Katherine Mansfield and the Problem of Time in 'How Pearl Button was Kidnapped'

Katherine Mansfield’s early stories first published in the magazine Rhythm, are heavily influenced by the works of philosopher Henri Bergson. His work introduced two ways of knowing time: intellectual and intuitive. The former being the way we formally recognise the time, measured by a series of artificial units and the latter is the way we “psychologically experience time, or what Bergson calls ‘duration’”. However, the most important aspect of Bergson’s theory is the fact that spatialised, intellectual time has already passed; it is documented and measured and can only be represented. A useful allegory for this would be a third person account of an event that happened. However, intuitive time is a psychological time, passing right now.

These aspects of the human consciousness are inseparable. They are created by the degree of tension or relaxation within the consciousness. When the mind is most tense, the intellect takes over but when more relaxed, intuition does. This means that our consciousness introduces different rhythms; it is changeable in terms of its relation to intellect and intuition.

In this sense, it is integral to consider that Mansfield does not simply write stream of consciousness narratives because time cannot simply be measured by the intellect or intuition. This is perfectly illustrated by Bergson, below where the inverted cone stands on its apex (S) on a rectangular plane (P) with its base (AB) uppermost:

 

The cone represents the

totality of the recollections accumulated in my memory, the base AB, situated in the past, remains motionless, while the summit S, which represents at all times my present, moves forward unceasingly also touches the moving plane P of my actual representation of the universe. At S the image of the body is concentrated; and, since it belongs to the plane P, this image does not but receive and restore actions emanating from all images of which the plane is composed.

The present never exists in the intuitive sense, it acts whereas the past merely exists and does not act, anymore. The past and the present are “united in the sense that human consciousness moves freely between them, or anywhere inside the cone”.

Mansfield’s 1910 short story ‘How Pearl Button was Kidnapped’ closely adheres to Bergson’s theories because Pearl’s experiences are constructed through the co-existence of contradictory intuition and intellect. Indeed, the title introduces the possibility of violence and shock; however, as the story progresses, it is clear the reader must identify how Mansfield reveals this not in the uncanny representation of the Maori community, but in the more familiar faces, the “little blue men” (or policemen) who ‘kidnap’ Pearl, snatch her from a place where she enjoys herself and “carry her back to the ‘House of Boxes’”. Mansfield’s abrupt, matter of fact tone suggests that these men are the intruders in the narrative. Besides, Pearl never seems to fear her ‘kidnappers’. Mansfield evokes a quasi-maternal bond between them because the woman “was softer than a bed and she had a nice smell- a smell that made you bury your head and breathe and breathe it”. Her ‘kidnappers’ are a source of comfort but it is her family and the police who brutally snatch her from this happiness and force her to return to her boring life in the “House of Boxes”, where she is no longer free or mobile.

Mansfield’s style is extremely ambiguous. There are only three paragraphs in this short story and the reader would expect the first to break with a temporal conjunction like ‘then’ between the sentences: “She swung on the little gate, all alone, and she sang a small song” and “Two big women came walking down the street”. Contrary to the expectations of an adult reader, events in the story- from Pearl swinging on the gate, the winds blowing up the street dust, Pearl singing, and the two big women walking towards her- happen in a continuous flow. This narrative technique implies that within Pearl’s consciousness, there are no breaks or paragraphs that sort things out ‘intellectually’. The story is told through Pearl’s intuitive consciousness, where time is experienced as duration rather than as measured and spatialised; therefore, Mansfield’s narrative could not follow a linear structure.

Mansfield’s methods regarding paragraphing demonstrate how the narrative is based on the child’s experience of duration. In fact, Pearl does not does not experience ‘kidnapping’, nor does she identify the two women as Maori. The reader is invited to follow Pearl’s sense of intuitive perception instead of intellectual identifications.

However, as Eiko Nakano identifies, Pearl might not know that the two women can be ethnically described as Maori, but this does not mean that she does not identify them intellectually. She gives her own definitions to what she sees or knows both at home and in a new environment. When she is asked where her mother is, she answers: “In the kitching, ironing-because-it’s-Tuesday”. The fact that Pearl can immediately link ironing and Tuesday indicates that she can identify what she knows in an adult, intellectual way. Similarly, when she goes to sit on the dusty ground: “she carefully pulled up her pinafore and dress and sat on her petticoat as she had been taught to sit in dusty places”. As a result of her upbringing, as Nakano argues, Pearl “instantly reacts to dust and automatically sits in the best way of sitting in such a place”. As she eats the peach, she worries the juices will spill onto her clothes. Unlike her mother, Pearl is not trapped within the ‘House of Boxes’, repeating the same ironing every Tuesday, she is mobile. Her consciousness moves, continually between the intellectual and the intuitive.

