And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Although the novel is obviously concerned with post-war 'modernist' concerns of materialism and faithlessness, the ending of the Great Gatsby seems to transcend any prescriptive interpretation. For the rhythm of the prose engenders a sense of the poetry of existence which overwhelms any one particular knowledge. Remembrance is pivotal to our identity and Gatsby's 'wonder' reveals his singularity, his awe-struck hope in the face of his ideal; even when that ideal is proved hollow and  unworthy. Gatsby's  tragic fallibility and his compromised brilliance are suggested rather than identified by the narrator's lexis. Carraway's choice of 'blue lawn' , 'green light' and 'wonder' all privilege Gatsby's sense of inspiration, his awe. The beat of the prose resembles a  heart; Gatsby's pulse of being is reanimated through the narrative of the only character to love him at all.

A parting gift and hypnotic requiem.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

This arrests us within the narrator's trapped  psychological time-line. We are in a world of haunting recurrence. Dreams secrete messages that require careful unlocking. We are invited into a world of hidden codes, lost desires. 'Manderley' impresses as it sounds both mythic and real. This conflation  between the world of unconscious urgings and conscious acknowledgement excites and entices us to read on.

We are compelled by the narratorial voice speaking of a compulsion we do not understand.But then do we doubt their authority too? For they are under the spell of recurrence. They go back because they cannot resist the riddle of the past. The intimacy of 'last night' reaches bathetic climax with the word 'again' . This is unfinished business. It has the perfect rhythm of remembrance. The past is only ever finished, never finished with.

Fabulous.

Crush

The older she gets,
the more she awakes
with somebody’s face strewn in her head
like petals which once made a flower.

What everyone does
is sit by a desk
and stare at the view, till the time
where they live reappears.  Mostly in words.

Imagine a girl
turning to see
love stand by a window, taller,
clever, anointed with sudden light.

Yes, like an angel then,
to be truthful now.
At first a secret, erotic, mute;
today a language she cannot recall.

And we’re all owed joy,
sooner or later.
The trick’s to remember whenever
it was, or to see it coming.

'It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. An expedition, I should say, which I will undertake alone, in the comfort of Mr Farraday's Ford; an expedition which, as I foresee it, will undertake me through much of the finest countryside of England to the West Country, and may keep me away from Darlington Hall for as much as five or six days.'  ( Kazuo Ishiguro , The Remains of the Day)

Ishiguro's narrator opens the novel with a rather convoluted and ponderous discussion of a projected 'expedition' which seems ironically named in view of its very English geographical limitations. These limitations are immediately 'heard' by the reader too, as we notice the rather stilted rhythm and register of the speaker. This is a narrator who reflects, and then reflects again for good measure. And indeed each word is measured against the next so that we immediately start to inhabit the world of the speaker whose rhetorical method is one of formality and fastidious measure. Thus the voice of the narrator at the beginning of Ishiguro's novel creates an expectation of a very delineated, bounded world through the corresponding boundedness of the point of view. And, unsurprisingly, but nonetheless brilliantly, Ishiguro delivers up a world to the reader which is studied, claustrophobic and mannered to the point of heartlessness. 'Englishness' is dismantled piece by piece by a writer whose 'eye' is relentlessly acute.

A fabulously written novel whose style of narration matches the repression of the protagonist perfectly. ( Needless to say, the speaker drives me nuts!)

Chapter 1
1801. - I have just returned from a visit to my landlord - the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist's heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name. 'Mr. Heathcliff?' I said.

A nod was the answer.

Novelists are frequently concerned with 'getting it wrong' and Emily Bronte's opening to Wuthering Heights presents the world of Heathcliff through the initial eye and vocabulary of a truly fatuous narrator. How ill equipped is Lockwood here to describe the scene before him? The strait-jacketed register of civilised exchange which Lockwood attempts to inflict upon the Heights ironically produces a perspective on this  tempestuous world  that renders the Heights monumentally 'Other' to all that Lockwood purports to know. Indeed the complexity of the narratorial perspective, shared anomalously between the house keeper Nelly Dean and the interloper Lockwood seems to leave much of the novel's 'truth' or purported 'centre' literally 'elsewhere'. For how can two such limited narrators convert the mysterious relationships they look upon at the Heights into any convincing and sustainable  reality?

