WSS pp. 65-67 : "I went out following the path… 'It is further complicated by…'"

Introduction :

- Situation of the passage :
The last three pages of the first section in part 2 : the first section is narrated by an unnamed narrator, whom we understand to be Rochester ; the second section, narrated by Antoinette, begins on p. 67 ("I did not look up though I saw him at the window") and goes down to p. 75 ; the 3rd section reverts to a narration by Rochester. So that this passage ends with an ellipsis, a textual gap, and then the text resumes in Antoinette's perspective.

The passage in its context : Rochester and Antoinette spend their honeymoon at Grandbois (experience of sexual passion),, until the day R receives a letter from Daniel Cosway, allegedly A's half-brother. He blackmails R by calumniating A, telling him that she is mad like her mother. After reading the letter, R is at a loss, as if stunned ("Your husband he outside the door and he look like he see zombi. Must be he tired of the sweet honeymoon too", p. 62). He witnesses a fight between A and Amélie (who seems to know a lot about the situation, she knows Daniel Cosway). Christophine tells A that she is leaving. A goes to sleep in her room, R enters her room and sees her asleep ("her back was towards me") so decides to stroll down the forest.

- Rochester stepping into the world of dream : his experience in the forest parallels A's second dream, her dream of "sexual initiation"(p. 34). Lexical/semantic similarities between the two scenes : "tall dark trees" —> "the tall trees on either side" (10) ; "stone wall" —> "a stone" (18), "a stone house" (21) ; "following the man" —> "following the path" (1) ; "steps leading upwards" —> "I stepped over a fallen log" (11) ; "I stumble over my dress" —> "I stubbed my foot on a stone" (18) ; "I will not go any further" —> "It is further complicated by…", etc…
Importance of the window in our passage, which seems to frame the text :
"I went out following the path I could see from my window" (1) // "I did not look up though I saw him at the window", p. 67 (A and R seem to have swopped parts, which they have indeed, as far as the narrative is concerned). But the window here gives the impression that R is stepping out of the window, into the world of fantasy, the world of dreams. Doors are closed (cf p. 64, also p. 62 : "your husband he outside the door"), so the only way out (or in) is through the window of fantasy.

3 parts :
1 Lost in the woods
2 Rochester under the Other's eyes
3 Impossible knowledge (epistemological uncertainty)

1 - Lost in the woods :

The passage may be divided into 3 parts :
- Rochester gets lost (reported thoughts)
- Rochester is rescued by Baptist and brought back home (reported dialogues)
- Rochester reads a passage from a tourist book on the island. Polyglossia : Rochester's voice, Baptist's voice, the book's voice. Then on to Antoinette's voice in the following section.

A - The traveller betrayed by his father/guide :

A flawed paternity, that cannot show the way, that cannot guide the son on the path of life. The son cannot "follow in his father's footsteps" (a cliché, which is of some relevance here : following what path ? Whose footsteps ?). No one to tell him the truth : "No one would tell me the truth. Not my father nor Richard Mason" (13).

The son betrayed by the father :
"As I walked I remembered my father's face and his thin lips, my brother's round conceited eyes. They knew." (4-5).
Cf p. 42 : "The thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me… I will never be a disgrace to you or to my dear brother the son you love."
Like Antoinette, a rejected child. Deprived of his inheritance (by the law of primogeniture)

A breach in the succession of generations, no transmission of a patrimony :
. the son deprived of his inheritance
. the traces of a bygone age (the old plantation system) are gradually being erased, they are repressed (Baptist denies that there ever was a road)
. no foundation on which to build anew : the "stones" do not connote solidity (as the name "Rochester" might have suggested), but dilapidation, ruin, and they make Rochester stumble on the path. Not sth to build on or build with.

Baptiste will guide Rochester back to Grandbois, but he is an ambiguous figure, not a clearly male figure that could make up for the paternal deficiency :
. he serves as a guide, but evades R's questions. He is not going to tell R the truth any more than his father.
. he seems to represent the threat of castration ("his machete was in his hand and the light caught the razor-sharp blue-white edge" 43-44), which tends to place him on the male side, the side of the father. But he is feminine in a way, not clearly male : "He was wearing blue cotton trousers pulled up above his knees and a broad ornamented belt round his slim waist" 42-43).
. he looks surly and reproachful, but all of a sudden he puts on his "service mask" and smiles at R ("It was as if he'd put his service mask on the savage reproachful face I had seen" (65-66). Ambiguity of his attitude.
So he looks enigmatic, he cannot easily be recognized ("when I heard footsteps and a shout I did not answer… I did not recognize Baptiste at first" 40-41) or deciphered.

—> the failure of the Name-of-the Father structure, of the symbolic order.

B - A twofold journey (a circular journey in space, and an inner journey, a quest for knowledge) :

- The spatial journey :
Verbs of vectorial displacement : "I went out" (1), "I passed" (3), "as I walked" (4), "I began to walk" (7), "I went on" (9, 16). References to "path", "way", "road".
But movement is checked, hindered :
"I stood still" (14), "I stubbed my foot on a stone" (16), "the undergrowth and creepers caught at my legs and the trees closed over my head" (35-36, an impression that he is trapped in the forest, that all he can do is return to the clearing and start again, but he is unsuccessful until he meets Baptiste). The road (that makes travelling possible) has nearly disappeared.
The only possible movement is circular : returning back to Grandbois. A sense of paralysis.

