Voices Lost In Time: Getting From Nowhere To The Far Bank

Transcript

VOICES LOST IN TIME: GETTING FROM NOWHERE TO THE FAR BANK Marta Dvorak, Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle Ever since Aristotle, scholars have strived to map literature into taxonomical classifications with respect to genre, mode, or voice. Russian formalists, French structuralists, and international poststructuralists and narratologists have categorized and quarrelled over the manifold shapes of that fictional creature known as the narrator, that writerly mouthpiece analogous to a mask which can be doffed on and off 1 . Strictly coded and closely correlated with issues of genre (epic, tragedy, comedy, satire) or aesthetic movement (such as romance, literary realism, or modernism), these range from omniscient narrator or narrator as external observer, to intradiegetic or extradiegetic narrator, homodiegetic or heterodiegetic narrator, framing or framed narrator, autodiegetic narrator or implied author, and so on. While hybrid forms participate in the transgressive dynamics of postmodern writers, they are in no way a postmodern invention, but were already gleefully practised by writers often classified for convenience’s sake under the label of literary realism, such as Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. While the scope of this paper will not allow an in-depth study of these hybrid forms, I propose to address them briefly in the spirit of the Voice & Vision project attempting to situate Canadian cultural production within global tendencies, before investigating in a global context once more the evolving dynamics of intertextuality in literary creation and the dialogism between production and reception, (which will lead me to raise a troubling question with respect to metafiction in mutation and the eventual death of the hypotext). I engage with these hybrid forms initially because they reveal themselves to be subversive components of a perlocutionary network of relations set up the world over between the producers of discourse and the receptors. When the voice of the narrator overlaps with the point of view of the focalizer, and this blend in turn is overcoded by the implied authorial voice, the métissage serves a strategy of destabilization which undermines the relations of distance and normativity initially set up in the reading pact. Already discernable in 1 Cf Ondaatje on Colette learning mime from Georges Wague, who told her "what she already knew. That there was nothing more assuring than a mask. Under the mask she could rewriter herself into any place, in any form" (Ondaatje, Divisadero 142) VOICES LOST IN TIME Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the mutation of voice withdraws the comfort of a powerful monologic axiology 2 . Other centrifugal combinations promoting the plurality of multiple subjectivities and consequently the provisional nature of truths and certainties abound in postmodern writing around the globe. One finds double or multiple narrators involving the almost mechanical repetition of a story through another voice and point of view (from Carol Shields's husband and wife Happenstance to Anita Rau Badami's mother and daughter Tamarind Mem) 3 . Or an exponential multiplication of focalization overlapping with voice. Such multivocality can be found in Janet Frame's Living in the Maniototo, the Tamil writer Ambai's story collection In a Forest, a Deer, Caribbean-Canadian Makeda Silvera's "Caribbean Chameleon" 4 , or expatriate Canadian writer Mavis Gallant's “Pegnitz Junction,” to take but a few examples 5 . There is Gallant’s remarkable variant in “Voices Lost in Snow” consisting of retrieving voices through image, voices lost in time recovered through an anamnesis triggered by a stored mental picture which erupts whole 6 . One also finds the disorienting shifts from first person to third, and the corresponding oscillation which occurs between the subjectivity which the former allegedly reflects and the objectivity that the latter allegedly guarantees (practised by Emily Carr in The Book of Small, Gallant in “Voices Lost in Snow,” and Margaret Atwood in her first novel The Edible Woman, interestingly perceived as realistic, but also in her recent story cycle of character Moral Disorders, as well as Nancy Huston in Histoire d'Omaya, and Michael Ondaatje in Divisadero 7 ). 2 Add explanatory footnote. 3 Explain? 4 In Her Head a Village. 5 note that most of these writers are migrants who illustrate the relevance of the distinction made by W.H. New between « belonging to place » (« the attitudinal identification with a particular locale » and « being in place » (an awareness of existing in a certain spatial environment)(New, 117) : Rushdie on cultural displacement and the dynamics of relocation and creativity/ Bhabha “how newness enters the world”. 6 The genesis of the Linnet Muir cycle can be traced to an image, a haptic image of a Montreal street lost in time. Gallant acknowledges in her Preface to the collection Home Truths that "An image of Sherbrooke Street, at night, with the soft gaslight and leaf shadows on the sidewalk – so far back in childhood that it is more a sensation than a picture – was the starting point" (Gallant, Home Truths xxii). Gallant transmits the picture with such clarity to her readers that Russell Banks in his introduction to Gallant's Varieties of Exile likens the effect on the reader to that of an Edward Hopper painting (Banks x). 7 The hermeneutic prefatory material preceding chapter One, italicized and related in the first person singular, is at first identified with the voice of the author and taken for a paratext ("When I come to lie in your arms, you sometimes ask me in which historical moment do I wish to exist" [Ondaatje, np]). Only at the end of the passage is the "I" positioned as the protagonist Anna. Or rather, in a slippery way, as the protagonist who "used to be" Anna. And only much later during the narration oscillating between omniscience, external observation, and first person subjectivity, does the proleptic fragment encounter its 2 VOICES LOST IN TIME The disjunctions are undeniably metatextual, calling attention not only to the writing process but also to the reading process. Ondaatje notably in Divisadero extends the reflection on reading practices, effectively guiding the projected reader through the hermeneutic interpretive process and proposing an objective correlative as the foundation for a reading praxis. The objective correlative is interestingly itself a form of intertext: the villanelle which "refuses to move forward in linear development" (Ondaatje 136). The villanelle, that 16th century verse form based on a peasant dance with a sung accompaniment, does indeed take one step back for every two steps forward, since it is made up of five tercets followed by refrains, all circling and looping back before arriving at the concluding quatrain, and just so does Ondaatje's sub-chapter circle back analeptically to a preceding ellipsis. The narrator's subsequent allusion to Nabokov (“only the rereading counts, Nabokov said” [136]), discloses the self-reflexive strategy subtending Ondaatje's orchestration of voices. Heteroglossia or polyphonic overcoding