The title reinforces the intellectual perspective because we can take a step into Pearl’s consciousness (where intuition reigns) in a dreamlike state but it is only when we finish the story (much like waking up) that we can interpret the story more intellectually and realise that Pearl’s mother had obviously sent out a search party for Pearl, yet our intuition tells us that the little blue men, the uncanny yet recognisable figures of policemen are to take her home to safety. What represent the ‘House of Boxes’ to Pearl, in fact restores order.

Henri Bergson describes time which is flowing and a time which has flown with an artistic metaphor: “The finished portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the nature of the artist, by the colours spread out onto the palette” but Bergson goes on to explain that not even the artist could have foreseen how the portrait would turn out “for to predict it would have been to produce it before it was produced- an absurd hypothesis”. Interestingly, Mansfield’s title allows the reader to anticipate something before reading it yet the story turns out differently than expected: the reader is the artist who creates lives by “reading the story about these lives”. The reader produces a portrait of the narrative in their consciousness, open for new interpretations.

Mansfield’s story paints the portrait of Pearl’s consciousness. Colours are extremely significant because Pearl may not know what specific things are called, but she takes in the visual richness of her surroundings. For instance. When she first meets the two women, they are introduced in relation to the clothes they wear: “One was dressed in red and the other was dressed in yellow and green. They had pink handkerchiefs over their heads”. Yet Mansfield’s language is especially perceptive in that Pearl makes “a cup of her hands” and catches some water from the sea: “it stopped being blue in her hands”. These changing colours hold a strong resonance because it describes the way Pearl is a part of nature yet takes part in creating it, too. She paints the portrait of the external world within her consciousness. Her excitement at changing the water’s colour, the way “she rushed over to her woman and flung her little thin arms round the woman’s neck, hugging her, kissing” is urgent and active but describes the way Pearl creates the scene surrounding her, inviting the reader into her consciousness to experience that same excitement.

The significance of intellectual and intuitive time in Bergson’s theory is indivisible in his philosophy and in Mansfield’s writing. Location is a significant feature in her early works but what makes Mansfield stand out as a Modernist writer is her ability to express the ways in which her characters experience time as linear and spatialised as well as intuitive.

Niamh Hughes

Works Cited

Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, A. Mitchell (trans.) (London: Macmillan, 1911)

-Matter and Memory, N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (trans.) (London: Allen and Unwin, 1911)

Mansfield, Katherine, ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’ in Selected Stories (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2002)

Nakano, Eiko, ‘Katherine Mansfield, Rhythm and Henri Bergson’ in Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism eds. Gerri Kimber, Susan Reid & Janet Wilson (London: Continuum, 2011)

David Jones: Painter and Poet

An epic poem in its own right, In Parenthesis is rooted in David Jones' experience as a soldier in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers during the First World War. Over two decades after Jones enlisted in 1914, In Parenthesis is an attempt to faithfully deliver his experience of life in the trenches. Starting as a series of war drawings with captions, the captions grew into "a writing", and from there he had a new objective: 'to make a shape in words'[1], or put more eloquently, 'to see how this business of 'form' and 'content' in a writing, compared with the same problems in [...] the visual arts'[2]. It is the evolution from painting to poem, that provides us with a beautiful 'landscape of language' that allows what a painting lacks: motion and sound.

 Painting by David Jones,Frontispiece for In Parenthesis, 1937,©Estate of David Jones

For example, at the close of Part Two, there is an explosion while John Ball is being reprimanded for his failure to address an officer properly (which says a great deal about the importance of hierarchy), and the scene's impact on the reader is, like the explosion itself, atomic:

[. . . ] in a stillness charged through with some approaching violence -registered not by the ear nor any single faculty -- an on-rushing pervasion, saturating all existence; with exactitude, logarithmic, dial-timed, millesimal – of calculated velocity, some mean chemist's contrivance, a stinking physicist's destroying toy. Out of the vortex, rifling the air it came -bright, brass-shod, Pandoran; with all-filling screaming the howling crescendo's up-piling snapt. The universal world, breath held, one half second, a bludgeoned stillness. Then the pent violence released a consummation of all burstings out; all sudden up-rendings and rivings-through -  all taking-out of vents - all barrier-breaking, all unmaking. Pernitric begetting  -  the dissolving and splitting of solid things. (p. 24)

In vivid slow motion, we are confronted with both stillness and velocity, a howling crescendo and a 'pernitric begetting'. This extract, like the rest of the text, is so visually striking that both the words, and the images they create, leave a lasting imprint on the reader.