- The inner journey (to knowledge) is impeded too, it leads nowhere :
"How can one discover the truth I thought… " (12). Epistemological quest for knowledge ("I thought", 5 occurrences). Everybody knows, but him : his father, his brother, Richard Mason…
Reaching a large clear space : the place where some revelation will take place, so that he can be initiated and so that he can return home a wiser man ?
This quest leads him nowhere, in fact to a kind of void :
- space as unreadable, all traces have been erased, the "track" (spatial journey) does not function as a "trace", as some writing that can be deciphered.
- the clear space offers no "clarity" as to meaning, the forest is the locus of meaninglessness (irony of "you cannot mistake the forest" 8), it is pure vacuity, sheer nothingness : "no one" (13), "not my father, nor…, nor…"(13-14), "nowhere" (13), "I don't know" (27 ≠ "so sure" 14, "so certain" 39), "no road" (52, 54, 63), "don't know nothing" (61), "nonsense" (95).
R, having failed to gain knowledge in the forest, will look for knowledge in a book, but that is "nonsense" (dismissed by the Whites as "nonsense", but that is exactly what R's quest leads him to). When Baptiste insists that there is "no road", that is not true (he is denying, repressing the truth), yet he is also speaking a deeper truth : there is indeed "no road" to knowledge, the road leads to "nonsense". R falls asleep (?) or stops thinking and planning (24-25). There is a blank in his narrative (as well as a new §) : "I don't know how long it was before I began to feel chilly" (27). The forest as a blank place, where tracks/traces have been erased, in which there is nothing that may be read by men, nothing that makes sense in the symbolic order.
Yet there is some beauty in this vacant spot, some pleasure that may be found there (23 : "a wild orange tree covered with fruit, the leaves a dark green. A beautiful place" : the tree of knowledge ?) Paradise, the place of origin ? The womb ?

2 - Rochester under the Other's eyes : the quest for knowledge, in which the hero seeks to obtain some kind of revelation (visual mastery), turns out to be a situation in which the subject finds himself being watched, under the Other's eyes. As we shall see, reversibility characterizes the experience Rochester goes through :

- He who wants to know is a man about whom other people know :
He is the only one who doesn't know, the others know about him. He feels he is being watched :
"I stood still, so sure I was being watched that I looked over my shoulder… I went on, glancing from side to side and sometimes quickly behind me." (14-17).
The hostile forest ("You cannot mistake the forest. It is hostile" 9), a figure of the Other, watching Rochester and setting traps for him : the "tall trees" (10), "trees that had grown to an incredible height" (21-22), close over his head (36), catching at his legs ("I found that the undergrowth and creepers caught at my legs" 35). They threaten the subject with annihilation / engulfment.
The Other also proliferates in the guise of "white ants" ("a fallen log swarming with white ants" 11), which echo the "white niggers" and "white cockroaches" of the previous pages.

- The man who is terrified by the oppressive atmosphere of the forest is seen as a zombi by the little girl : no longer a potential victim, but a man who gives rise to fear in others. Roles are reversed. In the world of dual relations, where the Symbolic is not working, intersubjective relations are bound to be violent and reversible. The little girl is the Little Red Riding Hood, who is terrified because she has seen the wolf/a zombie (Antoinette with her red dress as the Little red Riding Hood ?). Which introduces the theme of orality and of the desire of the Other. According to the book, the Other may be "propitiated with sacrifices or offerings of flowers and fruit" (87) : the Other wants to eat, to devour, he is never sated (cf Rochester not wanting to eat when he gets back home, line 81, maybe he has had his fill in the forest !).

Rochester as a wolf, or a zombi (≠ "your husband… he look like he see zombi" p. 62). Reversal and mirror relations : he has seen a zombi, now it is his turn to be a zombi. For indeed he comes from another world (England), he has entered the world of tragedy ("l'entre-deux-morts") in which he is not a free agent any more but is manipulated by everyone (Antoinette, Amélie, Christophine, Baptiste, Daniel Cosway). He is more dead than alive.

The little girl reveals to him the horror that is within him, not the horror out there in the forest or in the ruins. Not an outward journey, but a trip that takes him (back) home, right into the dark core of his own self.
A subversion of the tale of The Little Red Riding Hood.

- The subversion of the gothic motif :
A tropical version of the gothic setting : the oppressive, dark atmosphere of the gothic castle is here displaced to the jungle, to a ruin in the middle of the jungle. [The gothic novel : the novels of Ann Radcliffe, end of the XVIIIth century (ex : The Mysteries of Udolpho, or The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole). Set among a wild scenery, in haunted castles and ruined abbeys full of dungeons and hidden passages, with supernatural elements (ghosts…). They involve suspense, mystery, terror].
Here, no clearly defined idealized characters (because of the reversal pattern) : the dark villain ≠ the innocent girl. Rochester, the romantic suitor, turns into a Gothic villain. The innocent girl in distress turns out to be a "femme fatale". Baptiste, the helper, is perhaps an opponent. Roles are easily reversed.