can generate chronotopic indeterminacy. The voices of characters but also narrators - those creatures or figures of the writer overlap with the authorial voice and/or forms of the collective voice of the community from which the text emerges, producing a symphony of inherited knowledges, preconceptions, and naturalized axiologies 8 . The technique of ventriloquism underlies heteroglossic discourse, in which hybrid constructions reflecting and refracting diverse class-and-interest groups mingle, or in which different subjectivities are knit together (leading to genre blurring, from Gertrude Stein's desubjectivising The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas [1933] and Everybody's Autobiography [1937] to Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother [1996]). An alternate form of double voicing involves an enunciative split generated by a retrospective mode in which an older narrating I stages the fractured perceptions and distorted space-times of a younger, more naïve narrated self. While the device is discernable in texts ranging from Dickens’s Great Expectations to James Joyce’s Dubliners, the postmodern variant (easily exemplified once again by Atwood's Moral Disorder) fractures the binary enunciative present/diegetic past and their respective flashbacks and flash forwards. It consists of a present of enunciation which intermingles with diegetic time. This disorientingly blurs storytime (inhabited by the narrated I) with the narrating I's open-ended time of utterance which is perceived by receptors as interrelating with their extratextual, echo and the textual addressee "you" metamorphose into the third person ("When Rafael asks … in which historical moment I desire to live" [141]). 8 See Bakhtin’s discussion of heteroglossia in "Discourse in the Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination. 3 VOICES LOST IN TIME contemporary reality 9 . Postmodern writers, borrowing from the baroque strategies of the first practitioners of the novel, play extensively with this Third Space of enunciation (Bhabha, The Location of Culture). It can be envisaged as the interstitial territory between the distanced image of the represented object and the enunciative stance, disembodied yet rooted in personal authorial experience, which interrelates with an extratextual reality, in turn intricately linked to the fluid, always contemporary reality of the protean receptor. J.M. Coetzee gives a homely extended analogy for the Third Space of enunciation and the illocutionary act which constructs the metaphorical spatiotemporal category as a zone of direct contact in the metatextual incipit of Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons: There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on. Let us assume that, however it may have been done, it is done. Let us take it that the bridge is built and crossed, that we can put it out of our mind. We have left behind the territory in which we were. We are in the far territory, where we want to be. (Coetzee, EC 1). Deploying a strategy of proximity and inclusion, the author manipulates all three forms of deixis, namely person, location, and time. First, the first person pronoun (us/we) generates a bond-forming act of utterance shared by locutor and receiver who are not set off from the third person (People/they) but integrate effortlessly into a holistic entity, reinforced by the use of the first person inclusive let-imperative and the collective singular "our mind." Secondly, the 'nowhere' positioning the act of narration in the ou-topia or nusquam famously coined by Thomas More in his satire Utopia is opposed to the far bank of the story, the far territory which is the created fictional world calling to mind Nelson Goodman's landmark work Ways of World-Making. Coetzee ushers us from no place into an apparently concrete storyworld through spatial terms, foregrounding the mode of entry (knock together a bridge/ build/ cross). Thirdly, the open-ended enunciative present (There is/where we are/ which is, as yet) mingles with a synoptic present ("People solve such problems every day) positing a gnomic locution, repository of universal truth, which generates an impression of permanence and 9 add note on the postmodern augmenting or diminishing/erasing the enunciative split, the distance between diegetic time & time of narration/utterance; ie quasi-fusion of subject & object of utterance, a presencing of selfhood for a feeling of immediacy, either through a diegetic present tense that generates a simulacrum of synchronicity between the diegetic time of event and the enunciative position (Munro "Postcard" DHS) or through a synoptic present tense which generates an impression of permanence and timelessness encompassing readerly time (Carr) 4 VOICES LOST IN TIME timelessness encompassing readerly time. These are put in opposition with the present perfect and preterite which elliptically diegetize the writing & reading processes presented as if they were synchronous: "Let us assume that, however it may have been done, it is done. Let us take it that the bridge is built and crossed [stative locutions implying they they have been built and crossed], that we can put it out of our mind. We have left behind the territory in which we were" (1). The casual oral idiom 10 underlines the storytelling which deploys the use of textualized orality adopted by modernists like Ford Maddox Ford in The Good Soldier and honed by postmodernists like Salman Rushdie 11 . Earlier I alluded to the technique of ventriloquism which is discernable in heteroglossic discourse, in which the refracted intention of the author overcodes the direct intention of the character speaking, or in which an individual utterance masks the speech of current opinion and its verbal-ideological belief-system. In the incipit under scrutiny, the narratorial voice has incorporated another's speech, inherited in turn from an officially recognized, authoritative text - the Old Testament. An alert reader will recognize in the locution "They solve them, and having solved them push on" a parodic, bathetic stylization of the famous verse by Omar Khayyam influenced in turn by the Biblical passage on the writing on the wall from Daniel 5. Coetzee playfully transforms Omar Khayyam's rubai or individual quatrain which through Edward Fitzgerald's tradaptation has taken on an almost proverbial status "The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,/ Moves on." 12 This is an instance of internally dialogized discourse which is doubly complex. It is arguably the 19th-century European translator/ adapter who overcoded the 11th-century Persian text with the Biblical reference epitomizing Destiny which was so familiar to his Western audience 13 . And Coetzee's technique of reappropriation is analogous to that of the rhetorical device of the perverb, or perverted/adapted proverb, through which common knowledge is denaturalized and 10 We note the interjections, parataxis, and idiomatic register curiously at odds with certain elements belonging to a formal register such as the uncontracted form of the let-imperative). 