Alexis Grohmann & Caragh Wells (Eds.) - Digressions in European Literature - From Cervantes To Sebald (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) PDF

Digressions in European Literature
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08
10.1057/9780230292529 - Digressions in European Literature, Edited by Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells
Also by Alexis Grohmann:
COMING INTO ONE’S OWN: The Novelistic Development of Javier Marías
LITERATURA Y ERRABUNDIA

ALLÍ DONDE UNO DIRÍA QUE YA NO PUEDE HABER NADA. TU ROSTRO
MAÑANA DE JAVIER MARÍAS (Edited with Maarten Steenmeijer)
EL COLUMNISMO DE ESCRITORES ESPAÑOLES (1975–2005) (Edited with

Maarten Steenmeijer)
Digressions in European
Literature

From Cervantes to Sebald
Edited by
Alexis Grohmann
Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies, University of Edinburgh, UK
and
Caragh Wells
Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies, University of Bristol, UK
Selection and editorial matter © Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells 2011
Individual chapter © contributors 2011
Foreword © Ross Chambers 2011
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978–0–230–24798–7 hardback
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Digressions in European literature : from Cervantes to Sebald / edited
by Alexis Grohmann, Caragh Wells.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–230–24798–7
1. Digression (Rhetoric) in literature. 2. European literature—
History and criticism. I. Grohmann, Alexis. II. Wells, Caragh, 1967–
PN56.D54D54 2010
809'923—dc22
2010027574
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
For Ross Chambers
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Foreword by Ross Chambers ix
Acknowledgements xi
Notes on Contributors xii
Introduction 1
Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells
1 The Twists and Turns of Life: Cervantes’s Trials of
Persiles and Sigismunda 9
Jeremy Robbins
2 Digressive and Progressive Movements: Sympathy and
Sexuality in Tristram Shandy; or, Plain Stories 21
Judith Hawley
3 Little Dorrit: Dickens, Circumlocution, Unconscious
Thought 36
Jeremy Tambling
4 Concerning Metaphor, Digression and Rhyme
(Fetish Aesthetics and the Walking Poem) 49
Ross Chambers
5 Henry James, in Parenthesis 64
Ian F. A. Bell
6 A Slice of Watermelon: The Rhetoric of Digression in
Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog’ 82
Peter J. Rabinowitz and Corinne Bancroft
7 ‘Let’s Forget All I Have Just Said’: Diversions and
Digressions in Gidean Narratives 94
David H. Walker
8 Errant Eyes: Digression, Metaphor and Desire in
Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time 106
Margaret Topping
9 Virginia Woolf and Digression: Adventures in
Consciousness 118
Laura Marcus
vii
viii Contents
10 Stealing the Story: Robert Walser’s Robber-Novel 130

Samuel Frederick
11 Negotiating Tradition: Flann O’Brien’s Tales of Digression
and Subversion 143
Flore Coulouma

12 ‘Going On’: Digression and Consciousness in The Beckett
Trilogy 156
Edmund J. Smyth
13 Straight Line or Aimless Wandering? Italo Calvino’s
Way to Digression 169
Olivia Santovetti
14 Roving with a Compass: Digression, the Novel and the
Creative Imagination in Javier Marías 181
Alexis Grohmann
15 The Sense of Sebald’s Endings ... and Beginnings 193
J. J. Long
Index 205
Foreword
Ross Chambers

