Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 1988"

Celie in the Looking Glass: The Desire for Selfhood in The Color Purple

Abstract: For many readers the turning point of Alice Walker's The Color Purple occurs when Celie, the principal character, asserts her freedom from her husband and proclaims her right to exist: "I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly, and can't cook. . . . But I'm here" (187). Celie's claim is startling because throughout her life she has been subjected to a cruel form of male dominance grounded in control over speech. The novel's very first words alert us to the prohibition against speech served on Celie by her father: "You'd better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy." Thus, Celie writes, addressing her letters to God because she has no one else to write to and because she knows she must never tell

Unquiet Ghosts: The Struggle for Representation in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract: "We can assume that any theory of the subject has been appropriated by the masculine. . . . When she submits to [such a] theory, woman fails to realize that she is renouncing the specificity of her own relationship to the imaginary. Subjecting herself to objectivization in discourse—by being 'female' " (Irigaray 133). In these words Luce Irigaray aptly summarizes one of the basic problems that Jean Rhys attempts to grapple with in her best-known novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. The tale of Antoinette, as indicated by the critics, is the tale of a schizophrenic, a Creole whose search for identity leads to madness, or, as some would advocate, the story of a woman too weak to resist the onslaught of a strong male such as Rochester, and whose response is escape through madness. Yet such interpretations fail to take into account an important element of the text: its structure. A basic question remains. Why would a writer such as Jean Rhys, dedicated to portraying a female point of view, choose to write more than half the novel from a male perspective? In addressing this issue, it is important to bear in mind that Wide Sargasso Sea is a rewrite of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Rhys's statement as to the origin of the novel has been much quoted: "She seemed such

The Word Split Its Husk: Woolf's Double Vision of Modernist Language

Abstract: In private fantasies, like this late diary entry, as in formal essays like "Modern Fiction" and "The Narrow Bridge of Art," Virginia Woolf initiated a continuing feminist challenge to the high temples, reconstructed labyrinths, and reinforcing scaffoldings erected by the God-like men of literary modernism. She goes on to list T. S. Eliot as one of the "little boys" building castles for her engulfment. Her assessment of men of the

Italic Calvino: The Place of the Emperor in Invisible Cities

Abstract: As if hesitating on some sort of threshold between the modern and the postmodern, the novel presents a double structure of narrativity and seriality. . . . The seriality of the cities defines the trait we shall treat as postmodern, while the framing device, the narrative of those cities which would put them into a certain perspective, relates to a modern, or in any case pre-postmodern, esthetic of a mise-en-abyme or "narrative context." (James, "Seriality" 144)

Six Memos for the Next Milllenium, and: Alienation in Giuseppe Berto's Novels (review)

Abstract: than those preceding, because most writers discuss what H. Porter Abbott calls working \"against genre,\" Ben-Zvi's linguistic discussion of \"manipulation with phonemes\" excepted: against autobiography (Abbott), against the pastoral (Smith), against the whole of drama (Zeifman), against the whole of fiction (Moorjani), and against all genres (Hayman). Part Four, \"Transpositions for Stage and Screen,\" includes a survey of Beckett's work for television (Bishop), a detailed history of adaptations of Beckett's work by Mabou Mines (Cohn), and a look at the American playwright most influenced by Beckett, Sam Shepard (Brienza). By the fifth and final \"Part\" the reader may still be looking for the whole and feel a bit beaten about by the prefix \"trans.\" Even the neologistically clumsy rubric, \"Transcreations: Language to Painting,\" however, contains two fine essays on visual artists responding to Beckett's work: Max Ernst (Hubert) and H. M. Erhardt (Mitchell). The volume ends with Ruby Cohn's panegyric to an American director, the \"Inexhaustible Alan\" Schneider, to whom the volume is also dedicated and to whom we all owe an incalculable debt.