3 - Impossible knowledge (epistemological uncertainty) :
The uncertain vision of the protagonist :
there is no telling where the truth lies ("How can one discover truth I thought… No one would tell me the truth… " 12-13).
His journey leads him to a void, as we have seen, to a place defined by negativity. Illegible traces that remain inconclusive, he lacks the code to decipher them, and no one is prepared to give him the code (least of all Baptiste).
Even the familiar becomes unfamiliar/unheimlich : Baptiste's face is temporarily unfamiliar, he does not recognize him at first. Home is empty and disquieting ("no one on the veranda and no sound from the house" 75).

An unattainable truth that may be glimpsed (in the little girl's eyes), not spoken : strange voices, shouts, but very little articulated speech. The speech process is defeated.
"so certain of danger that when I heard footsteps and a shout I did not answer. The footsteps and the voice came nearer. Then I shouted back." 39-41). Hilda giggles (80), Baptiste grunts (48).
The truth speaks in enigmatic cries : "They cry out in the wind that is their voice, they rage in the sea that is their anger" (89-90).

The narrator encounters some difficulty in relating his experience :
"I don't know how long it was before I began to feel chilly" (27). A blank at the core of the text, a void out of which the narrative voice rises. Difficult to organize thought ("What had I to think about and how could I plan ?" 25). The thought process defeated (repetition of "I thought"), narrative ordering defeated too. Cf isotopy of confusion : "muddy" (2), "straggly" (3), "shadows" (28). Such a narrator can only be an unreliable narrator. "It must have rained heavily during the night" (2) : he can only try to make deductions, for lack of certainties. Uncertainty as the narrator's predicament, but also as the reader's predicament : just like Rochester, the reader won't know the truth about the pavé road, the old house, the bunch of flowers. The allusion to the priest, père Lilièvre, adds to the mystery (another form of worship, prompted by the very same lack of any answer to the enigma of the Other ?).

As truth is nowhere to be found (read) in reality, Rochester resorts to a book at the end of the passage : he looks for keys and clues in a travel book (which confirms his status as an outsider) on the islands. But this quest for interpretation leads him nowhere, nothing is explained beyond the surface meaning of the magical practices. The text ends on an aposiopesis: a figure in which a speaker suddenly stops (for the sake of special effect), as if unable or reluctant to continue. This resorting to a book, to no avail, confirms the impossibility for both narrator and reader to have access to truth. The narrator reading a book is a mise en abyme of the act of reading, and this mise en abyme heightens the sense of an elusive truth, a truth that can never be grasped. The book within the book, there is a book within the book, but also a book within the book within the book, a book within the book within the book within the book… Ad infinitum. Truth forever evades us. Similarly, the book resorts to another voice, to a quotation (in different quotation marks, 89-90) which is another form of mise en abyme : a quotation within the quotation, as if it were impossible to obtain an answer from a voice, and thus forever imperative to listen to other voices.

Conclusion :
WSS exposes the impossibility for language to express an elusive reality.

THE JOURNEYS TO THE LIGHTHOUSE 1

= different metaphors for different modes in the journey of human life which varies according to changing subjective positions.

The Lighthouse ? A different object for different desires, at different times in the journey.
For Mrs R : the Thing itself whose strokes and silver fingers at night bring in-human ecstasy (71-73, end of 11, I)
For James, a « silvery, misty-looking tower », reminiscent of Mrs R at night (201, end of 8, III) and « hoary, distant, austere in the mist », reminiscent of Mr R in daylight (18, end of 1, I).

A journey ? a displacement, a dislocation whose energy is fuelled by lack, by the fact that « this is not what we want ».
Lack opens space and distance : « so much depends… upon distance, » 206. The little boat travels away from the island.
Distance itself provides relief : comfort and geographical differences : far/close, high/low (195, beg. of 7, III, end of 8, 202)
Relief motivates metonymic displacement even though the real object of our motions lies in the dark of the Other’s desire : « Did they want to go ?… He had a particular reason to go… His wife used to send the men things. » (159-60)
The journey = an obscure necessity even though the children do not really know why they should go : « What’s the use of going now ?… What does one send ? What does one do ? » (quote: 159-160)


I. THOSE UNABLE TO MAKE THE JOURNEY :
= those who stay in London, and have no desire to return to the Isle of Skye because they are too occupied/blinded by their stop-gap objects : they don’t want anything.

1. THE SCIENTIFIC MINDS: William Bankes and Charles Tansley :
Bankes = the one who stays on the banks of life, who never commits himself, never lets himself “into a groove” (96) = not equipped for adult sexuality.
- In his young days, had been very much attached to Mr R : « after which Mr R had married, and their paths lying different ways, there had been, certainly and for no one’s fault, some tendency, when they had met, to repeat » (27-28) ;
their lost friendship, metaphorized by a young body in the peat.
His interest goes for little girls, not women, like Charles
Dodgson the mathematician for a little girl called Alice : 61, 97, 191.
He will be too « occupied » by his research to ask questions, and
will spend his life in laboratories : « a man who spent so much time in laboratories that the world when he came out seemed to dazzle him. » (191)
Likewise for Charles Tansley who avoids intercourse with women’s « fault » (94-95) and fills the void of his life with politics (212).
To Mrs R who prefers boobies, those clever young men are « dried up » (108), « rigid and barren » (97) and they will remain so.