Forgive me, reader, for plucking at your sleeve and interrupting your
train of thought. But that’s what forewords do; and I did want to draw
your attention to the phenomenon of digression, and how hard it is to
pin down.
Whatever the context may be, digression seems to be always already
active within it: it is a vehicle for whatever it may be that was inevitably
repressed by the defining of the context. So it is inherently oppositional
in character, which is to say wily, deceptive, uncanny and even per-
verse. I like that! Where there is a law, digression is on the side of desire;
where power reigns, it represents the strength of the weak. The defined,
the delimited, the regulated meet in digression a principle of untidi-
ness, drift and disorder – the relaxation of energy and the prospect of
coming apart that haunts the tightest of methodical constructs, the
strictest of systems, the tidiest of organizations. It is a parasite, living off
the cultural conventions that it simultaneously undermines and even,
eventually, bids fair to demolish. It is the noise of discourse, the static
of thought, preventing routine and keeping things lively.
Something that helps digression to get away with its vocation for
oppositionality is that it so readily passes as a mere lapse or error, a fail-
ure of logic or attention that seems negligible and eminently forgivable.
Considered as a figure of speech, it is a rhetorical device that mimes a
delinquency, then – or alternatively an errancy that has become avail-
able as a trope. If you take it to be an actual slip-up, you may very well
have missed the point. There are readers, for instance, who are irritated
by Tristram Shandy or A la recherche du temps perdu, and wish the author
would ‘come to the point’. Whatever Sterne or Proust’s point may be,
they have missed it. Still, I do understand how they feel – and anyway,
their supposedly naïve reaction is necessary, is it not, to validate the
point (whatever it may be) of texts such as these? Without guileless
readers to miss the point, masterpieces of long-windedness like Shandy
and the Recherche would simply not have a point to make. They would
be pointlessly wasting their time, and ours.
The scholarly authors of the essays in this collection – I confess to
being one of them – have done their level best to grapple with such
conundrums and to define the point of the many examples of literary
digressivity that have caught their attention. Like Freud, who knew
ix
x Foreword
when a cigar was a phallic symbol and when it was just a cigar, we can
tell, I assure you, when a digression is a trope and when it is just sloppy
writing. That said, however – and admirable as such efforts are – I do
hope, dear reader, that in the end you will agree with me that the real
reason we haven’t completely wasted our time is that, inadvertently or

otherwise, we have also taken a step or two towards measuring the sheer
elusiveness of literary digressivity. For digression is like that other most
slippery of rhetorical practices, irony, in that its vocation does seem to
be to impose on analytic criticism the usefully chastening maxim that
the more you succeed the more you fail, and the more you fail, the bet-
ter you succeed.
There, the prefacing is done now. We can return to our separate paths.
Thank you, though, for the opportunity to chat a bit; phone me some-
time and we’ll do lunch. I’d like to hear your thoughts on zeugma.
Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following for their help in making this
book possible in its present form: all the contributors, who so will-
ingly embarked on this adventure with us and without whose good-
will, patience, diligence and lucidity the book would probably never
have come to fruition; Stergios Delialis, for designing the book cover,
and Vetti Karvounari and Kostas Kalogirou for their assistance in this
regard; the Robert Walser-Stiftung and Keystone for permission to reprint
a manuscript page by the Swiss author; the Department of Languages at
Clemson University for paying for the rights to reprint the said image;
Paula Kennedy, Ben Doyle and, especially, Monica Kendall of Palgrave
Macmillan for their steadfast editorial assistance; Jane Horton, for the
splendid index; and, last but not least, Ross Chambers, loiterly trail-
blazer and patron saint of this collection (as Judith Hawley puts it), for
his good-humoured support of the project throughout, not least by way
of many transatlantic telephone conversations, letters and faxes over
recent years (but strictly no e-mails). This book is dedicated to him.
xi
Notes on Contributors

Corinne Bancroft graduated from Hamilton College, New York State, in
2010 where she studied Comparative Literature. She focuses on border
justice issues in literature and politics.
Ian F. A. Bell is Professor of American Literature at the University of

Keele. His principal research interests focus on the works of Ezra Pound
and Henry James, the intellectual history of Modernist aesthetics,
American notions of artistry, relations between history, fiction and com-
mercial forms, and literary negotiations with science. Current projects
include a monograph on the constructivist line in American literary
language from Emerson to Brautigan. Most recently, he has written a
series of essays on Modernism and the Fourth Dimension and is about
to start thinking about the ‘critic of the seven arts’, James Huneker.
In retirement from the University of Michigan, where he was Marvin

Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative
Literature, Ross Chambers, author of, among others, The Writing of
Melancholy (1993), Room for Maneuver (1991) and Loiterature (1999),
has turned his attention to the digressive relation of world writing to
European styles and genres.
Flore Coulouma is a Lecturer in English Linguistics at the University of

Paris Ouest Nanterre. She wrote her PhD thesis on language games in
Flann O’Brien’s work. Her research interests are Irish and post-colonial
literature, bilingual authors and their representation of language, and
linguistic and pragmatic approaches to literary criticism.
Samuel Frederick is Assistant Professor of German and Film at Clemson

University (South Carolina). He has published on Robert Walser, the
Brothers Quay and Oswald Egger, and is currently working on a book on
digression in Robert Walser, Adalbert Stifter and Thomas Bernhard.
Alexis Grohmann is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University

of Edinburgh, author of Coming into one’s Own: The Novelistic Development
of Javier Marías (2002), Literatura y errabundia (Literature and Errancy, 2010)
and other studies of contemporary Spanish and European literature, as well
as of the genre of the newspaper column by writers. He is also editor and
co-editor (mainly with Maarten Steenmeijer) of four collections of essays.
xii
Notes on Contributors xiii
Judith Hawley is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature in the

Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London. As
well as publishing essays on Sterne in, for example, The Shandean and
The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (2009), she has written on
encyclopaedias, Siamese twins and Grub Street. She is General Editor

of Literature and Science 1660–1832 (2002–3). She has edited various
eighteenth-century texts, including Jane Collier, The Art of Ingeniously
Tormenting (1994) and Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela
(1999), and works by Elizabeth Carter in the series Bluestocking Feminisms
(1999). Her current research centres on the Scriblerus Club.
J. J. Long is Professor of German at Durham University. He is the author
of books on Thomas Bernhard (2001) and W. G. Sebald (2007), and
co-editor of collections on Sebald, Gerhard Fritsch, literary forgery and
contemporary photographic theory. His research interests are twenti-
eth-century German literature and photography, fields in which he has
published widely. He was the recipient of the inaugural Max Kade Prize
for best article in Modern Austrian Literature and was awarded a Philip
Leverhulme Prize in 2005.
Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the
University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College. She has published
extensively on Virginia Woolf and on modernist literature and culture
more broadly. Her most recent book is The Tenth Muse: Writing about
Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007).
Peter J. Rabinowitz, Professor of Comparative Literature at Hamilton
College, New York State, is author of Before Reading (1987), Authorizing
Readers (1997; with Michael Smith) and numerous articles on nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century narrative. With James Phelan, he has
co-edited Understanding Narrative (1994) and A Companion to Narrative
Theory (2005) and currently co-edits the Theory and Interpretation
of Narrative Series at Ohio State University Press. He has also written
widely on music and serves as Contributing Editor of Fanfare and is a
regular contributor to International Record Review.
Jeremy Robbins is Forbes Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University
of Edinburgh. He is the author of numerous studies on the literature and
thought of the Spanish Golden Age, including Challenges of Uncertainty
(1998) and Arts of Perception (2007), and is currently working on the
representation of space in the European Baroque.
Olivia Santovetti is a Lecturer in Italian Literature at the University of
Leeds. She has published on Manzoni, Dossi, De Roberto, Pirandello,
xiv Notes on Contributors
Gadda and Calvino. Her monograph, Digression: A Narrative Strategy in

the Italian Novel (2007), examined the workings of digression in Italian
literature from the birth of the modern novel to the era of postmodernist
experimentation. She has also published on Laurence Sterne and edited
and translated selections of his Sermons (1994 and forthcoming).

