Digressions in European Literature: From Cervantes to Sebald

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Digressions in European Literature

10.1057/9780230292529 - Digressions in European Literature, Edited by Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells

Also by Alexis Grohmann: COMING INTO ONE’S OWN: The Novelistic Development of Javier Marías

ALLÍ DONDE UNO DIRÍA QUE YA NO PUEDE HABER NADA. TU ROSTRO MAÑANA DE JAVIER MARÍAS (Edited with Maarten Steenmeijer) EL COLUMNISMO DE ESCRITORES ESPAÑOLES (1975–2005) (Edited with Maarten Steenmeijer)



LITERATURA Y ERRABUNDIA

From Cervantes to Sebald Edited by

Alexis Grohmann Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies, University of Edinburgh, UK and

Caragh Wells Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies, University of Bristol, UK



Digressions in European Literature

Selection and editorial matter © Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells 2011 Individual chapter © contributors 2011 Foreword © Ross Chambers 2011

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. 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 978–0–230–24798–7

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Digressions in European literature : from Cervantes to Sebald / edited by Alexis Grohmann, Caragh Wells. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–24798–7 1. Digression (Rhetoric) in literature. 2. European literature— History and criticism. I. Grohmann, Alexis. II. Wells, Caragh, 1967– PN56.D54D54 2010 809'923—dc22 2010027574 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


For Ross Chambers




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Foreword by Ross Chambers

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Notes on Contributors

xii

Introduction Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells 1

2

3

4

1

The Twists and Turns of Life: Cervantes’s Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda Jeremy Robbins

9

Digressive and Progressive Movements: Sympathy and Sexuality in Tristram Shandy; or, Plain Stories Judith Hawley

21

Little Dorrit: Dickens, Circumlocution, Unconscious Thought Jeremy Tambling

36

Concerning Metaphor, Digression and Rhyme (Fetish Aesthetics and the Walking Poem) Ross Chambers

49

5

Henry James, in Parenthesis Ian F. A. Bell

6

A Slice of Watermelon: The Rhetoric of Digression in Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog’ Peter J. Rabinowitz and Corinne Bancroft

82

‘Let’s Forget All I Have Just Said’: Diversions and Digressions in Gidean Narratives David H. Walker

94

Errant Eyes: Digression, Metaphor and Desire in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time Margaret Topping

106

Virginia Woolf and Digression: Adventures in Consciousness Laura Marcus

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7

8

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vii



Contents

viii Contents

130

11 Negotiating Tradition: Flann O’Brien’s Tales of Digression and Subversion Flore Coulouma

143

12 ‘Going On’: Digression and Consciousness in The Beckett Trilogy Edmund J. Smyth

156

13 Straight Line or Aimless Wandering? Italo Calvino’s Way to Digression Olivia Santovetti

169

14 Roving with a Compass: Digression, the Novel and the Creative Imagination in Javier Marías Alexis Grohmann

181

15 The Sense of Sebald’s Endings ... and Beginnings J. J. Long

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Index

205



10 Stealing the Story: Robert Walser’s Robber-Novel Samuel Frederick

Foreword Forgive me, reader, for plucking at your sleeve and interrupting your train of thought. But that’s what forewords do; and I did want to draw your attention to the phenomenon of digression, and how hard it is to pin down. Whatever the context may be, digression seems to be always already active within it: it is a vehicle for whatever it may be that was inevitably repressed by the defining of the context. So it is inherently oppositional in character, which is to say wily, deceptive, uncanny and even perverse. I like that! Where there is a law, digression is on the side of desire; where power reigns, it represents the strength of the weak. The defined, the delimited, the regulated meet in digression a principle of untidiness, drift and disorder – the relaxation of energy and the prospect of coming apart that haunts the tightest of methodical constructs, the strictest of systems, the tidiest of organizations. It is a parasite, living off the cultural conventions that it simultaneously undermines and even, eventually, bids fair to demolish. It is the noise of discourse, the static of thought, preventing routine and keeping things lively. Something that helps digression to get away with its vocation for oppositionality is that it so readily passes as a mere lapse or error, a failure of logic or attention that seems negligible and eminently forgivable. Considered as a figure of speech, it is a rhetorical device that mimes a delinquency, then – or alternatively an errancy that has become available as a trope. If you take it to be an actual slip-up, you may very well have missed the point. There are readers, for instance, who are irritated by Tristram Shandy or A la recherche du temps perdu, and wish the author would ‘come to the point’. Whatever Sterne or Proust’s point may be, they have missed it. Still, I do understand how they feel – and anyway, their supposedly naïve reaction is necessary, is it not, to validate the point (whatever it may be) of texts such as these? Without guileless readers to miss the point, masterpieces of long-windedness like Shandy and the Recherche would simply not have a point to make. They would be pointlessly wasting their time, and ours. The scholarly authors of the essays in this collection – I confess to being one of them – have done their level best to grapple with such conundrums and to define the point of the many examples of literary digressivity that have caught their attention. Like Freud, who knew ix



Ross Chambers

Foreword

when a cigar was a phallic symbol and when it was just a cigar, we can tell, I assure you, when a digression is a trope and when it is just sloppy writing. That said, however – and admirable as such efforts are – I do hope, dear reader, that in the end you will agree with me that the real reason we haven’t completely wasted our time is that, inadvertently or otherwise, we have also taken a step or two towards measuring the sheer elusiveness of literary digressivity. For digression is like that other most slippery of rhetorical practices, irony, in that its vocation does seem to be to impose on analytic criticism the usefully chastening maxim that the more you succeed the more you fail, and the more you fail, the better you succeed. There, the prefacing is done now. We can return to our separate paths. Thank you, though, for the opportunity to chat a bit; phone me sometime and we’ll do lunch. I’d like to hear your thoughts on zeugma.



x

We would like to thank the following for their help in making this book possible in its present form: all the contributors, who so willingly embarked on this adventure with us and without whose goodwill, patience, diligence and lucidity the book would probably never have come to fruition; Stergios Delialis, for designing the book cover, and Vetti Karvounari and Kostas Kalogirou for their assistance in this regard; the Robert Walser-Stiftung and Keystone for permission to reprint a manuscript page by the Swiss author; the Department of Languages at Clemson University for paying for the rights to reprint the said image; Paula Kennedy, Ben Doyle and, especially, Monica Kendall of Palgrave Macmillan for their steadfast editorial assistance; Jane Horton, for the splendid index; and, last but not least, Ross Chambers, loiterly trailblazer and patron saint of this collection (as Judith Hawley puts it), for his good-humoured support of the project throughout, not least by way of many transatlantic telephone conversations, letters and faxes over recent years (but strictly no e-mails). This book is dedicated to him.

xi



Acknowledgements

Corinne Bancroft graduated from Hamilton College, New York State, in 2010 where she studied Comparative Literature. She focuses on border justice issues in literature and politics. Ian F. A. Bell is Professor of American Literature at the University of Keele. His principal research interests focus on the works of Ezra Pound and Henry James, the intellectual history of Modernist aesthetics, American notions of artistry, relations between history, fiction and commercial forms, and literary negotiations with science. Current projects include a monograph on the constructivist line in American literary language from Emerson to Brautigan. Most recently, he has written a series of essays on Modernism and the Fourth Dimension and is about to start thinking about the ‘critic of the seven arts’, James Huneker. In retirement from the University of Michigan, where he was Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Ross Chambers, author of, among others, The Writing of Melancholy (1993), Room for Maneuver (1991) and Loiterature (1999), has turned his attention to the digressive relation of world writing to European styles and genres. Flore Coulouma is a Lecturer in English Linguistics at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre. She wrote her PhD thesis on language games in Flann O’Brien’s work. Her research interests are Irish and post-colonial literature, bilingual authors and their representation of language, and linguistic and pragmatic approaches to literary criticism. Samuel Frederick is Assistant Professor of German and Film at Clemson University (South Carolina). He has published on Robert Walser, the Brothers Quay and Oswald Egger, and is currently working on a book on digression in Robert Walser, Adalbert Stifter and Thomas Bernhard. Alexis Grohmann is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, author of Coming into one’s Own: The Novelistic Development of Javier Marías (2002), Literatura y errabundia (Literature and Errancy, 2010) and other studies of contemporary Spanish and European literature, as well as of the genre of the newspaper column by writers. He is also editor and co-editor (mainly with Maarten Steenmeijer) of four collections of essays. xii



Notes on Contributors

Judith Hawley is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London. As well as publishing essays on Sterne in, for example, The Shandean and The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (2009), she has written on encyclopaedias, Siamese twins and Grub Street. She is General Editor of Literature and Science 1660–1832 (2002–3). She has edited various eighteenth-century texts, including Jane Collier, The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1994) and Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (1999), and works by Elizabeth Carter in the series Bluestocking Feminisms (1999). Her current research centres on the Scriblerus Club. J. J. Long is Professor of German at Durham University. He is the author of books on Thomas Bernhard (2001) and W. G. Sebald (2007), and co-editor of collections on Sebald, Gerhard Fritsch, literary forgery and contemporary photographic theory. His research interests are twentieth-century German literature and photography, fields in which he has published widely. He was the recipient of the inaugural Max Kade Prize for best article in Modern Austrian Literature and was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2005. Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College. She has published extensively on Virginia Woolf and on modernist literature and culture more broadly. Her most recent book is The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007). Peter J. Rabinowitz, Professor of Comparative Literature at Hamilton College, New York State, is author of Before Reading (1987), Authorizing Readers (1997; with Michael Smith) and numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative. With James Phelan, he has co-edited Understanding Narrative (1994) and A Companion to Narrative Theory (2005) and currently co-edits the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series at Ohio State University Press. He has also written widely on music and serves as Contributing Editor of Fanfare and is a regular contributor to International Record Review. Jeremy Robbins is Forbes Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of numerous studies on the literature and thought of the Spanish Golden Age, including Challenges of Uncertainty (1998) and Arts of Perception (2007), and is currently working on the representation of space in the European Baroque. Olivia Santovetti is a Lecturer in Italian Literature at the University of Leeds. She has published on Manzoni, Dossi, De Roberto, Pirandello,



Notes on Contributors xiii

Gadda and Calvino. Her monograph, Digression: A Narrative Strategy in the Italian Novel (2007), examined the workings of digression in Italian literature from the birth of the modern novel to the era of postmodernist experimentation. She has also published on Laurence Sterne and edited and translated selections of his Sermons (1994 and forthcoming). Edmund J. Smyth is Reader in French at Manchester Metropolitan University. His previous publications include, as editor, Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction (1991), Autobiography and the Existential Self (1995; with Terry Keefe) and Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity (2000). He is the general editor of the series Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, and was also recently a guest editor of a special edition of Romance Studies entitled ‘Noir Cityscapes’. He is currently completing a study of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Jeremy Tambling is Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester. He is author of two books on Dickens and on other literary topics and on critical theory. His most recent books are Allegory (2009) and On Anachronism (2010), which takes a theme from Proust and Shakespeare. Margaret Topping is Reader in French at Cardiff University. Her research spans two main areas: the work of Marcel Proust with a particular focus on its metaphorical construction, and textual and visual narratives of travel and migration. She is the author of Proust’s Gods (2000) and Supernatural Proust (2007), the editor of Eastern Voyages, Western Visions: French Writing and Painting of the Orient (2004) and the co-editor, with Mary Bryden, of Beckett’s Proust/Deleuze’s Proust (2009). She is currently working on a monograph on Phototextual Journeys: Francophone Travel Literature and Photography. David Walker is Professor of French at the University of Sheffield. He has published studies on numerous twentieth-century French writers and critical editions of texts by Gide and Camus. He is the author of a monograph, Outrage and Insight: Modern French Writers and the ‘fait divers’ (1995), and recently completed a book on Cultures of Consumption in Modern French Literature. Caragh Wells is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. Her research is focused on Spanish post-Civil War literature and, more generally, twentieth-century European literature. She has published a number of articles on post-war Spanish and Catalan writers. She is currently engaged in a research project on the philosophical ideas contained in the novels of Carmen Laforet.



xiv Notes on Contributors

Introduction

If we accept that literature and, in particular, verbal narratives, especially longer prose narratives such as novels, are digressive by their very nature, since, as Peter Brooks has intimated and Ross Chambers has confirmed, all narratives can only come into existence as narratives per se by not following the straight line, the shortest path, that leads from their beginning to their end, that is, they can only take shape as narratives by distancing their endings from their beginnings through, at the very least, Brooks’s minimally complicated detour or deviance (because otherwise there would simply be no narrative), then the question of digression in literature is one of degree rather than being absolute. It becomes a question of the extent of digressiveness of a work, that is, rather than one of kind or essence (the digressive versus the non-digressive varieties). Since there are, therefore, following this line of reasoning, strictly speaking, no non-digressive works, there are merely narratives that could be said to be more digressive than others (either on the level of story or on that of discourse or both), and some in more ways than one. This is the type of literature studied in this book, beginning with a work by one of the founding fathers of the modern novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda by Cervantes, a narrative of peripeteia arguably more digressive than his Don Quixote, and ending with a look at the writing of one of the most suggestively errant authors of the contemporary period, W. G. Sebald. The course charted through European literature, though by no means comprehensive (any attempt at comprehensiveness would, in any case, have been an illusory and therefore impossible enterprise) – there are no doubt notable omissions, such as Montaigne, Swift, Diderot, Flaubert, Joyce, Nabokov or Bernhard – does, we trust, allow us to glimpse, albeit somewhat waywardly (but perhaps 1



Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells


this errancy is not an entirely inappropriate purposive lack of method in a book on digression), how many of Europe’s major writers from the early modern period to the present day have run forth (excursus derives from excurrere), turning aside from a main path (digression stems from digredi) and producing thus a παρε´κβαση (parekbasis, a temporary distancing, turning away from the subject), which exceeds the order or structure of the main subject, as Quintilian saw digression, wandering off Descartes’s apparently singular right path of reason and reflection, and allowing Sterne’s sunshine to flood their pages. The chapters are arranged chronologically in the order of publication of the most important narrative or narratives discussed in each, and we have avoided any divisions, for the reason that digressions have formed part of the narrative form since Ancient times, at least, and evolve across historical boundaries and through an interrelated trajectory, with later narratives feeding on previous ones, as is borne out very clearly in the chapters that follow. Our focus on the European novel (for the most part – Chambers, as well as looking at Baudelaire, also reads two nonEuropean poets through the prism of Baudelaire; needless to say, we understand Europe to include the British Isles), is due to the fact that ‘in the richness of its forms, the dizzyingly concentrated intensity of its evolution, and its social role, the European novel (like European music) has no equal in any other civilization’, as Milan Kundera would have it (1988: 143), even though this has entailed regretfully casting aside such crystallizations of the art of digression as, say, Moby Dick; or, the Whale. And while we acknowledge the persistence of digressive writing across the centuries since the rise of the novel, our selection of essays illustrates how mainly twentieth-century European prose narratives not only pay homage to earlier, founding digressive texts, such as Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, but also signal an expansion in literary experimentation and its digressive tendencies. Traditionally, digression has been neglected or viewed as something to be corrected by both rhetoric and also theory (not usually considered a trope nor a legitimate rhetorical practice), literary or otherwise, with notable exceptions such as Randa Sabry’s Stratégies discursives (1992) and Ross Chambers’s Loiterature (1999). So, for instance, in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, J. A. Cuddon’s definition is that of ‘material not strictly relevant to the main theme or plot of a work. Sterne proved himself an incorrigible digressionist in Tristram Shandy’ (1999: 226). Of course, had Sterne been reformed and his digressiveness rectified, there would simply have been no narrative, but those who view digression with suspicion do not dwell on such matters; as



2

Pierre Bayard sums it up, ‘rhetoric’s dream is that digression not be digressive’, and the same could have been said of the yearning of literary theory and criticism, until fairly recently (Bayard 1996: 24). This corrective tendency notwithstanding, digression is an intrinsic part of the narrative form from its very beginnings, to be found even in the relatively linear simplicity of early epic narratives. One need only think of Homer’s Odyssey, an epic poem made up of the episodic nature of Odysseus’ attempt to return home and of innumerable narrative digressions, one of the better-known ones being the excursus on the origins of Odysseus’ scar, famously discussed by Auerbach: Odysseus, having finally returned to his home in Ithaca as a stranger who guards himself from being recognized upon finding his house and wife besieged by the Suitors, is afforded the courtesy of having his feet washed by Eurycleia, and the old maid recognizes her master by a scar; the diachronic progression of narrative is at that moment interrupted by the story of the boar hunt many years prior, during which hunt Odysseus was struck and scarred by the boar’s tusk (Book 19, ll. 393–467). The Odyssey is a wandering journey prolonged by adventure, which, in theory, like so many truly digressive works, not least Cervantes’s or Proust’s, is a form of work that has the latent quality of lending itself to being prolonged considerably, like life itself (if it is not cut short): Odysseus’ adventures might have been multiplied and, thence, his journey home, dilated; Don Quixote, though he dies at the end, might have been made to live by his author much longer and to have become involved in many more episodes; Marcel’s narration, too, might have carried on for a yet greater number of volumes than the ones of which it is made up. Hence, the dilatory practices of many narratives enhance both the narrator’s and the reader’s desire to prolong the pleasure indefinitely, as Chambers puts it (the other desire of what may constitute a divided attention being the desire to know what will happen [Chambers 1999: 20]). And this prolongation of narrative time can inevitably be read as a struggle to keep the end of the story but also, by implication, that of life, at bay. Thus, digression is intimately related to a seeming excess generated from within the text and the things that writers do with their texts that may take us to various beyonds. Digressions constitute a path of a certain order pursued through associations of a not necessary linear and simple kind. And, more often than not, the intricacy of associations effected in digressive texts reflects the complexity of the world contemplated, as Leo Spitzer once said of Proust’s prose in particular; nothing is simple in the world and, therefore, nothing is simple in a digressive form of writing, governed, as it



Introduction 3


is, by minds that are able and tend to see in their interrelationships the most seemingly disparate and diverse things (see Spitzer 1970: 397–473). Thus, digression is far more than a mere rhetorical figure, literary device or technique – it is a Weltanschauung, a way of contemplating the world in its manifold interconnectedness. Considerably digressive writing is ‘more in tune with the complexities of things and the tangled relations that join them’ than less errant writing, to quote Ross Chambers again (Chambers 1999: 31). And, accordingly, digression points to the freedom inherent in literature and writing, a freedom best laid bare and celebrated through the liberty taken of wandering off in many directions. The essays in our collection attend to the many directions and forms that digression has taken throughout the history of European literature. They illustrate how digression in literature (and here we include the short story and the poem) is both transhistorical and transnational. Present across the centuries, digression manifests itself as much more than mere trope or technique, and therefore points us towards what is fundamental to all modes of literature, namely creativity. Digression thus finds itself intimately linked to the esemplastic space of the creative imagination where the ingenious mind subjects ideas to alchemic and anarchic combinations. One of the most distinctive features of the writers discussed in this collection is their use of digression as a subversive narrative tactic, either as a means to challenge the conventional form of the novel (if such a thing in fact exists) and to contribute thus to the renovation of the novel form, or as a mode of calling into question the existing (and often predetermined) order within a society. Some writers have been intent on doing both, as is well illustrated in nearly all of the chapters that follow. For example, in her discussion of Sterne, Judith Hawley observes how, in the seventeenth century, digression represented ‘a mark of the feminine, the marginalized and dispossessed’ (Chapter 2). While Sterne sought to undermine the linearity of traditional modes of narrative plot, he also set out ‘to mount a defence against the powers that be’. His digressiveness, according to Hawley, ‘is an implicit criticism of conventional morality’. Margaret Topping observes a similar use of digression in Proust; she notes how in A la recherche du temps perdu digression serves as a metaphor that ‘tests and stretches moral codes, social conventions and readerly expectations’, thus enabling the reader ‘to see differently’ (Chapter 8). Similarly, Laura Marcus suggests that Woolf’s deployment of digressive devices challenges the masculinist point of view and ‘troubl[es] the boundaries between gender categories’ (Chapter 9). Some



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forms of digressive writing may then be linked to l’écriture feminine, a more female-centred mode of writing, such as Joyce’s famous digressive swerve at the end of Ulysses towards a ‘female aesthetic’ in Molly Bloom’s beautiful, sexually charged monologue. A bodily aesthetic emanates from the art of digressive writing, one that seems to be more in tune with the intangible rhythms of the human body and also the unconscious patterns of desire that are held in check by conventional morality. This is suggested in Chambers’s examination of the relationship between metaphor, digression and rhyme in Baudelaire and two contemporary poets (Chapter 4). Digression, accordingly, serves as a trope for an exploration of a more primal, libidinal energy that challenges the ordered structure of traditional thought and modes of behaviour. There is a certain pleasure associated with the act of digressing, as writers seek almost to stem the flow of time, prolong the suspense of the ending, and delay the moment of closure. As Jeremy Robbins proposes in his discussion of Cervantes, digression may be read as a metaphor for ‘the twists and turns of life’ (Chapter 1), as it works to delay the end-point of death but always as an active participant in the game of ending. The desire to linger for a moment within narrative and withhold the forward movement of the plot is also matched by the writer’s relationship with language, as he or she dallies in the possibilities afforded by words themselves and their multiple combinations, creating a digression into what might be described as poetic prose. This is illustrated in Ian Bell’s analysis of Henry James (Chapter 5) and, although we have not included a discussion of Flaubert in this book, it is also an integral feature of the latter’s writing; as Culler observes, Flaubert asks us ‘to admire his creativity more than the story itself’ and encourages the reader ‘not to involve himself in the tale but to take it as an artifact which reveals the daring and cleverness of the creative project’ (Culler 1974: 37). Digressive writing also finds itself inextricably linked to the more inchoate and intangible impulses operating in human subjectivity and the unconscious mind. This feature of the digressive text is examined in the essays on Woolf and Gide. For example, in David Walker’s discussion of Le Prométhée mal enchaîné he observes the relationship between Gide’s use of digression and human subjectivity, which, he concludes, represents ‘an explanatory discourse aimed at integrating subjective experience and the external world’ (Chapter 7). Digression thus permits the tentative articulation of a less familiar structure or mental realm into which we rarely have any insight or even knowledge, unless it thrusts its way through to the conscious mind in moments of revelation or epiphany (which in themselves may constitute digressions



Introduction 5


within a text, as Chambers suggests in his discussion of the ‘epiphanic rhyme’ [Chapter 4]). In Edmund Smyth’s analysis of Beckett’s trilogy, digression and one of its corollaries, discontinuity, serve to illustrate a decentred and disintegrating consciousness, revealing the unstable nature of the self (Chapter 12). While this may be a distinctive feature of postmodern literature, as Smyth suggests, it is also arguably present in earlier digressive narratives such as Don Quixote. The hapless knight’s forays into the realm of the imagination may serve equally as metaphors for his own disintegration into the realm of madness and a shattered consciousness. Yet the use of digressive literary techniques to undermine restrictive moral codes, social conventions and modes of thought to reveal the more transient, elusive realm of human consciousness is coupled with another significant intention that is found in digressive writing and which links the essays within this collection: to throw off any rigid schema that constrains literary creativity. Thus, the digressive novel nearly always entails formal innovation and may come to represent an attempt to break away from a literary tradition or to renew the form of the novel from within (even though we note that digressive writing in a sense also forms its own tradition). Conjoined with the characteristic of narrative inventiveness is the self-conscious nature of digressive writing. As Olivia Santovetti observes in her discussion of Calvino, digression becomes ‘a technique of critical detachment through which the text reflects on itself’ (Chapter 13). Similarly, Walker describes how Gide’s Prométhée sets out ‘to question novelistic conventions through its form as well as its content’ (Chapter 7). The self-reflexive or metafictional tendencies of digressive fiction have also engaged the reader to question literature’s claims to verisimilitude. This is amply illustrated in Flore Coulouma’s discussion of O’Brien’s metafictional masterpiece At SwimTwo-Birds, a novel, she argues, ‘marked by oral tradition while subverting the common perception of narrative structure’ (Chapter 11). The self-conscious novel remains a consistent feature of digressive literature, although it acquires greater acuity as the twentieth century progresses. What Beckett termed ‘nominalist irony’ leads to the breaking down of the very notion of narrativity itself (1983: 172). This is discussed in the chapters on Walser, Beckett, Marías and Sebald. Samuel Frederick observes how in Walser’s The Robber, the disintegration of narrative progression places the text in a state of ‘perpetual movement’ (Chapter 10). This technique finds an echo in the work of Javier Marías, which, Alexis Grohmann suggests, resists any attempt at a clear, rational design or plot (Chapter 14). Similarly, Jonathan Long notes how in the second



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narrative in Sebald’s first book of prose, Vertigo – ostensibly a travel narrative – digression is so pervasive that the reader is forced to wonder whether ‘the narrative has a sense at all’ (Chapter 15). It is important to record, however, that while the disintegration of plot and questioning of narrativity itself become dominant features of what can loosely be described as the postmodern novel, they are also present throughout the history of digressive writing, once again reminding us of its transhistorical nature. For example, Jeremy Tambling hones in on Dickens as a practitioner of digression: ‘Little Dorrit imposes universal deferral and delay as a mode of procedure’ so that ‘everything remains in process’ (Chapter 3). The writer’s desire to keep the narrative fluid takes us back again to Cervantes, Sterne and Melville. But the question that must be posed is what this disruption of plot might mean on a more philosophical level. Without wishing to draw digressive literature into an interpretative straitjacket, we might surmise that what links this approach to writing is a desire to articulate the interconnectedness of the world. As Bell notes in the chapter on James, the lesson that we learn from James is that ‘relations stop nowhere’ (Chapter 5). And Santovetti, in her reading of Calvino, suggests that digression is given shape as a figure representing ‘the multiplicity of the world’ (Chapter 13). In order to reveal the interconnected nature of all relations, one must be open to the randomness of chance ‘whose figure is digressivity’, as Ross Chambers observes (Chapter 4). The majority of the authors in this collection focus their attention on digressive narratives as entities in themselves, in which the use of digression is carried through the text as a consistent practice. Yet we must also consider the use of digression in narrative as a rhetorical tool for eliciting the reader’s attention or guiding his or her experience, which assists the generation of meaning within the text. This mode of digression, not as a sustained practice or technique, but rather as a figure or trope within a text, is discussed by Peter Rabinowitz and Corinne Bancroft in Chapter 6. In their analysis of Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog’, they describe one subset of these figures as ‘perturbative digressions’ that represent ‘invitations to serious reinterpretation of what is driving the plot’. In this case, the digressive trope acts as a guide to the reader to assist him or her in the game of interpretation. Yet behind such an exercise of control there is a lingering impulse to encourage the reader to relinquish control, and to resist thinking in a systematic and orderly fashion, as the chapters that follow testify. This loosening of the strictures that can stem the free flow of thoughts and ideas is the hallmark of creativity, as William James articulated in 1880,



Introduction 7

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Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions and discriminations, the most unheard of combination of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbling about in a state of bewildering activity, where partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine is unknown, and the unexpected seems only law. (James 1880: 456) It is just such a law of the unforeseen that determines the myriad links that, beyond their evident connections, bind all the chapters, and that gives rise to what Chambers calls ‘a new and unexpected order’.

Bibliography Auerbach, Erich. 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press) Bayard, Pierre. 1996. Le Hors-sujet: Proust et la digression (Paris: Minuit) Beckett, Samuel. 1983. ‘German Letter of 1937 to Axel Kaun’, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London: Calder), pp. 170–3 Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) Calvino, Italo. 1988. Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) Chambers, Ross. 1999. Loiterature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press) Cuddon, J. A. 1999. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th edn (London: Penguin) Culler, Jonathan. 1974. Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) Homer. 1991. The Odyssey (London: Penguin) James, William. 1880. ‘Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment’, Atlantic Monthly, 46.276 (October): 441–59 Kundera, Milan. 1988. The Art of the Novel (London: Faber) Sabry, Randa. 1992. Stratégies discursives: digression, transition, suspens (Paris: L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) Spitzer, Leo. 1970. Études de style (Paris: Gallimard)



and it lies behind the elusive and often bewildering art of digressive writing:

The Twists and Turns of Life: Cervantes’s Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda Jeremy Robbins

In his last work, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, historia setentrional (The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, a Northern Story, published posthumously in 1617), Miguel de Cervantes creates a narrative marked, on the level of both style and plot, by its errancy. Its eponymous heroes travel as brother and sister under the names of Periandro and Auristela from the frozen islands of northern Europe to the Mediterranean in fulfilment of a vow to go to Rome, their true identities and actual relationship not being fully revealed until the novel’s fourth and final book. As in Don Quixote, they encounter numerous individuals who narrate their own convoluted, amatory stories. The result is a marked tension between the movement of the titular heroes from north to south and the frequent stasis of the narrative with its endless inset narratives and back-stories. In books I and II, which trace the journeys of Periandro and Auristela through the somewhat nebulous geography of northern Europe (Lozano Renieblas 1998: 85–111), the interpolated episodes continually thwart both the reader’s narrative progression and the heroes’ actual journey. In books III and IV, which see Auristela and Periandro land in Portugal, travel through Spain and France, and finally reach Rome, there are fewer interpolated stories, but the pair are witness to a whole series of self-contained incidents along their route whose effect is similarly to slow down the forward movement of the main narrative. This switch from interpolated stories narrated by characters fortuitously encountered to incidents directly witnessed by the protagonists themselves broadly mirrors the change in narrative structure between parts I and II of Don Quixote, a change explained in that work by its fictional author, Cide Hamete, in terms of his desire to be praised not for what he has written, but for what he has not. This takes us directly to the issue of narrative relevance central to digression. 9



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The Persiles’ structure explicitly grapples with one of the abiding preoccupations of early modern poetics, and of Cervantes’s fiction, namely the prescription that narratives exhibit both unity and variety (Riley 1992: 116–31). The key dilemma, then as now, is when prolixity becomes digression, thus threatening or undermining unity. The digressive nature of the Persiles is evident not simply in its use of episodes and incident but in the overall arc of the work. Cervantes models the text on what were, at the time of his writing, the phenomenally popular Byzantine romances, rediscovered and translated in the sixteenth century, and mined by theorists and writers alike for the ways they reconciled both unity and variety and verisimilitude and the marvellous. (It is worth emphasizing here that admiratio itself was sought not simply in the number and type of incidents described, but also in the structure of the narrative that seeks to combine them into a whole [Cascales 1975: 170; Riley 1992: 92; Forcione 1970: 33–4, 61–2, 65–6].) In the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels, 1613), Cervantes makes explicit his competition with that most digressive of Byzantine romances, Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story, a work hugely admired and widely imitated in the early modern period. Like the Ethiopian Story, the Persiles begins in medias res, Cervantes plunging the reader into a nightmare scenario of cannibals and captives. And again as in Heliodorus, the events which led up to those depicted in the opening chapters are only narrated at a much later stage: Periandro gives an extended narrative in book II, chapters 10–20, which recounts how he ended up in the situation depicted in book I, chapter 1 – a back-narrative which also contains various inset and incidental narratives – while Auristela waits until book III, chapter 9 to say, briefly, how she ended up in the work’s opening situation. The actual true back-history – the full identities of Auristela and Periandro and the real reason for their pilgrimage – is deferred until book IV, chapters 1 and 12. In a way typical of Baroque narrative excess, the Persiles has, therefore, three beginnings, the last occurring at the work’s very end. The work’s digressive nature, together with its heavy emphasis on coincidence and the marvellous, has led many critics to see it as deeply flawed. Riley’s comments are not untypical: ‘The book is a welter of incident. Story crowds on story […] The temptation, successfully resisted in the Quixote, to hang a story on almost every character overcomes him in his last novel’ (1992: 125). The relationship between the whole work and the teeming digressions that (threaten to) overwhelm it has been seen as one of macrocosm to microcosm, with Forcione suggesting that ‘these adventures follow a cyclical pattern, as a moment of struggle, bondage,



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or “near-death” alternates with a moment of resurrection or triumphant vision of the final goal of the quest. Thus all adventures repeat in miniature the circular pattern of the entire quest’ (1972: 36–7; compare El Saffar 1980). Wilson, commenting on how the inset stories are not integral to the plot, interprets this astutely as evidence of how the work is ‘a romance undergoing “novelization”, that is, penetration by the nascent Renaissance novel that Cervantes was helping to create. These novelistic subplots both modulate the allegory of the main romance plot and tend to deflect readerly interest away from it’ (1991: 36). In looking at one of the most digressive works of narrative produced in Golden Age Spain, my aim here is to focus on the parallels drawn within the text between narrative and digression on the one hand, and a view of life itself as, essentially, digressive on the other. This parallel between narrative and existential digression raises the second area I propose to explore, namely the relationship between digression and deferral, not simply in terms of individual episodes but of the whole narrative. The digressive nature of the text is apparent from the first book onwards, but is explicitly foregrounded during Periandro’s long narration in book II in which he explains how he came to be in the situation with which the Persiles begins. Here, in typical fashion, Cervantes has various characters as well as the narrator pinpoint what are, for them, the shortcomings of Periandro’s narrative as narrative. Given that this narrative is itself a microcosm of the style of the work as a whole, Cervantes offers here a metatextual critique, informed by the Aristotelian-inflected theory of his day, of the Persiles. Central to the criticisms voiced is that Periandro dwells at length on unnecessary incidents and details and, in so doing, is tedious. Ironically, this point is made initially after only one chapter of what will end up being a ten-chapter narrative.1 Even Periandro eventually realizes that his narrative, told over several nights, is wearying his listeners and resolves – twice! – to shorten it as far as he can (II.15: 244–5, II.16: 248).2 The characters’ critical asides are tinged with humour, as when Mauricio, listening to Periandro’s account of his captaining a ship at night, says he bets Periandro will now describe at length the appearance of all the stars in the night sky (II.14: 239). The oddest moment of self-defence by Periandro for his discursive narrative comes when Arnaldo suddenly declares that he has had enough: ‘There you can picture me, noble listeners, having become a fisherman and a matchmaker, rich with my sister’s presence, poor without it, robbed by thieves, and raised to the position of captain to fight



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them; for the twists and turns of my fortune have not a single place to stop, nor any limits to contain them.’ ‘No more’, said Arnaldo at this point. ‘No more, Periandro, my friend. For although you never tire of telling your misfortunes, we are weary of hearing them, since they are so many’. To which Periandro replied: ‘Arnaldo, I am like that thing called “place”, which is where all things fit and where nothing is out of place, and in me all misfortunes have a place.’ (II.12: 226–7) One way in which the Persiles, a text marked so forcibly by narrative divergence, brings a sense of coherence to the whole is by being woven through with references to convergence. This is one such moment. On the one hand, Periandro asserts here ‘the absolute freedom and power of the artist’ to order the narrative and to include or exclude material as he sees fit (Forcione 1970: 205; also Wilson 1991: 86, 148, 155–6). On the other, he seems to picture himself as the vanishing point, as it were, of all the narrative orthogonals, and as a type of narrative monad in which the entire world is enfolded, and thereby centred, on his own, singular point of view. Important for my argument here is the fact that the criticisms of Periandro’s meandering narrative arise not so much because the characters are, in Forcione’s words, ‘preoccupied by literary concerns’,3 though their criticisms are indeed framed in relation to the prevailing (largely Aristotelian) orthodoxy as Forcione has analysed, but, rather, because they ardently wish not to be sidetracked or deflected from achieving their own goals and desires. This point is emphasized by being made twice in a single chapter, once by a character, Mauricio (II.14: 239), and once by the narrator (II.14: 234–5). The point is an obvious one, but Cervantes’s work explores all its narrative and existential ramifications: digression leads to deferral, and importantly deferral of desire, and thereby to frustration, and this not simply for the characters but also, potentially, for the reader. It is a comic but dangerous game for an author to point out the longueurs of their own narrative, but Cervantes is presumably confident in the fact that, while deferring the reader’s desire to move forward with the main narrative on one level, such digressions can be pleasurable in and of themselves: for all the continual carping of certain members of Periandro’s audience, we are reminded time and again of the sheer pleasure that his words (and equally his person) arouse in his audience (217, 227, 234, 242, 265).4 A further irony is that Periandro only finishes his narrative once the travellers have fled Policarpio’s island, meaning the one person



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who actually wanted to hear its end, Sinforosa, does not, as she remains behind there. The objection to Periandro’s narrative that it delays the characters’ achievement of their goals – and, by extension, frustrates a reader’s desire for a forward-moving and purposeful narrative – is connected with the early modern Christian conception of life as a pilgrimage which is exploited across the work. The idea of peregrinatio is central to the rise of the novel in early modern culture with, for example, the picaresque using the journey both as a mechanism to enable protagonists to have a diversity of experiences beyond the quotidian and as a metaphor for life itself, a process that reaches its apogee in Spain with Baltasar Gracián’s allegorical masterpiece El Criticón (1651–57), which sets out to show the reader ‘the course of your life in a discourse’ (Gracián 1993: 7). The long-standing Christian cliché of life as a wandering exile from heaven is literalized in the Persiles: Periandro and Auristela’s trajectory from the margins (Thule) to the centre (Rome) creates the novel out of their literal wanderings, which take the form of a ‘pilgrimage’ precisely because of their vow to travel to Rome, a vow often mentioned but never explained until the narrative’s close.5 On three separate occasions the Augustinian idea is repeated of restlessness being the defining feature of the human soul (II.3: 170; III.1: 275; IV.10: 458), with peace and stasis only being found when the soul returns to, and rests in, God, our ‘centre’.6 Rome serves as the narrative centre to which Periandro and Auristela are drawn – and for those critics who read the narrative as an allegory of (Christian) life, it becomes the point where truth, peace and Christian resolution are found. Certainly once in Rome, and with Auristela’s receiving full instruction in the Catholic faith, the Christian inflection of the notion of peregrinatio is taken further when she unexpectedly announces to Periandro that, rather than marry him, she plans to enter a convent so that she can go to heaven ‘without any detours, surprises, or worries’ (‘sin rodeos, sin sobresaltos y sin cuidados’, IV.10: 459). Auristela has recognized that life, since it necessarily involves the unforeseen and the contingent, is not simply inconstant but deflective, things and events constantly thwarting our desires and their fulfilment. (She had previously been glad to learn, once in Spain, that their journey could continue on land rather than by sea, given that her experience of the sea had confirmed the accuracy of it as the symbol of inconstancy [III.1: 278; III.4: 296; III.12: 366].) In deciding to marry Christ rather than Periandro, then, she seeks precisely to avoid the inconstancy of life. She recognizes that life’s very unexpectedness makes it, as she has vividly seen over the two years of her journey, ‘digressive’, and




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believes that the only way to avoid this is to withdraw from life.7 What is important here is that Cervantes has her desire to avoid ‘detours’, ‘surprises’ and ‘worries’ unambiguously evoke the nature of the narrative the reader has just traversed by specifically recalling not simply the Persiles in general but Periandro’s microcosmic narrative in particular, both being marked by their detours (literal and stylistic or narrative) and surprises. This parallel between life as accurately described by Auristela and the narrative style of the Persiles is even more marked in her words in the following chapter when she has to explain to their companions, none of whom know that she and Periandro are actually lovers, both her decision to enter a convent and Periandro’s departure on hearing of this. Seeking to justify her decision, she asks rhetorically, ‘Isn’t it better for me to leave the twisting paths and the uncertain roads and head for the obvious shortcuts which clearly show us the happy destination of our journey?’ (IV.11: 461). Her words recall criticism of Periandro’s earlier errant narrative in book II; Rutilo, for example, had declared in exasperation, ‘For God’s sake! […] Through what detours and with what links you have pieced together your errant story, Periandro!’ (II.16: 248). Given the text’s Christian view of life as an unavoidable series of unexpected twists and turns, as a wandering precisely because of the soul’s distance from its ‘centre’, then a narrative which mirrors life must itself consist of precisely such unexpected twists and turns. The diversions that are life are central to narrative too, and a mimetic text must therefore be digressive. What Cervantes suggests is that narrative, like life, is essentially digressive, and just as taking a ‘shortcut’ in life means not simply withdrawing from life, symbolized here by the convent, but actual death, so an avoidance of digression in narrative would mean the absence or end of narrative. The lesson which Auristela must accept in Rome, the lesson as to life’s unpredictability, its refusal to proceed in a linear fashion but, rather, circuitously as the contingent intervenes, is embodied in the whole narrative’s structure such that the reader by this point in the work has experienced similar frustrations on the narrative level as Auristela voices on the existential level. If the characters’ tortuous journey with all its reversals, twists and detours is a reflection of a Christian conception of life as peregrinatio, this raises the question of the end or purpose of the characters’ pilgrimage. Given that the characters are travelling to what is described on two different occasions as the ‘alma ciudad de Roma’ (‘Rome, the city of the soul’ [II.15: 243; IV.3: 426]), critics such as Casalduero, Avalle-Arce and Forcione have read the Persiles as an allegory of the soul’s journey



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through the trials of life towards the consolations of the Church and, thence, heaven. However, as more recent critics have pointed out, there is a problem with this view of the text as a Christian allegory, and that is that the work thwarts, complicates and fails to fulfil the expectations raised by precisely the Christian framing of the journey as a pilgrimage to Rome in fulfilment of a vow.8 Cervantes, in other words, has set up a tension between our legitimate inferences (pilgrimage to Rome = Christianity, therefore novel = in some way an allegory of life) and the full truth of the journey which is deferred until the second to last chapter (IV.12), a truth which casts a very different light on the purpose of the pilgrimage and, thereby, on the Persiles itself. Contrary to those critics who see Rome as, in Forcione’s words, ‘the point at which all unfulfilled desire ends, the centre at which the soul in its endless movements during its separation from God can find repose’ (1972: 106), others have focused on how our expectations of an absolute happy ending, a complete resolution, are thwarted. In this, of course, they follow those repeated elements of the Persiles, already mentioned, which stress that there can be no total happiness, no genuine repose, outside God, and thus none on this earth. Sacchetti, for example, describes how the reader expects an ‘unconditional happy ending’, but gets instead an ironic, ‘unfit’ ‘anti-climax’ (2001: 88), while Randel discusses how on ‘reaching Rome [Auristela and Periandro] discover the overreach of desire’ with the consequence that ‘the final cadence of the Persiles does not radiate that ultimate meaning which had been synonymous with arrival; for arrival cannot ever be Arrival’ (1983: 168).9 Here, though, I would like to focus on a broader narrative issue, namely the related question of our expectation that the erratic journey – and thus the errant narrative – serve a purpose. It is only once Persiles and Auristela are in Rome that the entire journey is revealed to be a subterfuge. While we know well before the final book that the pair are not brother and sister, and that they are in love, it is only two chapters from the work’s end that we learn their full story: Sigismunda, sent by her mother to be brought up by Persiles’ mother to protect her from the dangers of war, is promised in marriage to Persiles’ elder brother, Magsimino; Persiles also falls in love with her, and becomes dangerously ill once she is engaged to his brother; his mother learns the truth from Persiles, her favourite son, and, taking advantage of Magsimino’s absence, persuades Sigismunda to transfer her feelings to Persiles; Persiles and his mother then hatch a plot to avoid Magsimino’s wrath when he returns – Persiles and Sigismunda will leave and Sigismunda’s absence will be explained to Magsimino




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on his return as being due to her having made ‘a vow to go to Rome to learn there about the Catholic faith which in those northern parts was somewhat damaged’ (IV.12: 467). What we have taken to be a religious pilgrimage is thus suddenly revealed to be, at its inception at least, an amatory subterfuge: the city’s heavy religious connotations yield to earthly love; ‘Roma’ is reversed and becomes ‘Amor’. As in the Ethiopian Story, so at the conclusion here our expectations of a happy ending – essentially the marriage of the eponymous heroes – suffer a succession of major, last-minute reversals: Auristela loses her beauty when a spell is placed on her; on recovering, her decision to enter a convent prompts Periandro to leave Rome; this leads him to learn of his brother’s imminent arrival in pursuit of the pair and causes him to return to warn Auristela; he is then stabbed by Hipólita’s jealous lover and, as he lies in Auristela’s arms, seemingly mortally wounded, Magsimino arrives and promptly expires, but not before giving them his blessing. All obstacles now removed, the narrative ends, with a stunningly cursory summary of their long and fruitful marriage. But at the start of the final book, before we learn of this, the true nature of their journey, Auristela displays an unexpected, practical side to her character when, in her first intimate discussion with Periandro, she voices concerns about their future. She does so on a hill overlooking Rome, that is precisely at the point where their journey is coming to an end, her vow is about to be fulfilled, and the reader expects there to be nothing to prevent their marriage. There, she asks Periandro: ‘But tell me, what will we do after we are tied by the same knot and our necks are under the same yoke? We are far from our own lands, known by nobody in these foreign ones, with no support to which, like ivy, we can cling in our hardships’ (IV.1: 414). These practical concerns for their material wellbeing bring to mind Clodio’s malicious comment regarding the couple much earlier in the narrative when he criticizes precisely their indifference to practical matters (‘to think that they will always find kings to shelter them and princes to show them favours is out of the question’ [II.5: 183]). On the one hand, given her obsession with her own chastity, Auristela’s practical concerns can be read as the manifestation of an underlying fear of what has been so long deferred, namely marriage and sexual union.10 On the other, we might see in this stark contrast with the heroines of Byzantine romances, such as Charikleia in the Ethiopian Story who is most explicitly not concerned with the absence of material support,11 the emergence of the ‘novel’ at the exact point in the ‘romance’ when we are expecting the culmination of a pure, idealized romance. But the precise reasons for, and understandable nature of,



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these pragmatic concerns raised by Auristela only begin to emerge clearly in chapter 6 when the narrator says that, after having received Christian instruction, ‘she was looking to see if heaven would reveal to her some light which would show her what she should do once married, because she thought that to even think of returning home was a rash and stupid idea since Periandro’s brother, to whom she had been promised as a wife, seeing his hopes dashed, might take revenge for this offence on her and Periandro’ (IV.6: 436–7). And they are only fully comprehensible following the revelation in chapter 12 that the pilgrimage is an amatory subterfuge, for that revelation underscores the fact that marriage will not solve their problems and, even more unexpectedly for the reader, that their tortuous journey has consequently resolved nothing, and could never have resolved anything. They have simply deferred the problem. Not only is the pilgrimage to Rome not a pilgrimage, but it is revealed to be futile, since their arrival there cannot solve the practical problem of what to do about Magsimino. The pilgrimage is both purposeful (to go to Rome) and essentially futile, because once there, the same set of problems awaits them that caused them to leave Thule in the first place. Its only purpose is to put distance between the pair and Magsimino, but, as Auristela acknowledges, the end of their journey therefore finds them, for all intents and purposes, back where they started. The entire pilgrimage itself, then, is simply a sustained act of deferral. And if, as we saw in characters’ frustrations over Periandro’s endless mini-narrative in book II, digression amounts to a deferral of one’s desired goals, then in its final pages, a text which contains so many digressions is itself revealed to be in its entirety an act of digression because a sustained act of deferral. For the teleological thrust of the genre, romance, and its framing, pilgrimage, are subverted. The reader has been compelled to undertake a journey through the endlessly errant text to an end-point that suddenly becomes a reversal of our expectations of purpose and, hence, resolution. We have succumbed to what Randel calls the ‘powerful seduction of the quest’ (1983: 165). Just how strong these generic expectations are can be seen in critics’ description of the narrative as Christian pilgrimage, with Rome as apotheosis, and the attendant glossing over in silence of both Auristela’s real material concerns and their implications both for us and for her and Periandro. The thwarting of our carefully fuelled expectations of narrative purpose is a peripeteia that impacts the reader far more than either of the characters, precisely because, as is clear in book IV, Auristela has long been aware of them, and Periandro is willing blithely to ignore them. The end is not in Periandro and Auristela’s hands, as the seemingly




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purposeful journey had made it seem, but in Providence’s. And like the characters, having had our expectations dramatically reversed, we too are in the hands of Providence, that is to say, of Cervantes. The narrative, like the journey, is thereby on one level essentially futile. And here we return to the characters’ reactions to Periandro’s narrative in book II: the lack of narrative purpose, the revelation that the Persiles in toto is pure digression, can create either frustration or pleasure. What is revealed precisely by it being absent is the narratorial sleight of hand which normally selects events given in a narrative precisely to endow it, and them, with purpose and significance, precisely, and obviously, the very elements missing in so many events in our actual lives as lived. (It is exactly this that Cide Hamete wishes to be praised for in Don Quixote, Part II.) To use the language employed both metaphorically and literally within the Persiles, a narrative is normally a short-cut to meaning, and all twisting, forking digressions threaten this teleological thrust. Where that purpose is lacking, all that remains is digression. The end of the Persiles is a transitory moment of convergence on meaning in an otherwise divergent and digressive text (and world). In many ways, the reader’s relationship to the teeming, errant narrative is akin to the viewer’s with the illusion created by one-point perspective in a Baroque quadratura scheme. Just as with quadratura, so in the Persiles the narrative threads, its orthogonals, only create a perfect vision of the whole, in which all parts slot seamlessly into place, at the single spot where they all converge – in the Persiles, significantly, this is the Catholic centre, Rome, and, for the reader, the very end of the work. And as in a quadratura scheme, so in life continual movement is necessary, the impossibility of stasis meaning that the moment of totality – when real and illusionistic architecture fuse (in quadratura) or when all is resolved and makes sense (in narrative) – must pass, creating new and unexpected configurations, further confusion and potential chaos. That sense of perfect understanding can only be momentary; its arrival heralds the end, because after it must come more of the twists and turns of life.

Notes 1. Cervantes (1969: II.11: 217; compare II.14: 234; II.18: 259). All references are to book, chapter and page number. 2. As Riley (1992: 121), Wilson (1991: 142–4) and Williamsen (1994: 68–70, 150–5) comment, these reactions reveal Periandro to be boastful and a bit of a bore. 3. Forcione (1970: 187). Wilson (1991: 155) refers to Periandro’s ‘audience of carping neo-Aristotelians’.



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4. Forcione (1970: 187–211) reads Periandro’s narrative as a juxtaposition between narrative pleasure and neo-Aristotelian rules. 5. The classic study is Vilanova (1949). 6. The chain of being and life as pilgrimage, which Avalle-Arce (1990: 10–14) identifies as central to the allegory, fuse in this Augustinian idea. Compare Forcione (1972: 142–3) and Baena (1996: 112). 7. On Auristela’s eventual ‘acceptance of man’s duty to participate in the life cycle’, Forcione (1972: 76–7). 8. On Rome as anticlimax, see Wilson (1991: 122, 210); Baena (1996: 116, 128–30); Randel (1983: 162, 164, 168). 9. On unsatisfied and deferred desire, Baena (1996: 128–9). 10. Sacchetti sees Auristela’s justifications of her desire to enter a convent at IV.11 as ‘words of outstanding selfishness’ and reads her religious vows as insincere (2001: 90, 111). However, although Auristela’s decision to enter a convent may in large part be motivated by fear, of the future and of losing her chastity, there is no reason to doubt the truth of her religious conviction, cleverly juxtaposed in IV.10 with the full revelation of the true initial reason hatched by Periandro’s mother in IV.12. As with the signification of Rome (symbolic religious centre or locus of amatory intrigue, love and lust), there is a marked critical tendency to view things as either/or, whereas Cervantes has no problem in viewing them as both/and. Significantly, it is only when actually in Rome, and fully in the Church, that their love can be expressed in marriage. 11. See Heliodorus (1989, V.2: 447).

