind of prophet in the novel, reinforces its major theme of living in a period of interregnum when he speaks to Maddalena of “bad times coming” that will “be succeeded by good,” contending that what is needed in the meantime is “patience,” to which Maddalena responds, “There I can’t agree with you. I don’t put much value on patience. I find it best to act on impulse” (204). True to such a creed, Maddalena follows up her meeting with Sannazzaro by selling the building housing the “Refuge for the Unwanted” (which has, in any case, run into regulatory problems with the expanding state’s social welfare network) and using the money to purchase back Salvatore’s inherited land, which she then presents to him through her lawyer as a gift. True to his own inclination to feel insecure in regards to anything having to do with Chiara’s family of genteelly impoverished aristocrats, Salvatore interprets the gift as a belittling insult. Were Chiara present in person, she no doubt would have been able to dispel his wrong-headed skepticism with the warmth of her love. But since she miscarried, she has been recovering at the seaside, very much against her own wishes, for she would prefer to be with Salvatore. Left to his own devices, Salvatore allows his doubts and disbelief in regards to his wife’s and her family’s good intentions toward him to multiply, until he sees but one way out of his unhappiness and the unhappiness he is causing to others. He travels


outside of Florence to Chiara’s family’s farm where he asks her cousin, who runs the estate, for the loan of a gun with which he can kill himself. Her cousin, named Cesare, who is not an interfering man, obliges, and Salvatore is only saved by a miracle when Chiara, who is accustomed to speaking to Salvatore every night by phone, calls Cesare in her worry at not having heard from her husband, only to find that Salvatore is there at the estate. “He’s come to talk to you, he’s lonely. I knew it.” “I don’t know whether he’s lonely or not. He wanted a gun.” “But he never has a gun.” “I know, he wanted to borrow one of mine.” “But what for?” Cesare considered a little, and said, “He said he was thinking of shooting himself.” Chiara, so often misguided, so rarely knowing the right thing to do, now, by a miracle, did know. She said nothing at all. The unexpected silence had its effect on Cesare. (223)

Prompted by Chiara’s uncharacteristic silence, Cesare uncharacteristically interferes in another’s life (and death), retrieving the loaded gun from Salvatore and telling him that he is wanted by his wife on the phone. Salvatore threw up his hand. “What’s to become of us? We can’t go on like this.” “Yes, we can go on like this,” said Cesare. “We can go on exactly like this for the rest of our lives.” (224)

The novel concludes with Salvatore’s departure to join Chiara at the seaside. It is fitting that Salvatore, who repeatedly expresses his belief only in the narrowly factual reasoning of science, is saved by the miracle of Chiara’s instinctive silence. But the novel’s ending leads us to wonder how many more miracles he will require if he continues to deny the instinctive knowledge of his own heart and stubbornly insists upon the faulty reasoning of his head. Sannazzaro diagnosed Salvatore’s disease as a product of the modern condition in his conversation with Maddalena: “When I spoke to you just now of the bad times coming,” Sannazzaro went on, “I didn’t mean that they won’t be succeeded by good, only that you and I can hardly expect to live until then. And by ‘good’ I’m not referring, you understand, to the improvements brought about by science. Science has to take its proper place, it mustn’t try to take over from witchcraft. ‘Good

there’s a providence not so far away / 161 sense is dead, its child, Science, killed it one day to find out how it was made.’ Who wrote that, Signora Contessa?” “I don’t know,” said Maddalena. “Nor do I, but Nino [Gramsci] quoted it often.” (204)

The novel’s pointed religious allegory is indication enough that its author would be unsympathetic with the historical Gramsci’s dogmatic Marxist atheism, but she obviously is in agreement with his passionate rejection of a dispassionate, value-neutral science that would presume to be the arbiter of our lives. The values the novel endorses, by contrast, are embodied by the eccentric individuals in Chiara’s family of decayed aristocrats. Chiara herself, naturally, represents the power of selfless love, and it is significant that she and her family “were so constituted as not to feel jealously,” a “serious fault” (178) in a Machiavellian world. Her Aunt, Maddalena, as we have seen, represents vigorous and selfless action for social betterment, and she is unflinching in regards to present miseries in pursuit of an ultimate end, “Human sufferings aren’t to be thought about, said Maddalena, only the human future” (127–128). Maddalena’s brother and Chiara’s father, Count Giancarlo, by contrast, is a study in un-self-pitying resignation. When an activist communist artist asserts to him that “patience is the same as resignation,” he corrects him: “Surely not,” said Giancarlo . . . “Patience is passive, resignation is active” (104). Although Maddalena and Giancarlo would seem to be almost diametrically opposed in their approaches toward life, “What distinguished them was their optimism. Even disagreements between them produced hope” (15). Although the novel concludes with a miracle that saves it from descending into a tragedy, it is not a typical comedy (none of Fitzgerald’s novels are), as the marriage with which the conventional comedy concludes takes place in the middle of the novel, and it forms a relationship that seems destined to be difficult, if not disastrous, as the author forecasts for us (195). The novel’s ultimate emblem is one of hope, however, and is embedded in an offhand conversation between Giancarlo and Chiara’s visiting English school friend, Barney, in which he urges her to make an effort to see some of the “many delightful things by quite unknown artists” scattered throughout Italy, including a “wedding chest” at their family’s farm “painted with a design of Love Tamed by Time—it’s only a pity that the companion piece, Time Tamed by Love, seems to be missing” (80). The symbolically resonant wedding chest would seem to indicate that the love between Chiara and Salvatore will mellow with time, but the taming of time by love is a struggle that takes place on a wholly different and unrepresentable “missing” plane—one to which we are, however, intrinsically connected by hope,


and one that the novel quietly suggests (to those with eyes to see and ears to hear) in its subtle allegorical renderings of naturalistic figures that link the visible to the invisible—representing the unrepresentable. Throughout her novels, Fitzgerald suggests that, if left unimpeded by dogma and superstition, good sense will guide us instinctively to the “missing” realm in which spiritual or religious values are the ultimate realities. In her review of the life and work of the prolific Scottish Victorian novelist, Mrs. Oliphant, Fitzgerald observed that, “time and again [in her novels] she relates religion to instinct and nature” (Afterlife 49), and she compares the use of religion in Oliphant’s Carlingford novels to the use of it in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester series—in which it is “a variant of the political structure,” noting that the Preoccupations of Carlingford are unspiritual and often ludicrous, but the church no matter how far it falls short is there to link them with an unseen world. In this way, although her human comedy is much narrower than Trollope’s, it has a dimension that can hardly be found in Barchester. (Afterlife 33)

That is not to say that Mrs. Oliphant is in any way a typically or conventionally religious writer: “Forms of worship interested her very little” (Afterlife 33). The same could be said of Fitzgerald, at least as evidenced by her essays and novels, which likewise are inclusive of the spiritual dimension missing from the fiction of the vast majority of her contemporaries. The Beginning of Spring The writer of parables is inherently seeking to correct errors that impede our spiritual progress, concerning which Tolstoy—the prophetic figure in the background of Fitzgerald’s next novel, The Beginning of Spring—wrote in his A Letter to the Hindus, “In the spiritual realm nothing is indifferent: what is not useful is harmful” (Tolstoy). Fitzgerald’s corrective critique of the presumptions of a narrowly rationalistic and presumptively infallible science are overt in her final fictions, implying that faith in such a creed is one of modernity’s most dangerous errors. In his Letter, Tolstoy declared that a superstitious belief in science is as harmful as are religious superstitions, and he called for a “fundamental cleansing of religious consciousness from all ancient religious and modern scientific superstitions” (Tolstoy). Fitzgerald’s later fiction is quietly committed to such a cleansing, but her critique of religious superstitiousness is far more implicit than is her critique of science. She seemed to understand that the tendency to dismiss religious consciousness in its entirety is the modern intellectual prejudice that most needed addressing.


Fitzgerald takes up the argument concerning dismissal of religious consciousness in a central scene in The Beginning of Spring, which is set in Moscow in 1913. The novel’s main figure is Frank Reid (whose name is perhaps an ironic allusion to the famous American communist John Reed, who wrote the firsthand account of the 1917 Russian revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World). Although of English descent and nationality, Frank was raised in Moscow and considers it home. He has inherited from his father a small printing firm, and in the scene to which I refer, he is present at the annual ritual in which the local Russian Orthodox priest blesses the workshop’s ikons. As the priest offers a prayer for the Russian royal family, the nation, “the founders of the Press, and the workers there, for mercy peace, health salvation, visitation, pardon and remission of sins,” Frank thinks to himself “Because I don’t believe this . . . that doesn’t mean it isn’t true” (178). Then he considers the fact that he was alarmed to hear that his daughter’s primary school teacher was a self-declared atheist: “The alarm suggested that as a rational being he was unsuccessful . . . Perhaps, Frank thought, I have faith, even if I have no belief” (178). Part of the instructive message of Fitzgerald’s parables is to compel her readers to ask themselves whether they might in fact have faith even if they do not have belief and, if so, to consider the implications of this faith. At its most fundamental, such faith implies a belief not in any particular religious dogma or creed, but in the meaningfulness of reality, and therefore life, itself. Peirce, in arguing against the Cartesian “rationalist” dogma that everything must be doubted until it is proven, contended that “we cannot begin with complete doubt” but must accept that we always begin with beliefs and prejudices that “do not occur to us can be questioned,” and that any pretension to complete doubt is therefore self-deceiving and irrational (Writings 228). Belief or faith is primary; doubt secondary (Writings 296). Furthermore, he argued that the presumption that we as thinking individuals can be “absolute judges of truth is most pernicious” (Writings 229), in that it assumes that we are absolutely separate as individuals and are not a part of a continuum of community that stretches out in both time and space, connecting us to all that ever was, is, or will be. Peirce concluded that the idea that “I am altogether myself, and not at all you” is a “metaphysics of wickedness” that forces separations where there are none and that leads us to think and act in ways that are destructive of both ourselves and others (Collected Papers 7.571). Fitzgerald takes up precisely this theme of the continuity of the community of individuals, and its relation to truth and reality, in the next section of the key passage concerning the blessing of the ikons: The priest was giving a short address. “You are workers, and you are not only called upon to work together, but to love each other and pity each