Edmund J. Smyth is Reader in French at Manchester Metropolitan
University. His previous publications include, as editor, Postmodernism
and Contemporary Fiction (1991), Autobiography and the Existential Self
(1995; with Terry Keefe) and Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity (2000).
He is the general editor of the series Contemporary French and Francophone
Cultures, and was also recently a guest editor of a special edition of
Romance Studies entitled ‘Noir Cityscapes’. He is currently completing a
study of Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Jeremy Tambling is Professor of Literature at the University of

Manchester. He is author of two books on Dickens and on other literary
topics and on critical theory. His most recent books are Allegory (2009)
and On Anachronism (2010), which takes a theme from Proust and
Shakespeare.
Margaret Topping is Reader in French at Cardiff University. Her

research spans two main areas: the work of Marcel Proust with a parti-
cular focus on its metaphorical construction, and textual and visual
narratives of travel and migration. She is the author of Proust’s Gods
(2000) and Supernatural Proust (2007), the editor of Eastern Voyages,
Western Visions: French Writing and Painting of the Orient (2004) and the
co-editor, with Mary Bryden, of Beckett’s Proust/Deleuze’s Proust (2009).
She is currently working on a monograph on Phototextual Journeys:
Francophone Travel Literature and Photography.
David Walker is Professor of French at the University of Sheffield. He

has published studies on numerous twentieth-century French writers
and critical editions of texts by Gide and Camus. He is the author of a
monograph, Outrage and Insight: Modern French Writers and the ‘fait div-
ers’ (1995), and recently completed a book on Cultures of Consumption
in Modern French Literature.
Caragh Wells is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies in the School of

Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. Her research is focused on
Spanish post-Civil War literature and, more generally, twentieth-century
European literature. She has published a number of articles on post-war
Spanish and Catalan writers. She is currently engaged in a research project
on the philosophical ideas contained in the novels of Carmen Laforet.
Introduction
Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells

If we accept that literature and, in particular, verbal narratives, espe-
cially longer prose narratives such as novels, are digressive by their
very nature, since, as Peter Brooks has intimated and Ross Chambers
has confirmed, all narratives can only come into existence as narratives
per se by not following the straight line, the shortest path, that leads
from their beginning to their end, that is, they can only take shape as
narratives by distancing their endings from their beginnings through,
at the very least, Brooks’s minimally complicated detour or deviance
(because otherwise there would simply be no narrative), then the
question of digression in literature is one of degree rather than being
absolute. It becomes a question of the extent of digressiveness of a
work, that is, rather than one of kind or essence (the digressive versus
the non-digressive varieties). Since there are, therefore, following this
line of reasoning, strictly speaking, no non-digressive works, there are
merely narratives that could be said to be more digressive than others
(either on the level of story or on that of discourse or both), and some
in more ways than one.
This is the type of literature studied in this book, beginning with a
work by one of the founding fathers of the modern novel, Los trabajos
de Persiles y Sigismunda by Cervantes, a narrative of peripeteia arguably
more digressive than his Don Quixote, and ending with a look at the
writing of one of the most suggestively errant authors of the contem-
porary period, W. G. Sebald. The course charted through European
literature, though by no means comprehensive (any attempt at com-
prehensiveness would, in any case, have been an illusory and therefore
impossible enterprise) – there are no doubt notable omissions, such as
Montaigne, Swift, Diderot, Flaubert, Joyce, Nabokov or Bernhard – does,
we trust, allow us to glimpse, albeit somewhat waywardly (but perhaps
1
2 Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells
this errancy is not an entirely inappropriate purposive lack of method

in a book on digression), how many of Europe’s major writers from
the early modern period to the present day have run forth (excursus
derives from excurrere), turning aside from a main path (digression stems
from digredi) and producing thus a παρέκβαση (parekbasis, a temporary