Alongside his use of memory and vivid imagery, Jones also breaks out into poetry in times of great emotion. In Part Three, it seems that prose cannot bear the weight of John Ball's fear and a more expressive medium of poetry is needed:

You can hear the silence of it:
you can hear the rat of no-man’s land
rut-out intricacies,
weasel-out his patient workings,
scrut, scrut, sscrut

                                (p. 54)

Drawing our attention to the oppressive silence, this section demonstrates poetry's ability to compensate for what prose may lack; that is, that the aesthetics of poetry seem to help isolate the emotions and actions displayed. Prose, in turn, may provide a more emphatic way of conveying memories and experience than painting.

For this reason, it is easy to understand the indecisiveness of its genre: Is it a novel, a poem, or a "word painting"? Is it surely not all of these?




Sammy Evans.

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[1] David Jones In Parenthesis London: Faber and Faber (1937) pX. 

[2] Jonathan Miles Eric Gill & David Jones at Capel-y-ffin Bridgend, Wales: Seren (1992) p155.

In Parenthesis – What is it?

David Jones's In Parenthesis is a work that defies easy categorisation. My edition clocks in at over 220 pages if you include Jones's extensive endnotes, features seven parts or chapters, and is composed of (mostly) left-aligned prose of regular line-length. All of which seems to suggest that Jones's World War I narrative is a novel.

The good people at Faber & Faber seem to disagree, though.

Cover art isn't the only factor that complicates our reception of In Parenthesis as a novel though. The sheer density of allusion and variety of rhythmic features also suggest that sections of In Parenthesis are, in fact, works of poetry. 

In Part 4 of the text, for instance, Dai Greatcoat delivers a lengthy speech:

I am '62 Socrates, my feet are colder than you think
on this
Potidaean duck-board.
   I the adder in the little bush
whose hibernation-end
undid,
unmade'victorious toil:
In ostium fluminis.
At the four actions in regione Linnuis
                             by the black waters. (p. 80)

This text demands close attention – there are footnotes to consult, classical references to unpick, and mid-sentence line-breaks to consider – offering a reading experience that is perhaps closer to that a poem than a novel.

So how can we go about deciding what In Parenthesis is? George Szirtes defines poetry as a form in which 'the presence burns more than the narrative drive.' If we accept this definition as true, then it seems as though In Parenthesis could be quite confidently categorised as a work of poetry rather than a novel. Jones's depictions of trench warfare and military life are vividly rendered, while the causal conditions that drive these military men to action are comparatively muddled.

But would a causally sensible narrative be appropriate for a depiction of the Great War? In Part 6, John Ball and his company advance over no man's land, marching through the din of gunfire to arrive at a shallow trench opposite enemy lines:

Rain clouds thickened to wintry dark across the summer night, broke a soaker over them, more confused them where some sought with inutile tools to deepen against his retaliatory fire. Or some just curled up and chanced it. […] When daylight fully came they were withdrawn across the open, which seemed silly, and he obviously saw them and put across Wooly Bears [heavy German shrapnel] low over them scampering like disturbed game. (pp. 147 – 148)

Before long, Ball and company withdraw even further, giving up the ground they have painfully gained just hours before. At no point in this self-cancelling exercise have these soliders known where they were  or what they were doing there, but it is clear that the cost has been high:

God knows what it was all about, but they moved you back again that evening to another field of bivouac.
And you saw the whole depth of the advance and gauged the nature of the contest yard by yard, and made some estimate of the expenditure and how they'd bargained for each hundred feet with Shylock batteries. You marked how meshed intricacies of wire and cunning nest had played sharp tricks on green and eager plaintiffs. They lay heaped for this bloody suing. (pp. 147-148)

Perhaps In Parenthesis does favour presence over narrative drive, or perhaps the historical narrative that it is depicting simply doesn't make sense.