164 / alternative realisms other. How can that be? You will say that you didn’t choose to work next to this man or that man, he happened to be there when I first arrived, it was accidental. But remember, if that thought comes to you, that there are no accidental meetings. We never meet by chance. Either this other man, or this woman, is sent to us, or we are sent to them.” (178)

When the priest contends that “there are no accidental meetings,” he is implicitly instructing his listeners to think of reality in terms of a universal communal continuum whose actions are purposeful and meaningful in the same way in which our bodies’ actions are meaningful when we, say, drink a glass of water. Of course the mechanisms of the eye-to-glass vision, the hand-to-mouth motion, and the act of swallowing and digesting, are all separable actions taken by separate parts of the body and they are analyzable as such. But these more or less mechanical actions are only meaningful when placed within the larger context of the organism’s purposeful behavior of drinking a glass of water. The priest is asking his listeners to think of God’s purposeful actions, of which we are instinctive mechanisms, in the same way. To do so is to believe implicitly in divine providence. Such is the task placed before Frank (and, by extension, us as readers) in this novel in which, as Peter Wolfe observed, “Little happens without a reason, even if the reason is veiled from us” (238). Although it is not an outright mystery like The Golden Child, The Beginning of Spring is Fitzgerald’s most mysterious novel—the novel most concerned with the mystery of what happens to us and why, and the novel most difficult to unravel in terms of its plot’s causes and effects. As Wolfe commented, “The novel’s major events defy reason, and effects swerve from their presumed causes. This illogic holds at every level” (229). It is a feat indeed to create a novel of which it can be observed both that “little happens without a reason” and that “illogic holds at every level,” but Wolfe is correct in both observations. Bayley is also acute in his analysis of the mystery at work in Fitzgerald’s fiction in general and in this novel in particular: There is a kind of insecurity about the Fitzgerald world which makes it, as every page turns, so increasingly fascinating and challenging. She never attempts to analyze or to possess her characters . . . And this odd fact may indeed give the clue to the way in which readers find themselves hooked. Some mystery, some secret will surely emerge; and yet it does not. (x)

The expectation of such an emergence—the answer to our questions regarding actions and motives—is greater in The Beginning of Spring than in any other of Fitzgerald’s novels, and this makes the novel her most spiritual and religious in terms of the mysteries of faith—or, perhaps one should say, the mysteries that prompt faith as the only suitable and useful response.


In his fascinating study of Christian faith in a nuclear age, God and the Atom, Fitzgerald’s uncle, Ronald Knox, attempted “to show that mystery, in nature as in super-nature, ought to strengthen faith; mystery is its proper food” (133). The mysteries in The Beginning of Spring serve the same purpose for Frank Reid, the novel’s unwitting quest hero, who is shaken out of his midlife complacency by a series of unforeseeable events that prompt him to examine his own motives and behavior and to reach out sympathetically, imaginatively, and generously to others in ways that renew his faith in the goodness of life and the possibilities of being. The novel’s mysterious plot and motive prompt a similar response in the reader, as Wolfe observed of this novel, in which, “Fitzgerald overturns received notions of both probability and behavioral norms and thus deepens our sense of human possibility” (228). The archetypal quest is the basic plot structure at the foundation of each of Fitzgerald’s final four parable-novels. The archetypal quest begins with a significant break-in routine—a trauma, fall, or discovery, which leads the hero out of his home territory (which may be a psychological complacency, as in this novel, or an intellectual pretension, as in Innocence) and into realms of the world, psyche, or intellect that have been unexplored, in which the hero must discover the grail, secret, or cure that will enable him to return home in triumph, a different person. In all four of Fitzgerald’s final quartet of novels, the archetypal quest cycle is meaningfully incomplete; there is no return home in triumph, although, by each novel’s end, the vision of such a homecoming has come into sight. The incompleteness of the quest is pointedly instructive, indicating that we, as readers, must finish these journeys ourselves. Each of these novels is thus in effect concluding with the prophetic admonition from Rilke’s famously incomplete statue: “Du mußt dein Leben ändern”: You must change your life; you must become another (Rilke). As is befitting of quest narratives, each of these novels is insistently episodic—far more meaningfully so than are Fitzgerald’s earlier novels, which also are structured in chapters or sections that are scenes in themselves, but which do not have the compelling forward movement of the final fictions. Typically in the quest there are a number of tests to be undergone and/or battles to be fought and won, and it is also typical for there to be a guide figure and a goal figure, who in various manners embodies divine love. Sannazzaro is the closest to a principal guide figure in Innocence, although his promptings are significantly ignored, whereas Chiara is the obvious goal figure embodying love. The guide figure in The Beginning of Spring is the expatriate English accountant at Frank’s printing firm, Selwyn Crane, who is an eccentrically devoted follower of Tolstoy. Most of the mystery surrounding plot


and motive in the novel is in various ways tied to Selwyn, who appears a kind of holy fool, but who also significantly is involved in the romantic and political complications that suddenly beset his employer and friend, Frank—complications that effectively revolutionize Frank’s conventional, settled, and seemingly content and happy life. Even after repeated readings of the novel, it is a challenge to determine for certain whether Selwyn is in fact a broadly well-intentioned, pacifistic and incurably sympathetic Tolstoyan, as he is overtly presented and declares himself to be—or the near opposite: a closet revolutionary who is coldheartedly manipulating his friend in manners that further the ambitions of a radical and no doubt eventually violent political cause. It is even possible that he is both, although in a self-deceiving manner. The revolutionary cause is embodied (as we discover to our surprise near novel’s end) by Frank’s love interest and his children’s governess, Lisa Ivanovna, a striking and voluptuous young woman of peasant origin, who seems meant to emblematize, at least in part, mother Russia itself, and to whom Frank was introduced by Selwyn. Selwyn was also involved in prompting the surprise departure from Russia of Frank’s wife, Nellie, with whom Selwyn was in some manner romantically attached—a departure that prepared the way for Selwyn’s introduction of Lisa into the household as governess. Selwyn also allowed for the admittance of a supposed student revolutionary, Volodya (who later claims to be, rather, a jealous lover of Lisa) into Frank’s printing firm at night, and then for instigating Frank’s visit to the firm to investigate the break-in, at which point he is shot at by the young student. Once we as readers make these plot connections, which takes some effort, as they are not highlighted by the narrator and Frank himself is unsuspecting, it becomes very difficult to conceive of Selwyn as a wholly innocent character, who unwillingly attracted Nellie romantically, and who unwittingly introduced a revolutionary into Frank’s household, and who inadvertently allowed the violent student, Volodya, into the printing firm and then, by happenstance, discovered the break-in, deciding to go far out of his way in order to alert Frank to it, rather than investigating himself or calling the police or the local night watchman, who lives nearby. What is even more suspicious is that, when Frank arrives, the student appears to be waiting for him. Given all of this potentially damning evidence, there seems little doubt that we as careful readers are meant eventually to question Selwyn’s integrity and honesty, and even his identity as a cloudy-minded and caricaturedly earnest disciple of Tolstoy. But once we do so, the novel’s meaning—which, on first reading, seems tied to the divinely providential notion that, as the priest asserted, no meetings are accidents, and which thereby makes all of Frank’s sudden misfortunes and accidental missteps


seem in some mysterious way fortunate falls—becomes much more dark and ominous. Perhaps the sublunary world is in the hands of an evil demiurge after all, as the Gnostics contended. And perhaps Selwyn is a creature of darkness—one who helps to usher in the violent Russian revolution and its violent aftermath—rather than a pacifistic purveyor of light. The novel refuses to give us answers to the pressing questions regarding the very nature of life that it raises. Rather it ushers us into a complex mystery and keeps us there, forcing us to draw our own conclusions. The manner in which Fitzgerald in The Beginning of Spring combines a focus on complex motive with a deftly handled mystery plot that intertwines politics, religion, and romance results in a remarkably Russian-seeming English novel—one that has clear antecedents in Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Gogol. Human nature in this novel is, like Russian politics, finally inexplicable, and, like Russian weather, given to extremes. When Frank announces to his household of servants that his wife Nellie has gone away on a trip for an unspecified period (in effect, she has simply left him without warning or explanation), The women began to cry. They must have helped Nellie to pack, and been the recipients of the winter clothes which wouldn’t go into the trunks, but these were real tears, true grief. (276)

