Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives

Introduction Susan Osborn Although Elizabeth Bowen was first praised as a writer of sensibility and classed with E. M. Forster and Henry James as a psychological realist, upon reviewing the criticism of her earliest readers, one quickly perceives a sense of interpretive strain: at the same time that these readers herald her work as an instrument in the solidification and advancement of a specific artistic practice, they simultaneously and often with considerable discomfort, underscore Bowen’s lack of success in mediating many of the imperatives of the conventions of the realistic fiction to which her work was by them consigned. We need look no further to see evidence of this strain than Jocelyn Brooke’s Elizabeth Bowen (1952), the first long study of her fiction published during her lifetime. Brooke recognizes Bowen as one of the three or four most important novelists writing in Britain at the time, and he notes approvingly, as had other critics, that her ‘way of seeing’ was, like Forster’s and James’s, marked by imperatives generally assigned to context and class. But he is also troubled by Bowen’s divergence from realist practice, and especially by the abundance of excessive and extraneous stylistic tics apparent in her work that interrupt the reader’s unproblematic absorption in and validation of the text. Certainly her narratives are, as he approvingly writes, concerned with the ‘social behavior of highly civilized men and women’ especially as those highly civilized men and women are threatened by ‘the pretentious, Philistine middle-class’ (10); some of her narratives ‘(almost) [sic] [seem] drawing- room comed[ies]’ (16). But at the same time, he is distressed by the apparently unassociated, confusing, and exaggerated effects that he finds in her work including her ‘occasional use of the supernatural’ (19), her ‘tendency to “thicken” her stylistic effects’ (18), the ‘distorted fragmentary effect’ apparent in some of her work (25), and her ‘highly wrought’ (12), ‘idiosyncratic’ (18), and ‘convoluted style’ (26), which he ultimately likens to a ‘neurotic impediment, a kind of stammer; [that] occasionally . . . lead[s] to actual obscurity’ (26), all problematic estrangements that disturb the familiarizing work expected of this class of fictions, irregularities, in other words, that are at odds with some of the imperatives of the discursive practices of the conventional realism to which hers was most often compared. The praise and blame in Brooke’s account work jointly to identify certain aspects of Bowen’s fiction that make her work uncommonly difficult to conceive, describe, and evaluate and that make the terms of appreciation and analysis unusually difficult to apprehend and apply. That Bowen’s work has been considered worth reading since the publication of her first collection of short stories, Encounters (1923), has never been doubted. However, while her earliest interpreters have concurred with Brooke’s praise, like Brooke, they have also invariably been less enthusiastic about her tendency to complicate her management of the things that she should be managing. Especially dismaying, as noted by Brooke, are her ‘distortions’, ‘convolutions’, and the abundance of ‘distracting detail’, her ‘decorative elaboration’ as William Heath, another early commentator, described these apparent mismanagements, her ‘pointless verbal excess’ (44) as he complains with exasperation about Bowen’s early novel, The Last September (1929). Broken down, what Brooke is troubled by and what has been echoed by almost all of Bowen’s past critics, is that while some elements in Bowen’s fiction assure an unproblematic representation of the reader’s social experience in the world, others interrupt the naturalizing work expected of this class of fictions, in particular, by Bowen’s corruption of the boundary between the essential and the contingent and/or the ‘pointless’, the familiar and the strange. In other words, the realistic novel’s prestige and the reader’s confidence in the literary mimesis inscribed in realism is linked to certain initiatives and prospects that had been supposedly achieved during the nineteenth century. When well managed, literary realism as practised by Forster and James, for example, overcomes a sense of artificiality and intimations of excess and uncontainability by the ways the representation selects and arranges essential or representative patterns of experience that reveal a sense of the world in its innermost intelligibility; in other words, by the way the representation confirms the distinction between the probable and the possible, the imperative and the extraneous and arbitrary. The resulting verisimilitude is largely sustained by means of collective agreements and can be conceived of as a kind of contract: the reader gives credence to the mimetic claims of the text in return for confirmation by the writer of the reader’s expectations. But there is something in Bowen’s fiction that unsettles what Eco has termed the reader’s ‘prior stipulation of pertinence’ (225), something that seems fashioned for purposes other than those solely of consensus that threatens the set of agreements between reader and writer as to what forms faithful representation, an unregulated quality that had supposedly been settled by the likes of Forster and James that points to a presumably cast off and more indeterminate heterogeneity of the real that is both difficult to approach and to analyse and that challenges the reader’s efforts to control the interpretive field. And yet it is precisely the extra charge produced by this corruption, a charge that is felt as both enigmatic and occasionally burdensome that lends to her work its most penetrating influence, constitutes its most baffling and salient effects, and grants to her stories and novels a protean strength and allure not easily neutralized by conventional exegesis or by their proper classification. Within the last two decades, more complex modes of reading involving issues of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationhood and their multiple intersections have combined to create a more complicated understanding of some of the less familiar and more provocative valences in Bowen’s work that together reveal some of the less transparent, potentially subversive currents apparent in Bowen’s fiction. Distributing Bowen’s fictional narratives across an ideological spectrum bounded by Irish nationalism (pursuant to the Bowen family’s material status and class) at one end and a more progressive if coded feminism/lesbianism at the other, historical interpretations range from those that regard Bowen’s writing as a conservative and largely disciplinary apparatus to more nuanced approaches that steer a middle course between ideological extremes. Such readings carry considerable weight and force and have done much to galvanize interest in Bowen’s work. Among these are readings that look more broadly at the conservative topoi of Bowen’s fiction and the more disquieting implications that can be drawn from her writings. These include Phyllis Lassner’s Elizabeth Bowen (1990) in which Lassner regards Bowen’s class with its investment in patriarchal ideology as a legitimate bar to anything beyond a moderate or conservative feminism. As she writes, Bowen’s discursive practices are connected to women’s ‘struggle[s] with autonomy, dependence, and self-expression’, struggles that ‘reflect . . . [Bowen’s] position as outsider both culturally and as a woman of her time’ (153, 145). Likewise, in his ambitious The Novel in England 1900–1950: History and Theory, Robert Caserio suggests that Bowen’s female characters are indelibly marked by imperatives attributable to class and patriarchy. For example, in his analysis of The Last September, he connects the female characters’ gender status to their ‘beleaguered vulnerability as colonialists’, and, using Fredric Jameson’s notion of the political unconscious, suggests their ‘subversive alliance’ with the rebellious members of Irish Republican Army (251). These explanations, often with a good deal of technical competence, open new avenues of inquiry that allow, for example, an examination of the prospect of qualitative change for women, retrospectively, in other words, through the lens of recorded history. But where such criticism falls short is precisely in its assumption that Bowen’s practice was bounded by and sometimes identical to the purposes of social regulation identified by the historical context within which the reader’s argument is framed. There is no doubt that when reading Bowen’s narratives, we must be mindful of the imperatives of gender, class, ethnicity, and national conflict that we can, with some degree of confidence, speculate make Bowen’s work in some ways responsive to topical imperatives and local claims of propriety which, during the first half of the twentieth century, promoted women’s culture, for example, as a small and restricted circle circumscribed by imperatives dictated overtly and insidiously by class and patriarchy. Likewise, it would be just irresponsible and disingenuous to ignore probable influences on Bowen’s work of the rise of and various manifestations of oppositional sentiment that erupted in Ireland following the 1916 Easter Rebellion and the 1919 meeting of the Dail Eireann, generally understood to be embodied in and symbolized by Sinn Féin and the paramilitary operations of the Irish Republican Army directed at both the British colonizers and the by-and-large Protestant gentry, of which Bowen was a member, owners of Ireland’s Big Houses. Nor can we overlook probable influences on Bowen of both the Second World War and the Blitz. However, by interpreting Bowen’s oeuvre as social or political texts from which they cannot be disjoined, such historical readings make Bowen’s work answerable to given contexts instead of appreciating them as contexts in themselves in which history works to dilate and complicate competing pressures and inchoate forces already present in the work. In other words, rooted as these readings are in the known facts from which Bowen’s work is in some ways inextricably linked, such readings are limited to modes of interpretation and to conclusions that square with the particular historical and/or social contexts upon which they are based. Consequently, Bowen’s achievement is then read as a representation that works in only one register and to one single purpose. As such, these readings consistently stress the conservative, largely regulatory work of her fiction, over and against any other prospects they may hold, especially those nascent and intimated within the troubling excess, those instabilities of form, language, and composition that lend to her work both its uncommon elusiveness and that makes it uncommonly resistant to conventional historical, generic, and ethnic incorporation. Not surprisingly, as with Bowen’s earliest readers, the infrequent time that Bowen’s late twentieth-century readers do note the narrative and formal estrangements that discomfited and sometimes offended and obstructed Brooke and some of Bowen’s other early interpreters from forming the kind of apodictic and totalizing interpretations presented by these readers, they are most often dismissed or derided, as they had been in the past, as unaccountable gaffes, obscuring distractions unworthy of sustained critical attention.1 Within the last decade, Bowen’s readers have sought to recuperate her fiction by focusing their analyses precisely on those aspects of her work that produce the sense of interpretive strain early identified by Brooke and others, those problematic exchanges caused by the ungainly irregularities, the improprieties and ‘thickened’ stylistic effects that produce her works’ uncustomary recalcitrance and that continue to challenge readers’ interpretive abilities. Of special interest to these readers are many of the conspicuous and unruly excesses identified by Brooke, albeit in different terms, including Bowen’s weird and inconsistent mimeticism, the dramatizations of impasse and non- or dissolved presence, and the elliptical dialogue and lacunae in plotting that both invoke and discredit a sense of meaning, the way the concatenation of extravagant and conventionally employed forms, in provocative and sometimes impudent ways, confuses distinctions. For example, in her recent study, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page, Maud Ellmann explores some of the less regulated aspects of Bowen’s narratives, including the author’s disruptive and disconcerting ‘addictions’, as she refers to the representational incongruities, the ‘frictional disjunctions’ (4), and florid ‘clashes between literary forms’ (3) apparent in Bowen’s work. In his recent historically based study, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return, Neil Corcoran attends to the ‘arresting strangeness’ in her work and situates his interpretation in his notion of Bowen’s awkward and transgressive ‘bilocality’ by which he refers to her living ‘between’ Ireland and England (13). Corcoran is especially interested in the ways that the ‘peculiar [and] disconcerting ethics’ in her work, revealed by the ways the works’ heretofore unexplored ‘gaps, ellipses, absences, hauntings, silences, and aporias’ produce ‘arrestingly strange, but intelligible’ narratives, unexpectedly inflected with affirmation (13). In what is undoubtedly the most audacious recent reading of Bowen’s work, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, citing many of the especially strange and resistant aspects of her mimeticism, argue against all previous readings of her work, and suggest instead that Bowen’s fictional narratives are open to fundamental rereadings . . . which at once transform the status and importance of Bowen’s work and effect a deconstruction of everything that is seemingly most conventional and reassuring about the very notion of the novel. (xvi) Citing in