11 (identified notably in Midnight's Children by Timothy Brennan as a dominant mode of contemporary writing ("Shame's Holy Book" in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M.D. Fletcher) maybe develop textualized orature (Walcott & Sheila Watson's The Double Hook) 12 The full quatrain translated/adapted by Fitzgerald reads: "The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,/ Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,/ Nor all your Tears wash out a word of it." 13 The literal meaning of the Persian text has been given by Shahriar Shahriari as "The signs of what's to come has always been/ Has always written both benevolent and mean/ What is our lot was given by the hand unseen/ With futility we try, exert, weep or keen" (http://www.okonlife.com/poems/page6.htm; consulted 02/05/08). 5 VOICES LOST IN TIME questioned, shedding its totalizing status of universal given to take on that of a limited, cultural construction. Moreover, Coetzee's internally dialogized discourse belongs to that which Bakhtin calls "'nondirect speaking' - not in language but through language, through the linguistic medium of another" (313, original emphases), a practice which I shall subsequently investigate more extensively. Dialogic interrelation 14 in postcolonial literature notoriously decentres & recentres a master narrative by giving a voice and even agency to a previously voiceless, peripheral (dummy) protagonist (from Jean Rhys's notorious Wide Sargasso Sea and Karen KingAribisala's Kicking Tongues which transposes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to contemporary Nigeria, to Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad 15 and, albeit differently, Derek Walcott's Omeros or even "The Schooner Flight" in which the bifurcation of voice refracts the discourse of a whole incorporated genre). While Hugh MacLennan's use of Homer's Odyssey and Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonnus as intertexts in Barometer Rising and Return of the Sphinx respectively is a transcontextualized and blurred replication (corresponding to the minimal parody of Genette and Hutcheon) which is non-transgressive. Heteroglossic ventriloquism such as Atwood's and Walcott's however, is doubly subversive. The substitution of low style for high style, and "common language" expressing what Bakhtin terms the "going point of view" ("Discourse in the Novel" DI 301) for heroic perspective not only deflates the hierarchical position of the epic, but also disrupts the epic's traditional representation of an absolute, completive past totally separated from the time-and-value plane that the speaker shares with his/her contemporary audience (Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel" DI 14). Having been acknowledged to be more a rewriting of Joyce's Ulysses than a writing back to their common hypotext (Farrell 250), Homer's Iliad & Odyssey (which, it is useful to remember, were already cumulative and culminative works in Homer's time), Omeros is an interesting case of a hypertext which has morphed into a hypotext in turn producing a new hypertext, and it undeniably participates in the strategy of mimicry, which Walcott himself has argued refracts European texts through the irony of their differential positioning (Walcott, "Muse"). Coetzee pushes the experiment in mimicry further through a mise en abyme. By rewriting Joyce's Ulysses by proxy as it were, from the point of view of Leopold Bloom's wife Molly in The House on Eccles Street, a 14 In modernist and postmodern production, dialogic interrelation often takes the form of a deictic shift to the protean 'you' (inclusive second-person pronoun implicating the [dummy] receptor & positing universality. 15 Cf also the anterior play in "Little Red Hen" (Good Bones) 6 VOICES LOST IN TIME fictive novel authored by his fictive Australian novelist protagonist Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee deploys a Russian doll strategy of infinite regress in receding perspective. Coetzee also resorts to appropriation, the taking away of voice, notably in Foe, a rewriting of Robinson Crusoe in which a female castaway, Susan Barton 16 , tells the tale of Cruso, and in which Daniel Defoe metamorphoses from author to receptor, receiving Barton's tale and then "weaving it into a story" (Coetzee, Foe 58) 17 . The play with voice through intertext serves the metatextual, metaphysical, and ultimately political question concerning who writes, or, as he puts it, "Who takes up the position of power, pen in hand?" (Kossew 161). This is a bald way of putting the question which rears its head in the segment of the Rubaiyat which Coetzee has transformed in Elizabeth Costello, which telescopes metatextuality and metaphysics through its resonance with a wellknown contiguous quatrain by Omar Khayyam which concludes: "Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?" Nelson Goodman, too, addresses the notion of writer as demiurge as he investigates the ways of making worlds out of words 18 Intertext: Among the different ways of world-making, it can be valuable to distinguish mimesis, the Aristotelian concept of imitation, from mimicry. Mimesis has been acknowledged to be the representation of reality, and mimicry to be the representation of a representation (Terada 1). Michael Riffaterre, alongside Kristeva, Genette, Barthes, Culler, Todorov, Hutcheon, and Laurent Jenny, has at length investigated literary representations in which reference is not from words to things, but "from words to words, or rather from texts to texts," asserting that "intertextuality is the agent both of the mimesis and of the hermeneutic constructions on that mimesis" (Riffaterre 142). We have seen on the far end of the transtextual axis the transformational replication which structurally equates a text with a code or genre rather than another text (Gérard Genette's and Laurent Jenny's architextuality, illustrated by Omeros). In the incipit of Elizabeth Costello, although it is a mere semantic microstructure, and although the displaced, absorbed material may be familiar only to the receptor's unconscious, I have 16 Susan Barton is not a pure product of Coetzee's imagination designed to disrupt Defoe's master narrative. She is interestingly a hybrid product of both Defoe's and Coetzee's making, an original Defoe character uprooted and displaced from Roxanne and dropped into the parallel fictional world of Robinson Crusoe. 