Narrative 2013

I'm presenting a paper on Barbara Comyns at the Narrative Conference in Manchester, UK, this June. Here's my abstract:

Lightness of Voice and the Levitating Narratives of Barbara Comyns

The British writer Barbara Comyns wrote eleven well-received novels from the late 1940s to 1990, but she has been largely neglected in terms of scholarly attention. (The MLA bibliography lists one academic article, and she is briefly noted in a handful of monographs covering mid-century British fiction.) My paper seeks to bring renewed attention to this overlooked writer by focusing on what most commentators have mentioned admiringly, but only in passing: her distinctive voice. Drawing on James Phelan’s description of voice in Narrative as Rhetoric, I will examine how voice connects to both character and plot in two of Comyns’s novels: Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950) and The Vet’s Daughter (1959). I will argue that Comyns’s use of voice creates narrators particularly attuned to the undercurrent of violence that subsists within social relations. These narrative voices, spoken in homodiegetic narration by young women, are often described as simple, matter-of-fact, honest, and naïve. But another quality is also present, an “authority of address” and “method of seduction” (Davis viii, x), a “marvelousness,” “childlike wonder,” and “lightness (in Calvino’s usage of the term)” (Evenson vi). These voices, both naïve and seductive, straightforward and full of wonder, create uncanny effects in Comyns’s often darkly comic narratives, presenting the narrators as both ignorant and knowing: ignorant of normative social conventions while possessing an outsider’s knowledge of the violence that lies within them. If these narrators are often the passive victims of violence, their traumatic knowledge (Hartman) uncannily lifts them above these experiences, offering them the means to find a language for the traumatic effects of violence that that would not otherwise find expression in the normative discourses surrounding them. This lifting-above—literalized in the surreal and Gothic touches found in Comyns’s work, such as visions and levitation—is what accounts for the clear-eyed wonder and lightness of the voice.

Works Cited

Davis, Kathryn. Introduction. The Vet’s Daughter. By Barbara Comyns. New York: New York Review Books, 2003. vii-xi.

Evenson, Brian. Introduction. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. By Barbara Comyns. Urbana, IL: Dorothy, a publishing project, 2010. i-vii.

Hartman, Geoffrey. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.” New Literary History 26.3 (1995): 537-63.

Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination

My book Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination: The Death Drive in Post-World War I British Fiction is now available from Ashgate Press.

Looking closely at both case histories of shell shock and Modernist novels by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf, Wyatt Bonikowski shows how the figure of the shell-shocked soldier and the symptoms of war trauma were transformed by the literary imagination. Situating his study with respect to Freud’s concept of the death drive, Bonikowski reads the repetitive symptoms of shell-shocked soldiers as a resistance to representation and narrative. In making this resistance part of their narratives, Ford, West, and Woolf broaden our understanding of the traumatic effects of war, exploring the possibility of a connection between the trauma of war and the trauma of sexuality. Parade’s End, The Return of the Soldier, and Mrs. Dalloway are all structured around the relationship between the soldier who returns from war and the women who receive him, but these novels offer no prospect for the healing effects of the union between men and women. Instead, the novels underscore the divisions within the home and the self, drawing on the traumatic effects of shell shock to explore the link between the public events of history and the intimate traumas of the relations between self and other.

Looking closely at both case histories of shell shock and Modernist novels by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf, Wyatt Bonikowski shows how the figure of the shell-shocked soldier and the symptoms of war trauma were transformed by the literary imagination. Situating his study with respect to Freud’s concept of the death drive, Bonikowski reads the repetitive symptoms of shell-shocked soldiers as a resistance to representation and narrative. In making this resistance part of their narratives, Ford, West, and Woolf broaden our understanding of the traumatic effects of war, exploring the possibility of a connection between the trauma of war and the trauma of sexuality. Parade’s End, The Return of the Soldier, and Mrs. Dalloway are all structured around the relationship between the soldier who returns from war and the women who receive him, but these novels offer no prospect for the healing effects of the union between men and women. Instead, the novels underscore the divisions within the home and the self, drawing on the traumatic effects of shell shock to explore the link between the public events of history and the intimate traumas of the relations between self and other. - See more at: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409444176#sthash.mVA2IgED.dpuf