particular Bowen’s under-examined and under-valued novel Eva Trout or Changing Scenes (1968), they suggest that Bowen’s work undermines the epistemological foundations of the novel, necessitating ‘a new critical vocabulary’ (142), one that eludes all externally imposed vocabularies. However, while the radical narrative and formal transgressions erratically displayed and written into Bowen’s narratives are often felt to be urgent demands to be recognized as irreducibly other, Bowen’s works’ resistances and the unfamiliar and often irregular problems that the non-identical elements of her work present seem less indicative of an irreducible otherness or a conceptual or lexical failure than they do of the persistent uncertainty that readers share about how to approach and represent the competing pressures apparent in Bowen’s art. Because the identical and the non-identical in Bowen’s work insist, as early noted, at times hyperbolically, on their mutual entanglement, her work challenges us to make sense of the unruly and often egregious interdigitation in her work of the regular and the irregular, the familiar and the strange. Above all else, Bowen’s narratives are marked by the central linking of wellgoverned and less well-governed elements whose interpretation is dependent both on laws peculiar to itself and laws commonly recognized, and whose representation consequently sometimes but not always exceeds the orbit of the conventional conceptual categories used to interpret them. Indeed, one wonders if the derision still apparent in some Bowen criticism might in part be explained by what is perceived by some to be the intolerable pressure of contradictory compulsions that form the signature of Bowen’s style, a pressure that places her work, as Paul Muldoon suggests, along with Joyce’s and Beckett’s, at ‘some notional cutting edge’ (25). The most exciting aspect of this unusual quality of her work derives from the various ways that the categorical excesses offer new horizons of possibility that require ways of reading and modes of interpretation in which the works’ resistance is felt to be both empowering and impoverishing. In other words, because the relation between the non-identical and the identical in Bowen’s work cannot be reduced or stabilized into an opposition between antithetical forces, her narratives resist commonly employed metaphors of complimentarity and coordination; simply put, it is difficult to smother her work with our preconceptions because so much of what the work does and how it does it resist them. Consequently, among other things, Bowen’s work offers unfamiliar ways by which we might reconceptualize the relationship between realism and modernism, the ambiguities of identity, and the obscuring effects of many familiar critical assumptions including those pertaining to canonicity, notions of genre, and the representation of gender, sexuality, class, nationhood, and ethnicity in literature. Recognizing that it is the uneasy and often unexpected interlinking in Bowen’s narratives of the familiar and the strange that casts the strongest claim to comprehending the represented reality into critical relief, the essays collected here elaborate recent discussions of Bowen’s work by attending to the unexpected, often contradictory pressures and relations in Bowen’s work. While the essays are varied and do not provide a complete spectrum of contemporary responses, they are primarily concerned with two salient characteristics of Bowen’s work: her at times intimidating artistic, linguistic, and substantive difficultness, and her more recently recognized aesthetic, moral, and cognitive complexity and distinctiveness. Specifically, these essays examine and analyse in considerable detail some of the stranger pressures and unfamiliar tensions heretofore dismissed or ignored, tensions that make her work uncommonly difficult to conceptualize, describe, and evaluate, and that make the terms of appreciation and analysis difficult to apprehend and apply; to present fuller and more nuanced accounts than were previously available of a number of these tensions, and, partly on the basis of these two endeavours, to begin to develop ways of thinking about and developing terms for understanding the novelty, force, difficulty, and significance of Bowen’s work, and to develop the implications of these ideas for our thinking about a wide range of contemporary concerns. The ingenuity and complexity of many of these arguments testifies to both the complexity and originality of Bowen’s art. In the first essay, ‘Unstable Compounds: Bowen’s Beckettian Affinities’, Sinéad Mooney begins the work of setting aside the edifice of social realism that has obstructed critical efforts to represent Bowen’s narrative strangeness through an exploration of the striking similarities apparent in the two writers’ work. In particular, Mooney attends to the asymptotic approaches to zero that generate both writers’ novels, and pays special attention to the ways that the writers’ stylistic investment in the ‘nuances of negativity’—she sees in Beckett’s ‘depleted moribunds’ parallels to Bowen’s many suspended protagonists— discountenance classic realist narrative form. Particularly useful is Mooney’s exploration of the suggestive correspondences apparent in two of the writers’ ‘unreadable’ novels, Beckett’s Watt (1953) and Bowen’s Eva Trout or Changing Scenes (1968). While Bowen’s ‘defective’ or nonidentical protagonist has generally been read as a kind of monster (her representation has been criticized for being too bold, too brutal, too chalky, too inconsistent), Mooney unmoors Eva from certain vehicles of ideology, notably the conventional realist plot that have interfered with readers’ appreciation of this problematic character and this strange and difficult novel. Instead, Mooney reads Eva as a ‘proto-postmodernist younger sister of . . . Watt’, both of whom suffer a ‘loss of filiation’ from conventional linguistic structures. While the odd concatenations in both of these novels alternately provoke and resist a search for encompassing connections and apodictic readings, Mooney attends instead to the various stylistic disruptions and panicked linguistic atmosphere apparent in both and discusses ways that these irregularities dislocate fragile structures of identity and jeopardize readers’ confidence in hermetic structures of meaning. In the second essay, ‘“How to Measure this Unaccountable Darkness between the Trees”: The Strange Relation of Style and Meaning in The Last September’, Susan Osborn examines one of Bowen’s early novels, one most often read as a realistic novel concerned with the conflagration caused by Britain’s division of Ireland in 1920. However, Osborn examines some of the ways that Bowen’s troublesome and problematic stylistic irregularities undermine the ideological work represented as being achieved in such readings, and suggests instead that the novel’s most affecting dramas and the distinctive strain involved in interpreting this novel’s protean allure, result in large measure from the provocative and disordered ways that the prose violates rules of mimetic representation and realistic discourse while establishing a relationship with them. Where there are departures from the commonplace, the expected sites of agreed upon meanings, there occur interpretive challenges, but as Osborn contends, much of the interest of The Last September and of Bowen’s fictional narratives generally, lies in the way the representation acknowledges these problems not in terms of reductive psychological categories, but by estranging commonly conceived and represented relations among the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’, the phenomenal and the noumenal, and by Bowen’s idiosyncratic disconnection of the consequently represented irreality from the social context of practical knowledge, thus producing a novel that is driven as much by the epistemological suspensions that are formed among reader and text as it is by the action represented as occurring in the narrative’s manifest plot. In the third essay, ‘Dead Letters and Living Things: Historical Ethics in The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart’, Eluned Summers-Bremner examines some of the ways that the contradictions in Bowenian omniscience and the opacity and fluidity of ‘the real’ that they corporately foster disturb the traditional hegemonic compact between the reader and the text. While the classic realist text ensures the position of the reading subject in a relation of dominant specularity, Summers-Bremner traces some of the privileged spatial and temporal dislocations that in The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938) encourage a kind of reading practice which is in ways at odds with the realist imperative to clarify or dominate. At the same time, using a Lacanian concept of trauma, Summers-Bremner explores ways that the sufferings of the two children in The House in Paris, Portia and Leopold, are imbricated within the structures of Bowen’s convoluted syntax and grammar and analyses ways that this imbrication conduces to create a real where the readers’ and the characters’ sense of retrospection and possibility are largely interdependent. As earlier noted, the realist privilege is tied to a suppression of the extraordinary and the improbable; its practice inoculates itself to irruptions of the other and to an attenuation of the probable by admission of tempered variety and managed accident. And yet upon reading Bowen’s work, we often experience a dreadfully exciting and disconcerting feeling, not unlike that felt upon reading supernatural fiction, that the wall, let’s call it, which governs or regulates the visiting privileges between various domains is not always working in a customary or consistently reliable fashion. As a result, when reading, we sometimes feel we have ‘stepped unnoticingly over a threshold into some . . . world drawn up alongside [and] at times dangerously accessible to the unwary’ (Bowen, Collected Stories, 151). It is this queer, ‘provisional’ quality, as John Bayley once observed, ‘not quite like sleep, not quite like the future’ (166), this strange admixture of the ‘opposing’ realms of the awe-full and the awful in Bowen’s stories that the next two essays address. In ‘Mumbo-Jumbo: The Haunted World of The Little Girls’, June Sturrock examines the critical unease provoked by Bowen’s penultimate novel, The Little Girls (1964). This strange novel has received little sympathy from critics who tend to find its characters fey and its situations unrealistic. As with many of Bowen’s narratives, there is no terribly compelling story line in The Little Girls, little sense of cumulative progression. Yet Sturrock suggests that the near universal critical discomfort provoked by this novel is due precisely to the novel’s success in communicating its lack of faith in the representational systems used by the narrator, the author, and the characters. Sturrock is especially interested in Bowen’s use of an uncertain representational language that, as in A World of Love (1955), continually alludes to and verges on the supernatural, without ever abandoning the rationally explicable. The narrative incongruities here, seen especially in the concatenations of the strange and the ordinary that are frequently represented in a language of haunting and enchantment, simultaneously present horizons of possibility that are as closely akin to the Romantics’ commitment to a discourse of the imagination and to the ‘romantic’ claim of modernity to awaken the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom as they are to realistic discourse’s commitment to the quotidian and consensual. As such, the novel’s conflicted representation allows for certain possibilities in the text and in the modes of reading instilled, in excess of the aims and teleologies typically assigned to both Romantic and modern narratives. In its desire to grasp Bowen’s narratives ‘whole’, if you will, and generally in terms of the works’ ‘thematics’ or psychology of depth, criticism of Bowen’s work has tended to be impatient with the apparently decorative detail, the ‘claptrap’ seen in her work that often draws our attention away from the inside and holds it onto the surface of her narratives. Consequently, readers have left unexplored some of the most characteristic and daring aspects of her fiction. In ‘“She-ward bound”: Elizabeth Bowen as a Sensationalist Writer’, Shannon Wells-Lassagne examines the proliferation of competing, non-privileged representational discourses used in Bowen’s work and, as others collected here have emphasized, examines ways Bowen’s narratives are made of partial or indeterminate orders that resist common modes of interpretative adjudication and understanding. Wells-Lassagne is especially interested in Bowen’s use of techniques from popular or ‘low-brow’ genres including the detective story, the Gothic novel, the sensation novel, and the Victorian quest romance, and she focuses in particular on the use of visceral language and characteristic turns of plot that combine to create an uneasy tension that exists among the strange, intransitive two-dimensionality often seen in Bowen’s characters and her more conventional fictions of physical, personal presence. Finally, she discusses ways that the interdigitation of these techniques foregrounds issues of ontology in the reader and the text, while at the same time subduing or subverting explanatory structures that might, in a realist or modernist text, control, explain, or direct affectivity. Typically, fictional narratives written during the 1940s in Ireland and England are interpreted through the lens of recorded history and are understood to be produced by that history. For example, the stories collected in Bowen’s The Demon Lover (1945) are most often read as narratives of exposure, stories in which the members of the discrete world of the upper middle class are, by virtue of the consequences of the Blitz, no