17 The author himself points out in Doubling the Point that voice was the particular "feature of technique" on which he chose to concentrate in his novel Foe, as opposed to In the Heart in which it was montage, and in Barbarians in which it was milieu (Attwell and Coetzee 142-43) 7 VOICES LOST IN TIME shown that Coetzee's parodic citation of the anamorphic Biblical/ Persian intertext stratifies his novel with a network of codes and signifying practices whose traces modify its reception. Such a trace which Riffaterre dubs "intertextual syllepsis" produces a text fraught with significance there where a simple linear reading would only produce meaning 19 . Yet a "full" understanding (or grasp of both meaning and significance – which in this case involves an ontological and phenomenological reflexion on creation and Being, on fate and free will) depends on the reader's recognition and identification, in other words, on his or her culture and ability to connect and collocate. Using Genette's notion of hypertextuality as a point of departure in A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, Linda Hutcheon, too, argues that the characteristic feature of contemporary parodic codes is not derision, but the implied repetition of a second literary text or even of a more general form for which examples are familiar, involving the intertextual mingling of the familiar and the new in a ludic self-referential way. Hutcheon heuristically calls attention to a hitherto ignored dimension of parody long relegated to an oppositional activity of "counter-song" [para/odos], a second dimension which she grounds in an alternate acceptation of its etymological root parodia (notably para as signifying "beside") implying an accord or intimacy. This type of parody, a mixture of homage and playful offhandedness, is a transcontextualized repetition with a difference (Hutcheon 32-33). As a bitextual synthesis, such parody is homologous to Bakhtin's double-voicedness, but also to tropes such as the metaphor in which levels of meaning coexist within a paradigmatic relation of substitution and equivalence. As such, it is dependent for its decipherment on the decoder's ability to "construct a second meaning through inferences about surface statements and supplement the foreground with acknowledgment and knowledge of a backgrounded context" (Hutcheon 34) ( 20 ). The question now arises as to whether the cultural production and reading practices of the late 20th-century and early 21st-century continue to generate an ability to connect 18 I wish to thank two of my graduate students, Madeleine Laurencin and Sneharika Roy, for having drawn my attention back to these landmark texts in our discussions. 19 Riffaterre distinguishes meaning and significance in a manner analogous to the distinction previously made between mimesis and mimicry: "I shall speak of meaning when words signify through their one-to-one relationship with non-verbal referents, that is, their reference to what we know or believe we know as reality. I shall speak of significance when these same words signify through their relationship with structural invariants (no one-to-one relationship this time since there must be two or more variants for one invariant" (Riffaterre "Syllepsis," pp 625-626, original emphases) 20 for future book cf L Hutcheon's 5 directions of reference Poetics of PM 154). 8 VOICES LOST IN TIME with and collocate the segments from a network of inherited founding texts encoded into a contemporary work. Can a contemporary readership perceive such voices and decode them to arrive at a full interpretation other than in a second-hand way? How do the practitioners of dialogism, writers themselves, perceive their receptors, their interpreters, their interlocutors? How does their projection of reception affect their production? I seem to detect an evolution in which transtextuality with metatextual, even autotextual functions, designed primarily to foreground the text in process, is shifting to a new form of metafiction, inherently didactic. Mutant Metafiction: Dialogism and Death (of the Hypotext) From Canadian writer Margaret Atwood to New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones, one can discern a taste for an almost anxious dialogue with absent texts, in which exegesis becomes story, and interpretation interchangeable with plot. This exploration of metafiction in mutation was inspired by the examples of Jones's Mister Pip, winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and Atwood's recent story collection Moral Disorder (both published in 2006), notably the dialogues they respectively engage with Dickens, Washington Irving and Browning. I posit that their metafictional writing is no longer primarily self-reflexive but interpretive, calling attention not to its own process but to a hypotext which has been all but erased by the subsequent layers of palimpsestic overcoding, rather like an underpainting which has undergone the technique of obviation. In Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon, John Thieme has already amply investigated the complicitous reception outweighing the adversarial in Dickens's reception and influence outside of Britain, notably the filiative response he has aroused in a number of postcolonial writers from Narayan and Naipaul to Peter Carey (Jack Maggs) and Elizabeth Jolley (Miss Peabody's Inheritance). A dialogue with a canonical work by Dickens provides the building material in a more frontal, less oblique way for Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip. On an island blockaded by rebels in which the few available books are in pidgin, the last white man, Mr. Watts aka Pop Eye, agrees to take on the interrupted schooling. To the children who have never been read to in English before, he begins to read a chapter a day from Dickens's Great Expectations. The readings, which reveal themselves to be simultaneously a series of rewritings, are presented through the eyes of the small black narrator Matilda as a gift, calling up Derek Walcott's celebration of the "essential masterpieces" which his colonial classical education made available to him and the writers of his generation and which he called 9 VOICES LOST IN TIME "the greatest bequest the Empire made" (Walcott, "Meanings" 50). The very first sentences of the novel read to the children 21 stun them with the capacity of language and fiction to make worlds, notably with the first person shifter I/my and its power to project locutors and receptors into another subjectivity and field of experience. Little Matilda admits that when she heard Mr. Watts speak she thought "he was talking about himself. That he was Pip" and only later noticed the book in his hand. The children are mesmerised by the flow of words. When it stops, it takes them a while to "stir back into [their] bodies and [their] lives (Jones 18) 22 . In subsequent readings the children are amazed to discover words and the unknown notions, worlds, and truths which they carry: "We were amazed when he told us the truth of a rimy morning. We could not imagine air so cold that it made smoke come out of your mouth or caused grass to snap in your hands. We could not imagine such a world" (Jones 29). Jones's story is the story of world-making as a dialogical process between producer and receptor. When during a foray onto the island the rebel redskins burn down the village and the novel along with it, the children set out to "retrieve" (109) the lost novel, to reconstruct and re/member the space they had inhabited with Pip23 . The collective rewriting (the children providing recalled fragments in disorder) unfolds as a metatextual lesson in reception, the children learning that when the exact words of remembered fragments did not come, they could arrive at the gist of the meaning through analogy and substitution, and suggest the different through the same 24 . But another level of rewriting, or rather unwriting, is at the core of the novel. Following an apocalyptic turn of events during which the rebels chop up Mr. Watts and Matilda's mother and feed them to the pigs, Matilda, saved and at present in a high school in Australia, borrows a library copy of Great Expectations and has a thundering revelation: "Mr. Watts had rewritten Mr. Dickens' masterwork" (Jones 195), had "pulled the embroidery out of Dickens' story to make it easier on [their] young ears" (197). In hindsight she remembers how her mother had previously shocked the schoolteacher by accusing Dickens of using "fancy nancy" words merely to 21 Notably "My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip". 