Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Editor's Introduction Ellen Cronan Rose This issue of jml introduces two new features: each article is followed by a 100–150 word abstract and a list of key words. Our publisher asked us to include these features to make the journal more searchable online. The print version of jml becomes an electronic version that many university and public libraries make available to users via electronic databases such as Project Muse. Since 90 percent of jml's subscriptions are institutional, it seems safe to reckon that more than three-quarters of our readers read the journal on a computer screen. What next? iPod downloads? Well, maybe something like that. There's a company called E-ink in Cambridge, Massachusetts that has developed a prototype electronic gadget that looks and feels like a newspaper (paper, ink, and all). But because it can be wirelessly attached to a subscription source (e.g., The New York Times or jml), it automatically updates itself on demand (daily for the Times, quarterly for jml).1 Oh brave new world, that has such "books" in't. We begin this issue with a cluster of three essays that interrogate narrative discourse and textual production. If anyone could theorize the implications for literature and literary scholarship of E-ink, it might well be Tony Jackson, whose lead article, "The De-Composition of Writing in A Passage to India," asserts that the scholarship on writing as a material technology has "intriguing implications" for the study of literary texts. The assertion is amply supported by Jackson's provocative reading of E. M. Forster's canonical modernist novel. Jackson concedes that he did not attempt to historicize the theoretical issues and conflicts he saw at play in A Passage to India. Brian Rourke's study of Under the Volcano, "Malcolm Lowry's Memory Machine: An Eclectic Systemë," proceeds from a materialist understanding of textual production similar to Jackson's. Unlike Jackson, however, Rourke is keenly attentive to the way in which the historical contexts which inform Lowry's novel affected his technical problems in producing it. Illustrative of Tony Jackson's dictum that "one of the key qualities of written texts is their materiality" is Doris Lessing's palimpsestic The [End Page iv] Golden Notebook, with its black, red, yellow, and blue notebooks, which we are invited to read by Anna Wulf, protagonist of the frame novel "Free Women." That novel turns out to have been written by (the same?) Anna Wulf, who may or may not be the author of The Golden Notebook. These mysteries are boldly confronted by Tonya Krouse, whose project is precisely to distinguish Anna the fictionalized character from the Anna whose writing occupies, like Doris Lessing's, a multiplicity of twentieth-century literary movements. When pondering whether The Golden Notebook is a "modernist," "postmodernist," or "feminist" text, one might do well to remember Lessing's oft-quoted observation that "it isn't either or at all, it's and, and, and, and, and, and" (Briefing 165). The next cluster of three essays is also concerned—on a spectrum ranging from the cerebral and ratiocinative to the downright gory—with production. The unifying link is maternity. In "Kristevan Themes in Virginia Woolf's The Waves," Chloë Taylor deploys Julia Kristeva's theorization of the relationship to the mother and to language as a way to explicate the complex characterization and symbolism of Woolf's arguably most difficult if also most poetic and affecting novel. For Andrea Jenkins, the theory articulated by Kristeva's "Stabat Mater" is anticipated by the unjustly neglected Southern Renaissance writer Evelyn Scott. Scott's 1921 novel The Narrow House and 1923 memoir Escapade record the physicality and abjection of the maternal body that Kristeva's "herethics" was conceived to remedy. The ultimate maternal abjection is abortion, and jml may be the first literary journal to publish an article on the modernist and post-war novelists who dared to bring it to their readers' attention. Sally Minogue and Andrew Palmer resurrect these pioneering efforts by Aldous Huxley, Jean Rhys, Nell Dunn, and Alan Sillitoe, in a brilliant if discomfiting essay that situates their readings in a context provided by Bakhtin's theory of the...