longer able to seclude themselves. But in ‘Territory, Space, Modernity: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover and Other Stories and Wartime London’, Shafquat Towheed charts ways the fluid and overlapping fictional terrains represented in these stories, be they physical spaces (parks, streets, or bedrooms) or emotional (fear, desire, claustrophobia, anomie, alienation), unsettle the coherent coordinates and bench marks that have plotted our conventional sense of scale regarding psychic and physical space since the Enlightenment. Of special interest to Towheed is the importance of positive-negative space, the ‘glassless windows’ to quote Bowen’s story ‘In the Square’ that frame ‘hollow inside dark’, and the gnomons, to borrow a term first applied to Bowen’s work by Ellmann, the physical and emotional remainders that have indicative potential even after the removal of the causative agent, and in the ways the changing, contingent, elastic nature of physical and psychic space represented in these stories offers avenues for thinking about new interpretive cartographies. In the final essay, ‘Narrative, Meaning, and Agency in The Heat of the Day’, Brooke Miller et al. examine The Heat of the Day (1948), the novel widely known as Bowen’s ‘Second World War’ novel. Typically the interpretive challenges the novel presents are cited as naturally occurring, even predictable reactions to a catastrophe conceived as an historical event. But in this essay, the writers question the idea that the war creates the conditions that foster the epistemic and ontological crises experienced by the characters. In particular, the authors are interested in exploring ways the representation, as conventionally interpreted, cannot account for the uncustomary migratory relationship that is represented to exist among humans and objects. This fluid or hallucinatory exchange of aspects or partial aspects of essences represented in all of Bowen’s fiction, Bowen’s ‘expressionistic’ or non-naturalistic, contradictory, and distorted mapping of inner experience or character ‘psychology’, and the inconstant and compounded struggle for reliable object status represented have often provoked snide derision from Bowen’s earlier interpreters. But in this essay, the commentators examine the representation of character more as a mediation, a dilemma in response to a perceived sense of contingency, than as an identity in relation to inter-subjective and ideological pressures. Focusing primarily on Roderick whom they suggest is the most ‘porous’ of the many leaky characters in The Heat of the Day, the writers track ways that the characters resist being narrated and examine the ways they escape absorption by conventional historical interpretations and thereby elude any sense of final definition despite pressures often interpreted as irresistible or finalizing by prior readers. As is apparent, the essays published in this collection are not intended to represent a continuity of the writer’s endeavour, nor do they suggest the growth of an operative consciousness. While the essays do attempt to articulate a diverse range of vital if underexamined tensions in Bowen’s narratives, they do not culminate in a single account of Bowen’s extraordinary achievement either. Rather, by providing more carefully nuanced accounts of relationships in Bowen’s work, relationships that have typically not been given a substantive role in interpretation, it is hoped that these essays underscore a plea inherent in Bowen’s work for fine and flexible discrimination and provisional appreciation, as they simultaneously broaden and complicate our understanding of the many unsettling energies of her art. Note 1. Of Bowen’s late twentieth-century readers, hoogland has made the gamest attempt to address what she refers to as Bowen’s ‘unclassifiable’ narrative style, which she links to currents of disruptive same-sex desire that she suggests play a prominent role in Bowen’s narratives. See 83 and chapter 5. 

2 ‘How to Measure this Unaccountable Darkness between the Trees’: The Strange Relation of Style and Meaning in The Last September1 Susan Osborn Despite Elizabeth Bowen’s emergence as a seminal figure in several key areas of contemporary study, much of her fiction is still considered difficult and resistant to interpretation. In large measure, this is because Bowen’s past commentators have paid almost exclusive attention to historical and thematic aspects of her fiction, perhaps above all, to her ascribed interest in women’s experience as that experience was shaped by early and mid-twentieth-century Irish and English historical crises. Yet critical attention to such concerns has always brushed aside an immitigable fact of Bowen’s writing: her notoriously strange style which produces in almost every sentence – either explicitly or subliminally – some disorientation of sense, some deviation from standard meaning. The focus of this essay, then, is precisely on Bowen’s troublesome stylistic practices and their influence on and relation to meaning formation. Although the ideas here presented have degrees of applicability to all of her novels and stories, this essay will be primarily restricted to a discussion of Bowen’s as yet under-examined and under-appreciated The Last September (1929). In the past, The Last September was most often read as a realistic novel concerned with the conflagration caused by Britain’s division of Ireland in 1920. While some interpreters read the novel as a denunciation of the British colonialists, others read it as a condemnation of the resistance fighters, and still others including, most recently, Maud Ellmann read the novel as a critique of the Protestant Irish who are generally represented as anachronisms, destroyed by defects attributed to morality or class (52–67). For example, in Hermione Lee’s seminal study, she writes that the novel has to do with Ireland’s time of Troubles and the tragedy(ies) inherent in and to internecine warfare and colonialism (42–3), while Heather Bryant Jordan asserts that ‘the main subject of the novel is . . . the war of independence, or revolution’; the book’s theme concerns the ‘demise of the Protestant ascendancy’ (54, 49).2 In a complimentary reading, Neil Corcoran interprets the novel as a Big House ‘comedy of manners’, albeit one marked by unexpected ellipses and lacunae, one which forms part of Bowen’s effort to interpret the experience of being ‘bilocated’, by which he refers to the experience of living ‘between’ Ireland and England during the Troubles (39, 13). Other interpreters, including Phyllis Lassner, have found feminist themes in the novel and have read it as a reflection of Bowen’s concern with women’s ‘struggle with autonomy, dependence and self-expression’ (153). In one of the most complex feminist readings of The Last September, Robert L. Caserio connects the female characters’ gender status to their ‘beleaguered vulnerability as colonialists’. Using Fredric Jameson’s notion of the political unconscious, Caserio suggests their ‘subversive alliance’ with the rebels (251). In a similar reading, renée c. hoogland, suggests that the novel’s female protagonist discloses the ‘intertwined operations’ of the opposing realms of ‘phallogocentric gender and nationalist discourses personified by [her fiancé] as oppressive and exclusionary practices’ (69).3 Yet as interesting as these interpretations are, the enigmas surrounding The Last September, the novel’s shot-through queerness, give few grounds for any optimistic good faith or trust in any such comprehensive and competent handlings. Certainly these interpreters ably contract the area of unknown that exists in and around the novel, but there is an unfamiliar and unruly quality to this novel, something that oscillates between the formed and the perceived that cannot be well represented or neutralized through the logical coherence of a theory. The novel is fraught with a sense of suspense and danger – one cannot escape the sense of proximity to dangerous, unknown forces – and an exquisite tension is set up between the rational modern world and a sense of long-forgotten forces acting within it. As a result, when we read, we respond intensely, even in ways viscerally to the press of something not always made manifest in the language of the story. Yet whatever it is remains unknown and inchoate. The sense of illogical, disruptive, archaic forces skulking through and around the story is perhaps the story’s most prominent characteristic and yet it is not always apparent. This extra charge grants to the novel its most baffling and salient effect, and undoes our efforts at conceptual clarity in ways different from and beyond the familiar polysemie of language. By so saying, I don’t mean to suggest that past thematic or historical interpretations of The Last September are ‘wrong’; in fact, there is much that is right and challenging about them. Rather, that the ideological or suasive work represented as being achieved in these readings is undermined by the provocative and often defamiliarizing narrative and formal irregularities in the novel, irregularities that undermine the certainty upon which these readings rely for their force, and that bar us from forming conclusive statements about how the story might have been legislated prior to its writing, as well from making statements about its ultimate justification or meaning. That we cannot, with anything akin to certainty, attribute the vague sense of awe and dread that we experience upon reading The Last September to either the manifest political conflict or the personal conflict embedded within the more public context is perhaps what disturbs us most powerfully upon reading the novel. 4 That said, it is not surprising that critics have trouble articulating just what it is that makes The Last September so strange. A review of the manifest plot of The Last September reveals little that might account for the strange sense of proximity to ill-defined and unfamiliar forces that we experience when reading the novel.5 The novel is strangely unburdened of content, the putative subject – the engagement of a member of an Irish landowning family, Lois Farquar, to Gerald Lesworth, a British subaltern – is quotidian, and the characters, intellectually considered, are not very striking.6 Events thicken and accrete, and we have a sense, upon completing the novel, that something momentous and unmediated has taken place, but there are no clearly discernible climaxes.7 Certainly, the war is most often cited as the motivating theme in The Last September and, on occasion, the characters do attribute noises emanating from the woods to skirmishes between the republicans and the subalterns, but this in no way proves that Sinn Féin or its paramilitary wing, the Irish Republic Army, is the cause of the characters’ unease. In fact, outside of two scenes – the mill scene in which the man in the mill is assumed by most readers to be a member of the IRA, and one scene in which a house guest’s watch is taken and returned by an unseen character who is not identified in the story as a member of Sinn Féin but who is presumed by most readers to be associated with Sinn Féin, the supposedly malevolent rebels are never seen and the war takes place completely ‘off stage’ and is never reified in the narrative. Indeed, the war seems more a mechanical motif perhaps used to lend credibility or plausibility to a larger, darker texture of events. Even though the homeowners and their guests ascribe the family’s fears to aspects of the politically motivated conflict, one can’t help feeling that there exists, beyond the manifest world represented, a world or system whose workings are only partially revealed, a system, if you will, potentially malignant, certainly sinister, and implacable under whose persecutions the family is suffering. Upon finishing the story, we are chilled by a sense of something far more ominous than the fire raging at the Big House on the hill. How then, as Lois asks, can we account for the ‘living silence’, the ‘darkness between the trees’?8 In the past, perhaps from a sense of critical largesse, the few uncertain readers who addressed Bowen’s prose style saw in it most often an imperfect approximation of Woolf’s.9 Certainly, a case could be made for their similarity. Like Woolf’s, much of Bowen’s prose has a ‘transparent’, numinous quality that suggests the existence of deeper zones below the highly articulated surface. As with Woolf’s, a great deal of the beauty of Bowen’s ‘good’ prose springs from undulation. In other words, the sense and sound of multiple periods rise together and both fall away in a mutual, rhythmical cadence. The periodic rhythms control and direct the force of the sentences – a stage of thought finishes with a stage of rhythm, a thought member with a rhythmic member. Look, for example, at the much-acclaimed first paragraph of Bowen’s widely admired The Death of the Heart (1938): That morning’s ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam. The island stood in frozen woody brown dusk: it was now between three and four in the afternoon. A sort of breath from the clay, from the city outside the park, condensing, made the air unclear; through this, the trees round the lake soared frigidly up. Bronze cold of January bound the sky and the landscape; the sky was shut to the sun – but the swans, the wings of ice, the pallid withdrawn Regency terraces had an unnatural burnish, as though cold were light. There was something momentous about the height of winter. Steps rang on the bridges, and along the black walks. This weather had set in; it would freeze harder tonight. (3) What merits special attention here is the almost poetic continuity of this passage, the uninterrupted skein of the reader’s heightened attention and of the verbal beauty which excites it, the effect of the periodic prose, in other words, on the vivacity and susceptibility of the reader’s attention. As is typical of much of Bowen’s well-mannered prose, the