22 Quote from p200. 23 The room is large, for Pip quickly becomes the object of universal sympathy and identification. The older narrator emphasises the "personal touchstones" each re-reading offers her: "To this day I cannot read Pip's confession – It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home – without feeling the same of my island" (197). And she ponders the polyphonic resonances: "I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip is one of the most endearing lines in literature. This is who I am: please accept me as you find me. This is what an orphanage sends its charges out to the world with. This is what emigrants wash up on Pacific shorelines with." (218) 10 VOICES LOST IN TIME "pretty up a plain sentence" (196-97) She concludes that the children's attempts to retrieve fragments of the novel were analogous to rebuilding a castle with straw, that "[their] failure was guaranteed" because in appeasement to this objection, they subsequently hadn't been given the "full story" (195). The layers of rewritings seem to suggest that the original Victorian novel is hitherto accessible only through mediated, simplified reconfigurations. Or that it is not given a chance 25 . In today's publishing industry regulated by the market forces of consumer society and catering to an audience more comfortable with visual and audial forms of fiction, are the master narratives at all readable? Or are they reduced to living on solely through the spin-off products of their hypertexts, such as, let us say, the film Sleepy Hollow, directed by Tim Burton (1999)? These very same questions are raised on the other side of the globe by Margaret Atwood. Through the dynamics of dialogism, in which the locutor's utterance has been filled with the words of another before it and shaped by the anticipation of the response following it, the figurations and configurations of the headless horseman folktale have travelled across time and space. Through the dynamics of allegorisation, the motif of such a figure of power devoid of his head, of reason and control, have come to stand for evil. It has nourished the romance and then the Gothic, from medieval England's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (anonymous) and nineteenth-century America's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Washington Irving) to twenty-first-century Canada's Moral Disorder. Yet the folktale configurations are apparently no longer part of a cultural continuum identifiable to a wide readership. The older narrator of "The Headless Horseman" explains the origin of the Halloween disguise she chose at the age of thirteen: I got the Headless Horseman idea from a story we'd read in school. In the story, the Headless Horseman was a grisly legend and also a joke, and that was the effect I was aiming for. I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. (MD 32) The narrator's use of the indefinite article (a story; a thing) indicates already that the story does not conform to the concept of identifiability associated with the definite article. Thus it is not a huge surprise to the reader that, while her friend's Raggedy Ann 24 "Mr. Watts put it this way. 'If I say tree, I will think English oak, you will think palm tree. They are both trees. A palm and an oak both successfully describe what a tree is, but they are different trees.' (114) 25 For when the older Matilda becomes a relief teacher in Brisbane, reading Great Expectations aloud to classes of unruly boys is her "get-out-of-jail card." A mutinous class told that if after 10 minutes of reading they can leave if bored never fails to remain under its spell. Cf pawpaw (200) 11 VOICES LOST IN TIME disguise is readily identified by the adults who opened the doors, her Headless Horseman figure is absent from their cultural references: Everyone knew who my friend Annie was portraying – "Raggedy Annie!" they cried with delight, they even got the pun - but to me they said, "And who are you supposed to be?" My cape had a muffling effect, so I often had to repeat the answer twice. "The Headless Horseman." "The headless what?" Then, "what's that you're holding?" they would go on to say. "It’s the head. Of the Headless Horseman." "Oh yes, I see." The head would then be admired, though in the overdone way adults had of admiring a thing when they secretly thought it was inept and laughable. It didn't occur to me that if I'd wanted my costume to be understood immediately I should have chosen something more obvious." (MD 36). The loss of such literary and cultural artefacts, the anxiety of a progenitive hypertext confronted with the disappearance of its progenitor hypotext, make up a large part of the story cycle's general dynamics of entropy. The retrospective narration oscillates between "now" and "back then," a past contaminated by the degradation of the future through lexemes such as "still" and "not yet" announcing what they postpone, and the flashes forward to the time of narration project readers to a mother who "is now very old, and bedridden, and blind" (MD 37), a ternary series with a sledge hammer effect reinforced by the polysyndeton, alliteration, and strong one-syllable ending. Furthermore, standing in front of the mother's door with her now grey-haired little sister, the door she used to go in through year after year as a child, the narrator's voice overlaps with the author's to offer a gnomic locution suffused with an ontological resignation to the intimations of death: "all doors used regularly are doors to the afterlife" (61). "'That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,' said Miss Bessie." Atwood starts the following hypertextual story off with ventriloquism, displacing the first line of Browning's famous dramatic monologue "My Last Duchess" from the Duke of Ferrara's mouth into the mouth of a dummy fictional character, all the more jarring as it involves a shift in time and place, from the Italy of the Renaissance to contemporary Duchessless Canada. The ventriloquism is all the more complex as it replicates, with a difference (true to the parodic mode Genette identified and Hutcheon developed), the very genre of the dramatic monologue which became a trademark of the poet's aesthetics precisely because it dramatically refracted the utterances of others, and substituted another's voice for the subjective lyrical effusion favoured by the Romantics. Plato had condemned tragedy for its imitative transposition or illusory 12 VOICES LOST IN TIME enunciation, namely the poet's delegating speech to his characters and speaking as if he were another rather than speaking in his own voice. Browning reversed the mechanics of tragedy by making the "I," the speaking subject, appropriate the voice of the character. Atwood's