Performance, History, and Myth: The Problem of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo-Jumbo

Abstract: The work of Ishmael Reed presents both a puzzle to be solved and a problem to be engaged. Reed's intentional elusiveness invites the critic to fathom the difficulties of his prose by closely analyzing the patterns of allusion and reference that make up so much of his fiction. To provide a satisfactory solution to the puzzle of his individual works, the critic must further consider the problem of Reed's relationship to the literary movements of his time. Fortunately for us, Reed is not especially retiring as an advocate of his own work. Indeed, the occasional animus against his oeuvre may be a reaction against the claims he makes on behalf of his fiction. To be fair, these substantial claims on our attention are made not only by die author of those texts alone but also by the texts themselves. Reed's project has two distinct, though related parts. He wishes to loosen the stranglehold of the Judeo-Christian tradition on the cultural patterns of black people everywhere (not simply Afro-Americans).1 Further, he wishes to reestablish the virtue of fiction as performance on the

Feminism and African Fiction: The Novels of Mariama Bâ

Abstract: In Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease, Obi is asked the meaning of his name on the assumption that \"all African names mean something.\" With a modesty and an incisiveness more characteristic of the author than of his fictional creation, Obi replies, \"Well, I don't know about African names—Ibo names, yes\" (27). Obi, although a Nigerian, doesn't feel able to make comments about Nigeria (much less Africa) but only about his own people, the Igbos. So too, one cannot speak about feminism and African literature, especially in ajournai article, and hence the immediate limitation in the title above. The focus here will be on the contradictions

"Utterly Other Discourse": The Anticanon of Experimental Women Writers from Dorothy Richardson to Christine Brooke-Rose

Abstract: In pre-twentieth century women's fiction, the strains in the relationship between women and the dominant culture were represented through covert modes. The strategies of women writers included subtexts, minor characters, and patterns of imagery, which to various degrees undermined the traditional scripts for appropriate behavior in fiction and life that their surface plots and major characters seemed to confirm.1 Through her heroines, Jane Austen, for instance, maintains a \"double consciousness\"; as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar observe, although Austen drives her heroines into a final \"docility and restraint,\" she allows them to uncover the \"delights of assertion and rebellion\" on the way. In fact, Austen slyly subverted prevailing values through the \"duplicity\" of the \"happy endings\" of her novels, \"in which she brings her couples to the brink of bliss in such haste ... or with such sarcasm that the entire message is undercut\" (Gilbert and Gubar 168-169). Gilbert and Gubar reveal similar subversive subtexts in George Eliot, whose Maggie Tulliver, they

Feminist Critical Theory: A Checklist

Abstract: To be included in this bibliography a citation had to 1) reflect or discuss a feminist approach; 2) pertain to literary criticism; and 3) relate to theory. Subdivisions include \"Bibliographies,\" \"Introductory Sources,\" \"General,\" \"Black Critical Theory,\" \"Ecriture Féminine,\" \"Lesbian Theory,\" \"Marxist Theory,\" \"Mythic Theory,\" \"Other Poststructural Theories,\" and \"Psychoanalytic or Linguistic Theory.\" Classifying the citations was difficult because of overlapping concepts, and the subject headings are not rigid divisions but an attempt to impose a degree of order on the 247 books and articles (no dissertations are included). For example, discussions of écriture féminine and lesbian theory relate to psychoanalytic theory, and most feminist theory as a whole can be described as poststructural, but each of these is a separate category in the bibliography. The citations relating to linguistics pertain specifically to literary theory and reflect a small part of the literature on linguistics and gender differences in general. Coverage in years ranges from 1973 to 1987 with the two exceptions of Woolf and Beauvoir. The bibliography is extensive but not exhaustive.

The Gnomonics of Dubliners

Abstract: line as he is about to disappear is \"Now you see me, now you. ...\" The reader knows from Shakespeare's text that he is now a ghost through death; the auditor from Stoppard's play that he is a ghost through absence. The pregnant ellipsis is itself a ghost through absence, suspended aloft and rattling its chains, unspoken but nonetheless \"heard\" by the process of subliminal anticipation as we instinctively complete the line by availing ourselves of a preexisting text. The gnomon of Euclid resurfaces thousands of years later in the opening paragraph of \"The Sisters,\" trailing after itself clouds of meaning probably only dimly perceivable to the young dilettante of words who is the central intelligence of the story and variously apprehended by the variety of readers of Dubliners. Gnomon coexists in the boy's mind in an unholy trinity with paralysis and simony: he incarnates paralysis, the new word, as \"some maleficent and sinful being\" (Dubliners 9). Paralysis is the recent apparition come to claim Father Flynn;

Reading the Body: Alice Walker's Meridian and the Archeology of Self

Abstract: Alice Walker's writing presents a continually dichotomous world, the antecedents of which we can locate in a problem common to slave narratives—a problem emphasized in the Epilogue of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man—that identity is a function of place: \"If you don't know where you are,\" the invisible man informs Mr. Norton, \"you probably don't know who you are\" (436). An underlying premise of the slave narrative was that a literal place existed that altered the definition of humanity for Blacks. When the North failed to fulfill its promise of being that place, the relationship of place to identity became one more dichotomy embedded in the language and activities of black American existence, one more dichotomy embodying the impossibility of assimilation and the impossibility of continued \"apartheid.\"1

From Place to Place in The Sound and the Fury : The Syntax of Interrogation

Abstract: This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v034/34.2.lester.html.