THE RAYLEYS :
Paul : marrying Minta means fullness which the text associates with foolishness :

… the lights after the darkness made his eyes full, 86
I must not make a fool of myself, 188

Minta : there is a hole in her stocking (186), then in the carpet of her home (187) = a tear in the socially symbolic fabric which exposes her flesh : « how that little round hole of pink heel seemed to flaunt itself before them ! » (186)
Since their relation cannot give them the unity they want and since they believe it is the fault of sex, she takes lovers, and he takes up with another woman : 188.


II. THE FATHER’S JOURNEY :
A rite of passage from childish fixations, to the acceptance of old age.
1. THE TYRANNICAL FATHER : an imaginary figure, prominent in « The Window », associated with Victorian patriarchy and conventional gender positions.
* The Master-philosopher who believes in civilisation and progress :
- His mind is fully occupied with historical figures of heroes and great men, 44. Figures himself as the lonely leader at the outpost of progress, paving the way for the civilised world, standing as « a stake… marking the channel out there in the floods alone. », 51.
- Believes in relations based on force and hierarchy, therefore in the necessity of a slave-class/labour-class, 43.
- Privileges the signified, semantic relations : desire to make sense of the world, 12.
* A domestic tyrant, enraged by the folly of women’s minds (38, 163) but who uses their labour force and who wants a full house. Yet, he is also a little child who wants consolation and sympathy from his wife, and then from Lily :

Universities and people wanting him, lectures and books and their being of the hightest importance — all that she did not doubt for a moment ; but it was their relation… that discomposed her, 42.

For Lily, what he asks remains beyond request, « There was no helping Mr R on the journey he was going » 167.

2. THE SYMBOLIC FATHER = THE DEAD FATHER :
* A flawed figure : after Mrs R’s death he looks like a king in
exile (162), exposed to everything (218) : no longer the epic leader, but simply at the head of a little company bound by family ties, passing together along the edge (169).

* Has given up looking for the sense of life :
- Death : no longer part of the imaginary/literary reference, but the passing and the passage of generations,

They would soon be out of it, Mr R was saying to old Macalister ; but their children would see some strange things, 220

The story of the men drowned in the storm at sea arouses no poetic outburst in him, but simply,

‘Ah !’ as if he thought to himself, but why make a fuss about that, 221.

3. Accepting the enigma of the Other, without asking anyone to
solve it for him, but he did not ask them anything, 223.
= a human subject, divided by lack/loss/life after Mrs R = his lighthouse has vanished in the mist.

III. THE CHILDREN’S JOURNEY :
A passage from attachment to the mother, to the father as unconscious reference : from compact against the tyrant, to passing together along the edge :

… united by their compact to resist tyranny to the death, 178

… they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock, 223

The significance of the journey will vary according to gender positions, symbolized by the respective seats occupied by the children in the boat : they will look toward different objects of desire.
Nb : gender ≠ sex ≠ one’s unconscious sexual position.

1. CAM : From mother to father, to become a mother.
- A journey on the waters of separation, feeling the cutting edge of the Real : « the water was sliced, sharply » (179) ; « her hand cut a trail in the sea » (187). She first sits with her back to the lighthouse, looking at the island but she won’t see it, 181.
She looks down into the sea in revolt against her father’s will, and reluctant to enter the compass with James :

… her father’s anger about the points of the compass, James’s obstinacy about the compact, 203

There is another journey for her, beyond these causes.
- Identification to Mrs R’s signifiers :

From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change […] Greece, Rome, Constantinople, 204

The island then makes sense, she recognizes it, she re-members
the past with all the things in it,

It was like that, then, the island, with a dent in the middle and two sharp crags, 203
… all those paths, those terraces, those bedrooms — all those innumerable things, 219.

- Accepting/adopting the female gender position, which means that she will leave the charge of the compass to her father, « Where are we going ? », 181 ; then only can she allow herself to wander dreamily in the underworld of the sea (197), or back in the suspended gardens of Babylon (219-220) ; and then can she enjoy adventure stories about escaping a sinking ship, 203.

- The father ? a point of reference, a landmark, 220 :

Now I can go on thinking whatever I like, for there he is, keeping his eye on me.

Her father becomes an old gentleman in the study, associated with knowledge (205), preparing the way for the Spanish gentleman to whom she feels attracted and who becomes the focus of the young girl’s desire (221).

2. JAMES : from mother to father, to become a father.
a) The journey in space/time : relief comes, the rope knotted in the garden years before becomes loose,

… a rope seemed to bind him there, and his father had knotted it and he could only escape by plugging it [the knife]… [as the boat moves] the relief was extraordinary. 202

James takes a distance from the garden of the past, still the mother remains the center of unconscious attraction, the one truth,
She alone spoke the truth… That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him. 202


b) Symbolic ordering :
- The knife/scimitar used to be a metonym for the father’s tyrannical, arbitrary power,
[he] had brought his blade down among them on the terrace, and she had gone stiff all over… and left him there, impotent, ridiculous. 201

It has gradually become a symbol, and the father only a figure/symbol of life, the antagonistic power that falls on you and cuts through your flesh/hopes,

He had always kept this old symbol of taking his knife and striking his father to the heart — now, as he grew older, it was not him, that old man reading, whom he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that descended on him, … that fierce sudden black-winged harpy … that struck and struck at you. 198

- A symbolic distance has been achieved and James now looks for patterns of understanding, for symbolic forms, rather than acting out the desire to kill his father,
… an image to cool and detach and round off his feeling in a concrete shape, 199.