Of course, David Jones is far from the only modernist writer to have tested the boundaries of formal convention. Virginia Woolf's shorter writings, for instance, frequently operate at the boundary between short story and poetry. 'Monday or Tuesday' and 'Blue and Green' could both be read as short pieces of prose poetry, and it's clear from Woolf's critical writing that she was very much aware of this liminal quality in her work. 

In 'Modern Fiction' (available online here), she argues that:

[The writer] has to have the courage to say that what interests him is no longer "this" but "that": out of "that" alone must he construct his work. For the moderns "that", the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. At once, therefore, the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon something hitherto ignored; at once a different outline of form becomes necessary, difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predecessors. […] The emphasis is laid upon such unexpected places that at first it seems as if there were no emphasis at all […] But it is impossible to say "this is comic", or "that is tragic", nor are we certain, since short stories, we have been taught, should be brief and conclusive, whether this, which is vague and inconclusive, should be called a short story at all. 

In a sense, then, writers such as Woolf and her 'modern' contemporaries were engaged in the creation of hybrid forms that could serve as better vessels for the jarringly new experience of modernity. But unlike the key canonical figures of the modernist movement, Jones actually experienced the first great war of modernity in person. As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that his need for formal experimentation seems especially urgent, and that his text should defy our attempts at definition.

James Nouch

A journey to death, in Venice

In ‘The Aporia of Bourgeois Art: Desire in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice’, Hayes and Quinby present a reading of Mann’s novella through ‘a discourse of desire (…) produced by a system of binary oppositions in which one term is privileged over the other’ (1). As Death in Venice progresses, there is an uncanny merge of these initially apparent binaries, seen in Aschenbach’s decline as he becomes increasingly obsessed by Tadzio.

 

‘[Tadzio’s head] was like the head of Eros, with the creamy lustre of Parian marble, the brows fine-drawn and serious, the temples and ear darkly covered by the neat right-angled growth of the curling hair.’ (2).

Fig. 1

When considering the text in Nietzschean terms, the tensions between Apollonian and Dionysian powers can be seen to manifest in Aschenbach’s obsession with Tadzio, who he sees as being ‘as beautiful as a young god’ (Mann, p. 227). There is a parallel to be drawn between Tadzio, object of Aschenbach’s desires, and Tadzio’s sisters, who are seen, defeminised, dressed in unflattering, ‘cloistral’ clothing, reaffirming the concept of the female body as an object of desire (Mann, p.219).

On his journey to Venice in part three, Aschenbach observes an old man, masquerading in youth by wearing make-up and a wig. There is arguably an explicit shift in Aschenbach’s perception of the ordered, socially correct, Apollonian world around him, into a disordered, Dionysian one, ‘increasingly deranged and bizarre’ (Mann, p. 211). Perhaps this marks the beginning of the end for Aschenbach, as though from his decision to travel to Venice, he is fated to his death. T. J. Reed suggests in ‘Death in Venice’: Making and Unmaking a Master, that Aschenbach is ‘the fated victim of a god, his vacation a necessary passage to death at an appointed place’ (3). Later, in part five, Aschenbach appears as a reflection of the old man, described as wearing a scarlet necktie and broad brimmed straw hat, almost exactly as the Dionysian figure had worn in part three.

‘The old man (…) could not carry the wine as his youthful companions had done, and he was lamentably drunk’ (Mann, p. 213).

Fig. 2

So follows a tension of Apollonian and Dionysian forces as Aschenbach’s own balance is shifted back and forth between the two, as he focuses his attention towards Tadzio, and then as he tries to leave Venice, only to return to the hotel and to Tadzio. The tensions are, perhaps, reconciled in Aschenbach’s death, by forsaking ‘classical Apollonian form’ (Hayes and Quinby), because, as Nietzsche suggests, ‘wherever the Dionysian voice was heard, the Apollonian norm seemed suspended or destroyed’ (4).

Fig. 3

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Fig. 1: Statue of Eros stringing his bow, in the Musei Capitolini.

Fig. 2: Seated Dionysos holding out a kantharos, in the British Museum.

Fig. 3: Final Scene from the 1971 film, Death in Venice.

(1) Tom Hayes and Lee Quinby, ‘The Aporia of Bourgeois Art: Desire in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice’ in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 31:2 (Spring 1989), p. 159.

(2) Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. by David Luke (London: Vintage, 1990), p. 223.