Bibliography Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista. 1990. ‘Persiles and Allegory’, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 10: 7–16 Baena, Julio. 1996. El círculo y la flecha: principio y fin, triunfo y fracaso del ‘Persiles’ (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures) Cascales, Francisco. 1975. Tablas poéticas, ed. Benito Brancaforte (Madrid: Espasa Calpe) Cervantes, Miguel de. 1969. Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce (Madrid: Castalia) El Saffar, Ruth. 1980. ‘Periandro: Exemplary Character, Exemplary Narrator’, Hispanófila, 69: 9–16 Forcione, Alban. 1970. Cervantes, Aristotle and the ‘Persiles’ (Princeton University Press) —— 1972. Cervantes’ Christian Romance: A Study of ‘Persiles y Sigismunda’ (Princeton University Press) Gracián, Baltasar. 1993. El Criticón, ed. Emilio Blanco, Obras completas, I (Madrid: Biblioteca Castro / Turner) Heliodorus. 1989. An Ethiopian Story, trans. J. R. Morgan, in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, ed. B. P. Reardon (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press) Lozano Renieblas, Isabel. 1998. Cervantes y el mundo del ‘Persiles’ (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos)




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Randel, Mary Gaylord. 1983. ‘Ending and Meaning in Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda’, Romanic Review, 74: 152–69 Riley, E. C. 1992. Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta) Sacchetti, Maria Alberta. 2001. Cervantes’ ‘Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda’: A Study of Genre (London: Tamesis) Vilanova, Antonio. 1949. ‘El peregrino andante en el “Persiles” de Cervantes’, Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras, 22: 97–159 Williamsen, Amy R. 1994. Co(s)mic Chaos: Exploring ‘Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda’ (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta) Wilson, Diana de Armas. 1991. Allegories of Love: Cervantes’s ‘Persiles y Sigismunda’ (Princeton University Press)



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Digressive and Progressive Movements: Sympathy and Sexuality in Tristram Shandy; or, Plain Stories Judith Hawley The digressive nature of Tristram Shandy is notoriously challenging for the reader and rewarding for the critic. Because Sterne as Tristram not only digresses but theorizes about the significance of digression, Tristram Shandy has become a useful illustration of narrative principles for a range of critics and theorists. His squiggly experiments provide material for studies of the nature of the novel and of narrative beginnings, middles and levels (Shklovsky 1965; Said 1975; Brooks 1984; Genette 1996).1 Tristram Shandy provides a prop to arguments in studies of literature as different as Renaissance poetry and the modern Italian novel (Cotterill 2004; Santovetti 2007). There is disagreement among critics of Tristram Shandy about what Sterne’s digressions amount to. There are those who think that there is method in his madness (Baird 1936; Piper 1961) and those who conclude he is crazily chaotic. Early critics dismissed Tristram Shandy as a mess, even as imitators queued up to copy him (Bosch 2007: 259; for a selection of early responses, see Howes 1974: esp. 46–8, 119–24, 127, 138–9, 160, 168–9, 180–3). Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole dismissed his narrative experiments as gimmicks. Two recent critics challenge Johnson’s pronouncement on the oddity of Tristram Shandy by comparing him to his predecessors and successors (Keymer 2002; Bosch 2007). The tendency, since Nietzsche praised his squirrelish liveliness, has been to view his transverse zigzaggery as a cause for celebration. Wolfgang Iser (1988: 73), for example, declares Sterne a free spirit who frees us from the ‘tyranny of teleology’.2 It is no wonder that there is no critical consensus: Sterne’s digressiveness is so various that he differs from himself. He exemplifies a principle that Ross Chambers identifies: the multiplicity of options that the world presents forces the manic digressive into delicious tergiversation and contortion: ‘Digression introduces forks in the textual road that require us 21



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either to hesitate, to opt for one path or the other, or (as Yogi Berra recommends) to attempt to take both’ (Chambers 1999: 87).3 Sterne takes both paths; Tristram Shandy is replete with paradoxes and contradictions. He demonstrates that digression is, on the one hand, necessary to narrative and, on the other, that it is a threat to it. If there were no digressions, the narrative would short circuit; there would be no distance between A and Z. Moreover, digressions are necessary for making sense of the story, but if they go too far, the story gets left behind. Tristram frequently claims that he must digress from his story in order to explain things to his readers.4 William Bowman Piper argues that Tristram’s digressions follow a number of patterns and have logical narrative purposes. But the reader can be more baffled after the explanation than before when, for example, he explains that Toby’s modesty is the result of a blow. Even Tristram himself gets lost in his explanations (for example, Sterne 1978, II.vii: 119, VI.xxiii: 558, VI.xxxvii: 565, VII.xiv: 595 and VIII.vi: 663). Tristram also claims that there is aesthetic purpose to his digressive strategy: he manages the transitions so that the scene changes are smooth and there is order and harmony in his text (for example, Sterne 1978, IV.vi: 331, VI.xx: 533–4, VI.xxix: 549–50, VI.xxxv: 562, IX.xii: 761–2, IX.xiii: 763–4 and IX.xiv: 765–6). Repeatedly, Tristram claims that he is in control of his narrative and that his digressions have their own logic (for example, Sterne 1978, II.vi: 116, II.xix: 169–70 and III.x: 197–8. Compare Swift 1958: 135). However, he frequently cannot see any further than the end of his nose and is uncertain about how to proceed or what he will write next (for example, Sterne 1978, I.xiv: 40–2, VI.vi: 500 and VIII.ii: 656–7). Digression, division and indecision are deep principles of life at Shandy Hall and in Tristram Shandy as a whole. Paradoxically, they lend integrity to Tristram Shandy because they infect all aspects of the text. They govern the movement of characters through space and time as well as driving Tristram’s pen. The characters in the story digress as well as the narrator, Toby and Trim being the worst offenders. The forked path is both a metaphor and a metonymy for life as it is lived and as it is written in Tristram Shandy. The principle of duality is enshrined in one of his most famous tropes: the machine. Tristram claims ‘our family was certainly a simple machine’, but, because it was ‘set in motion by so many different springs, and acted one upon the other from such a variety of strange principles and impulses […] it had all the honour and advantages of a complex one’. One of its oddities is that ‘whatever motion, debate, harangue, dialogue, project, or dissertation, was going forwards in the parlour, there was generally another at the same time, and upon the same subject, running parallel along with it in the



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kitchen’ (V.vi: 427).5 This fact enables Tristram to cut backwards and forwards between the two sites (see V.vi: 427–V.xii: 439 and IX.xxiii: 778). In his first volume, Tristram had boasted to the reader of the sophistication of his narrative machinery. Although ‘I fly off from what I am about’, Tristram asserts, ‘I constantly take care to order affairs so, that my main business does not stand still in my absence’ (I.xxii: 80). The ‘master-stroke of [his] digressive skill’ lies in the uniqueness of his method: ‘By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by itself; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time’ (I.xxii: 80–1). It is progressive in more senses than one. First, Sterne by a sleight of hand moves the story forwards by pretending that in the time it has taken Tristram to recount a bit more, the story itself has moved on a little. Second, our knowledge of Tristram progresses even when he is not telling his own story. That is, when he tells us something about Walter and Toby (or following digressions from their stories), he implicitly and obliquely furthers our understanding of Tristram himself. There is another way in which Tristram Shandy is ‘progressive’. Horace Walpole dismissively pronounced that ‘the great humour’ of Tristram Shandy ‘consists in the whole narration always going backwards’ (Lewis et al. 1951: 66–7). Yet it goes forwards too. Digressions forwards can be achieved by means of smooth transitions, as when he finds himself in Avignon because he has already described the trip down the Rhône (VII. xli: 643–4), or, more often, by abrupt leaps (compare VI.xxxix: 568 and VII.xxvi: 615). The reader is frequently disconcerted by finding himself in the middle of the next scene. The crucial accidents in Tristram’s early life are narrated in this way (for example, I.xxi: 70, III.xvi: 220, III.xvii: 221, IV.xiv: 343, IV.xxiii: 360, IV.xxvi: 376, V.xvii: 449, V.xxx: 465, VII.xxix: 622 and IX.xx: 772). Sometimes Tristram employs simple prolepsis, hinting at what he will tell later (for example, I.xv: 47), but sometimes he reconciles his contrary motions by moving backwards and forwards at the same time: he looks forward to looking back on the deaths of Toby and Trim (VI.xxv: 544–5. Compare Tristram’s most famous prolepsis: III.xxxviii: 278). But, is shuttling back and forth along a temporal line really a digression? Tristram argues that a storyteller, ‘provided he keeps along the line of his story,—he may go backwards and forwards as he will,—’tis still held to be no digression’ (V.xxv: 457). Jeffrey Williams describes Sterne’s plot as ‘shuttling’ and ‘oscillating’ and notes that ‘Hillis Miller’s argument for the deconstruction of linear plot is borne out of this



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constant shuttling action’ (1990: 1042). But I want to distinguish between this mere oscillation which can be ‘held to be no digression’ and a true Shandean digression which is not only ‘progressive’ as well as digressive, but is also sinuous, or moves from side to side or twists around as well as back and forth. Shuttling motions do not get anywhere; they cancel each other out. When Mrs Shandy simply repeats Walter’s propositions back to him in the great bed of justice on the subject of putting Tristram in breeches, ‘the dialogue stood still’ (VI.xviii: 528) and Tristram considers that ‘to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil’ (VII.xiii: 593). To be digressive and progressive – that is to get somewhere, to make progress – you have to step out of line. To explore the difference between a mere shuttling digression and a good bouncing Shandean progressive digression, I need to draw on two of the most edifying scholars of the long way round, Ross Chambers and Anne Cotterill. They enhance our understanding of the literary, psychological and political possibilities of stepping out of line. I will then follow one of the lines that wend their way across the fertile plain of Sterne’s imagination. In his leisurely and expansive extended essay on digression as a mode of being and writing, Chambers treats Sterne as ‘the major progenitor’ of a sub-genre he dubs ‘modern loiterature’. For him, digression is a critique of the order (including narrative and temporal sequence) and authority it evades: Any digression enacts (though it may not intend) a criticism, because, once one has digressed, the position from which one departed becomes available to a more dispassionate or ironic analysis: it must have been in some sense inadequate or one would not have moved away from it. (Chambers 1999: 15) But, paradoxically, it can never be completely transgressive or lead to complete textual chaos because ‘The swerve, however, is necessarily defined by that from which it departs,’ that is, it reminds us of the law for which it is the loophole (Chambers 1999: 86). It may be transgressive, but it is a licensed departure, a necessary outlet or vent (to use a term that has resonance in Tristram Shandy) for natural urges, the needs and desires of the body, the attractions of the trivial which culture represses but needs to have at its margins in order to mark itself off from the unruly. Anne Cotterill (2004), whose argument partly derives from Chambers, examines an earlier era, ending with Swift (who deplored the licence which digression allows the author). She argues that in the early modern



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period, digression appealed particularly to writers who were marginalized or politically excluded because it allowed them to make a number of diversionary moves. Digression allows the writer, among other things, to mount a defence against the powers that be, to pursue alternative lines of (literary) affiliation and descent, to dawdle in realms of pleasure and indulge in forbidden desires, to avoid death by postponing closure, to express scepticism, and to withdraw into the self and explore an interior space. Sterne likes to go out of his way and step out of line. A Shandean digression is, I will argue, at once charitable and pleasurable, virtuous and errant. Early in his Life, Tristram warns the reader that ‘when a man sits down to write a history’, especially if he is ‘a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along’. He cannot ‘drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,—straight forward […] without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left’ because he has a multitude of different documents to consult and materials to include (I.xiv: 41). This combination of directedness (he has things he needs to do) and distraction (views and prospects solicit his eye) is characteristic of Tristram as a narrator. Moreover, that combination of metaphors of the journey and of the archive is revealing about Sterne’s use of digressions. When he describes a curve, he is not just interested in the line, but in the area under the line. The traveller, leaving the path, encounters something different and takes it along with him. When he strays from the narrative straight and narrow, Tristram incorporates new and heterogeneous material in his text.6 There are finer impulses at work in Tristram’s desire to deviate. Sympathy and charity, not just wilful eccentricity, make him leave the straight and narrow path. When he describes Toby going out of his way to offer comfort and material support to Lieutenant Le Fever, while Mr Yorick’s curate does nothing at all, Parson Sterne probably has in mind the parable of the good Samaritan who crossed the road to aid the man who fell among thieves while the priest and the Levite ‘passed by on the other side’ (Luke 10:30–7).7 His digressiveness is an implicit criticism of conventional morality. Immediately after his famous diagrams of his plot lines and his mock promise that he will tell his story in a straight line ‘turning neither to the right hand or the left’, Tristram ventriloquizes proponents of rectilinearity: This right line,—the path-way for Christians to walk in! say divines— —The emblem of moral rectitude! says Cicero—. (VI.xl: 572)




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Their rectitude is straight away undercut by the fact that this line is also the most convenient for market gardeners:

Behind Sterne’s playfulness is a long and serious debate about the role of the passions in ethics. The immediate context is the Latitudinarian strand in the Church of England and the cult of sensibility which shot through late eighteenth-century culture.9 Sterne himself was trained up on the sermons of major proponents of these ideals including Samuel Clarke, Isaac Barrow, Gilbert Burnet, John Tillotson and Edward Stillingfleet. Latitudinarian – or ‘Broad Church’ – divines deemphasized the divisive doctrines that had split the Church in the seventeenth century and downplayed rigid teachings about the sinfulness of man’s nature. Rather, their focus was on what bound society together – sympathy – and on the social virtue of benevolence. Moral action arises out of a sensation of fellow-feeling more than on law or a sense of duty. According to them, sympathy and benevolence are divinely instituted: feeling for other people induces a pleasurable sensation in the body, thus God rewards and encourages good behaviour. This view of the importance of sympathy and the passions in moral action was reinforced by developments in physiology, which allowed for a new and more complex understanding of sensation. Moreover, narrative is crucial to the cultivation of sympathy: stories of the sufferings of others were supposed to awaken and strengthen the responsiveness of the reader. Note how often Tristram’s digressions are interpolated tales or scenes of suffering which induce a sympathetic response in him which he tries to communicate to the reader. See, for example, his quest – much interrupted and ultimately fruitless, of course – in search of the tomb of the ‘two fond lovers’, Amandus and Amanda (VII.xxxi: 627–VII.xl: 643), or his anecdote about Toby and the fly (II.xii: 130–1), which makes a reappearance (III.iv: 191), or the tale of ‘Poor Maria’ (IX. xxiv: 780–4), a scene so popular that not only was it much represented in fashionable prints and crockery (Gerard and Friant-Kessler 2008), but that Sterne’s other alter ego, Parson Yorick (who repeatedly strays from the straight and narrow on the trail of a pretty woman), made a detour of ‘half a league’, ‘like the Knight of Woeful Countenance, in quest of melancholy adventures’, in order to enquire after her on his sentimental journey (Sterne 2002: 149–54). Volume VII best exemplifies how vital digression is to Tristram’s life. Volume VI ends, as we have seen, with yet another promise that he is



—The best line ! say cabbage-planters—. (VI.xl: 572)8

going to tell Toby’s story directly, but volume VII goes off on a tangent and follows the adult Tristram on his travels. The whole volume is a digression. Or rather it isn’t. The title page bears an epigraph from Pliny the Younger: ‘Non enim excursus hic est, sed opus ipsum est.’ That is, this is not an excursion but my main work.10 Death knocks on Tristram’s door so, to escape him, he scampers away on what Jacques Berthoud calls ‘a lyrical dans macabre’ through France in search of health (1984: 34). It is a digression from the main work in that Tristram leaves Toby’s story aside to pursue his own. Yet it is very much part of it in that it continues Sterne’s explorations of the workings of narrative and the composition of the self. The structure of this volume as a whole evokes the curving line of a Shandean digression. Tristram races through southern England too fast to look about him; he slows down a little when he reaches France, but still follows the most direct route down to Provence.11 When he reaches Languedoc, his journey takes an entirely different, a more languorous and sinuous course as he dawdles from ‘the banks of the Rhône to those of the Garonne’ (VII.xlii: 645).12 Just like a river which, from its source at the peak, rushes pell-mell headlong down the mountain, then zigzags more leisurely through its valley stage, when it reaches its fertile plain (a plain ultimately of its own making), no longer strongly impelled by the force of gravity, it slows down. Meandering across the levels, changing its path over time, it shrugs off traces of its former deviations in the form of ox-bow lakes. Tristram eventually realizes that he has left Death behind and now has ‘the whole south of France […] to traverse upon my mule at my own leisure’ (VII.xlii: 645). As he changes ‘the mode of my travelling’, he changes his narrative mode. Unlike ‘travel-writers’ who dread ‘one unvaried picture of plenty’ (VII.xIii: 646) because it gives them nothing to write about, Tristram relishes the prospect of loitering and straying in search of a something noteworthy. What he finds is trivial in the extreme but Tristram finds in these brief encounters enough material to comprise a volume which he will call my PLAIN STORIES. (VII.xliii: 648) He turns a flat and apparently empty terrain into a richly varied and eventful arena by seeking encounters with all types of people without discrimination – a man priming his gun, a drum-maker, a woman selling figs and eggs, ‘beggars, pilgrims, fiddlers, fryars’, a woman in a mulberry tree – demonstrating how broad-minded he has become




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as he has expanded his heart and relaxed his attitudes in the course of his journey. He then slows the narrative even further to explore an encounter which is crucial to his book (or, at least, to my argument). On the road ‘betwixt Nismes and Lunel’, Tristram comes across a group of swains ‘preparing for a carousal’ to celebrate the vintage. One of them, Nanette, a ‘sun-burnt daughter of Labour’ with a single tress of hair hanging loose, separates herself from the group and invites Tristram to join them in the dance. This chapter is given prominence at the end of a markedly digressive volume and symbolic ripeness because it weaves together numerous strands of imagery and thematic concerns. We find here recurring motifs such as the figure of the lame man, musical rhythms and harmony, a fetishistic focus on tendrils of hair, and on clothing and female openings. Generically, it is a combination of idealizing sentimental pastoral (‘The nymphs join’d in unison, and their swains an octave below them—’ [VII.xliii: 650]) and Rabelaisian bawdy (‘They are running at the ring of pleasure, said I, giving him a prick—By saint Boogar, and all the saints at the backside of the door of purgatory, said he’ [VII. xliii: 649]). These contrary tendencies are held in a precarious balance: Sterne teases the reader, challenging her to penetrate his innuendo. As elsewhere, relations between male and female are figured in terms of reciprocal motions of advance and retreat, here in the form of an intricately patterned dance. Sterne teases us with the possibility that Tristram might actually consummate his relationship with the supremely seductive Nanette, but the narrator’s breathless passion, as elsewhere in both Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, climaxes in verbal ejaculation in which he turns away from the woman to utter an apostrophe which takes him out of the situation. He removes himself further from the possibility of consummation by dancing away, putting acres of distance between himself and the ‘nut brown maid’ with her Freudian slit. Sterne leaves us with a choice of possible readings here. On the one hand, this Plain Story hints yet again at the impotence of Tristram (an inherited trait). On the other, this dalliance has brought him back to life, created new vigour in the narrative and restored him to a state in which he can pull out ‘a paper of black lines, that I might go on straight forwards, without digression or parenthesis, in my uncle Toby’s amours—’ (VII.xlii: 651). On yet another hand, Tristram does not go on. Although he continues ‘I begun thus—’, the volume abruptly ends with another coitus interruptus. But when he begins the next, he is unable to tear himself away from this scene.



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Sterne’s wanderings of the heart are in some senses feminine in themselves, not just inspired by women. Arguably, digression can be placed in the cultural category of the feminine. Dennis Allen argues that language is phallic and prone to impotence but the text is vaginal and capable of fertilization by the imagination, with ‘digression in particular serving as the space fertilized by the imagination’ (1985: 664). If this is so, it would be more precise to distinguish between female genital anatomy (indented) and the feminine form (sinuous) and, I would add, feminine sexuality (preferring delay to climax). This distinction is present in the opening of volume VIII which finds Tristram sitting in Perdrillo’s pavilion, unscrewing his ink-horn ‘to write my uncle Toby’s amours’, but, ‘with all the meanders of JULIA’s track in quest of her DIEGO, in full view of my study window—’, he cannot go on ‘planting his cabbages one by one, in straight lines […] without ever and anon straddling out, or sidling into some bastardly digression’ (VIII.i: 656, 655). Tristram is aroused by feminine slits, but is even more attracted by the distractive powers of feminine meanders. Tristram’s meandering line is related (perhaps parodically) to William Hogarth’s lines of beauty and of grace, as critics have noted (for example, Hillis Miller 2002: 167–8, 171–3, and Lamb 1989: 24–6, 147). According to Hogarth, true beauty inheres in the waving line, ‘composed of two curves contrasted’, while grace, a superior aesthetic principle, superadds a third dimension: it twists as well as waves. The ‘precise serpentine line, or line of grace’ can be represented by an eel, serpent, or ‘fine wire, properly twisted round the elegant and varied figure of a cone’ (Hogarth 1971: 38–9).13 Because it suggests movement, it evokes the fourth dimension, time, as well as space. Hogarth continues, ‘the serpentine line, by its waving and winding at the same time different ways […] may be said to inclose […] varied contents; and therefore all its variety cannot be express’d on paper by one continued line, without the assistance of the imagination’ (1971: 39).14 The waving line encloses ‘varied contents’, like Tristram’s inclusion of heterogeneous material in his digressions, but it also describes an empty space and thus figures the masculine desire for the feminine. It can also signify the indirection and postponement which characterize feminine desire. The line of beauty is recalled in the widow Wadman’s sinuous seduction techniques. She approaches Toby slowly, repeatedly; she advances in zigzags, sidles up to him and wreathes herself about him in a series of subtle manoeuvres (VIII.xvi: 675–8, VIII.xxiii: 705). Cotterill (2004) similarly associates digression with femininity. She argues that it allows the writer to withdraw into the self and explore




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an interior, feminine, space. While digression was sanctioned as a rhetorical technique and had a strongly masculine role to play in the epic, it was, in the violently disordered seventeenth century, a mark of the feminine, the marginalized and dispossessed.15 Tristram Shandy has more than its fair share of effeminate, emasculated or impotent figures. Sterne repeatedly threatens his characters with genital mutilation (though the observant and patient reader will discover in the last volume that the character most often assumed to be a capon is perfectly fit for the marriage state [IX.xxii: 776–7]). Not only do they fail to hit the mark sexually, they frequently fall short verbally and intellectually. Tristram has his disappointments with Jenny (VII.xxix: 624) and with his story: when he finally gets to his ‘choicest morsel’, he resigns his pen and laments he begins to ‘feel my want of powers’ (IX.xx: 779). Yorick and Walter both defeat themselves in argument, Walter because, although his rhetorical style is violently masculine (‘skirmishing, cutting […] slashing […] thrusting and ripping’), he always defends the most vulnerable point. Yorick chooses to hobble himself: ‘for this reason, though he would often attack him—yet could never bear to do it with all his force’ (VIII.xxxiv: 722). Walter also adopts a feminine subject position in that his opinions are so errant: ‘His road seemed to lie so much on one side of that, wherein all other travellers had gone before him’ (VII.xxvii: 617). It is as if he rides his hobby-horse sidesaddle. Digression, as Chambers argues, is a form of critique. Sterne rejects the masculinist end-driven plot of novels such as Tom Jones. The Shandy males lack the virility of Fielding’s hero anyway, but diversion is also a choice for Sterne: he prefers dalliance. Tristram Shandy is all narrative foreplay. An inadequate man is, of course, not the same as a woman. And I also do not mean to imply that Sterne was a feminist, or even that he really understood women. Indeed, the representation of women, including ‘Madam’ the reader, has been the subject of much debate (for example, Ehlers 1981; McMaster 1989; Benedict 1992; New 1990). Tristram’s portrayal of Janatone, part-description, part-fantasy, is a case in point. He encounters the coquettish inn-keeper’s daughter when he is on his excursion in volume VII and her sexy curves fit in with his narrative meanderings. Tristram tells her: ‘thou carriest the principles of change within thy frame […] e’er twice twelve months are pass’d and gone, thou mayest grow out like a pumkin, and lose thy shapes—or, thou mayest go off like a flower, and lose thy beauty’ (VII.ix: 589–90). While this turn of phrase is a reminder of the Hogarthian line of grace with its combination of form and motion, and while the description is appreciative of Janatone because of her difference from Sterne’s lanky narrator,



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there is nonetheless something nasty-minded in Tristram’s lusting after her while reminding her that she will get old and fat. Moreover, Tristram Shandy is not fully feminized. Some stories are told in a straight line and some characters do reach a climax, even if it is only indicated through double entendre. Both of these are especially true of the interpolated tales and particularly of Trim’s stories and adventures. Trim and Bridget go all the way on ‘uncle Toby’s curious draw-bridge’ (III.xxiv: 247) and in the widow Wadman’s kitchen (IX. xxviii: 797–7). We can compare the climax of Trim’s tale about the beguine (VIII.xxii: 703–4) and his account of how his brother Tom wins the Jew’s widow with a sausage (IX.vii: 750–2). Trim is a fine example of the convention of the virility of the lower orders. His robust coupling seems a vulgar activity when set against the effete genteel dalliance of the higher orders. But Tristram is not completely ineffectual. There is still some lead in his pencil. However, when Sterne’s narrators do succeed in copulation, it strikes a false note as it destroys the precarious balance between sensibility and sexuality, as it does the stairs of the concert hall in Milan, when the Marquesina de F*** lets Yorick ‘enter’ (Sterne 2002: 77–8). The ins and outs of Yorick’s affair with the Marquesina de F*** remind us that there are as many phallic objects as there are vaginal and cervical spaces in Tristram Shandy. For every button hole, there is a button, a nose for every crevice. There is, of course, a natural agreement or sympathy between these forms. Sympathy and reciprocality are built into the structure of Tristram Shandy. Sterne’s work is both digressive and progressive; moreover, it goes in and out, back and forth and from side to side. ‘In good truth’, says Tristram, ‘when a man is telling a story in the strange way I do mine, he is obliged continually to be going backwards and forwards to keep all tight together in the reader’s fancy’ (VI. xxxiii: 557–8). Tristram Shandy, then, is not completely feminine; there is some masculine thrusting and even a few climaxes, but the sense of freedom from both mechanical action and moral rectitude comes from the feminine digressions. Feminine dalliance, Sterne implies, is better at postponing death than masculine climax. Yet, in celebrating what Hogarth called the ‘elegant wantonness (which is the true spirit of dancing)’ (1971: 150), the Revd Laurence Sterne crossed the line. Readers and critics who had applauded the first instalment of Tristram Shandy when it was published anonymously, deplored it when the profession of its author was revealed. They encouraged him to pursue the path of sentiment rather than sexual suggestiveness. But Sterne demonstrated how closely intertwined they were. His




Judith Hawley

friend Denis Diderot expresses the idea memorably: ‘There is a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime sentiments and most refined tenderness’ (quoted in Gay 1977: 189–90). There is a flaw at the heart of the Latitudinarian ideal of benevolence and the politely fashionable cult of sensibility. Sympathy does not always lead to active charity: doing good makes you feel good, but those feelings are more likely to be inspired by the good-looking than the truly needy and might end in self-regard.16 Tristram is attracted by the ‘insiduous’ Nanette, but he flees from her slit and will not join in her carousal. In A Sentimental Journey, Yorick encounters an apparently similar country dance, but it differs in a crucial respect: ‘I fancied I could distinguish an elevation of spirit different from that which the cause or the effect of simple jollity.—In a word, I thought I beheld Religion mixing in the dance—’ (Sterne 2002: 159). In case we think Sterne is back on the straight and narrow, the next and final chapter finds him sharing a bedroom with two women and reaching out to them. Sterne exposes the flaw in sympathy, but is happy to tolerate it.

Notes 1. See also Williams (1990), who argues that despite appearances, Tristram Shandy ‘is a straightforward linear narrative that exactly follows chronological time’ because the real plot is Tristram’s act of writing his book which stretches from March 1759 to August 1766 (1990: 1043). Sterne makes only a very brief appearance in Kermode (1967). 2. See also Conrad (1978), Brady (1970), Harris (1982), Nuttall (1992) and McMorran (2002). The literature on Tristram Shandy is extensive; I refer to only a sample here. 3. Lawrence Peter ‘Yogi’ Berra (b. 1925) is a former Major League Baseball player, famous for his Zen-like malapropisms. 4. There are so many examples of this sort of digression that the following is just a sample: Sterne 1978, I.iii: 4, I.iv: 5–6, I.vii: 10–11, I.x: 17ff., I.xi: 25ff., I.xx: 65ff., I.xxi: 70ff., II.i: 93ff., II.ii: 97ff., III.vii: 194ff., III.xiv: 217–18, III. xxxi: 256–III.xxxiii: 262, IV.xxvii: 349–51, V.xvi: 445–9, VI.xxiv: 541ff., VII. xiv: 594–5 and VII.xxxi: 627ff. 5. This method is partly a borrowing from and parody of the narrative techniques of the historian Paul de Rapin-Thoyras (1743–47), who is referred to at the end of the previous chapter (V.v: 427). His History of England is a major source for Tristram Shandy. 6. Compare other instances in which Tristram recommends the scenic route: Sterne 1978, I.xx: 65, I.xxi: 74, III.xii: 214 and V.vii: 432. Tristram frequently figures his book as a journey (see, for example, Sterne 1978, VI.i: 491). He also likens the operations of the mind to travelling (see, for example, Sterne 1978, I.i: 2 and II.xix: 175). Compare the way Walter picks up ideas as some gather windfalls in another’s orchard (III.xxxiv: 264) with the way Tristram intercepts ideas in a kind of licensed theft or adultery (VIII.ii: 657).



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7. Contrast: ‘Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life’ (Matthew 7:14). For the story of Le Fever and his son, see Sterne 1978, VI.vi: 499–VI.x: 513 and VI.xii: 517–VI.xiii: 520. 8. See Sterne (1984: 442–3) for the possible obscene associations of ‘planting’ and ‘cabbages’. 9. My account of sympathy, sensibility and benevolence draws upon the following: Crane (1934), Brady (1970), Rousseau (1976), Mullan (1988), Barker-Benfield (1992), Van Sant (1993) and Ellison (1994). 10. Sterne (1978: 444), slightly adapted from Pliny, Epistles (V.vi, I: 355). 11. Tristram travels via Calais, Boulogne, Montreuil, Nampont, Bernay, Nouvion, Abbeville, Ailly au Clochers, Hixcourt (‘an error for “Flixcourt”’ according to the Florida editors, Sterne 1984: 464), Pequignay, Amiens, Chantilly, St Dennis, Paris, Fontainbleau, Sens, Joigny, Auxerre, Dijon, Challon, Mâcon, Lyons, St Fons to Avignon. 12. His route takes in Nismes (Nîmes), Lunel, Montpellier, Pesçnas, Beziers, Narbonne, Carcassonne, Castle Naudairy, and ends up in the fictional site Perdrillo’s pavilion (Sterne 1978, VII.xliii: 651). 13. For Tristram’s references to Hogarth, see Sterne 1978, II.vi: 115, II.ix: 121 and II.xvii: 141. 14. This passage is also discussed by Lamb (1989: 24). Sterne might also have been influenced by Hogarth’s discussion and illustration of dancing (Hogarth 1971: 146–51 and plate 2, ‘The Country Dance’). 15. Chambers identifies a specifically feminist loiterature which manifests and celebrates ‘the sense of ça ne se dessine pas (the failure of things to take shape)’ (1999: 37), but arguably all of the texts he studies demonstrate a rejection of phallic directedness in their deferral of climax. 16. The idea that Sterne might have been sceptical about sentiment was first broached by Dilworth (1948). Few have taken his arguments further except Keymer (in Sterne 1994) and Goring (in Sterne 2001).

Bibliography Allen, Dennis W. 1985. ‘Sexuality/Textuality in Tristram Shandy’, Studies in English Literature, 25: 651–70 Baird, Theodore. 1936. ‘The Time-Scheme of Tristram Shandy and a Source’, PMLA, 51: 803–20 Barker-Benfield, J. G. 1992. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (University of Chicago Press) Benedict, Barbara. 1992. ‘“Dear Madam”: Rhetoric, Cultural Politics and the Female Reader in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy’, Studies in Philology, 89: 485–98 Berthoud, Jacques. 1984. ‘Shandeism and Sexuality’, in Laurence Sterne: Riddles and Mysteries, ed. Valerie Grosvenor Myer (London: Vision and Barnes and Noble), pp. 24–38 Bosch, René. 2007. Labyrinth of Digressions: Tristram Shandy as Perceived and Influenced by Sterne’s Early Imitators, trans. P. Verhoeff (Amsterdam: Rodopi) Brady, Frank. 1970. ‘Tristram Shandy: Sexuality, Morality and Sensibility’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 4: 41–56 Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: A. A. Knopf)




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Chambers, Ross. 1999. Loiterature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press) Conrad, Peter. 1978. Shandyism: The Character of Romantic Irony (Oxford: Basil Blackwell) Cotterill, Anne. 2004. Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford University Press) Crane, R. S. 1934. ‘Suggestions towards a Genealogy of the “Man of Feeling”’, English Literary History, 1: 205–30 Dilworth, Ernest Nevin. 1948. The Unsentimental Journey of Laurence Sterne (New York: King’s Crown Press) Ehlers, Leigh A. 1981. ‘Mr. Shandy’s “Lint and Basilicon”: The Importance of Women in Tristram Shandy’, South Atlantic Review, 46: 61–75 Ellison, Julie. 1994. ‘The Politics of Fancy in the Age of Sensibility’, in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776–1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press) Gay, Peter. 1977. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. II. The Science of Freedom (1969, reprint New York: W. W. Norton) Genette, Gerard. 1996. ‘Voice’, in Narratology: An Introduction, ed. Susan Onega and Jose Angel Garcia Landa (London: Longman), pp. 172–89 Gerard, W. B. and Brigitte Friant-Kessler. 2008. ‘Towards a Catalogue of Illustrated Laurence Sterne: Decorative Arts’, The Shandean, 19: 90–110 Harris, Elizabeth W. 1982. ‘Sterne’s Novels: Gathering Up the Fragments’, English Literary History, 49: 35–49 Hillis Miller, J. [1978] 2002. ‘Narrative Middles: A Preliminary Outline’, in Laurence Sterne: Longman Critical Readers (London: Longman), pp. 165–77 Hogarth, William. 1971. The Analysis of Beauty (London, 1753; reprint Menston: Scolar Press) Howes, Alan B., ed. 1974. Sterne: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge) Iser, Wolfgang. 1988. Laurence Sterne: ‘Tristram Shandy’, trans. David Henry Wilson (Cambridge University Press) Kermode, Frank. 1967. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford University Press) Keymer, Thomas. 2002. Sterne, the Moderns and the Novel (Oxford University Press) Lamb, Jonathan. 1989. Sterne’s Fiction and the Double Principle (Cambridge University Press) Lewis, W. S., Charles H. Bennett and Andrew G. Hoover. 1951. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Sir David Dalrymple, The Yale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole, vol. 15 (Oxford University Press) McMaster, Juliet. 1989. ‘Walter Shandy, Sterne and Gender: A Feminist Foray’, English Studies in Canada, 15: 44–58 McMorran, Will. 2002. The Inn and the Traveller: Digressive Topographies in the Early Modern European Novel (Oxford: Legenda) Mullan, John. 1988. Sentiment and Sociability (Oxford University Press) New, Melvyn. 1990. ‘Job’s Wife and Sterne’s Other Women’, in Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism, ed. Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), pp. 55–74 Nuttall, A. D. 1992. Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press)



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Piper, W. B. 1961. ‘Tristram Shandy’s Digressive Artistry’, Studies in English Literature, 3: 65–76 Rapin-Thoyras, Paul de. 1743–47. History of England, trans. and continued by Nicholas Tindal, 3rd edn (London) Rousseau, G. S. 1976. ‘Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility’, in Studies in the Eighteenth Century III: Papers Presented at the Third David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (University of Toronto Press), pp. 137–57 Said, Edward. 1975. Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books) Santovetti, Olivia. 2007. Digression: A Narrative Strategy in the Italian Novel (Oxford: Peter Lang) Shklovsky, Victor. 1965. ‘Art as Technique’, and ‘Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary’, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), pp. 3–24, 25–57 Sterne, Laurence. 1978, 1984. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The Text, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New; The Notes, by Melvyn New, Richard A. Davies and W. G. Day (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida) —— 1994. A Sentimental Journey, ed. Thomas Keymer (London: Everyman) —— 2001. A Sentimental Journey, ed. Paul Goring (London: Penguin) —— 2002. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journey, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New and W. G. Day (Gainesville: University Press of Florida) Swift, Jonathan. 1958. A Tale of a Tub, to which is Added The Battle of the Books and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press) Van Sant, Ann Jessie. 1993. Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge University Press) Williams, Jeffrey. 1990. ‘Narrative of Narratives (Tristram Shandy)’, Modern Language Notes, 105: 1032–45




Little Dorrit: Dickens, Circumlocution, Unconscious Thought Jeremy Tambling

‘I hope you have preserved the unities, sir?’ said Mr Curdle. ‘The original piece is a French one’, said Nicholas. ‘There is abundance of incident, sprightly dialogue, strongly marked characters – ’ ‘All unavailing without strict observance of the unities, sir,’ returned Mr Curdle. ‘The unities of the drama before everything.’ ‘Might I ask you’, said Nicholas [...] ‘what the unities are?’ Mr Curdle coughed and considered. ‘The unities, sir,’ he said, ‘are a completeness – a kind of universal dove-tailedness with regard to place and time – a sort of general oneness, if I may be allowed to use so strong an expression. I take these to be the dramatic unities, so far as I have been enabled to bestow attention upon them, and I have read much upon the subject, and thought much.’ (Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens 1999: 301) The charge that Dickens is digressive and episodic, which appeared in post-Jamesian criticism of the novel, did not characterize the nineteenth century so much, in comparison with attacks on the novels as – despite, or because of their popularity – vulgar, exaggerating and uneducated. That criticism is most associated with G. H. Lewes’s essay, ‘Dickens in Relation to Criticism’, discussing, in the Fortnightly Review in 1872, the first two volumes of John Forster’s Life of Dickens. For Lewes, ‘thought is strangely absent from [Dickens’s] works’ (quoted in Ford and Lane 1961: 69).1 Forster replied to this, and also to Hippolyte 36



3

Taine’s 1856 comments on Dickens as having ‘the imagination of a monomaniac’ – which would imply in him the reverse of a digressive tendency – in the second volume of his Life (‘Dickens as a Novelist’, 9.1), but a limitation in Forster’s reading of Dickens, arguing for him as a humorist, will be noted below. Lewes tended to take the neatness of the drama as a model for thinking about the novel; but Nicholas Nickleby shows that Dickens was not so inclined to be reverent about anything in the drama.2 Lewes’s, and others’ charges were implicitly ways of critiquing Dickens’s digressiveness, but to be episodic was the marker of comic writing, and insofar as this was less ‘serious’, it did not matter in Dickens, but rather proved the point, that he was better in the early comic novels, which did not require thought. I will discuss digression in Little Dorrit, a later, less episodic or comic, but very rich novel, which first appeared in the same form as Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House and the later Our Mutual Friend – that is, as 20 monthly instalments, issued between December 1855 and June 1857.3 Though its complexity of plot has been criticized by various Mr Curdles, this, in the style of Lewes’s criticism, slights the text’s difference from previous novels: it is a novel about attempting to recover a repressed past, as suggested by the Clennam watch with its letters DNF – Do Not Forget (2.30: 808). To find it not digressive is, however, as an argument, likely to sound like a version of Freud’s ‘kettle’ logic: (a) Little Dorrit is not digressive, and where it seems to be so, it is all relevant; (b) it can be nothing else but digressive, because that is the only way writing can be; (c) it is digressive, and that is a marker of the text’s heterogeneity. But to these defences can be added the point that the novel which renames the Civil Service the Circumlocution Office puts digression at its centre. That organization’s ‘perception’ of ‘HOW NOT TO DO IT’ (1.10: 119) imposes universal deferral and delay as a mode of procedure, while silently breaking the name ‘Dorrit’ by taking out its centre, an image for how Mr Dorrit the man is broken by the prison system. ‘How not to do it’ ensures that nothing is ‘done’, everything remains in process. The narrative says that unfinished, undone business at the end of Parliamentary sessions is standard, ‘but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it’ (1.10: 120). That being so, the novel asks what is ‘beyond’ the laissez-faire principle. The fear that there may be no limit to the ‘beyond’ is at the heart of Little Dorrit, creating its modernism, and it matches something inherent in the book’s planning, which as appears in Dickens’s letters of 1855, and in Sucksmith’s Introduction, was marked by his ‘restlessness’; while the novel works through evoking



Dickens, Circumlocution, Unconscious Thought 37

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different spaces: Marseilles, Egypt, Chalons, Antwerp, the Swiss Alps, Venice, Florence and Rome, and, as a more ghostly place beyond those, repressed as far as knowledge of it goes, China.4 And the Crimea, the actual place and sphere of action the novel starts from, never appears. That sense of an absent centre associates with the anonymity of the ungendering draft title, ‘Nobody’s Fault’. The gap – fault – which exists must be filled; so in the chapter ‘Fellow Travellers’, Mr Meagles speaks of himself and his wife ‘trotting about the world’, and Tattycoram as a ‘greater traveller’ than Captain Cook (1.2: 34–5). Miss Wade, who maintains her strangeness by keeping her first name in reserve, says that in life ‘we shall meet the people who are coming to meet us from many strange places and by many strange roads’ (1.2: 39). Her words empty both sets of people – ‘we’ and ‘they’ – of significance: they only mirror each other, as nobodies. ‘Home’, the title of 1.3, meaning Clennam’s mother’s house, is the most unheimlich of all places in the book – the woman at its centre is not even Clennam’s mother, and is strangely unnamed by that point – and it imposes on the novel the necessity for travel; while in Book the Second, the Dorrits go on tour, and in another chapter named ‘Fellow Travellers’ meet Mrs Merdle and her son, and the Gowans, thus suggesting that only digressive paths produce nodal points, momentary centres. I will illustrate these points through comments on the fourth number of Little Dorrit, beginning with ‘Bleeding Heart Yard’ (chapter 12), continuing with ‘Patriarchal’ (chapter 13) and concluding with ‘Little Dorrit’s Party’ (chapter 14); I supplement these with comments on Miss Wade’s chapter (2.21). In Little Dorrit 1.12, Clennam and Plornish the plasterer settle a debt on behalf of Tip, Amy Dorrit’s improvident brother. Going from Bleeding Heart Yard to ‘a stable yard in High Holborn’, where they deal with Captain Maroon, of Gloucestershire, over money Tip owes for a horse, and from there by coach over Blackfriars Bridge to the Marshalsea in Southwark, Mr Plornish talks all the time, and digressively, about poverty, and whose ‘fault’ it was: And in brief his illogical opinion was, that if you couldn’t do nothing for him, you had better take nothing from him for doing of it; so far as he could make out, that was about what it come to. Thus, in a prolix, gently-growling, foolish way, did Plornish turn the tangled skein of his estate about and about, like a blind man who was trying to find some beginning or end to it, until they reached the prison gate. There he left [Clennam] alone, to wonder, as he rode away, how many thousand Plornishes there might be within a day or two’s journey of



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Everything in this passage is digressive: the two journeys Clennam and Plornish make which criss-cross London, north and south of the Thames, including crossing a bridge, which install digression as necessarily inherent in everyday urban life; the encounter with Captain Maroon, who is never seen again in the text, but who has his own narrative and indirect mode of doing business; and then Mr Plornish’s language, which, like a talking cure, works by free association.5 His digressiveness contrasts with that of Mr Dorrit, the prisoner whose language is marked increasingly by hesitations and periphrases, forms of circumlocution, and, as in his fictional account of Jackson and Captain Martin, told in parabolic fashion in order to make Amy keep the attentions of John Chivery, accompanied by hand-gestures which indicate that ‘he shrunk before his own knowledge of his meaning’ (1.19: 244). Circumlocution in Dorrit represses meaning and awareness of the shameful nature of what is being said; whereas with Mr Plornish, it suggests puzzlement and frustration. In Plornish’s speech appears the sense of both London and working-class life as labyrinthine: Clennam has already spoken of ‘this labyrinth of a world’ (1.2: 33). Perhaps the labyrinthine includes a reference, in the ‘tangled skein’, to Ariadne’s thread given to Theseus, and then, via the musical reference to variations, which imply digressions, the text arrives at an allusion to the Circumlocution Office, whose apparent deafness compares with the blindness of those outside. This government office, paired in the passage with the Marshalsea prison, capturing – entangling – so many different lives, is the entropic structure whose name and practice embody digressive tactics to defeat inquiry, as when it attempts to deflect Clennam who, in chapter 10, visits it repeatedly, and ‘wants to know’ about Mr Dorrit, and is sent from branch to branch of different departments. To this itemizing of forms of digression must be added the extraordinarily varied nature of the quotation, its own skeined nature and power of variations on the ‘Nobody’s Fault’ theme of the text, and the point that the difference between Plornish and the Circumlocution Office is that he is not paid for his tangle of language whereas they are (the lawyer in Bleak House chapter 1 is called Mr Tangle); that Plornish’s ‘tangled skein’ contrasts with the Circumlocution Office’s red tape, of which ‘it had used enough to stretch, in graceful festoons, from Hyde Park Corner to the General Post-Office’ (2.8: 543). The quotation shows



the Circumlocution Office, playing sundry curious variations on the same tune, which were not known by ear in that glorious institution. (1.12: 158)

Jeremy Tambling

no superiority to Plornish; ‘foolish’ makes him sound like a holy fool, an innocent, while ‘illogical’ must be read as ironic, for his own tangle of words is only less than the Circumlocution Office’s power of entanglement, and the prison is at the heart of the way it entangles, as it is at the heart of the quotation. The Circumlocution Office is put at the heart of London, while the Marshalsea prison’s status is to be a decentred presence in this text, needing a digressive route to reach it, since it is outside both Westminster and the City of London: unusually, considering Dickens’s practice, there is no reference in this novel to Newgate, a visible and obvious presence within Dickens’s London.6 The prison is the novel’s symbol, as all critics since Lionel Trilling have agreed, but its values have been assumed by the Circumlocution Office, which, put at the centre, constitutes everything around it as the prison which it keeps negligent guard over.7 (In 2.28, Ferdinand Barnacle even comes to visit Clennam in the Marshalsea to see if the Circumlocution Office was responsible for putting him there.) Mr Plornish must be ‘prolix’ because it is the nature of the Circumlocution Office and what it represents to incite someone to explain it: like Chancery at the heart of the fog of Bleak House, it is real, and yet it creates a decentred system which requires anyone who would understand it to go round, in every sense, because what it represents has neither ‘beginning or end’. Circumlocution produces discourse; like Chancery, the office comprises writing: minutes, memoranda and ‘ungrammatical correspondence’ which require interpretation, being illogical because outside the logos of grammar, writing which goes ‘beyond’, and fails to clinch anything, just as bafflingly as Middlemarch’s Mr Casaubon discovers, who, trying to work out ‘the key to all mythologies’, is confined to the digressional and the parergal.8 Like Plornish, Dickens can only be ‘digressive’, if a distinction is maintained between that and writing which keeps to a single strategy of progression. Dickens’s writing responds to the plurality inherent in any situation, digressing because being as unable as Mr Plornish to identify single causes for present discontents. And ‘illogical’, a paraphrase for ‘digressive’, is significant: Mr Plornish may be illogical, but that word implies the position of someone standing inside what Foucault would call a discourse of truth, one which can place speech outside that discourse (in this case, putting the working-class figure outside it). To criticize Dickens for digressiveness would be to side with those on the inside of ‘the truth’. After the voice of Mr Plornish whose prolixity and illogicality is part of his position outside a prolix and illogical system, comes a visit by Clennam to the house of the landlord of Bleeding Heart Yard, Mr Casby,



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‘O goodness gracious me I hope you never kept yourself a bachelor so long on my account […] but of course you never did why should you, pray don’t answer, I don’t know where I’m running to, oh so tell me something about the Chinese ladies whether their eyes are really so long and narrow always putting me in mind of mother-of-pearl fish at cards and do they really wear tails down their back and plaited too or is it only the men, and when they pull their hair so very tight off their foreheads don’t they hurt themselves, and why do they stick little bells all over their bridges and temples and hats and things or don’t they really do it!’ ‘Then it’s all true and they really do […] what a country to live in for so long a time and with so many lanterns and umbrellas too how very dark and wet the climate ought to be and no doubt actually is, and the sums of money that must be made by those two trades where everyone carries them and hangs them everywhere, the little shoes too and the feet screwed back in infancy is quite surprising, what a traveller you are!’ (1.13: 166–7) This is an extraordinary Joycean writing, not least because, as with Ulysses, it recycles the things which are on dit about China: it shows knowledge as never more than that which is acquired through unattributable sources, and what ‘they say’. There is nothing outside the text: no knowledge which is not intertextual, by which I mean knowledge produced out of indefinable secondary sources. Flora’s obviously digressive speeches about the Chinese offer, implicitly, a view on the dominant Orientalist ideological discourse about Chinese society as miniaturized, and infantile, hence ripe for further aggressive colonization, and by focusing particularly on Chinese women, shows women as marginal: Flora has been infantilized throughout her life no less than the women who have been foot-bound: so has Pet Meagles, and so has Tattycoram, and Amy Dorrit’s ‘littleness’ relates to the way she has been systematically treated. Feet screwed back in infancy only relate to other techniques of imprisonment basic to Little Dorrit. And Flora’s discourse is also fascinated by forms of beauty denied her: this is a China of the mind, her own version of Calvino’s invisible cities. Her speech is speculative, as when she deduces from the lanterns and umbrellas



and the meeting with his daughter, the widowed Flora Finching, even more prolix, especially after discovering from Clennam, the returnee from China, that he is not married:

Jeremy Tambling

that China must be dark and wet, and it is circumlocutive, making journeys (‘I don’t know where I’m running to […] what a traveller you are’). Leavis, saying that James could not have produced Flora Finching, points out that, like Dickens, ‘Flora enjoys herself’ in ‘these astonishing expressive flights’ (Leavis and Leavis 1970: 241). Plornish and Flora both suggest a pleasure of the text which creates a complete world of discourse, both doing so out of disappointment and from being outside the sphere where language is officially created as a system of inclusion and exclusion. Nor has Dickens finished when Flora has appeared, for she is accompanied by Mr F’s Aunt, a ‘legacy’ from Mr Finching, a figure hobbling Flora as much as any foot-binding would do. Her comments in chapter 13, all irrelevant to the conversation, comprise a cryptic digressiveness the polar opposite of Flora’s, but equally complete: ‘When we lived at Henley, Barnes’ gander was stole by tinkers.’ ‘The Monument near London Bridge [...] was put up after the Great Fire of London; and the Great Fire of London was not the fire in which your uncle George’s workshops was burned down.’ ‘I hate a fool!’ (1.13: 159) She apparently takes a dislike to Clennam, to whom she addresses this ‘sentiment, in itself almost Solomonic’, and has to be led from the room, with a fourth utterance, ‘What he come there for, then?’ (1.13: 172–3). Perhaps she fears, as Flora hopes, that Clennam will marry Flora. Certainly the intrusions are markers of paranoia, and perhaps it is an anger displaced from Flora, who seems proud of her, as if the Aunt was the symbol of what Flora had suffered; a supplement to Flora’s supplementary narratives, and the voice of her aggression, just as, in Bleak House, Mme Hortense is the aggressive unconscious of both Lady Dedlock and Esther Summerson; the servant of one who offers herself, later, to be the servant of the other, and the murderer of Mr Tulkinghorn, the threat to both mother and daughter. In such examples of minor characterization, the novel gets its fullest meaning, through supplementary figures. The first two statements of Mr F’s Aunt are suggestive for a sense of how private and public histories juxtapose, how knowledge is an impossible combination of unattributable details and facts which can never be verified, and of public knowledge (the Great Fire and the building of the Monument) which has no relevance to the



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subject speaking. Such information as she has is nonetheless equally paranoid knowledge: the Monument had an inscription which blamed the Catholics for starting the Fire, and Mr F’s Aunt clearly and equally wants to blame somebody for the fire in the workshops. One form of baseless knowledge constructs another; memory, which the novel tries to recall is, as with the Monument, of nothing except of something wholly precise (the gander, not the more generic goose) which stands entirely outside logic or meaning. Utterance, which is wholly digressive, based on fragments of events, but which constructs a family history, comes out of such a mad knowledge formed by ressentiment. Flora and Mr F’s Aunt are mad, and that condition is part of the ‘beyond’ which is constructed by the society whose two poles are the prison and the Circumlocution Office. While Mr F’s Aunt, in contrast to Flora, has no circumlocution in her language, she brings out something basic which is also the feature of the Circumlocution Office: language has no grounding except in its own excess: as Ferdinand Barnacle tells Clennam, ‘I can give you plenty of forms to fill up’ (1.10: 130); while this makes all speech digressive, it means that a political decision is at the heart of that which determines what is mad and what not, and what is digressive or not: the digressive being excluded like madness. The novel, however, will make no such distinction, that being its achievement, but its question is whether speech remains locked inside its own prison, self-obsessed, indeed monomaniacal, or whether it can go beyond it, however digressively. One of the most self-absorbed is John Chivery, with his fantasies about marrying Amy and becoming the bourgeois husband, being both inside the prison, where he will live and work, and which will give him security, and outside it (as turnkey); his digressive fantasy is to write his epitaph, which he does twice in 1.18 alone: an achievement in circumlocution, he enjoys the language which keeps him in a psychic prison, and he is mad enough to think of himself as already dead. This fourth instalment of Little Dorrit shows something else: the novel’s modernism is inseparable from awareness of city-space, and its form corresponds to negotiating the city and city spaces, which is what any walker in London does: digression is necessary because the city offers no direct routes, and the city’s existence constructs a memory, and an unconscious, and so a narrative, for its walkers. Chapter 13 concludes with a long walk for Clennam, accompanied by Mr Pancks, from Casby’s house, including the encounter with Cavalletto, before Clennam reaches his lodgings in Covent Garden. The following chapter, ‘Little Dorrit’s Party’, shows Amy and Maggy – a brain-fevered




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figure whose existence, in her lunacy and confused distinction between girl and woman, reproaches any idea of a normal progression or narrative – walking the streets all night. Returning from Covent Garden, where they have visited Clennam, to the Marshalsea, and finding they have been locked out, they return across London Bridge and around the north side of the river, both west and east, before returning south, to the prison, and to St George’s church in Southwark. The passage includes the encounter with the prostitute who says she is ‘killing herself’ (1.14: 191): there is an increasing heterogeneity within ‘going astray’; and it inheres in city-life, in ‘the great capital’ (1.14: 194). The fourth number has dramatized the lives of several women, each of whom, Flora, Mr F’s Aunt, Amy, Maggy and the prostitute, make alternative narratives necessary: some lives cannot be told in ways that conform to a single logic. In Bleak House chapter 3, ‘A Progress’, Esther Summerson’s first-person narrative begins by her saying that she is not clever, perhaps as a strategy; this is digressive in its isolation from the other history in the text, and reflects on her sense of being different, because illegitimate, having no name: a figure who has internalized her anxiety. Miss Wade is a fuller study of a woman who cannot be integrated with others in bourgeois society, as appears from her difference from the others in ‘Fellow Travellers’; while her lesbianism separates her, Dickens gives her a chapter of her own narrative, a written account of her life (‘The History of a Self-Tormentor’). Intending her at one stage to have had a father in prison (like Amy Dorrit), he then intended that Miss Wade should tell her story to Clennam when he met her (in Book the Second, chapter 20). Forster, who disliked the chapter, possibly for its feminine subversiveness, commented that ‘Dickens rightly judged his purpose to have been, to supply a kind of connection between the episode and the story’ of Little Dorrit, and quoted a letter from him: I don’t see the practicality of making the History of a Self-Tormentor, with which I took great pains, a written narrative. But I do see the possibility [he saw the other practicability before the number was published] of making it a chapter by itself, which might enable me to dispense with the necessity of the turned commas. Do you think that would be better? I have no doubt that a great part of Fielding’s reason for the introduced story [for example, ‘The Man of the Hill’ in Tom Jones, to which Forster alludes], and Smollett’s also, was, that it is sometimes really impossible to present, in a full book, the idea it contains (which yet it may be on all accounts desirable to present), without supposing the reader to be possessed of almost as much



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romantic allowance as would put him on a level with the writer. In Miss Wade, I had an idea, which I thought a new one, of making the introduced story so fit into surroundings impossible of separation from the main story, as to make the blood of the book circulate through both. But I can only suppose, from what you say, that I have not exactly succeeded in this.9 Dickens’s awareness of eighteenth-century digressiveness, as in A Tale of a Tub, or Tristram Shandy, is obvious, but the issue in Little Dorrit is not now one of marking digressions as opposed to progressions. Miss Wade must remain marginal, unnamed even; woman’s autobiography, as derived from Charlotte Brontë, being a new and different form, which Dickens adopts. The number-plans which Dickens wrote to sketch out how the novel would go, and which reveal his planning, had included ‘Miss Wade’s Story’ in chapter 21, adding ‘Unconsciously laying bare all her character’ (2.21: 895). The new freedom caused by the omission of what James Joyce calls ‘perverted commas’ as a result of the writing of an independent chapter means the disappearance of any metalanguage by which Miss Wade can be criticized.10 Whereas before, Clennam’s reactions would inevitably have commented on Miss Wade, that now disappears, and there is absolutely no comment made on the ‘History of a Self-Tormentor’. That, of course, allows for an ironic reading, as in the case of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, where the male ‘I’ speaks throughout as the voice of ressentiment, but it is not a necessary one: Dickens’s own inclination to lay bare her character has now disappeared as a critical gesture, and in the way she speaks for herself, the reader can make her own judgement. The first lines of Miss Wade’s account, ‘I have the misfortune of not being a fool. From a very early age I have detected what those about me thought they hid from me. If I could have been habitually imposed upon, instead of habitually discerning the truth, I might have lived as smoothly as most fools do’ (2.21: 693), recall the sentiments of Mr F’s Aunt. The woman who ‘hates a fool’, a divisive statement which would exclude Plornish from her consideration, has the sense that she is being practised upon; similarly, Miss Wade recognizes that the only way to survive in ‘Society’ (1.20: 258) is to be ‘a fool’; it is her misfortune to be different, and not to be different. Dickens links the two digressive figures, and by doing so both brings into question what is meant by ‘the main story’ and makes the text give more weight to the presence of the woman. Of course the woman who thinks she is not a fool may be the more so in that she is deceiving herself, but in Miss Wade’s thinking and disclosures, the digressive text becomes the




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unconscious of the ‘main story’.11 The idea of digression is eliminated when the main narrative is subtended by another which lifts the repression inherent within it, that which makes it narratable; to consider Miss Wade’s story as digressive, even exaggerative, could suggest a fear that it yields too many discomforts, and supplements the main text in the same way that Adorno says that ‘in psychoanalysis, nothing is true except the exaggerations’ (1978: 49). The remark tips Little Dorrit towards being seen as a psychoanalysis of ‘Society’; and the logic of psychoanalysis knows neither ‘digression’, nor single plot, nor single subject. Miss Wade’s story is not circumlocutory, but its cryptic nature may impose the limitation that she assumes too readily what ‘the truth’ is that she discerns. She ends with how Henry Gowan abandoned her; since he is connected to the Barnacles, to her sexual anger must be added what she also perceives, that is, the power of snobbery which has also marginalized her as an ‘orphan’ with whatever euphemisms lie behind that. Her single-minded obsessiveness, which is of the prison, applies the point only to herself, however, that she has been patronized, said to have an ‘unhappy temper’ (2.21: 695). The snobbery which keeps the Circumlocution Office in business is also within the Marshalsea, which exists as a parody of the class-system which it embodies; and when the Dorrit party arrive in Venice, Amy reflects that ‘this same society in which they lived, greatly resembled a superior sort of Marshalsea’ (2.7: 536). And so in Rome, ‘everything seemed to be trying to stand still for ever on the ruins of something else – except the water, which, following eternal laws, tumbled and rolled from its glorious multitude of fountains’ (2.7: 536). The ‘restlessness’ which is the concomitant of Dickens’s writing – which nonetheless also tumbles and rolls and is multitudinous – attends the knowledge that digression is the only progression; there can be no single truth to be found in circumlocution. In the novel, such restlessness moves the Dorrit family on, as it moves on all tourists, and it is generated from the oppressive snobbery of Mrs General, which they have bankrolled, and her guide-book. Amy, however, knows that one situation unfolds itself in another, or is folded in another. Seeing ‘the ruins of old Rome’ she sees London and the Marshalsea: this urban landscape becomes the unconscious ghosting her vision (2.15: 639). Yet no single character in Little Dorrit can trace each event’s every connection, and Dickens’s ‘restlessness’ suggests that this point applies to writing the text also; that it cannot know its beginning; which suggests the defeat of memory, which looks back, and forward, to ruins, nor the fearful extent of the abyssal ‘beyond’ which awaits in the present and future.



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1. The same volume contains Lionel Trilling’s 1953 essay on Little Dorrit. For comments on Lewes, see Ford (1955: 149–54); for Hippolyte Taine, see Collins (1971: 337–42); for contemporary nearly universal negative reviews of Little Dorrit, see also Collins (1971: 356–401). Collins’s Dickens quotes George Eliot on Dickens (Westminster Review, in 1856), which includes reference to Little Dorrit (1971: 343). 2. See Grunhut (1948: 491–511). 3. Quotations are from the Wall and Small edition (2003; volume, chapter and page numbers). See also Sucksmith’s Introduction (1979) to Little Dorrit for the novel’s inception, and Dickens’s ‘restlessness’, discussed throughout, Butt and Tillotson (1957) for the changes that took the novel from being called ‘Nobody’s Fault’ to Little Dorrit, and Philpotts (2003). 4. I discuss China’s relevance for Little Dorrit in Tambling (2004: 28–43 and 104–13). 5. For this passage, see Meckier (1967: 51–62). 6. On digression as that which London imposes, see Tambling (2008); for Dickens and digression with relation to Oliver Twist, see Tambling (1996: 43–53). 7. See Trilling’s Introduction in Dickens (1953). 8. I discuss this, and George Eliot’s response to Fielding’s digressions, in Tambling (1990: 939–60). 9. See Sucksmith’s Introduction (in Dickens 1979: xxxvi–xxxvii) and chapter 8.1 in Forster (1928). 10. See MacCabe (1979: 14). 11. For psychoanalytic material in the novel, see Trilling in Dickens (1953) and Bergler (1957: 371–88); see also earlier work on Little Dorrit and Miss Wade in Tambling (1995: 98–128).

