Karen Scherzinger

Allegory, the fantastic and trauma in Yann Martel's Life of Pi

Abstract Yann Martels Life of Pi takes as its focal point a deeply traumatic event that befalls its main protagonist, Pi Patel. One effect of Pis traumatic experience is that it hinders his ability fully to communicate the scope and detail of his suffering. This article argues that in its daring experimentation with allegory and the mode of the fantastic, the novel works creatively to confront the difficulties inherent in the representation of Pis trauma. The double narrative presented in the novel is an allegory, but not a straightforward one: its unorthodox implementation is best understood in the context of the deconstructive possibilities of allegory as delineated by Paul de Man. This device, in turn, opens up possibilities for the function of the fantastic, both strategies displaying significant potential for the expression of the ineffable.

Dying without Death: Temporality, Writing, and Survival in Maurice Blanchot's The Instant of My Death and Don DeLillo's Falling Man

What is at stake when we write about near-death? This essay engages with the temporal repercussions—a radical “time out of joint”—that the event of near-death opens up. It explores how Maurice Blanchot (in The Instant of My Death) and Don DeLillo (in Falling Man) attempt to write the instance of remaining through the creative use and transgressive play of language and grapple with the radical uncertainty of surviving death.

The Jouissance of Influence: Being and Following the Writer in Michiel Heyns's The Typewriter's Tale

Summary In Frieda Wroths attempts to balance the demands of her role as amanuensis with her desire to be an author, we can also see Heyns speculate self-reflexively upon the problems and delights attendant upon writing creatively about a writer. The parallels between Heyns and Frieda extend beyond the merely allegorical: they inflect the novels central ethical dilemma, as well as its negotiation between parody and homage. Writing is intimately associated with telepathy and mediation, activities which are associated, in turn, with the erotic. The effect of jouissance inspired by these metafictional correspondences may be regarded as a challenge to late- twentieth-century debates concerning authority and influence.

Caricature and Mrs Rooth’s Shawl in The Tragic Muse

Henry James’s readers have, on the whole, been impervious to the comic charms of The Tragic Muse. Contemporary reviewers described it as “heavily labored” (Gard 195) “thin, frigid and artificial” (Hayes 227), “stodg[y],” “the very dreariest production which has issued even from the pen of Mr. Henry James” (Gard 198), “monotonous” (209), “blottesque,” “tedious” (206), “torpid” (218), and eliciting a “half-suppressed yawn” (203). While subsequent critical attention to the novel has been more serious, and more appreciative, James’s readers have tended to focus on its representation of what James called “the conflict between art and ‘the world’” (Preface to The Tragic Muse 1), but remain fairly stony-faced: recently, for example, Christopher Lane has called it “‘stolid’” (739), and Victoria Coulson holds that it is a “surprisingly boring book” (69). However, it might be argued that The Tragic Muse possesses a distinctly comic aspect that challenges the terms of its critics’ disapproval. In the first place, the novel can (at least to some extent) be described as a comedy of manners, a commentary on which is often pithily provided in the witty, Wildean aphorisms of Gabriel Nash. Second, James’s makes shrewd and effective use of caricature in the representation of his minor characters: in the stern Lady Agnes’s “tall upright black figure,” for example, which “seemed in possession of the fair vastness [of Harsh] after the manner of an exclamation-point at the bottom of a blank page” (156); or in the often graceless Grace Dormer, who, participating in charades at Harsh, “dropped her h’s as with the crash of empires” (478). Caricature informs a key early moment in the novel: Peter fears that Miriam’s overwrought performance in front of Madame Carré might be perceived by their hostess as a “designed burlesque of her manner, her airs and graces, her celebrated simpers, so extravagant did it all cause these refinements to appear.” The element of exaggeration (a essential component of caricature) is sustained when James describes Madame Carré’s response: her “imitation of [Miriam’s] imitation” is the “drollest thing conceivable,” and causes Miriam to “[give] way to pleasure, to interest and large laughter” (128). Perhaps the most effective use of caricature in The Tragic Muse can be found in James’s representation of the irrepressible, ambitious, and doting actress-mother, Mrs Rooth, particularly in his animation of her “fluttering” (84) shawl as a metonymic figure for its owner’s eccentricity. The comic potential of the shawl (and other bohemian accoutrements) is established in Biddy Dormer’s first sighting of the remarkable Miriam Rooth and her mother at the Salon de l’Industrie:

“Wondrous Texture”: Henry James's Brocades

Summary This essay begins with a brief history of the cultural status of brocade in the 19th century, and then offers a critical account of the ways in which brocade features in Henry Jamess work. Jamess association of brocade with the aristocracy and the metropole, and his treatment of it as both an embodied object and a metaphor, reveals the textile to be a significant index of a number of his abiding concerns. The essay concludes with a consideration of how brocade both supports and contradicts poststructuralist positions about the referentiality of things in Jamess writing, as well as of how brocade provides a fitting analogy for his later style.