Artists and the art of living: order and disorder in toni morrison's fiction

Abstract: 'For example, in "Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in The Bluest Eye," Phyllis Klotman describes the "fraudulent images" on which Morrison's characters pattern their lives. Cynthia Davis in "Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison's Fiction" writes of the difficulties caused by characters who "use others to escape their own responsibility to define themselves" (325). In "Failures of Love: Female Initiation in the Novels of Toni Morrison," Jane S. Bakerman details ways in which families and communities contribute to women's failed initiations. My essay, "The 'Sweet Life' in Toni Morrison's Fiction," discusses the negative effects incurred by characters who choose "competitive-success" values rather than "idyllic" ones.

Journey through Darkness: The Writing of V. S. Naipaul (review)

Abstract: Sanford Pinsker's The Uncompromising Fictions of Cynthia Ozick places a much different kind of writer in residence. Cynthia Ozick for Pinsker is above all a Jewish-American writer who \"has radically changed the way we define JewishAmerican writing and more important, the way Jewish-American writing defines itself.\" Seeing Ozick as an uncompromising, self-confessed \"autodidact,\" he argues that she \"forces her readers to become something of the same thing, lest they miss the enormous cultural forces that bubble just beneath the surface of even her most 'realistic' fictions.\" She does not shy away from the Holocaust, \"as moral imperative, as Burden-of-History, as a confrontation between survivor and American Jew' ' ; she is able to see ultra-Orthodox Jewry in realistic rather than in symbolic configurations. And whereas this insistence on Jewish-American residency \"ought\" to make her a writer of limited appeal, the opposite has occurred: her influence and reputation are considerable for a writer who has published just two novels, three collections of short stories, and one book of essays. Both a polemicist and a writer of \"shimmering fictions,\" Ozick's effectiveness, according to Pinsker, lies in her intelligence, her droll wit, her sheer passion, her receptivity to change. Written somewhat whimsically, this short book is a personal essay of adulation and appreciation of Ozick's work. Liberally interspersed with quotations from Ozick's work, it provides, like Bender's book on Oates, a contextual framework in which to place a difficult and often misunderstood writer. Similarly, Uncompromising Fictions is limited in the depth of its analysis of individual works, and it refrains from critical judgment of the author's achievement.

(En)gendering Metafiction: Doris Lessing's Rehearsals for The Golden Notebook

Abstract: of the few literary genres that has managed to provoke and sustain controversy throughout its history.1 Not merely individual works of metafiction, but metafiction itself is regularly stigmatized or applauded as \"subversive,\" to the point where subversion might be called its defining feature. But the subversion presumed to be inherent in the form is equivocal, on one hand implying an undermining of authority cogenial to, if not identical with, political radicalism, and on the other hand suggesting a preoccupation with formal features of the text that would seem to subsume politics to a sort of latter-day aestheticism. For example, in a recent review article addressing the overlapping concerns of metafiction and feminism, Linda Hutcheon characterizes metafiction by its \"subversion of the stability of point of view\" and aligns this \"subversion\" with the disintegration of the bourgeois, patriarchal subject (\"Subject\" 80). But because the books that she chooses to illustrate this point are all by men, her argument tends to suggest that feminism is so purely a product of literary language that it is restricted to the domain of representation. To be sure, her subject is precisely \"the relation of noncoincidence between

The Two Narrators and Happy Ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract: Given the central role played in Nineteen Eighty-Four by documents, it is noteworthy that the book makes a gesture toward documenting itself: barely a thousand words into the text, we come upon a footnote to the first occurrence of the term \"Newspeak\": \"Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology, see Appendix\" (5). Whereas most readers have deemed Orwell's self-censoring language a brilliant invention, praise for the Appendix is often general, focusing only on the essay's thematic importance.1 There has been little agreement about how the appended document, \"The Principles of Newspeak,\" functions in the book. Attempting to explain its narrative function, recent criticism has drawn attention to two puzzles surrounding the Newspeak essay. The first concerns the identity of its speaker. The main narrator, who supplies the footnote that leads us to the Appendix, calls the document simply \"an account,\" leaving unclear the extent of his own responsibility for it. Although most readers seem to take it for granted that there is a single narrative voice in both the Appendix and the novel proper, a number have claimed that the Appendix has its own speaker, distinct from the main persona. The second puzzle is whether the Appendix im-