That these emotions would be genuine beggars belief; the moral challenge presented by such a setting for such a figure as Frank, and for us as readers, is to remain credulous. It is a challenge that Frank meets, as we discover near novel’s end when he is reflecting upon his romantic attachment and domestic alliance with Lisa Ivanovna, who manipulated Frank into unwittingly enabling her to abscond to Germany: “It’s not true, Frank thought, that she was pretending to look after the children. She did look after them. It’s not true that she pretended to make love to me. She did make love to me” (439). It is also true that Lisa, whoever she is or was and whatever her questionable motives, radically altered his life, alerting him to previously unperceived possibilities in himself and sensitizing him to the needs of others to such an extent that there literally is no telling what will happen next when his wife, Nellie, together with the belated Russian spring (both of which have been absent, except in memory, for the entire novel), suddenly make their appearance—with which this most mysterious and surprising of Fitzgerald’s novels mysteriously and surprisingly ends. Each of Fitzgerald’s final four novels is remarkably evocative of the spirit of its place and time. The Beginning of Spring seems suffused with a pungent mixture of political chicanery and spiritual complexity redolent of its Russian setting. Innocence, by contrast, seems a late flowering


of the crossbreeding in Italian history and culture of ritualistic religious instinct and iconography and a broadly skeptical individualistic humanism—both of which have contributed to the “unadulterated fatalism” that Count Giancarlo distinguished as the authentic “Italian attitude” (172). Fitzgerald’s final novel, The Blue Flower, evokes the heady spirit of German Romantic Idealism, buttressed by an earthy and explicitly feminist materialism. Her penultimate “English” novel, The Gate of Angels, by contrast, is evocative of the ongoing argument in English intellectual history between a hard-minded empiricism, carried at times to fanatical extremes that defy human nature, and an instinctively reactive spiritual enthusiasm that opposes all effort at control and systematization. The Gate of Angels The revolution in the background of The Gate of Angels is not political but scientific and it concerns the shift from classical deterministic physics in direct line with the theories and discoveries of Newton to an emerging quantum physics that describes a world in which chance is primary and probabilities are the basis of fact and knowledge. In many respects, this novel seems Fitzgerald’s masterwork, addressing more or less directly as it does her primary concern with faith and belief in a spiritual realm of being, while making an explicit critique of our modern intellectual pretensions regarding “rational” scientific certainties. Indeed, according to Wolfe, Fitzgerald wanted to call the novel “Mistakes Made by Scientists” (249), though it is hard to believe that her expression of such a desire was anything but facetious, given her tendency to embody her intellectual arguments in entertainingly diverting dramatic narratives. There is no doubt, in any case, that the novel broadly travesties the modern world’s self-destructive tendencies to cede all that we know of reality to the narrowly factual realm of empirical science. Since the time of Newton until quite recently, the world as described by science has been an ultimately physical world—a world of material things— rather than a spiritual or an organic world, both of which paradigms allow for the importance of ideas, motivation, purpose, and values. But a purely material world of things is characterized, rather, by mass and motion—of physical substances in causal relations with other physical substances. Such a world is purposeless and valueless to begin with, although it took several hundred years for the effect of the ensuing impoverishment of our everyday reality to be felt in full. Even Darwin in his biological theory of evolution remained to a large extent a prisoner of a narrowly materialistic paradigm, privileging the machinelike cause-and-effect operation of natural selection over the creative growth-and-change progression favored by Peirce and others.


Fitzgerald was born and raised into a family of intellectuals who came into full flower during the very period (the late nineteenth and early twentieth Centuries) at which the discrepancy between a purposeless scientific worldview and a purposeful religious worldview was beginning to be felt most distressingly and acutely by society at large. It is also the period at which the Newtonian model of a deterministic material universe was beginning to be dismantled—or perhaps we should say evolved—by the very physicists responsible for its characterization. The Gate of Angels is set in 1912 in and around Cambridge University and is in large part concerned with the atomic experiments begun there that would change our understanding of the physical world in such a manner that would allow us to reconnect the material to the spiritual realm at the promptings of matter itself. In 1912, the physical world was still largely understood to be a Newtonian deterministic world of cause and effect, although, with Einstein’s theory of relativity, the nature of that world had shifted from one in which there was a singular objective reality to one in which there are an infinity of subjective realities. It was still possible, however, to conceive of a mathematic “formula of the universe which would include a complete description of nature” in accordance with which every action and reaction would be determined (Prigogine and Stengers 219). The discoveries of quantum physics, led by the Danish scientist Niels Bohr, who trained and lectured at Cambridge and the University of Manchester during the period in which Fitzgerald’s novel is set, undermined all such universal determinism. The scientific details of these discoveries are far too complex, and my grasp of them far too tenuous, to be gone into here. Suffice it to say that the world of quantum physics is a world in which not everything is predictable or describable, and in which these very notions in some senses do not make sense. In this world, what the experimenter can know is dependent upon the question that is asked. In other words, “positive choice” is integral to the very production of reality in the quantum world (Prigogine and Stengers 225). Our interactions with the quantum world are as much creation as they are description. Such a world can no longer be characterized as either objectively or subjectively real; rather, it is creatively and interactively real. The observer becomes an integral part of the picture—the observer observed. As the contemporary French physicist Bernard D’Espagnat concluded, “To some extent, Bohr undid what Copernicus had accomplished; he reinstated man at the center of his own description of the world, wherefrom Copernicus had expelled him” (207). The world of fictive parable is a fitting parallel to the post-quantum scientific model in that it makes the positive choice of the reader-participant key to its understanding, and even to its being; for the parable requires such positive choice in order to reveal itself as


a work of instruction. Without the creative participation of the reader, the parable is inoperative; its instruction is nonexistent—just as the quantum world of physics remains in potential until actuated by the investigator’s interrogative. Most crucially, the parable, like the quantum realm, places the responsibility for choice in the hands of the interpreter. As Fitzgerald’s work progressed, she turned more and more to allegory as the form in which to deliver her instruction. Allegory is an instructive demonstration in itself, as it teaches us to translate the material into its spiritual antecedent and moral value. The Gate of Angels is Fitzgerald’s most thoroughly allegorical novel—seeming almost like a morality play when interpreted metaphorically. At the center of the novel is the character Daisy Saunders, a young nursing student who is also an angel of mercy and an embodiment of revelatory love, and who is perhaps the most positive figure in all of Fitzgerald’s fiction. Like all intensely allegorical figures, she wears an emblem that announces her embodied meaning. In Daisy’s case it is a gold ring she inherited from an aunt with an inscription engraved around the inside: “Whatever there is to know, That we shall know one day” (63). True to her emblem, Daisy has an unshakeable faith in the meaningfulness of life and in its ultimate goodness and rationality. This we infer from her behavior; for she is not a talker, but a doer. The characteristic that most distinguishes Daisy is her innate altruism. She is a natural giver, as the narrator explains: All her life she had been at a great disadvantage in finding it so much more easy to give than to take. Hating to see anyone in want, she would part without a thought with money or possessions, but she could only accept with the caution of a half-tamed animal. (118)

The moral challenge for Daisy in The Gate of Angels is to learn to receive life’s gifts as well as its hardships, as the moral challenge for the novel’s male lead and Daisy’s would-be knight in shining armor, Fred Fairly, is to learn to trust his heart over his head in making his most crucial life choices. There are two separate quest-lines that flow through this novel, one for Daisy and one for Fred. The two come together near the novel’s beginning in a chance collision that is also a natural confluence, and then are diverted into separate channels, only to be brought together again by chance or fate at novel’s end. While it is possible and useful to read the novel in terms of the archetypal-allegorical quest, Fitzgerald also has arranged it so that it may be read as a tale of atomic particles in random interaction. The parable-lesson of the novel is to instruct us in a manner of reading whereby the one interpretation implies the other without, however, losing


its own integrity—so that we come to see that what is a chance collision in the atomic material realm is a fated meeting in the allegorical realm, but one that was undetermined. Things turn out as they (on hindsight) were bound to turn out, but they always might have been otherwise. This “always might have been” continues to ramify regardless as the free will within necessity, without which necessity has no meaning, as Fred Fairly discovers to his distress and ultimate relief. In the novel’s plot, Daisy and Fred are brought together in an actual collision as they are bicycling on a country road outside of Cambridge. Daisy is cycling with a male companion, Kelly, who is, in the novel’s allegory, a devil-like tempter (down to his dyed red hair) and a classic unbeliever. When he first meets Daisy and follows her in an attempt to attach himself to her romantically, she in turn attempts to shake him off by walking into a church. “I’m going in here,” she said. “You can’t go in there, that’s a church!” “Well, I’m going in there.” “Whatever for?” he cried out. “If you want to get rid of me, surely there’s easier ways of doing it.” “What’s wrong with going into a church?” asked Daisy. “You’ can’t believe all that,” shouted Kelly in real distress. (95)

Once Kelly follows Daisy inside the church, he says to her, “Nothing they do in here is of any perishing use” (95), making explicit the nihilism he represents. Daisy, who is presented to us as not being particularly religious in any conventional sense, is nevertheless respectful of belief, however compromised by convention. The circumstances in which Daisy first meets Kelly are illuminating of her allegorical character. She is working as a nurse-in-training at the Blackfriars hospital in London, which is the recipient one night of a would-be suicide, a man—James Elder—who “threw himself off the Adelphi steps into the Thames” (83), only to be rescued by a fisherman and deposited by the local police at the Blackfriars, where he is put under the care of Daisy, in whom he rightly recognizes an allegorical figure: “I don’t want to call you Nurse. I want to call you Miss. I want to call you the Eternal Woman. Are you ashamed of that?” “I’m not ashamed of anything.” (84)

Although he is saved from a physical drowning, James Elder remains in great danger of drowning in despair and self-pity, prompted, as it seems, by a love affair gone bad. He is obsessed with seeing his drowning attempt


reported in a newspaper, seemingly relishing the opportunity to inflict guilt on his lover, Flo: “She might read it in the paper. When the morning comes up like thunder she may see a headline: WAPPING CLERK ATTMPTS FELO DE SE.” “There’s plenty of clerks in Wapping,” said Daisy. “Wapping’s full of them.” “But they don’t all try to take their own lives.” “It’s not your own life,” said Daisy. “How did you get that idea?” “I don’t think you’re meant to talk to me like that.” (85)