distancing, turning away from the subject), which exceeds the order or
structure of the main subject, as Quintilian saw digression, wandering
off Descartes’s apparently singular right path of reason and reflection,
and allowing Sterne’s sunshine to flood their pages.
The chapters are arranged chronologically in the order of publication
of the most important narrative or narratives discussed in each, and we
have avoided any divisions, for the reason that digressions have formed
part of the narrative form since Ancient times, at least, and evolve across
historical boundaries and through an interrelated trajectory, with later
narratives feeding on previous ones, as is borne out very clearly in the
chapters that follow. Our focus on the European novel (for the most
part – Chambers, as well as looking at Baudelaire, also reads two non-
European poets through the prism of Baudelaire; needless to say, we
understand Europe to include the British Isles), is due to the fact that
‘in the richness of its forms, the dizzyingly concentrated intensity of its
evolution, and its social role, the European novel (like European music)
has no equal in any other civilization’, as Milan Kundera would have
it (1988: 143), even though this has entailed regretfully casting aside
such crystallizations of the art of digression as, say, Moby Dick; or, the
Whale. And while we acknowledge the persistence of digressive writing
across the centuries since the rise of the novel, our selection of essays
illustrates how mainly twentieth-century European prose narratives
not only pay homage to earlier, founding digressive texts, such as Don
Quixote and Tristram Shandy, but also signal an expansion in literary
experimentation and its digressive tendencies.
Traditionally, digression has been neglected or viewed as something
to be corrected by both rhetoric and also theory (not usually considered
a trope nor a legitimate rhetorical practice), literary or otherwise, with
notable exceptions such as Randa Sabry’s Stratégies discursives (1992)
and Ross Chambers’s Loiterature (1999). So, for instance, in The Penguin
Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, J. A. Cuddon’s definition
is that of ‘material not strictly relevant to the main theme or plot of
a work. Sterne proved himself an incorrigible digressionist in Tristram
Shandy’ (1999: 226). Of course, had Sterne been reformed and his digres-
siveness rectified, there would simply have been no narrative, but those
who view digression with suspicion do not dwell on such matters; as
Introduction 3
Pierre Bayard sums it up, ‘rhetoric’s dream is that digression not be

digressive’, and the same could have been said of the yearning of liter-
ary theory and criticism, until fairly recently (Bayard 1996: 24).
This corrective tendency notwithstanding, digression is an intrinsic
part of the narrative form from its very beginnings, to be found even in

the relatively linear simplicity of early epic narratives. One need only
think of Homer’s Odyssey, an epic poem made up of the episodic nature
of Odysseus’ attempt to return home and of innumerable narrative
digressions, one of the better-known ones being the excursus on the ori-
gins of Odysseus’ scar, famously discussed by Auerbach: Odysseus, having
finally returned to his home in Ithaca as a stranger who guards himself
from being recognized upon finding his house and wife besieged by the
Suitors, is afforded the courtesy of having his feet washed by Eurycleia,
and the old maid recognizes her master by a scar; the diachronic pro-
gression of narrative is at that moment interrupted by the story of the
boar hunt many years prior, during which hunt Odysseus was struck
and scarred by the boar’s tusk (Book 19, ll. 393–467). The Odyssey is a
wandering journey prolonged by adventure, which, in theory, like so
many truly digressive works, not least Cervantes’s or Proust’s, is a form
of work that has the latent quality of lending itself to being prolonged
considerably, like life itself (if it is not cut short): Odysseus’ adventures
might have been multiplied and, thence, his journey home, dilated;
Don Quixote, though he dies at the end, might have been made to live
by his author much longer and to have become involved in many more
episodes; Marcel’s narration, too, might have carried on for a yet greater
number of volumes than the ones of which it is made up. Hence, the
dilatory practices of many narratives enhance both the narrator’s and
the reader’s desire to prolong the pleasure indefinitely, as Chambers
puts it (the other desire of what may constitute a divided attention
being the desire to know what will happen [Chambers 1999: 20]). And
this prolongation of narrative time can inevitably be read as a struggle
to keep the end of the story but also, by implication, that of life, at bay.
Thus, digression is intimately related to a seeming excess generated
from within the text and the things that writers do with their texts that
may take us to various beyonds.
Digressions constitute a path of a certain order pursued through
associations of a not necessary linear and simple kind. And, more often
than not, the intricacy of associations effected in digressive texts reflects
the complexity of the world contemplated, as Leo Spitzer once said of
Proust’s prose in particular; nothing is simple in the world and, there-
fore, nothing is simple in a digressive form of writing, governed, as it
is, by minds that are able and tend to see in their interrelationships
the most seemingly disparate and diverse things (see Spitzer 1970:
397–473). Thus, digression is far more than a mere rhetorical figure,
literary device or technique – it is a Weltanschauung, a way of con-
templating the world in its manifold interconnectedness. Considerably