passage is composed of impressionistic descriptions and presents a series of sentences of tempered variety free (except for ‘cracked’) of any harsh rhythmic or phonemic intrusions. The language dwells sensually on the scene described and is beautiful in its unobtrusiveness, in the way it, for the most part, leaves its calculation and skill unobserved. The description is heavily burdened by assonance and alliteration, the erotic ‘mouth music’ that ties Bowen’s work to that of poets like Heaney. The repetition of the initial and medial consonants, especially the s’s and l’s, creates easy and sensible swells through which the reader slides. The periodic rhythm controls and directs the force of the sentence; its predictability is clued to the hope of the shapeliness of things. The punctuation and sound patterns create an architectural momentum of imaginary weights and transported presences: the peculiar grace and expressive meaning is composed of recognizable rhythmic details and even visual grace. As is typical of much of Bowen’s prose, the infrequent moment when the language does call attention to itself, does so only by its continuous slight heightening and deft coordination; it is unmarked, in other words, by any strongly marked features – eccentricities, inelegancies, and inaccuracies of expression – which might contort or grotesque the surface. By reducing the number of sounds, selecting them from a limited range, and restricting the rhythms of the periods, both Woolf and Bowen – at least in places – numb our analytic attention and allow us to move inattentively over the surface of many of their sentences, as the punctuation of sound patterns creates implications of meanings which appear and disappear as the sounds and rhythms change and we adjust to the changes. The activity of both creates and leaves behind not a material object, but an imaginary one. ‘Somewhere between the realms of ornamental sound and representative statement, the words pause and balance, dissolve and resolve’ (Blackmur, 75). Like ice into water, words deliquesce into meaning.10 And yet, as is well apparent in The Last September, unlike Woolf’s, there is also much about Bowen’s prose that invites our derision. With wilful disregard for the reader, she often inserts ugly sounding words into otherwise mellifluous sentences when more euphonious ones would do just as well if not better; her syntax is often anfractuous and strained; her images are frequently bizarre, unexpectedly macabre, in places, even nonsensical; and her punctuation is so often ungoverned that one wonders, at times, if the errors were intended or the result of negligent proofreading. Sentences and phrases such as ‘In their heart like a dropped pin the grey glazed roof reflecting the sky lightly glinted’; ‘His singleness bore, confusing, upon her panic of thoughts her physical apprehension of him was confused by the slipping, cold leaves’; ‘. . . the sound moved shakily, stoopingly, like someone running and crouching behind a hedge’; ‘Chinks of sunlight darted up her like mice and hesitated away like butterflies’; ‘Split light, like hands, was dragged past the mill-race, clawed like hands at the brink and went down in destruction’; and ‘They approached the doorway that yearned up the path like an eye-socket’ appal and confound us (The Last September, 78, 213, 33, 45, 155, 105). How are we to account for these bizarreries, this kind of useless and confusing ‘decorative elaboration’, ‘this pointless verbal excess’ as an abashed William Heath once asked (43)? It is certainly tempting to read these apparently underworked or overworked sentences, as have earlier readers, as inadvertent errors, embarrassing evidence of authorial carelessness that somehow escaped the governing eye of the editor or proofreader. How else can we account for the often apparently arbitrary use of punctuation, the odd, seemingly rash and indiscriminate word choices, the convoluted and at times insensible syntax – the whole ungainly thing? Certainly, the want of ‘finish’ exhibited in these brief excerpts, the ways these strangely wrought sentences seem conceived and executed with a blatant disregard for the accepted norms of intellectual decorum, grammatical and syntactical coherence, and technical competence, those formal properties intended to assure an easy concord between reader and text, seems indefensible. Could these injudicious word choices, the unfamiliar syntax, the unexpected punctuation be the result of inexperience as Bowen’s biographer, Victoria Glendinning, has suggested (76)? Or are they, as Sean O’Faolain declared, merely the indecorous products of Bowen’s unaccountable penchant for the shocking and sensational: ‘[Bowen’s] sensibility’, he noted, ‘can be catty, even brassy, too smart, like an overclever décor for ballet . . . on occasion vulgar’ (167–8)? Or perhaps they are simply the unbecoming and ill-advised efforts of a writer whose ambition is, as Virginia Woolf averred, in excess of her talent: ‘In some passages you are in danger of being too clever’ (Pippett, 182).11 The want of artistic discipline exhibited here, the uninhibited way in which these irregularities are displayed, and the troubling excessiveness apparent in these transgressions have bothered many of Bowen’s more recent readers as well, including the admiring Hermione Lee who worries that Bowen’s stylistic infelicities become ‘uncomfortable, especially in [their] syntactical mannerisms’: Ever since the preciousness of Friends and Relations, Elizabeth Bowen has been in control of her idiosyncratic manner, which she has disciplined. In The Heat of the Day, for the first time, it begins to look like affectation; and although this was her most successful novel, it was after its publication that critical objections to ‘the unusually evasive surface’, ‘the proliferation of detail that is fascinating in itself but ultimately distracting’ began to be commonplace. Both The Demon Lover stories and The Heat of the Day overuse double negatives, inversions, the breaking-up of natural sentence order, passive constructions . . . such effects are all too easy to parody . . . and they look irritating . . . (165)12 While Lee ultimately tries to recuperate Bowen’s style in The Heat of the Day by analogizing it to the strain she sees apparent in the novel’s plot, she, like Maud Ellmann who fears that Bowen’s descriptions can be ‘somewhat overstated’, and who, with a barely concealed censure, suggests that Bowen’s ‘glorified addictions’ and ‘overheated’ syntax inexplicably ‘atrophy into strangulating mannerisms’, and obstructing affectations (189) and Neil Corcoran who suggests that Bowen has written some of the most ‘fearful’ prose in modern history, share a widespread concern that, as he writes, the ‘writer herself may not remain in control of the [stylistic] riot’ (3).13 Were it not for these lapses in taste or judgement, these untoward exaggerations, reads the subtext of these interpretations, many of her novels and stories might be declared master works, or at least be considered exceptional examples of their genre. Were it not considered the result of ineptness or a want of personal resolution, her style might be declared as strikingly complex and original as Joyce’s or Beckett’s, perhaps even more so. As it is though, the distaste and derision elicited by Bowen’s stylistic practices suggest that, as arresting as her style is, it has not been considered coherent enough, meaningful enough, or intended enough to warrant thorough examination and analysis. A careful examination of these readers’ remarks suggests that there are two conspicuously occurring features of Bowen’s prose style that most trouble her readers and interfere with their appreciation of her prose. The first and perhaps the most challenging is a general one concerning the diverse and often unfamiliar ways that the irregular aspects of her prose style interrupt the easy concord between the reader and the writer. In other words, generally, the reader gives credence to the mimetic claims of the text in return for confirmation by the writer of the reader’s expectations. But what Lee is saying, and what has been echoed by almost all of Bowen’s past critics, is that while some elements of Bowen’s prose style confirm and validate the unproblematic circuit of response between reader and text, others are deemed extravagant or excessive because they estrange the familiarizing work expected of this class of fictions. In other words, if we assume a sociological understanding of the process of reading and accept the Barthian notion that the ‘subject’ of mimesis is an inter-subjective entity issuing from a shared set of cultural codes, a collaboration dependent on interactive systems of mutual knowledge inscribed in representational discourse, then even with certain latitudes allowed, the lack of cooperation on the part of Bowen’s prose, and specifically, the way Bowen unsystematically applies artificial, elaborate, and unfamiliar tropes and images which frequently but not always confer onto the representation unusual, unexpected, and sometimes apparently arbitrary emphases and values which sometimes but not always resist being assimilated into the work of representation, produces in the reader an unfamiliar and often frustrating contest between absorption and distraction. In other words, by producing in places a sense of opacity rather than the expected intelligibility, the unusual imbrication and interdigitation of conventional and less conventionally referential and syntactical properties in Bowen’s work disturb the traditional hegemonic compact between the reader and the text by interrupting what Frank Kermode refers to (adopting a concept of Leonard Meyer’s used in relation to our responses to music) as the generically determined ‘probability system’ (119) within which the practice of literary mimesis is inscribed. Instead, as Ellmann notes, Bowen’s ‘addictions’ and unacceptable ‘mannerisms’, disrupt and estrange the cultural codes through which these readers expect the text to be realized in the act of reading. Historically, the indignation and derision expressed by Bowen’s readers are most often related to this insolent recalcitrance; in other words, to the peremptory ways that many of her tropes often but not always affront the logic encoded in these probability systems by resisting or refusing to be absorbed into the subjectum of the intellect. The difficulties that these unusual and inconsistently employed irregularities create present perhaps the greatest challenge to those readers such as Lee and Ellmann who most believe in her abilities, as the inequality of execution apparent in Bowen’s prose, the unsystematically employed irregularities, sometimes but not always resist hermeneutical penetration, thus making it difficult to reconcile her prose with generally held demands for narrative effectiveness. Yet here lies the chief virtue and central challenge of Bowen’s prose. As has been well remarked, in Woolf’s writing, her well-mannered and well-executed periodicity is clued to the hope of the shapeliness of things. As Robert Caserio has noted, Woolf’s narratives ‘solidif[y] [the] disjunction[s]’ among various narrative elements (272); ‘the contrast of opposition[s in Woolf’s work]’, writes Kathleen McCluskey, ‘enables an equilibrium between opposing forces in [her] text[s] as in the world’ (124). But in Bowen’s fiction, we see no such global attempt to superimpose a harmony or to consistently or evenly distribute the weight of meaning and emphasis across individual sentences or narratives, but nor do we see any consistent disruption of the formal coherence of the novel or its individual elements (such as diction, grammar, and syntax). Rather, the complex effects of Bowen’s prose, the potent yet relative and uncustomary legibility of The Last September, the novel’s enigmatic and burdensome charge and the distinctive strain involved in interpreting that charge, result in large measure from the unsystematic ways that the prose transgresses expected processes of signification and from the ways it confuses when it does not undermine many of the conventions of mimetic representation, especially the expected reciprocity at the level of the symbolic. In other words, because Bowen’s prose unsystematically violates rules of mimetic representation and realistic discourse while establishing a relationship with them, the prose both permits logical conceptualization and challenges it. As a result of these estrangements, many of the commonly employed interpretive binaries that we generally rely on to help us read and interpret works of literature such as the customarily conceived relation between form and content, sign and signifier, are deprived of much of their force and value, without being rendered completely meaningless. This is not to suggest that there is anything ‘wrong’ with The Last September, although there is – this novel and all of her fictional narratives are characterized by all sorts of rhetorical improprieties – but that it is Bowen’s inconsistent and unsystematic employment of representational and formal irregularities that threatens the stability of conventionally conceived historical interpretations and that also lends to The Last September its strangely transformed air, its sense of being about something other than itself, at times beyond the control of intelligence. In order to appreciate and better understand the protean strength and allure of Bowen’s fictional narratives, then, we must look not just at her regular or ‘good’ prose or at her irregular or ‘bad’ prose, but at the ways the unusual linking of the expected and the unfamiliar both invokes and discredits a sense of meaning, at the way the concatenation of extravagant and more traditional forms, in provocative and sometimes impudent ways, effaces areas of expected significance and confuses distinctions, thereby vitiating our attempts to control her narratives or even to think about them in conventional ways. Take