Daisy’s insistence that one’s life is not one’s own indicates that her altruism is not just a sentimental stance, but is based upon an understanding of reality as a continuum of community, rather than as a collection of self-determined individuals. It is an understanding that she brought with her to her interview for her position at the hospital, at which the matron informed her that “a sick nurse is of no use to the profession. One might call her an enemy of the profession. Above all, though, we don’t want a weakly habit of constant complaint. As a rough guide, remember that while the average man is ill for four days a year, a grown woman must expect to spend one fourth of her life in actual pain.” Daisy felt a rush of admiration. So far she herself had done nothing like her fair share. (72)

Although Daisy has not perhaps endured her fair share of physical pain, she is subjected to a great deal of emotional pain as well as to the prospect of actual physical want as the result of her decision to give the story of James Elder’s suicide attempt to the local paper. In his spiteful self-pity, Elder has refused for several days either to eat or drink, and she thinks that, if he sees his story in the paper, as he desires, it may snap him out of his funk. The editor of the paper is Kelly, who strategically and spitefully writes the story in such a manner as to finger Daisy, the attending nurse, as the story’s source, thus ensuring that she will lose her position at the hospital for breaking its rules of confidentiality and putting her in financial distress, and so at the potential mercy of a romantic predator such as himself. After she loses her job at the Blackfriars, Daisy determines to go to Cambridge, where one of the doctors from the Blackfriars is partner in a psychiatric hospital, where she hopes to find work. Kelly discovers Daisy’s plans from his journalistic informant at the Blackfriars and meets Daisy at the train station, where he convinces her, in her distress, to allow him to accompany her there. Once in Cambridge they take a room in a disreputable hotel


that rents rooms by the hour, and then they rent bicycles and embark on a cycling tour of the area, during which a chance collision forcibly separates Daisy from Kelly and lands her in bed, of all places, with Fred Fairly. The seemingly random collision that brings together Daisy and Fred is a central event in all of Fitzgerald’s fiction in that it embodies in miniature the relations between chance and providence, existence and reality, becoming and being, that is the basic concern of this fiction. In a sense, the novel is the product of this originating event, as are the futures of its characters Daisy and Fred. (The bed in which the couple end up together is fittingly in a room once used as a nursery, endorsing the idea that Daisy and Fred are being given fresh starts by chance or providence.) The manner in which we as readers interpret this event is also telling in terms of our own fates and futures. The novel itself interprets the event in various manners and may even be thought of usefully as a fictive meditation upon these interpretations. In any case, what is most crucial for our argument concerning Fitzgerald’s use of parable is to recognize that the act of interpretation is at the very heart of this her most completely characteristic novel, and that she has constructed the novel in such a manner that we as readers are given the ultimate choice concerning that act. Here is the scene of the bicycle crash in which Daisy is separated from Kelly and joined to Fred: Fred was just on the tail of the two bikers ahead of him, possibly rather closer than he should have been, when without warning a horse and cart came lumbering almost at a canter out of the opening. It had no lights and the driver was not holding the reins but either drunk, dead or asleep, lolling over the dashboard. There was a kind of shriek or scream which might have been from the horse, since even old horses make strange noises in a state of terror, then a sound like a vast heap of glass splintering as the world, for Fred jamming on the brakes, went absurdly out of the horizontal and hit him a decisive blow, as black as pitch, on the side of the head. (53)

This is a world-originating scene—a scene in which a world is created from chance. The glass splintering is remindful of the Cabbalistic creation tale, and the blindly lumbering horse and cart recalls the bombarding positive particles with which Cambridge physicists first split the atom, recreating in miniature creation’s big bang. Given Fitzgerald’s complexly allusive manner of proceeding in her late novels, it would not be too much of a stretch, I think, to consider the three bicyclists on the road as the atoms of Lucretius free-falling in the void, only to “swerve from their courses by spontaneous chance” (Peirce, Writings 325), thus in effect initiating a creative evolutionary universe that can only be described rationally in terms of probabilities rather than in cause-and-effect determinations. As the chaos


theorists Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers explain of Lucretius’s atomic creation story: If the [atoms’] vertical fall were not disturbed “without reason,” which leads to encounters and associations between uniformly falling atoms, no nature could be created; all that would be reproduced would be the repetitive connection between causes and effects governed by the laws of fate. (303)

Of course the colliding horse and wagon is a physical cause, but its reason is a matter of chance, or of providence. In the material realm, it is a product of chance and in the spiritual realm an emblem of providence. The two realms are not mutually exclusive, for the realm of providence is inclusive of the realm of chance, which providence cannot annul, but which it utilizes as a means of progress in a creative (as opposed to a determined) manner. Fred Fairly, who is an experimental physicist at Cambridge, and who has given up his Christian faith because the existence of God has not been proven, nevertheless does not hesitate to ascribe his bicycle accident, and the subsequent event whereby he is taken for Daisy’s husband and placed together with her in a bed, to good fortune: “My God, what luck, he thought” (54). The cause of his good fortune is Daisy’s ring that she wears as a wedding band to ward off unwanted attention—the ring from her aunt with the inscription, “Whatever there is to know, That we shall know one day”—an ultimate testament to faith and the hope on which it is based. Daisy’s reaction to being thrown in with Fred as his presumed wife after the accident is also telling, “It’s just my luck to be in bed with a lazy fellow” (55). She is responding to Fred’s inability to locate his clothes in the room because of his dizziness, but also she is irritated at having been put in a false position because of the ring. In her irritation Daisy has unwittingly—by fate or chance or intuition—put her finger upon Fred’s most vulnerable weakness: “Fred felt deeply shocked. In all his life he had never been called lazy before” (55). From the point of view of a committed scientist and teacher, and of a dutiful son, Fred is not lazy. But from the spiritual point of view emblematized by the inscription on Daisy’s ring, he most certainly is, for he has allowed himself to confuse the existent and the real by assuming that God’s reality can be measured and proved as though God were merely an existent actuality on our own level of being. The irony is that, although Fred refuses to believe in a God whose reality cannot be proved through experiment, he has no difficulty in believing in an atom that is entirely unobservable, and so, to that extent, also unprovable. His belief in the unobservable atom is based upon his observation of its effects when experimented upon, “It all


hangs together. If it works it must be true” (22), which is, paradoxically and crucially, one of the five classic “proofs” for the existence of God, the argument from an ordered design—the very proof that atomic theory, in its quantum mode, based upon chance as ultimate, would seem to undermine. However, as Fitzgerald’s uncle Ronald Knox pointed out in God and the Atom, it is only recently—in the modern mechanized age with its Newtonian theory of a clockwork universe—that the natural order has been presumed to be entirely deterministic in design, without any room for chance. In the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas argued, rather, “moderately enough, that if we see means being adapted to ends universally or for the most part, we can legitimately infer the existence of a Mind responsible for the adaptation” (Knox 106). Knox goes on to contend that the idea of such a divine Mind is inevitable to one amenable to metaphysical contemplation: The Atomic Age will have, no less than ourselves, windows that open on eternity. The true lessons of the five proofs, as of all other proofs devised to establish the fact of God’s existence, is that we see his face looking down at us from the end of every avenue of our thought; there is no escaping from it. All our metaphysics, play with word-counters and reshuffle our concepts as we will, take us back to God. The doubts, the hesitations, come only when human knowledge is suffering from growing pains, when we have not yet sorted out our ideas and integrated, for the hundredth time, our world-picture. Of that inevitability, our own heart-sickness is the best proof. (113–114)

Through her fictive parables, and particularly in her final four novels, Fitzgerald is attempting to help us to sort out and integrate our ideas. In The Gate of Angels, for instance, she offers us three interpretations of the world-shattering and world-creating collision between Fred and Daisy, each of which offers in effect a different contemporary approach to understanding reality. There is a supernatural explanation of the event, a natural-factual explanation, and an allegorical-providential explanation. When we read the novel closely, we find that Fitzgerald as author clearly favors the third explanation as being ultimate; but she doesn’t insist upon it. She allows us as readers the freedom to choose, and she further demonstrates the manner in which our free choice of an approach to reality in part determines our lives by demonstrating the effect of such a choice on the lives of her characters. The supernatural explanation of the collision between Fred and Daisy is given to us in the form of a ghost story, and serves as such as a defense of fictive truth as explanation in general. Truth in fiction—that is, aesthetic


truth—is innately paradoxical, as Oscar Wilde pointed out to us (982). It is that which attains to the truth by lying most persuasively, as emblematized by Touchstone’s observation in As You Like It that “the truest poetry is the most feigning” (III.iii.15–17). Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass world provides an excellent representation of fictive truth, which is attained by heading in the opposite direction from probability and likelihood. The most successful inhabitants of such a world are those with enhanced powers of negative capability whereby the are able, like the White Queen, to believe many unbelievable things (176). The paradoxical, imagined truth of fiction serves as a permanent goad to, and questioning of, the provable truth of fact. In that sense it serves as a necessary challenge to our habits and assumptions. The author of the inset ghost story in The Gate of Angels is Dr. Matthews, the Provost of St. James, a fictive college of Cambridge. The name of the fictive college is a clue, however, to the real-life model for the Provost, M. R. James, a medieval text scholar, ghost-story writer, and Provost of King’s College, Cambridge during the period at which Fitzgerald’s novel is set. Dr. Matthews, like his historical model, is a man of “unclouded faith” (46) who is scornful of the universal truth claims of science and mathematics, to which he opposes the envisioning of the soul’s “inner eye” that “opens for some of us, though not always when we want it or expect it” (49). His ghost stories seem intended to demonstrate that there are more things on heaven and earth than have been dreamed of by empirical science or mathematical theory. As Fitzgerald wrote of M. R. James, “it was not scientific accuracy” that he “objected to—that was necessary to all scholarship—but a sense that mankind was occupying the wrong territory,” and she noted that James advocated an education in the humanities as being superior to the scientific study of “things that have no soul” (Afterlife 139). The reality of the soul is at issue in Dr. Matthews’ ghost story, which accounts for the collision between Fred and Daisy by suggesting that the place at which the collision occurred is haunted because of a grisly murder committed there centuries before. In his story, Dr. Matthews claims to have taken part as a young man in an archaeological excavation at the site of the accident. The site was of archaeological interest because of a “small nunnery” that inhabited “this unlikely spot” between “the second half of the thirteenth century and 1427” (131), from which the few remaining nuns still living there in 1426 were perhaps evicted—a highly unusual event for the period. During the archaeological excavation, one of the investigators began to see visions of the nuns inserting the “naked body of a man” (he who had come centuries before with the eviction notice) “being inserted inch by inch into the culvert” that was being excavated by the archaeologists. In order to be made to fit into the narrow culvert, the


body’s bones seemed to have been “crushed and collapsed and his body distorted into a shape of grotesque length and thinness” (134). In this ghost story, Fitzgerald is in fact subtly evoking the Ruskin essay from Unto this Last discussed earlier in which he declared that any science that subtracts the moral or “soul” element from its investigations disqualifies itself from serious consideration in terms of how we in fact live our lives and order our world: I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusions of the science if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons. It might be shown, on that supposition, that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables; and that when these results were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitution. The reasoning might be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in applicability. (Ruskin)