(3) T. J. Reed, ‘Death in Venice’: Making and Unmaking a Master (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994), p. 11.

(4) Freidrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy <http://evans-experintialism.freewebspace.com/nietzsche_birth_tragedy_part_B.htm>

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Useful link

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Laura Lovelock

Ah Venice!

Venice, the sinking and stinking ‘queen of the Adriatic’ is a deadly place in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912). Behind the façade of the ‘splendid city’ flows the ‘murky labyrinth of canals’ that wind around the buildings like the rivers Styx, Acheron, Lethe, Phlegethon and Cocytus. Gustav Von Aschenbach’s fate, like Oedipus Rex, is apparent from the outset as the re-incarnated Charon ferries him across the water. The reader, like a Greek Chorus, shouts ‘stop!’ but Gustav carries on; he is drawn by the pleasure-filled image of ‘Ah Venice!’ articulated by the boat’s ‘goateed’ ticket master. Interestingly, the same phrase is used by Indiana Jones when seduced by an Austrian beauty in another decade.

Gustav Von Aschenbach is Mann’s lab rat in a literary experiment. The novella looks at the possibilities of homosexual emotion whilst, as David Luke notes, trying out ‘a kind of post-naturalistic, post-decadent aesthetic theory and practice.’ Gustav arrives at Venice; this quasi Thebes is a sick city with a mysterious disease lurking in the background. Gustav seems to solve the hushed-up riddle, but like Oedipus, he cannot escape the impending doom. Venice soon becomes a battle ground for an agon between, what Nietzsche calls, ‘two art-sponsoring deities’: Apollo and Dionysius.

Enter Tadzio, the ‘god-like’ beauty whose sculptural features attracts the gaze of the protagonist. The boy is ‘entirely beautiful’ with a ‘head of Eros’ and ‘the creamy lustre of Parian marble’ as if Winckelmann was describing him. Luke describes Tadzio as the ‘meeting point of the Apolline cult of disciplined sculptured beauty and the dark, destructive longing of Eros-Dionysius.’ Tadzio is statue-like; he is an êgolma (the Greek word for statue) meaning 'something to be gazed at' and Gustav desires to be a part of this creation. Even the name ‘Tadzio’ is formed by the fragments he acquires whilst eavesdropping.

Not all the characters are so beautiful. Mann creates a carnival of quasi mythical individuals. Voluptuous mouths and grotesque features re-appear like Wagnerian leitmotifs spelling out disaster for Gustav. The minstrel licks ‘the corner of his mouth’ like the ‘dandified old man’ who is himself an eerie reflection of what Gustav will soon become. Perhaps these numerous irruptions are manifestations of Dionysius, or even, death itself. The strange man in Munich, the ticket master and the gondolier all herald death with their strange and sometimes deformed characteristics. As we encounter these characters we suddenly think how they completely juxtapose with Tadzio - or maybe not. A closer look at Tadzio reveals his ‘jagged and pale’ teeth. Is it possible that this ‘moment’s ornament’ could be another irruption of Dionysius?  Luke locates Tadzio ‘between innocence and a certain half-conscious sensuous coquetry.’ But is this Gustav’s Tadzio – a product of his dreamy imagination?

Dionysius kicks Apollo off Gustav’s right-hand shoulder when, at the end of an orgiastic and highly erotic dream, the speaker notes that ‘the dreamer now was with them and in them, he [Gustav] belonged to the stranger- god.’ However, self-destruction soon follows when he loses ‘the rational freedom of the will’ as well as, what the Kantian tradition would call, ‘the specific dignity’ or Würde of a man. He fails to warn the family of the sickness! He succumbs to irrational behaviour! He stalks Tadzio without self-control! The Hyacinthus myth reverses when the beauty survives and the flying discus strikes one of his admirers. Aschenbach is no more! 

The death of Gustav symbolises a failure to combine the artistic spirits of Apollo and Dionysius. Bradbury and McFarlane use these deities when trying to describe the difficulty that arises in defining the nature of Modernism:  

It is one of the larger commonplaces of cultural history that we can distinguish a kind of oscillation in style over periods of time, an ebb and flow between a predominantly rational world-view (Neo-Classicism, Enlightenment, Realism) and alternate spasms of irrational or subjective endeavour (Baroque, Sturm und Drang, Romanticism). The resultant temptation is to regard ages as being identifiably one or the other: head or heart is in command, reason or emotion dominates, the cultural pattern is ‘naïv’ or ‘sentimentalisch’, Apollo or Dionysius claims allegiance. It may help us to understand Modernism if we recognize that these spirits can cross and interfuse. 