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. 1978. Minima Moralia, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso) Bergler, Edmund. 1957. ‘Little Dorrit and Dickens’ Intuitive Knowledge of Psychic Masochism’, American Imago, 14: 371–88 Butt, John and Kathleen Tillotson. 1957. Dickens at Work (London: Methuen) Collins, Philip. 1971. Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul) Dickens, Charles. 1953. Little Dorrit (Oxford University Press) —— 1979. Little Dorrit, ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith (Oxford: Clarendon Press) —— 1999. Nicholas Nickleby, ed. Mark Ford (Harmondsworth: Penguin) —— 2003. Little Dorrit, ed. Stephen Wall and Helen Small (Harmondsworth: Penguin) Ford, George H. 1955. Dickens and his Readers: Aspects of Novel-Criticism since 1836 (Princeton University Press) Ford, George H. and Lauriat Lane. 1961. The Dickens Critics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press)



Notes

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Forster, John. 1928. The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T. Ley (1872–74; reprint London: Cecil Palmer) Grunhut, Morris. 1948. ‘Lewes as a Critic of the Novel’, Studies in Philology, 45: 491–511 Leavis, F. R. and Q. D. Leavis. 1970. Dickens the Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus) MacCabe, Colin. 1979. James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan) Meckier, Jerome. 1967. ‘Sundry Curious Variations on the Same Tune’, Dickens Studies, 3: 51–62 Philpotts, Trey. 2003. Companion to Little Dorrit (London: Croom Helm) Tambling, Jeremy. 1990. ‘Middlemarch, Realism and the Birth of the Clinic’, English Literary History, 939–60 —— 1995. Dickens, Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold (London: Macmillan) —— 1996. ‘Dangerous Crossings: Dickens, Digression and Montage’, Strategies of Reading: Dickens and After, Yearbook of English Studies, 29: 43–53 —— 2004. ‘Opium, Wholesale, Resale, and for Export: Dickens and China’, Dickens Quarterly, 21: 28–43, 104–13 —— 2008. Going Astray: Dickens and London (London: Longman)



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Concerning Metaphor, Digression and Rhyme (Fetish Aesthetics and the Walking Poem) Ross Chambers

Ça a l’air de rimer. (Apollinaire, ‘Lundi rue Christine’) In culture, defined as it is by the incest taboo, desire inevitably becomes a mediated phenomenon, as René Girard so ably and amply demonstrated.1 That is, it becomes a figural formation. It requires an act of displacement (away from the forbidden primal object) and, simultaneously, a certain acquiescence in an act of substitution whereby the alternative object of desire acquires a fragile equivalence, despite its difference, in relation to the inaccessible ‘ideal’, producing an illusion of their identity – a quasi-identity, if you will. Which is to say that desire, as it exists in culture, is necessarily fetishistic in character, but also that a fetish is a figure that combines the effects of digression with those of metaphor. It is also to say that fetish is not a perversion but a norm. My interest, then, is in the way the fetishizing aesthetics of modernity mobilizes this joint dynamics of desire – its dependence on a certain solidarity of digressive displacement and metaphoric equivalence – in the interest of creating an aura of beauty that owes its power to forms of mediation not at all dissimilar from those at work in religious, sexual or commodity fetishism. I have written elsewhere about fetish aesthetics; here it is the confluence of digressive displacement and metaphoric substitution in the production of poetic form that I will try to demonstrate.2 For a metaphor, as its Greek name indicates, operates a kind of displacement, albeit one that elides the mediation that makes it possible, so that similarity is foregrounded over difference and an effect of ‘transport’ (metaphor’s Latin twin) or rapture is produced by the perception of an unexpected equivalence, the unlooked-for mutual substitutability of two terms. Conversely, digression’s ‘stepping away’ (the sense of its Latin name) foregrounds its mediatory function in the production of 49



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difference. But as such, digression elides the perception of equivalence that is inevitably entailed (vide Derrida) in the perception of difference, in the way that metaphor elides the difference entailed in the production of similarity. So metaphor is a kind of (accelerated) digression, and digression something like a (deferred or stretched-out) metaphor. Displacement implies substitution and substitution displacement. In what follows, it is the walking poem’s enactment of this figural dynamics of desire that I will try to trace. How does this genre perform the solidarity of metaphor and digression in the production of a form of aesthetic beauty and pleasure? I will propose an amble through readings of a few examples of the urban walking poem, attending in particular to the concurrence it seems regularly to construct – not unlike the interdependence of melody and harmony in music – between a certain reliance on chance, whose figure is digressivity, and an affirmation of necessity, of which metaphor is the model. The digressive linearity of an apparently aimless stroll, indicative of an attitude of disponibilité towards happenstance, resolves into a moment of unexpected epiphany that makes manifest the harmony of metaphor. So, it is as if the reward of a certain abandonment to diversion, diversity and dispersal can be the revelation of an order, pattern or meaning inherent in the disorder and noise of chance – but a revelation that, crucially, is itself conditioned by randomness and unpredictability. The harmonious moment is less a prize to be expected than it is a grace awarded as a consequence of the commitment to digressivity I call disponibilité. And remarkably, a quite similar pattern emerges in the evolution of the genre itself, which appears governed in turn by a dynamics of drift or displacement and equivalence or substitution, as walking poems differentiate and disperse, but in doing so end up ‘rhyming’ with one another. For, as we will see shortly, it is Baudelaire’s insight into what he terms the chanciness of rhyme that seems most aptly to characterize the mutual dependency, the confluence of the epiphanic coincidence and the loiterly stroll – that is, of metaphor and digression – as if the same joint dynamics that describes the workings of desire was, not coincidentally, at work in the life of culture. So, although I do not propose to do a formal history of the urban walking poem – one would have to go back at least as far as Juvenal, whose third satire concludes as an account of the perils of walking in Rome by night – it is at least worth pausing a moment or drifting a bit from my main purpose, to notice that the modern walking poem has its roots in the era that turned, as it were simultaneously, to the rapture of the sublime, but also, as English- and French-speakers tend to forget, to the ironies of what



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Friedrich Schlegel called permanent parekbasis, the endless digressivity of Romantic irony. These roots lie, of course, in the craze for nature-walking that took literary inspiration from the Rousseau of the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire and the Confessions, and soon thereafter from the poetry of Wordsworth and his contemporaries and imitators. But they lie too in the shift of the walking-craze from country to city that began in France with writers like Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Rétif de la Bretonne and quickly developed into the phenomenon, part-literary and part-journalistic, of flâneur writing, a prose genre that Baudelaire eventually adapted into verse. All of which matters to my present topic because the country-to-city shift of the walking poem parallels the shift from an aesthetics of sublimity and natural supernaturalism to an aesthetics of artificial supernaturalism and fetish, a shift that is interpretable, therefore, as an effect of the new, rationalizing, capitalist and industrial culture that, in France, followed the era of revolution and Napoleonic imperialism and resulted in the rapid growth of cities. (When I say shift, of course, I mean to imply a historical digression, more a matter of process and drift than of the kind of change that is perceived as an event, but productive of the kind of rhyme Baudelaire had in mind when he spoke of flânerie as herborizing on asphalt.)

Rhyme (‘Le soleil’) How to capture the atmosphere of the city? Such is Baudelaire’s question. Atmosphere, for him, is a privileged word: it refers, of course, to the air we breathe but cannot see, but by extension therefore to all the unnoticed phenomena of the city to which only poets are attentive: the noise of traffic, the electric energy that develops in a crowd, the ‘secret presence’ (Walter Benjamin) of poverty and the poor, like the street people (beggars, prostitutes, entertainers) in whose eyes a mute message is to be read. But atmosphere also describes the aura that arises in the fetish object from the exchange of qualities that brings the inaccessible into the domain of the accessible, and in the poem from its form, the crucial component of beauty in an aesthetics of fetish. At the outset of the ‘Parisian Pictures’ section of the 1861 Fleurs du mal, two poems, ‘Paysage’ and ‘Le soleil’, are strikingly juxtaposed, and the juxtaposition strongly suggests that, in order to grasp the atmosphere of the city, a panoramic approach is wrong-headed.3 The wide view of the city from the poet’s high window leaves him enclosed in the ‘chaude atmosphère’ of a protected ‘chez soi’ in which the city spectacle can safely be transformed, by imagination and dream, into a pastoral ‘landscape’, as the poem’s ‘I’ clings to what he calls ‘mes églogues’. The ‘chez soi’, in other



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words, is that of a self-sufficient subjectivity, the Sartrian en-soi. The alternative, addressed in ‘Le soleil’, is to take a partial, or sampling, because close-up approach, sallying forth into the ‘vieux faubourg’ or proletarian street. It is as if the street can do duty for the city as a whole, pars pro toto, in whose atmosphere it shares. For there is another kind of ‘warm atmosphere’ out-of-doors; this atmosphere is supplied by the sunshine that is everywhere at work, equalizing city and country but also the humble and the rich, the powerless and the powerful, and thus, by implication, the ‘faubourg’ and the ‘ville’; ennobling in this way the ‘basest things’, as if by the action of a fetishizing metaphor. The sun, in short, is the model for the poet’s pursuit of beauty. For a rhyme such as ‘valets’/’palais’, which is strategically situated at the poem’s conclusion, likewise creates a metaphor of sorts, ennobling what is base, generating an atmosphere. But there is a problem. For it is obvious that rhyme does not work as well as the sun in this respect. Rhyme is chancy, hit-or-miss; and this chanciness (‘les hasards de la rime’) means that many rhymes in the poem, although they bring together words that make strikingly unlikely partners (‘béquilles’ and ‘jeunes filles’, ‘chloroses’ and ‘roses’), do not necessarily ennoble the base, or do so only feebly, even though they constitute a kind of metaphor. But then their metaphoricity is dubious also, because it depends on the connecting role that is played in verse by the element of extension and intermediacy that is the line. Unless it is just a filler (or ‘cheville’), the line’s basic task is to construct a context of semantic betweenness – to work a modulation – that naturalizes, or renders plausible, the juxtaposition at line’s end of the unlikely rhyming partners that otherwise have only the accident of phonetic resemblance in common. Which makes rhyme not the miracle of simultaneity a metaphor purports to be, but rather the outcome of a kind of digression, one that entangles it in extension, occupancy of a certain amount of time and space; and thus more a matter of exploration than of rapture. And the true motivation of the poet, then, is not simply to find a rhyme that works the magic of fetish, but also to stumble onto the ideal coincidence of a perfect rhyme and a perfect verse. That is why, in the concluding distych of the first strophe of ‘Le soleil’, and as if to balance or correct the clumsy metrical stumble of 11.1–2, the words ‘mots’ and ‘vers’ are made to ‘rhyme positionally’, at the caesura: Stumbling over words as over paving stones Sometimes bumping into lines long dreamt of. (It is as if the ‘words’ that make metaphor were being declared equivalent to paving stones, while it is the ‘lines’ of verse corresponding to digression that equate to the transforming dream implied by ‘rêvés’.) 10.1057/9780230292529 - Digressions in European Literature, Edited by Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells


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Nevertheless stumbling and knocking into things is a large part of what a poet does, as the presence of the words ‘trébuchant’ and ‘heurtant’ at the head of these lines implies (they rhyme too, in the same positional sense that ‘mots’ and ‘vers’ rhyme). That is why the poet’s gait, as he makes his clumsy way ‘le long du vieux faubourg’ (traversing the extent of the street), is described as a ‘fantasque escrime’ – a loony fencing around – by contrast with the precision and efficacity, the impartiality also, of the ‘cruel’ sun which ‘frappe à traits redoublés’ – strikes doubly – by means of its equalizing rays. These two martial metaphors do suggest a degree of nobility on the poet’s part as well as on the sun’s; but they also point to his subjection to accident and chance, the randomness of intermediacy, in humiliating contrast with the sun’s immediate and universal access to town and country, poorhouses and palaces. Metaphor is the example the sun sets; in response the poet can offer only digressiveness. He has renounced the solar or panoramic view by becoming a walker, an explorer of intermediacy; and dependent as he is, therefore, on chance, his resources consist only, on the one hand, of a certain outgoingness or disponibilité, a willingness to explore (‘Flairant dans tous les coins [...]’) and, on the other, of reliance on happy accident (‘Trébuchant [...]’; ‘Heurtant [...]’; ‘les hasards de la rime’), which is ultimately, of course, another aspect of disponibilité. In short, his relation to the beyond is dependent on the chanciness of an epiphany; and if epiphany is the revelation of a rhyme as a metaphoric event or experience together with the long dreamed-of line that makes it ‘work’, it occurs only as the outcome of a willingness to explore the world of extension, striking out in all directions and at random – a willingness, that is, to digress. Wandering cannot guarantee wonderment, but it is wonderment’s necessary precondition – and meanwhile, I would add, it has pleasures of its own. That makes fetish aesthetics, subsumed by the rhyme as metaphoric rapture, a ‘noisy’ phenomenon that is itself subject, therefore, to drift. For it presupposes a certain complicity in the poem’s reception, and with that requirement of complicity the possibility of ironic distancing. Thus the genre of the walking poem becomes, itself, a poem that wanders.

Complicity (‘The Day Lady Died’) Midday, midsummer, mid-year in mid-town Manhattan: we are in medias res. The lunchtime stroll ‘up the muggy street beginning to sun’ is under way already.4 Frank has a dinner invitation on Long Island in the evening; but for now it is preparatory errands that are on his mind. 10.1057/9780230292529 - Digressions in European Literature, Edited by Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells



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He needs to get a shoeshine, not knowing ‘the people who will feed me’, and gifts for Mike and Patsy. He does not say so, but Mike Goldberg, a painter, and his wife Patsy Southgate are the friends who will introduce him to his hosts. With them, he is in the middle of a complex relation of swerving desires, a textbook illustration of Girardian triangularity. Patsy is Mike’s wife, as I said; but it was as Frank’s friend that she had been initially drawn to her husband (Frank presumably being sexually unavailable to her as a gay man); while Frank’s infatuation with Mike, similarly unavailable as a sexual partner, then led to his being attracted, ironically enough, to Patsy ... Like the ‘personist’ poem he once described in a mock manifesto as ‘Lucky Pierre’ – the poem inserted between two persons and doubly gratified as a consequence – Frank O’Hara is in the middle of this three-way of digressive desires; and the poem we are reading, itself so pointedly situated as an account of intermediacy, is his gift to the friends from whom his own intermediacy’s double gratification is derived.5 Or so one can surmise; again he feels no need to say so. When ‘The Day Lady Died’ begins, then, he is already launched on a wandering walk along and around a section of Sixth Avenue. In the course of it he stops for ‘a hamburger and a malted’, checks ‘an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets/in Ghana are doing these days’, pops into the bank for cash, then quandarizes at length in a bookshop over the right gift for Patsy, before moving off the avenue to ‘stroll into the PARK LANE/Liquor store’ for Mike’s gift of Strega (no hesitation there), then back to the avenue and a tobacconist’s for ‘a carton of Gauloises and a carton/of Picayunes’ (these also doubtless intended as gifts for everyone at the evening’s dinner). Frank has a ‘things to do’ list in his head – lunch, bank, gifts, shoeshine – but the list allows for a good deal of pleasant meandering, and even some indulgence in ‘quandariness’, in anticipation of an also pleasant evening. But suddenly a new and unforeseen digression occurs as a consequence, and the shoeshine forgotten, the poem that began in intermediacy and the enjoyment thereof ends, with an abrupt change of mood, in a moment of aesthetic and emotional epiphany – a gratification of a new and unexpected order. For the casual mood of disponibilité is displaced, now, at the sight of a face glimpsed on a newspaper, by a flood of grief and an experience of memory that entails a sense of intense immediacy, of rapture: [I] casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with



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and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing Tiny details matter a lot here: the dropped line-end, the speaker’s inability to pronounce the name represented only by ‘her’ and ‘she’, even the unusual and isolated comma marking a significant pause following the word ‘Picayunes’, in a poem that relies heavily on the conjunctive smoothness of ‘and’ to make its transitions. All these are devices that recruit our readerly complicity, a complicity that borders on participation, in the breathtaking event that is the news of Billie Holiday’s death. That is, and to say it technically, this last digression has stumbled upon a rhyme, a wonderful, epiphanic rhyme, of the kind Baudelaire knew to be rare. The rhyme, indeed is double. There is first the simultaneity of a moment in the present and a moment from the past that is produced by the experience Proust called involuntary memory. Present continuous verbs (‘I am sweating’, and ‘and thinking’) coincide here with past tenses (‘she whispered’, ‘I stopped breathing’), the transition between them being mediated by a gerundive (‘leaning’) and the conjunction ‘while’. But this rhyme – call it the rhyme of memory – has at its heart (like Proust’s memory of Combray) an experience of extension and intermediacy, a kind of walk: ‘while she whispered a song along the keyboard/to Mal Waldron and everyone’. And as a consequence the phrase concerning her song itself rhymes, therefore, with the ramble along the avenue that occupies the greater part of the poem, musicalizing and aestheticizing the walk, as it were, and retrospectively ennobling it, Baudelaire-fashion, as by a metaphor. This is the second rhyme, in which the walk is redeemed, then – given depth and significance – by Lady’s remembered song, whose loose structure it shares, while her offering of the song ‘to Mal Waldron and everyone’ specifies what is only implicit in the poem, that it too has the aesthetic character of a gift, one that is both presented in personal circumstances (that is, to Mike and Patsy), and simultaneously offered to all. Call this the rhyme of art. But how exactly does a ‘whispered’ song reach ‘everyone’? It sounds contradictory. Of course, Lady’s voice, at the end of her life, was breathy as she gasped for air, her singing reduced to a series of brief



her face on it

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phrases linked, as if by the poem’s ‘ands’, by quick intakes of breath. Its persistence, the heroism of its ‘ongoingness’, was part, then, of what made it compelling. But also the remembered song’s sotto voce quality offers insight into the sparseness of O’Hara’s own diction, its unpretentious reliance on everyday words and casually colloquial syntax, its understated simplicity. For to whisper is to engage the hearer’s most concentrated attention; and the trope of litotes, or understatement, the sotto voce that results from a deliberate thinning of the resources of language to their indispensable essence, has a similar effect. It too works a kind of enticement, an entrapment and an entrancement. It is a device, that is, to maximize readerly involvement and complicity. We might remember in this connection that Holiday, that evening at the Five Spot, was whispering her song along the keyboard in contravention of a court order barring her from giving public performances, and taking advantage therefore of the relative intimacy of a jazz-club that was frequented very largely by fellow-spirits: painters, poets, musicians. Outside lay the puritanical America of the 1950s, in which phenomena like the New York School or the West Coast ‘Beat’ generation were rare, self-conscious and barely tolerated anomalies. Such would be the kind of complicity that the song, and the poem, presuppose. But now let us return to the Mike-Patsy-and-Frank trio and the pattern of complicities that made it work. If we see it, as probably O’Hara did, as a kind of microcosm of the movement of poets and painters that was the School, the sense in which this poem understands there to be a kind of equivalence between the figure of Patsy, in the threesome, and that of Billie Holiday in relation to the School, becomes patent. Patsy disappears from the poem after her gift is finally bought, only to reappear, in the form of that spectral ‘her face’, on the front page of the New York Post, in the way that Holiday’s Five Spot performance, forgotten although it had so entranced Frank that he ‘stopped breathing’, suddenly resurfaces now and causes him to break into a sweat. So Patsy’s role in relation to Mike the straight painter and Frank the gay poet is equivalent to the role played, in relation to the group of mostly male painters and poets, some gay some straight, that was the School, by jazz music, perhaps specifically blues, and its particular embodiment, Lady. It is the role of mediation in each case, the role of the Muse. And now the gift of Verlaine ‘with drawings by Bonnard’ falls into place, not only because it combines poetry and pictorial art, but also because Verlaine’s bisexuality, which leaned strongly towards homosexuality, and his pioneering invention of a new kind of poetic diction, the casual, apparently formless and meandering, low-pitched or



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‘whispering’ style he summarized as ‘De la musique avant toute chose’, make the French poet the New York poet’s alter ego, as Lady is the alter ego of Patsy Southgate.6 And Patsy thus becomes something like the Muse of a poetry of whispered music: a complicitous voice drifting along a keyboard. Complicity, then, complicity ‘avant toute chose’. To breathe the muggy air ‘beginning to sun’ of Sixth Avenue in July 1959, or the doubtless foul air of the Five Spot some weeks earlier, was to be engaged, as Baudelaire might have put it, in an intense ‘atmosphere’ of complicity. And in the way that Lady sings complicitously to Mal Waldron and on to everyone, so a poem like ‘The Day Lady Died’, which in the first instance expects the complicitous reading of Patsy and Mike, also depends, if it is to ‘work’, on finding a complicitous readership. And ultimately, then, it is the walking poem’s adherence to an aesthetics of fetish – with the complex negotiations that fetish implies between digression and a thematics of intermediacy on the one hand, and on the other metaphor and its attendant poetics of rapture – that enforces its dependency on readerly complicity. Not only the complicity of the sous-entendu, available for instance to Patsy and Mike, but also that of the willing suspension of disbelief, or the ‘I know perfectly well ... but nevertheless’, the generic complicity in which ‘everyone’ may participate. For if the mobility of desire that I call disponibilité is indispensable to the genesis of a fetish, complicitous reading is essential to its reception. The poem cruises (along) the street, then, whispering to its potential readers, as Lady whispered her song to Mal Waldron (her accompanist) and everyone. That it shares something in this respect with the (largely) gay male genre of social interaction called cruising – a similarly pedestrian practice – is surely the point of the oddly insistent, six-line episode of delicious ‘quandarizing’ in the bookshop over a gift ‘for Patsy’. Cruising is surely the exemplary genre that mobilizes disponibilité and the mobility of desire, on the one hand, and complicity on the other. Cruising the shelves, in view of gift-giving as a symbolic three-way with Patsy, Frank goes first for Verlaine/Bonnard, then contemplates ‘Hesiod, trans. Richard Lattimore’ a moment (a potential four-way?), moves on to Brendan Behan and Genet, then finally back to Verlaine ‘after practically going to sleep with quandariness’. The poem is laying bare its device here, embedding its code (as we would have once said). It wants to lull our senses with its diversity and variability, to put us off guard, to send us practically to sleep with quandariness, so that we can complicitously follow our own desire, the critical faculty in abeyance; it wants to be cruised as it cruises us.




Ross Chambers

But the episode also reveals, albeit inadvertently, that the actual condition of our complicitous adherence is ultimately generic. Were I attuned to other genres but not to this one – if I were not part of the culture of the walking poem and it of mine – the very question of my going along so willingly with its devices and contrivances would simply not arise. But instead, I suspend my disbelief and go with the poem’s flow, because that is the condition of enjoyment of a walking poem, which I have learned to know as the site of an interaction of poetic disponibilité and readerly complicity, a conjunction that makes for a blissful textual encounter.

Irony (‘Afternoon Papers’) But if complicity is a function of genre, it follows that the withholding of one’s complicity must similarly be governed generically. I cannot withhold a complicity whose tug I have not to some degree experienced as possible. Generic change arises, of course, as an inevitable consequence of the noise that inheres in any shared channel of communicative interaction. But if genres change because they can, people historically situated at a distance from the source of generic influence to which they are nevertheless subject – colonial and former colonial subjects, for example – are especially well placed to experience the form of ambivalence, of uncomfortable or reluctant complicity that consists of recognizing the conventionality of certain generic presuppositions while simultaneously undergoing their coercive power. And thus, for example, a poem by the Sydney poet John Forbes, ‘Afternoon Papers’, offers itself, not at all as a refutation of the walking poem and its fetishizing aesthetics, but nevertheless as a site of ironic resistance to that aesthetic and the conventions on which it rests.7 And it does so most specifically by making pointed reference – in its title, its reference to a ‘picture of a girl’ in an afternoon paper, its remark that No one starts crying in Martin Place although a few are asleep – to ‘The Day Lady Died’.8 For this, at first glance, is a thoroughly digressive walking poem, but one without an actual walk (in the sense implied by Baudelaire’s ‘Le long du vieux faubourg [...]’ or O’Hara’s ‘up the muggy street [...]’ and ‘along the keyboard [...]’). And equally it appears to lack the culminating digression into rapture that I have been calling epiphany. There is apparently no rhyme.



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And yet this poem is strangely faithful to the tradition in the very means of its resistance, for it marshals an atmospherics of Sydney – the Sydney of the booming 1980s – as if by way of a deflationary response to the electric atmosphere of Baudelaire’s 1850s Paris, at the threshold of a certain modernity, and the excitement of post-World War II New York, in the era when it was wresting leadership of the art world from Paris, a capital of the twentieth century displacing the capital of the nineteenth. By contrast, the myth of Sydney to which ‘Afternoon Papers’ subscribes attributes to the city a certain double-sided and apparently contradictory but comfortable materialism, that of a city prosperous and hard-working, not to say money-grubbing, but also hedonistic and lazy, sun- and beach-loving, a city intensely drama-shy, suspicious of epiphany and inclined to cultivate, instead, the values of ordinariness and happy mediocrity, and so anti-aesthetic even as it deploys a certain elegance and glamour in the interest of attracting tourism dollars. It is allowable in Sydney to acknowledge the natural beauty of the city’s extraordinary site, and even to deplore its desecration by a history of haphazard urbanization – but only so long as one takes care not to be seen to rise above the level of the crowd by displaying undue sensitivity, insight, discrimination, or even wealth. So ‘Afternoon Papers’ responds to poems like ‘Le soleil’ and ‘The Day Lady Died’ with a kind of ‘yes, but not here’ that is implicit in the contented bathos of its conclusion: But with even a hint of sunshine or the picture of a girl suggesting the beach, a market survey’s worth of city workers eat their lunchtime sandwiches in peace. But it is simultaneously haunted, in the way this quatrain is haunted by a near-rhyme, by what it appears to decry; and inhabited, therefore, by both the ghost of a walk and a phantom of epiphany – something like a return of the repressed (‘phantom’ and ‘epiphany’ being in any case etymological kin). I mean that, a poem of near-absolute disponibilité, it seems able to move freely and unpredictably among a number of sites that Sydneysiders recognize as lying within no more than a square kilometre of one another at the city’s centre: the harbourside, nearby office buildings, Martin Place, then the Opera House and back to Martin Place again (the probable site of those folkdancing displays of lines 16–17), ‘restaurants revolving overhead’ and thence to the Archibald Fountain, a Victorian folly in, yes, Hyde Park (for London is also on the list of




Ross Chambers

metropolitan cities the poem ‘remembers’). Losing any trace of linearity in order to become directionless, the walk exists, but in the form of that essence of poetic walking that is digressivity. And as for epiphany – the possibility of rhyme, metaphor, rapture arising, as we have seen, as one implication of digressiveness – the very idea seems rejected out of hand – or at least segregated or quarantined – in the dismissive comment about ‘prima donnas not worth their keep/throw[ing] fits at the Opera House’. But if it is belied too by that final line extolling the placid scene of workers munching ‘in peace’ on lunchtime sandwiches as they dream of the ‘beach’, a slightly closer look at the rather careful structural organization that underlies the poem’s surface drift shows that rhyme is far from absent. For it is in three parts, corresponding to the long first sentence and relatively short final sentence, which are connected by two central sentences whose topic is grief and whose double function is to reference ‘The Day Lady Died’ and to wander the city of Sydney. As they do so, they traverse a space of reflective intermediacy that links, in a kind of rhyme, the indoors busyness of city workers, described in the first sentence, with the solace of outdoors leisure, sandwich-eating and dreaming of the beach, described in the final sentence. The two components of Sydney’s characteristic atmosphere, the city’s myth, are thus brought into relation: the city’s passionate attachment to commerce, the making of money, and its equally passionate fondness for leisure, of which beach-going is a standard metaphor, are made to rhyme semantically as indoors and outdoors, working hours and lunchtime respectively, the latter redeeming the former like Baudelairian sunshine ennobling what is base. But the poem also suggests that what is common to them is an undemonstrative or ‘private’ grief, a muted grief both like and very unlike the dramatic displays to be seen at the Opera House, or in poems like ‘The Day Lady Died’. A grief that is in the same relation to the prima donnas’ fits at the Opera House as the ghost of the walk and the phantom epiphany to its discreet rhyming structure. It is all very Sydney in its muting of the overtly aesthetic – a sign of ambivalence arising from simultaneous fascination and disabusement, a kind of suspicious enthralment to the generic models of beauty understood, in the words of another Forbes poem (‘Watching the Treasurer’), as ‘beautiful lies’. So I think of these inner connective sentences of the poem’s own rhyming lunchtime sandwich as a pseudo-Wordsworthian moment of reflective wandering. Lonely as a cloud, given the ‘million’ kept ‘off the street’ by their employment, the poet strolls the city, observing the absence of overt signs of grief and regretting the absence of transcendent



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assuagement of private grief like that once provided by the Olympian gods, now superseded as providers of a panoramic vision of the city by revolving restaurants atop tall buildings. But the rhyming initial and final sentences also make a rather more direct comment than this on the aesthetics of the fetish – that is, of rhyme – in its relation as an ‘artificial supernaturalism’ both to the sublimity of ‘natural supernaturalism’ and to the lost transcendence of the sacred that shadows the sublime. For their rhyming of Sydney commercialism and Sydney hedonism suggests a rhyming of nature and culture, in which ‘even a hint of sunshine/or the picture of a girl suggesting a beach’ produces the idyllic spectacle of ‘a market survey’s worth of city workers’ enjoying the outdoors ‘in peace’, among the city’s tall towers. For, as we know, the accommodation of nature to culture is what defines desire under the cultural regime of incest taboo and makes it fetishistic in character, the desired object being a culturally acceptable substitute for the natural, incestuous object that has become unavailable, and thus a product of the figurality of metaphor and digression: a matter of rhyming. So it matters that ‘Afternoon Papers’ opens on a metaphor of fit, where ‘fit’ refers both to what is fitting and to what is well combined. The opening words: ‘The city fits the Harbour’, which rhyme water and land as the natural and the artificial, then develop as a simile, indeed a double simile, of good tailoring (‘the way a new suit/fits a politician like applause’), and the mention of applause resolves in turn into an anthropomorphic refiguration of the harbour as ‘a drowned valley/[...] glad we are here, moving/tons of paper around [...]’. If fetish is a matter of making supposedly incompatible terms – the accessible and the inaccessible, the lowly and the elevated, the immanent and the transcendent – into differences that can be rhymed, or tailored to fit, then what we see in these lines is the poet actively engaged in that work of making things fit by means of figuration, and implicitly describing the work of poetry as such an engagement: the fabrication of fetish as a matter of mise en forme, mise en forme as the device that produces the epiphany of a rhyme. Such an engagement, as we have now seen at some length, entails the digressive elaboration of a metaphor that we see enacted in these very lines, which start from the metaphor of the ‘fit’ of the harbour and city. So the poem’s initial lines work like the line of verse, the ‘vers rêvé’ that, in Baudelaire, is necessary to produce the wonderful ‘fit’ of a rhyme. But they also echo the structure of the poem as a whole, which similarly works a conjunction of workaday and lunchtime, beach-loving Sydney by means of an intervening stretch of urban wandering. No wonderment without a wandering, no fit without tailoring.




Ross Chambers

So we might notice how, in Forbes’s poem, the singular verb ‘fits’ of the opening line (‘The city fits the Harbour’) fits with the plural noun ‘fits’ that describes the drama confined to the Opera House (‘prima donnas [...]/throw fits at the Opera House’), doing so across the extension of 13 lines of verse. At a thematic level, this rhyming suggests a reconciliation, ironic to be sure, between the fetishist aesthetics of epiphany that Baudelaire associates with ‘les hasards de la rime’, and the much more discreet, but still fetishizing, mode of making disparate words fit that Forbes favours, something like the half-rhyming of ‘beach’ and ‘peace’ in the concluding quatrain that seems to encapsulate this poet’s reserved complicity with and ironic participation in the aesthetics of the walking poem. ‘Afternoon Papers’ is one more whispered phrase along the keyboard of a genre-history that, in its modern incarnation, has been the story of the aestheticization of the urban by a form of artificial supernaturalism displacing the natural supernaturalism of the sublime. An aestheticization that draws its energy and power from the secret kinship of the metaphoric and the digressive as twin figures of transformative transport, and as a consequence displays the dynamics of genre as a matter of the metaphoric proximity and digressive distance – the complicity and irony on the part of both writers and readers – that makes one whispered phrase rhyme with another.

Notes 1. See Girard (1961). 2. On fetish aesthetics, see Chambers (2008a and 2008b). 3. ‘Paysage’ and ‘Le soleil’ are respectively poems LXXVI and LXXVII in Les Fleurs du mal (Baudelaire 1975). 4. See O’Hara (1964: 25–6 and 1971: 325). 5. All information about the personal background of ‘The Day Lady Died’ is drawn from Gooch (1994). 6. The Verlaine quotation is from ‘Art poétique’, in Jadis et naguère (Verlaine 1969: 261–2). 7. See Forbes (2004: 126). 8. The primary target of the Martin Place comment, however, is a poem by Les Murray, ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’.

Bibliography Baudelaire, Charles. 1975. Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Paris: Pléiade), I, pp. 82–3 Chambers, Ross. 2008a. ‘Modern Beauty: Baudelaire, the Everyday, Cultural Studies’, Romance Studies, 26.3: 249–70



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—— 2008b. ‘On Inventing Unknownness: The Poetry of Disenchanted Reenchantment (Leopardi, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Justice)’, French Forum, 33.1–2: 15–36 Forbes, John. 2004. Collected Poems, 1969–1999 (Blackheath, Australia: Brandl and Schlesinger) Girard, René. 1961. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset). Translated as Deceit, Desire and the Novel by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966) Gooch, Brad. 1994. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: HarperCollins) O’Hara, Frank. 1964. Lunch Poems (San Francisco: City Lights) —— 1971. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Knopf) Verlaine, Paul. 1969. ‘Art poétique’, in Œuvres poétiques, ed. Jacques Robichez (Paris: Garnier), pp. 261–2




5 Ian F. A. Bell

My cue is taken from Ezra Pound’s interview with Donald Hall for The Paris Review in 1962: I’ll tell you a thing that I think is an American form, and that is the Jamesian parenthesis. You realize that the person you are talking to hasn’t got the different steps, and you go back over them […] The struggle that one has when one meets another man who has had a lot of experience to find the point where the two experiences touch, so that he really knows what you are talking about. (Quoted in Dick 1972: 95) Pound, as one of the earliest and most astute sustained readers of James,2 has him as ‘weaving an endless sentence’ in Canto VII (1973: 24), and James’s biographer, Leon Edel, makes the point more expansively in his account of the novelist’s habit of dictating his later works, ‘filled with qualifications and parentheses; he seemed often, in a letter, to begin a sentence without knowing what its end would be, and he allowed it to meander into surprising twists and turns’ (Edel 1977, 2: 231). To meander, as we shall see, is an important form of digression, encouraging a new voice ‘in his use of colloquialisms, and in a more extravagant play of fancy, a greater indulgence in expanding metaphors, and great proliferating similes’ (Edel 1977, 2: 231). Such expansions and proliferations at the behest of the meandering impulse belong to the ‘endless sentence’ of James’s final two decades. Here, we are, of course, firmly in the territory of the archetypical digressive text – Tristram Shandy: When a man is telling a story in the strange way I do mine, he is obliged continually to be going backwards and forwards to keep all 64



Henry James, in Parenthesis1

Henry James, in Parenthesis 65

Metaphors and similes, particularly in their extended versions, have that degree of digression that permits figurative language to be simultaneously parallel to the main text and providing a vivid (always a crucial term in the Jamesian lexicon)3 alternative. James’s essay of 1888 on Robert Louis Stevenson chooses a metaphor from clothing to write of the ‘direct observation’ by which ‘character’ is constituted: He [Stevenson] makes his appearance in an amplitude of costume. His costume is part of the character of which I just now spoke; it never occurs to us to ask how he would look without it. Before all things he is a writer with a style – a model with a complexity of curious and picturesque garments. It is by the cut of this rich and becoming frippery – I use the term endearingly, as a painter might – that he arrests the eye and solicits the brush […] he wears a dress and wears it with courage, with a certain cock of the hat and tinkle of the superogatory sword. (James 1984a: 1232–3) The metaphor permits an absolute integration of self and style (it is harmonious to that extent) and performs such unity by a particular knowingness about its own procedures whereby the digressive nature of the metaphor digresses from itself: it is interrupted by a further figure (‘he is curious of expression and regards the literary form not simply as a code of signals, but as the key-board of a piano’) before returning to the trope of clothing – ‘the dictionary stands for him as a wardrobe, and a proposition as a button for his coat’ (James 1984a: 1232–3). And James is prepared to be playful about his knowingness; writing of the ‘gallantry’ of Stevenson’s style ‘as if language were a pretty woman, and a person who proposes to handle it had of necessity to be something of a Don Juan’ (1984a: 1232–3). James is similarly playful about the selfconsciousness of figurative language in the 1905 essay on Balzac where he considers Jane Austen’s ‘unconsciousness’: as if, at the most, for difficulty, for embarrassment, she sometimes, over her work-basket, her tapestry flowers, in the spare, cool drawing-room of other days, fell a-musing, lapsed too metaphorically, as one may say, into wool-gathering, and her dropped stitches, of these pardonable, of these precious moments. (1984b: 118)



tight together in the reader’s fancy […] there is so much unfixed and equivocal matter starting up, with so many breaks and gaps in it. (Quoted in Iser 1988: 76)

Ian F. A. Bell

Here, the joke resides not only in a technical foregrounding of metaphorical behaviour itself, but in the elaborate punctuation which can veer towards the parenthetical and in an acknowledgement (‘as one may say’) of the oral underpinnings of digression (to which I shall return, but it is worth noting here that figurative language tends to become more prominent in the ‘endless sentence’ of the later prose where James was increasingly reliant on dictating his work). More substantially, we might feel, James continues a version of the metaphor in his Preface to Roderick Hudson where he considers the general situation of the artist as presenting the plain moral that a young embroiderer of the canvas of life soon began to work in terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of that surface, of the boundless number of its distinct perforations for the needle, and of the tendency inherent in his many-coloured flowers and figures to cover and consume as many as possible of the little holes. The development of the flower, the figure, involved thus an immense counting of holes and a careful selection among them. (1984b: 1041) Embroidery and sewing are entirely appropriate for the ways in which digressive metaphor ebbs and flows, weaving itself in and out of the main narrative to illustrate not only one of digression’s principal features but also an abiding tenet of James’s entire aesthetic – his sense of art as relational, famously proclaimed in the same Preface: Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. (James 1984b: 1041) His relational embroidery marks the mobility of both writing and reading and its geometry is dedicated to appearance. Much earlier, in ‘The Art of Fiction’ in 1884, a more elaborate equation for the tensile compact of the factual and the factitious is offered. The ‘supreme virtue’ of a novel caught in one of James’s more striking parentheses (striking because of its potentially contradictory nature), the ‘air of reality (solidity of specification)’ (James 1984a: 53).4 Here is the characteristic Jamesian vocabulary of resistance to the seemingly given, whereby the writer produces ‘the illusion of life’, an art that ‘competes with life’ in which the necessary ‘solidity’ is preserved through the taking of notes – ‘He cannot



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possibly take too many, he cannot possibly take enough’ (James 1984a: 53).5 I shall return to this tension later (briefly rehearsed, it is between the ‘Romance’ form in Hawthorne and the factual plenitude in Balzac), but here the relational system of things is allied to their limitlessness – ‘Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms’, expressed through a donatively engineered metaphor: Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. (James 1984a: 52)6 An ‘endless sentence’ indeed, and the resistance to closure in favour of the more oblique possibilities offered by metaphoric digression makes a return in the Preface to The American: The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by the rope we know where we are, and from the moment that cable is cut we are at large and unrelated: we only swing apart from the globe – though remaining as exhilarated, naturally, as we like, especially when all goes well. The art of the romancer is, ‘for the fun of it’, insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him. (James 1984b: 1064–5) Again, there is a distinct playfulness here (his sense of the liberations permitted by the digressive romance ‘for the fun of it’) as James delights in the knowing artfulness of his text (‘There are drugs enough, clearly – it is all a question of applying them with tact; in which case the way things don’t happen may be artfully made to pass for the way things do’) and in the ‘ingenuity’ of the ‘hocus-pocus’ by which Christopher Newman’s ‘adventure’ is portrayed (James 1984b: 1064–5). One of the most useful ways of approaching James’s meandering is through William James’s The Principles of Psychology, in particular the chapter on ‘The Stream of Thought’, where he complains of our ‘inveterate’ habit of ‘not attending to sensations as subjective facts, but of simply using them as stepping-stones to pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal’ (James 1971: 48). Attending to sensations as ‘facts’ which are ‘subjective’ (Henry’s version in ‘The Art of Fiction’ is a ‘direct personal impression’ [James 1984a: 52]) and not




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language works against our perception of the truth. We name our thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else. What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for, with dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought to be named after all of them, but it never is. (James 1971: 54–5) William James’s preference is for the ‘transitive’ aspects of thought and word as opposed to their ‘substantive’ aspects, their ‘places of flight’ rather than ‘resting places’ (1971: 55–6), because it is in the former that we find the relational nature of subjectivity. So caught up with the ‘substantive’ are words and thoughts that the ‘thousand other things’ become suppressed, and with a wonderful scepticism about ‘existing language’, James claims: ‘We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold’ (1971: 57–8). His conjunctive lexicon resists the empiricist ‘error’ of ‘supposing that where there is no name no entity can exist where, consequently’ all dumb or anonymous psychic states have, owing to this error, been coolly suppressed; or, if recognized at all, have been named after the substantive perception they led to, as thoughts ‘about’ this object or ‘about’ that, the stolid word about engulfing all their delicate idiosyncrasies in its monotonous sound. (James 1971: 58) For William James the referential and representational stolidity and monotony of ‘about’ is inimical to the relational openness of conjunctive (and digressive) possibilities. Here is a perceptual proclivity that he recognizes as a ‘definite’ and ‘distinct’ form of consciousness, understood as transitive and unavailable to the illusory comfort of stolid articulation. It sees ‘psychic transitions’ which are ‘always on the wing’ and ‘not to be glimpsed except in flight’, transitions which ‘lead from one set of images to another’, maintaining the ‘feeling of direction’ suppressed by ‘full presence’, and James asks: has the reader never asked himself what kind of mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore; and yet how much of it



merely as temporary solidities, is a matter not only of epistemology but of language:


The project here, as for the ‘radical empiricism’ of James’s thought more generally, is to give body, as it were, to this kind of ‘mental fact’, to its sensorial elusiveness, and he is quite clear about his ambition to enflesh ‘these rapid premonitory perspective views’: ‘tendencies’ are not only descriptions from without […] they are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in very large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all. It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention. (James 1971: 61–2) It is the experientiality of the vague that orchestrates to a great extent James’s ideas of subjectivity which in turn underwrite his commitment to the relational character of things – a character neglected by the predilection for the substantive at the expense of the transitive, for the definite image rather than projective vagueness. With every image, he argues, goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo of penumbra that surrounds and escorts it. (James 1971: 62) Within the Jamesian philosophy, as he claims in a later essay, ‘A World of Pure Experience’, his ‘experienced relations’ must be accounted as ‘“real” as anything else in the system’; the most important members of ‘conjunctive relation’ are the forms of ‘continuous transition’, and it is these which resist the substantive and the definite, the ‘resting places’ of thought which lead to the anaesthetization of abstract thinking (James 1971: 1160). The hallmark of relations, conjunctions and transitions is that simultaneously they are nominatively vague and experientially real. William James’s ‘Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic?’ argues that while we ‘live’ in conjunctions, our state is literally transitional and that We can not, it is true, name our different living ‘ands’ or ‘withs’ except by naming the different terms towards which they are moving



consists of definite sensorial images, either of words or of things? Hardly anything. (James 1971: 60)7

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More is involved here than a sustaining of a freshly considered reality and a questioning of stabilities and their legitimating boundaries. A cue is given by the metaphor of the ‘mosaic’ that James develops for his philosophy: ‘In radical empiricism there is no bedding; it is as if the pieces clung together by their edges, the transitions experienced between them forming their cement’; he admits the partiality of the metaphor, but is keen to maintain that it ‘serves to symbolize the fact that Experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges’ (James 1971: 1180). These edges take boundaries and borders of conjunctive relations away from the monotony and stolidity of confinement and limit towards the more open, and more vague arena of liminality and permeability – the potential for alterability which may challenge the hierarchies and authorities of both traditional philosophy (for William) and narrative and logic (for Henry). William’s advocation of the vague feeds into Henry’s admiration for Alphonse Daudet’s capacity for being ‘truthful without being literal’ and having a ‘pair of butterfly’s wings attached to the back of his observation’ (1984b: 239, 242), and it is not difficult to picture William in the ‘car’ of the deeply ambiguous ‘balloon of experience’ prescribed by Henry. The digressive lexicon associated with the relational ‘vague’ that I have tried to sketch here (tendency, halo, conjunction, transition, edge, permeability, liminality) is captured by this wonderful metaphor for Henry’s meanderings: it is not under the balloon itself that the writer swings but under ‘that necessity’ of its being tied to the earth. Engagement and disengagement interfere with each other remarkably here, and that interference dissuades us from the ‘documentary’ form of knowledge that may be associated with representation. The ‘fun’ and ‘hocus-pocus’ that register the knowingness of the metaphor are extended into the ‘gambol’ of ‘frolic fancy’ differentiated from the decision-making process of ‘a board of trustees discussing a new outlay’ (James 1984b: 1057–8) – a brilliant trope for subverting those forms of knowledge and authority permitting encumbered representation and a faith in the ‘substantive’ which instigate ‘resting places’ and suppress the permeable conjunctions of the ‘transitive’ and the relational. ‘Really, universally, relations stop nowhere’ is one of the greatest Jamesian lessons – his, in Bakhtin’s phrase, ‘dialogic imagination’ – which counters singularity, opens words and things to what is other, rather than freezing them into manipulable categories, which is sceptical of binaries and schismatic perception, of interpretation and



us, but we live their specifications and differences before those terms explicitly arrive. (James 1971: 1204)8

fixed definition, is committed to the liberties of alterability and which persuades a dispersive and mobile selfhood (however difficult and painful that may be) against the forms of totality and authoritarianism associated with autonomous selfhood, where the effort to construct a unified self depends always upon the suppression of others. For James, being is fixed and objects or landscapes are solid only on a temporary and provisional basis, as a means of getting about, as points of departure.9 The knowingness of the ‘fun’ James has with figurative language suggests a self-reflectivity that, again, is a feature of the digressive text. The sheer bulk of his critical writing10 suggests a general commitment to a seemingly endless questioning of the relations between self and text, but there are specific moments when digression is recognized formally in its own right. The opening chapter of Washington Square (1880), for example, concludes with a vignette of the central female character, Catherine Sloper: She grew up a very robust and healthy child, and her father, as he looked at her, often said to himself that, such as she was, he at least need have no fear losing her. I say ‘such as she was’, because, to tell the truth – But this is a truth of which I will defer the telling. (James 1965: 8) This is quite extraordinary narrative disturbance: the slippage from ‘said to himself’ and ‘I say’ is a strident interruption of flow, and while James promises to ‘defer the telling’ of the ‘truth’, of course it is never given. Less strident, but rather more complex, is the account of Austin Sloper’s choice of location in the Square itself. The house is built in 1835, embodying ‘the last results of architectural science’ (James 1965: 16) within a city that is moving rapidly northwards with ceaseless invention (James 1965: 25); the house, claiming resistance to all this bustle as an ‘ideal of quiet and genteel retirement’, paradoxically shares this modernity, but the narrative disguises its newness. With the warm glow of a backward glance, James reminds the reader that he is proposing a retrospective history on behalf of his contemporary situation. He underlines his proposal by itemizing the area’s ‘repose’ through acts of domestic memory, ingenuously foregrounded as a ‘topographical parenthesis’, which fudge the conditions of history by naturalistic colouring and an association with the notion that the area expressed ‘the look of having had something of a social history’ (James 1965: 16). Since Sloper’s move to the Square occurred at its virtual nascence, it could only exhibit such




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a look from the retrospective of the late 1870s, the period of the novel’s composition. The ‘topographical parenthesis’ is thus displayed formally as a warning against the elisions whereby nostalgia and memory both interfere with and expand the experience of history. In a sense, the parenthesis functions as a form of textual waste; an echo of what is left behind by the main narrative but remaining within it as a trace whereby past and present are given a simultaneity within consciousness while maintaining temporal distance.11 Parentheses indicate two textual events simultaneously, and the reader is asked not only to probe the relation between them but also that simultaneity itself: they are both textually present and textually (typographically) marginalized. James was increasingly alert to fiction’s self-reflexivity as he matured as a writer. ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884) applauded ‘signs of returning animation’ to theorizing of the novel, arguing famously that ‘Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints’ (James 1984a: 44–5). And digression is one of the principal tenets of this refreshed animation; as Iser notes, it ‘is meant to lay bare the narrative fabric’ (1988: 71). By resisting the illusory comprehensiveness of the full body, the full text – and thereby querying issues of control and meaning – it declares itself as belonging to a world of unbounded possibilities. John Lennard quotes Puttenham on parenthesis to good effect as the ‘first figure of tolerable disorder’, and, thinking of Sterne’s attack on Newtonian determinism and T. S. Eliot’s attack on relativity, argues elegantly: ‘The relationship between a parenthesis and its context is exactly a contrast between absolute meaning, typographically isolated, and a relative meaning, typographically interposed’ (Lennard 1991: 50, 212). In addition to Lennard and Iser, masterly and exhaustive discussions of the challenges to order orchestrated by digression have been accomplished by Anne Cotterill (2004) and, in particular, Ross Chambers (1999).12 What is rather neglected in these accounts is the way in which, for James, these challenges are invariably at the behest of one of his most persistently advocated lessons – that of freedom for both text and reader. The extended metaphor that is the ‘balloon of experience’ in the Preface to The American incorporates not only digression’s capacity for critique and unsettlement but also to specific liberations: the experience here represented is disconnected and uncontrolled experience – uncontrolled by our general sense of ‘the way things happen’ – which romance alone more or less successfully palms off on us […] There is our general sense of the way things happen – it



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abides with us indefeasibly, as readers of fiction, from the moment we demand that our fiction shall be intelligible; and there is our particular sense of the way they don’t happen, which is liable to wake up unless reflexions and criticism, in us, have been successfully drugged. (James 1984b: 1064–5) By ‘intelligible’ here is intended that anaesthetization of faculties whereby the world is unproblematically seemingly there, unquestioningly is. Throughout his career, Henry James held fast to the principle announced in ‘The Art of Fiction’ that ‘the good health of an art which undertakes so immediately to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free. It lives upon exercise, and the very meaning of exercise is freedom’ (1984a: 49). We should note that the ambition here is to ‘reproduce’ and not ‘represent’, the latter belonging too comfortably to that form of mimesis which James viewed always with considerable scepticism. Indeed, in the 1888 essay on Robert Louis Stevenson, he mounted a defence of non-realistic forms in these terms: ‘The breath of the novelist’s being is his liberty, and the incomparable virtue of the form he uses is that it lends itself to views innumerable and diverse, to every variety of illustration’ (1984a: 1248). The diversity and variety of these forms are an integral aspect of digression in that they permit a series of alternatives that can be accommodated only awkwardly within ‘realistic’ structures and so offer themselves as newly reproducible. Iser puts it well: ‘The event defies referentiality as it transgresses rules and shatters expectations, issuing forth into incalculability. Thus, by replacing the journey as the plot-line, digression enables life to make itself present as a discontinuous sequence of events, refusing to allow the drawing of any connected thread’ (1988: 73). The opposition here between ‘referentiality’, and ‘incalculability’ registers James’s willingness to confront the risk of alienating the novel as a social force, a willingness that may be inferred more generally from his interest in the complex of Novel/Romance, the material/immaterial, that may be schematized in his negotiation of the possibilities represented by Balzac and Hawthorne respectively (and to which I shall return). The ‘geometry’ of his artistry, announced in the Preface to Roderick Hudson, is read by Leo Bersani in order to argue for its distances and abstractness as more closely ‘reproducible’ than the conventional psychology of novelistic realism: It’s as if he came to feel that a kind of autonomous geometric pattern, in which the parts appeal for their value to nothing but their contributive place in the essentially abstract pattern, is the artist’s




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more successful representation of life […] The only faithful picture of life in art is not in the choice of a significant subject (James always argued against that pseudorealistic prejudice), but rather in the illustration of sense – of design-making processes. James proves the novel’s connection with life by deprecating its derivation from life; and it’s when he is most abstractly articulating the growth of a structure that James is also most successfully defending the mimetic function of art (and of criticism). (Bersani 1969: 54) Here, Jamesian freedom is to be understood ‘in the sense of inventions so coercive that they resist any attempt to enrich – or reduce – them with meaning’ (Bersani 1969: 57–8). It suggests the principle of re-composition not only on behalf of James’s own practice but also on behalf of the liberty of both his characters and his readers. James’s analyses of his craft, his geometry of fiction and human behaviour are means of selfreflection, enabling his fictions to display their own process, to escape mystification, and to make themselves available for interventions by others. By maintaining this possibility for imagining alternative worlds (a key lesson from Hawthorne), James refuses to appropriate the freedom of his readers by resisting the potential of fiction to compete with a familiar world. His predilection for ‘magnificent and masterly indirection’ points liberty in style and behaviour as equally guaranteed by the digressiveness of the oblique angle (James 1967: 118). The possibility of alternatives creates a different sense of movement which, by its meandering and digressive nature, disturbs the controlling and hierarchical movement of linear narrative with another bid for comprehensiveness – the naturalness of thinking within and beyond the linear. Of course, we never actually think within the organized grammar of complete sentences: the categories and boundaries of thought are invariably permeable as, indeed, is the office of parentheses which, by their casualness (as a kind of afterthought), approximate to the oral (later, to take on a kind of literalness as James developed the habit of dictating his works). Parentheses (unlike the recognizable punctuation of semi-colon, colon or period) are, by virtue of their oral allegiances, more akin to the spontaneous and the natural which formed such an important part of James’s view in ‘The Art of Fiction’ for the novel as ‘a living thing’, an ‘organism’. In a review of Alphonse Daudet’s Mon frère et moi in 1882, he expressed his admiration in precisely these terms: The bright light, the warm water, the spontaneity and loquacity of his native Provence have entered into his style, and made him a



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More closely, in his review of Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street in 1914, we have ‘the value of the offered thing, its whole relation to us, is created by the breath of language’ (1984a: 159), the ‘breath’ which underwrites a proximity to the meandering of digression (talking as having that fluidity of the ill-discipline and instability of the tongue) and informs James’s simultaneous fascination with and scepticism for dialect (a discourse in which he self-confessedly fell short) in the Preface to Daisy Miller: the key to the whole of the treasure of romance independently garnered was the riot of the vulgar tongue. One might state it more freely still and the truth would be as evident: the plural number, the vulgar tongues, each with its intensest note, but pointed the moral more luridly. Grand generalised continental riot or particular pedantic, particular discriminated and ‘sectional’ and self-conscious riot – to feel the thick breath, to catch the ugly snarl, of all or of either, was to be reminded afresh of the only conditions that guard the grace, the only origins that save the honour, or even the life, of dialect: those precedent to the invasion, to the sophistications, of schools and unconscious of the smartness of echoes and the taint of slang. The thousands of celebrated productions raise their monument but to the bastard vernacular of communities disinherited of the felt difference between the speech of the soil and the speech of the newspaper, and capable thereby, accordingly, of taking slang for simplicity, the composite for the quaint and the vulgar for the natural. (1984b: 1279–80) To disentangle this particularly ‘endless sentence’ (proliferating with those subordinate clauses that so often serve the office of parentheses) is not to the purpose of the present exercise save to recognize that it is the very energy of the ‘vulgar’ tongue which both attracts James’s interest and prompts his rather patrician distaste: this is ‘dialect with the literary rein loose on its agitated back and with its shambling power of traction, not to say, more analytically, of attraction, trusted for all such magic might be worth’ (1984b: 1279).14 James’s playful handling of figurative language belongs to his insistence that fiction be, above all, ‘interesting’ (throughout ‘The Art of Fiction’, for example), and I would suggest that ‘interest’ here belongs in



talker as well as a novelist. He tells his stories as a talker; they have always something of the flexibility and familiarity of conversation. (1984b: 216)13

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part to the digressive habit in Sterne’s sense: ‘Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; – they are the life, the soul of reading’ and the digressive writer ‘brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail’ (quoted in Iser 1988: 72). Sterne’s ‘sunshine’ registers digression as distinctly pleasurable in its interrupting or deferring the forward thrust of narrative (for example, the ‘happy endings’ James dismisses so sternly in ‘The Art of Fiction’ [1984a: 48]). As Anne Cotterill notes, ‘The departures of digression always postpone ends’ (2004: 4). This is the delightful delectation of delay, taking pleasure in its own unfulfilment (desire once satisfied ceases its desirability). The Preface to The American offers a telling contrast between the ‘real’ and the ‘romantic’: The real represents to my perception the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another; it being but one of the accidents of our hampered state, and one of the incidents of their quantity and number, that particular instances have not yet come our way. Fairly unproblematically, the ‘real’ is understood as invariably quantifiable, a recognizable world. By comparison, The romantic stands, on the other hand, for the things that, with all the facilities in the world, all the wealth and all the courage and all the wit and all the adventure, we never can directly know; the things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and our desire. (1984b: 1062–3) By ‘romantic’, James intends the model of Hawthorne, as we shall see; and the point here is exactly a disjunction between the order of ‘quantity’ and that of ‘desire’. For Cotterill, the pleasure here verges on the erotic: ‘Digressive speaking appears to tap and channel the energy of forbidden, disruptive emotions, while it toys with the tension between exposure and concealment’; she goes on to argue in this context for the idea of digression as holiday – ‘Digressions seem to promise a forbidden, “stealthy” pleasure in the freedom of stepping not only aside from, but also out of, stated bounds’ – and picks up on the notion of delay whereby they ‘seem to be necessary when one’s subject cannot be stated directly but must be arrived at “little by little”’ (Cotterill 2004: 30–1). James provides a fine example of such delay in his account of Isabel Archer’s ‘extraordinary meditative vigil’ in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, whereby the ‘representation simply of her motionlessly seeing’ becomes