= not unlike the sublimation process, a change in substance/quality also inherent in the artistic process.

c) Moving toward secondary identifications :
Ideal ego : potency in the mother’s lap.
Ego ideal : from injustice in the garden of childhood, to dealing justice in this world :

But whose foot was he thinking of, and in what garden did all this happen ? […] It was in this world that the wheel went over the person’s foot. 200
… he would track down and stamp out tyranny, 199

= he will become James the judge, the lawgiver who deals justice (182) both according to the mother’s desire and in the father’s footprints,
… watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench and directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs, 9
… two pairs of footprints only ; his own and his father’s ; they alone knew each other. 199

- Identifcation to the ideal of the guide/leader, in shared
knowledge :
They shared that knowledge. ’We are driving before a gale. We must sink,’ he began saying to himself, hald aloud exactly as his father said it. 219, 221, 222

- The lighthouse ? never one thing, never the thing itself which is
inaccessible but which has remote features both of the father and the mother,
So it was like that … a stark tower on a rock … it confirmed some obscure feeling abut his own character. 218

the tower of strength/mother ; the stark/hoary appearance of the father.

3. FUSION AND UNITY
a). The mother-son dyad
b) The mystical attraction

[…] a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool [means here everyday life] is hidden a pattern ; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this ; that the whole world is a work of art […] there is a pattern behind the cotton wool. that we are parts of the work of art… There is no Shakespeare; there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; […] we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
(Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past”)


II.THE IMAGE IN THE MIRROR : THE SAME, YET DIFFERENT :
Je suis ce malheureux comparable aux miroirs
Qui peuvent réfléchir mais ne peuvent pas voir
Comme eux mon œil est vide et comme eux habité
De l’absence de toi qui fait sa cécité.
Aragon, Le Fou d’Elsa.


1.THE FLOUNDERING MIRAGE
a) Mirrors are traps :

Les miroirs sont des portes par lesquelles la mort va et vient […] vous verrez la mort travailler comme des abeilles dans une ruche de verre.
J. Cocteau

b) The body image in the mirror ?
c) The principle of reality prevails over the pleasure principle

FICTION AND HUMAN FANTASY

Fantasme:
Laplanche et Pontalis dans leur Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse définissent le fantasme comme un « scénario imaginaire où le sujet est présent et qui figure, de façon plus ou moins déformée par les processus défensifs, l'accomplissement d'un désir et, en dernier ressort, d’un désir inconscient ».
Pour user d’une métaphore qui sera tout de suite parlante, l’on peut dire que le fantasme est un bouchon qui vient combler un vide, un manque, disons une différence incommensurable, radicale.

Fantasy ?
A production of the human imagination which stages a human subject in the position of seeing/being seen by an object.
Cf. ça me regarde.
In TLH, an example of this in the children’s room where the skull is nailed on the wall.
The skull’s hollow eyes, sth unbearable.
The open eyes of the dead that seem to be looking at you.
The uncanny.
Fantasy requires a surface for projection : a stage, the pages of a book, a TV/video screen, the mind’s eye, a canvas, etc : some mirror/screening device in which one reflects oneself doing this and that, constructing a « heroi fantasy » for oneself…
Fundamentally, the screen (of the mind) is a mirror for identifications.

Mirror ?
A word derived from mirare: to look attentively, to gaze, in order to have a full vision of something : related to a mode of human desire, the scopic/epistemological drive : wanting to see/to know.
But mirare itself is also related to mirari, to wonder—in surprise, fear, amazement : which implies that there may be something disquieting/uncanny about the object one looks at.

Fiction,as a product of the creative imagination ?
A cultural function, to offer a mirror for reflecting human experience : since the birth of narrative fiction in 18th Europe, the novel has been considered as « a mirror held up to human nature ».
But a suspended mirror as well, which means that the world of fantasy is only a moment of « willing suspension of disbelief », an alibi, not real life.

I.MIRRORS AND MIRAGES :
The mirror stage ? A stage in the development of human beings, divided into two steps : discovering one’s own image, and giving a name to it.

The first step :
A visual moment when the human infant perceives itself for the first time not as a body made of separate fragments, but as a complete entity : either in a mirror, a puddle, or simply through the image reflected in the mother’s eyes (in the pupil, which means « little doll »).
This moment also applies metaphorically : our self image depends on the way in which our coming into existence was looked at/considered :

Au premier jour de ma vie il y avait une dame,
ses yeux étaient le premier miroir où je pouvais me voir.