The Beinecke’s Tragic Muse

Housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University is what appears to be a unique copy of Henry James’s novel The Tragic Muse (BEIN Tinker 1275), first published in two volumes in 1890 by Houghton Mifflin in the United States and by Macmillan, in three volumes, in the United Kingdom. The Beinecke copy (hereafter B) is a two-volume, 1892 reprint of the Houghton Mifflin first edition.1 What makes B apparently unique is the presence of what the Library’s Orbis catalogue describes as the “author’s manuscript [i.e. autograph] revisions.” A handwritten index card, inserted in the flyleaf of volume one, describes the book as containing “Corrections and alterations by the author throughout.” The Tinker catalogue describes it as “[e]xtensively annotated and corrected (in pencil) by James” (250). These corrections appear to have been made in preparation for the novel’s publication, revised and with a preface, as volumes seven and eight of The New York Edition of Henry James’s Novels and Tales (hereafter NYE) by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1908. If these revisions are indeed by James, they are additionally significant in that they exhibit a number of revisionary practices that are different from, or not detectable in, extant revised proofs of other texts that are known to be in his hand. The forthcoming publication of the Complete Fiction of Henry James by Cambridge University Press, a scholarly and critical edition that will contain (inter alia) complete lists of variants to the first editions of James’s texts, has occasioned renewed interest in James’s practice of revision, as well as the authority of manuscript, typescript, and revised copies. It seems timely, therefore, to consider the authority of the handwritten revisions in B. Both volumes of B have Yale University bookplates attached to the front pastedowns, inscribed with the words “Gift of Chauncey B. Tinker, 1951.” Handwritten pencil emendations, apparently in the same hand, occur in both volumes on approximately 570 pages (out of a total of 882). Corrections to or insertions of single words, phrases, and short sentences are made in the margins; longer revisions are not present but appear to be indicated by a caret and the abbreviation cf , both of which suggest the existence of a (lost) document in which extended revisions were recorded. Words that are changed or omitted in the NYE are lightly struck through, underlined, or placed within parentheses in B, occasionally accompanied by a delete symbol in the margin. The corrections marked on B are carried through without exception to the version published in the NYE, although the NYE is revised even more extensively and contains a number of changes not present in B. Some of these are hinted at by carets in B; yet other changes made to the NYE are not indicated in B at all, suggesting that B may contain James’s initial or preparatory revisions, undertaken more thoroughly and extensively at a later date. The verso back flyleaf of volume one reveals manuscript notes in pencil, in what appears to be the same hand as that which made the emendations to B’s text. At the top of the page is written

A deep fold in the grain of things

ABSTRACT Keith Neudeckers strangeness in Don DeLillos Falling man appears to stem from his condition as a victim of trauma neurosis. However, such a reading is worryingly reductive. It fails to acknowledge the repeated allusions to Keiths spectrality, and to the possibility that he does not survive the attack on the World Trade Center at all. This ar ticle argues that Keith is the “falling man” of the title, and attends to Lianne Neudeckers role as the novels central focalizer. More radically, I propose that Lianne is the “author” of the text, and that the novel could be regarded as an elegy, an act of mourning, and a subtle contemplation of the role that writing plays in response to loss. In suppor t of this argument, recourse is made to Peter Sacks work on the defining features of elegy, and to both Freuds and Derridas contemplations on the work of mourning.

‘THE DILEMMAS THAT JUMP OUT AT US IF WE LOOK SIDEWAYS’: SIBLINGS AND SERIALITY IN THE TURN OF THE SCREW

hen the governess in The Turn of the Screw challenges the placid Mrs Grose to acknowledge Bly’s sinister hinterworld, she asks the W housekeeper to take ‘a view of the back of the tapestry’ (78). Mrs Grose does so reluctantly; not so the tale’s critical audience. Meticulously tracing out the threads, knots, weft and warp of the text’s tapestry has been the business, in particular, of psychoanalytic readers who have concentrated on the character of the governess and the v ous pathologies suggested by

The ‘great religion of the elevator’: THE SKYSCRAPERS OF MANHATTAN, 1904 AND 2001

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the language used by different writers to describe the counter pointed moments of birth and destruction of the skyscraper and its iconic value in collective American identity. To this end, a comparative study is offered of Henry Jamess essay on New York in his late text, The American scene, and contemporary reports of the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The apparent oppositions of sacred and profane, church and temple in the narratives are shown to be undercut by an inevitable reversal in which the sacred is made profane and the profanity of “terrorism” is imbued with sacred grace.