E. M. Forster's A Passage to India: What Really Happened in the Caves

Abstract: The core event in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India is the \"attack\" experienced by Adela Quested in one of the Marabar Caves, where Aziz has taken Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore for a day's excursion. As Chapter Sixteen, the central chapter of the central section of the novel, begins, Aziz, Miss Quested, and a guide from the local village have climbed up the hills, away from the rest of the expedition party. Aziz has just separated himself from Adela, having lost his emotional balance due to her insensitive questioning. The narrator then follows Aziz, who, to recover his equilibrium, plunges into one of the caves where he waits, lights a cigarette, and thinks what he will say on rejoining Miss Quested. When he emerges from the caves Aziz finds the guide, who is alone and who tells Aziz that he has heard a noise—the whine of a motor car. Aziz and the guide then attempt to get a better look at the oncoming car. Only at that juncture, as Aziz runs back to tell Miss Quested that a car is approaching, does he realize that she has disappeared—into a cave, as the guide informs him. After berating the guide for not keeping track of her, Aziz looks fruitlessly and more and more confusedly for her. In his frustration he strikes out at the guide, who then disappears, resurfacing only hypothetically and not very seriously much later in the novel in discussions regarding the cause of Adela's upset. Immediately thereupon Aziz discovers that Miss Quested had in fact joined her friends at the base of the hill. Almost in the same moment his relief is followed by disquiet as he finds Miss Quested's field glasses, with a broken leather strap, lying at the verge of

Between Two Worlds: A Critical Introduction to "The Master and Margarita", and: Style and Structure in the Prose of Isaac Babel (review)

Abstract: and served to introduce Yiddish literature and culture to the West. By no means were Yiddishism and Zionism mutually exclusive, although the general impression today is that such was historically the case. There are some other rough edges to this book. Robertson mistakenly refers to the East Side, instead of Lower East Side. In Brod's Arnold Beer,, the crucial visit is to the grandmother, not the grandfather, as Robertson writes. He mentions the \"highly developed social consciences\" of Brod and Kafka, without explaining their provenance. Admittedly, these drawbacks (and others mat are similar) are mosdy minor, but their presence detracts from this work, which indeed makes a tangible and noteworthy contribution to Kafka scholarship.

The Grotesque Rose: Medieval Romance and The Great Gatsby

Abstract: It might seem perverse if not plain wrong to affirm, as I shall in this paper, that F. Scott Fitzgerald, known for his careful examination of the human heart and for his realistic evocation of the Jazz Age, Swiss mental hospitals, and Hollywood in the 1930s, should also be guilty of writing medieval romance. Fitzgerald is known primarily as a "realistic" writer: to be sure, not as intelligent a realist as Gertrude Stein, nor as intellectual a realist as Joyce, nor as depressive a realist as Hemingway, nor as evocative a realist as Faulkner—but a palpable realist nonetheless. Perhaps Fitzgerald was a lyrical realist or, more likely, a romantic realist.1 We all accept the notion of romance in his writing. Both Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon are subtitled "A Romance" (Bruccoli, Grandeur 343). And at the end of his life Fitzgerald thought of himself as a "romance writer." But I mean romance in quite a different sense. I want to look at the ways Fitzgerald used the design, characters, details, and distinguishing characteristics of medieval romance in composing The Great Gatsby.

An Interview with Raymond Federman

Abstract: This is part of a tape-recorded interview conducted in the Debrecen Center of the Hungarian Academy of Arts and Sciences on 19 February 1986, when Raymond Federman visited Kossuth University as part of a highly successful lecture tour in Hungary. Professor Federman has kindly revised the transcript of our conversation. He is the author of Double or Nothing (1971), Amer Eldorado (1974), Take It or Leave It (1976), The Voice in the Closet/La Voix dans Ie Cabinet de Débarras (1979), The Twofold Vibration (1982), and also of Smiles on Washington Square (1985), the novel that won the American Book Award in 1986. In this part of the interview Professor Federman discusses fiction generally. The section principally addressed to his own work will be published separately.