When we read this opening we notice how the setting is apprehended by Lockwood -the- visitor, in a vocabulary that he converts into a parody of the Gothic. Thus he uses words like 'desolate' and 'solitary' but has no real idea of what these words actually mean. They are empty of signfication being the traces of reading experiences enjoyed in the security of Lockwood's 'civilised' past.   Notice how the use of exclamation marks bestow a naive enthusiam upon a world that seems markedly unwelcoming. Lockwood is playing at being Romantic, he is enjoying the signs of isolation without having the slightest concept what such isolation encompasses. Heathcliff's mute acknowledgement of Lockwood's presence highlights the chasm between them linguistically and psychically. Lockwood has not the language to know Heathcliff and the latter knows that from the beginning hence his silence.

We are in a space where words fail to seal in meaning safely. Words fail to  stabilise the anti-social energies of a world profoundly resistant to cognitive clarity. The listeners within the story cannot understand what they hear; so we as reading listeners have to take our path to an interpretation  of the novel  and this is not a comfortable at all.

The later scene when Lockwood attempts to decode all the different signatures of Cathy inscibed on wood in her old room is one of most pyschologiclaly astute in fiction.  Identity is encrypted in language and this confrontation between failed interpreter and interpretation is foregrounded initially in this opening scene to the novel. Little wonder that such estrangement manifests itself in myth, as myth provides the only interpretation available for that which cannot be apprehended in any other way. 

When the Kelveys were well out of sight of Burnells', they sat down to rest on a big red drain-pipe by the side of the road. Lil's cheeks were still burning; she took off the hat with the quill and held it on her knee. Dreamily they looked over the hay paddocks, past the creek, to the group of wattles where Logan's cows stood waiting to be milked. What were their thoughts?
Presently our Else nudged up close to her sister. But now she had forgotten the cross lady. She put out a finger and stroked her sister's quill; she smiled her rare smile.
"I seen the little lamp," she said, softly.
Then both were silent once more.

Only an artist of Mansfield's calibre could communicate this fluid transformation of redness from the drain pipe to the child's blush, to the little lamp. We are held in some hypnotic moment where differences are elided and dream truth is privileged. The children's trance like state allows them to temporarily escape the petty degradations of their poverty and this moment of communion between the two sisters is one of the most precious connections in Modernist Fiction. Like Monet, Mansfield has made her girls alive through fresh strokes of colour drenched in light: they have seen the lamp and that we feel is more than enough!

Sublime!

Toni Morrison: Beloved



124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old--as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny band prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill.

We all live somewhere. Our living space may communicate far more of our personality and emotional landscape than we realise. This relationship between inner and outer worlds is frequently explored  and exploited by writers and this opening to Toni Morrison's Beloved is a very fine example of such a relationship. The story begins with emphatic conflict and this prompts considerable interest and disturbance on the part of the reader. This not a passive, complacent read!

We are confronted by a world where houses are spiteful and babies are blamed for such negative emotion. How can this be we wonder? How can such  juxtapositions exist?

The lack of disbelief about such a psychically disruptive situation is also striking. The inhabitants of the house 'knew it' and this conviction prevents us doubting the veracity of such an extreme situation. Thus we are the outsiders to this world with it strange vocabulary and sensibility. We feel a sense of awkwardness in the face of such detail.

We are also aware of the setting having its own distinctive rhythm. We can hear the 'voice' of this opening as it speaks to us in ways which thwart easy translation. This 'beat' or 'pulse' is significant as the house itself has its own voice; indeed the trouble that haunts the house seems  to centre around the reality of a disruptive psychical presence. So the voice of the text demands to be heard; it demands listeners, and this perhaps is what we presume, the text will supply.

All the detail in this opening speaks of loss and abandonment.  The characters have reached( and respected) their limits in terms of suffering. Morrison's intensely explores the thresholds of endurance reached by each charcter in sensory detail.

For we have crossed a threshold in entering into this violent world of 124 and such a crossing privileges different ways of knowing and behaving. Morrison once talked of the use of 'discredited knowledge' in her fiction and Beloved's opening makes not attempt to undermine or undervalue such 'discredited' ways of reading the world.

We wonder at the date.1873, the time of the Abolitionists in USA. A precarious and dangerously uncertain time and one whose volatility and provides the  horrorific background then for this mesmerising novel. All the 'signs' in the opening combine to produce a dramatic and uneasy setting which make demands upon the readers' assumptions and emotions.

Genius!