this short passage, for example, which describes The Last September’s homeowners, the Naylors, and their guests gathering for dinner: In the dining-room, the little party sat down under the crowd of portraits. Under the constant interchange from the high-up faces staring across – now fading each to a wedge of fawn-colour and each looking out from a square of darkness tunneled into a wall – Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, their nephew, niece and old friends had a thin, over-bright look, seemed in the air of the room unconvincingly painted, startled, transitory. Spaced out accurately around the enormous table – whereon in what was left of the light, damask birds and roses had an unearthly shimmer – each so enisled and distant that a remark at random, falling short of a neighbour, seemed a cry of appeal – the six, in spite of an emphasis in speech and gesture they unconsciously heightened, dwindled personally. While above, the immutable figures, shedding into the rush of dusk smiles, frowns, every vestige of personality, kept only attitude – an outmoded modishness, a quirk of a flare, hands slipped under a ruffle or spread over the cleft of a bosom – canceled time, negatived personality and made of the lower cheerfulness, dining and talking, the faintest exterior friction. In Lawrence’s plate of clear soup six peas floated. (24–5) Unlike the earlier excerpt reproduced from The Death of the Heart, on first reading, this odd, inexpedient passage plunges us into a vortex of linguistic confusion. The paragraph has an unfamiliar density to it, not a depth, but a kind of weird gumminess that resists penetration. Indeed, what strikes one first about this description is its strangely imperious and peremptory facture, the ostentatious way that the paragraph seems to call attention to its bizarre and disorienting execution. Certainly, the description is nuanced and individual parts of the passage are given precise and rigorous form, but just who or what is being described and by which parts of this description? While conventional syntax is intended to help us explicate the world and our ideas about it – it provides a kind of guarantee that through its proper application, a real and fulfilling comprehension of the intelligible may be had – the disorder and formlessness of these passages at first confronts the mind with absurdity. Certainly a progression of phenomena is represented, but with its disrupted periods, syntactical inversions, amphibolies, odd words and words used oddly (‘enisled’?, ‘dwindled personally’?), the shape of both that which is represented and the mode of its representation is difficult to apprehend clearly. Indeed, while reading this verbal filigree, one has the sense that the suturing of the various parts of this description was not necessarily impelled by any desire to conform to conventional or logical notions of succession or clarity. Instead, separate elements of phenomena are connected but are often placed in an obscure and even, in places, an apparently random relation to one another. Of special note are the proliferation of commas and dashes; normally refinements of meaning, here they isolate groups of words that often appear arbitrarily, incompletely, or imperfectly expressed. In other words, while the plethora of dashes and commas, adverbs, and other syntactical tools are all clearly circumscribed and differentiated in themselves, in this passage, they do not clearly delimit persons, things, or portions of actions or events in respect to one another. As with the separate elements represented, the relationships between and among elements in this description (i.e., their temporal, local, causal, consecutive, antithetical, and conditional limitations) are also often but not always confused and obscured by the punctuation and syntax. As a result, the apparently random formation that we find many of the words in, the uncustomary and irregular use of subordination and hypotaxis, challenges but does not completely prohibit our desire to highlight key or consistent concepts or to form one-to-one correspondences that might reliably help us gauge and reinforce our interpretations. In other words, oddly, for all its spectacularness, this description is, by and large, only unevenly or might we say uncertainly legible. And while one might imagine that the return to the mannerly and the regular at the beginning of the subsequent paragraph would moderate the abruptness of the disjunction between the more certainly understood and the less certainly understood parts of this description, that isn’t the case. Rather, by focusing our attention on the hyperbolic concatenation of the two, it exacerbates our sense of the disjunction. In other words, the interdigitation of various modes of representation in the same passage refuses to allow the ‘good’ or the customary and the ‘bad’ or the uncustomary to simply contrast with one another; one could not reduce or stabilize their relation as a simple opposition between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. Rather, the representation insists on their mutual entanglement. In large measure, the unexpected virtues of this passage and passages like it derive from the ways that they do not broadcast their intentions, from the ways that the descriptions or parts of the descriptions sometimes but not always seem to have no immediately available sense. In other words, descriptions such as the dining-room one are nuanced, but we couldn’t say they unfold. As a result, what ought to be obvious is not. Here are three more. In the first, a group from the house sets off on a walk: Out, at last, through the window, dazzled, threading and separating between the flower-beds, the party dispersed with their cigarettes. Large to themselves, to each other graduating from a little below life-size, to an eye from the mountain antlike – but smaller and less directed – or like beads, tipped out . . . The sense of a watcher, reserve of energy and intention, abashed Laurence, who turned from the mountain. But the unavoidable and containing stare impinged to the point of a transformation upon the social figures with orderly, knitted shadows, the well-groomed grass and the beds in their formal pattern. (147) The second describes a moment during a walk that Lois takes with her fiancé: She stood perplexed at the edge of the path; he kissed her with frightened violence. The laurels creaked, as in her arms, she bent back into them. His singleness bore, confusing, upon her panic of thoughts her physical apprehension of him was confused by the slipping, cold leaves. (213) And the last describes a guest upon her arrival in the drawing room after she dresses for dinner: Vague presence, barely a silhouette, the west light sifting into her fluffy hair and lace wrappings so that she half-melted, she gave so little answer to one’s inquiry that one did not know how to approach. (21) As with the dining-room description, these descriptions are explicit – they don’t fail to deliver – but what they deliver is often incongruous and difficult to tease out. In other words, if the scene of mimesis unfolds within networks of interpenetrating and interpretive schema within which the reader and writer participate in series of collaborative exchanges, then even allowing for a degree of ‘poetic license’ on the part of the author, the estranged and unfamiliar syntactical and grammatical arrangements used here undermine the stability of the participatory endeavour upon which the success of the mimetic enterprise depends, and challenge our ability to find apt terms to conceptualize, describe, evaluate, and analyse her prose. There is another way of thinking about these passages that warrants mentioning. You could say, as many have, that these passages are dreadful and, with their multiple distortions, that they have a dreadful quality about them. We have a sense, in other words, given the vast wealth of beautiful periodic prose from which they arise, that they have ‘come out of nowhere’ and that they intrude in an uncomfortable way into the norm of the rest of the prose. It is almost as if the language of the novel had been invaded by something that was not supposed to come out into the open, something other that should not have appeared. And while many of the sentences ultimately submit to rational paraphrase (for example, of the second short passage reproduced, we could say that Lois’s feelings about her fiancé are confused and somehow made more acute by aspects of the physical environment), they remain strikingly unfamiliar, and their placement within the rest of the prose of the paragraph and story which is, by and large, familiar and mannerly, gives the entire narrative an uncanny quality whereby the familiar and unfamiliar are interdigitated, the probable and the possible placed in proximity, and the dreadful aspect of the story, the other, lies not only ‘out there’, in the plot or a character or somewhere beyond the text, but exists out there and ‘in here’, in the prose, in the sentences that supposedly serve the function of representing the dreadful outside of itself. In other words, in The Last September and all of Bowen’s fictional narratives, the quotidian is no less genuine for containing the strange. Bowen’s smudging of boundaries which typically keep separate the seemingly distinct and contradictory realms of the beautiful, periodic prose and the rude, poorly executed, and sometimes even seemingly meaningless prose threatens to disrupt not only the ordinary tension between the known and the unknown, inside and outside, the familiar and the strange, and estrange that tension so that it seems unfamiliar, strange, unknown, and unknowable in the story, but also threatens the fixed laws of nature encoded in mimetic literature, laws intended to safeguard us against the unplumbed and unapprehended, and the putative transcendent stability of the prose is both evoked and disturbed by the syntactical indeterminacy, the dynamic interaction of the forms of the prose. The second conspicuous reservation expressed by Bowen’s past readers specifically concerns the ‘distracting’ ‘proliferation of detail’ as Lee noted, referring to the apparently undisciplined ways that Bowen’s prose sometimes draws the reader’s attention away from the ‘inside’ of the sentences, the place where the meaning is supposed to lie, and holds it instead on the surface, the word level or the ‘top’ of the prose, that level of the representation that is supposed to be passed through to get to the meaning ‘behind’. This is an interesting reservation as it concerns the inconsistent ways that Bowen’s language sometimes appears to seek to deny itself as language, to the often unfamiliar and distracting ways that Bowen’s language sometimes defamiliarizes the conventional role of the signifier in the performance of the act of reference, thus diminishing the importance of the ‘meaning’ by instead conferring much of the glamour and fascination with which meaning is usually endowed onto the words themselves, the patterns of signs that are conventionally supposed to represent the more interesting (and privileged) meaning ‘behind’. In other words, in narrative realism, words generally trace a reality without suggesting an architectural presence. When successful, the signs diffidently efface themselves before their referents in order to create what Barthes has described as the work’s reality effect (‘L’effet de réel’, 84–9). We say the writer has succeeded, then, when the reader enjoys the sense of being faced not with words but with things; in other words, with reality itself. But in The Last September, the putative immateriality of the signs is called into question. Words which are meant to ‘dissolve’ and disappear into meaning sometimes seem burdened by a strange, unexpectedly bossy, Braille-like tangibility, an unfamiliar sense of ‘material obtrusiveness’ as Ellmann has noted (x). Indeed, one often has the sense of having felt Bowen’s words before reading them and this unnatural sense of prominence sometimes makes us experience even the smallest compositional details not as flat, but almost as sculptured forms that emerge towards the reader. This strange materiality is more often associated with plastic arts than written, arts in which we more often find a salient concern with the relation between flatness and depth. Because one frequently feels a preponderance of a word over its meaning, many of the words in Bowen’s prose appear curiously more substantial than the passage as a whole and direct us to their definitions, the denotation in front of the meaning. For example, here is the opening of The Last September: About six o’clock the sound of a motor, collected out of wide country and narrowed under the trees of the avenue, brought the household out in excitement on to the steps. Up among the beeches, a thin iron gate twanged . . . (3) The first sentence would form a plausible beginning to any realistic novel. As with the passage reproduced from The Death of the Heart, Bowen’s scrupulous and economical rhetorical and syntactical choices emphasize proportion and stability and demonstrate the writer’s aesthetic competence and taste. The fidelity to detail, their precision and fastidiousness, provides a sense of the expected congruity between the representation and that represented and establishes a sense of the solidity, the materiality of external reality. In particular, Bowen’s extensive use of the assonance which spans these phrases, especially the repetition of the seductive and suggestive ‘o’ and ‘ou’ sounds, along with their complex echoes, enhances our apprehension of the orbit of meaning, while at the same time investing the words’ literal meanings with heightened emotional significances that the words would not bear if read in isolation. However, the most disturbing aspect of this short passage comes from the word ‘twanged’, from the way in which it seems to surface as a mark on the page, almost as some separate part of the