Linda Snopes Kohl: Faulkner's Radical Woman

Abstract: que of America. More commonly critics discuss ethical or aesthetic concerns that are rooted, as American political rhetoric is, in eighteenthcentury ideas of universality and the individual. In both the eighteenth century and in Faulkner's fiction, that individual is male; his experience is represented as culture. Faulkner's women also have a tradition in the texts, criticism, and Western civilization: they are nature. This mythology is set forth comically in The Hamlet and further subverted in The Town and The Mansion. The alternate vision of America is embodied finally in Linda Snopes Kohl, who walks out of the mansion and closes the door on the American dream of a patriarchal dynasty after achieving what no other female or male character in Faulkner's fiction achieves, an act of justice that settles her conflicts with the past and empowers her move into the future. Simone de Beauvoir would call it transcendence.

Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival (review)

Abstract: In the two years since this edition of essays on Doris Lessing went to press, Lessing has published two books of political writing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside and The Wind Blows A way Our Words: A Firsthand Account of the Afghan Resistance, as well as a novel, titled The Fifth Child, which is based on sociobiological notions that have disturbing political implications. Far from outdating this critical collection, the recent additions to Lessing's oeuvre render Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival all the more pertinent and timely. For the editors, Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose, have chosen for this volume eleven essays that address the political dimensions of Lessing's work. Together, these essays provide a vigorous interrogation of Lessing's texts in relation to the politics they engage and construct. Frederick C. Stern opens the discussion by dispelling the impression that the early Lessing was in any meaningful sense a Marxist writer. Stern sees \"Lessing as a novelist whose characters' ideology is consistent,\" grounded in radical humanism rather than in Marxism. Focusing on The Golden Notebook and later novels, Molly Hite and Alvin Sullivan characterize Lessing's fiction as consciously inconsistent in both ideology and technique. In the fiction between 1962 and 1979, they trace Lessing's rejection of both humanism and Marxism insofar as either assumes the possibility of a coherent world view. However, when Jeanne Murray Walker analyzes the puzzling Memoirs of a Survivor in terms of its treatment of modes of exchange, she arrives at a convincing evaluation of that novel as coherent (and perhaps also humanist and Marxist) in its insistence that we maintain our humanity through reciprocal exchanges of social and cultural goods. Katherine Fishburn holds that The Golden Notebook models dialectical thinking and that it ought to be taught as a subversive document. Elizabeth Abel and Nicole Ward Jouve treat Lessing's texts in the unexpected contexts of feminist psychoanalysis and l'écriture féminine. Taking a more traditional feminist line, Victoria Middleton traces the connections between Lessing and her literary foremother, Olive Schreiner. In their stance of respectful appreciation, these essays contrast markedly with Carey Kaplan's and Lorna Sage's tough-minded critiques of the Canopus in Argos series. Both critics contend that Lessing's saga of interplanetary colonization reduplicates unwittingly the pernicious ideology of British imperialism. The mode of suspicion continues in the last contribution to the volume, Eve Bertelsen's brilliant analysis of the struggle for power within an interview with Doris Lessing, which, in turn, Bertelsen offers as a model of Lessing's other texts. All eleven of these provocative and well-written essays are previously unpublished; most originated as Modern Language Association convention papers presented at special sessions arranged by the Doris Lessing Society. In their Introduction, the editors offer a useful history of the Society and a survey of the papers presented at its sessions. But scholars should note that the editors silently drop out ten of the seventy-five papers presented during the period they cover, 1971 to 1985. Oddly, their listing of scholarly books on Lessing stops at 1982.

The Role of Water Imagery in Uncle Tom's Children

Abstract: To say that each protagonist in Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children takes one step further along a progression toward greater strength is nothing new. Among patterns critics have dealt with, Campbell Tatham in "Vision and Value in Uncle Tom's Children" sees a progression from "relative passivity to authentic engagement" (14) paralleled by a broadening area of responsibility on the part of the main character, as he progresses from a boy to a community leader, from a victim to a victor, riding on a rising tide of militancy. Additionally, Tatham says the book

The Gods Must Be Angry: Flight to Canada as Political History

Abstract: This discussion of Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada has dual aims, for in it I seek to discuss the novel as literature1 and as social commentary. The literary discussion is an analysis of point of view and time (discussed here as a function of plot) as they impact on character development. The social commentary is derived from the literary analysis: point of view and time cause Reed's characters to illuminate reactionary and progressive aspects of Afro-American political history. The following quotation from the novel's first chapter provides a useful way to frame this analysis, for it contains the nucleus of the conflicts that animate the novel:

Western and Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction in America: High Noon to Midnight (review)