The moment of mutual reflection is very important for the constitution of subjectivity : when for the first time, one has a sense of unity, intimacy ; of perfect reflection and completeness : the moment which Narcissus tried to perpetuate when he spent his time contemplating his image himself in a pool of water.
This first step is accompanied by a sense of bliss, of great happiness, then followed by anxiety since the image is unstable and immaterial.
All human beings long to recover that stage of bliss : the pathological manifestation of this longing : Narcissism, a disposition of the ego throughout our lives.
Part of human existence depends on our image under the other’s eyes in the social mirror : cf. Mr R worrying how long his image of a brilliant philosopher will last, when it will vanish.

- The novel : traditionally, a reflector of the problematic of human identifications in the social mirror.


1.WHOLENESS IN THE MIRROR :Mirrors, windows : important places in the topology of stories (diegesis).
Cf. the first part of TTL, « The window », with its main motif, « Motherandchild in the window », the object of Lily’s picture.

a) The picture in the window ? held on four sides by the frame, it offers something for the eye to gaze at with rapture.
Cf. Lily B : « […] as she saw […] Mrs R sitting with J in the window and the cloud moving […] how life, from being made up of little separate incidents when lived one by one, became curled and whole » (54).

Cf Mr R, who for comfort, after his failure with the letter R, « gazed at his wife and child in the window » (62).

b) Images have a soothing/power : they make you believe that you will always be the same, eternally young, beautiful, and powerful = one of the main functions of human fantasy/dream, which is to protect you against time, death, mortality, etc…
TTL : :
- Mr R fancying a heroic death for himself as a means of compensation for the failure to find a stable meaning for R = some sort of glorification of the ego :

He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered and shivered […], 38
Yet he would not die lying down ; he would find some crag of rock and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. 42

- Charles T’s fantasy of triumphing on graduation day, seeing himself gowned and hooded under Mrs R’s eyes/the mother’s protective gaze.
- Mrs R and AC : looking together at the dish of fruit, feasting their eyes on an image of abundance from the sea, a horn of plenty, « united them » (105)
Nb : each time, Mrs R functions as the mirror for the other characters’ reflections : cf the first stage of the mirror stage.


2.THE METAPHYSICAL MIRAGE :Mirage métaphysique de l’harmonie universelle, abyme mystique de la fusion affective (C. Léger)

Mirages ? virtual reflections that attract human desire to an imaginary place, where thirst will be quenched (oasis), where bodily desires will be fulfilled (cf Celestial Jerusalem).
= nothing will be lacking/leaking, where there will be nothing to desire : the Promised Land of Bliss.
Mrs R’s/the mother’s presence : nurtures imaginary constructions, myth making and match making.

a) Myth making :
The function of myth ? To provide a narrative construction which solves the contradictions of human life, by giving « metaphysical » answers to the enigma of death and life. Lévi-Strauss
In nationalist myths, feminine figures are often associated with power : cf Marianne and the Republican myth ; the statue of liberty and the American myth ; Athena, the protector of the city which bears her name.

TTL : Mrs R built into the image of a goddess, the « lighthouse of the universe » (like the statue of liberty), through the prism of her guests’s eyes.
- A mythical goddess of natural cycles : WB sees her like someone
with « noble ancestry » (15), « at the end of the line, Greek » (36) ; she is Demeter (20), an « alma mater » (91) who patches up the wounds of human existence : « taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen » (20).
In Lily B’s fantasy, it is as if she held in her power the solution to the riddle of the universe :

did she lock up within her some secret which certainly LB believed people must have for the world to go on at all ? (58)

- The Great Absolute Mother, a « tower of strength, formidable to behold » (12), brandishing like Marianne « her sword at life » (68), possessing the force of a man like the Queen of England (20) : a queen-bee who seems to « pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray » (44) : here, the letter R is sounded.

b) Match-making : her presence seems to be the guarantee of a well-ordered world, where things seem to fit in safe binary oppositions, are safely wrapped together, « everything struck into stability ».

- The match-maker, fitting people and social relations together :
men and women, rich and poor, high and low : 32, 68, 86, 122.
[…] as if the walls of partitioçn had become so thin that […] it was all one stream […] and P and M would carry it on when she was dead, 122
It flattered her to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven. 122


- Her benevolent gaze presides over her chidlren’s destinies : she
helps them choose and cut out this and that picture for themselves, cut their way through life : she looks after James guiding his scissors (9), approves of Andrew dissecting crabs (34), gives her daughter Rose freedom to choose among her jewels (89).

- Her stories about Joseph and Mary : cuts are exquisite, not painful :
The air was shoved aside by their black wings and cut into exquisite scimitar shapes. She could neve describe it accurately enough to please herself. » (89)

- She is the queen of a fantasy world where the pain of loss/cutting is tamed/domesticated, into images of loss (castration imaginaire) :cf the one-armed man and the circus (17), James’ pictures of a mowing-machine, a knife with 6 blades (21) ; ¹ real mutilation, the mackerel in the sea between square brackets.