prose. In other words, by comparison with the words around it which quickly dissolve into meaning, ‘twanged’ assumes a strangely insistent quasi-materiality, a graphic indissolvability that distinguishes it from the more ‘transparent’ others. As a result, our attention is arrested by the word long after it ought to have been absorbed into the loam of signification. In part this happens because the word’s obtrusiveness disrupts the sentence’s anticipated arc of suspension, and momentarily stops our forward momentum through the narrative. But also, its unexpected appearance here grants ‘twanged’ too much emphasis as a word, a discrete combination of sounds separate from all the rest. As a result, the word diverts attention away from the ‘reality’ that the word transcribes and onto the verbal surface (the ‘top’) of the prose, thus disturbing the typically unimpaired movement from sign to signified. In other words, here and throughout The Last September, the unexpected substantiality of much of Bowen’s diction creates a highly stylized representation in which individual words sometimes seem to obtrude in an almost material way into the familiar immateriality of the language. Often these are chunks of words with an almost graspable solidity and cut to them such as ‘twanged’ or heavy-sounding verbs such as ‘clotted’ or ‘flanked’ or ‘clapped’ or adverbs such as ‘alacrity’ and ‘implacably’, words that contain a superfluity of aural contradictions in themselves and rapidly alternate soft and spiky tin-can consonants and sibilant vowels in a quick rhythmic mix that contrasts with the rounder fit of most of the other words in our mouths. Rather than providing the reader with a sense of wave-like unendingness that soothes and continues to promise continuing expansions and graceful transformations, these words suddenly and with a strange impertinence contract the periodicity of their sentences and emphasize the infiltration of the strange and unexpected into the ordinary daily world. Momentarily, inside the complex musical, rhythmic, grammatical, and syntactical labyrinth of these sentences, these surprising intrusions become unmanageable and pantomime physical shock that may or may not have any relation to the plot. Yet one cannot help but feel that the shock value is less intended as an aid to representation as it is used as a striking force directed at us, the readers. Further, ‘twanged’s’ unexpected emergence here (guitars twang, while iron gates more often clang) grants to the word an emotional surcharge which is difficult to avoid at the same time it liberates a rude aural value to the word that it would not necessarily bear were it used in a more customary way. But the way it is here deployed suggests excess while its rudeness simultaneously mocks the conventional eloquence established by the first signature sentence. Because Bowen’s diction sometimes but not always thwarts our desire to entertain illusions about entering fictive depth (the place where in mimetic narratives we expect to find meaning hiding or at least the beginning of a promise of meaning revealed by the tracks, the words), it thus creates a perpetual interchange between words as words and words as signifiers, apparitions which can be passed through to meaning. As a result, when we read, we vacillate between the gravitational pull of the representation into the vortex of meaning and an almost impertinent decorative quality to some of the words, as the prose inconsistently ‘vanishes’ into meaning or sense and comes forward in an almost physical way. Consequently, the representation is confused and deprived of a number of its conventional functions, as almost all parts of the composition – every formal element – are subjected to two different forces: ‘decorative’ two-dimensionality and ‘realistic’ three-dimensionality. Released, then, from conventional ways of functioning, a strange affinity between words and things is created in Bowen’s fiction whereby the words’ quasi-palpability sometimes occludes or at least hinders our search for deeper or hidden meaning. This unusual and unconventional rhetorical manipulation lends to Bowen’s prose a strange and continuous multi-dimensionality that forces the reader to slip from one plane of experience of the language to another, her being caught in a kind of strange and strenuous perpetuum mobile. Put somewhat differently, Bowen’s fictional narratives are written in a queer, opaque style that realizes itself not solely as a style to be looked through but as a style to be looked at as well;14 what is unsettling about her narratives is as much a function of their surface as it is of the various depths they conceal. In large measure, it is this strange, inconsistent, fluctuating motility, these unexpected and at times contradictory movements that take place within the same story, that give Bowen’s fictional narratives their sense of inchoate pressure and force. And while ‘twanged’ does not completely prohibit recuperation into the representational schema, it does dramatize the innate recalcitrance, not as openly admitted by more conventional realistic discourse, that materiality presents to the shaping imagination while, in various ways, it simultaneously emphasizes the arbitrariness of closure. While Bowen’s fiction has most often been likened to that of a diverse range of turn-ofthe-century and mid-twentieth-century writers typically associated with social and psychological realism such as E. M. Forster, Henry James, and Graham Greene, the inconsistent and erratic concatenations of surface and depth in Bowen’s fictional narratives bring into the open one of the salient dilemmas that define the problematic field of modern literature. Just as Manet’s peony still lifes could be said to define the problematic field of modern painting – the flowers appear to shed brush strokes not petals, and this undisguised facture anchors the painting to its surface and thwarts illusions viewers have about entering fictive depth – because the substantiality of many of Bowen’s words throws the substantiality of things into question, just as the substantiality of things throws the substantiality of words into question, her prose could be said to define the problematic field of modern literature. In the space remaining, I would like to discuss one more aspect of Bowen’s prose style that contributes to the hermeneutical uncertainty that characterizes The Last September and that makes the terms of appreciation and analysis uncommonly difficult to apprehend and apply. Despite modernist and postmodernist critiques of mimeticism and the prevailing suspicion of its ontological and ideological entrapment, generally contemporary criticism has yet to abandon ideas about mimeticism’s referential imperatives, ideas originally outlined by Aristotle and admirably consolidated by Ian Watt in his remarkable study, The Rise of the Novel.15 A reference is distinguished from other linguistic categories in a work of literary mimesis in that its purpose is to identify a particular individual member of a class of entities. While the topic of reference remains controversial, it is generally held that the conditions of a reference include a set of grammatical and contextual constraints on the capacity of an expression to perform this function. The idea of reference involves an existential presupposition: one can only refer to something that is held to exist in the world. By thus exploiting the referring properties of language, the mimetic text ensures that process of recognition whereby the reader connects the world produced by the text with the world of which she herself has direct or indirect knowledge. Reference, then, belongs to mimesis as part of a general process of reminding, a recognizing of the object as the same again; a work of literary mimesis maintains its intelligibility when the referential language used re-presents in ways that keep the criteria of identify intact. To the extent that such an agreement is unsupported by the representation or becomes impossible, the realistic effect is compromised. As Leslie Hill has argued, the success of the mimetic enterprise is then assured by virtue of reader and writer engaging in a ‘contract of mutual recognition’, a contract which accords with those general networks of agreements from which a society demarcates its boundaries between sense and nonsense, the typical and the anomalous, the normal and the abnormal (336). In other words, by suppressing and excluding anything arbitrary or fanciful and instead favouring descriptive verisimilitude, the mimetic enterprise reinforces rather than contradicts what is generally accepted as truthful and relevant without distortion or overt or conspicuous stylization. Stated somewhat differently, the mimetic enterprise gains its force from the way its use of referential language encourages certitude about the bond between the object of knowledge and the discourse about it, by the many ways it reinforces rather than contradicts our sense of congruity between the signified and the sign. As a consequence, mimesis tempts the intellect into believing that what is copied is the extent of the real. But while the similarity and appropriateness of the sign to the signified are the criteria for mimetic effectiveness, in The Last September, similitude is often rejected in favour of jarring and unsettling inaccuracies and improprieties. Consequently, many of the intellectual disturbances effected by Bowen’s prose are due to the unexpected ways that the representation sometimes confuses, estranges, or renders inadequate the set of socially constructed typifications in respect of which the world is supposed to function in certain more or less regular and predictable ways, thus forcing us to reconsider them or abandon them in favour of more transgressive comparisons of dissimilitude. Look, for example, at this passage that describes the terrain through which Lois and a guest drive on their way back to Danielstown from a neighbour’s: . . . Lois . . . drove home briskly. To the south, below them, the demesne trees of Danielstown made a dark formal square like a rug on the green country. In their hearts like a dropped pin the grey glazed roof reflecting the sky lightly glinted. Looking down, it seemed to Lois they lived in a forest; space of lawns blotted out in the pressure and dusk of trees. She wondered they were not smothered; then wondered still more that they were not afraid. Far from here, too, their isolation became apparent. The house seemed to be pressing down low in apprehension, hiding its face, as though it had her vision of where it was. It seemed to huddle its trees close in fright and amazement at the wise light lovely unloving country, the unwilling bosom whereon it was set. From the slope’s foot, where Danielstown trees began, the land stretched out in a plain flat as water, basin of the Madder and Darra and their fine wandering tributaries, till the far hills, faint and brittle, straining against the inrush of vaster distance, cut the droop of the sky like a glass blade. Fields gave back light to the sky – the hedges netting them over thinly and penetrably – as though the sheen of grass were but a shadow on water, a breath of colour clouding the face of light. Rivers, profound in brightness, flowed over beds of grass. The cabins lifting their pointed white ends, the pink and yellow farms were but half opaque; cast doubtfully on their fields the shadow of living. Square cattle moved in fields like saints, with a mindless certainty. Single trees, on a rath, at the turn of the road, drew up light at their roots. Only the massed trees – like a rug to dull some keenness, break some contact between self and senses perilous to the routine of living – only the trees of the demesne were dark and exhaled darkness. Down among them, dusk would stream up the paths ahead, lie stagnant on lawns, would mount in the dank of garden, heightening the walls, dulling the borders as by a rain of ashes. Dusk would lie where one looked as though it were in one’s eyes, as though the fountain of darkness were in one’s own perception. Seen from above, the house in its pit of trees seemed a very reservoir of obscurity; from the doors one must come out stained with it. And the kitchen smoke, lying over the vague trees doubtfully, seemed the very fumes of living. (78–9) And here is another that again describes the country through which Lois and a guest drive: . . . [S]he drove home briskly. On the bright sky opposite, Mr. Montmorency’s pale face hung like an apparition’s. She took the curves of Mount Isabel Drive with a rattle: the trap rocked on its axle, the traces creaked. Beyond the gates light lay flat and yellow along the hedges where brambles showered, hard red blackberries knocked on the spokes and swung back, shining. She took the short way, over a shoulder of mountain; the light pink road crushed under the wheels like sugar. Coming up out from the lanes, they bathed an hour or so in the glare of space. Height had the quality of depth: as they mounted they seemed to be striking deeper into the large mild crystal of an inverted sea. Out of the distance everywhere, pointless and unrelated, space came like water between them, slipping and widening. They receded from one another into the vacancy. On the yellow furze-dust light was hard and physical; over the parching heather shadow faded and folded tone on tone, and was drawn to the sky on delicate brittle peaks. The road bent over a ridge, the trap ran down on the pony’s rump, he and she shifted back up their seats. (73) It is perhaps no surprise that of all Bowen’s difficult passages, it is these irreal landscape and light descriptions, these intimidating, hard-to-approach ‘nature’ descriptions that constitute the most complex and intense moments of her fictional narratives that have been virtually banned from the territory of critical scrutiny, for it is here where we most often find the security of the assumptions which underpin the mimetic project