sustained hybrid utterance refracts the original refraction of the progenitor hypotext, all the while drawing the intradiegetic receptors, the high school class, and the extradiegetic receptors, we readers, into exegetic activity. Miss Bessie takes up her own voice in a maieutic strategy designed to take her learners line by line through the process of interpretation: "Now, class. What does that single word, last, tell us right away?" (MD 63). The story unfolds in accordance with this staged, stratified, and mediated dialogic encounter between production and reception, encoding and decipherment, through the subjectivity of the young female narrator: "Last Duchess. There had to be more than one, then. A whole bunch of Duchesses, all in a row like a chorus line. No: it was last as in last year. The Duchess was back there in the past – gone, over with, left behind" (MD 64). The self-correction of epanorthosis (No: it was) generates an illusion of orality and authenticity but also guides the second level of addressees, Atwood's readers, through the traps of polysemy, point of view, and verisimilitude into the world Browning has made with words. The adventure consists essentially in vulgarisation, in rendering the high style of the fictional world intelligible and relevant by transposing it into what Bakhtin has identified as the "common language" expressing the "going point of view" (DI 301) corresponding to the time-andvalue plane of contemporary readers. The young narrator Nell wrestles with point of view and muses: "Why indeed had the Duke spilled the beans in such a witless manner to a complete stranger if he was trying to convince the envoy to clinch the deal?" (MD 85, my emphases). Intelligibility is ultimately attained, and while Nell's interlocutors, her boyfriend Bill and his mother, find it neither readable nor relevant ("it was a shame he had to study it – it wouldn't be of any use to him later in life" (MD 88), Nell herself senses that hidden within such stories there is something important we need to know, tangled, oblique, and complicated. That it is "not so much a thing as a pattern, like the clues in a detective story once you start connecting them together" (MD 94, my emphases). Deciphering the patterns in the worlds of her prescribed texts enables Nell to make sense of hers, to see the multiplicity of viewpoints and the relative value of one's own, placed last in a long cultural continuum. The excipit of the story imparts this moral through antithesis, parallelism, and echo: "Very soon I would be a last-year's student. I would be gone from Miss Bessie's world, and she would be gone from mine. Both of us would be in the past, both of us over and done with – me from her point of 13 VOICES LOST IN TIME view, her from mine. Sitting in my present day desk there would be another, younger student, who would be poked and prodded and herded relentlessly through the prescribed texts, as I had been. The first line of a poem is very important, class, Miss Bessie would say. It sets the tone. Let us proceed.'" (MD 95) The multivocal, looping final echo, in which the teacher's initial remarks on the Browning poem are reiterated as a generic guidance, takes on allegorical connotations, as the young narrator prepares to enter "the dark tunnel" of the passage to adulthood (95). It is suggested that it is precisely those prescribed texts she has been herded through which are a source of empowerment: "I myself would be inside the dark tunnel. I'd be going on. I'd be finding things out. I'd be all on my own." (MD 95) What collides with an apparent level of optimism concerning transmission and cultural continuity and thereby links this story (and others in the cycle) with the anxiety of the preceding one is that Atwood too feels the necessity to herd her readers through a number of prescribed texts, but in the drastically abridged, simplified and ultimately reductive manner of common language which deflates the grand or cosmic to the low level of the going view. Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles is boiled down to soap opera level through a series of idiomatic enumerations which leaves the term "tragic" at the end emptied of all possible substance. [Tess] got taken advantage of, at night, in the woods, because she'd stupidly accepted a drive home with a jerk, and after that it was all downhill, one awful thing after another, turnips, dead babies, getting dumped by the man she loved, and then her tragic death at the end. ((MD 93) Jarred moreover by the equivalence between dead babies and turnips generated by contiguity, readers are informed that Tess was merely "another of those unlucky pushovers, like the Last Duchess, and like Ophelia" who are all "hapless, annoying, dumb-bunny girls" who get "bumped off" (93). Such polyphonic interpretive metafiction seems to challenge the very texts whose slide into oblivion is being mourned, and the vulgarising summaries which function equally as a hypertextual attempt to prolong these master narratives paradoxically drive a nail into their coffin. The speech of the narrator's social group knits with a debunking authorial voice, and collides paradoxically with an authorial stance of anxiety concerning an identified civilisational erosion. The story making this quite explicit is allegorically entitled "Monopoly," the board game and its rules representing life and its social organisation. The narration divides society into a Before and After in which the watershed separating past civilisation from present barbarism or moral disorder was that year of socio14 VOICES LOST IN TIME political upheaval and disruption, 1968, "when all games had changed at once and earlier structures had fallen apart and everyone had begun pretending that the very notion of rules was obsolete" (133). Moral Disorder is undeniably metalinguistic, metatextual, even metacritical in the manner of theory fiction 26 27 . As she has done in previous works such as The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake, Atwood sets out to investigate rules, to deconstruct the cryptic codes governing all areas of social interaction, laying bare their underlying mechanisms and interconnections, from dress codes and table etiquette to work, gender and identity construction. The narratorial/authorial voice laments the "old rules" (responsible doubtless for her having been among those still "herded through" the prescribed texts discussed above), and identifies an accompanying impoverishment in all domains of human interaction, particularly language 28 . Calling up Orwell's Newspeak, designed to reduce the faculty to conceptualize by reducing the language, and Atwood's own near-future fiction Oryx and Crake, in which the survivor Snowman desperately recites rare words in which he identifies the remnants of civilisation, the enunciative voice declares in all its multivocality, resonant with the speech of a common opinion in mutation: There had been entrances and exits then, not just the vague wanderings in and out of rooms and the mumblings and slouchings and shrugs that had replaced social life. Emotions with recognizable words attached to them had been involved: jealousy, despair, love, treachery, hate, fault, the whole antique shop. But to have a vocabulary of any size was now a disadvantage, among the young and those who purported to be young. (MD 134) 26 Cf Dvorak, ECW article. 