The attitude of Dr. Matthews to the ground-breaking scientists at Cambridge is similarly skeptical, “Science, he thought, was leading them nowhere, and quite conceivably backwards” (31). His ghost story, which accounts for the bicycle accident by arguing that the colliding horse and wagon, for which no driver had been found, were compelled by supernatural forces still haunting the murder site, serves as a fictive admonishment and challenge to any merely factual scientific explanation. Such an explanation is provided by the unbeliever Kelly, who testifies at a court hearing at which the collision between bicycles and wagon is being investigated in order to find out whether or not the farmer who owned the horse and wagon is to be held responsible for the accident, even though the itinerant day laborer who was the supposed driver of the wagon has not been found. At the hearing, Kelly provides the story of his trip to Cambridge with Daisy and of their checking into the disreputable hotel together and subsequent bike trip, and he identifies the farmer-defendant himself as the driver of the wagon. With such a testimony, Kelly provides a natural, factual explanation for the collision while at the same time inflicting further harm upon Daisy by charging her in public with being, in effect, an immoral woman. Kelly admits that his behavior in coming forward to offer such testimony is purely spiteful in regards to Daisy, thus reaffirming his role in the plot as a devil figure and as Daisy’s tormentor. Kelly’s damning testimony provides Fred Fairly with a life-altering choice. He can assent to moralistic society’s designation of Daisy as a loose woman and a bad person, who hid her true nature in order to pursue an advantageous marriage with Fred—a marriage, moreover, that would


prove in some ways disadvantageous to himself as it would necessitate that he give up his fellowship at the College of St. Angelicus, which stipulates celibacy for its members. Or he can follow his heart, which had told him, “after seeing Daisy at close quarters for let us say half an hour” that “he must marry her” (103): I cannot live without Daisy, Fred thought. There is no God, no spiritual authority, no design, there are no causes and no effects—there is no purpose in the universe, but if there were, it could be shown that there was an intention, throughout recorded and unrecorded time, to give me Daisy. (104)

Fred’s heart has led him to a conclusion and a discovery that his head entirely denies. But with Kelly’s damning testimony, Fred begins to doubt his heart’s knowledge, and he seeks out Daisy at the hospital where she is employed ironing the linen (because of Kelly’s report on James Elder in the newspaper, she was unable to finish her training as a nurse) in hopes that she will declare her love for him and enable him to overcome his doubts. Daisy, however, is no mere opportunist, and she instinctively refuses to give Fred the evidence his doubting head craves. In fact, they are both testing fate, which seems set against their happiness, and they leave their final meeting convinced that they will never see one another again. However, by fate or chance they do meet again, providing a potential happy ending to their seemingly ill-starred romance. Fitzgerald arranges it so that their surprise meeting is dependent upon a freak occurrence that might also be thought of as a miracle. If we interpret the freak occurrence as a miracle, then the happy ending follows naturally as the reward of providence; if we interpret it as a mere coincidence, then the happy ending is likewise a mere lucky happenstance, with no greater meaning. Our interpretation turns upon our willingness, or unwillingness, to consider Daisy as not merely a good-hearted caregiver who happens to be in the right place at the right time, but as a divinely inspired ministering angel of mercy—an angel, moreover, who is unaware of her status as such. The truth to her identity, as to the potentially providential nature of the novel’s ending, is a matter for the reader’s interpretation. The miracle involves a “strangely tall and narrow gate, as old as the college itself, in the south-west wall” of the College of St. Angelicus, concerning which Dr. Matthews, the ghost-story-writing Provost of St. James who is a frequent dinner guest at St. Angelicus, has a “running joke” with the College Master. He points out that the door is the walled college’s “only opening, dear Master,—apart from your front entrance—and quite inexplicable, since the only thought in the mind of the builders seems to

there’s a providence not so far away / 179 have been to keep visitors out.” There was no inscription on the gate, and no entry, in the records of the college expenses, for installing it. On the other hand it was noted in the annals that it had twice been found standing open . . . “There was no mention, on either occasion, of who opened your gate,” said Dr. Matthews, “nor of who shut it again.” “No-one, not even the Master, has any authority to do either,” said the Treasurer. “But if anyone had, or even if they had not, and if it were to stand open, who or what do you imagine might come in?” “I should not like to think about that,” said the Master. (30)

The door that seems to have been designed “to keep visitors out” is an emblem of the parable form itself, which serves as a spiritual blank wall for the unenlightened, but as a narrow passageway to spiritual transformation for the willing disciple. The Master who “should not like to think about” who might enter at the door were it to be opened is nevertheless compelled to think about it at the novel’s conclusion, at which the door is found standing wide open by Daisy as she makes her way across Cambridge to the train station on her way back to London. She came to a door as narrow as a good-sized crack, standing wide open. She felt no surprise . . . She was one of the few people, however, in Cambridge, who would not have been surprised . . . She heard a very faint cry, a human cry of distress. Without thinking twice about it she walked straight in by the passageway and found an elderly man in black clothes and a gown sitting propped against the trunk of a large tree with gently moving leaves. Daisy knelt down . . . (167)

The elderly man is the Master himself, who is blind, and who has had a fainting spell—“an ordinary syncope,” as Daisy diagnoses—which may have been caused by his sensing of the unfamiliar breeze blowing through the open door. She assures the Master as he comes back to consciousness that “there’s nothing to worry about” and instructs the alarmed fellows of the college (who are as disturbed by the sight of a female in their midst and by the open door as by their ailing Master) in how to care for the Master until the doctor arrives, and then she takes her leave: She got up, brushing down her skirt. The patient did not want to let go of her hand, but Daisy was used to this, and gently detached it. In a weak, clear voice he said, “Surely, it can’t be . . . ?” [ellipsis in text] Daisy picked up her bag and leaving the consternation behind her went out the way she had come in, pulling the tall door shut. This was much easier than you would have thought. The iron deadlock clashed tightly home. She must have spent five minutes in there, not much more. The slight delay, however, meant that she met Fred Fairly walking slowly back to St. Angelicus. (167)


The blind Master clearly suspects that he has been revived by the spiritual figure for which his college is named—the same figure who effortlessly enters and exits from the mysterious door with the narrow opening, which calls to mind the eye of the needle through which the elect travel into paradise and the mysterious “inner eye which opens for some of us, though not always when we want it or expect it” (49). It is up to the reader to decide whether or not Daisy is the agent of a miracle and whether or not the chance meeting with Fred Fairly is the rewarding gift of providence or a mere coincidence. This interpretive decision is a revelation of the interpreter’s own moral progress, as Fritz Hardenberg, who is later known as Novalis, informs his fiancé in The Blue Flower when she attempts to justify her spiritual skepticism: “Perhaps if I saw a miracle, as they did in the old days, I should believe more.” “Miracles don’t make people believe!” Fritz cried. “It’s the belief that is the miracle!” (84)

Such belief is a gift of grace, but it is a gift that can be denied, as Fitzgerald’s uncle, Ronald Knox, emphasized in the conclusion to his book on the importance of religious faith in a nuclear age, God and the Atom. Writing in 1945, just after the nuclear bombing of Japan, Knox pointed out that it would be tempting for post-nuclear man to unleash his energies in the cause of “self-assertion” (94)—to liberate the “force of will” by which his personality is constrained, as the structure of the atom constrains its energy within itself. He noted that the ascendance of chance as the dominant force in the world, as represented by the absolute unpredictability of “the moment at which a radium atom will explode” (50), would contribute to a tendency to view all meaning and order as provisional and, ultimately, fictional— thus underwriting a worldview that endorses the triumph of the individual will as a thing good in and of itself, no matter what spiritual values the will espouses and embodies. In such a worldview, power reigns supreme. To such a worldview, Knox opposed the idea of individual self-integration and restraint, pointing out that the “primary function” of the tremendous energy within the atom is to “hold things together,” and not to blow them apart; and he argued that, as the individual atom is the primary “unit” of the material realm, so the individual soul is the primary unit of the spiritual realm (187). He thus concluded that it is up to the individual to make the choice whether to liberate the self-destructive desires within his personality according to the model of an exploded atom that is “destructive only by accident” (160), or to integrate his personality in accordance with a world that is becoming “more perfect” as it grows toward the ideal of God


