Self In Fiction Research Articles

Stalky and the Language of Education

When he wrote Stalky cjf Co. (1899),1 Rudyard Kipling had become a master stylist. The book retains its appeal nearly a century later but no longer as a manual for training administrators of the British Empire, which is how many early critics interpreted it. Rather, it can be read as a celebration of language, boys' language—how they sift and assimilate both their cultural heritage and their immediate experiences through it, and how this prepares them to confront the challenges of adulthood. The book is about education, and a reader's experience with its language constitutes the very process of education as Kipling envisions it. Stalky A–1 Co. tells the story of three English schoolboys in about 1880. The school, the United Services College at Westward Ho! was a corporation established in 1874 by military officers who could not afford distinguished schools but who wanted their sons well enough educated to pass entrance exams into military academies. Operated the cheap (Smith 8), the school occupied a row of connected buildings facing the Atlantic in North Devon. Kipling immortalized those twelve bleak houses by the shore where the boys endured plenty of raw weather and never much food (Something 46). Because the three boys (Stalky, M'Turk, and Beetle) and all other characters are modeled on real people, the book is often treated solely as a roman A clef. Indeed, the three (L. C. Dunsterville, G. C. Beresford, and Kipling himself) later wrote autobiographical accounts augmenting or revising their fictional selves. But exclusively biographical readings seem inadequate. Kipling's imagination ran with a free rein once he escaped the bonds of journalism during his seven years' hard in India (Something 56). Moreover, he developed a poetic process of composition that emphasized the sound and rhythm of language. This polyglossic (and polysonic) style coupled with his high-speed imagination radically transformed events and people, blurring fact and fantasy. The distance between fictive language and reality became Shakespearean, which explains why a

Hallucinatory History: Hugo's Revolution

Readers of poetry and its criticism have long been accustomed to mixed reviews of its alleged autonomy. The lyric is generally the target here, although other poetic forms are also open to the charge of retreat from the public arena of history and politics. The loss of reference to empirical experience, deplored by some, has been felt by others to be a sacrifice made for gain: what poetry loses in concrete historical veracity, in attachment to a context, it makes up for by its achievement of the self-sufficiency and meaningful ideality of a fiction. What poems sacrifice in the way of a capacity to portray events or historical personages, they regain by depicting the human in all its generality. Structuralist and post-structuralist critiques of the subject have modified this assessment somewhat. A theory of' texts as self-reflexive structures has dispelled the illusion that poems represent a generalized, fictional self. One tends in recent times to praise poetry for its undoing of ideal fictions, rather than for its production of them. It is no doubt natural that, in the wake of the undoing of the self' as the meaning of the lyric, critics should cast around for something to put in its place and should ask whether they had not been too hasty in accepting the poem's autonomy. Even a poem understood to forego the representation of empirical experience can be considered in terms of a referent-for instance, as portraying a

Self, womanhood and social order in Narayan's fiction

ABSTRACT: Narayan's preference for a stable social order, as it is incorporated into the framework of his novels as both a structural device and reverential representations of community life, has been variously dealt with. This paper considers the effect of such a predilection upon his portrayal of the Indian women who are beginning to enjoy a greater measure of autonomy and social mobility in the context of changing socioeconomic structures than were available to them under the traditional patriarchal culture. Four of Narayan's novels will be used to discuss the nature and extent of this unfortunate complicity with a decidedly patriarchal social order even as he strives to dilute it with a degree of sympathy for the oppressed women.