27 The view of literature seen through the eye of the professional reader (teacher or editor), is almost invariably ironically reductive with Atwood. Through her focalizer who needs to read Victorian novels intensively so as to stay ahead of her students, Atwood sums up the "essence" of Victorian literature in a chaotic enumeration of items whose disorder is reinforced by polysyndeton, and whose contiguity apparently obeys the rules of musication, in which the phonic prevails over the semantic value. The list nonetheless metatextually identifies key features or constants, intermingling the trivial and the sublime : "She would … read about love and money and madness and furniture and governesses and adultery and drapery and scenery and death" Or see Nell marking trite essay topics (Moral Disorder 123, 137 respectively). 28 Known for her firm, often satirical stances on power politics, and for her claim that the novel is "a moral instrument" (Second Words 353), Atwood's societal critique in this story collection is not in question. What is interesting is that the social criticism is closely interrelated to the metalinguistic, metatextual investigations interrogating artistic production and the mechanics of reception. Paradoxically for a postmodern writer practised in interrogating certitudes and absolutes, Atwood roots her dynamics in an essentialist stance already strongly discernable in The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake – an essentialist stance seeking a meta-structure, a logic underlying all signifying systems. Even more interestingly, the formal permanent features or constants that she finds in all spheres, whether it be in literature or life, is the rules themselves, or rather the existence of rules. (Develop 132 & // with CES Palimpsests + transition) 15 VOICES LOST IN TIME If alongside of obsolete words and obsolete notions, we place obsolete texts, can we find a common denominator? A relation of cause and effect? And in the shrinking of cultural references which have replaced Vercingétorix with Astérix and Ulysses with a cartoon intergalactic traveller, what responsibility can be imputed to the education system? Or to the publishing industry? Are the grand narratives still read and studied by a small elite, available at least in university libraries and bookstores? Are the classics of Canadian literature still published and available? Apparently, texts published prior to the twentieth-century are increasingly rare in today's curricula. Having planned recently to include in a joint graduate seminar at the University of Montreal the landmark satire by Thomas McCulloch, The Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure, I quickly learned that it is among the numerous Canadian classics which went out of print in the 1960s and are likely to stay that way 29 . The fact that my own copy is a discarded library copy is an additional sign that the space granted on a library shelf is transient and dependent on fashion. Moreover, today's fast book as well as fast food culture has editors and publishers scrambling to accommodate tastes by cutting and abridging drastically. The back cover of the 1969 New Canadian Library edition of William Kirby's classic romance The Golden Dog (1877) announces that the editor cut the novel "to half its original (and somewhat alarming) length of 678 pages, without losing any of its essential tempo and colour" (my emphasis), and in his Introduction the editor, who is pleased to have reduced such a "discouraging length for the average reader," is happy that "Kirby's romance lends itself to cutting, especially if we consider the tastes of the modern reader" (vii). He enumerates the so-called redundant material which has been "struck out" Reader's Digest fashion: characters with no apparently direct bearing on the main plot, love scenes, historical details, whole chapters on feasts. It is of no concern apparently that feasts and other celebrations that authors describe at length conform to the symbolic acts of social cohesion best described as ritual, which Northrop Frye terms "the epiphany of the myth, the manifestation or showing forth of it in action" (Frye 55). What is particularly deplorable is that the truncated version is the only one available on library shelves. Finally, it is enlightening to look at the role critics, anthologists, and authors and editors of encyclopaedias and literary companions may have in promoting or silencing 29 This is in fact not entirely accurate, as I have learned since the moment of writing this. McCulloch's classic has been reedited by Gwen Davies and reprinted by the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts (Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1990) However, this significantly remains a well-kept secret. Several bookstores from Amazon and Abebooks to Exportlivres have been adamant these past 3 years 16 VOICES LOST IN TIME voices. Having written the chapter on Fiction in The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature, and then recently authoring chapters spanning two quite different time periods (from Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague [1769] to Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers [1966]) for two literary histories of Canada (Cambridge UP and Camden House) 30 , I have naturally compared and confronted preceding scholarly discussions ranging from Karl Klinck's Literary History of Canada (1965) to W.H. New's Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002). The comparisons were enlightening as to the shift in critical tastes which accompanies the evolution in readers' tastes, and which accounts for a writer either sliding into oblivion or being rescued from obscurity. To take but a few examples, in William Toye's Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (1983), under E one finds Arthur Eaton but no Edith, while in New's Encyclopedia (2002) one finds Edith but no Arthur. Arthur Eaton, a nineteenthcentury Maritime writer and poet, whose verses, satirical sketches, and historical studies of Nova Scotia were judged significant by Toye's contributor ("an independent, not a derivative, creation" Toye 227) but struck out by New. Edith Eaton, not deemed of sufficient literary significance to be included by Toye, finds herself included by New, whose entry acknowledges the stereotypical quality of the early twentieth-century stories on Chinese immigrants but finds her description of the problems of acculturation "sympathetic and insightful" (New 324). The choices reflect a growing interest in popular literature and culture as well as multicultural perspectives. Grace Campbell's formula fiction celebrating pioneer life and virtues, included by Klinck, is dropped by Toye in spite of its bestseller status during the war, but brought back into favour by New through a nascent interest in book design: the entries devote space not only to Campbell's Thorn-Apple Tree (1942), but also to the fact that Group of Seven member Franklin Carmichael provided the woodcuts, directed the typography, and completed the book design. Evelyn Eaton, however, present in Klinck's literary history, sinks without a trace in Toye's, never to rise again. How many readers familiar with the title of Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls can identify John Donne's sermon "No Man Is an Island" (Meditations XVII) as the intertext which gives the work not only its polyphonic but also its ontological resonance? Who still reads Donne today? There are undeniably certain literary giants (since early 2006 when I began to work on my chapter for the Cambridge UP Literary History of Canada) about the book being out of print. 