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the ‘landmark’ of her realization about the truth of her circumstances (1984b: 1084). Ross Chambers takes a rather sterner view. Recognizing that digression is ‘licensed’ by the pleasure it gives, it is ‘a mode of pleasure which can function as a pleasurable relaxation of constraint only to the extent that it remains connected with, and hence governed by, the constrictions of discipline, system, cohesion, and linearity that it seeks to relax’ (1999: 19). But here he has in mind critical rather than creative activity for which indeed a more relaxed view is germane. I favour the ‘meander’ Edel discerns in James’s style as a term for digression’s permeability (Edel 1977, 2: 231),15 its changing of direction, of moving backwards and forwards that is both liberating but also a source of anxiety in that the movement may be sensed as undetermined and without any form whatsoever. I want to suggest, at the risk of schematization, that the issue of the parenthetical James may most productively be sketched through his sense of the two novelists who inform his aesthetic most powerfully – Hawthorne and Balzac (recognizing that Turgenev and Flaubert have only a slightly less potent influence) – to follow the hint offered by the opposition between the ‘real’ and the ‘romantic’ already identified from his Preface to The American. For James, it is a tensile relationship, attracted equally by the ‘extravagant’ plenitude of Balzac and the ‘poetic’ precinct of Hawthorne’s Romance, but equal also are the competing dissatisfactions found in each: while Balzac is problematized by size, Hawthorne is problematized by shadow (a model for the consanguinity of constraint and relaxation). The key term for Hawthorne, announced in his Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, is ‘latitude’ in relation to both style and theme, guaranteeing the liberation of both text and reader (1995a: 3–4) from the constraint of mere novelistic realism. The ‘charm’ of the novel for James was ‘of the kind that we fail to reduce to its grounds […] It is vague, indefinable, ineffable’, and its portrayal of contemporary American life is to be found in ‘the indirect testimony of his tone […] of his very omissions and suppressions’ (1967: 118–19). Such indirection and obliquity is an ‘inevitable tendency’ to ‘divergence, to following what may be called new scents’ (1967: 127) or, as ‘The Art of Fiction’ puts it, this is ‘The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things’ (1984a: 53). The imaginative resource James finds in Hawthorne is a fresh version of the ‘picturesque’, finding in the ‘landscape of the soul all sorts of fine sunrise and moonlight effects’ (1967: 88) and in a review of 1866, he celebrates a freedom of enquiry that is ‘profoundly self-conscious’ where characters ‘obtain a notion of the relation of their virtues to a




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thousand objects […] and, owing to their relations with these objects, they present a myriad of reflected lights and shadows’ (1984b: 434–5). From this freedom emerges a self-consciousness that depends upon recognizing relations, two principal features of the digressive adventure. The final image here is telling, bespeaking not only complexity, diversity and colour, but also a world that is potentially fragile: lights and shadows are attractive but simultaneously deceptive because their reflections come close to the realm of appearance, performance, mirror, surface and social gambit (the risk James takes with his version of Hawthorne’s New England in The Europeans of 1878). While James applauds Hawthorne’s resistance to ‘literal exactitude’, he also faults The Marble Faun where ‘the element of the unreal is pushed too far’ (1967: 129, 152, 154). Nevertheless, he finds the inhabitants of The Blithedale Romance as ‘not afflicted with a Gallic passion for completeness’ and regards America’s youthfulness and experimentation as leading to a sense of ‘relativity’ which ‘replaces the quiet and comfortable sense of the absolute as regards its own position in the world which reigns supreme in the British and in the Gallic genius’ (1967: 85, 142). Completeness and the absolute are exactly the points of resistance for the digressive temperament which James finds in the ‘experience’ of the Romance form in his Preface to The American: ‘experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it’ (1984b: 1064). The ‘Gallic passion for completeness’ is, of course, best exemplified by Balzac, a story that is too familiar to warrant rehearsal here, but it is notable that James’s first essay on Balzac in 1875 attended to this very issue: ‘His great ambition and his great pretension as a social chronicler was to be complete’ (1984b: 34). An essay of 1902 again attends to the sheer scale of the Balzacian enterprise in largely approving terms, but noting that its density can suffer from ‘that odd want of elbow-room’ (1984b: 91) and in 1905 remarking that his ‘extravagance is also his great fault’ (1984b: 126). It is at this very point in the later essay that Balzac’s enterprise takes on a distinctively digressive and Hawthornesque tone, allowing his readers to ‘live vicariously – succeed in opening a series of dusky passages in which, with a more or less childlike ingenuity, we can romp to and fro’ (1984b: 127). James’s ‘romp’ returns us to the knowing playfulness of his figurative language. In the Preface to What Maisie Knew, he tackles the notion of ‘theme’ with considerable élan: Once ‘out’, like a house-dog of a temper above confinement, it defies the mere whistle, it roams, it hunts, it seeks out and ‘sees’ life; it can



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This witty simile points the joyfulness of digressive behaviour, freed momentarily from the constraints of the actual and returning to it with the possibility of transformation. Digression’s ties to the actual are never severed, but it enables a revisiting with fresh eyes, playing with a release from formula but also with a code of sorts of its own. With Hawthorne in mind, James writes of Turgenev’s ‘vividness’ in 1874 as remaining ‘imaginative, sportive, inconclusive, to the end’ (1984b: 997). If resistance to the illusion of completeness in all its forms is the principal feature of James’s transformative digression, it carries also elements of the self-reflexive, the relational, the oral, the erotic and the playful. If the case of Balzac provides the ground of the exercise then the case of Hawthorne offers its complementary latitude for both writer and reader. For James, in short, the size of Balzac is held in productive tension with the shadow of Hawthorne.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

I am grateful to Theresa Saxon for the acute punctuation of my title. See his 1918 essay for The Little Review (Pound 1963: 295–338). His responses to Turgenev are an apposite example (James 1984b: 968–1034). The phrase is repeated in his essay on Turgenev in the same year, albeit less problematically: ‘He cared, more than anything else, for the air of reality’ (1984b: 1011). ‘Try to be someone on whom nothing is lost’ was his advice to the aspiring novelist. It is but a short step to recognizing how the life of a text depends upon this view of the relational: ‘A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts’ (James 1984a: 54). Both brothers would be in sympathy with Emerson’s essay on ‘Experience’ where he claims: ‘Nature hates calculators; her methods are salutatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic movements are such; and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate; and the mind goes antagonising on, and never prospers but by fits’ (Emerson 1981: 338). It is here that he recognizes the idea of flow assumed by the ‘doctrine of the reality of conjunctive relations’ in which these relations are ‘parts constitutive of experience’s living flow’ and not ‘as they appear in retrospect, each fixed as a determinate object of conception, static, therefore, and contained within itself’. It is against this ‘relationalistic tendency to treat experience as chopped up into discontinuous static objects’ that radical empiricism ‘protests’. He offers a similar argument in ‘A World of Pure Experience’ (James 1971: 1181).



be brought back but by hand and then only to take its futile thrashing. (1984b: 1159–60)

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9. I have attempted to sustain this reading in Bell (1991). 10. The two-volume Library of America edition of his critical works lists more than 300 essays, prefaces, notes and commentaries, excluding the essays on art and drama and the travel writings. 11. As Wolfgang Iser has argued, ‘measurable time runs forward, which is contrary to the time of the subject. For his time is not a linear movement, but it is a ceaseless re-emerging of the past from whatever may be the standpoint chosen in the present’ and that digression ‘signalises subjectivity as “comprehensive” time, i.e. as an unending interpenetration of past and present’ (Iser 1988: 77). In a fascinating paper on the Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, Amber K. Regis (2007) writes of the various sources and multiple perspectives contributing to the text: ‘Symonds saw this supplementary and digressive textual practice as the only means to represent the self.’ For Regis, the inclusion in the original text of letters, anecdotes, diaries and various other forms of printed material (excavated with wonderful diligence) precludes that singleness of voice, denying alternative versions of the self, produced by the illusion of ‘generic fixity and unified subjectivity’. (I have had the benefit of an advance copy of ‘Erasing Digression from the Memoirs of John Addington Symonds’, and I am grateful for help and advice in the drafting of the present essay.) James’s playfulness in turn belongs to that rather neglected area of his aesthetic, the concern with surface and performance, of which the best example in the early fiction is the figure of Eugenia in The Europeans of 1878 (see Bell 1991: 147–72). 12. In Loiterature, in addition to wide-ranging and impressive scholarship, Chambers treats his subject with great wit. 13. An essay of the following year repeats the point: ‘His manner is the manner of talk’ (James 1984b: 231). Of Hawthorne himself, James claimed in 1879: ‘The tone of his writing is often that of charming talk – ingenious, fanciful, slow-flowing, with all the lightness of gossip, and none of its vulgarity’ (1967: 97). Cf. the account of Turgenev in 1884 (1984b: 1008). 14. The clearest example of the ‘riot’ in an American context would be Whitman, and it is worth noting how dismissive James was in his review of Drum-Taps in 1865 (1984a: 629–34). 15. It is a term favoured also by Cotterill as she develops the image of the labyrinth or maze in opposition to the straight line. She quotes Angus Fletcher – ‘The loss of direction is a lost sense of direction […] The thinking of the labyrinth is the problem of the labyrinth. It is not so much a trial of strength as a kind of perceptual skill. The meandering passage promotes always a thinking into one’s state of mind’ – and goes on to quote Thomas Greene on straight lines where meandering ‘diverts and entangles these lines, thus rendering explicit a half-conscious fear that human experience is indeed an entanglement of lines, of progressions, of sequences, we had been led to expect to remain distinct’ (2004: 9).

Bibliography Bell, Ian F. A. 1991. Henry James and the Past: Readings into Time (London: Macmillan) Bersani, Leo. 1969. ‘The Jamesian Lie’, Partisan Review, 36: 53–79



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Chambers, Ross. 1999. Loiterature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press) Cotterill, Anne. 2004. Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press) Dick, Kay, ed. 1972. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (Harmondsworth: Penguin) Edel, Leon. 1977. The Life of Henry James, 2 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin) Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1981. Selected Writings of Emerson, ed. Donald McQuade (New York: Modern Library) Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1973. The Scarlet Letter (Harmondsworth: Penguin) —— 1995a. The House of the Seven Gables (London: Dent) —— 1995b. The Marble Faun (London: Dent) Iser, Wolfgang. 1988. Tristram Shandy (Cambridge University Press) James, Henry. 1965. Washington Square (Harmondsworth: Penguin) —— 1967. Hawthorne, ed. Tony Tanner (London: Macmillan) —— 1984a. Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: The Library of America) —— 1984b. Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: The Library of America) James, William. 1971. William James: The Essential Writings, ed. Bruce Wilshire (New York: Harper and Row) Lennard, John. 1991. But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parenthesis in English Printed Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press) Pound, Ezra. 1963. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber) —— 1973. The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions) Regis, Amber K. 2007. ‘Erasing Digression from the Memoirs of John Addington Symonds’ (unpublished conference paper, Textual Wanderings: The Theory and Practice of Digression in Literature, Leeds Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds, 30 November)




A Slice of Watermelon: The Rhetoric of Digression in Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog’1 Peter J. Rabinowitz and Corinne Bancroft ‘Passed in silence’ In September 1846, Johann Gottfried Galle and Heinrich d’Arrest first observed the planet later called Neptune. Except among astronomers, this event barely registered at the time, and even now, it has had no impact on literary studies. It was surely not in Chekhov’s mind when he introduced a curious non-event a quarter of the way through ‘The Lady with the Dog’ (1899). After a week’s suave flirtation, Gurov, a practised ladies’ man, finally makes it into the hotel room of the inexperienced Anna Sergeyevna; but he finds her response to their sexual encounter ‘odd and disconcerting’. Anna pulls out the cliché, ‘You will never respect me anymore’; Gurov finds himself at a loss. ‘On the table was a watermelon. Gurov cut himself a slice from it and began slowly eating it. At least half an hour passed in silence’ (1979: 225). Why do we align these two unconnected events, one a historical moment that passed by almost unnoticed and one a fictional moment in which nothing happens?2 And why, for that matter, talk about Chekhov’s fiction in a book on digression? ‘Everyone knows’ that Chekhov’s plays are full of digressions – one might even argue, with only a dash of hyperbole, that their scenes of conversational non-connection are nothing but digression. The mature stories, in contrast, are lean and direct, with none of the self-conscious flamboyance usually associated with digression; and they do not expand the scope of fiction in the manner of such digressive experiments as Tristram Shandy or Pale Fire. Surely we are rowing upstream? Perhaps. But given the nature of the subject, study of digression inevitably pushes against the current, and we ask you to bear with us as we make three interrelated points that we hope will justify our eccentric 82



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choices. First, digression itself – a category that, like ‘the novel’, resists definition – has more eddies and inlets than we often realize, and some of those less dramatic eddies are just as resonant as the detours that usually serve as exemplars. Second, the discovery of Neptune provides a template for understanding a rarely noticed and undertheorized subset of such modest digressions. Third, this half-hour blank – a blank that appears an interpretive irrelevancy, a minor detail of no significance – is the story’s key moment, and thinking about it in terms of digression not only gives insight into ‘Lady with the Dog’, but also casts light on Chekhov’s fiction more broadly.

‘The most complicated part’ Since digression has a wide range of meanings, we would like to begin with a series of distinctions that situate our rarely noticed type of digression and our perspective on it. First, we are talking specifically about a type of narrative digression. Digressions in poetry, philosophy and elsewhere operate according to different laws and have different kinds of effects. Second, we are concerned with digressions in narratives, not with digressive narratives such as the class of texts Ross Chambers has dubbed ‘loiterature’. Loiterature is a genre (Chambers 1994: 20); digression is a technique. Furthermore, our inquiry into this technique is grounded in post-classical narratology (in particular, rhetorical narrative theory) rather than post-structuralism. That is, as we believe appropriate in an essay on Chekhov, we are leaving aside the metaphysics, the jouissance, or the subversive political potential of digression.3 Rather, we are concerned with digression’s rhetorical potential as a way of guiding reader experience. In analysing this rhetorical potential, we will be relying on the schema set out in Before Reading, which charts four types of rules that readers apply as they make sense of texts: rules of notice (which tell us where to direct our attention), rules of signification (which allow us to draw meanings from the details we notice), rules of configuration (which allow us, as we read, to create larger patterns out of details we have noticed, and thus to develop expectation and a sense of closure) and rules of coherence (which allow us, once we have finished a text, to ascribe more generalized meanings, including thematic meanings, to the work as a whole) (Rabinowitz 1987). Third, we are distinguishing digression from transgressions more generally. Narrative digressions are a subclass of swerves that run against the expectations set up by the narrative so far and that thus challenge



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Peter J. Rabinowitz and Corinne Bancroft

the reader’s understanding of the rules (particularly rules of configuration) in effect; transgressions are provocative violations of more general protocols (political, social, sexual) established outside the text. The two, of course, overlap: Lucky’s explosion in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot breaks the play’s momentum, and does so in socially transgressive ways. But Stavrogin’s description of raping a child in Dostoevsky’s The Devils is transgressive without being digressive; the guest list in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is digressive without being transgressive. Even once we have narrowed the field this way, of course, we face a variety of narrative swerves. There are lurches on the level of story (the interpolated Flitcraft story in Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon) and deviations on the level of discourse (the shifts of style and perspective in Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell). There are positive deviations: surpluses, elements that no one would miss if they had not been included. There are also (something less often studied) negative deviations, gaps where the text wobbles because something important has been left out or skimmed over. Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, for instance, indulges in such lavish detail that few readers complain that anything is missing. But the novel is also pierced with moments where key events are mysteriously elided: the narrator’s initiation into sex with an otherwise unmentioned cousin (1993, II: 208–9), his trip to Germany with his grandmother (1993, II: 406), his duels (1993, III: 485; V: 387). There are deviations that work primarily on the level of configuration – there are deviations that continue to trouble the level of coherence (there is no way to make the death of Owen Taylor cohere with the rest of Chandler’s The Big Sleep). To narrow in on the particular kind of digression we find in ‘Lady with the Dog’, we need one further distinction. First, we have narrative cadenzas: moments where the narrative pauses so that an author, narrator or character can give a virtuoso performance that offers pleasure on its own. The Gatsby guest list is a canonical instance; one might argue, too, that – for all its importance on the level of coherence – ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is a cadenza on the level of configuration. Traditional classical cadenzas – however far they modulate over their course – get us nowhere new, since they return us to the point where we began. Often left to the performer to improvise, they can be shortened, lengthened, snipped out or substituted without major structural harm. Second, we have true narrative modulations, during which the narrative slides into new terrain. For the rest of this essay, we will be dealing primarily with a special subclass of modulation. What makes it special? This brings us back to 1846. The discovery of Neptune improved our understanding of the solar system, but it



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represented a methodological advance as well. Whereas the planets closer to the sun were discovered through optical observation, Neptune’s existence and location were initially established indirectly. Uranus did not move as Newton’s laws seemed to predict – and by examining its deviation (or, to use the more technical term, its perturbation) from its expected orbit, astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier was able to determine the invisible gravitational force working on it and to tell Galle and d’Arrest where to look. Since the digressions in which we are interested here are something of this sort, we will term them perturbative digressions. Like the deviations in Uranus’s orbit, perturbative digressions have a crucial doubleness: they are unexpected and at first inexplicable; but they point to something otherwise invisible that allows us deeper understanding of the universe they inhabit. Thus, in formal terms, they can be described as apparently unmotivated (or significantly undermotivated) deviations from the textual norm, including apparently unmotivated changes in what James Phelan calls local ‘tensions’ and ‘instabilities’ (1996: 30). More important for our purposes, though, in rhetorical terms they invoke a rule of signification that we call the Rule of Causal Extrapolation: perturbative digressions are to be read as invitations to figure out the unseen force or hidden motivation that produces them. Thus, perturbative digressions are distinguished from normal changes in plot direction because they are apparently unmotivated. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth changes her attitude towards Darcy, but there is no mystery about why; likewise, we understand why Raskolnikov turns himself in. They are distinguished from plot filler – for instance, what Seymour Chatman (1978) calls ‘satellites’ as opposed to ‘kernels’4 – not only because they are modulations rather than cadenzas, but also, more important, because they are invitations to serious reinterpretation of what is driving the plot. In Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Kazbich tells how he escaped from the Cossacks. The nominal point of this storywithin-a-story is to tout the quality of his horse; but since we already know the horse’s value, this passage serves as a satellite to garnish established facts with local colour, not as an invitation to interpretive labour. Perturbative digressions may be disguised as satellites, but are counterintuitively kernels because, despite their subtlety, they play a twofold function, not only moving the plot forward, but also changing its direction. At the same time, perturbative digressions differ from narrative compromises because we are intended to give them notice. The Devils is full





of awkward narrative shifts, but these result from competing needs that require mutually contradictory means. Dostoevsky wants to explore how the understanding of momentous events is coloured by perspective and how gossip affects community transmission (most conveniently done with a narrator involved in the action); at the same time, he wants to explore the private psychology of his most tormented characters (most conveniently done with omniscient narration). He solves the problem inelegantly by lurching from one technique to another – but far from offering these jolts as an invitation to interpretation, he intends the inconsistencies to go unnoticed. The invitation to interpretation does not mean that the force behind the digression will be found. Some perturbative digressions, like the negative digression of Miles’s discharge from school in James’s Turn of the Screw, remain ambiguous. But in such cases, the impossibility of interpretation remains part of the rhetorical point. And in all cases, perturbative digression represents the author’s trust in the reader – trust that the reader will both recognize the invitation and follow it up. The subtler the perturbation, the greater the trust – and few perturbative digressions are as subtle as the half-hour of silence as Gurov eats his melon.

‘Every individual existence revolves around mystery’ ‘You will never respect me anymore’ – we know immediately where this is going. A long uncomfortable silence following awkward sex seems only to emphasize that the affair with Anna will be, like Gurov’s other liaisons, temporary – perhaps briefer than most since as Gurov listens, he is ‘bored to death’ (1979: 225). If we notice the silence at all, it is because Gurov’s response seems rudely inappropriate, a mini-cadenza recapitulating his patronizing dependency on the ‘lower race’ (1979: 222).5 After this brief pause, the plot line seems to return to normal. A romantic visit to Oreanda gets their affair back on track, and this section closes with the mutual understanding of the transitory nature of their Yalta affair. Yes, we still know where this is going: we have read stories about vacation adultery before and have met wolves like Gurov and dissatisfied women like Anna. More important, we have read other Chekhov stories and we develop expectations by applying rules of configuration we have learned from a familiar Chekhovian plot structure: a character lives a predictable existence; something (a death, a love affair, a marriage) happens that ought to bring about change; life nonetheless continues as it was.



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In this case, however, life does not continue as it was. As their affair continues against all odds, Gurov has, in the final pages, a revelation about the ‘double life’ that is the subject of so many Chekhov stories. It is at this point that we most clearly understand that we have had a major modulation. It is not simply that Gurov describes the secret kernel (зерно) of his existence (his love for Anna) using positive, albeit corny, adjectives (‘important, interesting, essential […] sincere’) and distinguishing that genuine self from the ‘husk’ (оболочка) of his inauthentic performances in daily life (1979: 233). It is not simply that he comes to recognize – in opposition to traditional bourgeois ethical principles – that his real truth is separate from and opposed to his professional and family activities, that, as Janet Malcolm puts it, ‘a lie […] can be the fulcrum of truth of feeling, a vehicle of authenticity’ (2001: 38). More important, he applies this broad ethical realization both to himself and to others. By the end of the story, he grants strangers the benefit of the doubt, ‘always assuming that the real, the only interesting life of every individual goes on as under cover of night, secretly’ (1979: 233). This shift from the disgust at the habitual false performances and the ‘savage manners’ (1979: 229) of his peers and previous lovers to the generous concession that they may also have some kernel underneath indicates that Gurov has begun to come to terms with the complexity of performance norms, and is now able both to resist them and to resist judging others. On the surface, this revelation seems the turning point in the story, the moment where Gurov comes into his own. But in fact the trajectory has been altered long ago, even though the evidence is subtle at first. Gurov may begin as what Donald Rayfield calls ‘a cynical enchanter’ (1999: 172), but we see an unexpected tremor of difference already as he sees Anna leave Yalta. It is more pronounced upon his return to Moscow. He cannot forget Anna; in fact, she becomes clearer in his mind. What instigates this swerve? Is the half-hour of silence a perturbative digression, a modulation shifting the orbit of the story?6 If so, the Rule of Causal Extrapolation asks us to examine it, as Leverrier did Uranus’s perturbation, to discover what hidden force caused it. What did Gurov see in Anna that caused him to spend half an hour silently eating a watermelon when he could have dismissed Anna’s doubts easily or left the room? What pulled him off his trajectory of short-lived inauthentic affairs, first sending him like a madman to S. in search of a woman who had appeared but an awkward summer fling and eventually leading him to deep ethical insight? As we have said, the silence is placed so unostentatiously (clearly not in a privileged position) and gets so little textual attention (in





Russian, seven words describe a half-hour) that it does not initially attract much attention. On rereading, though, it seems to evoke several rules of notice. A long awkward silence during a sex scene and this departure from Gurov’s established norm is arguably a slight rupture, usually a call for attention (Rabinowitz 1987: 65–75). In addition, there is a general rule that elements establishing a continued pattern are to be noticed. While it is difficult to apply this rule when we first read the page, looking back at the scene in terms of the later husk/kernel metaphor, it is retrospectively clear that Anna’s response to their lovemaking is an early manifestation of that theme. Gurov recognizes its resonance almost immediately, because it disrupts his pattern. In the past, he has categorized women – and hence controlled his emotions towards them – according to the acts they choose to put on: whether they view sex as a simple pleasure, a metaphysical breakthrough or a predatory battle, their outer performances, rather than their true selves, define them.7 Anna, at this moment, is radically different, and Gurov is thrown off by her innocence and sincerity; ‘the naïve accents, the remorse, all was so unexpected’. At first, this is so unfamiliar that he nearly interprets it backwards: only her tears suggest that she is not ‘jesting or play-acting’ (1979: 225). In fact, what is key here is that she is not trying to pretend or to convince Gurov she is anything she is not. She is a non-performer – probably the first he has encountered. It is this non-performance that, gently at first, pulls him out of his orbit.8 Or, more accurately, it is Gurov’s recognition of Anna’s difference that causes the shift – his recognition that there is another way of leading one’s life, and that he too might escape from performance. This is crucial: the Neptune here is internal, not external; Gurov stops, reflects, and works with Anna towards taking agency in his own life. Anna plays the pivotal role in helping Gurov change his trajectory in three distinct ways: she shows him that people can act without performing; she explains her insight into the double life; and she is patient while he struggles to understand. Not only does her refusal to perform stop Gurov in his tracks, but, in addition, the self-contradictory and unflattering way she explains it helps him to understand her, even if it bores him at the time. Following the half-hour of silence, she says (in words similar to those he will later use to describe his kernel) that she was ‘devoured by curiosity’, that she desired ‘something higher’ and needed to escape ‘like a madwoman’ (безумная) from her flunky husband (1979: 225). Although he may not realize it at the time, Gurov’s thoughts as he decides to pursue her demonstrate at least partial understanding of this speech: ‘there was nowhere to escape to, you might as well be in



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a madhouse (в сумасшедшем доме)’ (1979: 229). When he finds her in S., she concedes that they share something essential that draws them together: ‘I lived on the thoughts of you’ (1979: 232). But this does not lead her (as it leads the title character of ‘Ariadne’) to bohemian flaunting of unconventional behaviour. Rather, Anna is careful to preserve the husk of her married life, begging Gurov to leave but simultaneously promising that she will come to him in Moscow. Here, Anna presents an inarticulate but profound acceptance of the deception intrinsic to the double life. Chekhov’s stories often document the power of inertia to congeal performance into habit, the tendency of the husk to solidify until the kernel is no longer accessible. From other Chekhov stories – and nineteenth-century Russian fiction more generally – readers reasonably expect the rigid strength of these social norms to trap Gurov and Anna and pull them apart, back to their respective ‘husk’ lives (as it does Alekhin and his Anna in ‘About Love’) or to destroy them (as nearly happens to Laevsky and Nadezhda in The Duel until they are saved by a deus ex machina). What is striking in this story is that this rigidification is averted. Instead, while the ending is hardly upbeat (‘the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning’) (1979: 235), Chekhov does give us some confidence that his characters are prepared to face the future. In Chekhov’s world, this is a considerable victory.

‘As people who are very close and intimate’ A considerable victory – and a rare victory as well. While socially rigidified performances often determine the lives of Chekhov’s characters, what is special about ‘The Lady with the Dog’ is the turn during that moment of silence. Other stories portray opportunities for the same kind of modulation. But in most cases, as we have suggested, these opportunities are missed. For instance, at the beginning of ‘The Man in a Case’, Burkin describes the power of Belikov, the local teacher of Greek, to push people into a shell or case (фуґляр) by forcing them to perform certain social rituals and assent to social norms. In ‘Gooseberries’, Ivan Ivanich describes the way his brother Nikolai’s obsessive commitment to an inflexible image of a country estate – symbolized by the presence of gooseberries – rules his life and destroys his moral fibre. Each of these stories leads to a major event that ought to change things. In ‘The Man in a Case’, Belikov dies. Since everyone has blamed his reign of fear for keeping them in line, they treat his funeral as a ‘great pleasure’, comparing the





liberation brought upon by his death to ‘childhood, when the grownups went away and we could run about […] enjoying perfect freedom’ (Chekhov 1979: 184). In ‘Gooseberries’, Ivan Ivanich clearly expects the sour berries to reveal to his brother that his country-estate quest is itself a performance. But for some reason nothing happens. If we had never read ‘The Lady with the Dog’, the stasis in ‘The Man in a Case’ and ‘Gooseberries’ might plausibly be interpreted to mean that change is simply impossible. Personal performances have become so frozen that alternative ways of life can be imagined, but not achieved. Despite the townspeople’s belief that Belikov’s death will liberate them, the return to old ways suggests that their unimaginative rigidity comes from internalized norms rather than from the enforcers they blame. In ‘Gooseberries’, Nikolai’s cramped vision has blinded him to material reality. It is thus easy to come to the pessimistic reading that habitual performance is stronger than the individual’s willpower. But with ‘The Lady with the Dog’ as a countertext, one can read the stories in another way. Is it possible that these other characters, too, had the power to change things? If so, why are these clearer opportunities for modulation missed while the subtler opportunity in ‘The Lady with the Dog’ actualized? Perhaps it is partly a matter of chance. The stars align for Gurov for three reasons: he recognizes the power of performance and the double life it implies; he pauses long enough to act on his recognition; and, absolutely essentially, he has Anna, someone to share it with.9 Failure in any of these three areas seems to result in losing your opportunity for change. Thus, some characters, like the protagonists of ‘The Teacher of Literature’ and ‘House with a Mansard’, simply do not see through the performances of the sisters they meet, and, as a result, fail to realize they have fallen for the wrong one. Others fail to pause and think. In ‘Gooseberries’, there is an awkward silence after Ivan’s rant. But unlike Gurov, the characters in the frame narrative refuse to engage, using the silence instead to dismiss any potential revelation. ‘It was not interesting to listen to the story of a poor clerk who ate gooseberries, when from the walls generals and fine ladies […] were looking down from their gilded frames. It would have been much more interesting to hear about elegant people, lovely women’ (1979: 193). The power of the paintings to arrest thought is chilling. But the most poignant stories are those where the characters come close to breaking free but cannot do so because they lack the necessary companionship. At the end of the frame narrative in ‘The Man in a Case’, Ivan makes a comment that is nearly an epiphany about



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performance, but Burkin simply goes to sleep. Although Alekhin and Anna, in ‘About Love’, recognize non-performance in each other, they cannot bring themselves to discuss it, let alone extend the revelation as Gurov does to strangers in the street. Rather than talking it over, Alekhin is content to imagine what Anna is thinking: ‘If she abandoned herself to her feelings she would have to lie, or else to tell the truth, and in her position either would have been equally terrible and inconvenient’ (1979: 199–200). And although, at the end of the story, he realizes ‘how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was’ (1979: 201), he chooses even then not to act, locking himself in the standards of a community of performers. What sets Anna and Gurov apart is their mutual understanding, most tenderly represented at the end of the story where, rather than comforting Anna inauthentically as he did in Yalta, he now shares her concerns and seriously addresses them with her. Is this analysis of digression in ‘The Lady with the Dog’ too subtle? We said earlier that perturbative digression is a rhetorical technique that relies on trust between author and reader. We might more accurately have used the word ‘intimacy’ rather than ‘trust’, since intimacy is, among other things, the ability to communicate without the need for words. What could be a more appropriate rhetorical technique for what is arguably Chekhov’s most intimate major story, a story with essentially only two characters (even the dog of the title has but a ghostly presence in the text)? In the end, then, while ‘The Lady with the Dog’ opens up insight into Chekhov’s moral universe thematically, it reinforces that insight rhetorically, by inviting readers to participate in the kind of intimacy that the story celebrates.

Notes 1. This work would not have been possible without a strong community of narrative-theory friends, including Jamie Barlowe, Alison Case, Dana Luciano, Alan Palmer, James Phelan, Cynthia Port, Brian Richardson and Priscilla Walton, not all of whom realized how they were helping out at the 2009 Narrative Conference in Birmingham. Thanks as well to Nancy Rabinowitz for close reading, to Seth Major for advice on physics and to Michael Harwick for research assistance. 2. Most critics pass over it in a silence less interesting than Chekhov’s. De Maegd-Soëp (1987) emphasizes the scene, but neglects the half-hour. Rayfield points to Gurov’s tendency to eat or drink when Anna cries (1999: 209), but similarly short-changes the silence. See also Creasman, who focuses instead on Gurov’s more dramatic ‘flights of emotion’ (1990: 257). Fulford, unusually, stresses the strangeness of the silence, but his interpretation (‘Anna




3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Peter J. Rabinowitz and Corinne Bancroft is paralyzed by shame’ and ‘Gurov has nothing to say to her’) (2004: 337) underestimates the half-hour’s impact. See Chambers’s claim that ‘digression is culture’s inevitable reminder that its law is not unique and so not necessarily as legitimate as one might like to think’ (1999: 89). Nor are we sympathetic to the recent religious rereadings of Chekhov (for example, Butler 2008). For a sharp critique of the religious approach, see McSweeny. Other theorists use other terms, but Chatman’s are deliciously appropriate to this essay. Gurov is so comfortable with women that he ‘could even be silent in their company without feeling the slightest awkwardness’ (Chekhov 1979: 222). This silence with Anna, however, is not one of those comfortable occasions. For a different reading, see Malcolm: it is a ‘mark of the cold roué that he is’ that ‘only deepens the mystery […] of his later transformation’ (2001: 9). Significantly, she stresses the watermelon, which she sees as an Edenic reference (2001: 162) rather than the silence. Our position is not identical to, but not inconsistent with, Linaker’s claim (2005), in the wake of such critics as Judith Butler, that Chekhov recognizes gender as performative. In our reading, Chekhov recognizes the way women ‘perform’ their sexuality; but he is less concerned with troubling gender in particular than with analysing social conventions more generally. Greenberg suggests that Anna is a displacement for Gurov’s ‘unconscious attraction to his adolescent daughter’ (1991: 126), an argument that ties in with Smith’s more general claim that Chekhov’s heroines are attractive for their ‘childlikeness’ (Smith 1973: 77). While unconscious incest may be part of the initial attraction, it is hard to see Anna as childlike at the end. Nor does incestuous desire in itself explain the qualities the relationship has. For a different interpretation, see Porter: ‘they have so little to talk about’ because they ‘have little in common’ (1977: 53). We are more in tune with Rayfield, who notes that ‘despite all the squalor of “affairs” […] the commitment of one human being to another’ allows us to break out of isolation and ‘get round the uselessness of words for communication’ (1999: xvi).

Bibliography Butler, Pierce. 2008. ‘The Church Bells of Easter: Chekhov and the Path of Conversion’, Commonweal, 24 October, pp. 20–4 Chambers, Ross. 1994. ‘Strolling, Touring, Cruising: Counter-Disciplinary Narrative and the Loiterature of Travel’, in Phelan and Rabinowitz, pp. 17–42 —— 1999. Loiterature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press) Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) Chekhov, Anton. 1979. Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw, trans. lvy Litvinov, Constance Garnett and Marian Fell (New York: Norton) Creasman, Boyd. 1990. ‘Gurov’s Flights of Emotion in Chekhov’s “Lady with a Dog”’, Studies in Short Fiction, 27: 257–60 De Maegd-Soëp, Carolina. 1987. Chekhov and Women: Women in the Life and Work of Chekhov (Columbus: Slavica Publishers)



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Fulford, Robert. 2004. ‘Surprised by Love: Chekhov and “The Lady with The Dog”’, Queen’s Quarterly, 111: 331–40 Greenberg, Yael. 1991. ‘The Presentation of the Unconscious in Chekhov’s Lady with Lapdog’, Modern Language Review, 86: 126–30 Linaker, Tanya. 2005. ‘A Witch, a Bitch or a Goddess? Female Voices Transcending Gender as Heard and Recorded by Chekhov, Mansfield, and Nabokov’, Slovo, 17: 165–78 Malcolm, Janet. 2001. Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random House) Phelan, James. 1996. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press) Phelan, James and Peter J. Rabinowitz, eds. 1994. Understanding Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press) Porter, Richard N. 1977. ‘Bunin’s “A Sunstroke” and Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog”’, South Atlantic Bulletin, 42: 51–6 Proust, Marcel. 1993. In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library) Rabinowitz, Peter J. 1987. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; reprint Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998) Rayfield, Donald. 1999. Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov’s Prose and Drama (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press) Smith, Virginia Llewellyn. 1973. Anton Chekhov and the Lady with the Dog (Oxford University Press)




‘Let’s Forget All I Have Just Said’: Diversions and Digressions in Gidean Narratives David H. Walker

For Gide, the essence of writing novels is to lose sight of the shore, disdaining those who hug the coastline: creation requires the authentic artist to ‘navigate for days and days without any land in sight’ (Gide 2009b: 435, 528). Given also his attachment to ‘inconséquence’ in his characters1 and adventitious happenings in the development of his narratives (Gide 1966: 56), Gide’s fictions are particularly susceptible to defying the predictable, the relevant, in pursuit of the kind of erratic outgrowths that can be grouped under the heading of ‘digressions’. A classic instance occurs early in The Vatican Cellars when the narrator apologizes for embarking on a passage which may not have a bearing on the business in hand: At this point, despite my desire to recount only the essential, I cannot let Anthime Armand-Dubois’s wen go unmentioned. For as long as I have not learned more surely to distinguish the incidental from the necessary, what else should I ask of my pen but exactness and rigour? And who indeed could affirm that this wen had no share, no weight, in the decisions of what Anthime called his free thought? (Gide 1952: 8) The narrator is conscious of the need to be relevant, to be thematically consistent. But to obey this requirement would entail a choice he feels ill-equipped to make. He is, after all, still in the opening stages of the novel and is entitled to the conceit that he does not yet know where he is going, what will turn out to have significance. The passage highlights criteria that conventionally preside over what to include and what to exclude; notably, here, whether or not a certain physiological feature might have a function in determining human behaviour and might thereby corroborate a thematic or ideological premise. And in the 94



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absence of a decisive understanding of such issues, the passage implies, the realist narrator includes things because they are there. As heir to the fin de siècle’s scorn for the novel, Gide is duty bound to show that he does not take too seriously the genre’s claim to referential fidelity or authority. Hence these lines are typical of the classic self-conscious text, defying convention by introducing an extradiegetic digression in order to raise questions about its own method and validity. This is a standard example, taken from a novel purporting to be openended, whose storyline comes into being as we read it. But Gide is well known also for his récits, retrospective narratives in which his protagonist-narrator recreates in the first person a story he or she has already lived. In this form the digression takes on a different function, as the narrative strategy is bound up with a more or less conscious need to vindicate a view of events which are already complete in the past. Here digression is bound up with stories that tell half-truths by redistributing emphases between incidents. The minister-narrator of La Symphonie pastorale provides a good illustration. In recounting the story of how he came to welcome into his family home a blind orphan whom he subsequently falls in love with, the pastor aims to make of the tale an innocuous morality, highlighting questions of education, child development and theology. The first part of the text is a retrospective retelling of how she came to stay and how the pastor initiated her education; the second part is more properly a diary in which the pastor records his day-to-day dealings with the girl and with his own family. Towards the end of part one is a section introduced by the pastor as if it were a departure from his main narrative: Gertrude was a very eager reader; but as I wished as far as possible to keep in touch with the development of her mind, I preferred her not to read too much – or at any rate not too much without me – and especially not the Bible – which may seem very strange for a Protestant. I will explain myself; but before touching on a question so important, I wish to relate a small circumstance which is connected with music. (Gide 1963: 35–6) The upcoming episode is announced as of little significance, merely an afterthought having a bearing on music (the pastor and Gertrude have recently attended a performance of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony). In fact the ‘small circumstance’ in question consists of the pastor’s stumbling upon his son giving music lessons to Gertrude; on discovering he had a rival for the girl’s affections, he has compelled Jacques to leave



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home and abandon plans to propose marriage to her. The memory of this outcome is in the pastor’s mind as he begins recounting the event, which means he is being duplicitous (or insensitive to his son’s pain) in seeking to make of it a mere digression. But even before he has embarked on this anecdote, it has fulfilled the function of a digression in that it serves to deflect attention and defer the need to explain the suspicious claim that he has sought to restrict Gertrude’s reading and above all to control her reading the Bible. Here, therefore, the digressive strategy is charged with significance as it is used by a culpable narrator to dubious and misleading ends. Gide’s third-person narrators are never quite so concerned to elude guilt. On the contrary, they exercise their freedom with some nonchalance. Having inserted into The Vatican Cellars a passage on Anthime’s wen in possible defiance of the rules of relevance, the narrator subsequently rounds on his hero Lafcadio as the latter contemplates rescuing a family from a house fire: ‘Lafcadio, my friend, here you need the pen of a newspaper reporter – mine abandons you! Do not expect me to retail the confused exclamations of the crowd, the cries’ (Gide 1952: 56). Here he refuses the extraneous material that Lafcadio’s actions would entail. He can take or leave digressions as the spirit moves him, it would seem. In this sense, digressions are part of Gide’s ludic stock in trade. Indeed he applied the playful label ‘sotie’ to many of his texts, conceding the designation ‘first novel’ only to The Counterfeiters. But this narrative features a narrator of particularly flamboyant intrusiveness, whose interjections constitute a key element in the text (Walker 1986). Two instances will give a flavour. When at a particularly dramatic moment Laura collapses, overcome with emotion, onto a chair which proves unequal to the task it is called upon to fulfil, the narrator suspends the action: ‘Here there occurs a grotesque incident, which I hesitate to recount,’ and there follows a proliferating parenthesis offering a disquisition on the particular weaknesses of the chair and, among other details, its similarity to a bird bending its leg up underneath its wing (Gide 1966: 117–18). This digression is playing with the mechanisms of suspense while giving free rein to the self-generating dynamic of literary expression. If such passages show the narrator deliberately drawing attention to narrative metalepsis, there is a further form of digression which undermines its own status. As Bernard reads the diary he has purloined from Edouard’s suitcase, three chapters reproduce the text that he reads. At the end of the second of these, ‘Bernard had to stop reading for a moment,’ we read. There follows a commentary by the narrator on his state of mind; then: ‘Let us move on. All I have said above is merely intended to introduce a little air



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between the pages of this diary’ (1966: 106). Retroactively the narrator reduces his intervention to the status of a mere digression, an insignificant aside to the ongoing process that is the stuff of the narrative. In fact Gide was already practising such techniques a quarter-century earlier, in Prometheus Misbound (Le Prométhée mal enchaîné) of 1899, a text whose wit and artistry are underestimated, in my view. It provides spectacular examples of the uses to which digressions can be put. The construction of a plot is the very stuff of this text; it is the explicit concern of the café-waiter, a character who acts as a kind of master of ceremonies or novelist within the text. His function in life is to bring people together by seating strangers at the same table, so that they may interact with one another, enabling him to study ‘the relations between personalities’ (Gide 1953: 106–7). However, despite this concern for relations, the structure of Prometheus Misbound, as its very title suggests, is disjointed. The text falls into three parts, and is divided throughout into both numbered and titled chapters; but the two types of chapter are not homologous, and do not fit into any overall structural frame. Those with titles are interrupted by divisions corresponding to the sequence of numbered chapters; and similarly, they themselves follow a sequence which cuts across the flow of the numbered chapters. No sooner do we embark on reading a sequence whose coherence is implied by its title or number, than our progression is sidetracked by a heading promising a sequence of a different kind. Thus the two sets of sequences represent alternating digressions from each other. Holdheim (1959) argues that the sequence of numbered chapters traces and corresponds to the interplay between events and between characters, while the chapters with titles highlight the individual, subjective and essentially separate state of each character. The lack of fit between the two systems suggests a kind of incompatibility between two views on human reality, a tension between two distinct domains in which human reality is played out. When the three characters Damocles, Cocles and Prometheus, seated together at the same café table, embark on their acquaintance by introducing themselves, their conversation turns on one recurring theme: the manner in which a chance event can constitute a turning point dictating someone’s destiny. What has befallen each character, as the reader pieces together while digesting their separate stories, is that they have been picked out as playthings by Zeus, the ‘millionaire’ banker, who personifies the random influences which impinge indifferently on human beings and the rest of the universe. We learn that he has fortuitously selected Cocles to address an envelope to the person whose




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name first came into his head, and to be the recipient of a mighty slap in exchange. Damocles in turn receives by mail a 500-franc note in the envelope Cocles addressed to him as ‘a perfect stranger’ (Gide 1953: 115). A point to observe is that the original encounter between Zeus and Cocles occurred through the adventitious conjunction of Zeus dropping a handkerchief and Cocles being in the vicinity. Moreover, Zeus at first merely thanks Cocles ‘and was about to continue his way, when, changing his mind, he leaned towards the thin person’ (1953: 101). He could just as easily have proceeded on his way, and none of what follows would have happened. The very existence of the story is fortuitous: its substance is a digression from what was about to happen otherwise. Moreover, the motif of alternative paths for the narrative is highlighted in subsequent events. Cocles, who first incurs a vicious slap from Zeus and then loses an eye when Prometheus’s eagle swoops down into the café, responds positively and actually does surprisingly well out of his misfortunes; he becomes the beneficiary of a public appeal and sets up a hostel for one-eyed people, appointing himself its director. On the other hand, the windfall which comes Damocles’s way unexpectedly provokes in him an enfeebling guilt, a sense of responsibility which prompts him to dispose of the money at the first opportunity (on a glass eye for Cocles, among other things); thereafter he succumbs to distress and remorse at the thought of the unknown person who had been deprived of the cash, and dwindles to death as a result. Not only are these two characters presented as illustrations of alternative outcomes from the same random event; we can also see that while the one could just as easily have received the banknote and the other the slap, so too extreme distress might have been more likely to flow from Cocles’s mischance while great happiness could more readily be imagined to ensue from the large sum of money that falls into Damocles’s lap. The pairing of these individual stories serves to illustrate a model of narrative structure which stresses the fact that any story consists of a series of moments at which digressive bifurcations occur. Thus a typical narrative sequence starts with the possibility of a certain action or event: confronted by a closed door and no answer to our knocking, we may break the door down – or we may not.2 The story proceeds, after posing the possibility or virtuality of an incident, via the realization (or otherwise) of the incident, and its result. What characterizes the stories of Damocles and Cocles is that though they conform to this process, they are shadowed, as it were, by the unrealized virtualities which, rather than being superseded by the actual course of events, remain in our minds because they are invested with a greater weight of plausibility. The sequence which realizes itself does



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not conform to primary patterns of narrative verisimilitude. Indeed it ostentatiously avoids a more conventional storyline which the reader is tempted to compose in his or her own mind on the basis of the ‘overcoded, ready-made paths’, as Umberto Eco calls them, deriving from our past experience of the kind of thing which normally happens in stories: loss of an eye triggers misfortune while acquisition of money produces an increase in happiness (see Eco 1981: 214–16). This branching narrative presents its two paths as entirely contingent, and just as likely – on balance, marginally more likely – to have produced different outcomes. What is stressed by this type of narrative structure is that events and actions do not necessarily produce the results we might expect. The ‘Epilogue’ to the book confirms this idea through its evocation of Pasiphaë who hoped that consorting with a bull might result in her producing a child of Zeus as happened to Leda after her adventure with the swan: instead of which she merely gave birth to a calf. In a sense we are here in a version of Borges’s ‘Garden of Forking Paths’, a tale in his Labyrinths: the storyline we read represents a digression from the more compelling one which for that very reason remains within our minds. Elsewhere in the story, another pair of parallel paths emerges, linking in this case the fate of Damocles and that of Prometheus. The crucial analogy lies between the remorse which is devouring Damocles and the eagle which feeds on Prometheus’s liver. The significance of the parallel derives chiefly from the outcome of each story: Damocles dies from what is eating him, while Prometheus quite literally makes a meal of his eagle, overcoming the enfeebling conscience it represents. Here too, then, the narrative presents forking paths leading from the same initial ingredients, implying that for one set of events which occurs there is an equally possible though diametrically opposed alternative. Thus the plot of Prometheus Misbound is conceived in such a way as to highlight the contingency governing human affairs. None of these things had to happen, and they could well have happened differently. They were largely ‘adventures’, in the sense of unpredictable occurrences,3 and therefore deny validity to structures involving exclusive unilinear connections between groups of events. ‘See how today everything somehow links up (tout s’enchaîne), yet instead of explaining itself becomes still more complicated,’ complains Cocles when the bare facts are initially revealed and corroborated by the separate narratives of each protagonist (Gide 1953: 116). This allusion to the title of the text calls for further consideration. What we notice in the first part of Prometheus Misbound is that the protagonists offer projections of their experience in the form of narratives: each contribution is headed




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‘The Story of [...]’. But narrative cannot accommodate the chance interaction and digressive outcomes which characterize a large part of this experience: its structure transforms open-ended, multivalent gratuitousness into one-dimensional teleological necessity; so neither singly nor together – after four different versions of the salient events – can the various narrators provide a satisfactory account of what has happened to them. Such specious connections as they can suggest by means of narrative merely complicate matters rather than explaining their situation. The whole sequence, the entire ‘chronique’, remains mal enchaîné. A noticeable exception to the pattern in part one is the fact that Prometheus’s contribution is not announced as ‘The Story of […]’, but simply with the words, ‘Prometheus Speaks’ (Gide 1953: 118). We may perhaps suppose that he has no (hi)story because he does not exist in the same contingent world as the others, being a mythological stereotype who has merely strayed into Paris from the Caucasus of legend; or alternatively, that he has had no ‘adventures’ in the short time he has been there. (The dramatic incidents his eagle precipitates suffice for it to have an ‘histoire’.) More to the point perhaps, anything he has to contribute has ‘so little connection’ (1953: 118), and therefore would not fit into the system of relations the others are seeking to construct out of their experiences.4 Prometheus’s more relevant contribution will come later; and it is significant that even then he continues to avoid narrative but adopts a different form of discourse, that of the public lecture. This represents another attempt to come up with an explanatory discourse aimed at integrating subjective experience and the external world. Prometheus’s lecture highlights once more, with particular force, the problems involved in speaking about the contingent quality of human reality. In the absence of a principle in which to ground moral discourses, Prometheus’s lecture exhibits features of another attempt at coherence, complementing those patterns of narrative coherence we have already seen discredited: here logical connections take over from cause and effect connections. They are no more effective: Prometheus ties himself up in the circular logic of the pétition de principe (begging the question) in seeking to demonstrate how people should conduct their lives. In fact Prometheus’s lecture stands as a satire of rational approaches to contingency. From the outset he invokes the standard methods of classical rhetoric in support of his case, and already the selfconscious asides hint at the digressions to come: My lecture, gentlemen, has three points; (I felt there was no need to reject this style of construction, which suits my classical turn of



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The rhetorical questions, apostrophes and rhythmic sentence structures that follow all stem from the same source and stand as flourishes intended to keep the audience’s attention while camouflaging the impossibility of his core purpose. Their comic futility is underlined by the caricatural digressions represented by Prometheus’s recourse to fireworks and obscene photographs, which he circulates at moments when his public is losing interest; and by tricks his eagle performs as diversions ‘after every tedious portion’ (1953: 134). Here we see that digressions have a role – largely phatic – and a value – entertainment value – in discourses other than narrative. By the conclusion of Prometheus’s lecture, therefore, we have been presented with critiques concerning the discourses employed to speak of gratuitousness. But the end of Prometheus’s lecture is not the end of his story; and this text has more to say on the matters it has raised. The third part of Prometheus Misbound recounts the illness and death of Damocles. These events have a considerable impact on Prometheus, since the death of Damocles was in part due to the influence of Prometheus’s own lecture. A transformed Prometheus appears at the funeral of Damocles and presents an oration which appears to exemplify a discourse better suited to engage with gratuitousness. It is an ‘Histoire’, but its form is that of narrative fiction. It does not recapitulate the lives of the protagonists, but transposes their concerns into a narrative structure which is symbolic, rather than referential. It concerns Tityrus, the erstwhile protagonist of the fiction-within-the-fiction of Paludes (1895), who devotes himself to an idea sown, in the form of a seed in the midst of his marshlands, by Ménalque. The seed grows into a tree which dries out the marshes, making them suitable for cultivation and bringing an ever-increasing burden of obligations for Tityrus as he takes on a workforce, administers the resulting population, supervizes the local economy, appoints office staff, a judiciary and so on. Finally, the commitment becomes too much for him and, prompted by his wife Angèle, he breaks the ties that bind him to his tree and heads for Paris. There Angèle in turn is captivated by the pastoral pipes of the naked Mœlibeus (like Tityrus and Menalcas a character from Virgil’s Bucolics) and leaves for Rome, disappearing arm in arm with him into the sunset. The story is judged highly amusing and is enjoyed by all the listeners, although Cocles remarks: ‘Your story was charming, and you amused



mind.) – And with this as an exordium, I will now announce, in advance and without meretricious disguise, the first two points of my discourse. (1953: 135)

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us extremely […], but I didn’t quite grasp the connection’ (1953: 171). ‘If there had been more of a connection, you wouldn’t have laughed so much,’ Prometheus replies: but Cocles’s question implies that this oration is merely a digression. At the same time it makes another crucial reference to links, connections and relationships, which run like a motif through the text as a whole. Narrative discourses reconstitute history in unilinear cause and effect sequences which do not explain reality; rhetoric and logic encapsulate moral questions within the articulations of circular arguments; does Prometheus’s fictional narrative offer a more appropriate ‘enchaînement’ of the text’s elements? The first thing to note is that though at first it appears to be a digression from the ongoing narrative around it, the ‘Story of Tityrus’ is a mise en abyme; it relates to the main narrative via structural parallels and metaphorical cross-references rather than in any linear or logical way. Passing motifs echo allusions encountered earlier in Prometheus Misbound: for example the seed parallels the slap, banknote and eagle in that it engenders proliferating obligations. Numerous other crossreferences mark the establishment of sense via associative networks, and ground the mal enchaîné text in which this digression is embedded in a homogeneous composition. So much so, suggests Helen WatsonWilliams, that the incoherence which is the raison d’être of the overall work is almost invalidated: ‘The effect of Gide’s transposition is […] to reduce the dispersed and apparently digressive story of Prometheus to its main outline’ (1967: 52). Above all, the fiction is itself gratuitous; it represents therefore humanity’s appropriate response to the contingency of the universe. Prometheus both prefaces and follows his story with the words: ‘Let’s forget all I have just said’ (Gide 1953: 163, 171). This is perhaps the ultimate formulation of a pointless digression: he could just as easily not have said anything. He has produced a discourse which does not arrogate to itself a false impression of logical, moral or mechanical necessity. Prometheus declares after the company have eaten the eagle that he has kept all its feathers; and the narrator, in the final lines of the narrative, announces: ‘It is with a pen made from one of them that I have written this little book’ (1953: 173). The remark extends the scope of the debate about the eagle and its uses beyond the world of the diegesis, and prompts us to consider the relationship of the author to the fiction. This relationship is of course already inherent in the portrayal of Prometheus’s development into a storyteller; but in Prometheus Misbound can be seen clear indications of Gide’s own developing aesthetic of the novel (Goulet 1981). Already he is presenting a highly self-conscious



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example of the genre, setting out to question novelistic conventions through its form as well as its content. Most notably for present purposes, transitions in the story are handled with a cavalier disregard for coherence and consistency, as we have seen in connection with the two contradictory systems of chapter divisions. The leitmotif ‘while we’re on the subject, here is an anecdote’ marks transitions which inaugurate digressions and highlight the actual lack of connection between the elements thus linked (Fillaudeau 1985: 108); and when the same phrase is uttered by characters within the story after initially being established as an instrument of the narrator (Gide 1953: 105, 107, 163) it provokes a subtle kind of disjunction since the overlap between the language of the narrator and that of the characters suggests a narrative metalepsis, or blurring of levels in the narrative hierarchy, which takes digression further as a challenge to conventional consistency of technique. Frequently the narrator breaks into the fabric of his fiction with digressive remarks which draw our attention to the fact that the text is an artificial construction: ‘The reader will allow us […] to pay no further attention for the present to a person of whom he will see quite enough in the sequel’ (1953: 102) he says in conclusion to the opening sequence. Later, he brings an episode to a close with the remark: ‘The end of this chapter can present only a much inferior interest to the reader’ (1953: 122); and one chapter heading actually reads: ‘A Chapter to Keep the Reader Waiting for the Next’ (1953: 131). Elsewhere the narrator admits he is not omniscient and introduces a new chapter with the words: ‘Not having known him personally, we have promised ourselves to speak only briefly of Zeus […] Let us report simply these few phrases’ (1953: 151). Similarly, the chapter titles interrupt the flow of the narrative – reinforcing the impression of a narrative which is mal enchaîné or digressive – to tell us what is coming while paradoxically postponing its arrival: Damocles said: THE STORY OF DAMOCLES. (1953: 110–11) All these devices are typical of a certain kind of self-conscious digressive fiction, drawing on eighteenth-century models such as Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or Fielding’s Tom Jones. Gide’s most significant contribution to the trend is generally held to be The Counterfeiters, but Prometheus Misbound can be seen to anticipate the techniques of the later text by a quarter of a century. The interactive aspects of digressions are foregrounded, held up for scrutiny: ‘Gentlemen, I see, from the absence of your amazement that I am telling my story badly,’




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says Damocles (1953: 112) and the phatic aspects of digressions – used as ingredients to maintain the reader’s attention – are satirized in the fireworks and photographs which Prometheus distributes during his lecture. Hence Prometheus Misbound can be seen to be flamboyantly self-conscious, flaunting its own digressions. It highlights in its burlesque way the interpenetration of forms and structures which are used conventionally to create an impression of a seamless reality. Here the resolutely disjoined – mal enchaîné – structure through which they are presented makes of Prometheus Misbound a forerunner of those modern texts of which Jonathan Culler has written: ‘In place of the novel as mimesis we have the novel as a structure which plays with different modes of ordering and enables the reader to understand how he makes sense of the world’ (1975: 238).