Abstract: of the basic formula, which is \"built around the testing and confirmation of key American values, especially individualism, and are closely tied to the myth of the American dream.\" The formula has five elements: setting, hero, plot, style, and theme. There are two crucial elements in the basic formula for the subgenres under discussion: \"lawlessness and the maximum opportunity for personal enrichment.\" Hamilton quite rightly calls for an end to the hierarchical notion of culture and the correlative belief that different methodologies should exist for studying high and popular art. In a demonstration of such an approach, she divides the discussion into two parts. Part One (three chapters) describes the types of \"relationships\" essential to her method. Chapter One places the formula within an historical framework. Chapter Two (the least convincing) attempts to explain how a \"layering process\" is used to superimpose different generic patterns and results in \"richness\" or \"tension.\" Chapter Three discusses the important connection between the marketplace and variations in the formula. Part Two includes four chapters that focus on the biographies, thematic concerns, and stylistic characteristics of four writers—Zane Grey, Frederick Faust, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. Evaluating this study presents certain problems. My first reaction to Hamilton's work was to reject it because it attempted to link two genres that seemed separate and unconnected. After more consideration, I began to see certain linkages in structure, characterization, and theme. It is true that all four writers do depend on a \"typically American\" sense of individuality and the lawlessness that seems inherent in the American character. In the same vein, Hamilton's discussion of the connections between the closing of the frontier and the popularity of adventure fiction in the late nineteenth century are insightful. Her discussion of the sources of the Western's popularity seems rather truncated because she fails to mention Smith's Virgin Land, which explores the popularity of the Western adventure in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. The individual chapters in Part Two are thorough, full of scholarly and critical insights; however, I wondered about the lack of any discussion to establish connections between the four writers' biographies, themes, and styles. This work desperately needs a concluding chapter and perhaps some mention of other writers who wrote adventures, like the prolific and popular Louis L'Amour. Ultimately, Hamilton's study must be called successful because it does provoke serious consideration of works that seem utterly unconnected. My serious consideration leads me to make two suggestions to broaden the discussion further: 1) Hamilton's analysis would be more useful if she considered authors closer in relative popularity and output. Comparing Grey (fifty novels) to Hammett (five novels) seems strange. It might be more useful, in terms of discussing popular literature, to consider more prolific or widely popular detective writers like Erie Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane along with Grey and Faust. 2) Hamilton's

Fitzgerald's "May Day": The Uses of Irresponsibility

Abstract: For a story so good, \"May Day\" is remarkably bad. Fitzgerald acknowledges its most flagrant fault in his Preface to Tales of the Jazz Age. After stating that the story is based upon three unrelated events, he concludes that he tried \"unsuccessfully ... to weave them into a pattern\" (viii). Furthermore, as Richard D. Lehan notes, the action is \"badly motivated\" and \"unconvincing and melodramatic\" (84-85). Even the generally brilliant writing often strains too hard after cleverness and sometimes merits complaints about its coarseness and intrusive irony (Tuttleton 191; Sklar 78). Yet if Henry Dan Piper goes farther than most critics when he extols it as Fitzgerald's finest work before The Great Gatsby (69-71), the consensus is that \"May Day\" is one of his better efforts. Both Matthew J. Bruccoli (141) and Kenneth EbIe (56) rank it among his very best stories. Sergio Perosa finds the technique \"masterful\" (32). Even those who rate it lower invariably place it above numerous other stories with more plausible events and more compact structures. Many of the flaws of \"May Day\" result from its being a combination of incongruous elements. Part traditional fiction and part avant-garde, it combines plot devices characteristic of Fitzgerald's early Saturday Evening Post stories with themes of the less popular pieces that appeared in The Smart Set. It also juxtaposes naturalism and satire. It has some of the breadth of the novel it was originally to have been and the concentration of the successful short story. It is alternately funny and sad, ludicrous and disturbing—a discordant piece that captures the silliness and pathos, the banality and vitality of the Jazz Age, whose opening it heralds and dramatizes. As in a Charles Ives symphony, where hymn tunes collide with passages from Beethoven, the effect is simultaneously crude and stimulating. Faults become inseparable from virtues, and the lack of synthesis is part of the message. Fitzgerald should not have been surprised when The Saturday Evening Post rejected \"May Day.\"1 Few stories would seem less likely to have appealed to the magazine's morally conservative, probusiness editor, George Horace Lorimer. After all, it opens with a parody oÃthe Bible and ends with a suicide. In between are riots, debauchery, a sordid liaison, and a monstrous marriage. One character gets his leg broken; another is shoved from a window to his death. Throughout nearly

