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.

---

[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