(123): “Man, the atom is free to choose. And freedom means not doing what he likes, but doing what he wants to do” (Knox 149). The Blue Flower In his philosophy and poetry, Novalis—the subject of Fitzgerald’s final novel, The Blue Flower—likewise contended that it is the ultimate task of man not only to integrate his individual personality, but to work towards bringing our world as a whole into closer harmony with the ultimate ideal of divine love. “Nature will become moral. We are her educators—her moral tangents—her moral stimuli” (Notes 73). Novalis’s fragmented, unfinished work is remarkably suggestive and elusive and impossible to summarize at all adequately in a small space. But one constant theme of the work that is particularly pertinent to Fitzgerald’s fiction is Novalis’s insistence that our hearts’ knowledge is superior to and more comprehensive than our narrowly rational understanding, and that it is our duty as the earth’s most self-conscious and, therefore, potentially most “moral” creatures to recover the hearts’ instinctive knowledge and to use it to lead nature itself forward towards the infinite ideals of harmony and love: “Man began with instinct—and he will end with instinct. Instinct is the genius in paradise” (Notes 340). In drawing upon the life and work of the prototypically romantic Novalis in her final novel, Fitzgerald seems to be suggesting that the romantic urge and the romantic vision remain potent allies in our struggle to sort out and integrate our ideas and to clarify our worldview in accordance with advanced scientific discoveries and revivified spiritual values. In a review essay on the English poet Philip Larkin, Fitzgerald observed that, with his marvelous talent for the clearest possible everydayness, he combined the torment of the romantic conscience and, however embarrassing it might be, the romantic vision. (Afterlife 264)

The Blue Flower dramatizes the radiant and joyful, and at times tormented and embarrassing, life of a fated and devoted romantic visionary in an insistently everyday world. The unsuspecting reader might be inclined to interpret this sharp-edged, clarified novel as a satire on the vaporous idealist in an all too solid and practical world, but that would be a misreading. Rather the novel is an examination of the difficulty and necessity of not merely transcending but, more crucially, transforming the material world in and through spiritual envisioning.


As is typical in her final novels, Fitzgerald in The Blue Flower creates a naturalistic story (in this case, a historical story as well) that lends itself to allegorical interpretation. This double-vision method enforces Fitzgerald’s ongoing parable instruction concerning the necessity of creatively interpreting the everyday existent in order to reveal the eternally real. The focus of the novel is the historical relationship between the twenty-two-yearold Friedrich von Hardenberg—known as “Fritz” in the novel and later to write under the pen-name of Novalis—and his twelve-year-old fiancé, Sophie von Kuhn, who died of tuberculosis at the age of fifteen, five years before Fritz himself succumbed to the disease. The novel is set during the two-and-one-half-year period stretching from the time in which Fritz (a recent college graduate who is destined to become a salt mine inspector, like his father) first meets and becomes engaged to Sophie, until the time in which she becomes ill and dies. In the historical life of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), his “grief at the death” of Sophie—whom he nicknamed his “philoSophie”—prompted him “to change the course of his studies [from philosophy and poetry] and delve into rigorous scientific pursuits” (Notes, “Introduction,” xi). His ultimate aim became “to reunite all the separate sciences into a universal science” (Notes, “Introduction,” x) by poeticizing and romanticizing all factual and theoretical knowledge—thus joining together in one overarching paradigm of the world the spheres of matter and spirit, which, he argued, only seem separate to us because we do not any longer know how to read and interpret them correctly, having allowed our obsession with the merely existent—with scientific fact and technical mastery—to separate us from the eternal verities that are the ultimate reality. Novalis’s theory of romanticism is in effect a working method for correcting our erroneous habitual perceptions through creative interpretation of the perceived: The world must be romanticized. This yields again its original meaning . . . In this operation the lower self becomes identified with a better self . . . The operation is still entirely unknown. By giving the common a higher meaning, the everyday, a mysterious semblance, the known, the dignity of the unknown, the finite the appearance of the infinite, I romanticize it—For what is higher, unknown, mystical, infinite, one uses the inverse operation . . . It receives a common expression . . . Romantic philosophy. Lingua romana. Reciprocal raising and lowering. (Werke 2: 545)

In Fitzgerald’s complex rendering, the relationship between Fritz and Sophie is a demonstration of such lingua romana, operating as an allegory of the relationship between soul and body, spirit and matter. This bold figuring is undercut throughout by a humorous and practical materialist-feminist


critique of masculine verbosity and intellectual-spiritual presumption. The relationship is revealed in the dialogue between Fritz and Sophie as he attempts to understand her character and personality: “Now, tell me what you think about poetry.” “I don’t think about it at all,” said Sophie. “But you would not want to hurt a poet’s feelings.” “I would not want to hurt anyone’s feelings.” . . . He asked her about her faith. She answered readily. They kept the days of penitence, of course, and on Sundays they went to the church, but she did not believe everything that was said there. She did not believe in life after death. “But Sophie, Jesus Christ returned to earth!” “That was all very well for him,” said Sophie. “I respect the Christus, but if I was to walk and talk again after I was dead, that would be ridiculous.” (82–83)

This typically humorous and telling interchange may be interpreted as a dialogue between body and soul—Fritz as the soul insisting upon immortality and poetry, and Sophie as the body equally insistent in her espousal of the factual truths of materiality. Fitzgerald maintains this argumentative dialogue throughout the novel, and pushes home the argument through the extended treatment of Sophie’s painful and debilitating mortal illness. Fritz as the representative of spirit fittingly refuses to look at Sophie’s “wound”—a tubercular tumor on her hip that is operated on repeatedly and unsuccessfully, and when he volunteers to nurse Sophie himself at her family home, he is informed by her older stepsister, the Mandelsloh: “If you stayed here, you would not be wanted as a nurse . . . You would be wanted as a liar . . . You would have to say to her—‘You look a little better this morning, Sophigen. Yes, I think a little better.’ ” . . . “And if I could not say that, would you think of me as a coward?” “My idea of cowardice is very simple,” said the Mandelsloh. After a moment Fritz cried out, “I could not lie to her, any more than I could lie to myself.” “I don’t know to what extent a poet lies to himself.” “She is my spirit’s guide. She knows that.” The Mandelsloh said nothing. “Shall I stay?” Still she said nothing, and Fritz went abruptly out of the room. (221–222)

Fritz’s refusal to attend upon Sophie in her final illness seems a failure of character—a display of simple cowardice—but when the scenario is read through the eyes of allegory, his refusal seems rather proof of the soul’s immortality—of the spirit’s insistence upon taking leave of the failed body


that can no longer sustain its presence. In her final hours, Sophie “in her fantasy, had kept thinking she heard the sound of horse’s hooves” (225). Whether the sound is representative of Sophie’s longing for Fritz’s return or of her spirit’s longing to leave the body is meaningfully uncertain. As an allegory of body and soul, The Blue Flower tells the love story of love stories—the narrative at the heart of all other romances. It is a story that is both brokenhearted and triumphant, as love always survives its mortal incarnations. In his subsequent philosophizing, the real-life Novalis devoted himself to healing the breach between body and soul that was created when modern man lost the habit of thinking allegorically and began to interpret material and linguistic signs as ultimate realities, referring to nothing other than themselves. To do so is to limit one’s reality to the realm of signs—a limitation that the signs themselves endorse, as deconstruction has driven home to us—which is to be hopelessly unrequited in one’s relation to reality. In a chapter of The Blue Flower entitled “The Nature of Desire,” Fritz has a conversation with a young woman friend named Karoline Just, whom he has nicknamed Justen. She is secretly suffering from unrequited love for him and is frustrated by her inability to express her desire. Fritz senses her frustration but misreads it as love for an absent person, which she feels compelled to keep secret. He attempts to draw her out: “Words are given us to understand each other, even if not completely . . .” “And to write poetry.” “Yes that’s so, Justen, but you mustn’t ask too much of language. Language refers only to itself, it is not the key to anything higher. Language speaks, because speaking is its pleasure and it can do nothing else.” “In that case it might as well be nonsense,” objected Karoline. “Why not? Nonsense is only another language.” (75)

All language is nonsense when it is limited to itself and is not seen to speak to a greater reality that reaches beyond language. In Novalis’s development as a philosopher, the major shift occurred when he turned against the solipsistic idealism of his teacher Fichte, whose theory of the self in its world reduced “being to structures via which the subject thinks about it” (Bowie), and substituted his own theory of being as an infinite progress or approximation toward the realm of ideals that is the ultimate reality (Notes, “Introduction,” xxix)—a progress that is fueled by love, and the goal of which is love. “I see the fault in Fichte’s system,” Fritz says to himself in The Blue Flower. “There is no place in it for love” (29). Love connects us to that which is beyond us, giving the lie to all notions of a self-enclosed existential system or of a self-sufficient individuality. It is that in which the spirit moves, and which moves the spirit—the emotive


proof of the spirit’s reality. “The life of the spirit,” Fitzgerald wrote, “is just as real as the pigeon dung and the bloated corpse. ‘I am’ has no meaning without ‘There is’ ” (Afterlife 226). In her creation of instructive parables that prompt us to participate in creating meanings that point beyond their seemingly (and misleadingly) self-sufficient naturalistic narratives, Fitzgerald in effect demonstrated Novalis’s dictum that “Idealism is nothing but genuine empiricism” (Notes 402); it is that which arises naturally and inevitably from our attentive interaction with Nature itself. In this sense, Fitzgerald’s mature method in the final four historical-romance novels, in which she deftly intertwined conventional fictive naturalism with religious and metaphysical allegory, is not so much a reproof of conventional naturalism as it is a correction of it, prompted by Nature itself, which Novalis labeled “a singular image of the eternal kingdom . . . If we suddenly became as elastic as was necessary, we would see ourselves in its midst” (Notes 234, 341).