Two into Three Won't Go: Mimetic Desire and the Dream of Androgyny in Dancing in the Dark

Abstract: ions of patriarchy, a god who allows for \"the appearance of the feminine,\" only to make women \"deny themselves in deference to the supreme image of the phallus.\"8 Male homosexuals are treated with much the same ambivalence, with some feminists arguing that \"gay men and all women share a 'natural,' transhistorical alliance and an essential identity of interests (e.g., in breaking down gender stereotypes),\" and others proclaiming that \"male homosexuality is an epitome, a personification, an effect, or perhaps a primary cause of woman-hating\" (Sedgwick 19-20).9 Such ambivalence is not hopeless, however, for what remains a frustrating impasse for feminist theorists has become fertile ground for female novelists who see the problematic search for androgynous symmetry as a source of inspiration.10 One of the most accomplished of those writers is Janet Hobhouse, whose Dancing in the Dark has been praised for evoking \"social set-piece scenes\" with the \"old-style authoritativeness\" of Austen or Trollope as it examines \"that corner of the emotional landscape where heterosexual women befriend and are befriended by homosexual men\" (\"Briefly Noted\" 130-131). Hobhouse's novel is more than a contemporary comedy of manners, however, for beneath the brilliant descriptions of disco life in lower Manhattan is what Barbara Koenig Quart 'Heilbrun invokes Dionysus in much the same spirit as Berg, proclaiming that the god exemplifies \"the unbounded and hence fundamentally indefinable nature of androgyny\" (x-xi). The most thorough treatment of the aporetic character of Dionysus can be found in Walter F. Otto. Robert B. Palmer, in his excellent \"Introduction\" to Otto's Dionysus: Myth and Cult, writes that \"Dionysus, as Otto so clearly illustrates, is a god of paradox. Any study of him will inevitably lead to a statement of paradox and a realization that there will always be something beyond, which can never be explained adequately in any language other than the symbolic—and yet concrete—language of poetry or myth\" (xix-xx). 8LuCe Irigaray's remarks on Dionysus are paraphrased in Berg (20). For a more orthodox Freudian reading of Dionysus and phallic authority, see Helene Deutsch (13-48). 9Heilbrun sees male homosexuals as natural allies of women, whereas representative opposing views are presented in Jane Marcus and Irigaray. l0Some contemporary novelists who deal with the issue of homosexuality and androgynous mediation are Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Julia Markus, and Susanna Kaysen. DANCING IN THE DARK 391 describes as \"an explicit inquiry into the viability of marriage, of heterosexual couple-ness\" (739), an inquest that seeks to determine whether a triangle of mimetic desire mediated by a homosexual man can engender and maintain egalitarian relations between a man and a woman. Dancing in the Dark, then, makes the feminist dream of symmetry—androgynous mediation—its point of departure as it determines whether such a dream can survive the asymmetrical vicissitudes of Girardian and Freudian desire, whether the Dionysus/homosexual is doomed to be sacrificed in the name of such a dream, or whether the dream itself must be sacrificed to engender a triumph of egalitarian heterosexuality. Dancing in the Dark opens with what the narrator describes as \"a miraculous harmony,\" the three main characters drowned in \"the intense pleasure of the moment\" after \"they had come back from dancing at four o'clock and were still up drinking brandy\" (3). Such bliss is illusory, however, because the reader learns that it is supported precariously by a relationship that is characterized by a \"strange sexual tension, paralyzed by ambivalence\" and a \"jarring of desires and dissatisfactions\" (140). In terms of the Girardian triangle, Claudio, a homosexual, has become the apparently androgynous mediator between Gabriella's and Morgan's desire for each other, a Dionysus presiding over what all three believe to be a \"noble experiment\" (197) that can somehow overcome the perils of marriage—the confused \"intimacy and opposition\" (80), the games characterized by bewildering maneuvers of sabotage, challenge, and what appears to be fair play only if one has not witnessed the emotional blackmail that has brought about such apparent reciprocity (160). Claudio and his band of homosexual friends seem to offer the couple an entrance into what the narrator calls a \"cult of the moment\" (8), an escape from the fate of many \"young people, appalled by the costs of intimacy,\" who \"played those games [of manipulation] until one partner awoke to find himself simply alone\" (210). For Gabriella, \"partnering had always ended with someone being possessed and someone else possessing: men possessed women, and women, by agreeing to be possessed, secured possession of their men.