Notes 1. ‘Inconsistency. Characters in a novel or play who act all the way through exactly as one expects them to […] This consistency of theirs, which is held up to our admiration, is on the contrary the very thing which makes us recognize that they are artificially composed’ (Gide 1966: 295). 2. Bremond has developed a model of narrative as bifurcating possibilities (1981: 66–83). This theory of narrative structure is discussed in RimmonKenan (1983: 22–8) and Bal (1985: 19–23). 3. The influence of the ‘roman d’aventures’, theorized most notably by Jacques Rivière in 1913, was openly acknowledged by Gide. See O’Neill (1969). 4. In quotations from the standard English translation, words or phrases underlined indicate modifications made in the interest of accuracy or to restore relevant nuances present in the original.

Bibliography Bal, Mieke. 1985. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. Christine van Boheemen (University of Toronto Press) Bremond, C. 1973. Logique du récit (Paris: Seuil) —— 1981. ‘La logique des possibles narratifs’, Communications, 8: L’Analyse structurale du récit (Paris: Seuil), pp. 66–83 Cancalon, Elaine D. 1981. ‘Les Formes du discours dans Le Prométhée mal enchaîné’, Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide, 9.49: 35–44 Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul) Eco, Umberto. 1981. The Role of the Reader (London: Hutchinson) Fillaudeau, Bertrand. 1985. L’Univers ludique d’André Gide (Paris: José Corti) Gide, André. 1952. The Vatican Cellars, trans. Dorothy Bussy (London: Cassell) —— 1953. Marshlands and Prometheus Misbound, trans. George Painter (London: Secker and Warburg)



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—— 1963. La Symphonie pastorale and Isabelle, trans. Dorothy Bussy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books) —— 1966. The Counterfeiters, trans. Dorothy Bussy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Modern Classics) —— 2009a. Romans et récits, œuvres lyrique et dramatiques, ed. Pierre Masson, I (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’) —— 2009b. Romans et récits, œuvres lyrique et dramatiques, édition publiée sous la direction de Pierre Masson, II (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’) [English versions of texts referred to in this edition are my own.] Goulet, Alain. 1981. ‘Le Prométhée mal enchaîné: une étape vers le roman’, Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide, IX, 9.49: 45–52 Holdheim, W. W. 1959. ‘The Dual Structure of Le Prométhée mal enchaîné’, Modern Language Notes, 74: 714–20 O’Neill, Kevin. 1969. André Gide and the Roman d’Aventure, Australian Humanities Research Council Monograph 15 (Sydney University Press) Rimmon-Kenan, S. 1983. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen) Walker, David H. 1986. ‘Continuity and discontinuity in Les Faux-Monnayeurs’, French Studies, 40: 413–26 Watson-Williams, Helen. 1967. André Gide and the Greek Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press)




Errant Eyes: Digression, Metaphor and Desire in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time Margaret Topping

What can I say? Life is too short and Proust is too long. (Anatole France) Perhaps it’s just me, but I can’t understand how someone can spend thirty pages describing how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep. (Manuscript reader for Ollendorf) [T]he whole thing could be cut by half, by threequarters, by nine-tenths. (Jacques Madeleine)1 Considering that the beginning and end of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time were written in preliminary form as early as 1911 to create the symmetrical diptych of ‘Time Lost’ and ‘Time Regained’, one might provocatively argue that the 3000-page, seven-volume novel into which these initial two volumes organically evolved in the period until Proust’s death in 1922 is largely composed of digressions from this teleological frame.2 As the sampling of critical evaluations above suggests, readers have often condemned Proust’s narrative and stylistic wanderings: errancy has been perceived as error. Proust’s errancy encompasses not only grand narrative sweeps such as the novella within the novel, ‘Swann in Love’, or the prolonged reflection on grief in the penultimate volume, The Fugitive; it also draws in more localized intradiegetical digressions: the narrator/protagonist may, for instance, encounter another character and, through a series of associative leaps, guide us far from our point of departure – in a gesture, a word, a facial expression – to some social or psychological meditation, some past or future moment, some seemingly unconnected 106



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person or place. The dynamic mobility of the text thus becomes a source of readerly disorientation. Moments such as these generate some of the novel’s most tantalizing stylistic digressions too, in the form of sentences which, over dozens of lines, pile subordinate clause upon subordinate clause. How then should the reader seeking, like Anatole France, to make Proust shorter and life longer respond? Pierre Bayard, in his study of Proustian digression, tackles this question by tentatively opposing ‘necessity’ and ‘utility’ (1996: 26). Thus, while Proust’s stylistic meanderings may not be necessary to the grammatical integrity of the main clause within which they are embedded nor, indeed, to the novel’s broader ‘plot’, they are ‘useful’ as a means of elaborating ideas. Yet to categorize these errant moments as merely ‘useful’ is to flatten out Proust’s multi-levelled, multi-directional and polyphonic text. It is also to imply that such ‘digressions’ are not integral to Proust’s vision, whereas it is precisely these moments of ‘deviation’, I would argue, that prompt a freshness of perception in the reader, challenging him/her, as Ross Chambers proposes in Loiterature, to see in ways that run counter to the ‘disciplined and the orderly, the hierarchical and the stable, the methodical and the systematic’ (1999: 10). Digression, for Chambers, ‘blows up’ linearity (1999: 118), replacing ‘a simplifying sense of order’ with a ‘dehierarchizing disorder’ (1999: 119). Crucially in relation to Proust, though, Chambers argues that ‘linear pro-gression from point to point is not incompatible with, and in fact can be seen to generate, clogging, slippage and blowing up – the delights of di-gression and multidimensionality’ (1999: 124). The teleological movement of the Search from ‘time lost’ to ‘time regained’ is thus not antithetical to a peripatetic journey. Indeed, the peripatetic may be its very condition. As an illustration of the functions and effects of digression in the Search, this chapter focuses on the motif of the wandering eye, the desiring gaze which roams throughout the novel, frequently transformed through an intense metaphorization by Proust. Bayard hesitates to classify metaphor as digression (1996: 59–69, 127), yet Proustian metaphor links suggestively to the mechanics of ‘loitering’ as understood by Chambers: in its Bakhtinian synthesis of high and low, sublime and trivial, comic and tragic, and in its reliance on incongruous juxtapositions, Proustian metaphor tests and stretches moral codes, social conventions and readerly expectations. As Proust writes, in terms echoed in Chambers’s celebration of the figure’s capacity to embody ‘similarity in difference’ (1999: 120): One can list infinitely in a description all the objects that figured in the place described, but the truth will begin only when the writer



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takes two different objects, establishes their relationship, the analogue in the world of art of the unique relation created in the world of science by the laws of causality, and encloses them within the necessary armature of a beautiful style. Indeed, just as in life, it begins at the moment when, by bringing together a quality shared by two sensations, [the writer] draws out their common essence by uniting them with each other, in order to protect them from the contingencies of time, in a metaphor. (Proust 2002, VI: 198) Metaphor produces ‘continuity-in-disjunction’ (Chambers 1999: 120): beneath the surface impression of distance and disconnection (Bayard’s ‘écart’ [1996: 139]), one finds unexpected resemblance, surprising ‘crossties’. Metaphors thus serve to generate some new ‘truth’, both individually and in their relationship to the wider web of metaphorical allusion on which the novel is constructed. Structural and metaphorical arches, spanning up to 3000 pages, are the cohesive forces of the Search: beneath a façade of superfluity or excess, they cumulatively stimulate and create the development of character and situation in the novel, and are thus integral to its forward – if not exclusively forward-looking – movement. As regards the specific motif under discussion here, Proust, it gradually becomes clear, devotes sustained attention to certain characters’ eyes; yet what may seem like no more than an arbitrary ‘excess of narrative zeal’ (Bayard 1996: 44) is, I would argue, a carefully contrived riddle for the reader, the answer to which is the character’s homosexuality. The reader is initially forced into the same blind stance as the naïve young narrator/protagonist, a figure who rarely suspects a character’s outward (hetero)sexual identity may be deceptive. However, the voice of the mature extradiegetical writer can be heard whispering in the background, planting clues – appreciated only in retrospect – that we may have to reconsider our assumptions. Excess thus becomes essential, not only revealing hidden identities, but also playing out, and playing with, contemporary perceptions of homosexuality as ‘exceeding’ conventional moral boundaries, as departing (digressing) from societal ‘norms’.3 This motif, that is itself grounded in mobility, thus illustrates that digression in the novel is a deliberate, selective and dynamic device which advances, rather than impedes, the narrator’s search and ultimate epiphany. Proust’s descriptions of his characters’ eyes are ingeniously diverse, ranging from the piercing, birdlike variety of the Guermantes to those of M. de Cambremer which are as unpleasant to behold as a surgical operation (Graham 1966: 71, 58). Yet these are mere fleeting references



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in contrast to Proust’s prolonged focus on the eyes of characters who are ultimately revealed to be homosexual. The ‘flaw’ in the disguise that contemporary societal prejudice has obliged homosexuals to assume is, for Proust, the eyes, the traditional site of self-betrayal. Thus, their eyes are variously ‘as active as those of a painter sketching’, or those of a hungry animal; the signals they emit to other homosexuals are like lighthouses, or stars; and ‘the intensity of such gazes [for Proust] makes them seem almost corrosive’ (Graham 1966: 82). Within this paradigm, no character’s eyes betray more than those of that singularly complex, contradictory and carnivalesque figure, the baron de Charlus. Our first encounter with him, in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, is immediately preceded by his nephew Saint-Loup’s boastful pronouncements on Charlus’s enthusiastic heterosexuality. An expectation of linear character development is thus deliberately created only to be defied by Proust’s subsequent digression, discussed below, into the nature of Charlus’s gaze. In a fitting play of dual identities, Proust is both ‘mystificateur’ and heuristic detective: he may leave clues for the still naïve reader and narrator/protagonist, but he cannot solve them on our behalf. The rectification of this illusion and the acquisition of knowledge are thus deferred pending the reader’s and the young narrator/protagonist’s deciphering of both the textual digression and the experience respectively. The narrator recounts: ‘I was walking back to the hotel when, right in front of the Casino, I had a sudden feeling of being looked at by someone at quite close quarters’ (Proust 2002: II, 332). This as yet unidentified figure is cast in the role of the observer, the voyeur, while the narrator is the observed, the vu. He continues: [He was] staring at me with eyes dilated by the strain of attention. At times, they seemed [to be pierced] with intense darting glances of a sort which, when directed towards a total stranger, can only ever be seen from a man whose mind is visited by thoughts that would never occur to anyone else, a madman, say, or a spy. He flashed a final look at me, like the parting shot from one who turns to run, daring, cautious, swift and searching; then having [looked] all about, with a sudden air of idle haughtiness, his whole body made a quick side-turn and he began a close study of a poster. (2002, II: 332) This prolonged extract – in particular, the oddly diffuse second sentence – far exceeds the basic line of action that relates how Charlus stares at the young narrator, then turns away. Yet it is this expansiveness



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which situates the passage – the work of a quintessentially arch Proust – firmly within the proleptic logic of the narrative as a whole, for it baits the reader and, indeed, the young intradiegetical narrator/protagonist, with early, if still dim, intimations as to Charlus’s true sexual identity: as Martin Jay highlights, ‘the dilation of the pupil can unintentionally betray an inner state, subtly conveying interest or aversion on the part of the beholder’ (Jay 1993: 10). The ambiguity of the emotion betrayed by Charlus’s involuntary external reaction – interest or aversion? – aptly reflects the young narrator’s and indeed first-time reader’s inner confusion as to what Charlus’s gaze implies. What the narrator/protagonist is aware of are the contradictory impulses contained within the stranger’s gaze: it is at once daring and cautious, swift and searching, these quasi-oxymoronic formulations auguring the dualities and contradictions which will gradually emerge within Charlus’s nature as a whole. The very eclecticism of the images deployed further marks the narrator/protagonist’s search for some anchoring point to explain what he sees, while the images themselves suggest how, long before the discovery of a single character’s homosexuality, Proust is already subtly rehearsing his open scrutiny of homosexual mores within society in Sodom and Gomorrah: the images of piercing and of firing a shot may, for instance, be open to a psychoanalytic reading, while beneath the surface incongruity of a juxtaposition of madmen and spies, we detect underlying commonalities centred on the hidden, the marginal and the subversive which herald the social identification of homosexuals as outcasts later in the novel. Yet as if to mark Charlus’s own abrupt resumption of control, these metaphorical digressions into his obscurely revelatory gaze are halted by a stylistic transition to the neutral verb ‘to look’ (in ‘having [looked] all about’).4 As Jay further explains, the eyes may be the locus of an unintentional self-betrayal, but ‘there is [also] a learned ability to use the eyes to express something deliberately […] Ranging from the casual glance to the fixed stare, the eye can obey the conscious will of the viewer in a way denied other more passive senses’ (1993: 10). The tension between the voluntary and the involuntary gaze, between digression and a straightforward linearity, is emblematic of the pressure placed on the homosexual man within Proust’s novelistic universe to disguise his true nature. Subsequent encounters with Charlus in this second volume of the novel are similarly dominated by his gaze, but as if to echo the narrator/ protagonist’s, and indeed reader’s, nascent intuition as to his sexual identity, what was mere observation evolves by often unexpected associative leaps of the kind analysed by Bayard (‘sauts’ [1996: 66])



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Although M. de Charlus was careful to keep a hermetic seal on the expression of his face, to which a faint dusting of powder gave something theatrical, his eyes were like a crack in the wall, or a loophole in a fortification, which he had been unable to close up, and through which, depending on one’s position with regard to him, one felt oneself to be suddenly in the line of fire of some inner device that seemed potentially perilous, even for the person who, without having it completely under his control, carried it about with him in a state of permanent instability and readiness to explode; and the expression of his eyes, circumspect and incessantly uneasy, left on his face, whatever its fineness of design and construction, deep marks of fatigue, including dark circles hanging low under them, and made one think of an incognito, a disguise adopted by a powerful man threatened by some danger, or at times just of an individual who was dangerous, but tragic. (Proust 2002, II: 341–2) With its layering of clause upon clause, its seemingly unruly excursus into the disparate metaphorical worlds of the theatre, architecture, weaponry, disguise and adventure, the entire extract cumulatively emphasizes the increasing triumph of involuntary over voluntary gaze, laying the foundations for Charlus’s progressive degeneration and loss of self-mastery in the course of the novel. The reader likewise experiences disorientation and a loss of mastery when confronted with this grammatically and conceptually complex sentence, for if digression – to recall Chambers’s image – can be visualized as an escalator that progressively disrupts linearity, we as readers ‘find [ourselves] skipping back to early, emergent parts of the climb’ (1999: 123) in order to make sense of it. For readers confronted with Proust’s monolithic text, this ‘skipping back’ is required not just to early parts of a given extract, but to earlier threads in the metaphorical web of images of the errant eye. Beneath the impression of wayward digression, however, lies narrative control, a craftedness which not only enhances Proust’s positioning of the homosexual’s public persona between performativity (as implied in the theatre metaphor) and automation (suggested in the image of the inexorably ticking bomb), but also lays the foundation for future moments in the novel. The structural allusion to the eyes as cracks and loopholes, for instance, prefigures the architectural eye, the oeil-de-boeuf through which the narrator, in Time Regained, witnesses Charlus’s masochistic degradation



into more penetrating analysis of the psychological significance of this physical characteristic. We read:

Margaret Topping

as he is shackled and whipped in Jupien’s male brothel (Proust 2002, VI: 123). Yet these ‘digressions’ have more than a proleptic function in that they also disturb the conventional order, for while the physical toll taken on Charlus’s eyes by this battle between his true nature and his now fissured disguise could be interpreted as an endorsement of the contemporary medical identification of homosexuality as a disease, Proust’s tone is surely marked by a call for empathy and compassion for this ultimately tragic figure. Although grounded in ambivalence, therefore, the digression at least opens up the possibility of an alternative to contemporary prejudices. If, as Martin Jay proposes, ‘the life of vision is one of endless wanderlust, and in its carnal form the eye is nothing but desire’ (1993: 10), this desiring gaze is at its most blatant, its most involuntary, in the following description of Charlus’s rapt attention to one of Mme de Surgis le Duc’s handsome sons: Not only were his eyes, like those of a Pythoness on her tripod, starting from his head, but, so that nothing might come to distract him from labours that required the cessation of the simplest movements, he had […] put down beside him the cigar which, a short while before, he had had in his mouth but which he no longer had the necessary freedom of mind to smoke. On remarking the two crouched divinities borne on its arms by the chair set facing him, you might have thought that the Baron was seeking to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, had it not been rather that of a young and living Oedipus, sitting in that selfsame chair, where he had installed himself in order to play. (Proust 2002, IV: 93) Mediated by the classical myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx, the description stresses Charlus’s helpless fascination with the young man. I have speculated elsewhere on a possible source for Proust’s emphasis on Charlus’s fixed stare, for while Oedipus may be a fitting symbol of forbidden love, the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx is not, in its various textual retellings, characterized by any spellbound gaze. The source, I have suggested, may be Gustave Moreau’s Oedipe et le sphinx, making this an interaesthetic rather than narrowly intertextual borrowing (Topping 2000: 44–58, 143–4). As such, the range of engagement demanded of the reader is extended. Each of Bayard’s ‘subject[s] who make associations’ (1996: 94) creates the text afresh. Yet the mobility produced by the subjectivity of digression also raises the spectre of a failure of recognition on the part of an inattentive reader.5 A second reader



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may detect different ekphrastic echoes here; a third may detect none. As Bayard points out, the textual metaphor exists whether it is deciphered or not (1996: 127), whereas the possible further digression I have identified into a subtextual layer of visual reference may be overlooked. What is potentially lost, though, is the dramatic fixity, the fitting impression of a suspension of time for Charlus, which seeps in through the possible evocation of the medium of painting. Pierre-Louis Mathieu’s description of this particular work draws out these dramatic qualities: ‘It is between the side-long gaze of this woman […] and the gaze of the man […] that the drama of this motionless confrontation is played out. There is an underlying eroticism in this sketch of a monstrous coupling between man and beast, the latter’s lips parted and ready for a deadly kiss’ (1977: 85). Moreau’s already hyperbolic representation of the myth may thus have been transformed by Proust into something akin to caricature, as the writer plays with the comic potential of deliberate incongruity in imagery. Fittingly, too, comparison with the Moreau painting adds further nuances to Charlus’s gender ambiguity and to Proust’s conception of homosexuality as an intersex, as, within the logic of the image, Charlus initially assumes the role of Oedipus, only to abandon this position for that of the Sphinx. Gender boundaries thus blur, for although the Sphinx was not always depicted as female, in Moreau’s art this legendary creature has the face and naked breasts of a woman, and thus becomes the sensual seductress. Yet while the textual image creates an immediate impression of humour, which is potentially magnified by the incongruity of Charlus’s embodiment as a figure in Moreau’s painting, this apparent ‘gap’ (écart) also conceals a subtle, but potent, resemblance.6 For what are the implications of casting Charlus in the role of Oedipus (among others), that is, in the role of an epic figure whose tragic destiny is beyond his control? Might Proust not be suggesting that this is what tragedy means in the modern world? That a figure defined by forces beyond his control should be condemned? The dominant role of fate in Oedipus’ incarnation as a symbol of forbidden love seems to imply that homosexuality is neither a choice nor an illness to be cured, but is rather inherent to the individual.7 The tragic-comic tone may betray traces of unease about (his own) homosexuality on Proust’s part, but this metaphorical digression nonetheless hints that Proust may be testing moral codes and subtly contesting prevailing ones.8 A consideration of Proust’s handling of the lesbian gaze – as embodied in the figure of the narrator’s lover, Albertine (a figure who is increasingly shrouded in suspicions of lesbianism or, at least, bisexuality) – provides



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a telling counterpoint to this analysis of the homosexual’s errant eyes, for the contrast between these two paradigms underlines the deliberateness of Proust’s digressions. In a metonymic extension of her early association with the unrestrained atmosphere of Balbec, Albertine’s eyes are likened to the sky or the sea, while elsewhere they are compared to butterfly wings and precious – although often flawed – jewels (Graham 1966: 67). The boundlessness of both sky and sea, and the suggestions of the transitory and the ephemeral contained in the reference to butterfly wings seem to herald her resistance to complete possession by the narrator, while the image of a flawed precious stone betokens an absence of complete translucency. In other words, the lesbian gaze appears to invert the operation of the male homosexual gaze, digressing from the patterns drawn out above: Albertine’s eyes are symbols of her impenetrability, not markers by which the narrator can retrospectively grasp her sexual nature. In a further inversion, the lesbian, unlike the male homosexual who generally assumes the role of desiring ‘voyeur’, is more commonly cast in the role of observed. The young narrator famously spies on the sadistic scene enacted by Mlle Vinteuil and her (female) lover in their house at Montjouvain, and any number of examples, including the entirety of The Captive, depict the closely guarded Albertine denied the role of ‘voyeur’ in the narrative.9 On the few occasions when the narrative does grant her the identity of desiring, observing subject, the writer’s attention to her eyes is not as sustained as with the male homosexual gaze, marked by relatively few stylistic digressions. She looks at Mlle Bloch and her lover, for example, with ‘[a] sudden and profound attentiveness’ (Proust 2002, IV: 203). Not only are these terms almost identical to those appearing in Proust’s description of Charlus’s first stare at the young narrator,10 but the description evolves no further. Moreover, her gaze is usually indirect (she watches these known lesbians via a mirror), or is curbed by the presence of the narrator: ‘there had come into my loved one’s eyes that sudden and profound attentiveness […] But Albertine had at once turned her gaze […] back on to me’ (2002, IV: 203). The sequence of actions – attentive stare followed by turning away – echoes strikingly Charlus’s early gaze at the narrator, yet Proust’s account is not reinvented as metaphor in the case of Albertine, and only the mere facts are offered. In intradiegetical terms, this seemingly uneven balance of power may be explained as the inevitable symptom of the narrator/protagonist’s obsessive surveillance of Albertine and her acute awareness of that surveillance; but Proust’s handling of the lesbian gaze might also be adduced in support of those critics who accuse the writer of eclipsing lesbian desire in favour of a



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detailed scrutiny of male homosexuality and of creating lesbian characters who are fraudulent, little more than thinly disguised men.11 Viewed from this perspective, male homosexual characters appear to be invested with a power in the text that Albertine is denied. However, an alternative interpretation of this non-digressive construction of the lesbian gaze might propose that her gaze can be read as denoting ‘impotence’ or ‘lack’ only from the outsider perspective of the uncomprehending heterosexual narrator/protagonist. If, in viewing Albertine, the role he appropriates for himself is always that of subject, of voyeur, then from his perspective alone is she objectified, allocated the role of vue, and, in fact, it is his powerlessness to penetrate lesbian desire that these images betray. The use of near-identical terms to describe both Charlus’s and later Albertine’s desiring gazes can thus, and in contrast to the previous interpretation offered, be read as the narrator’s attempt unsuccessfully to assimilate lesbianism to male homosexuality. As if to reflect the inadequacy of this assimilatory position, words fail and the description of Albertine’s gaze stops far short of the detailed and repeated teasing out of every aspect of Charlus’s eyes. The power of digression is lost, replaced by genuine stasis. As such, the absence of digression conveys how Gomorrah remains a tantalizing enigma for the desiring heterosexual male subject, the epitome of alterity, indeed, of what cannot even be visualized.12 To sum up, then, in accompanying Proust on his peripatetic journey through the desiring gaze, I hope to have illustrated that his errancy is not to be equated with error, but, rather, that his digressive meanderings are part of a consciously crafted network of hints and reminiscences – one of many in the novel – which moves the narrative forward. Uncovering and deciphering these networks is one of the reader’s primary tasks and the novel’s principal pleasures. Digression and a teleological progression may seem unlikely bedfellows, but the apparent ‘écart’ between them masks an underlying compatibility which allows room for slippage, seepage and uncertainty and which is appreciated only when the reading, interpreting subject completes his/her task. In contrasting the deliberate ‘excess’ of Proust’s treatment of the male homosexual gaze to the ‘underwriting’ that marks his dramatization of the lesbian gaze, my aim has been not only to emphasize the controlled nature of his digressions, deployed or withheld to achieve particular effects, but also to suggest that Proust has not conflated Sodom and Gomorrah, that he does not see them as parallel phenomena, as critics have sometimes argued. Digression thus offers a conscious means of suggesting their difference and thus contests existing assumptions,



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both critical and social. We have also seen how Proust’s digressions in portraying the male desiring gaze may, beneath a façade of irony or an apparent confirmation of contemporary stereotypes surrounding homosexuality, reveal a subtle testing of conventional moral codes. Key to conveying this challenge is the way that Proust plays with the reader’s expectations and the way he transforms the homosexual’s errant eyes into unexpected metaphors. While we have seen a range of forms of digression in the course of this discussion – grammatical ‘disruption’ through Proust’s lengthy, disorienting sentences, intertextual and interaesthetic allusion, subtle oscillations between the voices of the mature narrator/writer and the young narrator/protagonist – it is perhaps metaphor above all that has the capacity to prompt a freshness of vision, and thus to generate the productive challenges to existing hierarchies and accepted systems of thought that Chambers celebrates in his analysis of loiterature: ‘Delay and indirection […]’, he proposes, ‘become at once sources of pleasure and devices of provocation’ (1999: 11). Proust’s digressions into the world of the errant eye render the gaze of his own readers mobile, provoking us to see differently.

Notes 1. Cited in Bayard (1996: 11–12). My translations. 2. For the genesis and development of Proust’s novel, see Feuillerat (1934) and Finch (1977). 3. Although my conclusions aim to counter some of the criticisms of Proust’s treatment of homosexuality, my purpose here is not to rehearse the debates already explored in a range of excellent studies, including Rivers (1983), Ladenson (1999) and Carter (2006). 4. The verb ‘regarder’ in French follows on from such evocative phrases as ‘percer’ ‘fixer [les] yeux’, ‘lancer une suprême oeillade’ (Proust 1987–89, II: 110). 5. Bayard argues that ‘digression is a subjective phenomenon and, as a result, only the reading subject is in a position to recognize its existence’ (1996: 121). 6. See Bayard chapter 5 (1996). 7. For contemporary views of homosexuality in these terms, see Rivers (1983). 8. Space does not permit a detailed examination of all the homosexual characters on whose eyes Proust focuses, but one might mention in passing his attention to Saint-Loup’s monocle (an accessory increasingly associated with homosexual characters) or the suggestive parallels between Legrandin’s and Charlus’s gaze. This resemblance is based on an apparent digression from sexual desire into social desire, for it is in the context of his social snobbery that Legrandin betrays himself, his homosexuality being revealed only much later. By focusing on Legrandin’s eyes, however, and particularly the eyes as a locus of self-betrayal, Proust establishes a link between this



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9. 10.

11. 12.

would-be social climber and Charlus. By subjecting their gazes to a very Proustian ironic scrutiny, the author is thus not only dangling evidence of their respective ‘vices’ before us – social and sexual desire are essentially the same for Proust – but he is also intimating that they share the same ‘vice’. For examples of Proust’s equally digressive descriptions of Legrandin’s gaze, see, for instance, 2002, I: 126–8. Comparison between these pages and Proust’s descriptions of Charlus’s gaze reveals a common use of the verb ‘percer’, similar shadows under their eyes, both gazes’ seemingly independent will and both gazes’ conflicting impulses, a dialectic which is embodied stylistically, in both cases, in the use of quasi-oxymoronic structures or expressions. In retrospect, therefore, the two characters can be inserted into a coherent pattern of specular/sexual imagery. ‘I held Albertine captive with my eyes’ (Proust 2002, IV: 493); ‘my adhesive gaze could not be removed from Albertine’ (2002, IV: 493). While the published English version translates the terms of Charlus’s gaze as ‘swift and searching’, the original French text is closer to the description of Albertine’s gaze: where Albertine’s is ‘brusque et profonde’ (Proust 1987–89, III: 198), Charlus’s is ‘rapide et profonde’ (1987–89, II: 110). Notable among these critics is Natalie Clifford Barney, whose position is summarized in Ladenson (1999: 4–5). See Ladenson (1999: 53) on this point.

Bibliography Bayard, Pierre. 1996. Le Hors-sujet: Proust et la digression (Paris: Minuit) Carter, William C. 2006. Proust in Love (New Haven: Yale University Press) Chambers, Ross. 1999. Loiterature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press) Feuillerat, Albert. 1934. Comment Proust a composé son roman (New Haven: Yale University Press) Finch (Winton), Alison. 1977. Proust’s Additions: The Making of ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’, 2 vols (Cambridge University Press) Graham, Victor E. 1966. The Imagery of Proust (Oxford: Blackwell) Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press) Ladenson, Elisabeth. 1999. Proust’s Lesbianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) Mathieu, Pierre-Louis. 1977. Gustave Moreau: Complete Edition of the Finished Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings, trans. J. Emmons (Oxford: Phaidon) Proust, Marcel. 1987–89. A la recherche du temps perdu, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard) —— 2002. In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols, trans. various, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Penguin/Allen Lane) Rivers, Julius E. 1983. Proust and the Art of Love (New York: Columbia University Press) Topping, Margaret. 2000. Proust’s Gods: Christian and Mythological Figures of Speech in the Works of Marcel Proust (Oxford University Press)



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Virginia Woolf and Digression: Adventures in Consciousness Laura Marcus

The development of Virginia Woolf’s fiction is frequently framed, as it was by Woolf herself, as a movement away from the more conventional realist modes of the first two novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), to the experiments with the novel form, the search for ‘new names’, as she wrote in her 1927 essay ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’ (Woolf 1994: 435), and new shapes for the novel, inaugurated in her third novel Jacob’s Room (1922). Her early short stories played a crucial role in this process of reinvention. Writing in her diary of her plan for Jacob’s Room to be a novel without ‘scaffolding […] all crepuscular’, Woolf stated that she conceived of three of the stories written in the late 1910s and early 1920s – ‘The Mark on the Wall’, ‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘An Unwritten Novel’ – as ‘taking hands and dancing in unity’ (Woolf 1981: 13–14). The steps of this dance were formed by Woolf’s experiments with wandering, digressive narrative voices and her explorations of consciousness and subjectivity, including the possibility, or impossibility, of entry into minds other than one’s own. ‘The Mark on the Wall’ was the first text to be hand-set and printed on the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, along with Leonard Woolf’s ‘Three Jews’, with which it was bound into a volume entitled ‘Two Stories’ (1917). ‘The Mark on the Wall’ traces the journey of the wandering mind, as it uses the eponymous ‘mark’ as a starting point for its adventures in consciousness: ‘How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it’ (Woolf 2003: 77). Woolf’s use of the ellipsis, in this story and throughout her work as a whole, signals her attraction to narrative open-endedness and incompletion, which she found in particular in Russian literature (including the work of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov). In ‘The Mark on the Wall’, as 118



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in her other stories of this period, the use of ellipses also suggests a self-consciousness, undoubtedly heightened by a new awareness of the processes of compositing and printing, about the role of punctuation marks in beginning, suspending and ending ‘trains of thought’: ‘there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall’ (Woolf 2003: 82). Composition, compositing, and the play of the mind are brought into a new relationship. The directions of the narrator’s thoughts are a return to a form of primitive or primeval consciousness – the insect’s eye view of the world, as Woolf was to describe it in the late 1930s, when she was reading the work of Freud – which becomes closely identified with the ‘subconscious’ mind. Perceptual uncertainty – the indeterminate identity of the ‘mark’ – gives the mind freedom to wander. The threat to this free association comes with forms of authority connected in the story to ‘the masculine point of view’, identified with social hierarchy and militarism – ‘generalities’ are linked to ‘Generals’ – and reminding us that the story was written and published during World War I. The mind’s adventures are thus an escape from the realities – or insanities – of the period. A direct reference to the war, from an external voice which conclusively identifies the nature of the mark, brings the story, and the narrator’s wandering consciousness, to a halt: Someone is standing over me and saying – [...] ‘Curse this war! God damn this war! … All the same, I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall.’ Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail. (Woolf 2003: 83) The snail, like the oyster, is a recurrent image in Woolf’s writing of a vulnerable organism protected by its carapace, the shell serving as both home and defence, and contrasted, as in her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting’, with an unhoused and wandering consciousness. The self lives inside a shell, which is all that others know us by; it is the function of the new literature, Woolf suggests, to open up the depths of consciousness within the self: ‘Suppose the looking-glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people – what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in’ (Woolf 2003: 79). In ‘Street Haunting’, the self leaves behind its shell – the house and habit – to become an oyster-eye of perception in the crepuscular city. As in Woolf’s day-in-the-life-of-the-city novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), movement in and around the London streets



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opens up imaginative possibilities, digressive spaces of fiction and fantasy. In ‘Street Haunting’ she describes the pleasures of communing with the volumes (‘wild books, homeless books’) in a second-hand bookshop: there is ‘a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime’ (Woolf 1994: 488). In ‘The Mark on the Wall’, by contrast with the representation of the ambulatory, aleatory adventures of Woolf’s walkers in the city, the narrator remains housed within a room, undertaking her thoughtadventures from an armchair in front of a fire. This recalls a much earlier narrative, Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey Round My Room (1795), in which the author (on whom Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was a powerful influence), confined to his chambers for 42 days as a punishment for duelling, extols the delights of travelling without leaving home: There’s no more attractive pleasure, in my view, than following one’s ideas wherever they lead, as the hunter pursues his game, without even trying to keep to any set route. And so, when I travel through my room, I rarely follow a straight line: I go from my table towards a picture hanging in a corner; from there I set out obliquely towards the door; but even though, when I begin, it is really my intention to go there, if I happen to meet my armchair en route, I don’t think twice about it, and settle down in it without further ado. (De Maistre 2004: 7) De Maistre’s digressive text – one of the works which exemplifies, for Ross Chambers, the category of ‘loiterature’ – plays with the concept of narration as ‘excursion’. The paintings on the walls of the room lead to stories and imaginings which become lengthy digressions from the course of the journey round the room. De Maistre recreates his armchair as a ‘post-chaise’: he tips it backwards and uses it to move around his room, until it overturns. This, he writes, ‘has done the reader the service of shortening my journey by a good dozen or so chapters’, as the narrator is propelled in front of his desk, ‘and there was no longer time to make any reflections on the number of engravings and pictures that I still had to get through, and which might have lengthened my little excursions on painting’ (De Maistre 2004: 47). Journey also elaborates a metaphysical system in which we can find an anticipation of Woolf’s meditations on self and other and on the nature of reflection (interiority becoming figured as a form of mirroring) in ‘The Mark on the Wall’, as in many of her short fictions. De Maistre



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When you read a book, sir, and a more agreeable idea suddenly strikes on your imagination, your soul straight away pounces on it and forgets the book, while your eyes mechanically follow the words and the lines; you come to the end of the page without understanding it, and without remembering what you have read. – This comes from the fact that your soul, having ordered its companion to read to it, did not warn it of the brief absence on which it was about to embark; as a result, the other continued to read even though your soul was no longer listening. (2004: 10) As Andrew Brown notes, De Maistre ‘indulges in a fanciful reprise of Cartesian dualism […] the experience of being alone will naturally lead to an obsession with “reflection” (indeed, in the Journey, with mirrors) and with the sense of doubling that is forced on anyone who can think but not act, or is obliged, for company, to talk to himself’ (Brown in De Maistre [2004: xiii]). We might also see Journey as a ‘fanciful reprise’ of Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637), which constitutes a search for epistemological certainty taking place in the solitude of a poêle (‘stoveheated room’), and in which the ability to construct ‘a method’ is said by Descartes to derive from his keeping to the straight road of reason and reflection: ‘those who go forward only very slowly can progress much further if they always keep to the right path, than those who run and wander off it’ (Descartes 1968: 27). (‘Method’ derives from the Greek hodos, road or way.) De Maistre seems to mock this wisdom in his claim that ‘I rarely follow a straight line.’ Woolf, too, plays with Descartes’s terms in A Room of One’s Own (1929), charting her meanderings and the progressions of her ‘trains of thought’ along roads and routes that are far from straight: ‘For truth […] those dots mark the spot where, in search of truth, I missed the turning up to Fernham [...] I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations, for no conclusion was found on the road to Headingley, and I ask you to suppose that I soon found out my mistake about the turning and retraced my steps to Fernham’ (Woolf 1993b: 14). In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf extends the question of gender and modes of thinking which she had opened up in ‘The Mark on the Wall’. A Room of One’s Own takes the form of a journey – from a fictionalized ‘Oxbridge’ to London – in the course of which the narrator seeks to



represents a division of self into ‘the soul and the beast’ (2004: 9) (‘the beast’ not to be identified with the non-sentient body), and provides this example as illustration:

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develop her thoughts on women and fiction. It opens with a ‘but’, as if Woolf had intervened in the middle of a discussion with an apparent digression: ‘But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction – what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain’ (Woolf 1993b: 3). As the narrator points out, discussion of the ‘two questions’, ‘women and fiction’, could lead anywhere or nowhere; she has elected instead to begin with a conclusion – that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ – and ‘to develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought which led me to think this’ (1993b: 3–4). A foregone conclusion could suggest a rigidly analytical or logical line of argument, but Woolf transgresses this, placing emphasis on the journey taken by thought. Exploring the path of associations is the textual ideal, but from the outset, the structures and institutions of patriarchy and privilege are represented as a bar or barrier to the free play of the imagination. The ‘I’ of the narration (‘“I” is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being’) is sitting on the banks of the river in the University town, ‘lost in thought’, as ‘the river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree’ (1993b: 5): ‘Reflection’ here, as in the short stories, conjoins the definitions of the word as both meditation and mirroring; ‘Thought’, the narrator continues, ‘had let its line down into the stream,’ and catches an idea, as one might catch a fish: ‘Put back into the mind, it [...] set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still’ (1993b: 5): It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me [...] His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle, I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here [...] in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding. (1993b: 5) Women’s creativity and imaginative life are thus represented as forms of trespass. It is only in the garden of the women’s college – poor as that institution is by contrast with the plenty of the men’s college in which the narrator lunches – that freedom, at dusk, is glimpsed: ‘The gardens of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild and open, and in the long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung, were daffodils and bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times, and now wind-blown and waving as they tugged at their roots’ (1993b: 5).



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‘I thought’, Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own, ‘how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in’ (1993b: 21). Throughout the text, thought’s freedom is represented in contrast to ‘the trained mind’ of the university-educated man. Sitting in the British Museum Library, overwhelmed by the quantity of literature on the theme of ‘woman’, Woolf’s narrator observes that: ‘The student who has been trained in research at Oxbridge has no doubt some method of shepherding his question past all distractions till it runs into its answer as a sheep runs into its pen [...] my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings’ (1993b: 25–7). Doodling in the margins, ‘drawing a picture where I should, like my neighbour, have been writing a conclusion’, wool-gathering rather than ‘shepherding’ a thought into, and by means of, a ‘pen’, the narrator discovers that she has, in fact, identified a ‘submerged truth’: that the work she has been reading, by men writing on the topic of woman, was created out of anger, and has induced anger in her. It is this ‘one fact of anger’ that is then followed in the numerous places in which it is to be found, in a patriarchal England (1993b: 30). Woolf’s Three Guineas, published some ten years later, pursues the question of men’s anger and women’s fear, and the workings of patriarchy and privilege, in the context of the rise of Fascism and the threat of war. The text is written as a letter, answering a male correspondent’s query as to how women are to prevent war: it concludes with the answer that ‘we can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods’ (1993b: 272). Throughout her writing life, Woolf explored the possibilities of conceptual and generic innovation, as her desire to find ‘new names’ for the novel reveals. As she was completing and revising To the Lighthouse in 1927, she began to record in her diary her desire for ‘an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books whose form is so closely considered. I want to kick up my heels & be off’; It struck me vaguely, that I might write a Defoe narrative for fun. Suddenly between twelve & one I conceived a whole fantasy to be called ‘The Jessamy Brides’ – why, I wonder? I have rayed round it several scenes. Two women, poor, solitary at the top of the house [...] Everything is to be tumbled in pall mall. It is to be written as I write letters at the top of my speed: on the ladies of Llangollen; on Mrs Fladgate; on people passing. Sapphism is to be suggested. Satire is to be the main note – satire & wildness [...] And it is to end with three dots ... so. (Woolf 1982: 13)




Laura Marcus

The ‘fantasy’ would be realized in Orlando (1928), though the two poor, solitary women would be replaced by the patrician splendour of the eponymous hero/heroine. Orlando was an escapade, or an escape, not only from the ‘serious poetic experimental’ novels but from the work of literary history Woolf was attempting to write: never completed, it would be published in essay form under the title ‘Phases of Fiction’. Orlando is itself a literary history of a kind, as Woolf moves through the ‘styles’ of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages, the Enlightenment, the Romantics and the Victorians, and into the ‘present day’. The concept of a ‘Defoe narrative’ bears on the text’s play with, and between, the genres of autobiography and fiction, fact and fancy. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was also a powerful influence. Lytton Strachey had indeed suggested to Woolf, after she had completed Mrs Dalloway, that she write a Shandean narrative, and elements of this emerge in Woolf’s play with silences, digressions and parentheses which radically disrupt the narrative. As in Jacob’s Room, Woolf adopts the strategy of a narrator-biographer with limited omniscience, who follows in the footsteps of his/her subject but, on occasions, finds that doors are closed, and narrative time must be whiled away while the biographer waits. Through all his/her other vocations – courtier, ambassador, society lady – Orlando remains a writer, and Woolf further plays with the difficulties that this represents to the biographer, who must fill in time while the writer writes. Orlando even starts living his/her life as if it were a book; we are told of one life event or ‘episode’ that ‘she skipped it, to get on with the text’ (Woolf 1993a: 177). A central trope of the text is that of suspension or pause. Death does not come to Orlando, who is alive throughout the four centuries of text-time, first ‘as a man’ and then ‘as a woman’, but he/she undergoes periods of amnesia, trances and death-like states, during which time is suspended. These states are, the narrator writes, dark mysteries which disrupt the biographer’s ‘first duty [...] which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth, unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads’ (1993a: 47). Pauses, or holes, in time and in texts, create narrative swerves, deviations from the ‘plod’ from birth to death which is, Woolf suggests, the accepted form of conventional biography. In ‘revolutionis[ing] biography in a night’ – Woolf’s aspiration for her text – she not only parodies the ‘deathly’ mode of traditional biographies, which bury their subjects rather than bringing them to life, but opens up the complexities of biographical and narrative temporalities (Woolf 1977: 429). Orlando



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lives through the centuries, but does not retain or contain the totality of time: while images from the past persist in the present, he/she forgets as much as he/she remembers. The holes in time created by states of suspension are also structures of repression, which hollow out an unconscious for the text: ‘a pool where things dwell in darkness so deep that what they are we scarcely know’ (Woolf 1993a: 132). The opacity of these issues is made denser, and the satire at times sharper, by Woolf’s historicizing, and hence relativizing, of the terms in which metaphysical questions can be posed, and human subjectivity understood: ‘Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story’ (1993a: 49). Woolf’s most overtly and self-reflexively digressive texts – those which point to and play with narrative digression – are those in which questions of male and female identity and the troubling of the boundaries between gender categories are also made most explicit: A Room of One’s Own and Orlando are again the central examples here. The ‘nature’ of androgyny, at the heart of both texts, finds its rhetorical dimension in Orlando in the extensive use of simile. The language of simile is a language of approximation, clothing or veiling reality, and a way of turning one thing into another, enacting ‘the strangest transformation[s]’ (1993a: 39). It is also closely identified with the narrative workings of digression, as in the extended epic or Homeric simile. In Woolf’s numerous essays, we find further levels to the play of digression in her work, inseparable from the particular forms of discursivity exemplified in the essay form and in ‘essayism’. A number of recent critics have drawn Woolf’s essays into the conceptual frameworks established by Theodor Adorno, in his ‘The Essay as Form’ (1958), itself in dialogue with Georg Lukács’ ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay’ (first published 1958). For Adorno, the essay, anti-Cartesian in all its aspects, ‘suspends the traditional concept of method’ (we recall De Maistre’s and Woolf’s satirical play with Cartesian thought and their refusal to take the straight path of reason), and ‘freely associates what can be found associated in the freely chosen object […] The essay abandons the main road to the origins, the road leading to the most derivative, to being, the ideology that simply doubles that which already exists’ (Adorno 1984: 159). Proceeding ‘methodically unmethodically’, in Adorno’s phrase, the essay, or ‘essayism’, becomes identified with fragmentation, discontinuity, transgression and digression. These attributes become identified not only with Woolf’s ‘essayism’ but with her ‘feminism’: in particular, her commitment to




Laura Marcus

ways of thinking and writing differently, which are in turn inseparable from her interrogations of the question of male and female ‘difference’ and the uncertain but crucial issue of what women, in changed material and cultural circumstances, might ‘become’. The Essais (the term coined from the French ‘essai’, ‘attempt’) of Montaigne, often held to be the first ‘modern’ writer, were, from the outset, a significant influence on Woolf. In 1903, a year before she published her first essay, she was writing to her brother, Thoby Stephen, to thank him for his gift of Cotton’s translation of Montaigne: ‘I always read Montaigne in bed, and these books will do beautifully’ (Woolf 1975: 66). Her essay on Montaigne, published in her 1925 collection of essays The Common Reader, points to the exceptional nature of his self-portraiture and to the complexities, and the self-contradictions, of his concepts of the good life: ‘Movement and change’, Woolf glosses Montaigne, ‘are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order’ (1984: 63). This call for ‘order’, seemingly at odds with the call for absolute freedom of thought and action, is explained by Woolf through the importance Montaigne placed on the guidance of ‘un patron au dedans’ (1984: 63), which she defined, in post-Freudian terms, as ‘an invisible censor within […] this is the censor who will help us to achieve that order which is the grace of a well-born soul’ (1984: 63). We might extend this model of selfhood to writing, and more specifically, to the genre of the essay itself: digression (parekbasis, excursion), and the following ‘of the most fantastic fancies’ (1984: 63), is a departure followed by a return, to the place where a topic, or a self, is (provisionally) grounded. In his essay ‘On Books’ Montaigne wrote that it was only ‘chance’ which put order into his writings: ‘As my thoughts come into my head, so I pile them up […] Even if I have strayed from the road I would have everyone see my natural and ordinary pace. I let myself go forward as I am’ (Montaigne 1958: 160). His discussions of literature, Montaigne added, ‘are not matters about which it is wrong to be ignorant, or to speak casually and at random’ (1958: 160). This is echoed in Dr Johnson’s image of ‘the common reader’, who differs, as Woolf noted, from the critic and the scholar. She took this figure up in the Preface to The Common Reader – ‘he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole – a portrait of a man, a sketch



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of an age, a theory of the art of writing’ (Woolf 1984: 1) – and it shaped her writerly and readerly self-image as a literary ‘outsider’. Woolf’s essay ‘On Reading’, or ‘Reading’, written in 1919 and published posthumously, speaks back to Montaigne’s ‘On Books’. In Orlando the recurrent trope of ‘the pause’ (which I have linked to the workings of digression) is frequently invoked in relation to literary composition – the biographer must wait while Orlando writes. In the essay ‘Reading’, an immersion in books leads both to a form of timetravel – the past comes alive as the narrating ‘I’ reads the Elizabethans and traces a lineage of English literature – and to the creation of a continuum between book and world, in which, to borrow the words of Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’, ‘the reader became the book; and summer night/Was like the conscious being of the book’ (Stevens 1983: 358). In Woolf’s essay, the reader’s eye and brain finally become saturated and the mind takes a departure from the pages, which becomes an excursion, a parekbasis. Dusk falls for the reader/narrator, the ‘I’, of Woolf’s essay, and the scene moves from the library to the woods and the eventual capture of a great moth: ‘There was a flash of scarlet within the glass. Then he composed himself with folded wings. He did not move again’ (Woolf 1988: 152). From this scene the narrative returns to the daylight and to ‘another sort of reading’ – that of the work of Sir Thomas Browne (whose Urn Burial appeared in 1658, and is one of Orlando’s many intertexts) and of Cervantes, which Woolf’s narrator defines in the terms of estrangement, difficulty and ‘the region of beauty’ (Woolf 1988: 59). The central section of ‘Reading’, describing the journey to the woods, the luring of the insects with sugar and the capture and killing of the great scarlet moth, is an excursion from the history of books which the body of the essay explores. It is a night-scene, which seems to dissolve the self-certainties of the day: ‘What is it that happens between the hour of midnight and dawn, the little shock, the queer uneasy movement, as of eyes half open to the light, after which sleep is never so sound again? Is it experience, perhaps – repeated shocks, each unfelt at the time, suddenly loosening the fabric? breaking something away?’ (1988: 152). Woolf would use the same imagery (whose appropriateness she questioned in the essay, for its suggestion of destruction rather than creativity) in Jacob’s Room, and in the central section of To the Lighthouse, ‘Time Passes’, in which she depicted a world without a perceiving subject. The duration of ‘Time Passes’ is both one night and a period of ten years in the empty house, vacated after the death of the mother, Mrs Ramsay, during which time war breaks out and the world tosses and turns in the




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nightmare of history. The war is heralded by ‘ominous sounds like the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt, which, with their repeated shocks still further loosened the shawl and cracked the tea-cups’ (Woolf 1992: 145), the words themselves a reverberation from ‘Reading’ and its image of the tree that falls in the night, creating a ‘hollow rattle of sound in the deep silence of the wood’ (Woolf 1988: 152). Both the essay and the novel are formed of three parts. In To the Lighthouse, ‘Time Passes’ is a ‘passage’, interlude or interval (of a kind that became increasingly central to Woolf’s fiction, as in The Waves and The Years) between the two separate days whose activities constitute the first and last sections of the novel, and this is also the structural role of the moth-hunt in ‘Reading’. The world of the night, Woolf seems to suggest in both texts, is an interruption of the diurnal world, breaching the familiar surfaces of dailiness and opening up a rent in the fabric of being. Digression is thus constituted as a mode of interruption or breaching. It also, paradoxically, becomes a way of reaching into the very heart of things.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. 1984. ‘The Essay as Form’, New German Critique, 32 (Spring–Summer), 151–71 Bowlby, Rachel. 1997. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh University Press) Cuddy-Keane, Melba. 2003. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere (Cambridge University Press) Descartes, René. 1968. Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin) De Maistre, Xavier. 2004. A Journey Round My Room, trans. Andrew Brown (London: Hesperus) Montaigne, Michel de. 1958. Essays, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin) Snaith, Anna. 2000. Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (London: Macmillan) Snaith, Anna and Michael Whitworth, eds. 2007. Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (London: Palgrave Macmillan) Stevens, Wallace. 1984. Collected Poems (London: Faber) Woolf, Virginia. 1942. The Death of the Moth (London: The Hogarth Press) —— 1975. The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1888–1912, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Chatto and Windus) —— 1977. A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1923–1928, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Chatto and Windus) —— 1981. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2: 1920–1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin) —— 1982. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin)



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—— 1984. The Common Reader: First Series, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press) —— 1988. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press) —— 1992. To the Lighthouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin) —— 1993a. Orlando (Harmondsworth: Penguin) —— 1993b. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Harmondsworth: Penguin) —— 1994. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4: 1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press) —— 2003. A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick (London: Vintage)




Stealing the Story: Robert Walser’s Robber-Novel Samuel Frederick

The Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956), known mostly for his eccentric novels and short stories, insisted that his prolific output in the genre of his choice, the short prose piece, ultimately amounted to nothing more than ‘one long, plotless, realistic story’ (1986b: 322). This statement is in its seeming contradictoriness extremely revealing. For, on the one hand, most of Walser’s prose work is indeed conspicuously lacking the dynamics and determinations of plot. Even those pieces that at least initially or ostensibly conform to the expectations of narrative – and a good portion of them simply do not – end up preoccupied with something other than the story, and in the process undermine or neutralize the mechanisms of plot progression. The apparent story in Walser’s work is either lost in a barrage of excessive narratorial reflection or abandoned as a result of the narrator’s thematic promiscuity.1 Walser’s self-characterization is in this regard felicitous: his is a genuinely ‘plotless’ prose. And yet he maintains that what he is writing is not simply prose, but narrative: a ‘realistic story’. This paradox – that his works are at once ‘stories’, though they contain no plots – describes the governing logic of Walserian narrative. His ‘stories’ are only ever told by a process of deferral, digression, dismissal, or denial of the story. Walser’s narratives come to be despite but also by virtue of the narratorial impulses that appear to prevent them from being, those that want to dispense with plot or at least render its teleological tendencies null and void. But isn’t the ‘plotless story’ an oxymoron? How can we speak of a story in the absence of plot? What else is a story if not its progression towards the end that defines its dynamic and grants it design, if not purpose?2 Walser’s work as a whole can be read as a series of implicit, experimental answers to these questions, his storyless stories as alternatives to the plot-centred narrative. Instead of reading selections from his 130



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large corpus of short prose – a form that lends itself more easily to the jettisoning of plot – the following analysis of Walserian digressivity and its resulting plotless narration will focus on one of his novels, a form even more beholden to the strictures and expectations of plot progression. Perhaps as a challenge to its prevailing form, to its all-too-familiar reliance on narrative necessity, the novel becomes for Walser the site of some of his most extreme digressivity, an occasion for him to test to what degree and to what length plotlessness can be maintained without a collapse into non-narrative. The novel becomes the critical space where Walser most rigorously demonstrates that only in suspending plot is he able to forge anything like narrative at all. The only novel-length incarnation of Walser’s late period experimentation, The Robber, is one of the most outrageously eccentric and utterly aberrant artifacts of modernism, a cultural phenomenon already famous for its celebration of the new, the unusual and the unconventional. And it is, importantly, an artifact, no mere book; a work that is anomalous both as a linguistic and narrative construct, and as a textual object, as a manuscript comprised of the material and materiality of paper and writing itself. The Robber was written in the summer of 1925, a time during which Walser wrote on scraps of paper, backs of letters, used calendar pages, envelopes, even business cards, in a penciled cursive averaging 1 millimetre in height. These texts (which, along with this novel, consisted of poetry, short prose and dramatic scenes) took over 17 years to decipher, though they fill only six volumes. The socalled Robber-Novel (it bears no title in Walser’s hand) was found among these ‘microscripts’, spread across merely 24 pages of finely penciled script, appearing more like pages awash with grey: murky, enigmatic, impenetrable (see Figure 1).3 (The novel, of course, is not nearly as short as its manuscript suggests: transcribed and placed in standard typeface, Walser’s two dozen microgrammed pages multiply nearly sixfold to fill out over 140 pages.) As if this minuscule materiality could only give birth to a novel that mirrored its grapho-formicating paper landscape, an apparent restlessness that is in fact static, a blur of ashen alphabet in strings of nearly formless, leaden inscriptions, Walser’s last novel skirts the boundaries of its own form, moving forward without ever really progressing, almost succumbing to its own digressive mania. For The Robber is a work of nearly unrelenting asides, a novel that sacrifices story in its onslaught of hesitations, prolepses, deliberations, non sequiturs, meta-commentary, retractions, contradictions, exhausting inattentiveness, apologies and a seemingly limitless supply of other dilatory tactics. The announced



Stealing the Story 131


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Figure 1 One of the Robber manuscript pages. The image has been reduced in size to fit the page. Original dimensions approx. 129 ⫻ 212 mm. (© Keystone/ Source: Robert Walser-Stiftung)


intention of telling a story (which has nothing whatever to do with an adventurer or criminal, as the title might suggest) is, nonetheless, its apparent backbone, even if it is an infirm, scoliotic support. This serpentine, even labyrinthine, structure is repeatedly shown to be feeble and fragmentary, by no means sufficient for holding the text together as narrative, in the conventional sense. The story elements found here among an inchoate concatenation of narrative material are simply not allowed to assume the shape of a plot. For this reason the novel defies summary: the events contained in it (and yes, there are events recounted here) are not provided the necessary causal or even temporal interconnections and determinations that would result in any familiar narrative design, however crude or confusing. Therefore even events that might constitute the building-blocks of a plot become digressions themselves by virtue of the fact that they contribute nothing to any story structure or intention. An example of how Walser treats such potentially plot-productive material can be gleaned in the following excerpt: And while two such schoolmates were scaling these so formidable bourgeois rungs, the Robber now paid a visit to Fräulein Selma so as to inquire courteously as to whether or not she might, for example, be in any way in need of him. ‘What can I do for you?’ she asked. She was drinking her coffee over the newspaper. One must add that Fräulein Selma lived largely without meat, that is, consumed a skimpy, delicate diet, in other words voluntarily submitted, in culinary matters, to the most well-thought-out limitations. She also, incidentally, let a room to a Russian girl who was a student. (2000: 94–5) Coming in at the tail end of a two-page-long digression about two of the Robber’s schoolmates (who appear to have no bearing on his life, except that they became respectable members of the bourgeoisie, while he did not), the narrator shifts mid-sentence to the Robber’s visit with Fräulein Selma. Instead of making this visit the occasion for character development or for attempting to establish the relationship between these two figures (a relationship that elsewhere has explicit romantic overtones, which however remain unexploited), Walser isolates the encounter, providing neither context nor motivation. The pivotal question addressed to our eponymous ‘hero’, one that has all the potential for setting a series of plotted events in motion, is given tantalizingly in direct discourse, but then abruptly suspended. It does not, as far as we know, remain unanswered; it is, however, left unnarrated while we shift from what might be a meaningful interaction to a banal description of