The Writing of “The Yellow Wallpaper”: A Double Palimpsest

THE WRITING OF “THE YELLOW WALLPAPER”: A DOUBLE PALIMPSEST Catherine Golden* The first-person narrative of “The Yellow Wallpaper” unfolds as a diary written by a woman undergoing a three-month rest cure for a postpartum depression.1 Judith Fetterley has argued that the wallpaper functions as a text through which the narrator expresses herself; its pattern becomes the dominant text and the woman behind the pattern the subtext with which the narrator identifies.2 To recall the terminology of The Madwoman in the Attic, the yellow wallpaper thus can be perceived as a “palimpsest.” Similarly, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story itself can be read as a palimp­ sest. The hallucinations and dramatic actions of tearing the wallpaper and creeping on the floor comprise the dominant text, but the writing com­ prises the second muted text, informing the narrator’s final characteriza­ tion. This muted text shows how the narrator fictionalizes herself as the audience of her story. Forbidden to write but continuing to do so in secret, the narrator comes to express herself by writing her own text. As she comes to see the wallpaper as a palimpsest, she presents herself on paper in a way that suggests that, although mad, she is not completely “destroyed”3 by her patriarchal society. As the story unfolds, the narrator’s writing ceases to match her thoughts and actions or to convey a cohesive characteriza­ tion of a timid oppressed figure. The increased use of “I” and her syntac­ tical placement of the nominative case pronoun within her own sentences demonstrate a positive change in self-presentation precisely at the point when her actions dramatically compromise her sanity and condemn her to madness.4 The narrator records her stay in a country ancestral hall through ten diary-like entries, each undated and separated only by several lines of blank space. The separateness of these units can be seen as a spatial indication of the narrator’s own fragmented sense of self.5 As Waiter Ong notes, the audience of a diarist is oneself “encased in fictions. . . . The diarist pretend­ ing to be talking to himself has also, since he is writing, to pretend he is somehow not there. And to what self is he talking? To the self he imagines he is? Or would like to be?”6 Although the narrator may in fact be writing for a fictional self, the way she imagines this selfto be changes as the entries continue. The writing in her early entries matches the dominant text of *Catherine Golden is an Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore College. She has published in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Studies, Salmagundi, TheJournal ofAesthetic Educa­ tion, and Teaching English in the Two Year College. She is currently at work on a book on Victorian authors as illustrators. her thoughts and actions. In the opening sentence the narrator introduces her husband before herself: “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.”7 Rarely used for self-expression, the reflexive case more effectively emphasizes an ante­ cedent rather than replaces a subject. The narrator who claims she wants very much to write also hides her own belief that writing is “a great relief to my mind” (p. 10) by placing this insight in parentheses. Punctuation marks eclipse the forcefulness of this belief, which directly confronts the opinion of those who prescribe her rest cure: her physician-husband, John, who “hates to have [her] write a word” (p. 13); her physician brother; the socially prominent nerve specialist S. Weir Mitchell, who is “just like John and [her] brother, only more so!” (p. 19); and even John’s sister Jennie, an “enthusiastic housekeeper” who “thinks it is the writing which made [her], sick!” (pp. 17-18). At this point in the story the self-consciousness displayed through punctuational subordination keeps the narrator in a subordinate place within her sentences. The muted text matches the domi­ nant text ofher actions, which at this point reveals the narrator as fanciful and fearful. Even though her room initially repulses her, she rests in the former nursery because John chose it for her. The narrator prefers a room “that...

The Complete Notebooks of Henry James , and: Eliot, James, and the Fictional Self: A Study in Character and Narration (review)

The Complete Notebooks of Henry James , and: Eliot, James, and the Fictional Self: A Study in Character and Narration (review)