digressive writing is ‘more in tune with the complexities of things and
the tangled relations that join them’ than less errant writing, to quote
Ross Chambers again (Chambers 1999: 31). And, accordingly, digression
points to the freedom inherent in literature and writing, a freedom best
laid bare and celebrated through the liberty taken of wandering off in
many directions.
The essays in our collection attend to the many directions and forms
that digression has taken throughout the history of European literature.
They illustrate how digression in literature (and here we include the
short story and the poem) is both transhistorical and transnational.
Present across the centuries, digression manifests itself as much more
than mere trope or technique, and therefore points us towards what
is fundamental to all modes of literature, namely creativity. Digression
thus finds itself intimately linked to the esemplastic space of the crea-
tive imagination where the ingenious mind subjects ideas to alchemic
and anarchic combinations.
One of the most distinctive features of the writers discussed in this
collection is their use of digression as a subversive narrative tactic, either
as a means to challenge the conventional form of the novel (if such
a thing in fact exists) and to contribute thus to the renovation of the
novel form, or as a mode of calling into question the existing (and often
predetermined) order within a society. Some writers have been intent
on doing both, as is well illustrated in nearly all of the chapters that
follow. For example, in her discussion of Sterne, Judith Hawley observes
how, in the seventeenth century, digression represented ‘a mark of the
feminine, the marginalized and dispossessed’ (Chapter 2). While Sterne
sought to undermine the linearity of traditional modes of narrative plot,
he also set out ‘to mount a defence against the powers that be’. His
digressiveness, according to Hawley, ‘is an implicit criticism of conven-
tional morality’. Margaret Topping observes a similar use of digression in
Proust; she notes how in A la recherche du temps perdu digression serves
as a metaphor that ‘tests and stretches moral codes, social conventions
and readerly expectations’, thus enabling the reader ‘to see differently’
(Chapter 8). Similarly, Laura Marcus suggests that Woolf’s deployment
of digressive devices challenges the masculinist point of view and
‘troubl[es] the boundaries between gender categories’ (Chapter 9). Some
Introduction 5
forms of digressive writing may then be linked to l’écriture feminine,

a more female-centred mode of writing, such as Joyce’s famous digressive
swerve at the end of Ulysses towards a ‘female aesthetic’ in Molly Bloom’s
beautiful, sexually charged monologue. A bodily aesthetic emanates
from the art of digressive writing, one that seems to be more in tune with

the intangible rhythms of the human body and also the unconscious
patterns of desire that are held in check by conventional morality. This is
suggested in Chambers’s examination of the relationship between meta-
phor, digression and rhyme in Baudelaire and two contemporary poets
(Chapter 4). Digression, accordingly, serves as a trope for an exploration
of a more primal, libidinal energy that challenges the ordered struc-
ture of traditional thought and modes of behaviour. There is a certain
pleasure associated with the act of digressing, as writers seek almost to
stem the flow of time, prolong the suspense of the ending, and delay
the moment of closure. As Jeremy Robbins proposes in his discussion
of Cervantes, digression may be read as a metaphor for ‘the twists and
turns of life’ (Chapter 1), as it works to delay the end-point of death but
always as an active participant in the game of ending. The desire to lin-
ger for a moment within narrative and withhold the forward movement
of the plot is also matched by the writer’s relationship with language, as
he or she dallies in the possibilities afforded by words themselves and
their multiple combinations, creating a digression into what might be
described as poetic prose. This is illustrated in Ian Bell’s analysis of Henry
James (Chapter 5) and, although we have not included a discussion of
Flaubert in this book, it is also an integral feature of the latter’s writing;
as Culler observes, Flaubert asks us ‘to admire his creativity more than
the story itself’ and encourages the reader ‘not to involve himself in the
tale but to take it as an artifact which reveals the daring and cleverness
of the creative project’ (Culler 1974: 37).
Digressive writing also finds itself inextricably linked to the more
inchoate and intangible impulses operating in human subjectivity
and the unconscious mind. This feature of the digressive text is exam-
ined in the essays on Woolf and Gide. For example, in David Walker’s
discussion of Le Prométhée mal enchaîné he observes the relationship
between Gide’s use of digression and human subjectivity, which, he
concludes, represents ‘an explanatory discourse aimed at integrating
subjective experience and the external world’ (Chapter 7). Digression
thus permits the tentative articulation of a less familiar structure or
mental realm into which we rarely have any insight or even knowledge,
unless it thrusts its way through to the conscious mind in moments of
revelation or epiphany (which in themselves may constitute digressions
within a text, as Chambers suggests in his discussion of the ‘epiphanic