Samuel Frederick

what Fräulein Selma was doing at the moment she asked her question. This description, however, does not serve as a transition back to the conversation, but rather compels the narrator (‘One must add […]’) to stray further from the narrative situation by mentioning Selma’s vegetarianism. Not only is this dietary fact inconsequential, the narrator insists on repeating it in three different, increasingly verbose variations: Selma lived ‘largely without meat’ becomes ‘consumed a skimpy, delicate diet’ and, lastly, in a baroque version of the first, rather succinct, expression: ‘voluntarily submitted, in culinary matters, to the most well-thoughtout limitations’. Each restatement is not only increasingly wordy, but also increasingly imprecise (neither mentions a specifically meatless diet), so that each protracted iteration is further removed from the content of the original digression. And as if these unnecessary reformulations were not sufficiently dilatory or off-topic, the narrator proceeds by adding – ‘incidentally’ – that a Russian student boards with Selma. We have up to this point not heard of this student, and will only encounter her once again, in passing. The Robber’s visit, then, is not just cut off and diverted to trivialities, these trivialities are proliferated by narratorial discursiveness. Neither does our storyteller’s circuitousness simply trail off before he returns us to the narrative situation already introduced. Instead, after his remark about the Russian lodger, his excursus abruptly ends, and with it ends the entire section (the novel is separated into 35 chapter-like divisions). This sharp caesura, furthermore, is not followed in the next section by information about what had transpired between the Robber and Selma while the narrator was unsuccessfully meandering through variations on vegetarianism. Rather, the situation – itself only a possible plot seed – is fully abandoned, left to fall between the fallow cracks of the novel’s disconnected digressions. If there is one candidate that might be said to have out-shandied Tristram Shandy, this is it. For despite its slim size, in particular next to Shandy’s impressive girth, Walser’s novel is even more radically digressive and dilatory. Moreover, it is lacking that which makes Sterne’s masterpiece more than just an ingenious display of the fabula interrupta. Simply put: The Robber has no Uncle Toby. We are, therefore, denied those master strokes of characterization that are central to Sterne’s achievement and that contribute to his novel’s greatness and renown as palpably as its famed digressiveness. Walser’s is a novel of utterly empty characters. Even its titular hero is a cipher, neither presented with an inner life (let alone a complex one), nor shown to perform any heroic acts. As one of the novel’s figures remarks to him, ‘you are entirely lacking in character’ (Walser 2000: 87), by which she does not just mean he



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lacks moral grounding. Neither is he empty of qualities but brimming with ideas, like the figure of Ulrich whom Robert Musil – incidentally a great admirer of Walser – thought best suited for the modern novel. When Walser’s narrator is not stealing his stage time in circumlocutionary excess, the Robber (who is not even given a name) can only be glimpsed stealing across the page like a spectre, as fleeting and insubstantial as the story to which he is supposed to belong. Without plot, without character what are we left with? Nothing, really. And it is upon this nothing that Walser appears to erect his novel. Indeed, nothing is there from the very start: Edith loves him. More on this later. Perhaps she never [nie] should have initiated relations with this good-for-nothing who has no money. It appears she’s been sending him emissaries, or – how shall we put it – ambassadresses. He has lady friends everywhere, but nothing ever comes of them, and what a nothing has come of this famous, as it were, hundred francs! Once, out of nothing but affability, benevolence, he left one hundred thousand marks in the hands of others. Laugh at him, and he’ll laugh as well. This alone might make a dubious impression. And not [Nicht einmal] one friend to show for himself. In ‘all this time’ he’s spent here among us, he’s failed [nicht gelungen] – which delights him – to gain the esteem of gentlemen. Can you imagine [Ist das nicht] a more flagrant lack of talent? (Walser 2000: 1 and 1986a: 11)4 As if responding to a challenge, Walser digresses from the novel’s story not just after its first sentence, but after the novel’s first three words. Though betraying the necessity for the semblance of plot in order to instantiate his digressive gesture, Walser reduces this plot to its barest minimum: subject, verb, object. And he promptly dismisses it in just as many words, at least in the original German: ‘Hiervon nachher mehr’ (‘More on this later’).5 With the most extreme economy, these opening two sentences of the novel enact a limit-case of digressive storytelling in announcing and performing in its first six words the novel’s governing principle. And as if to acknowledge and even to celebrate this nearly absurd narrative reduction, which leaves the reader with next to nothing by way of a story, Walser’s narrator sprinkles the following few sentences with a series of ‘nothings’ (nichts), ‘nots’ (nicht), a ‘never’ (nie), as well as ‘no money’ (kein Geld) and a final ‘lack of talent’ that we are to assume will contribute to the stuff of the story. Unable to orient ourselves in this breathless opening, we are left instead with the repetition of nichts,




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nichts, nichts, nichts in close succession, followed – after a short, twosentence breather – by nicht, nicht, nicht, in only slightly larger intervals, which together appear to be parsing out the novel’s structural principle, subliminally intoning its aesthetic of negation. When we turn to the actual content of the novel we do not find nothing, of course, but we do find nothing in the way of novelistic material, which is to say: there is no coherent story here. Or rather, there is just enough story to make palpable how unimportant that story is. On the one hand, Walser is parodying plot.6 In the novel’s fifth sentence (quoted above), the reader is introduced to a ‘famous […] hundred francs’, without further explanation. It is as if the public and readerly attraction of this plot point about 100 francs has by the very start of the novel already run its course. They were famous, but now they have ‘come to nothing’, like so much else ostensibly important to the story the narrator intends to tell. We find out later that the Robber inherited these 100 francs from his uncle, and that this seemingly generous act in fact led to the series of events that the narrator attempts to – but ultimately wishes he did not have to – relate: ‘Ah, how clear it is to me now that this entire story is the fault of no one other than the mediocrity of this Batavian uncle’ (Walser 2000: 120). The giving of 100 francs – itself a trivial act – thus sets into motion one event after the other, each of which is shown to be arbitrary, not teleologically motivated and therefore (for any pretence of plot) uninteresting. Cause may lead to effect, but each chain of causal relations does not necessarily make a plot; in fact, as the novel makes abundantly clear, causes will always lead to effects, to endless effects, but these are also endlessly ordinary. They will only ever ‘come to nothing’. And therefore Walser’s novel not only tells us ‘nothing’ by way of a story, it also lacks any edifying content: ‘I am constructing here a commonsensical book from which nothing at all can be learned’ (2000: 4–5). Though the story of this novel has been overgrown by rampant, seemingly uncontrollable digressivity, the narrator tells us here that we should not even be looking for that which is frequently to be found in a novel’s digressive passages, namely, didactic or instructive discourses. If ‘nothing’ is to be learned from the book, and, as the narrator admits, the story itself ‘will come to nothing’, what impulse hides behind the narrator’s insistence to keep on writing? And, more importantly, why do we bother to keep on reading? The answer (to both questions) lies in Walser’s particular means of exploiting that nothing for narrative ends. ‘Nothing’, the novel’s very lack both of story and edifying discourse, becomes part of its marshalling of negation for the means of



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narrativization. It is the very absence of story that proliferates the text that, despite and by virtue of its plotlessness, takes on a different kind of narrativity altogether. We can begin to better grasp the logic of this deviant narrativity by turning to some of the numerous self-reflexive moments in which Walser allows his narrator to speculate on writing itself: You’ve no idea what a pile of things I have to tell you. A stalwart friend might perhaps be necessary, that is, important for me, though I consider friendship unfeasible: it seems too difficult a task. On this specific point various reflections might be made, but my little finger cautions me to avoid verbosity. Today I gazed into a marvelous thunderstorm whose tumultuous strength delighted me. Enough, enough. Already I’m afraid I’ve bored the reader atrociously. (2000: 5) In this passage the narrator acknowledges his dilatory mania, except that in doing so he also perpetuates it – one of the supreme ironies of Walserian digression. Our storyteller not only introduces a digression to comment on his digressivity, he also digresses within the digression that itself only exists by virtue of his excessive digressions. Since that ‘pile of things’ he has to tell us itself consists mostly in digressions that delay the story of the Robber, the narrator is effectively delaying his further delays of the story in reflecting on his propensity to delay. In this way the novel’s proliferation of nothings feeds back into itself. ‘We’ll do well to add nothing more to this sentence’ (2000: 121), the narrator later notes, only dimly aware, it seems, that in saying he will add ‘nothing more’ to the sentence, he is in fact adding more to the sentence. Except that what he is adding is really only ‘nothing’ – or rather, nothing except to comment that nothing will be added. Similarly the narrator remarks after a brief description of a pretty woman: ‘This woman’s significance for us is absolutely nothing’ (2000: 49).7 She means ‘nothing’ to the narrator and to his story, and yet he writes about her, again suggesting that in some way ‘nothing’ itself is that which is mysteriously and productively significant for the novel. Even though he claims the Robber’s story is a priority, the narrator insists that he is doing the right thing by continuing to relate trivial nothings: Once, in that other restaurant, he dined on chicken while sipping Dôle. We say this only because, at the moment, nothing of more weight occurs to us. A pen would rather say something improper than




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For the narrator, therefore, it is perfectly proper to ‘say something improper’ (that is, something irrelevant and with no bearing on the story) because the ultimate narratorial impropriety is to ‘lie idle even for an instant’. Silence – saying nothing – is to be avoided at all cost, even if that means filling the page with nothing, that is, trivialities. ‘It’s best we say nothing’ (2000: 64), the narrator writes several pages later, acknowledging that ‘saying nothing’, paradoxically, does not equate with pure silence or the blank page. To say nothing – to tell nothing – manifests itself as loquaciousness, the narrator’s unceasing digressivity. Walter Benjamin referred to this quality of Walser’s prose as its ‘Geschwätzigkeit’ (1991: 327), its garrulousness. It is indeed the performance of narrative voice that permeates so much of Walser’s prose. Here the narrator reminds us he is writing (‘the pen’), and yet that this process is and ought to be driven by ‘impulse’. We need to ask, however: towards what is that impulse directed? Or is it only directed back at itself? Is the narrator of The Robber only writing for the sake of writing, or does he mean to sustain our interest in something like a story? And, most decisively: is there, for him, a difference? To begin answering these questions we should consider one of the narrator’s favourite techniques: the anticipatory prolepsis. We already saw this mode of the introduction and delay of a plot point in the first two sentences of the novel, where the space between that introduction and its postponement was brought to an extreme minimum: ‘Edith loves him. More on this later.’ The novel abounds in such prolepses: ‘More will be said of this at some later point’ (2000: 20); ‘I’ll elucidate later the reason for this’ (2000: 28); ‘We’ll want to return, by and by, to this’ (2000: 49). Scores of examples could be provided; the anticipatory prolepsis appears on almost every other page. It is an essential part of the novel’s logic of narrative proliferation through plot negation, of the narrator’s proclivity for ‘saying nothing’ through excess verbiage. Characteristically, the narrator reflects on his need to delay and, unsurprisingly, provides conflicting reasons for his compulsive dilatoriness. On the one hand, he has his readers in mind: On some later occasion we shall elucidate, illuminate this. Much in these pages may strike the reader as mysterious, which we, so to speak, hope, for if everything lay spread wide open to the understanding, the contents of these lines would make you yawn. (2000: 41)



lie idle even for an instant. This is perhaps a secret of quality literature, in other words, the writing process must work on impulse. (2000: 54)

The narrator here claims to be delaying the details and explanations of his story strategically so as to assure sustained interest on the part of the reader. He is cognizant of the reader’s expectations, and does not want us to be bored. This strategy would seem to make sense in terms of the conventional dynamics and desires of reading narrative, except that the narrator rarely fulfils his proleptic promises (that is, much of what he promises to reveal later is never returned to) and elsewhere claims to be simply ‘filling time’: The Robber now came to a house that was no longer present, or, to say it better, to an old house that had been demolished on account of its age and now no longer stood there, inasmuch as it had ceased to make itself noticed. He came, then, in short, to a place where, in former days, a house had stood. These detours I’m making serve the end of filling time, for I really must pull off a book of considerable length, otherwise I’ll be even more deeply despised than I am now. Things can’t possibly go on like this. Local men of the world call me a simpleton because novels don’t tumble out of my pockets. (2000: 74–5) The Robber’s perambulations – a central motif in Walser’s work as a whole, and one intimately related to his digressivity – manifest themselves on this page as the ramblings of the narrator who traces and retraces his steps in his seemingly futile attempt to express the absence of a particular architectural structure. This passage again displays one of the structural paradoxes of the novel: its narrator is occupied with relating that which is really nothing (here quite literally: the space where a house had once stood), and in doing so ends up unfurling sentence after sentence in the service of that nothing. To what end? That of ‘filling time’, the narrator freely admits, appealing to his reputation as a less-than-prolific writer. But if ‘filling time’ is really his motive, why doesn’t he fill time with those shards of story that he so liberally tosses aside for the supposed purpose of keeping his readers interested? On the very same page he rejects such a story – ‘the Robber once treated an unemployed person to a sausage. Perhaps we’ll return to this later’ (2000: 75) – in favour of further reflection on the Robber’s meanderings. Ultimately it becomes clear that there is little difference between the narrator’s notion of ‘filling time’ with ‘detours’ and those repeated suspensions of story elements inaugurated by the anticipatory prolepsis. To suspend a story does not and really cannot come down to any true cessation of the novel’s progress, which is why narrative digression always brings us closer to the end of the book, even if it moves us further from




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the end of the story. Suspensions of story in The Robber coincide with those ‘detours’ that only fill time because, as the narrator frequently demonstrates, to narrate suspension – the discontinuance of narration – is to keep on narrating something, anything, or (as he would like it) nothing. And this nothing that fills both the time and space of the novel does not simply delay plot development and the fulfilment of proleptic promises for a later time, it does so almost perpetually. For even those plot points to which the narrator does in fact return (and these are few) are revealed to be of little importance, primarily because Walser has managed to shift this novel’s narrative weight from the centre to its periphery so that it moves by constantly circling around the centre towards which it always points, even though this centre is shown to be empty. To delay plot ‘in the interest of sustaining interest’ (2000: 31), as the narrator of The Robber claims to be doing, becomes for Walser a kind of pleasurable deferral that exposes the tautology of narrative suspense, and then neuters it. Interest leads to interest, which generates more interest, ultimately leading nowhere. Without the end to give meaning to the sequence, without the fulfilment of that which is postponed, narrative teleology is short-circuited and sent into a self-perpetuating loop. In The Robber this circular movement appears as a dynamic circuitousness that generates the paradoxical narrative logic of the novel, one in which nothing itself is repeatedly covered up and simultaneously perpetuated. This perpetual, pleasurable (and productive) circling points to Walser’s alternative notion of narrative desire. Typically digression grants us those crucial moments of ‘satisfaction and reassurance’, as Derek Attridge notes, in returning and importantly ceding to the main narrative. Digressions maintain the ‘order and wholeness of the text’ in being temporary, in always ultimately bringing the reader back to the story they had abandoned in a manner that grants us ‘the sweet pleasure of relevance’ (Attridge 1988: 222). That Walser denies the readers of The Robber this crucial satisfaction by no means undermines the novel’s pleasurability. In fact, he claims it makes the pleasure of the text possible in the first place. Walser is seeking to redefine our relation to narrative by insisting on the satisfaction that can be had from perpetually postponing plot, not in order to maintain suspense, but in order to heighten and take pleasure in the unfulfilled desires of narrative. The narrator of The Robber equates narrating nothing (or trivialities) with filling time and sustaining interest because for Walser the unfulfilled desires in fact fulfil in remaining unfulfilled. In this novel and in much of his prose Walser insists that we take pleasure in being denied pleasures, just as the Robber ‘take[s] pleasure in robbing [himself] of pleasure’ (2000: 95), in part because if our desires were to be fulfilled, they would also be annihilated. 10.1057/9780230292529 - Digressions in European Literature, Edited by Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells


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In this way, Walser’s digressivity is importantly not destructive of narrative. It does not, for example, neutralize the generic markers of narrativity, reversing the centre–periphery relation of plot to excursus so that the text ‘can be read for something other than the narrative’, as Attridge suggests of the radically digressive work (1988: 228). Neither do Walser’s digressions lose their quality of digressivity in diminishing the influence of the plot against which they must define themselves. Walser maintains a productive tension between digression and plot that affirms the former’s subversiveness while insisting on the narrativity generated from its restless process of plot-negation. This activity of subversion is – within the text – a perpetual movement (circular, tracing out the shape of the nought), one that cannot come to a halt or reach completion lest it merely accede to the usurped position of plot whose dynamic it is seeking to annul.8 In insisting on telling stories freed from the influences of plot, as he does in The Robber and in much of his narrative work, Walser gestures towards relocating narrative dynamics from plotting to the active efforts to thwart that plotting. Plot is therefore necessarily always present in his work as that which is being deferred or playfully deconstructed, that which must be suspended to inaugurate a new mode of (plotless) narrativity. The inverted logic of negation underlying these narrative movements is not only structurally pivotal to Walser’s work, it is also one of its principal thematic preoccupations. In The Robber, in particular, we find one of the most apt formulations of this governing paradox: ‘To be able to fall asleep, then, one should make the effort to remain awake. One shouldn’t make an effort to sleep. To be able to love, one should make an effort not to love’ (2000: 119–20). To be able to tell a story, we might add, one should make the effort not to tell a story. And this is precisely what Walser has done. Except that not telling a story is for him no mere privation of activity; it is an ‘effort’. In The Robber the story has therefore not so much been left untold as it has been actively stolen. The novel has been forged not out of the absence, but out of the absenting, of story. Thus, in stealing the story Walser succeeds in negating normative narrativity, thereby setting in motion an elusive new mode of narrativity whose locus is neither in plot nor in digression, but in their dialectical interaction.

Notes 1. Throughout the chapter I use ‘story’ not only in a somewhat untechnical, descriptive sense – following Walser’s usage – as roughly synonymous with narrative itself (in whatever guise), but also, normatively, as the content readers typically expect from a narrative, its plotted events and characters. The slippage between these two notions of story is – as we will see – itself a




2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

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product of Walser’s idiosyncratic narrative mode. I therefore do not mean by ‘story’ the structuralist-narratological or Russian Formalist notion of the raw material of ‘plot’. This raw material I call the ‘story elements’ or ‘events’. See Peter Brooks’s famous theory of plot (1984). On Walser’s writing as process and its visuality, see Siegel (2001: 103–25). Emphasis mine; Bernofsky’s translation slightly altered to reflect repetition of ‘nichts’. This first digression is also importantly a verbless sentence. The syntactical unit of progression has been excised, action itself suspended. On Walser’s parodying of trivial literature, see Fuchs (1993: 103–32). Bernofsky’s translation altered slightly. The literature on Walser’s digressivity (which is surprisingly small) tends to fall into the trap of supplementarity by positing exactly such a reversal of the story–digression dichotomy that would ultimately only recentre the marginal digression in the former position of the central story. See, for example, Annette Fuchs (1993: 89ff.), or Susanne Andres, who insists on the collapse of primary and peripheral narrative strands – to claim that everything in The Robber is digression – without acknowledging that this collapse would result in our inability to recognize digression as digression, let alone identify the text as narrative (1997: 154). A more sophisticated reading of Walser’s digressivity is explored by Peter Utz (1998: 369–423).

Bibliography Andres, Susanne. 1997. Robert Walsers arabeskes Schreiben (Göttingen: Cuvillier Verlag) Attridge, Derek. 1988. Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) Benjamin, Walter. 1991. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, II: Aufsätze Essays Vorträge (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp) Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) Fuchs, Annette. 1993. Dramaturgie des Narrentums. Das Komische in der Prosa Robert Walsers (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag) Siegel, Elke. 2001. Aufträge aus dem Bleistiftgebiet. Zur Dichtung Robert Walsers (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann) Utz, Peter. 1998. Tanz auf den Rändern. Robert Walsers ‘Jetztzeitstil’ (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp) Walser, Robert. 1986a. Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet, ed. Bernhard Echte and Werner Morlang, III: ‘Räuber’-Roman, ‘Felix’-Szenen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp) —— 1986b. Sämtliche Werke in Einzelausgaben, ed. Jochen Greven, XX: Für die Katz: Prosa aus der Berner Zeit 1928–1933 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp) —— 2000. The Robber, trans. Susan Bernofsky (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press)



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Negotiating Tradition: Flann O’Brien’s Tales of Digression and Subversion Flore Coulouma

Talking about Flann O’Brien and digression might be called a pleonasm: all his novels and chronicles are known to realize the full comic potential of systematically digressive tales. The question, therefore, is not whether Flann O’Brien’s writing is digressive, but rather, how digression as a theme and structural device contributes to his ambivalence towards tradition and authority through his complex representation of language and discourse. First, let us follow Flann O’Brien’s example by bringing in the authority of the dictionary here: Digression: 1. The action of digressing, or turning aside from a path or track; swerving, deviation. b. fig. Moral deviation or going astray. c. Deviation from rule. 2. Departure or deviation from the subject in discourse or writing; an instance of this. 3. Astron. and Physics. Deviation from a particular line, or from the mean position; deflexion; e.g., of the sun from the equator, or of an inferior planet from the sun. (OED) We immediately note that the most common meaning of digression comes second to the spatial sense of digression and its corollary, the moral sense of going astray. Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman similarly show how space, morality and language are interrelated: the metafictional games of back and forth between oral speech and the written word give pride of place to the notion of space. 143



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In the novels, the fragmented linearity of the page reflects the breaking down of discourse, as well as a chaotic perception of the world. We will first examine digression as a feature of the oral tradition, and focus on At Swim-Two-Birds as marked by oral tradition while subverting the common perception of narrative structure. We will then analyse the spatial metaphor of digression in The Third Policeman and its emblematic figures: the landscape, the road and the bicycle. Finally, we will address the linguistic and political dangers of digression, to show how Flann O’Brien’s ambivalent satire purposefully avoids all definite judgement on what digression and discourse should be, and lets us decide for ourselves.

Digression and the oral tradition Flann O’Brien’s digressive writing is part and parcel of his inscription in a literary tradition of orality and addresses the complex relationship between orality and literacy. O’Brien acknowledged his admiration of Joyce’s capacity to ‘[set] down speech authentically’ (1993: 103). On the other hand, O’Brien’s acute awareness of the artificiality of writing gives scope and depth to his comedy. Digression as a form of diversion and linguistic loitering thus finds its natural place within Flann O’Brien’s narratives of orality. The Irish bardic tradition is the one most obviously featured in At SwimTwo-Birds, with Flann O’Brien’s parodic tribute to Finn Mac Cool and King Sweeney, but it can also be traced structurally in the other novels and chronicles. Flann O’Brien’s games with orality also hail from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Tristram himself famously acknowledged the role of digression within a story (Sterne 1996: 50). For Tristram and Sterne, and indeed for Flann O’Brien, a good novel needs to be digressive, to avoid the dullness of a straight storyline. For Flann O’Brien, digression is primarily a feature of orality and physical utterance: digression is a game led by the teller of the tale, with which readers/listeners must comply. This necessarily entails, as with all oral interaction, elaborate interactive rules with the reader, so as to deceive playfully his or her expectations while never losing sight of the plot. Digression is therefore an essential part of Flann O’Brien’s language games, and constitutes a metanarrative device in his reflections on the workings of language and conversation. Closer to home, Flann O’Brien’s digression recalls Joyce’s stream of consciousness writing. In O’Brien’s work, however, such loitering of discourse always stems from conversations, be they imaginary or actually taking place in the narrative. Let us now examine the function and structure of



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digressions in At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien’s first and most digressive novel.

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activity. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter a hundred times as many endings. (O’Brien 1967: 9) This incipit defines the mental process of digression as stepping aside into a different sphere of thought. Here, the very act of digression lies in the contrast between the narrator’s perception of reality (which is also the frame narrative) and his recurrent reminiscences which develop into their own stories. According to the narrator, the plot and its digressions only appear not to be related, while they are in fact part of the author’s plan. More than a mode of creative thought, this makes digression the very condition of the process of writing a novel. In At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien’s digressive imagination generates the infinite mise en abyme of embedded stories, as each anecdote from a character features another character with more stories to tell; At Swim is a conscious dialogue of digressions. By blurring the limits of narrative levels and the distinction between fiction and reality, its first-person narrator takes digression to its extremes, justifying his theoretical assertion to the reader in the first paragraph of the novel. As a meta-novel consciously playing with its own digressiveness, At Swim regularly features reminders to the reader, with an ironically inverted ratio between the main plot and its digressions. By the end of the novel, the frame narrative only comes up as a series of brief biographical reminiscences of the narrator, while embedded stories (about Trellis, Finn and Sweeney) are foregrounded in the book. Unsurprisingly enough, when Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien’s real name) gave the first draft of his book to his friend Niall Sheridan, passages featuring Finn Mac Cool were even longer and more numerous, and Sheridan himself shortened the draft by about a fifth (Cronin 1989: 85). One of the metanarrative games is that each subplot can be read as a main line from which other anecdotes digress. Thus, the embedded



At Swim-Two-Birds: unsettling traditional narrative

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Synopsis, being a summary of what has gone before, FOR THE BENEFIT OF NEW READERS: DERMOT TRELLIS, an eccentric author, conceives the project of writing a salutary book on the consequences which follow wrongdoing and creates for the purpose THE POOKA FERGUS MACPHELLIMEY […] Now read on. Further extract from Manuscript. (O’Brien 1967: 60–1) Strictly speaking, should we consider this excerpt a digression from the main first-person narrative? Or, should we say that the passage quoted previously, now a mere reminiscence, is itself a digression? There is no definite answer to this, but rather, an ironic reversal of the traditional view that a story must have a single linear structure. For the two main author-characters in At Swim, what constitutes a proper story goes hand in hand with the materiality of the book: the first and last pages define its limits and the manuscript spatially embodies the story. Ironically, such materiality is no guarantee that the main thread of a story can be retained forever, as it is subjected to the difficulty of safekeeping the manuscript itself. Halfway through the novel, one extract is abruptly interrupted by another biographical reminiscence, as the firstperson narrator has lost part of his manuscript. The story branches out into another direction, in a comical display of how fragile and inconsequential the concept of linear story is: It happens that a portion of my manuscript containing an account (in the direct style) of the words that passed between Furriskey and the voice is lost beyond retrieval. I recollect that I abstracted it from the portfolio in which I kept my writings – an article composed of two boards of stout cardboard connected by a steel spine containing a patent spring mechanism – and brought it with me one evening to the College in order that I might obtain the opinion of Brinsley as to its style […] In the many mental searches which I conducted subsequently in an effort to ascertain where the manuscript was mislaid in the first instance, I succeeded in recalling the circumstances of my meeting and dialogue with Brinsley with perfection of detail and event. (O’Brien 1967: 50) This passage shows how losing the plot provides the narrator with another story, his encounter with Brinsley. Ironically, material



story of the Red Swan Hotel characters is presented as a traditional plot with ‘one beginning and one ending’:

precautions are no protection against the narrator’s own carelessness: the stout cardboard and patent spring mechanism, reminiscent of Pandora’s box, are no match for the narrator’s compulsive need to remove extracts and bring them together with other narrative fragments (for example, from the press) as props for a conversation with his friends. The narrator’s inability to keep it together is in fact perfectly relevant if we consider his theory of the novel at the heart of At Swim. Digression can be said to be a logical consequence of the narrator’s polyphonic definition of the ‘satisfactory novel’ as a ‘work of reference’ (O’Brien 1967: 25). Intertextuality and referentiality in literature necessarily disturb any linear approach to a story, since it privileges the paradigmatic over the syntagmatic axis of discourse. Every segment of the story refers back to its own narrative, and the story itself becomes a dialogue between digressive, often dissenting, narratives and voices. Or, as Ross Chambers puts it, digression defines a ‘theory of versatility grounded […] in uncenteredness’ (1999: 23). The narrator’s theory in At Swim has been viewed as postmodern referentiality (Hopper 1995), but I believe that it really belongs to a tradition that places orality at the centre of the act of storytelling. As the previous examples show, the many digressions in the narrator’s stories derive from interruptions by the voices of his friends or his uncle. All the stories are framed in dialogues, which echoes the folk tradition of tale-telling. Trellis’s characters are gathered around the fire in the evening and tell each other stories punctuated by interruptions and questions. Their digression is a natural part of the dialogic process, as much as it is an expected effect of any tale sung from memory. As in traditional bardic poetry, stories revolve around recurring phatic formulas (such as the ubiquitous ‘do you tell me now?’ or ‘do you know what I am going to tell you?’) and have a great scope for variation (Lord 1968). Tales unfold and vary according to the reaction of the audience, and all digressions are welcome, as long as there is a proper end. This explains why Finn’s convoluted rambling still makes for good stories to his audience of working-class, hard-boiled Dubliners: His stories are not the worst though, I’ll say that, said Lamont, there’s always a head and a tail on his yarns, a beginning and an end, give him his due […] I mean to say, said Lamont, whether a yarn is tall or small I like to hear it well told. I like to meet a man that can take in hand to tell a story and not make a balls of it while he’s at it. I like to know where I am, do you know. Everything has a beginning and an end. (O’Brien 1967: 63)




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Lamont’s severe assessment of a good storyteller is ironically debunked, since his naive insistence on having ‘a head and a tail’ to any story gives way to a quasi-infinite potential for digression within the story itself, according to the fancy of the bard and the accidents in the performance. The story thus becomes an endless journey. When Finn relates the adventures of King Sweeney wandering through Ireland, his stories resemble explorative travelling and map out Flann O’Brien’s geography of digression.

Mapping digression: the syntax of digression Flann O’Brien’s language games mostly revolve around the relation between orality and the written word, sometimes through the use of visual techniques. One recurring joke in the chronicles is transcribing onomatopoeic sounds, or using Irish spelling conventions to transcribe English and vice versa: AAAAHOOOO! Do not, good reader, be intimidated by that spectacular title of mine. It is nor just another dose of compulsory Irish. It is my attempt to represent a yawn. (O’Brien 1987: 161) However primordial, orality is always represented indirectly, due to the radical discrepancy between oral speech and the written word: one unfolds in time, and the other on the space of the page. This is where digression comes in, as a realistic representation of dialogic speech and as a main theme in O’Brien’s stories. In At Swim, digressive speech translates as parenthetical excerpts in the main body of the text. The Third Policeman features two simultaneous stories running parallel, with the De Selby anecdotes appearing in the footnotes, mirroring the first-person narrative in the main body of the text. From its very first paragraph, The Third Policeman defines itself as a digressive novel: Not everybody knows how I killed old Philip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicyclepump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar. (O’Brien 2001: 2)



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As Jean-Jacques Lecercle has shown in his linguistic analysis of the incipit, the first sentences of a novel set the pragmatic rules it will follow (or play with), and thus largely define the reader’s expectation of what the story will be in terms of genre and plot (1996: 9). Here the two, very long first sentences are already digressive in their syntactic structure, so as to reflect the narrator’s convoluted mode of thought. The narrator interrupts his address to the reader half way with a digressive clause: ‘but first it is better to speak […]’. This incipit starts with a double implicit statement: 1) my story is not new information (‘not everybody knows’, that is, I am telling the story only for those who still don’t know); 2) because this first clause is pragmatically unintelligible without a broader chronological context, the purpose of the next clause (‘but first […]’) will be to make explicit the underlying story. Thus the digressive structure of this sentence mirrors that of the novel as a whole: it is a flashback, a temporal digression told by the narrator from the afterlife. Within this story-as-digression or digression-as-story, the narrator tells a tale of wandering, as physical motions and journeys again mirror his confused and digressive thoughts.

Mapping digression: narratives of exploration In typical metanarrative fashion, walking along the road prompts the narrator in The Third Policeman to ‘reflect upon the subject of roads’ (first digression) and to ponder De Selby’s teachings on the same topic (second digression, with footnotes): The road was narrow, white, old, hard and scarred with shadow. It ran away westwards in the mist of the early morning, running cunningly through the little hills and going to some trouble to visit tiny towns which were not, strictly speaking, on its way […] I found it hard to think of a time when there was no road there because the trees and the tall hills and the fine views of bogland had been arranged by wise hands for the pleasing picture they made when looked at from the road. Without a road to have them looked at from they would have a somewhat aimless if not a futile aspect. De Selby has some interesting things to say on the subject of roads. (O’Brien 2001: 37) The narrator describes a winding road. The sense of direction, ‘away westwards’, seems infinite, as it goes forever towards sunset and death, and warns the reader of the narrator’s fate. It is more of a Deleuzean




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ligne de fuite than a straight line linking together fixed destinations. Like a digressive line of thought, the narrator’s road takes unexpected turns which can seem inconsequential or illogical at first (‘tiny towns […] not [...] on its way’). However, these very twists and turns of the road enable the narrator to take in the beauty of the landscape, and to reflect back on the importance of the road itself, as the necessary device revealing the beauties of the world. Digression and straight line cannot be defined without one another: just as digressions give purpose and existential justification to the line of the road, so the road itself makes sense of the chaos of the world. Such a binary structure is prominently featured in Flann O’Brien’s writing to which liminality and ambivalence are central. The road then, is the vantage point from which the landscape can be admired and examined. Again, despite its apparent triviality, the perception of the landscape is far from straightforward and seems as blurred and confused as the infinity of turns that the description of the road suggests: There was nothing familiar about the good-looking countryside which stretched away from me at every view […] Everything seemed almost too pleasant, too perfect, too finely made. Each thing the eye could see was unmistakable and unambiguous, incapable of merging with any other thing or being confused with it. (O’Brien 2001: 39–40) This passage offers a good definition of Flann O’Brien’s digressions as discrete fragments only brought together by the perception of the reader/viewer. Taking in all the elements of such a landscape finally helps the narrator recollect fragments of his own life while his eyes roam the landscape. There is also an unmistakable sense of wonder attached to the mental and spatial wandering of the narrator. As he ponders the uncanny unfamiliarity of the quasi-supernatural landscape, he cannot help but feel the elation of the explorer, all the more so since he is on a quest for his elusive black box: I was clearly in a strange country but all the doubts and perplexities which strewed my mind could not stop me from feeling happy and heart-light and full of an appetite for going about my business and finding the hiding-place of the black box. (2001: 40)



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How can I convey the perfection of my comfort on the bicycle, the completeness of my union with her, the sweet responses she gave me at every particle of her frame? […] She moved beneath me with agile sympathy in a swift, airy stride, finding smooth ways among the stony tracks, swaying and bending skilfully to match my changing attitudes, even accommodating her left pedal patiently to the awkward working of my wooden leg. (2001: 196) Apart from the obvious sexual subtext and the theme of impotence conveyed by the narrator’s wooden leg, this excerpt points to the idea of digression as explorative pleasure, in both a geographical and a sentimental sense. The bicycle enables the narrator to find his way through space; we know the narrator is as much lost in space and time as he is in language. This is due partly to his own incapacities, and his wooden leg can be no substitute for what Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has called the ‘missing limb syndrome’ to describe the loss of the native tongue and the difficulty of writing in the colonial language (quoted in Caroll 2003: 8). Here the narrator has lost his identity and, with it, his ability to verbalize and explain his confused perception of the world, relying only, for that purpose, on the nonsensical corpus of De Selby’s aphorisms. Finding the bicycle literally frees the narrator, and gives him the power to roam, which brings us back to the elation of digression as a form of negotiating the accidents of discourse and taking in all the possibilities of a wandering mind and body. The flexible (and feminine) bicycle stands in stark contrast with the stiffness of the wooden leg and of the intolerant compartmentalization of the voices of authority, be they academic (De Selby and his critics) or judiciary (the policemen). De Selby is the cause of the narrator’s murder of Old Mathers, and subsequent damnation, while the policemen are his executioners. The bicycle on the other hand allows him to let himself go, which in terms of language and discourse means to embrace the spontaneity of digression as liberating rather than pathological or abnormal. In this sense, Flann O’Brien reverts here to the ambiguous opposition between orality and literacy. The symbols of written authority, De Selby’s volumes and the policemen’s notebooks, are mere instruments of the death of language, while the bicycle’s silent acquiescence



This sense of geographically explorative pleasure comes to a head with the narrator’s encounter with the bicycle, and their escape from the barracks:

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paradoxically brings us back towards an ideal of cooperative conversation and to the immediacy and authenticity of orality. The bicycle metaphor shows the poetical power of digression. Such poetical dimension is to be found with equal relevance in At Swim-TwoBirds’ Sweeney, the legendary king condemned to roam ‘through the length of Ireland’. In Sweeney’s case, however, the epiphanies of digression are soon outnumbered by its dangers, and we will now examine them. Indeed, for many characters in Flann O’Brien’s novels, what lurks beneath the beauty of digressive tales is schizophrenia and alienation.

Losing the plot? Losing the plot is a favourite theme of Flann O’Brien, both literally and metaphorically. More than just an excuse for jokes, it betrays the underlying fear at the heart of O’Brien’s conception of language and his fascination with nonsensical discourse. For O’Brien, language means identity, and the loss of the native language entails a physical loss of one’s tongue (that is, ability to talk) and of one’s mental integrity, further linking verbal expression to sanity. In this context, digression becomes an ambiguous, potentially dangerous device. Although digression may be conducive to the elating sense of a complete freedom of the language, it remains fundamentally deceptive. In his novels and chronicles, Flann O’Brien’s satire of the discourses of authority deflect the idea that language can be perfectly referential and that it can be perfectly mastered and used. The dangers and excesses of digression show that there is no such thing as complete linguistic freedom, a point made all the more poignant because Flann O’Brien wrote within the context of linguistic colonialism. His narrators and characters never fully appropriate their own tales, because the language they speak is not their own.1 In The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds, two characters fall victim to the overpowering force of digression: Trellis, the stay-inbed author whose own characters attempt to kill him, and The Third Policeman’s first-person narrator. In both cases, the characters’ inability to curb digressive speech leads to mental alienation and schizophrenia, whereas their digressions take on an independent life and become fullblown narratives in their own right. In The Third Policeman, footnotes begin when the narrator starts his solitary journey with a visit to the house of his victim, in search of the black box. Timing is essential here for, once on the road, the narrator has lost all memory of his own identity (‘I don’t even know my own name’ [O’Brien 2001: 17]). As he becomes aware of his memory loss, the



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narrator develops a form of schizophrenia symbolized by the digressive footnotes and by the voice of his independent and strong-willed soul, Joe. As a result, the narrator exists only through other voices and loses his power of decision and analytical thought, although he remains aware of his shortcomings and maintains his ironic posture throughout the novel. Any attempt at expressing a dissenting opinion is crushed by the otherwise benevolent voices in his head: I felt, for no reason, that his [Joe’s] diminutive body would be horrible to the human touch – scaly or slimy like an eel […] Why scaly? I don’t know. How can I know why I think my thoughts? By god I won’t be called scaly […] I’m leaving. What? Clearing out. We will see who is scaly in two minutes. These few words sickened me instantly with fear although their meaning was too momentous to be grasped without close reasoning. (2001: 131–3) Joe comically illustrates the form of linguistic authoritarianism to which the narrator has fallen victim. The narrator cannot live without his voices since they provide the missing limbs he needs. With them gone, he is dead, as Joe cunningly remarks: ‘Before I go I will tell you this. I am your soul and all your souls. When I am gone you are dead’ (2001: 133). De Selby’s discourses represent the narrator’s lifetime work and, as such, his sole existential and philosophical justification, even though his life has become an illusion (he is dead and in hell). At Swim-Two-Birds offers a more comical version of some of the dangers of digression, when Trellis, the author, faces mutiny from his own characters. In full revolutionary mode, the characters overturn Trellis’s plot and impose their own stories, writing Trellis in as the hapless target of their vengeful determination: Greatly excited, they suggest that he [Orlick, Trellis’s son with one of his fictional characters] utilize his gift to turn the tables (as it were) and compose a story on the subject of Trellis, a fitting punishment indeed for the usage he has given others. (O’Brien 1967: 164) The characters have rebelled because their author does not handle his story properly. Digression is used excessively in the novel to very effective comic results but it is shown within the embedded story to be a sign of




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weakness. Here, the overall narrator’s point of view remains purposefully ambiguous. The different narrative levels in At Swim present digression at once as subversively liberating and oppressively dehumanizing (literally so: the characters decide to turn Trellis into a rat before slicing him up). The final twist in the novel re-establishes the liberating power of chaos and digression when the maid accidentally throws parts of Trellis’s manuscript into the fire, and unwittingly destroys all the rebellious characters.

The politics of digression Our quick study of digression in At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman leaves us with the fundamental inconclusiveness of Flann O’Brien’s writing. He explicitly uses digression as part of the Irish bardic tradition as well as to represent oral interactions and thought processes more realistically. The result is both poetical and comical, and can be said to belong to a well-established tradition of digressive satire and tales, from bardic poems to Sterne to Joyce (Booker 1995). Still, digression serves another, more subversive purpose, in O’Brien’s satire of literary and academic authors. It points out their inner contradictions and shows that the very notion of a single plot is a fallacy. For Flann O’Brien, no author or critic can keep a story straight, either structurally or in terms of meaning and truth. The lesson to authors (including O’Brien himself) is not to try to do away with digression and nonsense, since they will only return in the narrative with a vengeance. Digression as a satirical device disturbs the notion of authority in discourse, as it is traditionally linked to stability and fixity. In this sense, O’Brien’s use of digressive anecdotes in his Irish Times chronicles is also part of his political satire at a time when the question of straight talk was still an avatar of the question of language. Flann O’Brien’s playful use and meta-commentary on digression cannot therefore be interpreted without taking into account his diglossic vision of language as a whole.2 As a bilingual author who chose very early on to write exclusively in English (soon after An Béal Bocht, published in 1940), O’Brien was aware of his ambiguous position as a native speaker of Irish writing in the colonial language. For an Irish author writing in English, he said, there is always an ‘unknown quantity that enables us to transform the English language’ (quoted in Clissmann 1975: 238). Digression works at the level of O’Brien’s narratives as the unknown quantity that enables him to transform and subvert narrative traditions and to resonate as a truly unique voice within the canon of twentieth-century Irish literature.



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1. Flann O’Brien’s view of language regularly echoes Stephen Dedalus’s interview with the English dean of studies at his school, and his painful realization that ‘the language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine […] His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech’ (Joyce 1996: 215). 2. Diglossia refers to a context in which two languages are used for different socio-economic situations. It can refer to two dialects of a single language (high v. low dialect), or to two completely different languages, one of which has official status and symbolically dominates the other (English v. Irish in pre-independent Ireland, for instance).

Bibliography Booker, M. Keith. 1995. Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire (Syracuse University Press) Caroll, Clare, ed. 2003. Ireland and Postcolonial Theory (Cork University Press) Chambers, Ross. 1999. Loiterature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press) Clissmann, Anne. 1975. Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction to his Writings (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan) Cronin, Anthony. 1989. No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien (New York: Fromm International) Hopper, Keith. 1995. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Postmodernist (Cork University Press) Joyce, James. [1916] 1996. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin) Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. 1996. ‘Combien coûte le premier pas? Une théorie annonciative de l’incipit’, in L’Incipit, ed. Liliane Louvel (Poitiers: La Licorne), pp. 7–17 Lord, A. B. 1968. The Singer of Tales (New York: Atheneum) O’Brien, Flann. [1939] 1967. At Swim-Two-Birds (London: Penguin) —— [1964] 1993. The Dalkey Archive (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press) —— [1967] 2001. The Third Policeman (London: Flamingo) —— [1977] 1987. The Hair of the Dogma (London: Grafton Books) Sterne, Laurence. [1760–67] 1996. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Ware: Wordsworth Editions)



Notes

‘Going On’: Digression and Consciousness in The Beckett Trilogy Edmund J. Smyth

Any attempt to elaborate a poetics of digression in European fiction must take account of Samuel Beckett’s unique contribution to the limits and potentialities of this narrative strategy. The fictional narratives of Samuel Beckett are especially preoccupied by digression and discontinuity: the narrators in Beckett’s fiction are engaged in a perpetual endeavour to explore the meanderings of a disintegrating consciousness, and thus deviate from any unified concept of subjectivity, in order to translate the fragmentation of the self in a discourse characterized by repetition, instability and fracture. Beckett’s adoption of this narrative structure has become extremely influential in modern and contemporary fiction, especially in the nouveau roman movement of writers (many of whom were also published by his French publisher, Les Editions de Minuit), who sought to contest omniscience, traditional linear narrative, plot and character-based fiction (in the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon and Robert Pinget the Beckettian influence is particularly tangible). The enduring impact of the Beckettian monologue is evident in the works of writers as diverse as Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald and James Kelman. Arguably, Beckett’s variation on the internal monologue presents an extreme case in the development of modern fiction. This chapter examines the way in which digression in Beckett’s trilogy is used as the principal narrative device that serves to foreground both the workings of consciousness and the predominance of discours over récit in narratological terms, a discourse which presents a vivid formal and stylistic metaphor for disintegration. The Beckett Trilogy, as these novels have collectively come to be known in English, is made up of Molloy (1950), Malone meurt (Malone Dies; 1951) and L’Innommable (The Unnameable; 1952). These works were, in fact, written between 1947 and 1949, during his ‘frenzy of writing’ (Knowlson 1996: 358), as he came to terms with metaphysical darkness, failure, 156



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powerlessness and hostility towards conventionalized language. Molloy was the first novel which Beckett wrote in French (if the, at this point unpublished, Mercier et Camier is excluded), mainly in an attempt to depart from the erudite and punning modes of writing which characterized his earlier prose works in English, and as part of a desire to attain simplicity and a sense of the strangeness of language and existence. As James Knowlson comments, ‘French offered him the freedom to concentrate on a more direct expression of the search for “being” and on an exploration of ignorance, impotence and intelligence’ (1996: 357). Before writing Molloy, he wrote three short stories in French: ‘L’Expulsé’ (‘The Expelled’), ‘Premier amour’ (‘First Love’) and ‘Le Calmant’ (‘The Calmative’) which anticipated many of the themes he would develop in the trilogy. Waiting for Godot was also, of course, being elaborated during this period. It is evident that the trilogy departs from narrative convention. Any identifiable ‘story’ and ‘character’ quickly dissolves in favour of discontinuities, inconsistencies and implausibilities at every level. Molloy, which is divided into two parts, contains only the most rudimentary histoire: at the opening, the narrator is in his mother’s bedroom, and is engaged in an attempt to tell the story of how he got there; then in part two, Moran, an investigator of some kind who has been instructed to find Molloy, at the end of this quest seems to kill someone whom he himself resembles. Molloy seems to have become part of Moran, and vice versa. In Malone Dies, the narrator, a reincarnation of Molloy, confined to bed, stressing that his death is imminent, becomes preoccupied with the lives of the individuals in the rural area where he is living; as in the previous volume, another ‘character’ is created (Macmann) into whose mind he seems to merge. Then in The Unnameable, the confined and apparently limbless unnamed narrator (who is presented as little other than a denatured voice) seems to live in a claustrophobic world between light and dark; he also invents personages named Mahood and Worm, who in turn appear to be variations of himself. In The Unnameable narrative incoherence becomes significantly more pronounced, and makes even fewer concessions to lisibilité in Barthesian terms. Whereas both Molloy and Malone Dies contain elements of cohesion (in part two of Molloy even detective story elements are used to some degree), the final volume asserts bodily and psychological disintegration, leaving only the voice of a disembodied consciousness, in which even the first-person pronoun becomes suspect (anticipating the torrent of speech issuing from Mouth in the play Not I [1973]). Any attempt to outline the ‘plots’ of the trilogy is thus bound to be futile, such is the extent to which they resist summary, by endlessly digressing, proliferating and undermining their own



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status as linear and coherent in traditional terms. The text of the trilogy, taken as a whole, then, progressively demonstrates the impossibility of conventional modes of narrative organization. It becomes impossible even to assert that the discourse can be attached to an identifiable narrator, such is the extent to which there is a merging and confusion of names, identities and consciousnesses. What is highlighted in the closing pages is the pressing and anguished irrepressible desire to continue telling stories, despite the assaults on the self and the disintegrating subjectivity: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (Beckett 1979: 382). It is impossible to locate these narratives in a definable, realistic spatio-temporal or geographical location or context: they occur in beds, urns, vases, in unnamed countries, roads, bogs, the seaside, forests and plains. We can see the various processes of disintegration throughout the trilogy as it develops. In Molloy, the narrator starts off on a bicycle and is then on crutches. Although engaged on a journey, the narrator is constantly being sidetracked into telling other stories, most of which appear to be unconnected. Although the journey theme provides a basic narrative framework, there are so many non sequiturs and unrelated and unmotivated episodes that this quest structure breaks down: why does he end up at the house of the woman known as Lousse? Has he been imprisoned there in some sense? How does he come to be transported to his mother’s house? Has he been affected by ending up in a ditch? What is the explanation for the murders which seem to have been perpetrated? Does Moran kill someone who resembles himself? The ontological status of the episodes recounted is constantly being undermined, and there are no obvious links and explanations between these micro-stories, other than the unregulated workings of a subjective consciousness attempting to shape an account of its existence, but hampered by a deficient memory and increasing physical incapacity. Even as his narrative begins, Molloy underlines the extent to which he may be just elaborating a fiction, thus casting uncertainty over the whole narrative. The narrator indulges in constant speculation, and the narrative structure is characterized by a series of repetitions and bifurcations. The novel starts to digress almost immediately: we are given an account of a meeting between two men, ‘A’ and ‘C’, but whose ‘story’ is quickly discarded, and does not appear later in the narrative. Observing the comings and goings of A and C in the manner of an investigator (presaging Moran’s detective role in part two), Molloy wonders if he is not confusing different occasions: And perhaps it was A one day at one place, then C another at another, then a third the rock and I, and so on for the other components, the



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Shortly after this, a lengthy account is given of his obsession with the sucking stones. Setting off to see his mother on a bicycle, he will encounter the police, then will spend time with Mrs Lousse, before returning to look for his mother, despite losing interest at several points, while progressively becoming more and more subject to physical decomposition. In part two, Moran increasingly comes to resemble Molloy by the end of the novel. The quests of both men end in failure, in that Molloy does not manage to see his mother; Moran returns home without having found Molloy. If we pursue a reading of the text as stream of consciousness (which Beckett would seem to invite in the initial stages), the narrative’s multiple digressions can thus be read or recovered as a consequence of the unreliability of the narrator’s grasp over his own discourse, memory and identity. In this reading, the persistence of the processes of invention and fiction-making will come to overtake memory. Molloy will be unable to fulfil his search for his mother just as Moran’s quest for Molloy will have to be abandoned – they are forced to depart from their tasks, either by circumstance or, more likely, by the imperatives of their narratives. As Rónán McDonald has stated: ‘The goal or the end of both narrative quests unravels before our eyes, like a metaphor for the abandonment of the principles of story-telling itself’ (2006: 95). Furthermore, the stream-of-consciousness reading on closer inspection will itself prove inadequate. As Michael Sheringham has demonstrated in a masterly analysis of the structure of the text (1985), the existence of so many parallels, echoes, contrasts which exist between parts one and two of the novel suggests that we have to consider the way in which textualization in fact transcends interior monologue. The parallels between the Molloy and Moran characters and stories are of course numerous: for example, the experience of disintegration, debilitation and failure, concern with family relationships, journeys, physical violence, the sense of being pursued and victimized by a mysterious agency and messengers. However, this system of internal parallels and echoes between the two parts of the novel in fact invites the reader to consider the unity of the text as a whole, which is primarily conveyed through the emphasis on a writing presence. Thus, we must pursue an approach to the text which respects the circularity of the narrative, despite the fact that the novel is divided into two apparently discrete parts: we are encouraged to read part one again after reading part two.



cows, the sky, the sea, the mountains. I can’t believe it. No, I will not lie. I can easily conceive it. No matter, no matter, let us go on. (Beckett 1979: 15)

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Above all, Sheringham highlights the numerous references to the activity of narration, and the manner in which the text provides a running commentary on its own processes and on the performance of the narrators. It is certainly the case that there is an increasing preoccupation with the disintegration of self: towards the end of the novel there is a recognition by the narrator of ‘the great changes I had suffered and of my growing resignation of being dispossessed of self’ (Beckett 1979: 137). Throughout, we become attuned to the text’s self-reflexivity as a result of the numerous references to writing: Molloy is being given money to scribble on some pages; Moran is attempting to produce a report on his quest for Molloy. The Moran narrative in the second part contrasts initially with the kind of style used in part one, in that it seems to promise the precision and detail characteristic of a report, especially when compared with the long rambling paragraph which occupies part one (‘My report will be long. Perhaps I shall not finish it. My name is Moran, Jacques. That is the name I am known by. I am done for. My son too. All unsuspecting’ [1979: 84–5]); however, this coherence will also evaporate, and by the end of Moran’s narrative we have rejoined Molloy’s narrative in part one. Part two opens with the words ‘It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. I am calm’ (1979: 84); however, the very last words of the novel contradict this: ‘It was not midnight. It was not raining’ (1979: 162), and Moran/Molloy is far from being calm. Thus the whole intervening narrative is in effect cancelled out, and we are left with a palpable impression of a fiction. The circularity of the novel is thus apparent – the end of Moran’s narrative in effect occurs before Molloy’s narrative. The narrator(s) of Molloy is plagued by the uncertainty of memory, which casts doubt on the status of the narratives and stories being elaborated. In Malone Dies, there is only one voice, immobile, and left with few possessions (linking him with the earlier narrators and with previous Beckett characters), and the narrator relies on the use of a stick to fulfil his needs. He is in his room, meditating on the approach of death, and passes the time telling the story of Sapo/Macmann; and as in Molloy, there are many stories concerning violent death. This ‘digression’ in fact constitutes the major narrative element, and comes to dominate the diegesis. In common with the merging of characters we found in Molloy, Macmann seems to end up in an institution like that in which Moran is telling his story, telling himself numerous stories as distractions from the inevitability of death and the textual extinction provided by narrative silence. As in the previous volume, stories are commenced then interrupted, and there occurs a transformation of one character



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and voice into another (here Sapo mutates into Macmann, who in turn merges with Malone). Unlike the first part of Molloy, however, there are shifts in paragraphs, often alternating between first and third person, thus contesting the grammatical and existential status of the pronoun: the narrative flow becomes less univocal. Our reading of this novel directs us back to Molloy, such is the extent to which there is thematic continuity and parallelism of incident and situation: the narrator, for example, ends up in an institution of some kind, in which he is a kind of victim of an anonymous authority. It is evident that the narrator is becoming preoccupied by the nature of language itself: ‘Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying clashing, merging, endlessly’ (1979: 182), which can almost be taken as a mise en abyme of the whole narrative and linguistic process in the trilogy. His attempts at an inventory and ordering of experience quickly fall apart, thus underscoring the coherence of his own narrative: ‘What tedium. And I call that playing, I wonder if I am not yet again talking about myself’ (1979: 174). Multiple intrusions, diversions and distractions occur as the novel proceeds in a narrative that loses authority and coherence. His attempt at an inventory and the four stories he tells himself are interrupted, despite the plan he had conceived at the outset. Only the first of these stories (the Sapo narrative) is in any sense undertaken in detail, and he inevitably digresses away from the other three, despite his best efforts to maintain the linear narrative line. There are of course numerous crossreferences, echoes and parallels with the first volume; for example, the story concerning the relationship between Moll and Macmann echoes that between Molloy and Lousse in Molloy (the consonance in syllables also invites this comparison). Like Molloy, he does not know how he had come to be in this institution; he feels a compulsion to write an account of his adventures. Stressing the lack of unity in his own story, he does not provide the reader with explanations: ‘I have tried not to reflect on the beginning of my story. There are things I do not understand. But nothing to signify, I can go on’ (1979: 174), as his narrative cancels itself out. His reference to ‘losing consciousness’ (1979: 168) can be read metaphorically as the diminishing hold he has over his discourse (‘I have lived in a kind of coma. The loss of consciousness for me was never any great loss’ [1979: 169]). In the last lines of the novel, the language and syntax disintegrate as his death seems ever more imminent, and his story collapses under the weight of its unreliablity. In The Unnameable, the flux of language is particularly intense: in this novel there is only a single paragraph, with very minimal punctuation and an increasingly fractured syntax. Whereas in the previous



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novels a psychological realist reading is invited by providing a streamof-consciousness motivation, in The Unnameable fewer reading cues and concessions to readerly recuperation are provided, thus making the text one of Beckett’s most demanding yet central works. What we are presented with is in fact a crescendo of language: syntactically, the sentences grow longer and longer, and words and referents become divorced. Dissonances and diverging perspectives are presented in a non-hierarchized narration, from which linearity and traditional narrative unity are absent. The impression is created of a speaker who barely has control over his own narrative, as contradictory and proliferating stories are slipping constantly outside his grasp. The novel begins with an assertion of powerlessness in both physical and narrational terms: ‘Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on’ (1979: 267). This volume is entering into a dialogue with the two previous novels, with an assumption of the reader’s familiarity with the rest of the trilogy. Rubin Rabinovitz has demonstrated in a study of the use of repetition in the trilogy that ‘This is the very antithesis of aimless rambling [...] The novels of the trilogy are painstakingly organized and meticulously crafted’ (1990: 64), such is the extent to which the reader is invited to compare, contrast, review and discern the links between the constituent novels. Indeed, The Unnameable surely constitutes the most radical of the three works: as Sinead Mooney has commented, ‘all the appurtenances of fiction have been abandoned’ (2006: 35). This is an even more subversive text without the narrative frameworks, however fractured, of Molloy and Malone Dies: crucially, there is no sense at all of a linear development or the logic of a consciousness. The text, instead, foregrounds the fragmentary, while the narrator is speaking endlessly of himself, admitting that he is inventing a sequence of stories and embellishing fictions which generate ever more fictions, as the adventure with language continues unabated. Indeed, such is the ‘breathless’ pace, that we have the sense that the narrative cannot stop, and that the observations, micro-stories and speculations will proliferate endlessly. The narrator seems in fact barely even a human consciousness: described as ‘a big, talking ball’ and ‘a liquefied brain’ (Beckett 1979: 280, 269), and that he may even be in a jar of some kind in a legless and armless state of complete immobility. Inevitably, there are references to his previous incarnations: ‘All these Murphys, Molloys, and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone’ (1979: 278). All of these voices and



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‘characters’ throughout the trilogy become metamorphosed. Mahood in his crutches becomes transmogrified into the narrating ‘self’; returning from his travels, the one-legged Mahood finds that all his next-of-kin have died of food poisoning. However, this story is undermined by the narrative voice: ‘But enough of this nonsense. I was never anywhere but here, no one ever got me out of here’ (1979: 297). Perhaps the most disconcerting incarnation is the creature in the jar across from a restaurant, which is one of the major stories being recounted. After this, the next major digression is the almost ten pages which are devoted to the account of Worm being born. We have an equivalence mooted between Basil, Mahood and then Worm: ‘Perhaps it’s by trying to be Worm that I’ll finally succeed in being Mahood, I hadn’t thought of that. Then all I have to do is be Worm. Which no doubt I shall achieve by trying to be Jones’ (1979: 311–12). Just like the authority figures from the previous novels, they become in various ways representatives of the normal social order, and exist as the narrator’s surrogates and delegates: ‘It was he who told me stories about me, lived in my stead, issued forth from me, came back to me, entered back into me, heaped stories on my head’ (1979: 283). These other presences are depicted as tormentors and ‘vice-existers’, with whose voices he is locked in discursive combat. All of these ‘characters’ blur into each other; Mahood’s voice mingles with his own: ‘It is his voice which as often, always, mingled with mine, and sometimes drowned it completely’ (1979: 283). There is a concerted contestation of the identity of the narrating first person: ‘Do they believe it is I who am speaking [...] To make believe I have an ego of my own’; and later ‘Is there a single word of mine in all I say? No, I have no voice’ (1979: 317, 329); ‘It is not I who am speaking [...] Where do these words come from. That pour out of my mouth, and what do they mean’ (1979: 340). These statements can be seized upon by post-structuralist critics who will argue that the notions of the self are determined by language and that the self does not exist prior to language. In this concluding volume, the impossibility of a rational ordering of experience is underlined. All is invention: ‘all lies, God and man, nature and the light of day, the heart’s outpourings and the means of understanding, all invented, basely, by me alone’ (1979: 278–9). Despite having a ‘traumatized’ consciousness, faulty memory and bereft of emotional contact with humanity, the narrator insists that he will go on: ‘there was never anyone, anyone but me, anything but me, talking of me, impossible to stop, impossible to go on, but I must go on, I’ll go on, without anyone, without anything, but me, but my voice’ (1979: 374).