The Space of Play in L'Impromptu d' Ohio

The Space of Play in L'Impromptu d' Ohio AUDREY MCMULLAN But it's to me this evening something has to happen, to my body as in myth and metamorphosis, this old body to which nothing everhappened, or so little, which never met with anything. J oved anything, wished for anything, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shaner, the plane, the curved, the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the havoc of its images. I One of the most innovative aspects of Beckett's dramatic practice is his sculptural and semantic use ofspace. The "framing" ofindividual forms against the space of the stage, of sounds against silence, emphasizes their visual or aural materiality, and highlights the "gestalt" between form and space, figure and ground. The rigourous dramatic structure provides a framework within which each element is juxtaposed with other scenic or verbal elements, creating a continual interplay and questioning of levels of interpretation, while expanding and extending the play of associations or implications. Instead of a linear unfolding of plot, there is a juxtaposition of presented or represented "images of being" throughout the space and time of the performance, emphasizing the Derridean lack of a stable centre of meaning, or indeed of being, at the heart of the formal structure. L'lmpromptu d'Ohio was originally written in English for an international symposium at Ohio State University during May 1981 , on "Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives.,,2 The title links the play to a theatrical tradition of Impromptus, including Moliere's Impromptu de Versailles, Giraudoux's Impromptu de Paris, and Ionesco's Impromptu de l'Alma. These, according to Pierre Astier, "deal to a large extent with problems of play-acting or play-writing through the acting or the writing of a play that turns out to be the very one performed before our eyes...3 The work therefore announces itselfas a play about creation and the artistic practice of its author. However, rather than incorporating a personal apologia into the text, Beckett sets up a dialogue 24 AUDREY MCMULLAN between the different levels or languages of the play, in particular, between the scenic and the verbal, so that each comments upon the other, and together they constitute an "auto-critique" of the author's work. The piece continually refers to and plays upon the conditions of its dramatic performance, and will be considered within this context.4 In Beckett's later plays, the visual image is largely static, while the spoken text is usually in the form of monologue, or, in L'Impromptu d' Ohio, narrative, read from a book by one of the figures on stage. These two levels ofrepresentation , the scenic and the verbal, are therefore deliberately differentiated, to produce ajuxtaposition of narrative and visual image. In L'Impromptu d'Ohio, the narrative tells of a loved one lost, and subsequently regained, while the scenic level focusses on t~e reading and reception of the narrative, and its relation to the two figures on stage. It can therefore be seen as a metaphor for the origins and creation of fiction, and its relation to self: in particular, the relationships between self, fictional self, and self as creator of fiction (or fictional selves). Pierre Astier has seen the book in front of the Lecteur not only as the record of a life, but as constituting: "a writer's lifework, a whole oeuvre representing in this case, I think, that of Beckett himself in the form of a make-believe compilation of all his writings so far.'" Martin Esslin has seen the use of visual image and narrative as characteristic of Beckett's dual approach to the representation of being, though he sees in the later work a turning away from the narrator's use of internal monologue, and a growing reliance on the visual image. which condenses "l'experience individuelle de l'Etre, I'experience existentielle, en une seule metaphore visuelle: une puissante image aux profondeurs multiples.,,6 There does seem to be a move away from the desperate search for the self in and through the internal monologue, to the presentation of "images of being." The text of the later fiction and most of...

Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison's Fiction

Toni Morrison's novels have attracted both popular and critical attention for their inventive blend of realism and fantasy, unsparing social analysis, and passionate philosophical concerns. The combination of social observation with broadening and allusive commentary gives her fictions the symbolic quality of myth, and in fact the search for a myth adequate to experience is one of Morrison's central themes. Because her world and characters are inescapably involved with problems of perception, definition, and meaning, they direct attention to Morrison's own ordering view and its implications. All of Morrison's characters exist in a world defined by its blackness and by the surrounding white society that both violates and denies it. The destructive effect of the white society can take the form of outright physical violence, but oppression in Morrison's world is more often psychic violence. She rarely depicts white characters, for the brutality here is less a single act than the systematic denial of the reality of black lives. The theme of invisibility is, of course, a common one in black American literature, but Morrison avoids the picture of the black person invisible in white life (Ellison's Invisible Man trying to confront passersby). Instead, she immerses the reader in the black community; the white society's ignorance of that concrete, vivid, and diverse world is thus even more striking. The constant censorship of and intrusion on black life from the surrounding society is emphasized not by specific events so much as by a consistent pattern of misnaming. Power for Morrison is largely the power to name, to define reality and perception. The world of all three novels' is distinguished by the discrepancy between name and

Librarians—Our Fictional Selves

ON various occasions librarians have had cause to bemoan the representation of themselves in print. Instances have been quoted to show how low an estimate of our worth novelists have and we usually seize the opportunity to cry aloud, “And in any case, it is not true!” I can not claim that I manage to keep abreast of the tide of modern fiction, I have neither the time, the strength nor the inclination, but I have received one or two impressions as to our present adjudged value. I think that there are three headings under which we might consider the subject. Firstly, does it matter how we are portrayed in fiction? Secondly, are any of the strictures true? Thirdly, what, if anything, can be done to amend the present state of affairs?