Abstract
Throughout this study we have sought to engage not only with a rereading of Bowen’s work but also with the indissociable question of how to write about that work. In other words, how might we present the novels or still lives of Elizabeth Bowen in critically appropriate ways? What sorts of critical concepts and vocabulary do the novels themselves prompt? What kinds of critical and theoretical thinking does Bowen’s work seem to call for?
The obelisk having no approaches is taken away. (TN 99)
The futility of the heated inner speed, the alternate racing to nowhere and coming to dead stops, made him guy himself.
(HD 14)
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Notes
See, for example, Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation (London: Vision, 1981) 191,197.
A weak sense of ‘metafiction’ would involve ‘simply’ the idea of fiction which draws attention to itself as fiction or fiction which is about fiction (as in the novel about a novelist writing a novel about a novelist, etc.): it would not engage with more fundamental disturbances of the relations between what is fictional and what is not. Patricia Waugh’s Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984) strives to elaborate a stronger notion of metafiction, declaring, for example, that metafiction ‘self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text’ (2). Waugh’s account, however, tends to preserve or reinscribe precisely what metafiction (in a ‘strong’ sense) puts into question — for instance, the very notion of the ‘artefact’ (in the above quotation), the maintenance of an oppositional logic of ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’, and a privileging of the concept of self-consciousness (evident even in the title of her book). The ‘metafictional’ in the terms in which we are seeking to elaborate in the present chapter is less subject-oriented and subject-centred, and concerned rather with the citational per se.
Compare in this respect Bowen’s Preface (1947) to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, in which she observes of Le Fanu’s characters: ‘There is abnormal pressure, from every side; the psychic air is often overheated’ (MT 105).
More fully, the passage from Traherne reads: ‘As iron at a distance is drawn by the lodestone, there being some invisible communications between them: so is there in us a world of love to somewhat, tho we know not what in the world that should be. There are invisible ways of conveyance, by which some great thing doth touch our souls, and by which we tend to it. Do you not feel yourself drawn with the expectation and desire of some great thing?’ See ‘Centuries of Meditations’, 1:2, in Thomas Traherne, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Alan Bradford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) 187. It may be noted that Bowen’s ‘citation’ of this passage includes the (as we shall come to describe it, obeliskine) ‘drawn by’ instead of ‘drawn with’.
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© 1995 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle
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Bennett, A., Royle, N. (1995). Obelisk. In: Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374355_6
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