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What is striking about this novel is the compulsion to continue narrating, which is prepared by Molloy’s comment in the first volume of the trilogy: ‘And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate’ (1979: 30–1). These words from the opening of the trilogy are in effect translated into the final volume of the trilogy, again suggesting the way in which the trilogy has to be considered as a single entity. However, the narrator here seems even more extreme: ‘A far more agonised, confused and desperate voice than in the first two novels of the trilogy’ (McDonald 2006: 104). There is the sense of a culmination if we consider the position of the narrator in this volume compared with the previous two; however, far from offering closure or explanation, it is the circularity of the trilogy that is stressed. The complex relationships between text, voice and consciousness are problematized in this novel; specifically, the origin of discourse is queried: ‘It issues from me, it fills me, it clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I can’t stop it, I can’t prevent it, from tearing me, racking me, assailing me. It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and must speak, that is all I know’ (Beckett 1979: 281). It is the imperative to speak which emerges, despite the ravages of the narration and the physical disembodiment. It has been observed on many occasions that Beckett is grappling with the problematics of the Cartesian subject (the philosopher Guelincx is referred to in Murphy). When the narrator in The Unnameable states ‘I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me’ (1979: 267), Beckett is departing from the Cartesian mind–body dualistic tradition in Western humanism. In his essay ‘Beckett and the Philosophers’, P. J. Murphy provides a timely reassessment of the ways in which Beckett is entering into a debate with such questions at least implicitly in his works. It is of course the case that early criticism of Beckett is grounded in the existential and metaphysical implications of the narratives. In his essay ‘Consciousness and the Novel’, David Lodge presents a masterly account of the ways in which modern fiction ‘represents’ consciousness, and locates Beckett’s interior monologues as works whose ‘narrator seems to be a consciousness totally deprived of sensory input’ (2002: 82). In The Art of Fiction, Lodge introduces the chapter on aporia using the opening section of The Unnameable: ‘All we have is a narrative voice talking to itself, or transcribing its own thoughts as they occur, longing for extinction and silence’ (1992: 221). Lodge is able to use the Beckettian self-cancelling and contradictory discourse as an object lesson in the narrative trope of aporia. The continuity and coherence of consciousness is radically contested in this final volume in particular, but apparent to a



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lesser degree in the first two novels. As Paul Davies has said, ‘Beckett’s narrators embody the emergency of the Cartesian consciousness, split off not only from the environment but also from its own organism [...] Beckett’s lost, blind, will-less, impotent, dried-up tramps and wanderers are the casualties of Cartesianism’ (1994: 45). The reading of the text as unmediated stream of consciousness, however, is of course a psychological realist means of naturalizing and recuperating the work, which otherwise seems to defy a specific origin in consciousness, by ostentatiously undermining the notion of a direct link between text and voice. A new generation of critics, attuned to the way in which the trilogy foregrounds the lack of a fixed centre, voice and consciousness, has focused on how the trilogy proclaims a suspicion of language: in The Unnameable, words become castigated: ‘the words swarm and jostle like ants, hasty and indifferent, bringing nothing, taking nothing away, too light to leave a mark. I shall not say I again, ever again, it’s too farcical. I shall put it in its place, whenever I hear it, the third person, if I think of it’ (Beckett 1979: 326). Leslie Hill (1990) has analysed how Beckett’s fiction anticipates those concerns about language and textuality with which Derrida would be preoccupied. Indeed, as Iian Wright has argued, Beckett’s narrators are ‘at work in a deconstructionist activity – foregrounding their own textuality, decentring the texts they inhabit, subverting subject positions, denaturalizing language’ (1983: 71). In this respect Beckett is anticipating the deconstructionist proposition that the ‘I’ that speaks differs from the ‘I’ that is spoken of. Along similar lines, David Lodge has rightly commented that ‘Beckett was a deconstructionist avant la letttre’ (1992: 221). Postmodern readings of Beckett will concentrate on the problematics of language articulated in the texts (Trevise 1990; Uhlmann 1999; Watson 1991); as Rónán McDonald has put it, Beckett’s fiction is susceptible to a range of subtle postmodern readings: ‘There is no self anterior to the speaking self; language makes the self, it does not simply reflect it’ (2006: 121). Selfhood becomes contested in the trilogy; the ‘I’ becomes indeterminate and detached from consciousness, and is instead a pure narrative device – a voice without a consciousness, a discourse without an origin, an impersonal text without a narrator of a conventional first-person kind. In exploring the relationship between digression and consciousness, the trilogy can be recruited to chart the transition from a modernist towards a postmodernist aesthetic in literary-historical terms, in the sense that the decentred consciousness is precisely what is conveyed (McHale 1987; Smyth 1991). We have shifting narrative viewpoints, the disintegration of linear plot, an affirmation of writing, and a lack



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of fixed character and finality. Patricia Waugh identifies a postmodern fiction as one which plays on the gap between the linguistic ‘I’ and the existential ‘I’: ‘To conceive of subjectivity as contextual, fluid, relational, constituted and annihilated through language, is to recognise that as one writes the self one’s self is also similarly written’ (1992: 65). Arguably, the trilogy’s problematization of the concept of a unified consciousness constitutes a challenge to the Enlightenment and humanist idea of the centrality of the mind: perhaps this is the most radical feature of the work. By detaching consciousness from the notion of a fixed identity, the trilogy contests this basic tenet of the Western philosophical tradition. In post-structuralist literary theory, the human subject is constructed by the discourses in which it is situated. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has maintained that consciousness is an epiphenomenon or illusion, and refers to the ‘pandemonium’ of brain activity (1993). It could be argued that the representation of the functioning of consciousness in the trilogy mirrors this, in that the narrative nature of human consciousness means that human beings are ‘condemned’ to tell stories. The trilogy boldly collapses the previously linked categories of language, consciousness and selfhood. However, it would be dangerous to assert a narrowly mimetic view that the trilogy represents consciousness in such an unmediated way, for this ignores the emphasis on writing and the manner in which the trilogy has been constructed as a single entity. As we have seen, there are numerous echoes, parallels and correspondences between its constituent parts, and the three enter into a dialogue with each other, with the concluding volume being seen as a development from the previous two, however inconclusive the ending may appear. For a narrative that may initially seem to focus on subjectivity, the link between language and the self is dissolved, and is replaced by a more fluid ‘identity’: there can be no self before the creation of narrative, and consequently no totalized selfhood (Durozoi 1972; Mayoux 1982). It is tempting to see The Unnameable as a ‘decline into narrative anarchy’ (Mooney 2006: 39): in this reading, the disintegrating body becomes a structural metaphor for the disintegrating text, bereft of unity, and capable of multiplying and permutating endlessly, utterances without an origin, resisting textual and psychological totalization. It is evident that Beckett, in his heightened adoption of digression, is advancing upon the modernist experiments of James Joyce and Marcel Proust. However, we find in the trilogy a departure from the essentialism of Proust, that is to say, the notion of an irreducible essence despite the ravages of time and space. Beckett’s use of the digressive internal monologue is clearly derived in large part from the adventures in



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form of first-person narration in modernist fiction. The novels which make up The Beckett Trilogy are not, however, confessional narratives, highlighting the rich exploration and completeness of the inner self. Instead, Beckett’s contribution to this device is to remove the valorization of interiority which had come to characterize the digressive interior monologue in modernism. Far from celebrating the inner life, Beckett depicts the multiple and unstable ego, bereft of a solid and recognizable identity or personality. Beckett departs from the modernist emphasis on interior monologue as the basis for the creation of character. The ‘logic’ of the interior monologue provides only a partial (psychological realist) reading for the text; what now has to be considered is the manner in which the trilogy resists being reduced to an individuated and unmediated stream of consciousness, by its foregrounding of the writing process and its emphasis on competing discourses and voices. Paradoxically, in order to develop new reading strategies, the ‘unity’ of the trilogy as a whole needs to be re-examined, as a result of the existence of numerous internal parallels and correspondences. Digression is an integral part of the diegesis in the three novels, foregrounding fragmentation and discontinuity. The trilogy exceeds the limits of the representation of consciousness in fiction and it subverts totalizing fictions of the self. ‘The stream of consciousness has turned into a stream of narration,’ as David Lodge has summarized the distinction between Joyce’s modernism and Beckett’s postmodernism (1990: 44).

Bibliography Beckett, Samuel. 1979. The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable (London: Picador) Davies, Paul. 1994. ‘Three Novels and Four Nouvelles: Giving up the Ghost Be Born at Last’, in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge University Press), pp. 43–66 Dennett, Daniel. 1993. Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin) Durozoi, Gérard. 1972. Beckett (Paris: Bordas) Hill, Leslie. 1990. Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge University Press) Knowlson, James. 1996. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury) Lodge, David. 1990. After Bakhtin (London: Routledge) —— 1992. The Art of Fiction (London: Penguin) —— 2002. Consciousness and the Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) Mayoux, Jean-Jacques. 1982. ‘Molloy: un événement littéraire, une œuvre’, in Molloy, by S. Beckett (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, édition double), pp. 243–74



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McDonald, Rónán. 2006. The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge University Press) McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge) Mooney, Sinead. 2006. Samuel Beckett (London: Northcote House) Murphy, P. J. 1994. ‘Beckett and the Philosophers’, in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge University Press), pp. 222–40 Rabinovitz, Rubin. 1990. ‘Repetition and Underlying Meanings in Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy’, in Rethinking Beckett, ed. Lance St John Butler and Robin J. Davis (London: Macmillan), pp. 31–67 Sheringham, Michael. 1985. Beckett: ‘Molloy’ (London: Grant and Cutler) Smyth, Edmund J. 1991. Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction (London: Batsford) Trevise, Thomas. 1990. Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature (Princeton University Press) Uhlmann, Anthony. 1999. Beckett and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press) Watson, David. 1991. Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (London: Macmillan) Waugh, Patricia. 1992. Practising Postmodernism: Reading Modernism (London: Arnold) Wright, Iian. 1983. ‘What Matter Who’s Speaking? Beckett, the Authorial Subject and Contemporary Critical Theory’, Southern Review, 16.1: 59–86



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Straight Line or Aimless Wandering? Italo Calvino’s Way to Digression Olivia Santovetti

I am not devoted to aimless wandering, I’d rather say that I prefer to entrust myself to the straight line, in the hope that the line will continue into infinity, making me unreachable. I prefer to calculate at length the trajectory of my flight, expecting that I will be able to launch myself like an arrow and disappear over the horizon. (Calvino 1988: 47–8) Digression was not the typical feature of the Italian writer Italo Calvino. His predilection for linear writing, the ‘straight line’, was frequently reaffirmed by the writer himself: his temperament, as he confessed in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, prompted him to ‘keep it short’ (Calvino 1988: 120) and his stories tended to ‘go down straight as a plumb-line’ (1991: 133). And yet, no other writer in Italian literature has given so much thought to the elaboration of the strategy of digression as Calvino. This is evident in his appreciation of digressive authors (including Ariosto, Sterne, Diderot and Gadda), in his memorable definition of digression as one of the ‘pleasures of lingering’ (1988: 46) and finally in his original experimentation in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979). This novel can be seen as an attempt – a carefully planned or ‘calculated’ attempt – of a partisan of the linear plot to come to terms with a digressive pattern of writing. Here, Calvino deliberately employed digressions to undermine and dismantle the plot – by breaking its linearity and showing its status of artifice – and at the same time to emphasize its irreplaceable function – by restoring the Aristotelian formula of the plot as ‘organization of the events’ in the narration (Aristotle 1996: 11). In Calvino’s writing, linear plot and digressions stand as two poles of an opposition that, together with other pairs of opposites (including order/disorder, 169



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lightness/weight, quickness/delay, sunny/opaque, detachment/participation), constitute a binary logic at the core of his oeuvre. The binary logic provided creative constraints for a writer who defined himself and his work through dichotomy, as ‘a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury’, and whose work ‘reflects these two impulses’ (Calvino 1988: 53). I will analyse Calvino’s use of digression through three definitions of digression. The first is explicitly formulated by Calvino in the Norton lecture on ‘Quickness’: digression as ‘a strategy for putting off the ending’ and maintaining the potentiality of the beginning (1988: 46). The second is alluded to in Calvino’s apology of the work of Carlo Emilio Gadda – the quintessential digressive author in Italian literature – with which he opens his final lecture on ‘Multiplicity’: digression as the means through which the narrative text recreates the multiplicity of the world. The third definition is, I will argue, implied in the self-reflexive vocation that ran through all of Calvino’s production, fiction and nonfiction: digression as a technique of critical detachment through which the text reflects on itself and calls into question the reader.

Digression as a strategy for maintaining the potentiality of the beginning In Six Memos, Calvino describes digression and pays homage to its inventors: ‘Laurence Sterne’s great invention was the novel that is completely composed of digressions, an example followed by Diderot. The digression is a strategy for putting off the ending, a multiplying of time within the work, a perpetual evasion or flight. An evasion from what? From death, of course’ (1988: 46). Narratively speaking, to escape death means to be able to prolong the preliminaries indefinitely, to maintain, against the definitiveness and completeness of the end, the potentialities of the beginning. This is the aim of Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night as stated by the writer Silas Flannery, Calvino’s alter ego in the novel: I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object. But how could such a book be constructed? Would it break off after the first paragraph? Would the preliminaries be prolonged indefinitely? Would it set the beginning of one tale inside another? (1981: 177) The answers to these questions is If on a Winter’s Night itself. The novel tells the story of a fictional reader whose reading is continuously



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interrupted and rerouted; his frustrating experience in getting hold only of beginnings, incipits, of books is mirrored in the real readers, who have to deal with a plot – the one in which the reader is protagonist – that is interrupted to allow the interpolation of the incipits. The plot is developed in 12 chapters, which faithfully follow a linear Aristotelian formula, with a hero (the Reader), a heroine (the Female Reader), a clear beginning, middle and end, with a happy ending. However, the plot is interrupted by ten major digressions, which are the ten incipits the Reader protagonist begins but never finishes reading. The incipits are interleaved between chapters and constitute an autonomous story that is detached from the main plot, but also intertwined with it. The structure at the macro level, characterized by the unusual combination between chapters and incipits, can be seen as an application, exact and rigorous, of the strategy of digression. However, digression is also and increasingly present, and in an apparently more spontaneous way, within each interpolated story or chapter where the different narrators interrupt the narration and introduce their comments and reflections. The adoption of a digressive model is openly acknowledged by Calvino as he underlines that ‘the interruption of the plot’ is ‘the structuring motif of [his] novel’ (1991–94, II: 1390). The writer uses interruption and digression as devices through which to emphasize, preserve and multiply the narrative potential which he sees concentrated in the beginning: a book that is only an incipit, as Silas Flannery fantasized. Indeed, the beginning or incipit expressed for Calvino the quintessence of the potentialities of literature. It is significant that Calvino dedicated the first of the Norton lectures to the problem of beginning and ending (‘Cominciare e finire’). It began with a series of definitions of the function of beginning, of which two are of interest here. The first is the definition of the beginning as the entrance to a different world, the written world; prior to the beginning there exists only the ‘non-written world’ where we live (Calvino 1995: 735). Silas Flannery had expressed this idea as ‘the incipit seems to open the passage from one world to the other, from the time and space of here and now to the time and space of the written world’ (Calvino 1981: 176–7). For Flannery/Calvino the beginning was the first space where fiction and reality confronted each other. I argue that this definition of beginning bears an analogy with the mechanism of digression. Digressions, too, are a threshold since, by interrupting the sequence of the plot, they divert the attention from the narrated events to the narrative process itself and stimulate an awareness of the problematic relationship between the fictional text and reality, between narrator and readers, and between two different temporalities, that of the narrated story and that of the narrating.



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The second definition of beginning is related to the idea of expressing the maximum of potentiality and energy: it is the ‘moment of detachment from the potential multiplicity’ (Calvino 1995: 735), the ‘passage from the universal to the particular’, where the writer feels the ‘need to leave the vastness of the cosmos, in order to dedicate all his/her attention […] to the detailed representation of a single story’ (1995: 738). However, this exalting, creative and promising moment – whose potentiality is immortalized in the Sternean image, so recurrent in Calvino’s work, of the white page on which anything can be written – is also the crucial moment of choice: ‘We have the possibility of saying everything, in all the possible ways, but we have to say one thing and in one particular way’ (1995: 734). Few other writers ‘have had such an acute and almost painful sense of the choice which pervades the activity of writing’ (Barenghi 2007: 62). The choice in Calvino is always accompanied by anxiety and regret: something will be discarded and lost. Hence the suggestive and melancholic reflection in the end of the famous ‘1964 Preface’ to The Path to the Spiders’ Nests: ‘A book written will never console me for what I have destroyed writing it’ (1991–94, I: 1204). This feeling was expressed on many other occasions by Calvino, including in the Norton lectures (‘Cominciare e finire’ [1995: 748] and ‘Exactitude’ [1988: 68]). A dense page in the fifth interpolated story, ‘Looks down in the gathering shadow’, of If on a Winter’s Night also deals with the idea. Here, though, the nostalgic tone is supplanted by a bold narrator who explains all the advantages of ‘a trick of the narrative art that [he is] trying to employ’ (Calvino 1981: 109). This trick is digression. After an adventurous life the narrator has time for recollection. In this reverie are stated the terms of Calvino’s project in If on a Winter’s Night. One element that is considered is the density of material to be told. The way this density is realized is by writing a story that produces around itself a feeling of ‘saturation of other stories, which [he will] tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion’ (1981: 109). The space that this saturation creates is important: ‘a space full of stories’ where the reader ‘can move in all directions’ (1981: 109). The actual story that the narrator tells is not as important as what he is leaving out of the main narration: In fact, looking in perspective at everything I am leaving out of the main narration, I see something like a forest that extends in all directions and is so thick that it does not allow light to pass: a material, in other words, much richer than what I have chosen to put in the foreground this time, so it is not impossible that the person who



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follows my story may feel himself a bit cheated, seeing that the stream is dispersed in so many trickles, and that of the essential events only the last echoes and reverberations arrive to him; but it is not impossible that this is the very effect I aimed at when I started narrating, or let’s say it’s a trick of the narrative art that I am trying to employ. (1981: 109) A digressive and multiple narration, one that is ‘dispersed into many trickles’, is a strategy deliberately adopted by the narrator in order to preserve the narrative possibilities at his disposal, which, if you look closer, is the sign of real wealth, solid and vast, in the sense that if, we’ll assume, I had only one story to tell, I would make a huge fuss over this story and would end up botching it in my rage to show it in its true light, but, actually having in reserve a virtually unlimited supply of narratable material, I am in a position to handle it with detachment and without haste, even allowing a certain irritation to be perceptible and granting myself the luxury of expatiating on secondary episodes and insignificant details. (1981: 109–10) By avoiding a focus on a single story, the narrator has the advantage not only of handling the story with more detachment but also of not exhausting its potentiality. This is the key concept. In the original Italian Calvino used the verb ‘bruciare’, burn, for what in the English translation has been translated as ‘botch’. The verb ‘burn’ would have been more precise because the reader would have not missed the link with the last line of the ‘1964 Preface’ where Calvino spoke with regret and sadness of all the material that he had to ‘distruggere’, destroy, almost as a sacrifice, in order to tell his single story. With a digressive pattern of writing the sacrifice is no longer required, the extra material can find expression in ‘secondary episodes’ or apparently ‘insignificant details’ (1981: 110). Through digression the novel recharges itself and becomes a ‘machine for multiplying narratives’ (1988: 120).

Digression as a strategy to recreate in the narrative text the multiplicity of the world By multiplying narratives within a single text, digressions achieve another important result, which is that of paralleling in the narrative structure the wayward discontinuity and multifariousness of life. This




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definition of digression is not explicitly formulated by Calvino but is implied in his observations on digressive authors, primarily Carlo Emilio Gadda. Gadda, says Calvino, ‘tried all his life to represent the world as a knot, a tangled skein of yarn; to represent it without in the least diminishing the inextricable complexity’ (1988: 106). Gadda’s digressive style matched his vision of the world as inextricable multiplicity. Calvino paid homage to Gadda by beginning his Norton lecture on ‘Multiplicity’ with a long quotation from That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (1957), because it provided an ‘excellent introduction to the subject of [his] lecture – which is the contemporary novel as an encyclopaedia, as a method of knowledge, and above all as a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of the world’ (1988: 105). He stated that If on a Winter’s Night was that type of novel, albeit in the condensed and modular form that is most in line with his tendency to ‘keep it short’. Calvino’s aim was ‘to give the essence of what a novel is by providing it in a concentrated form’, ‘to sample the potential multiplicity of what may be narrated’; the word he used in relation to these structures is ‘hyper-novel’, intending with ‘hyper’ to convey the ‘sense of infinite possibilities’ (1988: 120). Calvino’s digression in If on a Winter’s Night, by branching in multiple directions, aimed to recreate in narration – or at least suggest – the ‘infinite possibilities’. Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s Calvino wrote several pieces that made explicit the link between digression, multiplicity and the hyper-novel. Three are particularly interesting: the travel essay ‘The Form of the Tree’ (1976), in which Calvino made clear his fascination for a digressive pattern of writing; ‘La Poubelle Agréée’ (1974–76), an essay where he explored the implication of what is left out or thrown away; and finally the short story ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ (1967). In ‘The Form of the Tree’ Calvino described a gigantic tree said to be 2000 years old that he saw during his trip to Mexico. Calvino approached the tree and tried to grasp the secret of a time-resistant living form: ‘The first sensation is that of an absence of form: a monster that grows – one would say – without any plan, the trunk is one and multiple […] The trunk seems to unify in its actual perimeter a long story of uncertainties, germinations and deviations’ (1995: 600). Does this imply, wondered a bewildered Calvino, that the secret of lasting is in abundance? – ‘Is it through a chaotic waste of matter and shape that the tree is able to give itself a shape and maintain it? Does it mean that the transmission of meaning is ensured in the excess of manifestation, in the profusion of expressing ourselves, in throwing away, whatever happens?’ (1995: 602). Here, the writer has taken the place of the



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traveller, and the interrogative refers more generally to literature as the human activity conveying meaning, and implies questions of methodology, poetics and style. He reflected on a different pattern of writing, a different style, which through its many deviations, digressions and linguistic deformations – the ‘throwing away, whatever happens’ so distant from his controlled and calculated style – attempted to reflect reality as a multiplicity. Written in the same period, ‘La Poubelle Agréée’ returns to the idea of the ‘throwing away’ – it is a piece on the daily routine of domestic rubbish. The writer dwells on the different meanings of ‘throwing away’ and makes the remark that ‘only by throwing something away can I be sure that something of myself has not yet been thrown away and perhaps need not be thrown away now or in the future’; this makes the ‘gesture of throwing away […] the first and indispensable condition of being, since one is what one does not throw away’ (1993: 103–4). Evidently, the discourse, as in the case of ‘The Form of the Tree’, has moved to a different level and instead of household waste Calvino is speaking of identity: by expelling something that is no longer mine I proceed towards a more precise definition of myself. Once again Calvino detects a dichotomy: the daily routine of the dustbin is a rite of purification, but it also alludes to a ‘descent below ground’, ‘my own personal funeral, to postpone it if only for a little while, to confirm that for one more day I have been a producer of detritus and not detritus myself’ (1993: 104). In writing, the same idea is at the base of Tristram Shandy’s postponing the end of his book through digressions in order to cheat death: ‘the more I write, the more I shall have to write’ (Sterne 1984: 341–2). Digression could be considered as production of extra material, detritus, that is essential to the self being alive and to the narrative for not reaching its final destination. Calvino concludes by making explicit the parallel with the process of writing: ‘Writing’, he says, ‘no less than throwing away, involves dispossession, involves pushing away from myself a heap of crumpled-up paper and a pile of paper written all over, neither of the two being any longer mine, but deposited, expelled’ (1993: 125). Could the ‘deposited, expelled’ material be recovered and reused? This is the ambitious idea behind Calvino’s hyper-novel, as a way in which the novel can attempt to replicate the multiplicity of reality. The word hyper-novel appeared for the first time in Calvino’s short story ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ (1967) and in the essay ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’ (1967). In both pieces the hyper-novel is described as a structure that ‘contains all possible variants’ (1987: 26). This structure – as the narrator




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Arranging one after the other all the continuations which allow the story to be extended, probable or improbable as they may be, you obtain the zigzag line of the Monte Cristo of Dumas; whereas connecting the circumstances that prevent the story from continuing you outline the spiral of a novel in negative, a Monte Cristo preceded by the minus sign. (1983: 151) The new plot hypothesized by Calvino is based, once again, on a paradox: it should include that which the actual novel has left out, it should account for the variants that had been discarded, for the possibilities that had been left unfulfilled – in short, it should contain its own negation, the ‘novel in negative’. The hyper-novel should also include the story of itself, of its own making. This brings us to a third definition of digression, as Calvino, with a characteristic twist in the narration, breaks down the wall of fictional illusion and brings the readers around the table of the novelist Alexandre Dumas, who is depicted in the frenzy of his creation: ‘Dumas selects, rejects, cuts, pastes, interposes’ (1983: 149).

Digression as a technique of critical detachment through which the text reflects on itself and calls into question the reader The depiction of a fellow writer, Dumas, at his desk caught in the act of sorting out his material, is a sign of the self-reflexive vocation which runs through the entire work of Calvino and which finds its most original expression in If on a Winter’s Night. Digression, by definition, is an interruption into the sequence of the plot which has the effect of provoking the critical detachment of the reader, who finds him/herself shifting their attention from the narrated story to the narrative process. Calvino knew very well that one of the great advantages of adopting a digressive model was being able ‘to handle’ his material ‘with detachment’ – as put by the narrator of the fifth interpolated story of If on a Winter’s Night (1981: 110). Calvino began to use digression as a technique of critical detachment after his neorealist phase. The focus on the mechanisms of narration is evident in The Baron on the Trees (1957), where Calvino explored the passion of reading and the dynamics of storytelling and where he



of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ elucidated – rejected the single or linear plot in favour of a multiplication of the plot, a multiplication which may assume either the form of a zigzag line or that of a whirling spiral:


Ombrosa no longer exists. Looking at the empty sky, I ask myself if it ever did really exist. That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless […] was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps. (1980: 284) In The Non-Existent Knight (1959) the self-reflexive game is deliberately exposed: from chapter IV the intrusions of the nun narrator – usually at the beginning of the chapter – increase steadily: from digressions no longer than a page in chapters IV, V and VI to two and four in chapters VIII and IX. The last two digressions are not only the longest but also the most dense: in the first the narrator openly shows herself as the puppeteer behind the stage who manipulates the narration: On my paper I trace a straight line with occasional angles, and this is Agilulf’s route. This other line all twirls and zigzags is Gurduloo’s. When he sees a butterfly flutter by, Gurduloo at once urges his horse after it, thinking himself astride not the horse but the butterfly, and so wanders off the road and into the fields. Meanwhile Agilulf goes straight ahead, following his course. (1980: 345) The modes of travelling of the two characters embody once again the binary logic at the base of Calvino’s narrative and constitute also, incidentally, a self-evident metaphor of the two modalities of writing, ‘digressive and progressive movements’ (Sterne 1984: 81). In the long digression of chapter IX the narrator continued her observations on plot construction to the point of confessing candidly that she would prefer to indulge in her philosophical meditations on the act of narration rather than waste her time in following the plot: ‘What the vulgar – and I too until now – considered as the greatest of delights, the interweaving adventures which make up every knightly tale, now seem to me pointless decorations, mere fringes, the hardest part of my task’ (Calvino 1980: 357). This is a narrator who is completely converted to the cause of digression. In the 1960s, the influence of a digressive and self-reflexive pattern of writing became very evident in Calvino’s work. First of all, it visibly affected the style of his non-fiction work. Characteristically limpid and



devised a memorable finale à la Cervantes in which the novelistic illusion is dispelled by reminding us of its status of artifice, its being made of ink on the page:

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articulated in paratactic and brief sentences, this now leaned towards a more convoluted and meditative style in order to reflect the complexity and indecipherability of reality. This is seen in the 1964 Preface of The Path to the Spiders’ Nests and the 1960 ‘Introduzione inedita ai Nostri Antenati’ (‘Unedited introduction to Our Ancestors’): here Calvino’s way of arguing was eminently digressive and circular, involving readjustments of the focus of his argument: ‘It is better if I go back to the thread’ (1991–94, I: 1189); ‘I must restart from the beginning. I got myself in the wrong direction’ (1991–94, I: 1191). The linearity was also broken by abundant – or ‘mannerist’, as described by Martin McLaughlin (1998: 157) – use of parentheses, through which Calvino inserted doubts, clarifications, corrections, even self-mocking comments. Reflection on the narrative text became one of the most recurrent topics in Calvino’s essay writing. In ‘The Novel as Spectacle’ (1970), Calvino observed that ‘never before has this human act of telling a story, always operative at all stages of a civilization, been so often analyzed, dismantled, and reassembled in all its most basic mechanisms’ (1987: 194). Self-reflexivity, he continued, was both the most eminent feature of contemporary and experimental literature and the main object of critical studies. Calvino believed that the invaluable advantage of self-reflexivity was that of ‘re-establishing communications between the writer, who is fully aware of the mechanisms he is using, and the reader, who goes along with the game because he, too, knows the rules, and knows he can no longer have the wool pulled over his eyes’ (1987: 194–5). The centrality of reading is explicitly argued in ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’ (1967), a sort of manifesto of the new Calvino: ‘Once we have dismantled and reassembled the process of literary composition, the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading’ (1987: 15). From this moment onwards the appeal to the cooperation of an active, responsible reader dominated Calvino’s essay writing. It culminated in his last novel, If on a Winter’s Night, which is a successful attempt to establish, on the basis of a shared awareness of the narrative rules, a new relationship with the reader. In conclusion, digression did not come naturally to Calvino. It was a strategy deliberately adopted to put into practice a conception of literature that developed after his abandonment of neorealism and which he finalized in If on a Winter’s Night. Digression, as he succinctly described it, multiplied time within the novel; this operation had the advantage of putting off the ending and therefore maintaining the potentiality of the beginning, and at the same time of making available



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within the novel an ‘unlimited supply of narratable material’ (Calvino 1981: 110). This formulation recalls the appeal to variety advocated by digressive authors including Ariosto and Sterne. Calvino’s postmodern term was ‘multiplicity’: thereby, digression allowed the novel to ‘sample the potential multiplicity of what may be narrated’ (1988: 120). The sampling took the form of ten different types of fiction in If on a Winter’s Night, ten being enough, said Calvino, to ‘convey the meaning of multiplicity’ (1991–94, II: 1393) Digression was linked to multiplicity not only as a strategy to include the ‘novel in negative’, that is the discarded, potential and possible variants, but also because by interrupting and disrupting the linearity of the plot, the novel resembles the heterogeneous, unpredictable and mutable character of life (1983: 151). The Reader of If on a Winter’s Night experiences the book, fragmented by digressions, as no longer ‘something solid, which lies before you, easily defined, enjoyed without risks’ but as ‘a real-life experience, always elusive, discontinuous, debated’ (1981: 32). Hence, a zigzag and digressive pattern of narration is – to adopt the words Calvino used to describe Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste – ‘the only, authentic image of the living world, which is never linear nor stylistically homogeneous’ (1999: 108). The appeal to the authenticity of the representation indicates that behind digressions there is a thirst for knowledge: the more the representation breaks the canons of a ‘realistic’ narration (with the intrusive presence of the narrator in the fiction, and with the confusion between the fictional and the real) the closer the writer feels he has come to reality. I have elsewhere described this attitude in the terms of ‘anti-realistic realism’ (Santovetti 2007: 234). This is what informs the conception of the literary work that Calvino began elaborating from the 1960s onwards, as a ‘map of the world and of the knowable’, a challenge to understand the world (1987: 32). This conception was then further elaborated in the Norton lectures with the notion of the novel as ‘open encyclopedia’, ‘method of knowledge’ and a ‘network of connections’ (1988: 105). The function of literature in contemporary society is to keep the challenge open, to pursue the process of understanding, the search for a method, in spite of and because of the overwhelming chaos. Finally, the process of understanding, the mapping ‘of the world and of the knowable’ (1987: 32), must necessarily include the analysis of its own mechanisms of representation and must acknowledge and reflect on the fact that ‘books are made of words, of signs, of methods of construction’ (1987: 99). Digression, among other self-reflexive strategies, lays bare the rules of the narrative game and, in so doing, testifies to ‘the critical manner in which literature regards itself’ (1987: 99). This




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Bibliography Almansi, Guido. 1971. ‘Il mondo binario di Italo Calvino’, Paragone, 22: 95–110 Aristotle. 1996. Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin) Barenghi, Mario. 2007. Italo Calvino, le linee e i margini (Bologna: il Mulino) Calvino, Italo. 1980. Our Ancestors, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (London: Picador) —— 1981. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, trans. William Weaver (London: Secker and Warburg) —— 1983. Time and the Hunter, trans. William Weaver (London: Abacus) —— 1987. The Literature Machine: Essays, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Secker and Warburg) —— 1988. Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) —— 1991. I libri degli altri. Lettere 1947–1981, ed. Giovanni Tesio (Turin: Einaudi) —— 1991–94. Romanzi e racconti, ed. Mario Barenghi, Bruno Falcetto and Claudio Milanini, 3 vols (Milan: Mondadori) —— 1993. The Road to San Giovanni, trans. Tim Parks (London: Jonathan Cape) —— 1995. Saggi 1945–1985, ed. Mario Barenghi, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori) —— 1999. Why Read the Classics?, trans. Martin McLaughlin (London: Jonathan Cape) Cases, Cesare. 1958. ‘Calvino e il “pathos della distanza”’, Città aperta, 7–8: 33–5 McLaughlin, Martin. 1998. Italo Calvino (Edinburgh University Press) Santovetti, Olivia. 2007. Digression: A Narrative Strategy in the Italian Novel (Bern: Peter Lang) Sterne, Laurence. 1984. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida)



critical awareness does not influence literature alone but society in general in as much as literature becomes ‘one of a society’s instruments of self-awareness’ (1987: 97).

Roving with a Compass: Digression, the Novel and the Creative Imagination in Javier Marías Alexis Grohmann I As regards a novelist’s approach to his or her work, that is, the method of writing or process of creation of a work, there seem to be two classes of novelists: on the one hand, those who form a more or less clear plan of their novels in advance of their writing them and then execute their plan in the course of it; and, on the other hand, those who devise no such plan and work not on the basis of any great number of preconceived ideas, but, rather, proceed irregularly, as Samuel Richardson put it in 1751. The former, he wrote, conceive ‘an agreeable plan, write within its circle, and go on step by step with delight, knowing what they drive at. Execution is all they have to concern themselves about’ (quoted in Allott 1959: 144). The latter, with whom Richardson aligned himself, have no such plan, know not (or not entirely) what they drive at and proceed rather errantly, feeling about in the darkness that envelops them, so to speak. Among this latter class of writer is the contemporary Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who on repeated occasions has explained that he has no interest in knowing in advance what his novels will be about. As he expounds in a short but revealing piece entitled ‘Roving with a Compass’ (‘Errar con brújula’, also translatable as ‘Erring with a Compass’), he lacks a vision of the future and an aim: Not only do I not know what I want to write, nor where I would like to get to, nor do I have a narrative project that I can formulate before or after my novels have come to exist, but I do not even know, when I begin one, what it will be about or what will happen in it, or how many characters there will be, not to mention how it will end […] The truth of the matter is that nowadays I still continue to write 181



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There are writers, he adds, who know from the outset what they want their text to be like and what they will write about; they are novelists who ‘work with a map, and before setting out are already familiar with the territory they have to traverse: they confine themselves to covering this ground, secure in the knowledge of possessing the means by which they are to do so’ (1993: 92). On the rare occasion when Marías has seen the route in advance, in the case of the odd short story, he has admitted to having the feeling of merely transcribing, writing out something, and he has found this tiresome (1993: 92). That is why he prefers, instead, to work with a compass, as he puts it: Not only do I not know what my purpose is and what I would like to or will write about on each occasion, but I am also entirely ignorant of the representation, to employ a term that can encompass both what one calls ‘plot’, ‘storyline’ or ‘story’ and its formal, stylistic, or rhythmical appearance, as well as its structure. (1993: 92) Moreover, writing blindly or in the dark (‘escribir a tientas’) and this ‘not knowing’ (‘no saber’) allow him to settle himself in digressiveness or errancy (‘errabundia’), something that critics frown upon, according to Marías, ‘granting great importance to what is “pertinent” or “essential” to the story, as if everything that appears in a narrative should be useful information and directed at one and the same end’ (1993: 92–3).1 Furthermore, as he has said elsewhere, ‘sometimes in literature as in life, one does not know what is part of a story until the story takes shape and is complete and finished’ (2008: 125). This makes eminent sense: unless one is already in possession of all the facts, of the whole story, before actually writing the story, how can one know what will turn out to be related (to it) and what not? As Marías puts it, Cervantes, Sterne, Proust, Nabokov, Bernhard or Benet ‘have been masters of this errancy of texts or of the art of drifting, digression, the aside, the lyrical interpolation, the prolonged and autonomous affront and metaphor, respectively’; however, it cannot be said, he adds in defence of digression in literature, that this tendency is gratuitous in any of their cases, or that it is not pertinent or essential to the story; what is more, it is precisely such digressive dispositions that actually make narrative possible in each case (1993: 93). And he concludes, with reference to the novel he had just finished at the time, A Heart So White (1992), that the reason he found



without much purpose and without an objective worth mentioning. (Marías 1993: 91)

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as happens when reading the authors mentioned, whilst I was writing I found myself obliged to stop due to an aside, a digression or an interpolation: my interest as a writer is not very different to my interest as a reader: as such, I want to be forced to stop and think, and as long as this is the case I don’t really mind what story I am being told. At the end of the day, what is narratable in a novel is only what can also be said in a few and interchangeable words. Novels, however, tend to consist of many words and precisely these are not interchangeable. (1993: 93; original italics) So, in the case of Marías, the significance of this errant process of creating a novel, this need to feel his way in the darkness that is the unmapped novel, to find his way in uncharted territory, is threefold: it sheds light on the processes of the creative imagination; it is this errant process that facilitates a formal digressiveness, a digressive style of writing;2 and it is ultimately related to the freedom of the novel per se. If a work is already complete before being written, before being created in written language, then written language and the imaginative and inventive processes become inessential.3 Instead, through the method or approach adopted, the process of the novel’s unfolding, its becoming while he writes, is what ensues and what appeals to Marías (Marías 1989: 26). The work cannot be preconceived, planned or forecast – it can only become. What this errant process allows him to do – by resisting a mapping of the way, a plotting of the work, an imposition of a structure in advance, and by preferring the uncertainty of not knowing what it will be about – is to suppress a natural human tendency to impose pattern that, according to Anton Ehrenzweig’s study of the psychology of the creative imagination, is so detrimental to the creative effort; this errancy thus breaks what Ehrenzweig calls the ‘pernicious rule of preconceived design’ (1967: 49). As Ehrenzweig says in his discussion of the functioning of the creative ego and the role, within that, of the differentiated and undifferentiated modes in the creative search (for an image or an idea), such a search involves the scrutiny of ‘an astronomical number of possibilites’, and the correct choice cannot be made ‘by a conscious weighing up of each single possibility’; ‘if we could map out the entire way ahead, no further search would be needed. As it is, the creative thinker has to make a decision about his route without having the full information needed



out what this novel of his was about – but only after he had completed it – was that,

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for his choice’ (1967: 35–7). This is a dilemma, he adds, that belongs to the essence of creativity. Marías’s errant writing process flows in just this way, abandoning exact visualization or mapping, since that would only lead one entirely astray (1967: 36). This errant operation effects just what Ehrenzweig says is necessary in the creative process: the ‘clouding’ of consciousness in order to make the right decision (1967: 38). This points to the ‘yielding’ of reason that is necessary in the work of the creative imagination, a way of ascertaining that reason does not constrain the imagination, because it is ‘a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in – at the very gateway as it were’, as Freud affirms in The Interpretation of Dreams by quoting Friedrich Schiller (1976: 177).4 The errant method of Marías allows him to ‘move and make interim decisions without being able to visualize the precise relationship with the end product’, which, according to Ehrenzweig, is exactly what the creative artist has to do (1967: 47). Each stage of the process imposes new choices and decisions that could not have been foreseen at an earlier stage; it is not that the writer is unconcerned about the effect of the interim decisions taken on the end product or about the final outcome as a whole; it is just that ‘he must be able to bear the suspense’ (1967: 48). Marías’s errant way of proceeding enables him to do just that. The value of the interim choices, the motifs, fragments, episodes or digressions pursued, the value of every element opted for, is discovered errantly in the (digressive) process of writing and is only revealed at the end, when everything gradually becomes associated and acquires significance as part of an interrelated whole (even if the literary work can never really be wholly and properly elucidated). The structure has to be imperfect and the artist needs to resist the ‘law of closure’ that will strive to ‘round off the work prematurely’.5 The errant method in particular is very well suited to preventing such closure, and allowing the writer to work with the incoherent fragment, the disruptive form element – what is a digression if not precisely such a disruptive form element in writing? – since, not least, such disruptive, unruly devices break hold of mannered formulae and stem the rush to predetermined solutions (Ehrenzweig 1967: 48–53). Too deliberate a handling of elements would be detrimental for the creative process and there is a real need to frustrate preconceived intentions and an overprecise visualization, argues Ehrenzweig (1967: 56), something which Marías’s creative errancy and his digressiveness permit him to achieve fairly ‘naturally’, since this way of proceeding is part of the normal technique employed, his way of writing, a method that allows the mature artist to keep his intentions flexible enough, and it is also ‘natural’, for that



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matter, in that the digressive mode appears to be no less than the mind’s primary, inherent, instinctive, spontaneous way of operating.6 The creative errancy and the concomitant formal digressiveness (the digressiveness of the form, of his writing, that is) provide Marías with the (welcome) ‘accident-inviting’ means necessary, according to Ehrenzweig, to disrupt the flexible planning of the artist, in the conversation between the writer and the medium that the process of creation and writing can become, especially in the case of a mature artist (who may be less inclined to view the unruly element as unwelcome); ‘true craftsmanship does not impose its will on the medium but explores its varying responses’ in the conversation between equals that the process of creation thus develops into (Ehrenzweig 1967: 58). An excessive preoccupation with pattern, structure or plot, with an individual element, episode, even an aside or digression and a need for fully conscious control of the medium would blind the writer to the transformations taking place as all the various elements coming to make up the work evolve into a more complex total structure, a growth that cannot be foreseen or predicted in any way from the nature of the particular. The number of possible choices open to the artist are not limited in the creative work, unlike in a game played in which choices are limited strictly by the rules of that particular game; there are no limiting rules in creative work, argues Ehrenzweig, since the work, as Marías shows, ‘creates its own rules which may only be known after the work is finished’ (1967: 39).

II This is particularly so in the case of Javier Marías’s Dark Back of Time (Negra espalda del tiempo [1998]). Presented by the author as a ‘false novel’, it seems to have created its own rules that have allowed it to take the ‘irregular’ form it has. That is one of the reasons why Marías called it a ‘false novel’, because it is not to be construed as a novel in the mould of previous ones. A generically errant text, part-memoir, part-biographical narrative, part-essay, with an element of fiction, Dark Back of Time proposes or pretends – as the first-person narrator, who bears the name ‘Javier Marías’ and appears to be the author himself (in as far as narrator and author of a literary work can be ‘the same’), explains in the opening section or chapter – to tell what happened, or was ascertained or simply known – what happened in my experience or in my fabulation or in my knowledge – or




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The novel referred to here is Marías’s All Souls (Todas las almas [1989]), set in Oxford and inspired by, and drawing on, Marías’s own experiences in the city where he worked as Lector in the Sub-Faculty of Spanish at the university in the early 1980s. It was read by many as a roman à clef, and fiction and reality were often conflated to such an extent that the fiction ended up having a considerable effect on the empirical reality of the author, which is what he sets out to recount in Dark Back of Time. And he proposed to do this, despite the profound distrust of certainty that all of Marías’s narratives evince and the extreme scepticism regarding the possibility of reproducing the world through writing that is expressed in the first two pages of Dark Back of Time: Language can’t reproduce events and shouldn’t attempt to […] Words – even when spoken, even at their crudest – are in and of themselves metaphorical and therefore imprecise, and cannot be imagined without ornament, though it is often involuntary […] Fiction creeps into the narration of what happened, altering or falsifying it. The time-honoured aspiration of any chronicler or survivor – to tell what happened, give an account of what took place […] – is, in fact, a mere illusion or chimera, or, rather, the phrase and concept themselves are already metaphorical and partake of fiction. ‘To tell what happened’ is inconceivable and futile, or possible only as invention. The idea of testimony is also futile and there has never been a witness who could truly fulfil his duty. (2001: 8) This notwithstanding, Marías places himself in Dark Back of Time ‘on the side of those who have sometimes claimed to be telling what really happened or pretended to succeed in doing so’ (2001: 8). But he does his telling through an errant creative process and a digressive form. His narrative holds for him ‘the diversion of risk, the risk of narrating something for no reason and in almost no order, without making an outline or trying to be coherent’ (2001: 9). His story is profoundly digressive, so much so that this time he not only purports to wander without any compass in the process of its creation, but the story he discovers has no beginning nor any ending and may, indeed, not even be a story at all:



perhaps all of it is only consciousness that never ceases – as a result of the composition and circulation of a novel, a work of fiction. (Marías 2001: 8–9)7

The elements of the story I am now embarking upon are entirely capricious, determined by chance, merely episodic and cumulative – all of them irrelevant by the elementary rule of criticism, none of them requiring any of the others – because in the end no author is guiding them, though I am relating them; they correspond to no blueprint, they are steered by no compass, most of them are external in origin and devoid of intention and therefore have no reason to make any kind of sense or to constitute an argument or plot or answer to some hidden harmony, and no lesson should be extracted from them (nor should any such thing be sought from real novels; above all, the novels themselves should not want it) – not even a story with its beginning and suspense and final silence. I don’t believe this is a story, though, not knowing how it ends, I may be mistaken. I do know that the beginning of this tale lies outside it, in a novel I wrote some time ago, or before that (in which case it’s even more amorphous), in the two years I spent as an impostor in the city of Oxford, teaching entertaining but on the whole quite useless subjects at its University […] Its ending must also lie outside it, and will surely coincide with my own, some years from now, or so I hope. Or it may happen that the ending survives me. (2001: 9–10) It is true that both its beginning and ending lie outside of Dark Back of Time, and the work ends with the promise of more to come: ‘A great deal has yet to be told, some of it recent and some still to come, and I need time […] I am going to stop now and say no more for a while’ (2001: 335–6). It seems unlikely, though, that this promise will be kept, and, consequently, the tale remains fittingly imperfect. So, as the narrator insists, Dark Back of Time is not really a true novel, a true fiction (Marías 1998: 11), only a ‘false’ one at best; it tells a story with no real ending or beginning, a story which, in truth, may not be a story at all, and attempts to recount what really happened, though the narrator acknowledges readily this is not possible. (Marías’s literature is governed by paradox.) As a matter of fact, at one point the narrator goes as far as admitting: ‘I don’t know what it is that I am doing nor why.’8 What, then, is he doing? Well, he speaks, ‘among other things, of several dead men, real ones’, among them the now obscure poet and former King of Redonda John Gawsworth (whose Kingdom Marías eventually reveals he has inherited), the ill-fated writer Wilfrid Ewart, killed by a stray bullet in Mexico, or the adventurer Hugh Oloff de Wet, men whom he never knew, ‘thereby becoming a kind of unexpected and distant posterity for them’, their ‘memory’; ‘I will be their ghost’, he concludes (2001: 12). As a ghost, then, Marías proceeds to tell us




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of these errant ‘wanderer[s] into nothingness’ (‘errabundos hacia la nada’), as de Wet is described (2001: 284), and he does so appropriately digressively: ‘I must make a digression’, he announces at the very beginning of the fifth section, ‘– this is a book of digressions, a book that proceeds by digression –’, he immediately interpolates in a metanarrative echo of Tristram Shandy’s famous analysis of the two ‘contrary motions’ of his art of writing (‘In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, ––and at the same time’ [Sterne 1967: 95]).9 And he also tells of a particular conception of time, a time ‘that must be different for someone who began writing and reading in reverse’ (being lefthanded, he started writing from right to left [2001: 300]), a perception of moving through ‘the other side of time, its dark back’, a time that has not existed, that awaits us and ‘also the time that does not await us and therefore does not happen, or happens only in a sphere that isn’t precisely temporal, a sphere in which writing, or perhaps only fiction, may – who knows – be found’, a time in which, also, ‘the living and the dead, can speak to each other and communicate’, the only dimension they have in common (2001: 301). Dark Back of Time, through its irregular nature, through the creative errancy and digressiveness it lays bare, is in many ways a fairly novel form that pays tribute to the novel form, a celebration of the freedom of the form that is the novel, a freedom that characterizes some of the best novels in the history of the genre, from Cervantes’s Don Quixote or Persiles, through Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, to Proust’s Remembrance. This freedom is directly related to their digressiveness. Javier Marías has said that Sterne’s work also taught him that ‘everything could be made to fit into this flexible genre called novel, provided it was done gracefully’ (2009). Dark Back of Time is indeed sui generis, generically and otherwise, and, to draw a parallel with an equally magnificently ‘irregular’ work from another continent and century, in formal terms very much like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, in that Dark Back, too, is an ‘odd book, professing to be a novel; wantonly eccentric; outrageously bombastic; in places charmingly and vividly descriptive’, as was said of Melville’s work at the time.10 And just as Ishmael was said to be, the narrator Marías is carefully ‘careless about “narrative”, offhand about consistency, resistant to completion or closure’ (yes, ‘carefully careless’, the oxymoron must stand since the carelessness is, as we have had the occasion to observe, the result of a modus operandi), and ‘does not care to approach his writing task “methodically”’, opting, instead, to wander with – or even without – a compass. And if Dark Back of Time is indeed ‘wild, unconnected, all episode’, digressive and lacking ‘cohesion’, as



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Melville’s work was said to be, even though it does ultimately show, like the most truly free and digressive novels, how everything in the world is interconnected in one way or another, then, like Melville’s work,11 it, too, is therefore no different to the world, and so, as the narrator of Dark Back of Time explains, if the reader should wonder what on earth is being recounted here or where this text is heading, the only proper answer, I fear, would be that it is simply running its course and heading towards its ending, just like anything else that passes through or happens in the world. (2001: 287)

Notes 1. Marías is probably thinking here of Spanish critics, though there also seems to be a tradition of disregard for the digressive and episodic element in English literature, the most notable and extreme example perhaps being Anthony Trollope’s assertion that ‘there should be no episodes in a novel. Every sentence, every word, through all those pages, should tend to the telling of the story. Such episodes distract the attention of the reader, and always do so disagreeably’ (quoted in Allott 1959: 233). Apart from Sterne, as Judith Hawley reminds us in her essay in the present book (and also Cervantes), Fielding, too, seems regularly to have attracted much criticism, notably for the episode of ‘The Man of the Hill’ in The History of Tom Jones (for instances of such criticism, see Allott 1959: 227–55). 2. If Marías’s work is begun without premeditation and ‘becomes’ as he writes, then this is also true of his style – that is, it also applies at the level of his sentence – which is a ‘loose style’ of writing very much along the lines described by Morris Croll in his study of the Baroque style in prose (in Sir Thomas Browne and other seventeenth-century writers): ‘Its purpose is to express, as far as may be, the order in which an idea presents itself when it is first experienced. It begins, therefore, without premeditation, stating its idea in the first form that occurs; the second member is determined by the situation in which the mind finds itself after the first has been spoken; and so on throughout the period, each member being an emergency of the situation. The period – in theory, at least – is not made; it becomes. It completes and takes on form in the course of the motion of the mind which it expresses’ (Croll 1972: 111; my italics). And it is the movements of such a mind that we are invited to follow as readers, more than the realities presented or the topic at hand; the primary focus of such an errant, ‘loose’ and ‘free’ prose style will always be the course of the motion of the mind perceiving the world. For reasons of space, I cannot elaborate on this intricate way in which style and creative imagination are interwoven in Marías; I have, however, discussed this in more length elsewhere (Grohmann 2002).