In short, her presence wraps things/holes into a whole, like the shawl flung over the picture frame, erasing the limits between the real world and the imaginary (34, 37, 73).

a) The aim of the artist, or what does a painter/writer want ? to
capture the rapture into a picture ; cf WB looking at Mrs R with rapture, and Lily painting by his side :
Once more under the power of that vision which she had seen clearly once and must now grope for among hedges and houses and mothers and children—her picture. » (61)

But it is here that problems begin :
a picture ? an object within a frame under the viewer’s gaze.
an image ? no frame, it floats and vanishes.

impossible to capture the whole thing into a picture :

‘But this is what I see ; this is what I see’, and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, […] » (26)

The metaphysical mirage flickers and flutters away, the mirror is an empty looking glass (cf the mirrors in a lighthouse) : a gap opens in love relations.
TTL : Lily’s desire is inadequate to what she can achieve : cf her sense of social inadequacy (26).

The text as narrative structure

Narratology deals with the question of “who sees ?” and “who speaks ?”.
Both questions are about the angle of vision through which the story is focused.

1. Focalization (who sees?)

Gérard Genette (Figures III) has distinguished between three types of focalisation :
- zero focalization, when the narrator is omniscient, i.e., knows more than any of the characters. N > C
- internal focalization, when the perspective is limited to what only one character can see or say. N = C
- external focalization, when the narrator knows or says less than what the characters know. N > C.

This raises the issue of voice (who speaks ?) and the question of the different types of discourse :

2.who speaks ?

- direct discourse, in inverted commas, introduced by a verb or an introductory reporting clause (like “she said”, “he uttered”...).
- indirect discourse = reported discourse.
- Free Direct Discourse: direct speech has two features testifying to the narrator's presence, i.e. the quotation marks and the introductory reporting clause. You have the Free Direct Speech when you remove either or both of these feautures. (Leech and Short, Style in Fiction)
- free indirect discourse: a sort of midway point between the first two, or a combination which blends their grammatical characteristics.
Three examples given by Rimmon-Kenan :
Direct discourse: He said, “I love her;”
Indirect discourse: He said that he loved her
Free Indirect Discourse : He loved her.
—> FID retains the third person “he” and the past tense from indirect speech, but in its truncation resembles the words used in the direct discourse example.
FID makes your hear the voice of a character, as relayed by the narrator’s voice. In fact you hear a blend of two voices

CM 5 : The text as linguistic structure

In literary texts, meaning is always multiple, and a text is always a palimpsest: different strata of meaning superimposed upon each other.

1. polysemy
Polysemy is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a word, phrase, etc.) or signs to have multiple meanings.
Those multiple meanings can be deliberately suggested by the writer, or can appear to the reader independently from the writer’s intention.

2. the syntagm and the paradigm
A text is produced by the interplay of these two axes: the Syntagm and the paradigm.
The syntagmatic axis and the paradigmatic axis are interlaced to produce meaning.

- The syntagm is the linear, horizontal, dimension of the text, i.e., the words combined with each other according to the rules of syntax.
The words function by contiguity, we have a succession of words: subject, verb, complement… and this combination produces meaning.

- The paradigm is the axis of selection. For when a writer chooses a word in preference to another, he chooses it from the vast reserve of words that constitutes language.

3. Énoncé / énonciation (sometimes in English “statement” / “utterance”, or “enunciated” / “enunciation”):
the text on the page is the visible side of the énoncé, but each énoncé only exists because of the act of enunciation which produces it.

Statement (énoncé) = a linguistic unit (a sentence, a phrase or clause, a text, a novel, or a short-story), i.e., the verbal result of the act of enunciation.

Enunciation: the act performed by a speaker, for it takes a speaker, a human originator, for any statement to exist (whether he is fictional or not).
There can be no énoncé without this act, performed by an enunciator.
Enunciation: a pragmatic reality (an énoncé is a discursive reality).

Je propose, sans insister sur les raisons, d’ailleurs évidentes du choix des termes, de nommer histoire le signifié ou contenu narratif […], récit proprement dit le signifiant, énoncé, discours du texte narratif lui-même, et narration l’acte narratif producteur et, par extension, l’ensemble de la situation réelle ou fictive dans lequel il prend place. (G. Genette, Figures III, p. 72).

The title of "In Another Country", comes from The Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe

Thou hast committed—
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides the wench is dead.


The title “Now I Lay Me” comes from a bedtime prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Child’s bedtime prayer

“Ten Indians”:

Ten little Injuns standin' in a line,
One toddled home and then there were nine;
Nine little Injuns swingin' on a gate,
One tumbled off and then there were eight.
One little, two little, three little, four little, five little Injun boys,
Six little, seven little, eight little, nine little, ten little Injun boys.
Eight little Injuns gayest under heav'n. […]
Children's rhyme.

CM, littérature du monde anglophone, séances 2 et 3 :

“Time and space in fiction”


I- Time
* Signifier, signified, referent
The signifier: has a material existence, both visible (a written trace upon a page) and audible (sound). The signifier is present, palpable.
The signified: it is the concept / thought/ impression that corresponds to the signifier; it is therefore abstract; it is a mental image. In this sense, it is immaterial, impalpable.
The referent is the object referred to by the sign, the objective reality referred to

1. narrated time (ou « le temps de la chose racontée » ou « temps du signifié », Metz),
corresponds to the length of time covered by the story.

Rimmon-Kenan:
Story designates the narrated events, abstracted from their disposition in the text and reconstructed in their chronological order, together with the participants in these events. Whereas “story” is a succession of events, “text” is a spoken or written discourse which undertake s their telling. (3)

2. narrative time (“Le temps du récit” ou “temps du signifiant”, Metz in Figures III, p. 77).

