Abstract
What makes the ‘miracle’ of reading … even more singular is that here the stone and the tomb not only contain a cadaverous emptiness that must be animated, but they also constitute the presence — hidden though it is — of what must appear.1
Bowen characters are in transit consciously.
(MT 286)
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Notes
Maurice Blanchot, ‘Reading’, in The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Station Hill, 1981) 95–6.
Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation (London: Vision, 1981) 204. Lee does, however, go on to suggest that The Little Girls and Eva Trout are not ‘merely failures of assurance’ and makes the important point that these texts become ‘increasingly concerned with the concept of a breakdown in language’: ‘That Elizabeth Bowen’s highly charged, contrived and controlled style should have been reduced to the clumsy procedures of The Little Girls can be attributed to more than obvious reasons of old age and a dissatisfaction with out-dated formulae. The last two novels incorporate the idea of a future without any verbal “style” at all’ (205–6).
See 156, where Clare admits to having written another letter in Unknown Language, but says that it arrived too late: Major BurkinJones, Clare’s father, asks her to write a letter to him in Unknown Language (115). Before he receives it, however, he is killed in the First World War. For more on posterity and reading, see Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954) 137.
For more on this passage and on the reading body in reading theory, see Andrew Bennett, ‘On Not Reading’, in Andrew Bennett (ed.), Reading Reading: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Reading (Tampere: Tampere English Studies, 1993) pp. 221–37. It should be noted that a not insignificant part of The Little Girls involves Dinah taking Clare to visit a mask-maker, Clare’s purchase of some masks for her gift shops, and their placing of a mask on Frank’s cottage wall; see especially 182–8. 13. See Dinah’s comments on Clare’s ‘symbol shop’ (180).
See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss et al. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
‘What really expresses people?’ asks Dinah, ‘The things, I’m sure, that they have obsessions about.… You know, a person’s only a person when they have some really raging peculiarity’ (15); the object of the second collection of objects to be buried ‘for posterity’ is, Dinah claims, to preserve the specific identity of herself and her friends and acquaintances (14–15). The collection ironically suggests, however, that there is in fact very little to differentiate people (10). For an interesting discussion of this idea more generally, see Ian Hacking’s essay, ‘Making Up People’, in Thomas C. Heller et al. (eds), Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individualism, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford: University of California Press, 1986) 222–37.
For a recent empirical study of the trance of reading, see Victor Nell, Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988).
This undecidable sense-making quality of the name is what Joel Kuortti has named ‘nomsensical’: see his ‘“To be born again …”: Reading Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses’, in Bennett (ed.), Reading Reading, pp. 69–82. Compare also the duplicities of Robert Kelway and Harrison in The Heat of the Day. Names and their instabilities are constantly highlighted in The Little Girls in other ways: they can, for example, be ghostly (119), as well as the subject of irritation (33), confusion (55), or half-veiled ridicule (Francis on Mrs Artworth: 202). In her review of The Little Girls, Christine Brooke-Rose points to naming in the novel as one of Bowen’s ‘main affectations’ and includes a substantial list of, especially, euphemistic namings in the novel (‘Lady Precious Stream’, The London Magazine, 4(2) [May, 1964] 84–5).
See, for example, Allan E. Austin, Elizabeth Bowen (New York: Twayne, 1971), Chapter 4; Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation (London: Vision, 1981), Chapter 7.
See, for example, Edwin J. Kenny, Elizabeth Bowen (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1975) 93.
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© 1995 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle
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Bennett, A., Royle, N. (1995). Trance. In: Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374355_7
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