No t e s

Two One is Never Quite Totally in the World: Jane Bowles’ Allegorical Realism 1. Writing just a few years before the publication of Bowles’ story, Weil predicted that America, being a nation of relatively recent arrivals from elsewhere, would likely suffer more acutely than other nations from the disintegrative social and psychological effects of uprootedness, while exerting a negative “dominating influence” on cultures that had yet to be uprooted (Roots 50). Bowles’ story would seem to endorse such a forecast, which history has born out.

Three Whatever Is, Is Wrong: James Purdy’s Allegorical Realism 1. In a related argument concerning the history of drama, Northrop Frye noted the general allegorical basis of realism when he wrote that “a genuinely realistic play has, built into it, an allegorical relationship to what both author and critic think of as real life” (A Natural Perspective 9–10). 2. In their late collaboration, What is Philosophy?, post-structuralist theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari posited a “virtual-actual” model of reality, inspired by post-quantum physics, that is useful as an analogy for explaining the fictive workings of an allegorical text. According to their model, the “virtual” is a world that is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract,” existing as “events” that are “immaterial, incorporeal, unlivable: pure reserve” (156). (In the terms of post-quantum physics, this world is envisioned as a realm of pure, un-embodied energy.) This virtual realm of events is continually “actualized in a state of affairs,” within the material world of our bodies and lives within time; but the event, unlike the state of affairs, does not pass away with time: “When time passes and takes the instant away, there is always a meanwhile to restore the event.” All events coexist in this world of “meanwhiles,” which “are superimposed on one another, whereas times succeed each other” (158). The virtual world, like the realm of fiction itself, both is and is not the world in which we live our lives. We live in actuality, within time, in a series of passing instants; but meanwhile we live within eternity, in a world of pure potential that has nothing to do with time as duration, as Spinoza (another source of Deleuze and Guattari’s virtual model) famously envisioned in the Ethics (306). This is a “dead-time” world in which “nothing happens” but “everything becomes” outside of the rational chain of cause and effect (Deleuze and

188 / notes Guattari 159). In fictive terms, this eternal world of meanwhiles is envisioned as the home of the gods, of magic, and of myth. Allegory may be thought of as operating in a self-conscious manner upon the boundary between the virtualmythical and the actual-material worlds, from which it serves as an implicit critique of complacent rationalist conceptions of reality, and as a rebuke to narrow-minded mimetic habits of reading and interpretation. In his insightful Reader’s Guide (see Works Cited) to the two volumes on Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Deleuze and Guattari, Brian Massumi explores in-depth the relationship between the virtual and the actual in post-structuralist thought, and explains its relationship to contemporary post-quantum theory: “If all this talk of VIRTUALITY and ACTUALITY sounds mystical or mythic, it may well be, but only to the extent that quantum mechanics and astrophysics are. Prigogine and Stengers apply the coresonance model to the debate on the origin of the universe. They theorize that the virtual is inherently unstable because it is composed of different particles that are in constant flux, but in ways that do not harmonize. In the absence of matter, at maximum entropy, the turbulence in the virtual is amplified to the point of an explosive contraction releasing an unimaginable amount of pure energy. The energy is unstable as the void and immediately dilates, creating matter. A universe is born (and Lucretius is vindicated). The presence of matter muffles the turbulence by giving it an outlet, by providing a dimension rigid enough to limit it but flexible enough to absorb it. What we get in the form of “chance” and indeterminacy is overflow from the actual’s absorption of the virtual. After the initial contraction-dilation, the material universe goes on dilating slowly until its future is consumed by its past and it disappears into maximum entropy. Then it all starts over again. There is a time line or “arrow of time” (clinamen, or “swerve,” in Lucretius’s vocabulary) leading out of the void through the material world and back into the void. More accurately, there are many time lines, as many as there are universes that will have been, even more, as many as the phenomena that will have been born and died in those worlds—because the resonance between the virtual and the actual never ends. This amounts to a scientifically derived version of Nietzsche’s theory of the ETERNAL RETURN OF DIFFERENCE that is very close to Deleuze’s philosophical version” (168–169). 3. The morally didactic nature of O’Connor’s allegory in contrast to Purdy’s is evident in the comparison between O’Connor’s and Purdy’s agents of divine retribution. In O’Connor’s story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the Misfit explains his behavior in terms related to Christian dogma (which he has learned imperfectly). Likewise the behavior of the avenging black woman with the purse in O’Connor’s story, “Everything that Rises must Converge,” is easily understandable within the context of American racism. These divine agents are comprehensible within conventional contexts of religion and history. By contrast, Purdy’s agents of divine retribution, such as Captain Stadger in Eustace Chisholm and the Works and Roy Sturtevant in Narrow Rooms, seem expressions of irrational and supernatural fury. Certainly their rage may be attributed to their self-hatred regarding their homosexual impulses, just as Daniel Haws’ and Sidney De Lakes’ acquiescence to punishment is indicative of their own self-hatred. But such behavior and emotion is not explicable within any conventional religious moral system. On the contrary, it condemns conventional

notes / 189 morality itself, and the history that created it, in the name of human nature, the ultimate instigator and arbiter of our fate. The contrast applies as well to the victims of the divine agent. The grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and the mother and son in “Everything that Rises must Converge” all are clearly guilty of conventional sins of pride and omission, and the author delivers them to the judgment prepared for them. Purdy’s characters, by contrast, are condemned by their own natures, which they are helpless to alter; their decision to take society’s and morality’s side against their instinctive desires is a judgment against society and morality in the name of nature. 4. The full passage by Benjamin follows: “By its allegorical form evil as such reveals itself to be a subjective phenomenon. The enormous, anti-artistic subjectivity of the baroque converges here with the theological essence of the subjective. The Bible introduces evil in the concept of knowledge. The serpent’s promise to the first men was to make them ‘knowing both good and evil.’ But it is said of God after the creation: ‘And God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good.’ Knowledge of evil therefore has no object. There is no evil in the world. It arises in man himself, with the desire for knowledge, or rather for judgment. Knowledge of good, as knowledge, is secondary. It ensues from contemplation. Knowledge of good and evil is, then, the opposite of all factual knowledge. Related as it is to the depths of the subjective, it is basically only knowledge of evil. It is ‘nonsense’ in the profound sense in which Kierkegaard conceived of the word. The knowledge, the triumph of subjectivity and the onset of an arbitrary rule over things, is the origin of all allegorical contemplation. In the very fall of man the unity of guilt and signifying emerges as an abstraction. The allegorical has its existence in abstractions; as an abstraction, as a faculty of the spirit of language itself, it is at home in the Fall” (233–234). 5. We may note in passing that Freud has proved particularly un-useful for modern and contemporary creative allegorists (as contrasted, obviously, with allegorical critics, who have thrived upon his work). Freud is un-useful for allegorical creators, I believe, because of his insistence upon the provable scientific truth status of his own remarkably allegorical system, and because of our culture’s general acceptance of that claim. Freud’s claim of scientific truth status has had the effect of putting a perpetual licensed withholding on his system, whereas the admittedly allegorical system of archetypes designed by his onetime disciple, Jung, would seem to operate like open software for the allegorical creator.

Four

Some Imaginary Vienna: Ronald Firbank’s Pastoral Realism

1. Kopelson writes, “Unfortunately, the canny pederast who thinks he is stealing love is really only paying a different price for it. By keeping his love, if not to himself, then at least away from his beloved, he may be that which according to his way of thinking is an impossibility—a pederast in love. But he is not a pederastic lover. The lover must say ‘I love you,’ and must say it to the beloved” (68). But must he? What about the scores of unrequited lovers in literature, those who “love from afar?” What about Dante and Beatrice?

190 / notes 2. Goldman writes, “A concern with the gap between signifier and signified is not unique to writers of the frivolous, but frivolity foregrounds this space, from which it arises” (292). 3. The utopian tendency of the pastoral is related to a similar tendency in the history of the homosexual. Michel Foucault comments, “The historical importance of a radical, essentialized, transgressive sexuality is that it became the experience/identity for a utopian vision of the future” (216). 4. See Clark and Kiernan (works cited). 5. Firbank’s refusal to accede to society’s moral standards of judgment calls to mind Nietzsche’s conclusion to The Gay Science, in which he prophesies the arrival of “a spirit who plays . . . with all that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine . . . when it confronts all earthly seriousness so far, all solemnity in gesture, word, tone, eye, morality, and task so far, as if it were their most incarnate and involuntary parody” (347). 6. Criticism condemning Firbank’s fiction for violating narrow contemporary standards of political correctness is a more recent version of critical misunderstanding, intolerance, and condescension.