Fusing Apollo and Dionysius would form a new Janus-like god. In order for 'newness' to be achieved, death must occur. Bradbury and Mcfarlane note that the ‘war itself can be recognised as the apocalyptic moment of transition into the new’. In a way, Aschenbach was a relic and his failure to pacify the warring agon between Apollo and Dionysius was the cause of his death in Venice.

Nathan Llywelyn Munday

Works Cited

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912)

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1871)

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764)

Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 (1991)

Looking Beyond the Railings in James Joyce’s Dubliners.

In contrast to his most experimental Modernist work Ulysses (1922), James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners (1914) initially appears to contain more linear narratives of ordinary people in their ordinary lives. Through an analysis of the epiphany motif which is a prominent feature in all of his short stories, it is evident that this is not the case. Joyce’s characters experience moments of realisation in each story which he himself referred to as ‘epiphanies’. Traditionally an epiphany connotes an enlightening religious revelation. However, Joyce’s Dubliners reverses the conventional definition of the epiphany; they are far more ambiguous than the term suggests. This leads Kevin J. H. Dettmar to suggest that each character actually experiences an ‘epiphony’ and he argues that the ‘false epiphany […] is always ultimately subjective, the validity – the efficacy – of a character’s epiphany is available to scrutiny’. Joyce’s characters cannot move beyond paralysis and the epiphanies demonstrate the moment of recognition in which they realise this.

A close reading of ‘Eveline’ reveals Joyce’s epiphany/epiphony and is exemplary of the characteristics of Joyce’s short story collection. The eponymous protagonist is stuck in a state of paralysis in this story, fixed in a circulatory routine within ordinary domestic life: ‘Home! She looked round the room reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years’. Eveline is offered an escape from this familiarity in an alternative life in Buenos Ayres with an enigmatic sailor named Frank. Frank’s representation remains detached from the narrative so he does not gain the trust of either Eveline or the reader. The narrator’s description of her opportunity to escape paralysis appears predetermined by Frank: ‘She was to go away with him by the night boat to be his wife and to live with him in Buenos Ayres where he had a home waiting for her.’ It is clear that Eveline has little agency in her fate and it is suggested that Frank has constructed a similarly circulatory life for her in the ‘home’ which ‘he had waiting’. The ‘waiting’ home appears sinister similar to a predator waiting for its vulnerable prey.

Eveline’s epiphany results in her abruptly deciding to remain in Ireland, leaving Frank to sail off towards her abandoned future. Her decision is made on the dock when she feels that, ‘All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.’ The image of the seas tumbling reveal the inaccessibility of a better future as if she would drown before reaching Argentina. The iron railing is an image which effectively demonstrates the ambivalence of Joyce’s epiphanies. The railings are fragmented: made up of both solid bars and empty spaces. These empty spaces represent the possibility to break free from routine but it is impossible due to the physical barriers which break up the empty space. The fragmentary characteristics of railings, in that the bars physically represent a barrier to freedom, but this freedom can be seen through the empty spaces beyond the bars, displays a future that can never be reached. Eveline’s potential to escape is equally ambiguous and fragmented as it is not necessarily going to result in her liberation from paralysis. Joyce’s epiphanies are neither freeing nor caging as characters are left in a liminal state between bars/barriers and empty spaces.

The closing sentences of the story maintain the tone of ambiguity: ‘She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.’ Just as animals are evolved to their habitats, Eveline is unable to adapt to leaving Dublin. Additionally the image of a ‘helpless animal’ alludes to a caged animal unable to break free from captivity. The predatory undertones of Frank’s character culminate in the direct comparison of Eveline to a ‘helpless animal’. The emptiness of Eveline’s final gaze at Frank portrays this inability to abandon her home/habitat as she is both emotionally and physically holding on to Dublin. 

Joyce’s short stories demonstrate the physical railings of linear narratives but significantly the empty spaces in between which ultimately facilitate the reader’s epiphany that paralysis prevails.

By Sarah Lough and Niamh Hughes 

Colour and symbolism in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Blue and Green’

A Victorian lustre

 

Colour is powerful. It modifies our perception of objects in a way that is difficult to communicate through language. Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘Blue and Green’, first published in Monday or Tuesday (1921), makes an attempt at reconciling this power of symbolism with the modernist aim of representing reality through language using unconventional structures and forms.