most dramatically called into question, where we see the problem of the relations among representation, origin, and referent most dramatically encountered in Bowen’s work. While reading these descriptions, the entire matter of our making sense is experienced as strange and is defamiliarized. Certainly these descriptions appear grounded in realism – the represented world is minutely described and the descriptions seem true enough, up to a point. But what are we to make of a landscape where space comes like water, where trees exhale darkness, where lawns are blotted out by the pressure of trees? Where are these places where height has the quality of depth, where houses press down in apprehension, and hills strain against the inrush of distance? Just what parts of Ireland do they describe? At any point in the system of mimesis, we should be able, in principle, to infer the unfolding of causal sequences that allow us to recognize the represented objects as the same again, and that consequently lends to the work its sense of teleological coherence. As earlier noted, the authentic mimetic work refers to and arranges essential or typical patterns of experience and in so doing, grasps laws underlying reality and history, putatively revealing the world in its innermost principles of intelligibility. When successful, the formalized representation of this capacity includes the deductive inferences of logic and the inductive inferences of science; to the extent that the work of literary mimesis is shaped by these modes of reasoning, it rests on exceptionally durable intellectual foundations. But because these frequently encountered light and landscape descriptions do not consistently obey the laws of logic, identity, or causality, nor do they consistently follow the grammar of intention, finding a map, if you will, for reading these descriptions is extremely difficult. These landscape descriptions hardly resemble the domesticated lower altitudes found in realistic fiction, but nor do they represent the foreign yet natural terrain of exiled excess.16 Unlike the recognizable landscapes in realistic fiction, these landscape descriptions appear to invite us to decode them, to make meaning of them, and yet that being described often eludes recognition. Objects are clearly defined yet for all their specificity, these descriptions are curiously unkenable, not invisible but in ways hard to ‘see’. In other words, because they sometimes but not always escape the cartography of consensus upon which our comprehension depends (which are the contingent parts? which are the essential?) they only irregularly avail themselves of our cognizance, and then often only relatively. One almost has the impression reading the strange way the narrator describes the world (square cows?, pink and yellow farms?, faint hills that cut the droop of the sky like a blade?) that we are not reading a description of natural geography, but rather are reading an imaginative interpretation of an expressionistic landscape painting or even of an evocative dream. Certainly this is not reality, or is it? We often find these ambiguous descriptions in The Last September and in all of Bowen’s fictional narratives, descriptions that move fluidly between the conscious mind with its symbolic resources and the unconscious with its subliminal significations or the semiotic where words may be nonsense and images meaningful. Because these descriptions make it difficult to uphold the distinction between the probable and the possible, in ways, they work to expand and decentre meaning itself for if we accept, as the descriptions insist that we do, the existence of an ambiguous, hard-to-discern reality, of the represented irreality existing alongside or among the represented recognizable reality, our acceptance has the paradoxical effect of undermining the authority with which one asserts the principle that guides our assertion to the irreality or improbability of parts of the description in the first place. Here is another passage which describes a derelict mill: The mill startled them all, staring light-eyed, ghoulishly, round a bend in the valley . . . The river darkened and thundered towards the millrace, light came full on the high façade of decay. Incredible in its loneliness, roofless, floorless, beams criss-crossing the dank interior daylight, the whole place tottered, fit to crash at a breath. Hinges rustily bled where a door had been wrenched away; up six storeys panes still tattered the daylight. Mounting the tree-crowded, steep slope some roofless cottages nestled under the flank of the mill with sinister pathos . . . The sun cast in through the windows some wild gold squares distorted by the beams; grasses along the windowsills trembled in light . . . Split light, like hands, was dragged past to the mill-race, clawed like hands at the brink and went down in destruction. (151, 152, 153, 155) And here is one more which describes Lois walking outside in the evening: A shrubbery path was solid with darkness, she pressed down it. Laurels breathed coldly and close: on her bare arms the tops of the leaves were timid and dank, like tongues of dead animals . . . High up a bird shrieked and stumbled down through the darkness, tearing the leaves . . . Fear curled back in defeat from the carpet-border . . . Now, on the path: grey patches worse than the dark: they slipped up her dress knee-high. (36) There is a monstrous incompatibility to many of Bowen’s images – laurels breathe, leaves are like tongues, light claws like hands – and a shocking taint of primitivism, of pressures exerted by energies more typically repressed that provokes unease and anxiety and suggests a freedom of association that borders on anarchy. As with those earlier explored, much of the power of our experience of reading these images derives from their spectacular obscurity, from the fact that the mental image or meaning created by the words cannot always be judged similar, analogous, or even identical to what we know about the world from sense data directly (‘Fear curled back in defeat from the carpet-border’?), or from the words (ditto). To a great extent, these descriptions’ originality consists neither in their referential purity nor in the fantastic quality of their content but rather in the oftentimes florid contingency and interdigitation of the recognizable, the nearly recognizable, and the unrecognizable. Because these descriptions combine obscure, evocative language with more conventionally referential language of description without, despite their occasional syntactical regularity, a consistently convincing force employed to mediate between the words and the sentences and the words and the meaning, these descriptions are often unknowable or rather only relatively knowable, as they depend for their force on an occlusion not created by any theorized ‘failure of the signifying order’, but by the irregular concatenation in the prose of the natural and supernatural, the familiar and the strange, the known and the unknown, the recognizable and the unrecognizable. In other words, where the mimetic project relies on the certitude engendered between the object of the representation and the discourse about it, much of the power of Bowen’s bizarre images lies precisely in the way that many of them refer to no one thing, neither a known and recognizable material phenomenon nor an historical reality. In fact, the critical interest and indeed, in ways, the comprehensibility of these passages resides in the ways they are fashioned for something other than a reality effect, in the ways they are fashioned for something other than the purposes of consensus. Yet the intellectual disturbances effected by these images are due not only to the inappropriateness of the sign for what is signified, but also to the ways that Bowen’s weird images often undermine the mind’s confidence in similitude and mimesis as criteria of language and cognition. A common aspect of many of Bowen’s aesthetic deformations is that they take mimesis as their target; rather than presenting the mundane as the real, by creating instead unions that are grotesque, anomalous, and excrescent, the deformed images negate the ontological status of ‘copy’, eliminating the ‘world’ and its differentiations. The semantic conceptual anomalies produced not only menace our expectations about comparison and signification, but call attention to and undermine our confidence in customary processes of signification. In other words, by denying or at least questioning that there is some form of relation between language and the object world, Bowen destabilizes and defamiliarizes a fundamental theoretical support of mimesis. While the rhetorical excess in these descriptions arouses in us an expectation that the base reality represented will be, through understanding, transmuted into a ‘higher’ form of truth or understanding ‘outside’ or beyond itself, by sometimes but not always locating a dimension of meaninglessness within the very vehicle of meaning, Bowen disconcerts and sometimes subverts the reader’s expectation that the visual description can be translated into a pattern of knowledge, a cognitive structure or information (on the basis of the assumption that the visual description is assumed to promote or project the creation of a verbal text which is materialized in various kinds of commentary and which can be translated back into the prior verbal text, the description in the story). That said, some of Bowen’s most effective images are those that are least weighed down by the dross of similitude. Look, for example, at this passage that describes Lois and a house guest walking along a path: They approached the doorway that yearned up the path like an eye-socket. A breath of peat-smoke, of cold trodden earth, of the ghostly dark of white walls came out from the cottage. Danny took form in the darkness, searching with his one eye. He stood with his white beard, helpless and eager. ‘Well!’ exclaimed Hugo. Then Danny broke out this was young Mr. Hugo, wasn’t he a lovely gentleman, as fine and as upstanding as ever. And here was his wife he brought with him, the beautiful lady. And trembling and searching, he took Marda’s hand. He declared that she brought back the sight of youth to his eyes. (105) The most startling image in this passage is of course the first. ‘[T]he doorway yearned up the path like an eye socket’? It’s hard to imagine what we might do to ‘correct’ that image, to make it yield or be assimilated into the work of representation. If there is congruence here, it is so estranged from the unities of identity that we have learned to take for granted and that are assumed in realist formulation that it is unfathomable to us. Like many of Bowen’s images, the transgressive nature of this image, the way it combines parts from two discrete categories, in this case the inanimate (the door) and the animate (the human), suggests an outrageous mixing of categories of being established by science and logic and alludes to a frightening and disconcerting interpenetration of putatively discrete categories, thus confounding the orderly principles of differentiation purchased through a reduction of traits and/or qualities inscribed in mimesis. In other words, the dissemblance of parts combined in, for example, the doorway image creates a kind of amalgamation that bursts and dissolves ‘natures’ as it instead combines different natures according to conventions or norms of possibility that exist beyond those inscribed in the conventional mimetic project. By thus dissolving the structural integrity of ‘natures’, these descriptions force different parts into combinations whereby our desire for consistency and proximity is thwarted, as is our desire to form a continuity, for forming a relation and thus gaining a sense of completion. For example, in this image, by suspending or temporarily negating the presumed inviolable integrity of the human and the presumed inviolable integrity of the inhuman or inanimate, Bowen’s representation suggests that the concept of identity through differentiation is a tenuous and fragile one, and points to complicated engagements among the concepts of self and other, natural and unnatural. In a metaphysical sense, you could say that these descriptions attack nature in its very forms, which it mocks and deforms, while they scramble the hierarchical order that separates and puts humans on top, thus cancelling the linear process of their relationship. By so doing, these images contradict the absoluteness of nature’s order and categorical structures, and suggest instead their instability and arbitrariness. Even where a choice between two meanings might finally be made, the sustained alternative has, by its very existence, asserted a threat to resolution; consequently, the various possibilities posed disconcert at the same time they enrich our sense of possibility. By showing what is not, by sundering the expected relationship between the sign and the signified and deforming the form that contains the subject (indeed, as mentioned, there is a way in which the landscape’s or object’s structure as an object capable of representation is itself called into question by Bowen’s transgressive processes; you could say the objects described want a certain imaginary solidity and integrity), Bowen’s excrescent imagery suggests the uncertainty of representation and its limitations, while at the same time, by replacing the descriptive apparatus of the classical model of the theory of categories and undermining its philosophical underpinnings, Bowen’s representation suggests the possibility of different theories of meaning, truth, reason, knowledge, and understanding than those encoded in conventional mimetic representation. Yet while these descriptions interrupt our attempts to consistently progress towards and secure determinate meaning, it is important to note that it is, by and large, the conventional rhythm and syntactical regularity of these irreal passages that keeps them