\" Gay life, on the other hand, seems \"to function rather along the lines of the celebrated anarchist Dutch white bicycle: a vehicle for communal transport, ridden for joy or quickly abandoned; in either case, altruistically shared among the brethren\" (69-70). Gabriella wants \"blankness, puppy trust, a bumpless harmony\" that she can \"simply lean into and count on,\" but she wonders if heterosexuality can ever result in such happiness: Perhaps it was sex that made the difference, and the answer was to proceed as Claudio, Preston, and Mickey, never making friends of tricks, never going to bed with a friend: strict categories for everyone. Morgan, though, was Gabriella's lover and friend, and that, perhaps was the explosive combination. Or was it, rather, no combination at all, and was Morgan 392 MODERN FICTION STUDIES always either lover or friend, and never, in the same passionate breath, the two at once? And yet the two at once had once been their ideal: to be equal, really the same, and to be passionate. And perhaps that was what wasn't possible. Perhaps the sex itself, however innocently and fraternally the bodies came to bed, ensured that they leave it with one more powerful than the other. (58) Gabriella has real faith that \"gay\" men can bring her marriage a sense of \"gaiety\" (4-6, 121, 139), that \"the gay wisdom, life as a series of points,\" a kind of \"angelic algebra,\" will never succumb to the \"solid geometry\" of heterosexuality (109), to Claudio's disdainful vision of a \"world divided into, practically patrolled by, hundreds of self-esteeming little twosomes\" (52). Triangular relationships overshadow \"twosomes\" in Gabriella's experience because her first moments of sexual ecstasy resulted from her guilty denial of her status as object in a homosocial relationship between two best friends,\" a relationship in which she \"had been a gift from the one boy to his friend, binding the boys to each other and her to both of them\" in a perfect balance that seemed \"sexless and free\" until Gabriella, torn in two, watched how her chemistry separated the two boys, and she became the lover of the man to whom she had been given (103). When she made love with this man, however, she attempted to erase the guilt-engendering fall into asymmetry by allowing fantasy to rebuild a symmetrical triangle—one with an androgynous mediator. Gabriella says that she and her lover felt \"a descent of a Holy Ghost . . . another person\" at the moment of highest sexual union and that the third person made possible her metamorphosis into an hermaphrodite whose existence was characterized by \"wonderful sex and wonderful peace at the same time.\" Gabriella says that she left this man for Morgan shortly after, perhaps as \"an instinct against perfection,\" because she \"needed not to be hermaphrodite, but only female.\" As her relationship with Morgan grew, however, she says that she felt \"only the polarities\" and the \"huge distance\" between them (94-96). Gabriella, then, hopes that Claudio will become the incarnation of the androgynous fantasy-figure who redeemed her first love affair, regaining for her marriage some kind of \"precious unearthly space\" free from the will and desire that had \"suddenly risen like a serpent,\" twice, to expel her from the realm of androgynous bliss (103). She sees Claudio's homosexuality as androgyny and assumes that he can foster a symmetrical economy of desire within her marriage: Gabriella walked across the room and sensed how her movements attracted the impassive gaze of her husband and the benign approval of Claudio. She heard them hover in their \"See Eve Sedgwick (1-5) for an insightful analysis of differences between \"homosexual\" and \"homosocial\" attitudes in men, that is, between a man's erotic desire for another man and a man's desire for a feminine object being mediated through the desire of another man for the same object. According to Sedgwick and despite objections found within psychoanalytic theory, androcentric mimetic desire is basically homosocial, not homosexual. DANCING IN THE DARK 393 talk, reassure themselves she was returning, and then begin again as she moved away noiselessly in her stockinged feet. Happy in the renewed circulation of her body, tall, powerful, she knew herself to be loved by both, aware that Claudio's adoration incited the love of her husband as at the same time it confused him, unused as he was to an unmenaced recognition of another man's regard for his wife: (9) Gabriella hopes that such recognition will somehow \"release the being that burned and dazzled\" inside Morgan (7), and she also feels a satisfying \"bond of taste and power\" being formed between her and gay men who realize that she is \"partnering such a good-looking man\" but who offer no real competition for the attentions of her heterosexual husband (20). Even though Morgan has no real idea of the symbolic significance Claudio has for Gabriella, he nevertheless senses the growing problems in his marriage, and he tolerates Claudio and company and what he considers to be an exhausting and superficial mode of living—a way of life in which everyone kids everyone else \"about stamina, about gender, about their daytime lives\