Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives

204 Pages·1994·10.16 MB·English

by  Andrew Bennett, Nicholas Royle

Elizabeth Bowen and the
Dissolution of the Novel
Still Lives
Andrew Bennet and Nicholas Royle
ELIZABETH BOWEN AND
THE DISSOLUTION OF THE NOVEL
Also by Andrew Bennett
KEATS, NARRATIVE AND AUDIENCE
READERS AND READING (editor)
READING READING (editor)
Also by Nicholas Royle
AFTERWORDS (editor)
TELEPATHY AND LITERATURE
Elizabeth Bowen
and the Dissolution
of the Novel
Still Lives
Andrew Bennett
University of Bristol, England
and
Nicholas Royle
University of Stirling, Scotland
Foreword by
Ann Wordsworth
M
St. Martin's Press
© Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle 1995
Foreword © Ann Wordsworth 1995
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First published in Great Britain 1995 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
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and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
ISBN 0-333-60760-0
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 95
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
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First published in the United States of America 1995 by
Scholarly and Reference Division,
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 0-312-12048-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bennett, Andrew, 1960-
Elizabeth Bowen and the dissolution of the novel: still lives /
Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle; foreword by Ann Wordsworth,
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-312-12048-6
1. Bowen, Elizabeth, 1899-1973—Criticism and interpretation.
I. Royle, Nicholas, 1957- . II. Title.
PR6003.06757Z515 1995
823' .912—dc20 93-39875
CIP
Contents
Foreword by Ann Wordsworth vii
Acknowledgements ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction xiii
Abeyances: The Hotel and The Last September 1
Shivered: To the North and Friends and Relations 23
Fanatic Immobility: The House in Paris 42
Dream Wood: The Death of the Heart 63
Sheer Kink: The Heat of the Day 82
Obelisk: A World of Love 104
Trance: The Little Girls 121
Convulsions: Eva Trout 140
Notes 158
Index 177
V
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Foreword
Ann Wordsworth
Nowadays painting occasionally makes us realize that what it
wants to create, its 'production', can no longer be works of art, but
corresponds rather to something for which there is not yet a
name. The same applies to literature. That towards which we are
advancing is not perhaps what the future will in fact disclose. Yet
that towards which we advance is vacant and full of a future we
must refrain from freezing in the traditions of past structures.1
This intimation and warning is Blanchot's, from his essay 'The Book
to Come', and its sound is not easily heard by academic ears. The
traditions of past structures are familiar and apotropaic and they
hold both critic and reader in a benign literary history which assim-
ilates the new to its own patterns: Elizabeth Bowen 'is what hap-
pened after Bloomsbury ... the link that connects Virginia Woolf
with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark'. But the nameless space which
Bennett and Royle's study invokes is unmapped and we, whether
resentfully or with relief, find ourselves denied the positioning of
the canon and the accommodation of character and plot to the suav-
ities of paraphrase. These are such stable critical practices that to
write without their architecture requires a different address, a
mobility which must take the reader out of the known context and
into a space which is more truly that of the novels themselves. The
words of the sub-title Still Lives enact this movement by an indeter-
minate pressure of adjective and adverb, noun and verb, which
breaks down the resistance of the phrase as a single defining term.
Under this pressure Bowen's vocabulary is sheered from the
mimetic function and its supposed relation to her sensibility and
freed to make transitions that surpass the activities of plot. 'Writing
is eventful.'
Bowen's novels and the corresponding chapters of this book are
generated around the energy of words and phrases - going, abey-
ances, dream wood, sheer kink.... The world of experience is no
longer separable from a linguistic drift; nothing pins activity to any
constitutive authority. The Cogito and the House of Fiction alike are
vu
viii Foreword
transgressed. Mirages of selfhood, the re-enactments of the dead on
the unwitting bodies of the living, the tensions of heat and stillness
and erotic expectation are all loosened from their explanatory con-
texts and given a figurative energy, unreified and unconstrained.
Bowen's language, only seemingly representational, becomes the
generator of what moves through the novels, across and beyond the
traditional space of literature.
The course and process of this language are not easy to trace and
it is through theoretical work that Bennett and Royle find a mode
adequate to the eventful writing of the novels. Their readings are
performative, not critically prejudged, not tautological like para-
phrase. Theory, therefore, is not used, as is so often the case, like a
talisman to give power and a safe passage to a critical work through
the authority of cited names - Derrida, Freud, Nicolas Abraham,
Maria Torok. ...
(A talisman, nevertheless, for this foreword: to cite Derrida's
'single definition of deconstruction, one as brief, elliptical and eco-
nomical as a password': 'plus d'une langue - both more than a
2
language and no more of a language'. This too is intimation and
warning to artist, critic and reader alike.)
This volume, so old-fashioned in its apparent scope - a single-
author study of a 'minor' figure whose work is most often read as a
charming but dated embodiment of traditional literary and social
values - follows instead processes of dissolution, 'of loosening, fad-
ing away, breaking up, unsolving'. The precarious beauty and com-
edy of the novels is dispersed through a writing of life/death which
the critical work in its turn mobilizes through the uncanny
exchanges of language. Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the
Novel sets a precedent for more readings and rereadings of other
novelists enfolded in traditional criticism whose future has not yet
been opened.
Notes
1. Maurice Blanchot, The Siren's Song (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982)
p. 248.
2. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986) p. 15.
Acknowledgements
When Jane Gallop learnt of this project she exclaimed incredulously:
'You're co-writing a book? How can you co-write a book?' Still uncer-
tain as to how we might want to answer such a question, we would
like to acknowledge the appropriateness of that incredulity and our
thanks for the perverse pleasure which we derived from it. To give an
account of how this book was written would, we suspect, necessitate
the writing of another. Suffice to say that there are many people with-
out whom this study would not have been possible, even though they
may have made no identifiable, and certainly no culpable contribu-
tion to it. In the first place we must register our indebtedness to the
example of Michael Gasson, most passionate and exacting of Bowen
readers. In a more immediately practical sense, we would like to
thank Robert Cooper at the University of Tampere in Finland, for driv-
ing us into the extraordinary environs of Bowen's work (we were
asked to teach To the North), and to thank our students for all their
enthusiasm and interest. In particular we should like to thank Pia
Hovi, Asko Kauppinen, Joel Kuortti, Leena Lehto, Maarit Piipponen,
Riitta Santala, Tiina Sarisalmi and Arto Schroderus. We would also
like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to Ralf Norrman,
for all his generosity and support as Professor of English at the
University of Tampere. More generally, we are very grateful to the
University for its assistance in enabling us to set up the Bowen News-
letter, now based at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and the
University of Bristol, England. Thanks, too, to everyone who has
given their critical support and encouragement in the broader and
expanding area of Bowen studies, especially Bill Readings, Sarah
Wood and Ann Wyatt-Brown. For detailed and invaluable comments
and suggestions regarding various parts of the manuscript we are
very grateful to Valerie Allen, Derek Attridge, John Bayley, Rachel
Bowlby, Maud Ellmann, Jacqueline Hall, Ann Wordsworth and Robert
Young. Finally, this book could never have happened without the
love, patience and support of Ann Bennett, Arma-Maria Hamalainen-
Bennett, Minnamarja Rasi, Kathleen Royle and Maxwell Royle.
The authors and publishers would like to thank the following for per-
mission to use copyright-material:
ix