Looking closely at both case histories of shell shock and Modernist novels by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf, Wyatt Bonikowski shows how the figure of the shell-shocked soldier and the symptoms of war trauma were transformed by the literary imagination. Situating his study with respect to Freud’s concept of the death drive, Bonikowski reads the repetitive symptoms of shell-shocked soldiers as a resistance to representation and narrative. In making this resistance part of their narratives, Ford, West, and Woolf broaden our understanding of the traumatic effects of war, exploring the possibility of a connection between the trauma of war and the trauma of sexuality. Parade’s End, The Return of the Soldier, and Mrs. Dalloway are all structured around the relationship between the soldier who returns from war and the women who receive him, but these novels offer no prospect for the healing effects of the union between men and women. Instead, the novels underscore the divisions within the home and the self, drawing on the traumatic effects of shell shock to explore the link between the public events of history and the intimate traumas of the relations between self and other. - See more at: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409444176#sthash.mVA2IgED.dpuf

Looking closely at both case histories of shell shock and Modernist novels by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf, Wyatt Bonikowski shows how the figure of the shell-shocked soldier and the symptoms of war trauma were transformed by the literary imagination. Situating his study with respect to Freud’s concept of the death drive, Bonikowski reads the repetitive symptoms of shell-shocked soldiers as a resistance to representation and narrative. In making this resistance part of their narratives, Ford, West, and Woolf broaden our understanding of the traumatic effects of war, exploring the possibility of a connection between the trauma of war and the trauma of sexuality. Parade’s End, The Return of the Soldier, and Mrs. Dalloway are all structured around the relationship between the soldier who returns from war and the women who receive him, but these novels offer no prospect for the healing effects of the union between men and women. Instead, the novels underscore the divisions within the home and the self, drawing on the traumatic effects of shell shock to explore the link between the public events of history and the intimate traumas of the relations between self and other. - See more at: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409444176#sthash.mVA2IgED.dpuf

From an interview with Mary Caponegro:

"I work from ideas and images and abstractions—from an impulse to conflate the sensual and the abstract, and from an impulse to generate a species of music. For a writer such as myself, who wishes to blur the line between fantasy and reality, a crisp delineation of character and setting, etc. would not serve my purpose—whereas the creation of a mood or texture might be utterly crucial. Plot might be quite intricate, but in ways likely comprised more of nuance than event. I suppose that in my work, character tends to become merely a prop for voice, and often there are very few characters, perhaps only one speaker who refers to other characters and whom the reader experiences only through that 'central intelligence.' But when characters do figure, they might have quite defined attributes. My interest is, I think, to explore them more from the inside out than from the outside in, if you will—laying bare their psyches through involution of syntax, as if syntax itself were the objective correlative—rather than giving a host of external details from which the reader can deduce internal 'truths.' One could view my work as a fiction of the psychological epiphenomena of event. My tendency toward abstraction may be felt by some conventional readers to hold them at a distance, but I hope the psychological intensity compensates for this."

Norman Fischer, from his essay "Do You Want to Make Something Out of It?":

The reason we need art so desperately I would say is that the world and we ourselves persist in being made. There is something exhausting and troublesome in the madeness of the world and in the madeness of ourselves. What is made has always the quality of limitation or unsatisfactoriness. Madeness captures us into a vicious cycle of desiring more madeness or better madeness, and the madeness we get only makes us want to make improvements or additions. Art making is an anti-making. It is an anti-making because it is a making of what is useless--this is what makes art art, that it is useless, that it doesn't do anything, that it is something inherently unmade and this is the source of its liveliness. Any piece of art stares us in the face with the fact of its being what it is uselessly, it is a record of a person's commitment to the confrontation with the made, a confrontation one is bound to come away from second best, and yet one does it, and reaches a peak of exaltation in the doing of it, and the art work facing the viewer or hearer is a phenomenal testament to that useless confrontation, which by virtue of its supreme failure, calls our life into question. If you really look at a piece of art or hear a piece of music or poetry or see a dance, you walk away wondering about your life. This is what these objects are supposed to do, this is why artists make such sacrifices in the doing of what they do--because this doing is the undoing at least temporarily of what has done them in in their lives and would do them in to the point of death or madness if it weren't undone in the process of making art.

Wigleaf is featuring two stories of mine this week: "The Old Church" and "Sister Finds a Box." Check out the postcard I sent, too.

My story "None of Your Business" is the web feature at Hobart today. I've been reading daily since they rebooted the web site, and it's been spectacular. Very happy to be part of it.

I am very happy to see "Bible Camp" on the long list of Wigleaf's Top (Very) Short Fictions of 2012. Thanks to Scott Garson and Ravi Mangla for including my story and for creating this list every year, which is such a wonderful resource for everyone interested in the form of the short short story. (Here's the link to the Top 50.) I see that Ravi is stepping down from his role as Series Editor for this list and that Lauren Ellen Scott will take over, along with Mel Bosworth, Erin Fitzgerald, and Sean Lovelace. It'll be exciting to see what the next year will bring.