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3. As Maurice Blanchot put it once, ‘if the work is already present in its entirety in the writer’s mind and if this presence is what is the essence of the work (the words being here considered as inessential), then why should there be, any longer, a need for him to produce it? Either the work is, as an interior project, all that it will ever be, and the writer, from that moment onwards, knows everything he can ever hope to learn from it and will let it lie in its twilight, without translating it into words, without writing it – but then he will not write it, he will not be a writer; or, becoming aware that the work cannot be projected but only realized, that it has no value, no truth and reality other than through the words that develop it in time and inscribe it in space, he will set to writing it, but starting at nothing and with a view to nothing – and, paraphrasing Hegel, like a nothingness working in nothingness’ (1949: 296). 4. It has long been argued that the workings of the imagination are based, to a significant extent, on unconscious, inspired, intuitive, dream-like, spontaneous, or other, analogous processes of association that make it a unifying force; these processes of association are not generally deemed to be governed by the intellect, reason or the conscious mind and the imagination is therefore taken to operate, to a certain degree, independently of reason and rational, conscious thought; hence, the imagination entails freedom (from practical considerations and purpose) and is determined in the act of perception and free in aesthetic creativity, as Kant sought to demonstrate (see Kant 1924, esp. section 43; see also Starobinski 1970, for an overview). 5. ‘The “law of closure” postulated by the gestalt theory will always tend to round off and simplify the images and concepts of conscious thought. It makes it difficult, if not impossible, for rational thought to handle “open” material without rounding it off prematurely. A second revision will tend to impart to such material a greater precision and compactness than it actually possesses. This can lead to wrong results’ (Ehrenzweig 1967: 39). In a sense, the errant processes and the digressive form of the writing naturally, that is, through their very nature, by diverting attention through the accidental or to the seemingly insignificant detail, say, tend to disrupt and destroy ‘the good gestalt’ of the material and stem the processes of secondary revision or elaboration, thus allowing for an exploration of the complexities radiating across the work. 6. On the one hand, digression represents a continuity of thought through the processes of association that lead from one element to the next, whether by way of contiguity or resemblance between the elements, as Pierre Bayard concludes in his study of digression in Proust (Bayard 1996: 23). But, as Bayard also suggests, it is reasonable to assume that the natural tendency of the mind is to create such links in general (1996: 124); and this is substantiated time and again in studies of digression and the processes of association. This is why, for example, Ross Chambers speaks of the ‘naturalness of loiterature’, maintaining, for instance, that a digressive style of writing ‘seems somehow natural – or at least more natural than disciplined argument or the tightly controlled narratives that we nevertheless tend to get so caught up in. It’s more in tune with the complexity of things and the tangled relations that join them’ (1999: 31; original italics). And Arthur Koestler, in his fascinating study of the creative process, explains that conscious controls and reason



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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

are necessary to maintain the disciplined routines of thought but that they become an impediment to creativity because they block more primitive and natural levels of mental organization and functioning, which are digressive (1964); ‘during strenuous effort to concentrate’, he says, ‘one seems literally to “feel” inside one’s head the expenditure of energy needed to suppress diversional thoughts which keep popping up like jacks-in-the-box’, and he goes on to quote James Clerk Maxwell, who once remarked that ‘“a great part of our fatigue often arises, not from those mental efforts by which we obtain the mastery of the subject, but from those which are spent in recalling our wandering thoughts”’; all this seems to indicate that these are ‘our preferential matrices of ideation’, concludes Koestler, that is, in lay terms, this is our natural, uninhibited way of thinking (Koestler 1964: 645–6). Most subsequent quotations are of this 2001 English translation of the novel, unless I have provided my own for the purposes of greater precision, in which case I cite explicitly the original text of 1998. Here, too, the English translation of the Spanish is a bit too vague for our purposes and I have slightly modified it (‘no sé qué es lo que estoy haciendo ni por qué lo hago’ is what is said [Marías 1998: 73]). As it happens, the allusion to Sterne is not entirely accidental: Marías translated literature in English for many years (among others, prose texts by Sir Thomas Browne, Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats and poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson, Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner and John Ashbery), and also Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy into Spanish (which won him Spain’s National Prize for Translation in 1979), and he has repeatedly declared that the latter is his favourite work and the work that has had the most profound influence on his own writing (mainly as a result of the act of ‘re-writing’ that translation represents), because, apart from Sterne representing for Marías the most genuine inheritor of Cervantes (more so than any Spanish author), Sterne taught him ‘the freedom and daring’ of writing and how ‘to expand or delay time or, in other words, how to contrive to give existence in the novel to that time that in real life never has the time to exist’ (Marías 2009). This is what one of the first reviewers of The Whale said, quoted by Tony Tanner in his ‘Introduction’ to the Oxford World Classics edition of Moby Dick (in Melville 1998: vii). See Tanner (in Melville 1998: xxv–xxvi).

Bibliography Allott, Miriam. 1959. Novelists on the Novel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul) Babb, Howard, ed. 1972. Essays in Stylistic Analysis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) Bayard, Pierre. 1996. Le Hors-sujet: Proust et la digression (Paris: Minuit) Blanchot, Maurice. 1949. La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard) Chambers, Ross. 1999. Loiterature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press) Croll, Maurice. 1972. ‘The Baroque Style in Prose’, in Babb, pp. 97–117 Ehrenzweig, Anton. 1967. The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of the Imagination (London: Phoenix Press)




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Freud, Sigmund. 1976. The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Penguin) Grohmann, Alexis. 2002. Coming into One’s Own: The Novelistic Development of Javier Marías (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi) Kant, Immanuel. 1924. Kritik der Urteilskraft (Leipzig: Felix Meiner) Koestler, Arthur. 1964. The Act of Creation (London: Penguin) Marías, Javier. 1989. ‘La magia de lo que pudo ser’, Quimera. Revista de literatura, 87: 24–31 —— 1993. ‘Errar con brújula’, in Literatura y fantasma (Madrid: Siruela), pp. 91–3 —— 1998. Negra espalda del tiempo (Madrid: Alfaguara) —— 2001. Dark Back of Time, trans. Esther Allen (London: Chatto and Windus) —— 2008. ‘Para empezar por el principio’, in Lecciones y maestros. II Cita internacional de la literatura en español, 16, 17 y 18 de junio de 2008 (Fundación Santillana), pp. 109–33 —— 2009. ‘Javier Marías’, Mercurio. Panorama de libros, ‘La huella de los maestros’, June, revistamercurio.es Melville, Herman. 1998. Moby Dick; or, The Whale (Oxford University Press) Starobinski, Jean. 1970. L’Oeil vivant II: la relation critique, Paris: Gallimard Sterne, Laurence. 1967. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (London: Penguin)



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The Sense of Sebald’s Endings … and Beginnings J. J. Long

I The texts of W. G. Sebald are digressive in myriad ways. Ontologically, they shift vertiginously between fact and fantasy, between documentary solidity and self-conscious fictionality. Generically, the discourses of history, biography, novel, essay, autobiography and travel writing combine to create hybrid forms. Typographically, a lack of paragraph breaks facilitates a free-flowing discourse unconstrained by the discipline of the paragraph, while a refusal to use speech marks means that shifts between speakers are not always marked. Furthermore, the progression of the verbal text is constantly interrupted by the insertion of visual material: photographs, reproductions of paintings, facsimiles of handwritten documents, and so on (see Horstkotte 2009). If, as Ross Chambers argues in what has become a central reference point in any discussion of digression, a primary function of the digressive is to make the reader aware of the permeability of contexts (1999: 12), then this is precisely what Sebald’s texts effect. Irruptions of fantasy, imagination, dream and invention perpetually interfere with the texts’ ostensible solid grounding in verifiable reality. Generic hybridity produces a constant shifting of the interpretative frames within which Sebald’s texts can be understood, while techniques of embedded quotation and the reproduction of visual material relativize, respectively, the centrality of the primary narrator and the verbal medium: anything can always be represented otherwise. Digression in Sebald, however, occurs not only at the level of ontological instability, generic interference, or typography, but at a narratological level. Sebald’s most obviously digressive text is The Rings of Saturn, purportedly the narrative of a walking tour along the Suffolk 193



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coast, but in fact a wide-ranging meditation on a plethora of subjects whose relationship to the physical environment of coastal Suffolk is at times clear, at times tenuous. Sebald’s text owes much of its digressive charm to the fact that it ‘re-literatizes’ the dead metaphor contained in the word ‘digression’, a derivative, as many commentators remind us, of the Latin ‘dis-gradi’, a stepping aside. The narrator’s walking tour involves a series of deviations and recursions, errors and loops that lead to no determinate goal, and this structure of walking is congruent with the digressive narrative to which it gives rise. For Claudia Albes, The Rings of Saturn is a decentred text, not only in the sense that the narrator’s spatio-temporal co-ordinates are repeatedly decentred by the chronotopes of other stories, but also in the sense that the dense network of meanings that accrues around each signifier turns the text into a rhizomatic structure from which there is no escape, and within which there is no hierarchy (2002: 290–1). But as I have sought to argue elsewhere, The Rings of Saturn cannot help but reinforce the sense of linearity and narrative progression from which it so insistently deviates (Long 2007: 144–6). While the narrator may end his narrative inconclusively, the narrative itself does reach a home of sorts, for ‘Heimat’ is the final word of the German text. It is, admittedly, a lost ‘Heimat’, the one left behind by the departing souls of the dead. In extremis, then, the book figures arrival in terms of new departure. But the text has to end, as does the narrator’s walk. As Chambers notes, the ‘negentropic constraints of a cultural order’ – an order that includes narrative syntax – ‘cannot be dispensed with if only because they are part of the very definition of the digressive, as that from which it departs’ (1999: 104). In this model, digression, no matter how radical, is a disruption that ends up confirming what it seeks to undermine. This is not, however, the only way of understanding digression in Sebald’s work. Indeed, his most interesting contribution to a poetics of digression may be both more widespread and more subtle than the combination of ambulatory thematics and digressive discourse that combine so felicitously in The Rings of Saturn.

II Theories of digression tend to assume the primacy of plot and the ability of the reader to distinguish between a main plot and the textual matter which is in some sense extraneous or tangential to it. This is certainly the case in traditional poetics, for which digression is an error within discourse and, therefore, in need of correction. But even in more recent



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theoretical works that celebrate digression, the presupposition of a more or less stable relationship between the main plot and that which deviates from it persists. For Chambers, this relationship is configured in terms of linearity and dilatoriness, the former allied with culture, order, discipline, and the latter with nature (albeit a nature-within-culture), pleasure and desire. Desire is also central to Peter Brooks’s conception of digression. Rather than positing digressive or ‘loiterly’ writing as a discrete object of study, however, Brooks understands digression to be the very precondition of narrative in the first place. ‘The desire of the text (the desire of reading)’, he writes, ‘is […] desire for the end, but desire for the end reached only through the at least minimally complicated detour, the intentional deviance, in tension, which is the plot of narrative’; he continues: Deviance, detour, an intention that is an irritation: these are characteristics of the narratable, of ‘life’ as it is the material of narrative, of fabula become sjužet. Plot is a kind of arabesque or squiggle toward the end. (Brooks 1984: 104) Deviance and detour here are synonymous with digression. For my purposes, the crucial aspect of Brooks’s work is less the centrality of detour to narrative than the confident association of digression with the narrative middle (Brooks 1984: 139). His account of narrative is predicated, ultimately, on the stability of beginnings and end-points, the latter being immanent in or intended by the former, and narrative consisting precisely in what delays arrival at the end. In this sense, Brooks shows his debt not only to a Freudian model of human life, but to Roland Barthes’s notion of the hermeneutic code. The typical narrative, Barthes argues, proceeds by posing an enigma and then working towards its resolution. The middle of the narrative, the ‘dilatory space’, is expanded by means of what he terms ‘hermeneutic morphemes’; these may take the form of partial, false or decoy responses, equivocation, and such like, and sustain the reader’s desire for the end (Barthes 1970: 215–16). The intentionality inherent in such a conception of beginning is addressed by Edward Said in his book Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975). Writing of various eighteenth-century thinkers, such as Rousseau, Kant and Vico, Said comments that their investigations are conditioned by a necessary certainty, a genetic optimism, that continuity is possible as intended by the act of beginning. Stretching from start to finish is a fillable space, or time, pretty much there but, like a foundling,



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The notion that the middle is a fillable space lodged between start and finish and awaiting transformation into discourse articulates clearly the conception of the narrative middle that we encounter in Brooks. The question posed by some of Sebald’s quirkier narratives, though, is this: what happens to our understanding of digression in texts whose beginnings and end-points do not exist in a determinate intentional relationship that is amenable to analysis in terms of desire and discharge, or enigma and resolution? This question can be best explored by means of a reading of Sebald’s story ‘All’estero’, the second narrative in his first book of prose, Vertigo (Sebald 1999), first published in German as Schwindel. Gefühle. in 1990.

III ‘All’estero’ can be loosely described as a travel narrative that recounts the narrator’s experiences of two trips to northern Italy. The first takes place in October 1980, the second – which to an extent repeats the first – in late July and early August 1987. John Zilcosky has argued that, whereas in conventional narratives travellers get lost in order to find their way home, Sebald’s texts dramatize an insistent failure to get lost in the first place. Ostensible disorientations lead back to uncanny returns and a sense of the omnipresence of home. Like all of Sebald’s travel narratives up to and including The Rings of Saturn, ‘All’estero’ overturns what Zilcosky sees as the ‘master trope’ of travel writing, namely the ‘fear of getting lost and the desire to find one’s way’ (2004: 102–9). A narratological implication of Zilcosky’s argument is that conventional travel narratives rely, like the forms of fictional narrative analysed by Brooks, on a structure that is fundamentally teleological: the moment of arrival and reorientation is presupposed and intended by the disorientation that constitutes the conventional starting point of travel narratives, while the narrative middle consists of the errancy – detour in a literal as well as a textual sense – that defers the moment of arrival. If Sebald’s texts overturn the dominant paradigm of travel writing at the level of thematics, we might expect a similar disruption to exist at the level of narrative structure, and in order to investigate this we might as well begin at the beginning. The first sentence of ‘All’estero’ reads: ‘In October 1980 I travelled from England, where I had then been living for nearly twenty-five



awaiting an author or speaker to father it, to authorize its being. (1975: 47–8)

years in a county which was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life’ (Sebald 1999: 33). A more accurate rendering of Sebald’s prose would, however, be: ‘Back then – October 1980 it was – I travelled from England, where I have now been living for nearly twenty-five years.’ Massimo Leone has noted that the opening paragraphs of Sebald’s texts frequently combine temporal precision with vagueness concerning the narrator’s motivations (2004: 96). Yet there is more to the beginning of ‘All’estero’ than this. The very first word of the German text, ‘damals’ (‘back then’, ‘at that time’), is a deictic form whose meaning is contingent on the specific temporal context of its use. Its unmediated presence in Sebald’s text implies that what we read is in fact the continuation of a discourse that is already underway. This is one of the many disorientating strategies employed by the narrator throughout his text (see, for example, Klebes 2004; Wohlleben 2006), as the text presupposes a reader who can supply the referent of the term ‘damals’ as well as the context that allows ‘damals’ to signify at all. More interesting and relevant for the current discussion, though, is the fact that rather than a beginning as inauguration, we have here a beginning as continuation – or, indeed, as middle. If digression is a property of narrative middles, as both Brooks and Chambers argue, the fact that the beginning of ‘All’estero’ is already constituted as a kind of middle immediately alerts us to the possibility that digression might reside also in beginnings, and this possibility is repeatedly realized as the text progresses. The therapeutic promise of a change of place, for example, turns out to be illusory: the narrator notes that once he has arrived in Vienna, he becomes listless and at a loss as to how to fill his time (Sebald 1999: 33), and nowhere else in the text does travel permit the narrator to get over the dark days that were the initial motivation for embarking on the journey. Drawing on the structuralist distinction between story and discourse, we might say that the narrative discourse immediately dramatizes the abandonment of the hope that had motivated the start of the story and reorientates reader expectations concerning the likely result of the narrator’s travels. The very act of beginning thus entails a moment of digression, for the intention of the journey fails to coincide with the intention of the text, the goal announced by the former being immediately renounced by the latter. It is no coincidence that the opening episode of the text is saturated with terms that express a lack of direction: ‘without aim or purpose’, ‘traversing of the city’, ‘wander aimlessly’, ‘aimlessly wandering about’




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(Sebald 1999: 33–6). The impasse in which the narrator finds himself at the level of the represented world exists in a curiously congruent relationship with the condition of the text itself, for the very opening of the narrative is entirely lacking in directionality. By this, I do not mean merely to repeat my earlier point concerning the therapeutic value of travel, but to note that the whole Vienna episode does not point forward to events to come. It fails to fulfil normative expectations of narrative beginnings. If it incites desire at all, it is not in the sense developed by Barthes and those writing in his wake such as Brooks: there is no founding enigma and no intentionality towards the end that might be identified as such in this opening episode – unless, that is, we reconfigure the problem in metanarrative terms and see the very irrelevance of the Vienna episode as constituting the text’s founding enigma. Even this critical manoeuvre, however, cannot fully integrate the Vienna episode, a fact that becomes particularly apparent once the second part of the narrative has commenced. As I noted briefly above, the structure of ‘All’estero’ is ostensibly repetitive: the narrator sets out in 1987 with the explicit intention of checking his rather sketchy memories of the 1980 trip and attempting to write some of them down. As we will see below, the logic of repetition is persistently undermined by the logic of the detour. But repetition is also only partial: there is no repetition of the sojourn in Vienna, and the second part of the narrative begins with the narrator’s taking the night train from Vienna to Venice (Sebald 1999: 97). The opening Viennese episode, then, falls outside the repetitive structure on which the formal integrity of the narrative as a whole would seem to depend. As the narrative of ‘All’estero’ progresses, it singularly fails to resolve the question as to the relevance of Vienna for the subsequent narrative. There is no necessary relationship between the Vienna episode and that which comes later, and no sense in which it might contribute to an economy of plot. This is to say that the beginning of the text is already digressive with respect to what comes after it.

IV Such a realization is, of course, a product of retrospection: the digressive character of the beginning is not clear at the outset but becomes evident only as one’s reading of the text proceeds. Theorists of narrative, from Benjamin to Brooks and beyond, have noted the role of the end as the guarantee that all that precedes it will be meaningful. Brooks goes so far as to claim that all narratives rely on the anticipation of ultimate retrospective understanding (1984: 34). In this light, the ending of



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‘All’estero’ emerges as highly problematic, for it is itself explicitly figured as a digression: ‘By way of a postscript, I should perhaps add that in April 1924, the writer Franz Werfel visited his friend Franz Kafka in Hajek’s laryngological clinic in Vienna, bearing a bunch of roses and a copy of his newly published and universally acclaimed novel with a personal dedication’ (Sebald 1999: 135–6). The final page is then taken up with brief comments on Kafka’s last days in a nursing home in Klosterneuburg, and a discovery that a previous owner of the narrator’s copy of the Werfel novel in question had chosen the Pyramids of Giza as the insignia on his ex libris plate (1999: 136–7). The postscript is structurally akin to digression in that it stands outside of the text while being an integral part of it, and this structural kinship is emphasized in ‘All’estero’ by the digressive nature of the content of this particular postscript. Taking as its cue Salvatore’s own self-confessedly digressive discourse on Verdi’s Aida, the passage moves without mediation to Werfel to Kafka to the narrator in a way that is associative rather than logical – association being the very hallmark of the digressive novel, and ironically thematized as such in the opening pages of Tristram Shandy. The postscript of ‘All’estero’ does not fulfil the function that Brooks attributes to the end: it does not offer ‘retrospective understanding’. If we choose to discount the postscript and seek to locate the ending of the text proper at an earlier moment, the same point obtains. Immediately prior to the postscript, the narrator awakes in his room in the Golden Dove hotel in Verona, while being unable to explain how he got there. Before that, he has a vision of an open-air performance of Aida that he had attended as a child in Augsburg. And before that, he sits in a café making notes on the conversation he has just had with Salvatore. No matter how far back one seeks to locate the ending of the narrative, then, nothing quite suffices in Brooks’s terms. The ending of ‘All’estero’ is similar to many of Sebald’s other endings, which exist in a digressive relationship to the narrative they purport to complete. The other quasi-autobiographical narrative in Vertigo, ‘Il ritorno in patria’, ends with the narrator’s hallucination of an empty, post-apocalyptic landscape and his recall of Samuel Pepys’s account of the Great Fire of London. In The Emigrants, the final story ends with a description of a photograph of three Jewish girls in the Lodz ghetto, taken by the ghetto accountant Walter Genewein in 1940 and finally exhibited publicly in the late 1980s (Sebald 1997: 235–7). The Rings of Saturn ends with a meditation on a Dutch custom, allegedly noted by Thomas Browne, of draping black crepe over the mirrors and paintings in the houses of the recently deceased (1998: 296). In Austerlitz, the




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narrator revisits the fortress at Breendonk and paraphrases sections of Dan Jacobson’s family history Heschel’s Kingdom (Sebald 2001: 412–15). None of these endings is amenable to analysis in terms of an economy of plot, and all of them represent a stepping away rather than a resolution or conclusion. To term Sebald’s texts ‘open-ended’, however, would be to ignore the precise function of these endings. The point can be illustrated with ‘All’estero’ but could as easily apply to any of the other Sebald texts mentioned above. The postscript to ‘All’estero’ constitutes an attempt to establish links between diverse entities, or, as the narrator himself puts it, ‘to draw connections between events that lay far apart but seemed to me to be of the same order’ (1999: 94). As other critics have noted, ‘All’estero’ owes its coherence to a dense web of repetitions of motifs and the omnipresence of coincidence, which is itself a form of repetition (for example, see Atze 1997; Fuchs 2004: 87–93; Long 2007: 105–6; Loquai 2005: 245–6). In this regard, it corresponds to what Ross Chambers identifies as a more general characteristic of digressive narrative: It is organized […] by relations of resemblance and contiguity, metaphor and metonymy, rather than the formal unity of argument or the narrative of event. Such a style is often more concerned with the, often obscure, ‘coherence’ of experience […] than it is respectful of patterns that are more strictly designed and thus ‘cohesive’. (1999: 31) The endings of Sebald’s texts represent neither the logical outcome of the foregoing narrative nor a conventional denouement of a putative ‘plot’, but rather operate metaphorically, condensing certain motifs and thematic strands that have been running through the text. In ‘All’estero’, for example, the book by Franz Werfel constructs a connection between the narrator and Kafka, whose traces he has been following throughout the story: the repeated references to jackdaws, the two boys in the bus, the surmise that Kafka might have used the urinals at Desenzano station, the allusions to Kafka’s story ‘The Hunter Gracchus’. Furthermore, the fact that Kafka died in a nursing home in Klosterneuburg reminds us of Clara’s grandmother Anna Goldsteiner’s death in the St Martin’s home at Klosterneuburg in the early part of the text (Sebald 1999: 46). (The name ‘Goldsteiner’ also hints at Jewish provenance to reinforce the link yet further.) At the same time, the opera Aida functions as a relay between Werfel, the narrator’s childhood, and the recent conversation



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with Salvatore, providing a compressed recapitulation of what the text has frequently implied, namely that the narrator’s life is governed by patterns of equivalence, repetition and similarity that exceed the representational capacities of linear narrative. The same kind of Verdichtung occurs in the closing paragraphs of The Emigrants, Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn. However, a comparison between this latter text and ‘All’estero’ will show that while Chambers’s view of the ‘cohesiveness’ of the associative text works well with reference to The Rings of Saturn, it works less well in the case of ‘All’estero’ because the very repetitions that would seem to construct a certain coherence of experience are themselves prey to derailment and detour. In The Rings of Saturn, as I have argued elsewhere, digression is controlled by the pervasive metaphorical similarities that exist between the various episodic narratives that constitute the bulk of the text (Long 2007: 142–4). It is this that prevents the dilatoriness of the narrative from degenerating into complete incoherence, but is also central to the philosophy of history that Sebald’s narrator explicitly espouses as his narrative draws to a close. History, he claims, blindly stumbles from one misfortune to the next and consists of nothing but calamities (Sebald 1998: 256, 295). By this time, though, the fabric of the narrative discourse has already shown that every event replicates both every other event and the wider process of history, of which the individual event is merely an epiphenomenon. Thus the asyndetic structure of the text does indeed convey a sense of historical and biographical coherence. In ‘All’estero’, by contrast, there is significantly less faith in this kind of narrative structuration.

V Repetition is the explicit goal of the second part of ‘All’estero’: ‘In the summer of 1987, seven years since I had fled from Verona, I finally yielded to a need I had felt for some time to repeat the journey from Vienna via Venice to Verona’ (Sebald 1999: 81). As we have already seen, though, there is no repetition of the sojourn in Vienna, and this inaugural failure of repetition at the level of narrative discourse corresponds to the narrator’s inability to repeat experiences at the level of the represented world. His second visit to northern Italy is in fact repeatedly disrupted by detours. Firstly, he does not proceed directly from Venice to Verona. Possibly as a result of seeing a rat scamper along the gunnels of a barge and plunge into the canal, he decides to travel to Padua to visit Scrovegni’s Arena Chapel (1999: 83). When he finally does board




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a train to Verona, his motives for doing so have changed somewhat: not only does he wish to shed light on his own experiences of seven years before, but he wishes to learn something about the afternoon that Kafka spent there in September 1913 (1999: 84). But he is inexplicably paralysed as the train pulls into the station at Verona, and alights only in Desenzano (1999: 85). From here, the narrator proceeds to catch a bus to Riva, but having been mistaken for a pederast by the parents of the twin Kafka-lookalikes and subjected to incessant sniggering by the boys themselves, he gets out at Limone instead (1999: 90). After a night in Limone, he declares: ‘I had decided to go over to Verona after all’ (1999: 98), but his passport has been given to another departing guest in error, necessitating an unscheduled visit to the German consulate in Milan (1999: 103–14). In one sense, this structure is precisely that developed by Brooks in Reading for the Plot: the second section of ‘All’estero’ opens with an explicit intention, but the arrival at Verona is deferred by a series of unplanned detours or digressions that constitute the middle of this particular narrative segment. At the same time, ‘All’estero’ would seem to problematize Chambers’s suggestion that the digressive text depends for its coherence on patterns of repetition or similitude. Rather than working in concert in this text, digression and repetition work against each other, the desire to repeat being constantly thwarted by a failure to stick to the intended path.

VI At the heart of ‘All’estero’ is a narrative that does lend the text a degree of cohesion. Indeed, it is narrative cohesion of the most conventional kind: that of crime and detection. The crimes of the Organizzazione Ludwig, a group that claims responsibility for a series of murders in northern Italy and about which the narrator reads in October 1980 (Sebald 1999: 78), are finally ‘solved’ (1999: 129–32) when the narrator meets with Salvatore Altamura and hears about further murders and the eventual arrest of the two men responsible. However, this detective story stands in stark contrast to the remainder of the narrative, which possesses no such clear linear progression and no definitive ending. In effect, it is a framed tale that stands as what Chambers elsewhere terms an ‘anti-model’ of the overall text (see Chambers 1984). As we have seen throughout this chapter, ‘All’estero’ is digressive to a degree that forces a rethinking of narratological accounts of digression. Rather than a property of a middle that is located firmly between beginning and



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end, Sebald’s text suggests that beginnings and endings can themselves exist in digressive relationships to middles. This is not to say, of course, that the middle of Sebald’s narrative is not also digressive. In fact, it is in many respects quite radically digressive, to the extent that digression even undermines the structures of repetition that, in Chambers’s view, can compensate for weak narrative cohesion by communicating a sense of an obscure but perceptible coherence of experience. In many of Sebald’s later texts, patterns of repetition, metaphorical similarity, and hermeneutic structures of enigma and resolution come to play a much more prominent role in the construction of the narrative. They are much more amenable to understanding in terms of what Peter Brooks identifies as the ineluctable double logic of narrative: The metaphoric work of eventual totalization determines the meaning and status of the metonymic work of sequence – though it must be claimed that the metonymies of the middle produced, gave birth to, the final metaphor. The contradiction may be in the very nature of narrative, which not only uses but is this double logic. (1984: 29) ‘All’estero’, however, thwarts the work of metaphoric totalization, for the coherence striven for by the end of the text and its Verdichtung of certain recurrent topoi is, as I have hoped to show, subverted by the structures of digression that resist the drive towards metaphorical recuperation. The ultimate effect of this, I think, is to produce a text that is ultimately unable to contain the potential of narrative to succumb to the threat of dilatoriness and randomness. Digression is all-pervasive and as such cannot be seen as something that delays arrival at or wanders from the point of the narrative, but must rather be seen as the point. In this sense, the Schwindelgefühle – the sense of both dizziness and of having been conned or swindled – provoked by the text are not merely a result of isolated narrative devices, but of a profound and radical distrust in the capacity of narrative to organize and represent human experience. This is an aspect of Sebald’s work that has, perhaps, not been adequately remarked upon by critics who have found that his later prose responds more directly to current academic concerns with memory, the Holocaust, trauma and travel. While the later texts are self-reflexive to a high degree and continually cast doubt on the process of representation per se, none of them is as sceptical as ‘All’estero’. My title implies that this chapter will have elucidated the sense of Sebald’s endings and beginnings, but what ‘All’estero’ calls into question is the very notion that the narrative has a sense at all.




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Albes, Claudia. 2002. ‘Die Erkundung der Leere. Anmerkungen zu W. G. Sebalds “englischer Wallfahrt” Die Ringe des Saturn’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 46: 279–305 Atze, Marcel. 1997. ‘Koinzidenz und Intertextualität. Der Einsatz von Prätexten in W. G. Sebalds Erzählung “All’estero”’, in W. G. Sebald: Porträt, ed. Franz Loquai (Eggingen: Isele), pp. 146–69 Barthes, Roland. 1970. S/Z (Paris: Seuil) Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) Chambers, Ross. 1984. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Manchester University Press) —— 1999. Loiterature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press) Fuchs, Anne. 2004. Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte. Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W. G. Sebalds Prosa (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau) Horstkotte, Silke. 2009. Nachbilder. Fotografie und Gedächtnis in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau) Klebes, Martin. 2004. ‘Infinite Journey: From Sebald to Kafka’, in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, ed. J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (Edinburgh University Press), pp. 123–39 Leone, Massimo. 2004. ‘Textual Wanderings: A Vertiginous Reading of W. G. Sebald’, in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, ed. J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (Edinburgh University Press), pp. 89–101 Long, J. J. 2007. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity (Edinburgh University Press) Loquai, Franz. 2005. ‘Vom Beinhaus der Geschichte ins wiedergefundene Paradies. Zu Werk und Poetik W. G. Sebalds’, in Sebald: Lektüren, ed. Marcel Atze and Franz Loquai (Eggingen: Isele), pp. 244–56 Said, Edward W. 1975. Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books) Sebald, W. G. 1990. Schwindel. Gefühle. (Frankfurt a.M.: Eichborn) —— 1997. The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill) —— 1998. The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill) —— 1999. Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill) —— 2001. Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton) Wohlleben, Doren. 2006. ‘Effet de flou. Unschärfe als literarisches Mittel der Bewahrheitung in W. G. Sebalds Schwindel. Gefühle’, in W. G. Sebald: Politische Archäologie und melancholische Bastelei, ed. Michael Niehaus and Claudia Öhlschläger (Berlin: Erich Schmidt), pp. 127–43 Zilcosky, John. 2004. ‘Sebald’s Uncanny Travels: The Impossibility of Getting Lost’, in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, ed. J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (Edinburgh University Press), pp. 102–20



Bibliography

absenting of story in Walser’s RobberNovel, 141 Adorno, Theodor, 46 ‘The Essay as Form’, 125–6 aesthetics see fetishist aesthetics Albes, Claudia, 194 Allen, Dennis, 29 ‘anti-realistic realism’, 179 anticipatory prolepsis, 138–40 aporia and Beckett Trilogy, 164 Ariosto, Ludovico, 169, 179 Aristotle, 169 association and digression, 3, 8, 190n.4, 199, 201 free association, 39, 119 and Proust, 106, 110–11, 112, 190n.6 and Woolf, 119, 122, 125 see also connections Attridge, Derek, 140, 141 Auerbach, Erich, 3 Augustine, St, 13 Austen, Jane, 65, 85 Auster, Paul, 156 Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista, 14–15 Balzac, Honoré de, 65, 67, 77–9 Bancroft, Corinne, 7 Baroque style in prose, 189n.2 Barthes, Roland, 195, 198 Baudelaire, Charles, 2, 5, 50, 58, 61 ‘Paysage’, 51 ‘Le soleil’, 51–3 Bayard, Pierre, 3, 107, 108, 110–11, 112–13, 190n.6 Beckett, Samuel The Beckett Trilogy, 6, 156–67 L’Innommable (The Unnameable), 156, 157, 161–5, 166 Malloy, 156, 157, 158–60, 161, 164 Malone meurt (Malone Dies), 156, 157, 160–1

unity and connections in, 162, 166, 167 Waiting for Godot, 84, 157 beginnings Calvino on potentialities of, 170–3, 178 and narrative middle, 195–6 Sebald’s digressive beginning, 196–8, 202–3 see also ending(s): and beginnings Bell, Ian, 5 Benet, Juan, 182 benevolence in Tristram Shandy, 25, 26, 32 Benjamin, Walter, 51, 138 Bernhard, Thomas, 182 Bersani, Leo, 73–4 Berthoud, Jacques, 27 bifurcation and narrative, 21–2, 98–9 biography and Woolf’s Orlando, 124–5 Blanchot, Maurice, 190n.3 Borges, Jorge Luis, 99 Bremond, C., 104n.2 ‘Broad Church’ theology, 26 Brontë, Charlotte, 45 Brooks, Peter, 1, 195, 196, 198, 202, 203 Brown, Andrew, 121 Browne, Thomas, 199 Byzantine romances and Cervantes, 10, 16 cadenzas in narrative, 84, 85 Calvino, Italo, 6, 7, 169–80 The Baron on the Trees, 176–7 ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, 174, 175–6 ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’, 175–6, 178 ‘The Form of the Tree’, 174–5 ‘hyper-novel’, 174–5 205



Index

Index

Calvino, Italo – continued If on a Winter’s Night, 169, 170–3, 174, 176, 178, 179 The Non-Existent Knight, 177 ‘The Novel as Spectacle’, 178 The Path to the Spiders’ Nest Preface, 172, 178 ‘La Poubelle Agréée’, 174, 175 Six Memos, 170 Cartesianism see Descartes, René Casalduero, Joaquín, 14–15 Causal Extrapolation Rule and Chekhov, 85, 87 Cervantes, Miguel de, 7, 182 Don Quixote, 3, 5, 9, 188 Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, 1, 5, 9–19 Chambers, Ross, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 72, 147 digression as criticism, 24, 30 disruption of linearity, 107, 111 feminine in digression, 33n.15 ‘loiterature’ as genre, 83, 120 metaphor and digression, 107, 108 naturalness of ‘loiterature’, 190n.6, 195 pleasure and digression, 3, 77 and Proust, 107, 116 and Sebald, 193, 194, 200, 202, 203 and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 21–2 chance, 7 in Gide’s Le Prométhée mal enchaîné, 97–8 and rhyme, 55 Baudelaire’s ‘Le soleil’, 51–3, 61, 62 Chandler, Raymond: The Big Sleep, 84 Chatman, Seymour, 85 Chekhov, Anton: ‘The Lady with the Dog’, 7, 82–92 China and Orientalism in Little Dorrit, 41–2 Christianity Cervantes’s Persiles and Sigismunda allegory of soul’s journey, 14–15 and peregrinatio of life, 13–14 rectilinearity and morality, 25–6 Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit, 37, 39–40

cities and walking Dickens’s Little Dorrit, 43–4 ‘walking poem’ and metaphor, 50–62 Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’, 119–20 Coetzee, J. M., 156 coherence rules of reading, 83, 84 cohesiveness in Sebald’s texts, 200–1 comic writing and episodic, 37 complexity of world, 3–4 Calvino and multiplicity of world, 170, 173–6, 179 duality of life at Shandy Hall, 22–3 interconnectedness, 4, 7, 189 complicity and walking poem, 53–8, 62 configuration rules of reading, 83, 84, 86 connections Calvino on multiplicity, 174 in Gide’s work, 100, 101–2, 103 interconnectedness of world, 4, 7, 189 lacking in Walser’s work, 133–4 and Sebald’s work, 200 see also association and digression consciousness and digression, 6–7 Beckett Trilogy, 156, 158, 159, 160, 163, 164–7 consciousness as impediment to writing, 190–1n., 190n.46 and postmodern novel, 165–6 William James’s ‘Stream of Thought’, 67–70 Woolf’s short stories, 118–20 contingency and Gide’s work, 100, 102 convergence in Cervantes’s Persiles and Sigismunda, 12, 18 corrective tendencies, 2–3 Cotterill, Anne, 24–5, 29–30, 72, 76, 80n.15 Coulouma, Flore, 6 Creasman, Boyd, 91n.2 creativity, 4, 7–8 psychology of creative imagination, 183–5 critical detachment: Calvino, 6, 170, 176–8, 179–80 criticism: digression as, 24, 25–6, 30



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Croll, Morris, 189n.2 cruising and O’Hara’s poem, 57 Cuddon, J. A., 2 Culler, Jonathan, 5, 104 d’Arrest, Heinrich, 82, 85 Daudet, Alphonse, 70, 74–5 Davies, Paul, 165 De Maegd-Soëp, Carolina, 91n.2 death as end to digression, 3, 27, 31 Calvino and postponement of, 175 and potentialities of beginning, 170 deconstructionism in Beckett’s The Unnameable, 165 deferral and delay anticipatory prolepsis in Walser’s Robber-Novel, 138–40 Calvino and potentiality of the beginning, 170–3, 178 in Cervantes’s Persiles and Sigismunda, 11, 12, 13, 17 Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit, 7, 37, 39–40 feminine and digression, 29 pleasure of, 76, 116, 140 Dennett, Daniel, 166 Derrida, Jacques, 165 Descartes, René, 2, 121, 125, 164, 165 desire and digression in Tristram Shandy, 24, 25, 29 for end, 12, 15, 195 errant eye in Proust, 107–16 and fetishistic, 49, 57 and prolonging pleasure, 3, 5, 140 detritus and ‘throwing away’ in Calvino, 175 Dickens, Charles Bleak House, 39, 40, 42, 44 contemporary criticism, 36–7 Little Dorrit, 7, 36–47 Circumlocution Office, 37, 39–40 circumlocution and supplementary characters, 39, 41–3 Miss Wade’s story, 44–6 Nicholas Nickleby, 36, 37

Diderot, Denis, 32, 169, 170 Jacques le fataliste, 103, 179 digression as criticism, 24, 25–6, 30 definitions, 143 as intrinsic to narrative, 1, 2, 3, 14, 22, 195 types of digression, 83 as Weltanschauung, 4 Dilworth, Ernest Nevin, 33n.16 discontinuity, 7 discourse and Beckett’s work, 156, 158, 164–5, 166 and Sebald’s ‘All’estero’, 197 displacement: digressive displacement and metaphoric substitution in poetry, 49–62 disponibilité, 51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59 Dostoevsky, Fyodor The Devils, 84, 85–6 Notes from Underground, 45 duality in Tristram Shandy, 22–3 Dumas, Alexandre, père, 176 Eco, Umberto, 99 écriture feminine, l’, 5 Edel, Leon, 64, 77 Ehrenzweig, Anton, 183–5 Eliot, George: Middlemarch, 40 Eliot, T. S., 72 ellipses in Woolf’s work, 118–19, 123 embedded stories see interpolated stories embroidery metaphor of Henry James, 65, 66 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 79n.7 ending(s) and beginnings, 1 Calvino, 170–1, 178–9 Marías, 186–7, 189 O’Brien, 145, 146 and deferral, 3, 5 desire for, 195 as digression in Sebald, 198–203 expectation of ‘happy ending’, 15–16, 76 and retrospective meaning, 198, 199 see also death



Index 207

Index

epiphany, 5–6, 108 in Chekhov’s stories, 90–1 in walking poems, 50, 53, 54, 58, 59, 60, 62 errancy, 1, 4 Cervantes’s Persiles and Sigismunda, 9, 14, 15, 17, 18 Marías’s writing style, 181–9 Proust and errant eyes, 106–16 ‘essayism’ and Woolf, 125–6 excursion, 2, 120, 126, 127 eyes: errant eyes in Proust, 107–16 ‘false novel’ of Marías, 185, 187 feminine and digression, 4–5 in Tristram Shandy, 29–31 feminism: Virginia Woolf, 121–3, 125–6 fetishist aesthetics, 49, 51, 53, 57, 58, 61, 62 Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones, 44, 103, 189n.1 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 84 flâneur writing, 51 Flaubert, Gustave, 5, 77 Fletcher, Angus, 80n.15 flexibility of novel as genre, 188 Forbes, John: ‘Afternoon Papers’, 58–62 Forcione, Alban, 10–11, 12, 14–15 forking paths and narrative, 21–2, 98–9 Forster, John, 36–7, 44–5 Foucault, Michel, 40 fragmentary in Beckett’s The Unnameable, 162, 167 Frederick, Samuel, 6 freedom and novel form, 4, 12, 72–3, 188–9 Freud, Sigmund, 184 frustration of reader, 12, 13 Fulford, Robert, 91–2n.2 ‘fun’ of language digression in Henry James, 67, 70, 71, 78–9 Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 169, 170, 174 Galle, Johann Gottfried, 82, 85 gaze and homosexual characters in Proust, 109–15 lesbian gaze, 113–15

gender digression as mark of feminine, 4–5, 29–31 simile and gender in Woolf’s Orlando, 125 Woolf’s feminism, 121–3, 125–6 Genewein, Walter, 199 geometry of fiction in Henry James, 73–4 Gide, André, 94–104 The Counterfeiters, 96–7, 103 Le Prométhée mal enchaîné, 5, 6, 97–104 La Symphonie pastorale, 95–6 The Vatican Cellars, 94–5, 96 Girard, René, 49 Gracián, Baltasar: El Criticón, 13 Graham, Victor E., 109 grammar: stylistic digression in Proust, 107 Greenberg, Yael, 92n.8 Grohmann, Alexis, 6 Hall, Donald, 64 Hammett, Dashiel: The Maltese Falcon, 84 ‘happy endings’, 15–16, 76 Hawley, Judith, 4 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 67, 74, 77–9 Heliodorus: Ethiopian Story, 10, 16 hermeneutic code and narrative, 195, 203 Hill, Leslie, 165 historians and multiplicity of options, 25 history in Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, 201 Hogarth, William, 29, 31 Holdheim, W. W., 97 Homer: The Odyssey, 3 homosexuality and errant eyes in Proust, 108–16 humour see comic writing and episodic ‘hyper-novel’ and Calvino, 174–5 identity and Beckett Trilogy, 163, 166 imagination, 4 psychology of, 183–5 incipits, 149, 171



208

‘inconséquence’ in Gide’s characters, 94 interconnectedness of world, 4, 7, 189 internal monologue and Beckett, 156, 159, 164–5, 166–7 interpolated stories Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night, 171 Cervantes’s Persiles and Sigismunda, 9, 10–11 O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, 145–6, 153–4 in Woolf’s work, 127–8 interpretation digression as aid to, 7 and perturbative digressions, 7, 85–6 interruption and digression and potentiality of beginnings in Calvino, 171–3, 178 in Woolf, 127–8 Iser, Wolfgang, 21, 72, 73, 80n.11 Jacobson, Dan, 200 James, Henry, 5, 7, 64–80 ‘The Art of Fiction’, 66–7, 72, 73, 74, 75 on Hawthorne and Balzac, 77–9 The Portrait of a Lady, 76–7 Turn of the Screw, 86 Washington Square, 71–2 James, William, 7–8, 67–70 Jay, Martin, 110, 112 Johnson, Samuel, 21, 126–7 journey mechanism and digression, 13 Little Dorrit, 38–9 travel in Sebald’s ‘All’estero’, 196–8, 201–2 travels in Tristram Shandy, 27–8 Joyce, James, 144, 166, 167 Ulysses, 5 Juvenal, 50

language Beckett, 157, 161–2, 165 O’Brien, 144, 152–3 see also speech Latitudinarianism, 26, 32 ‘law of closure’, 184 Leavis, F. R., 42 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 149 Lennard, John, 72 Leone, Massimo, 197 Lermontov, Mikhail Yurevich: A Hero of Our Time, 85 lesbian gaze in Proust, 113–15 Lessing, Doris: Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 84 Leverrier, Urbain Jean Joseph, 85 Lewes, G. H., 36, 37 life digressive nature, 73, 195 Calvino’s multiplicity, 179 Little Dorrit, 39 multiplicity of options and Tristram Shandy, 21–2, 25 Persiles and Sigismunda, 11, 13–14 limitlessness in James, 67 Marías and futility of testimony, 186 Sebald and capacity of narrative to represent, 203 Linaker, Tanya, 92n.7 linearity and digression Calvino, 169–70, 177–8, 179 disruption of linearity, 107, 111 rectilinearity and morality in Tristram Shandy, 25–6 Lodge, David, 164–5, 167 ‘loiterature’, 24, 83, 107, 116, 120 naturalness of, 190n.6, 195 loitering, 51, 107, 144 Long, Jonathan, 6–7 Lukács, Georg, 125

Kafka, Franz, 199, 200, 202 Kelman, James, 156 ‘kernels’ and plot, 85, 87 Knowlson, James, 157 Koestler, Arthur, 190–1n.6 Kundera, Milan, 2

Mackenzie, Compton, 75 Maistre, Xavier de: A Journey Round My Room, 120–1 Malcolm, Janet, 87 manuscripts see writing process Marcus, Laura, 4



Index 209

Index

Marías, Javier, 6, 181–91 Dark Back of Time, 185–9 A Heart So White, 182–3 as translator, 191n.9 Mathieu, Pierre-Louis, 113 Maxwell, James Clerk, 191n.6 McDonald, Rónán, 159, 165 McLaughlin, Martin, 178 meandering Henry James, 64, 67, 70, 74, 75, 77 Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 27, 29, 30 Melville, Herman, 7 Moby Dick, 2, 188–9 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 51 metaphor and digression errant eye in Proust, 107–16 James and parenthetical, 65–6 in poetry, 49–62 middles: Sebald and narrative middles, 195–6, 197, 202–3 Miller, Hillis, 23–4, 29 modulation of narrative, 84, 85, 87 Montaigne, Michel de: Essais, 126–7 Mooney, Sinead, 162 morality and rectilinearity in Tristram Shandy, 25–6 Moreau, Gustave: Oedipe et le sphinx, 112, 113 multiplicity Calvino and multiplicity of world, 170, 172–3, 173–6, 179 Marías and psychology of creativity, 183–4, 185 of options and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 21–2, 25 see also complexity of world Murphy, P. J., 164 Musil, Robert, 135 Nabokov, Vladimir, 182 narrative digression as intrinsic to, 1, 2, 3, 14, 22, 195 disintegration of narrative progression, 6–7, 157–8, 165–6 narrative digressions, 83–4 narrative middles and Sebald, 195–6, 197, 202–3 prolixity and threat to unity, 10

and types of digression, 83 see also beginnings; ending(s); plot narrator in Beckett’s The Unnameable, 162–4, 165, 166 naturalness Henry James on Daudet, 74–5 of ‘loiterature’, 190n.6, 195 nature-walking of Romantics, 51 negative digressions, 84, 86 Neptune, discovery of, 82, 83, 84–5 Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, 151 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 21 night and uncertainty in Woolf, 127–8 nothing and Walser’s Robber-Novel, 134–8, 140 notice rules of reading, 83, 88 nouveau roman movement, 156 O’Brien, Flann, 143–55 At Swim-Two-Birds, 6, 144, 145–8, 152, 153–4 The Third Policeman, 143, 148–53, 154 Odysseus, 3 O’Hara, Frank: ‘The Day Lady Died’, 53–7, 58, 60 options Marías and psychology of creativity, 183–4, 185 multiplicity of options and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 21–2, 25 oral tradition and O’Brien’s At SwimTwo-Birds, 6, 144–5, 147–8, 151–2, 154 order and digression, 24, 72, 107, 126, 140, 194, 195 paralleling structure of narrative Beckett, 159 Calvino, 173–4 parekbasis (excursion), 2, 51, 126, 127 parentheses Calvino, 178 James, 64–80 passions and moral action in Tristram Shandy, 26 past: digression and narrative views of, 95–6



210

Pepys, Samuel, 199 peregrinatio concept, 13 performance and Chekhov’s stories, 88, 89, 90–1 peripeteia in Cervantes’s Persiles and Sigismunda, 17–18 perturbative digressions and Chekhov, 7, 85–6, 91 Phelan, James, 85 picaresque and journey mechanism, 13 pilgrimage in Cervantes’s Persiles and Sigismunda, 13, 17 Pinget, Robert, 156 Piper, William Bowman, 22 pleasure and digression, 3, 5, 12, 76, 77, 116, 140, 169 Pliny the Younger, 27 plot Calvino and linear plot, 169–70, 177–8 disintegration of narrative progression, 6–7, 157–8, 165–6 ‘satellites’ and ‘kernels’, 85, 87 Walser’s ‘plotless’ prose, 130–1, 136, 141 see also progression and digression poetry, 49–62 political marginalization and digression, 25 Porter, Richard N., 92n.9 post-structuralist literary theory, 166 postmodern novel Beckett, 165–6 disintegration of narrative progression, 6–7, 157–8, 165–6 Pound, Ezra, 64 progression and digression Dickens’s Little Dorrit, 46 Proust’s A la recherche, 115 Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, 194 Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 23–4 Walser’s Robber-Novel, 139–40 prolepsis in Walser’s Robber-Novel, 138–40 Proust, Marcel, 55, 166, 182 A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), 3, 4, 84, 106–17, 188

psychoanalysis and Little Dorrit, 46 psychological realism and Beckett, 162, 165, 167 psychology of the imagination, 183–5 Puttenham, George, 72 quadratura scheme, 18 Quintilian, 2 Rabinovitz, Rubin, 162 Rabinowitz, Peter J., 7, 83 radical empiricism, 69–70 Randel, Mary Gaylord, 15, 17 Rapin-Thoyras, Paul de, 32n.5 Rayfield, Donald, 87, 91n.2, 92n.9 reading rules, 83–4 ‘real’ and ‘romantic’: Henry James on, 76, 77 realism: ‘anti-realistic realism’, 179 récits in Gide, 95 reflection and Woolf’s work, 120–1 Regis, Amber K., 80n.11 relational in Henry and William James, 66–70, 77–8, 79 repetition Beckett, 156, 158, 162 Marías, 196, 198 Sebald, 198, 199, 200, 201–2, 203 restlessness, 13 Dickens, 37, 46 Rétif de la Bretonne, Nicolas Edme, 51 rhetoric desire to correct digression, 2–3 perturbative digressions and Chekhov, 7, 85–6, 91 rhetorical narrative theory, 83 simile and gender in Woolf’s Orlando, 125 rhyme and chance in Baudelaire, 51–3, 55, 61, 62 and ‘fit’ in Forbes’ ‘Afternoon Papers’, 61–2 Richardson, Samuel, 181 Riley, E. C., 10 Rivière, Jacques, 104n.3 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 156 Robbins, Jeremy, 5



Index 211

Index

‘romantic’ and ‘real’ in James, 67, 76, 77–9 Romanticism and walking poem, 50–1 Rome as destination, 13, 14–15, 16, 17, 18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 51 Rule of Causal Extrapolation and Chekhov, 85, 87 rules of reading, 83–4 Sabry, Randa, 2 Sacchetti, Maria Alberta, 15, 19n.10 Said, Edward, 195–6 Santovetti, Olivia, 6, 7 ‘satellites’ and plot, 85 Schiller, Friedrich, 184 schizophrenia and digression in O’Brien, 152–3 Schlegel, Friedrich, 51 Sebald, W. G., 1, 156, 193–203 ‘All’estero’ (Vertigo), 6–7, 196–203 Austerlitz, 199–200, 201 The Emigrants, 199, 201 Rings of Saturn, 193–4, 201 ‘Il ritorno in patria’ (Vertigo), 199 self see consciousness; identity; subjectivity self-consciousness and digression, 6, 7, 95, 100–1, 102–4 self-reflexivity of fiction, 6 Beckett, 160 Calvino and critical detachment, 6, 170, 176–8, 179–80 James, 72, 79 sensibility cult, 26, 32 sewing metaphor and Henry James, 65, 66 sexuality and digression homosexuality and errant eyes in Proust, 108–16 in Tristram Shandy, 28–32 see also feminine and digression Sheridan, Niall, 145 Sheringham, Michael, 159–60 signification rules of reading, 83 simile and gender in Woolf’s Orlando, 125 Simon, Claude, 156 Smith, Virginia Llewellyn, 92n.8

Smollett, Tobias, 44 Smyth, Edmund, 6 space and digression in O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, 149–52 speech digressive speech in Little Dorrit, 41–3 Henry James on Daudet’s spontaneous style, 74–5 O’Brien and oral tradition, 6, 144–5, 147–8, 151–2, 154 Spitzer, Leo, 3–4 Sterne, Laurence, 7, 72, 169, 170, 179, 182 digressions as sunshine, 76 A Sentimental Journey, 26, 28, 32 Tristram Shandy, 2, 4, 21–33, 64, 103, 134, 175, 188, 199 influence of, 120, 124, 144 lack of critical consensus, 21 multiplicity of options and digression, 21–2, 25 progression and digression, 23–4 rectilinearity and Christian morality, 25–6 sex and sexuality in, 28–32 Stevens, Wallace, 127 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 65, 73 storytelling Beckett Trilogy, 158, 160–1, 163 and narrative structure in At Swim-Two-Birds, 147–8 Strachey, Lytton, 124 stream of consciousness and Beckett Trilogy, 159, 162, 165, 167 stylistic digression in Proust, 107 subjectivity, 6–7, 100, 112–13 Beckett Trilogy, 158–9, 164–5 postmodern novel, 165–6 William James’s ‘Stream of Thought’, 67–70 subversiveness, 4, 6, 7, 83, 141, 154 Sucksmith, Harvey Peter, 37 supplementary characters in Little Dorrit, 39, 40–2 swerves and narrative digressions, 83–4 Swift, Jonathan, 24



212

Symonds, John Addington, 80n.11 sympathy and digression in Tristram Shandy, 25, 26, 32 Taine, Hippolyte, 36–7 talking see speech Tambling, Jeremy, 7 ‘throwing away’ in Calvino, 175 time digression and narrative views of past, 95–6 and Marías’s Dark Back of Time, 188 in Woolf’s Orlando, 124–5, 127 see also deferral and delay Topping, Margaret, 4 transgressions and digressions, 83–4 transhistorical nature of digression, 4, 7 transnational nature of digression, 4 Trilling, Lionel, 40 Trollope, Anthony, 189n.1 Turgenev, Ivan, 77, 79 unity in narrative, 10 Beckett Trilogy, 162, 166, 167 Verlaine, Paul, 56–7 voyeurism in Proust, 114 Walker, David, 5, 6 walking as digressive context Dickens’s Little Dorrit, 43–4 Sebald in Rings of Saturn, 193–4 ‘walking poem’ and metaphor, 50–62

Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’, 119–20 Walpole, Horace, 21, 23 Walser, Robert: Robber-Novel, 6, 130–42 wandering and walking poem, 53, 61 Watson-Williams, Helen, 102 Waugh, Patricia, 166 Werfel, Franz, 199, 200–1 Williams, Jeffrey, 23–4 Wilson, Diana de Armas, 11 Woolf, Leonard, 118 Woolf, Virginia, 4, 118–28 The Common Reader, 126–7 Jacob’s Room, 118, 124 ‘The Mark on the Wall’, 118–19, 120 Orlando, 124–5, 127 ‘Reading’, 127, 128 A Room of One’s Own, 121–3, 125 ‘Street Haunting’, 119–20 Three Guineas, 123 ‘Time Passes’, 127–8 Wordsworth, William, 51 Wright, Iian, 165 writing process in Beckett Trilogy, 160, 166, 167 loss of manuscripts in O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, 146–7, 153 and ‘throwing away’ in Calvino, 175 Walser’s manuscript form of Robber-Novel, 131, 132 Zilcosky, John, 196



Index 213

Digressions in European Literature: From Cervantes to Sebald

Cervantes

Cervantes

The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

Moebius Trip: Digressions from India's Highways

Memory in literature: from Rousseau to neuroscience

The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes

Cervantes Street

cervantes-donquixote

Understanding W. G. Sebald (Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature)

European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism: A Reader in Aesthetic Practice (Continuum Collection)

Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny

A European Life: From War to Peace

Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny

Slovenia: from Yugoslavia to the European Union

From Proto-Indo-European to Slavic

Introducing Children's Literature: From Romanticism to Postmodernism

Cervantes Saavedra Miguel De

Cervantes y la crítica

Mi Entrañable Señor Cervantes

Mystery in Children's Literature: From the Rational to the Supernatural

Satire and Secrecy in English Literature from 1650 to 1750

Romantic irony in French literature from Diderot to Beckett

Satire and Secrecy in English Literature from 1650 to 1750

Islamic Literature in Contemporary Turkey: From Epic to Novel

A Planet Called Cervantes

Cervantes NOVELAS EJEMPLARES

The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne

Overtones of Opera in American Literature from Whitman to Wharton

Love and the Law in Cervantes

Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale

Digressions in European Literature: From Cervantes to Sebald

Cervantes

Cervantes

The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

Moebius Trip: Digressions from India's Highways

Memory in literature: from Rousseau to neuroscience

The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes

Cervantes Street

cervantes-donquixote

Understanding W. G. Sebald (Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature)

European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism: A Reader in Aesthetic Practice (Continuum Collection)

Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny

A European Life: From War to Peace

Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny

Slovenia: from Yugoslavia to the European Union

From Proto-Indo-European to Slavic

Introducing Children's Literature: From Romanticism to Postmodernism

Cervantes Saavedra Miguel De

Cervantes y la crítica

Mi Entrañable Señor Cervantes

Mystery in Children's Literature: From the Rational to the Supernatural

Satire and Secrecy in English Literature from 1650 to 1750

Romantic irony in French literature from Diderot to Beckett

Satire and Secrecy in English Literature from 1650 to 1750

Islamic Literature in Contemporary Turkey: From Epic to Novel

A Planet Called Cervantes

Cervantes NOVELAS EJEMPLARES

The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne

Overtones of Opera in American Literature from Whitman to Wharton

Love and the Law in Cervantes

Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale

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