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 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1995 978-0-333-60760-2 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Great Britain 1995 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-39202-5 ISBN 978-0-230-37435-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230374355 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 95 First published in the United States of America 1995 by Scholarly and Reference Division, ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., 175 Fifth A venue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-12048-1 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 978-0-312-12048-1 1. Bowen, Elizabeth, 1899-1973-Criticism and interpretation. 1. 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 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 X Acknowledgements Jonathan Cape Ltd, on behalf of the estate of Elizabeth Bowen, for the extracts from the following novels by Elizabeth Bowen: The Death of the Heart, The Heat of the Day, A World of Love, The Little Girls and Eva Trout; Curtis Brown Ltd, London, on behalf of the estate of Elizabeth Bowen, for the extracts from the following novels by Elizabeth Bowen: The Hotel, The Last September, Friends and Relations, To the North and The House in Paris; Alfred A. Knopf Inc., for the extracts from the following novels by Elizabeth Bowen: The Last September, copyright 1929, 1952 by Elizabeth Bowen; To the North, copyright 1933, renewed 1961 by Elizabeth Bowen; The House in Paris, copyright 1935, renewed 1963 by Elizabeth Bowen; The Death of the Heart, copyright 1938, renewed 1966 by Elizabeth Bowen; The Heat of the Day, copyright 1948 Elizabeth Bowen; A World of Love, copyright 1954, © 1955 by Elizabeth Bowen; The Little Girls, copyright © 1963 by Elizabeth Bowen; Eva Trout or Changing Scenes, copyright © 1968 by Elizabeth Bowen. All the above extracts are reprinted by kind permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc. Finally, the authors would like to thank the Institute for Languages and Intercultural Studies at the University of Aalborg, the Depart- ment of English Studies at the University of Stirling, and the Depart- ment of English at the University of Bristol for assistance in covering the cost of the permission fees. ANDREW BENNETT Tampere, Cambridge, Aalborg NICHOLAS ROYLE Tampere, Widworthy, Stirling