‘Blue and Green’ portrays a conscious mind grappling with the myriad images that a ray of green light evokes. It is an investigation into consciousness and demonstrates how colour can be a catalyst for the conscious mind to perceive reality in different imaginative ways. Green gives the mind a link between a Victorian ornament (the lustre) and palm trees, parakeets and ponds. It is not as if the lustre has an outside context that informs the viewer’s perception of the object, as may be the case with an ornament taken from another country. The lustre’s transparency gives it a sort of neutrality that allows it to be modified by colour, almost as a blank canvas.

As the green light starts to fade with the coming of night, the viewer’s thoughts have rested on “the ruffled surface of ocean” where “the aimless waves sway beneath the empty sky.”(1) By this time the mind has begun a narrative, in which the new blue light follows the water symbolism in evoking images of the sea, which continue until the end of the story. If the viewer’s meandering thoughts had commenced with the blue light rather than the green, then any number of other images (such as the sky, or bluebells) may have been induced. However, water has been firmly established in the viewer’s mind, finding its outlet through various water-related images. ‘Blue and Green’ is an effective representation of the mind’s journey from perceiving a glass ornament — that it may have perceived many times without event — to revelling in its imagination of the sea, all through the capacity for colour to profoundly affect consciousness.

The philosopher G. E. Moore outlined the immense difficulty of properly explaining colour in his essay ‘The Refutation of Idealism’: “that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact seems to escape us: it seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be transparent — we look through it and see nothing but the blue; we may be convinced that there is something but what it is no philosopher, I think, has yet clearly recognized.”(2) In true modernist fashion, however, Woolf does not attempt to explain colour but only to represent its effects on the working mind and its ability to adjust the perception of reality in a purely subjective way, since every mind would be affected in different ways.

(1) Virginia Woolf, ‘Blue and Green’ in Selected Short Stories, ed. Sandra Kemp (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 44.

(2) G. E. Moore, ‘The Refutation of Idealism’, in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, ed. Morris Weitz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), p. 27. 



Owen Harry 

Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf: A Feud Between Two Literary Generations

In a feud that lasted more than a decade, Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf went blow for blow until, perhaps, the dispute eventually became more personal than professional. Nevertheless, some interesting insights into the character and what makes a good character arose. For example, whilst Bennett believed that Georgian's were to be blamed because they were 'unable to create characters that are real, true and convincing' ('Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, 1924, p. 4), Woolf locates the problem in the previous generation of the Edwardians as she believed that although they are able to supply a great deal of detail, they lack the ability to create complex characters. Of course Woolf is unable to leave this statement hanging; she must provide evidence. It is here that not only does Woolf provide evidence against Mr. Bennett, but also Mr Wells and Mr. Galsworthy too. On pages 13-14 of 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown', Woolf uses the figure of Mrs. Brown to argue that Mr. Wells would act in ignorance and would project her as perfectly happy and would omit her poor dress and anxiousness. She implies that Mr. Galsworthy would simply ignore or discard her, and she asserts that Mr. Bennett would do his best to avoid her. This is perhaps where it gets a little more personal, as Woolf extends this criticism of Arnold Bennett into his own work, using a paragraph from his novel, Hilda Lessways, as an example. Woolf boldly argues that Bennett, and the Edwardians in general, were materialists who were more preoccupied with outward details rather than the inner complexities of people and life. Woolf calls to abandon Edwardian interests in outside details and to instead embrace the internal complexities of that character in his/ her representation. In An Unwritten Novel (1921), Woolf not only gives voice to a "normal" middle aged woman (like Mrs. Brown), but also muses about the complexity of the soul and the inner self and wonders 'when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? - the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world [...]' ([p. 34). In more abstract works, such as Blue and Green (1921), Woolf uses literary impressionism to convey what is difficult to express through language, but which is ultimately a representation of one's innermost feelings as portrayed through objects, sounds and light- 'harsh cries', 'sharp blades', 'empty sky'. Even in these abstract works a high sense of reality is achieved; we know not who the narrator is, or if there is one, but we are able to sense emotions that are so true, so identifiable, that there is no need for the descriptiveness a writer such as Arnold Bennett may provide, for Woolf bares the inner complexities of the soul through the words she paints. 




Sammy Evans