rhyme’ [Chapter 4]). In Edmund Smyth’s analysis of Beckett’s trilogy,
digression and one of its corollaries, discontinuity, serve to illustrate
a decentred and disintegrating consciousness, revealing the unstable
nature of the self (Chapter 12). While this may be a distinctive feature

of postmodern literature, as Smyth suggests, it is also arguably present
in earlier digressive narratives such as Don Quixote. The hapless knight’s
forays into the realm of the imagination may serve equally as meta-
phors for his own disintegration into the realm of madness and a shat-
tered consciousness.
Yet the use of digressive literary techniques to undermine restrictive
moral codes, social conventions and modes of thought to reveal the
more transient, elusive realm of human consciousness is coupled with
another significant intention that is found in digressive writing and
which links the essays within this collection: to throw off any rigid
schema that constrains literary creativity. Thus, the digressive novel
nearly always entails formal innovation and may come to represent an
attempt to break away from a literary tradition or to renew the form of
the novel from within (even though we note that digressive writing in a
sense also forms its own tradition). Conjoined with the characteristic of
narrative inventiveness is the self-conscious nature of digressive writing.
As Olivia Santovetti observes in her discussion of Calvino, digression
becomes ‘a technique of critical detachment through which the text
reflects on itself’ (Chapter 13). Similarly, Walker describes how Gide’s
Prométhée sets out ‘to question novelistic conventions through its form
as well as its content’ (Chapter 7). The self-reflexive or metafictional
tendencies of digressive fiction have also engaged the reader to question
literature’s claims to verisimilitude. This is amply illustrated in Flore
Coulouma’s discussion of O’Brien’s metafictional masterpiece At Swim-
Two-Birds, a novel, she argues, ‘marked by oral tradition while subvert-
ing the common perception of narrative structure’ (Chapter 11). The
self-conscious novel remains a consistent feature of digressive literature,
although it acquires greater acuity as the twentieth century progresses.
What Beckett termed ‘nominalist irony’ leads to the breaking down
of the very notion of narrativity itself (1983: 172). This is discussed in
the chapters on Walser, Beckett, Marías and Sebald. Samuel Frederick
observes how in Walser’s The Robber, the disintegration of narrative
progression places the text in a state of ‘perpetual movement’ (Chapter
10). This technique finds an echo in the work of Javier Marías, which,
Alexis Grohmann suggests, resists any attempt at a clear, rational design
or plot (Chapter 14). Similarly, Jonathan Long notes how in the second
Introduction 7
narrative in Sebald’s first book of prose, Vertigo – ostensibly a travel nar-

rative – digression is so pervasive that the reader is forced to wonder
whether ‘the narrative has a sense at all’ (Chapter 15).
It is important to record, however, that while the disintegration of plot
and questioning of narrativity itself become dominant features of what