30 give titles 17 VOICES LOST IN TIME whose canonical works continue to be read and translated in themselves. After leaving his imprint on modernists Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, Dante has notably influenced contemporary poets Robert Lowell, James Merrill, and Seamus Heaney to Wilson Harris and Derek Walcott. Simultaneously, in the last fifty years comporting late modernism and postmodernism, no less than fifty writers have tackled new prose and verse translations of Dante 31 . Still, I suggest that most texts are fully intelligible only within their cultural time frame (roughly the span of a century). Since writing, particularly ironic writing, resides not only in the writer's ability to represent textually, but also in the receptor's process of perception, successful reception requires certain shared frames with respect to values, cultural and aesthetic context, or at the very least a readerly sensibility to authorial intent 32 . These texts, then, metamorphose into palimpsestic background cultural myths, informing new texts which render them once more readable by transforming them, in an eternal process in which hypotext morphs into hypertext, and then back into hypotext. In this cyclical process, many of these master narratives disappear. Or rather, they enter the collective unconscious as archetypal motifs (perceptible in the mass media, in advertising, film, or comics), having undergone a detextualisation in our multimedia world which is perhaps identifiable as the true mutation. We can indeed evoke the death of the hypotext, for we are more in the realm of myth than text. Text in the original etymological sense of textus (surface/material/base) signifying the concrete bottom or supporting part has mutated – mutated to an immaterial mental state, but also to other forms of material, other cultural media, transforming intertextuality to intergenericity, intersemioticity, or rather, intermediality. Bibliography 31 See Maria Cristina Fumagalli, The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and the Impress of Dante. Cross/Cultures 49.Amsterdam/N.Y.: Rodopi, 2001. 32 Klinck's Literary History notably dismisses Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague , the first novel to emanate from the North American continent, as a merely amusing account of social occasions, and the "niceties of courtship and love" (78, viii respectively), ignoring the series of letters analysing the political and religious state of Canada. The satirist Thomas McCulloch is also read through the filter of modern sensibility, notably the modern reader's taste for realism and distaste for apparent self-righteousness. The recourse to farce and to caricatures for characters are judged as "technical flaws," even "defects," (Klinck 107, New) 18 VOICES LOST IN TIME Ambai. In a Forest, a Deer. Translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström. Oxford: Oxford Up, 2006. Attwell, David and J.M. Coetzee. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Cambreidge/London: Harvard UP, 1992. Atwood, Margaret. The Edible Woman. Toronto: NCL McClelland &Stewart, 1973. ---------- Good Bones --------- The Penelopiad -------- Second Words Bakhtin, Mikhaïl. The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas Press, 1996. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Banks, Russell. "Introduction." Mavis Gallant, Varieties of Exile. New York: New York Review Books, 2003. Brennan, Timothy. "Shame's Holy Book" in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M.D. Fletcher. Carr, Emily. The Book of Small. Coetzee, Foe, New York: Penguin, 1987. --------- Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. London: Vintage, 2004. Dvorak, Marta "The Right Hand Writing and the Left Hand Erasing" in Palimpsests. Commonwealth Essays and Studies 25.1, autumn 2002: 59-68. Farrell, Joseph. "Walcott's Omeros: The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World." The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives. South Atlantic Quarterly 96:2, spring 1997: 247-273. Fitzgerald, Edward. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. [1859] Frame, Janet. Living in the Maniototo. London: The Women's Press, 1996. Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard UP, 1976. Fumagalli, Maria Cristina, The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and the Impress of Dante. Cross/Cultures 49.Amsterdam/N.Y.: Rodopi, 2001 Gallant, Mavis. Home Truths. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart/. -------------. Pegnitz Junction. (1963) Eblem Editions, M&S, 2002. Genette, Gérared. Palimpsestes. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of World-Making. Huston, Nancy. Histoire d'Omaya. Paris: Actes Sud, 1998. 19 VOICES LOST IN TIME Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Urban/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Jenny, Laurent. "La Stratégie de la forme" in Poétique 27, 1976: 257-281. Jones, Lloyd. Mister Pip.Rosedale, New Zealand: Penguin, 2006. --------. The Book of Fame. Auckland: Penguin 2000. King-Aribisala, Karen. Kicking Tongues Oxford: Heinemann, 1998. Klinck, Carl. ETC Kossew, Sue. Pen and Power: A Postcolonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. McCulloch, Thomas. The Stepsure Letters (1862) NCL, 1960. The Mephibosheth Stepsure Letters, Gwen Davies, ed. The Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts (Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1990. More, Thomas. Utopia. [1516] New, W.H. Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing. Toronto, U ofToronto Press, 1997. WC -----------. Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002 Ondaatje, Michael. Divisadero. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Riffaterre, Michael. "Intertextual Representations: On Mimesis as Interpretive Discourse", Critical Inquiry 11.1, Sept. 1984: 141-162. ------ "Syllepsis", in Critical Inquiry 6.4, summer 1980: 625-638. Silvera, Makeda. Her Head a Village. Vancouver: Press Gang Publications, 1994. Terada, Rei. Walcott's Poetry: American Mimesis. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1992. Thieme, John. Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon. London/New York: Continuum, 2001. Toye, William. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature Toronto/Oxford/New York: Oxford UP, 1983. Walcott, Derek. Omeros. --------- "The Muse of History", in Edward Baugh (ed.), Critics on Caribbean Literature: Readings in Literary Criticism (Allen and Unwin, 1978: 38-43. ----------"Meanings", in Robert Hamner (ed.) Critical Perspectives. Boulder, Color, 1997. 20