Real time is irreversible, chronological (diachrony),
Fictional time is reversible, circular (synchrony),

a) Order
The narrator uses what we call “anachronies” (from anachronism), that is to say,

Any chunk of text that is told at a point which is earlier or later than its natural or logical position in the event sequence. (M. J. Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, London, Routledge, 1988.)

Analepsis and prolepsis (“flashback” and “flashforward”).


b) Frequency
In narratology, frequency designates,

The number of times a specific event occurs in a story in relation to the number of times it is narrated. (Cohan and Shires, Telling Stories, London, Routledge, 1988.)

4 possibilities:
1. An event happened once, and it is narrated once.
2. An event happened once, and it is narrated many times.
3. An event happened more than once, and it is narrated once.
4. An event happened more than once and it is narrated several times.

c) Duration“The time during which something continues” (OED).
* the number of lines, paragraphs, devoted to an event.
* the pace of the narrative,
* the different narrative techniques used to accelerate and decelerate. (The maximum acceleration of the pace of the narrative is ellipsis, the maximum deceleration, i.e., the increase in speed, is what we call pause).


II- Space

1. Setting
“The general locale /environment in which action occurs” (Abrams 172)

“setting refers to more than a specific space. It refers to the total environment for your story, with all its cultural shadings as well as its physical landmarks and characteristics…” (The Creative Writer's Handbook)

It can have a referential function, i.e., might “contribute to a greater illusion of reality, a greater verisimilitude.”

Space markers: geography, space directions, toponymy, street names...
Mimetic purposes : the stress is laid on what is unique about a particular setting.
Didactic purposes: the setting is more stereotyped and representative of a whole series of similar places.


* Setting and symbolical relevance

- Confinement
- a murky atmosphere
- darkness and silence
- the womb and the tomb

* Setting and characters


* Setting and scene

Fantasy
- A production of the human imagination which stages a human subject in the position of seeing/being seen by an object : the skull’s hollow eyes, sth unbearable.
- Requires a surface for projection : a stage, the pages of a book, a TV/video screen, the mind’s eye, a canvas, etc… : some mirror/screening device in which one reflects oneself doing this and that, constructing a « heroic fantasy » for oneself…
- Fundamentally, the screen (of the mind) is a mirror for identifications.

Université Lumière-Lyon2
Département du Monde Anglophone,
Faculté des langues
CM Littérature du Monde Anglophone
Redouane.Abouddahab@univ-lyon2.fr

CM1 : présentation
(structure et enjeux du récit de fiction en prose)

R. Barthes :
[…] l’œuvre est un fragment de substance, elle occupe une portion de l’espace des livres (par exemple dans une bibliothèque). Le Texte, lui, est un champ méthodologique. L’opposition pourrait rappeler (mais nullement reproduire terme à terme) la distinction proposée par Lacan : la « réalité » se montre, le « réel » se démontre.
« De l’œuvre au texte », Le Bruissement de la langue, Seuil, p. 70-71, pp. 69-77.

I – What is a literary text ?

Diegesis
According to Gerald Prince, diegesis is

(1) The (fictional) world in which the situations and events narrated occur;
(2) Telling, recounting, as opposed to showing, enacting. (A Dictionary of Narratology)

Mimesis:
A Greek word and notion mainly discussed by Plato and Aristotle. Both of them saw in mimesis the representation of nature. So, it is not the function of the poet to convey the truth, but only to copy it.
For him, all creation is imitation (nature itself, the world are an imitation of the truth and essence of God or the Ideal). In this sense, the writer is nothing but the imitator of an imitation.
So truth is not the concern of the poet or writer, but the concern of the philosopher only.

Roland Barthes:
[…] This type of illusion is not exclusive to historical discourse. It would be hard to count the novelists who imagined—in the epoch of Realism—that they were ‘objective' because they suppressed the signs of the 'Iext' in their discourse! Today linguistics and psychoanalysis have made us much more lucid with regard to privative utterances: we know that absences of signs are also in themselves significant

George Eliot:
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.

Fredric Jameson
Once upon a time at the dawn of capitalism and middle-class society, there emerged something called the sign which seemed to entertain unproblematic relations with its referent.
[That was the] initial heyday of the sign, the moment of literal or referential language.

This autonomy of culture, this semi-autonomy of language, is the moment of modernism, and of a realm of the aesthetic which redoubles the world without being altogether of it. (The Linguistics of Writing)

Oscar Wilde:
Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
(The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 2)

Roland Barthes :
L'enjeu du travail littéraire (de la littérature comme travail), c'est de faire du lecteur, non plus un consommateur, mais un producteur du texte… Interpréter un texte, ce n'est pas lui donner un sens (plus ou moins fondé, plus ou moins libre), c'est au contraire apprécier de quel pluriel il est fait. (SZ, pp. 10-11)

De ce texte absolument pluriel, les systèmes de sens peuvent s'emparer, mais leur nombre n'est jamais clos, ayant pour mesure l'infini du langage… il n'y a jamais un tout du texte" (ibid., p. 12).