from meaninglessness. Indeed, the incongruity between realistic and patently unreal formulations often goes unnoticed. Were they written completely in solecisms, we would feel at a loss, our proximity to meaning so great that it would feel untransversible and we might choose instead of reading these descriptions just to ignore them. But as it is, even completely nonsensical phrases such as ‘in their heart like a dropped pin the grey glazed room reflecting the sky lightly glinted’ sound so much like they make sense that we experience the pull of the onomatopoeia of meaning suggested by the smooth rhythms and expected movement of sounds while at the same time we are obstructed and ultimately unable to form paraphrasable meaning. One of the great merits of these descriptions, then, derives from the reader’s fluctuating cognitive affirmation and questioning of the representation. The infiltration of transcategorical (i.e. monstrous) beings into the domestic world of tea parties and tennis matches represented in The Last September suggests that Danielstown and its surroundings are places in which monstrosity is neither excluded nor put on the periphery, but are instead places where the monstrous and the ordinary are unpredictably and inexplicably interdigitated. Until recently it has been those commonplace narrative elements that represent the manifest plot that have constituted the mainstay of critical scrutiny. But the infiltration of the monstrous discomfits the absoluteness of the natural order represented in the manifest plot and of most historical and thematic interpretations of The Last September exposing them as uneasy intellectual impositions. In addition, the escape of matter from form described in many of these descriptions, the moments when things (humans, lawns, skylines) become or are represented as ‘blotting out’ or when they ‘melt’ into or out of shape, portends a return to chaos that is only insecurely and erratically stabilized by matter’s resumption of coherent, recognizable form in other parts of the descriptions. In other words, the shape-shifting quality of these descriptions suggests that the boundaries of natural forms are insecure, that it is somehow possible for natural objects (trees, lawns, grass) to slip out of the clothing that declares their identities and to move in and out of shapes that confuse and may misrepresent them. As a result, these shape-shifting landscape descriptions often declare an unstable and inconstant independence from the natural, material world. As mentioned, by underscoring the variable and irregularly pressured contingency of the formed and unformed and emphasizing the instability of their relationship, Bowen creates in places a kind of monster of signification that deforms the commonly theorized relationship of sign and signified. This erratically represented deformation and defamiliarization of the relationship between formed and unformed, sign and signified, parodies the intellectual vulgarity of materialism which underlies the privileging of sign over signified, and at the same time, it also rejects any definitive (spiritual or ideal) conception of the precedence of signified over sign. The erratic contraventions that take place in these descriptions, especially when form and nature are seen paralleled by sign and signified, serve to discomfit the mimetic project, as generally understood, and suggest that the comprehension of meaning is dependent on an understanding of a provisional and unsettled relation between the congruous and the incongruous. As is generally assumed, in a conventional work of literary mimesis, the hypostatized representing subject is presumed to be a unified and homogenizing agent who provides an essential guarantee of the security of the representational space she commands. Yet the major symptoms of unease in The Last September and those which have provoked most derision in Bowen’s work generally are those in which mimesis runs counter to its socially sanctioned forms. Because the ‘mimesis’ produced by The Last September takes the form of a series of strangely connected referential (i.e. ‘realistic’) and unexampled elements in which apparently disconnected parts are connected syntactically and are constantly likened to parts within a textual whole which itself as whole erratically suspends the possibility of a direct ‘referential’ passage to the known world beyond the text, interpretation itself must run counter to its socially sanctioned forms. ‘Excessiveness’ or bad execution is the term that has most often been used to recuperate Bowen’s transgressions of consensual codes of recognition. However, the chief virtue of The Last September lies precisely in the ways that it will not allow us to take for granted the meaning of excessive as construed by consensus, just as, in the opposite emphasis, it will not allow us simply to invert that meaning. Where there is a departure from the commonplace, the site of agreed upon meanings, there is certainly a problem, and much of the interest of The Last September and Bowen’s fictional narratives generally lies in the way they acknowledge these problems, not in terms of reductive psychological categories, but by estranging commonly conceived and represented relations among the ‘realistic’ and the ‘fictional’, the noumenal and the phenomenal, and by Bowen’s idiosyncratic disconnection of the irregular from the social context of practical knowledge. In fact, you could say that the most compelling psychological and affective drama of The Last September is an epistemological one, for it performs a series of epistemological suspensions whereby both the knowing subject and the objects of knowledge remain uncertain entities, the charting of the map of the relations between the self and the world blurred by the representation. In short, far from being disentangled from the question of the economy of mimesis, as some have averred, The Last September engages with it in provocative and important ways. Our appreciation and understanding of Bowen’s work will continue to be enhanced as our susceptibility to her disarming challenges increases in depth and variety. Notes 1. I would like to thank Julian Moynahan and Guarav Majumdar for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this essay. 2. William Heath also suggests that the novel’s theme involves internecine warfare and has to do with the opposition between the non-events inside the house and the war taking place outside (38). In a complementary reading, Bennett and Royle relate what they interpret as a dissolution of the boundaries of the protagonist’s self to the problematic construction of political boundaries in Ireland in 1920 (14–22). (Typically, even the ‘love relation’ in the novel is viewed as a ‘microcosm’ of the more elaborately discussed political conflict and generally takes one of two forms: Lois, the protagonist, is either seen as the tragic young innocent shocked and fatally disappointed by war’s realities (writes O’Faolain, Lois is a ‘girl emerging, awkwardly for herself and for others into womanhood’ and who dreams of romance and has a thirst for life but is ‘inadequately wary of its complexities’ [152]) or the aspiring young feminist who longs for something beyond the presumably claustrophobic clamp of a marital relationship and who, by virtue of war’s fortunes, escapes potentially tragic unfulfilment; see, for example, Lassner (152–5). In a contrary reading that offers an exciting platform for greater and more complex elaboration, Jacqueline Rose suggests that the representational instability in Bowen’s work including The Last September repudiates the political undercurrents in Bowen’s narratives (93). 3. Other valuable feminist readings of The Last September include Claire Hanson’s who writes that Bowen’s stories and, by implication all of Bowen’s fictional narratives, were written in ‘response to problems of entrapment within the patriarchally coded adult female body’ (73), and Harriet S. Chessman’s who writes about the female characters’ alienation from and identification with language (123–38). 4. This queer, ‘provisional’ quality of Bowen’s fictional narratives (‘not quite like sleep, not quite like the future’, as John Bayley wrote of her short fiction [166]), the obscure, edgy indeterminacy that undoes our efforts at conceptual clarity has been noted by a few earlier readers including William Trevor who notes that ‘[t]here are echoes of mystery in many of Elizabeth Bowen’s stories, like reverberations after an explosion that has not itself been heard’ (131) and Harriet Blodgett, who suggests that Bowen’s ‘resonantly allusive’ prose will not bear ‘too literal reading’ (24). 5. Of Bowen’s past readers who have approached the troubling instability in Bowen’s prose, Robert Caserio has perhaps been most astute when he describes the ‘conflict of unity and disunity’ (265) that he sees in her work. Bowen’s stories have a ‘habit of ruining or muting oppositions’; quoting Bowen, he writes that they pursue ‘“a thinning of the membrane between the this and the that”’ (271). 6. It is worth noting, as Jocelyn Brooke has, that of the great novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Dickens, Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf, James, and Joyce, only Bowen has not created any memorable characters. As he writes, even the characters in The Heat of the Day, Bowen’s novel which is most often cited as being well and legibly plotted, seem to inhabit ‘a kind of a limbo’ (25). Think of Lois, the protagonist of The Last September, for example, although we might just as well be considering any of Bowen’s artless and uncertain protagonists including Jane, the unconcentrated protagonist of A World of Love (1955); Emmaline, the erratically recessive and prominent main character of To the North (1932); Callie, the undetermined main character of ‘Mysterious Kôr’; or the uncondensed Tibbie of ‘The Girl with the Stoop’. Although the relative vagueness of these characters is often attributed to a kind of inherent innocence, Bowen’s female protagonists are more often united by a want of clearly defined qualities and especially by a want of clearly motivated actions and condensed purposes than by any moral or ethical choices that might lead one to characterize them as innocent or guilty. For more on this aspect of Bowen’s strange characters, see Osborn (190–2). 7. As Brooke has noted, Bowen’s stories can hardly, with the possible exception of The Heat of the Day, be said to have plots at all (8). 8. Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September [1929], 218. All references are to this edition and will be cited in the text. 9. She is the missing ‘link’, as Victoria Glendinning regrettably claims, connecting ‘Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark’ (xv). More often, she is cited, with an undercurrent of disdainful largesse, as a ‘less experimental heir to Virginia Woolf’ (Kershner 68). As Bennett and Royle have noted, this unfortunate hierarchical comparison has done much to constrain Bowen’s literary reputation and to relegate her to the status of a minor novelist (xvi). 10. For a sensitive discussion of the effects of Woolf’s periodicity, see McCluskey, especially 122–6. 11. In a fairly feckless if well-intentioned passage, Heath, specifically citing Bowen’s penchant for double negatives, suggests that they may support, in some way he seems unsure of, Bowen’s ‘defiantly’ avowed intentions (and here he refers to her essay, ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’), even as he owns that these ‘tricks’ form ‘deliberate trials of the reader’s patience’ (142). More recently, Roy Foster has written that ‘[Bowen’s] more risky and over-the-top passages do not always come off’ (149), while Paul West simply dismisses her fiction, complaining that her narratives are ‘too oblique, too exacting’ in their demands on the reader (77). In an early and suggestively ambivalent reading, Jocelyn Brooke observed that Bowen’s complex style (that he likens to a kind of ‘neurotic impediment, a kind of stammer’), creates a ‘distorted, fragmentary effect’ that, in places, ‘leads to actual obscurity’ (25, 26). 12. Lee is here quoting Elizabeth Hardwick who mocks Bowen in a Partisan Review essay noteworthy more for its provincialism than in its insight (XVI [November 1949], 1114–21), and John McCormick in his Catastrophe and Imagination (93). 13. Although his discussion is not lengthy, in a contrary reading, Paul Muldoon, writing specifically about ‘The Tommy Crans’, has noted the formal and thematic ‘concomitancy’ of ‘discrete coexistent realms’ in Bowen’s work, a characteristic that he suggests ties her work to Joyce’s and Beckett’s and that positions her work, along with theirs, ‘at some notional cutting edge’ (24, 25). 14. Bowen’s narratives have been called pictorial and, in some ways, her narratives are painterly. But they call to mind less the representational work of Sargent or the fragmented perspectives of Picasso than they do the epigraphic ornamentation found in Islamic art that functions simultaneously as both writing and as decoration. In other words, because Bowen’s strange prose possesses both decorative and representational qualities, it both shows and tells. 15. For recent examinations of some of those critiques, see Prendergast, Melberg, Potolsky, and Burwick. For an excellent, wide-ranging, and recent discussion of issues associated with the history of and the aesthetics of mimesis, see Halliwell. 16. As George Levine notes in The Realistic Imagination, a ‘topographical survey’ of novels in the realist canon would produce an ‘unilluminating catalog’. As he notes, be it Dingley Dell, or Loamshire, or the Belgian lowlands, landscapes in realist novels are ‘barely varied by the slightest rise’ (216, 208); one thinks more of Dutch realism than Turner when reading these landscapes. Extremes, such as we see in Bowen’s descriptions, of psychic intensity, violent behavior, or geography are generally avoided.