Wor k s Ci t ed

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I N DEX

Acocella, Joan, 140, 150 Adams, Stephen, 47 Ade, George, 12 allegory, 2–5, 9, 12–14, 18, 20–22, 27, 32–34, 42, 43, 47–61, 64–8, 73–4, 106, 107, 117, 127, 134, 156, 161, 170, 182–5, 188n allegorical realism, 4–6, 11–74, 187n as distinct from myth, 33 as distinct from parable, 127 Allen, Carolyn, 31 artifice, 3, 10, 70, 81 Ashbery, John, 12, 31, 56 Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh), 80–3 Austen, Jane, 50, 123, 134 Basbanes, Nicholas, 138 Bassoff, Bruce, 104 Bayley, John, 123, 142, 164 Beckett, Samuel, 22, 58 Benjamin, Walter, 21, 32, 33, 55–7, 60–1, 66–7 Bergman, David, 93 The Bhagavad-Gita, 31 Binding, Paul, 68 Bishop, Elizabeth, 82 Blake, William, 50, 56, 58, 74 Bohr, Niels, 169 Bowles, Jane, 3, 5, 11–43, 187n “Camp Cataract,” 15, 33–43

The Collected Works of Jane Bowles, 9, 18 “Going to Massachusetts,” 15, 18–19 Out in the World, 5, 43 Two Serious Ladies, 5, 15, 21–33, 34, 36 Bowles, Paul, 11, 16, 17, 19, 33, 41–2, 43 Brophy, Brigid, 82, 93–4 Brueck, Katherine, 14 Bunyan, John, 12, 53, 136 Callimachus, 78 Capote, Truman, 12, 16 Carlyle, Thomas, 144 Carroll, Lewis, 4, 52, 56, 176 Caserio, Robert, 76 Cather, Willa, 82 Céline, 22 Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith), 133 Clark, William Lane, 77, 190n Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 76 Curti, Lidia, 13 Dante Alighieri, 4, 56, 58, 62, 68, 126, 189n Delafield, E(lizabeth) M(onica), 148 Deleuze, Gilles, 59–60, 187–8n Descartes, René, 100, 128, 130 D’Espagnat, Bernard, 169 Dillon, Millicent, 15, 17, 18, 31 Dollimore, Jonathan, 92 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 167

198 / index Eder, Richard, 140, 142, 145 Einstein, Albert, 116, 169 Eliot, George, 126 Facknitz, Mark, 110 Faulkner, William, 6 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 184 Firbank, Ronald, 1–3, 7–8, 54, 72, 75–94, 96–7, 99, 189–90n Caprice, 8, 79, 88 The Complete Ronald Firbank, 83 Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, 8, 88 The Flower Beneath the Foot, 89, 91, 94 Inclinations, 8, 84 Vainglory, 86, 89, 92 Valmouth, 91 Fitzgerald, Penelope, 3, 9, 123–85 At Freddie’s, 137, 145, 147–51 The Beginning of Spring, 155, 162–8 The Blue Flower, 131, 140, 152, 153, 155, 168, 180, 181–5 The Bookshop, 134–7, 140, 146, 151 “Desideratus,” 142–4 The Gate of Angels, 124, 144, 155, 168–81 The Golden Child, 133–4, 137, 140, 151, 164 Human Voices, 137, 145–7 Innocence, 144, 153, 155–62, 165, 167 Offshore, 137–42 Fletcher, Angus, 13, 21–2, 34, 47, 52, 54, 57–9 Forster, E(dward) M(organ), 75, 77, 82, 83, 86, 93 Foucault, Michel, 86, 190n Frye, Northrop, 22, 50, 71, 73, 187n

genre, 1–3, 5, 9–10, 12–13, 22, 51, 58, 61, 77, 133–4, 137 as distinct from mode, 80 Gogol, Nikolai, 167 Goldman, Jonathan, 77, 190n Gramsci, Antonio, 155–8, 161 Green, Henry, 3, 8, 76, 95–121 Caught, 109 Concluding, 8, 103–21 Guattari, Fêlix, 187–8n Hacking, Ian, 131 Halperin, David, 83 Hartshorne, Charles, 101 Holmesland, Oddvar, 96 Homer, 78 homosexuality, 6, 7, 65–6, 69–71, 76, 79, 81–3, 93–4, 188n, 190n idealism, 128–9, 144, 168, 184, 185 The Illiad, 19 Iser, Wolfgang, 70, 73 James, M(ontague) R(hodes), 176 Kafka, Franz, 4, 12, 59, 127, 134 Kierkegaard, Søren, 28, 42 Kiernan, Robert, 190n Knox, Ronald, 133, 153, 165, 175, 180, 181 Kopelson, Kevin, 189n Kraft, James, 12, 34 Lane, Christopher, 46 Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert), 123, 124, 127, 152, 153 Lebowitz, Naomi, 42 Lesser, Wendy, 138, 139, 149 Lewis, Tess, 137, 138, 153 Lucretius, 173, 174, 188n Lukács, Georg, 115

index / 199 Lukacs, John, 49 Luther, Martin, 49 Marvell, Andrew, 81 Massumi, Brian, 188n materialism, 2–6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 19, 31, 33–4, 41, 56, 102, 128, 152, 168–71, 180–4 Melville, Herman, 6 Mengham, Rod, 117 Merrill, James, 56, 58, 82 mimesis, 2, 22, 81–2 mimetic fiction, 7, 54, 75, 95, 113 mimetic materialism, 4 mimetic naturalism, 82 mimetic realism, 3, 12, 13, 21, 22, 43, 47, 77 Murrow, Edward R(oscoe), 146 Myers, L(eopold) H(amilton), 138, 139 myth, 5–6, 33, 57, 71, 73, 188n as distinct from allegory, 33 naturalism, 21, 25, 46, 51, 53, 55, 59, 75, 81–2, 125–7, 134, 137, 140, 143, 150, 162, 182, 185 Neville, Robert Cummings, 148 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 190n nominalism, 128–30 North, Michael, 96, 112, 115 Novalis, 135, 141, 144, 151, 152, 154, 181, 184, 185 O’Connor, Flannery, 51, 56, 127, 137, 153, 188n Oliphant, Margaret, 162 Painter, George, 114 parable, 2–4, 9, 34, 123–8, 130–1, 134, 136–7, 139, 143–4, 147, 152–5, 162–5, 169–70, 173, 175, 179, 182, 185 as distinct from allegory, 127

parablistic realism, 3, 9, 123–86 The Paris Review, 82, 103, 105 pastoral, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6–9, 54, 57, 61, 69–74, 75, 77–94, 96, 97, 100, 102, 103, 107, 109, 110, 111, 116, 120, 121, 159, 190n pastoral-organicism, 95, 103, 105, 113–15, 121 pastoral-organic realism, 95–121 pastoral realism, 75–94 pastoral-romance, 61, 69–72, 159 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 129–32, 141, 148, 153, 154, 163, 168 Plato, 4, 14 pluralism, 10, 74 Poggioli, Renato, 83 Powell, Anthony, 75, 76, 83, 86, 104 Prigogine, Ilya, 174 Pritchett, V(ictor) S(awdon), 76, 79 Proust, Marcel, 58, 76, 83, 86, 91, 114, 119 Ptolemy Philadelphus, 78 Purdy, James, 3, 5, 45–74 63: Dream Palace, 65, 67–9 Cabot Wright Begins, 62–4 Eustace Chisholm and the Works, 55, 65, 68, 69, 188n Garments the Living Wear, 69, 71, 72 The House of the Solitary Maggot, 65 I am Elijah Thrush, 47, 52–3, 59, 63, 64–5, 69 In a Shallow Grave, 69, 70–1 Jeremy’s Version, 65, 69 Malcolm, 52, 59, 63, 69 Narrow Rooms, 65, 69, 188n The Nephew, 69 On Glory’s Course, 65 Out With the Stars, 69, 71–2 Pym, Barbara, 134 Pynchon, Thomas, 22

200 / index quantum physics, 168–9, 187n quest, the, 34, 36, 165 Quilligan, Maureen, 47, 48, 50, 73

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 4 Stokes, Edward, 97, 114, 117 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 56

realism, 1–3, 25, 27, 41, 47, 97 allegorical realism, 4–6, 11–74, 187n alternative realisms, 2–3 fictive realism, 41, 42, 43 literary realism, 1–3, 5, 10, 103 metaphysical realism, 128 mimetic realism, 3, 12, 13, 21–2, 26, 43, 47, 77 parablistic realism, 3, 9, 123–86 pastoral-organic realism, 95–122 pastoral realism, 6–9, 75–94, 189n philosophical realism, 128 psychological realism, 25 romantic realism, 109 Reed, John, 163 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 165 Roditi, Edouard, 13 Ruskin, John, 136, 153, 177

Tanner, Tony, 46, 47, 50, 57 Theocritus, 1, 72, 78–9, 83, 159 Thomson, Virgil, 72 Tolstoy, Lev, 153, 154, 162, 165, 166, 167 Treglown, Jeremy, 104, 114 Trollope, Anthony, 162

Salmagundi, 126 Samson, Ian, 126, 139, 150 Sannazzaro, Jacapo, 159 Schwarzchild, Bettina, 50 Shakespeare, William, 67, 71, 73, 147, 148 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 56 Sitwell, Edith, 45 Sitwell, Osbert, 88, 90, 92, 93 Sontag, Susan, 92 Sophocles, 78 Spark, Muriel, 137 Spenser, Edmund, 4 Spinoza, Baruch, 60, 117, 154, 187n Stadler, Matthew, 55 Steiner, George, 56, 68 Stengers, Isabelle, 174 Stevens, Wallace, 56

Updike, John, 97, 120 Vaneigem, Raoul, 62 Van Vechten, Carl, 72, 80 Virgil, 70, 83, 159 Waugh, Evelyn, 76, 82, 97 Weil, Andre, 16 Weil, Simone, 5, 12–19, 23, 24, 26, 30–3, 36, 38, 40, 42, 187n Wells, Robert, 78 Welty, Eudora, 95, 97, 98, 99, 104, 114, 115 Whitehead, Alfred North, 7, 8, 98–103, 105, 108–10, 114, 115, 117, 119–21, 135 Whitman, Jon, 49 Wilde, Oscar, 3, 6–8, 10, 64, 68, 76, 79, 93–4, 102, 113, 176 Williams, Tennessee, 12, 17 Wilson, Angus, 96 Wilson, Edmund, 76 Winch, Peter, 14, 15 Wolfe, Peter, 164–5, 168 Yorke, Gerald, 98 Yorke, Henry, 95 see also Green, Henry

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