can loosely be described as the postmodern novel, they are also present
throughout the history of digressive writing, once again reminding us
of its transhistorical nature. For example, Jeremy Tambling hones in on
Dickens as a practitioner of digression: ‘Little Dorrit imposes universal
deferral and delay as a mode of procedure’ so that ‘everything remains
in process’ (Chapter 3). The writer’s desire to keep the narrative fluid
takes us back again to Cervantes, Sterne and Melville. But the question
that must be posed is what this disruption of plot might mean on a
more philosophical level. Without wishing to draw digressive literature
into an interpretative straitjacket, we might surmise that what links
this approach to writing is a desire to articulate the interconnectedness
of the world. As Bell notes in the chapter on James, the lesson that
we learn from James is that ‘relations stop nowhere’ (Chapter 5). And
Santovetti, in her reading of Calvino, suggests that digression is given
shape as a figure representing ‘the multiplicity of the world’ (Chapter
13). In order to reveal the interconnected nature of all relations, one
must be open to the randomness of chance ‘whose figure is digressivity’,
as Ross Chambers observes (Chapter 4).
The majority of the authors in this collection focus their attention
on digressive narratives as entities in themselves, in which the use of
digression is carried through the text as a consistent practice. Yet we
must also consider the use of digression in narrative as a rhetorical tool
for eliciting the reader’s attention or guiding his or her experience,
which assists the generation of meaning within the text. This mode of
digression, not as a sustained practice or technique, but rather as a fig-
ure or trope within a text, is discussed by Peter Rabinowitz and Corinne
Bancroft in Chapter 6. In their analysis of Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the
Dog’, they describe one subset of these figures as ‘perturbative digres-
sions’ that represent ‘invitations to serious reinterpretation of what is
driving the plot’. In this case, the digressive trope acts as a guide to the
reader to assist him or her in the game of interpretation.
Yet behind such an exercise of control there is a lingering impulse to
encourage the reader to relinquish control, and to resist thinking in a
systematic and orderly fashion, as the chapters that follow testify. This
loosening of the strictures that can stem the free flow of thoughts and
ideas is the hallmark of creativity, as William James articulated in 1880,
and it lies behind the elusive and often bewildering art of digressive
writing:
Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one

another in a beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most

abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another, the most
rarefied abstractions and discriminations, the most unheard of com-
bination of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word,
we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where
everything is fizzling and bobbling about in a state of bewildering
activity, where partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant,
treadmill routine is unknown, and the unexpected seems only law.
(James 1880: 456)
It is just such a law of the unforeseen that determines the myriad links
that, beyond their evident connections, bind all the chapters, and that
gives rise to what Chambers calls ‘a new and unexpected order’.
Bibliography
Auerbach, Erich. 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
(Princeton University Press)
Bayard, Pierre. 1996. Le Hors-sujet: Proust et la digression (Paris: Minuit)
Beckett, Samuel. 1983. ‘German Letter of 1937 to Axel Kaun’, in Disjecta:
Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London: Calder), pp. 170–3
Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press)
Calvino, Italo. 1988. Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press)
Chambers, Ross. 1999. Loiterature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska
Press)
Cuddon, J. A. 1999. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory,
4th edn (London: Penguin)
Culler, Jonathan. 1974. Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press)
Homer. 1991. The Odyssey (London: Penguin)
James, William. 1880. ‘Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment’,
Atlantic Monthly, 46.276 (October): 441–59
Kundera, Milan. 1988. The Art of the Novel (London: Faber)
Sabry, Randa. 1992. Stratégies discursives: digression, transition, suspens (Paris:
L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales)
Spitzer, Leo. 1970. Études de style (Paris: Gallimard)
1
The Twists and Turns of Life:
Cervantes’s Trials of Persiles and

Sigismunda
Jeremy Robbins
In his last work, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, historia setentrional

(The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, a Northern Story, published posthu-
mously in 1617), Miguel de Cervantes creates a narrative marked, on
the level of both style and plot, by its errancy. Its eponymous heroes
travel as brother and sister under the names of Periandro and Auristela
from the frozen islands of northern Europe to the Mediterranean in
fulfilment of a vow to go to Rome, their true identities and actual rela-
tionship not being fully revealed until the novel’s fourth and final book.
As in Don Quixote, they encounter numerous individuals who narrate
their own convoluted, amatory stories. The result is a marked tension
between the movement of the titular heroes from north to south and
the frequent stasis of the narrative with its endless inset narratives and
back-stories. In books I and II, which trace the journeys of Periandro
and Auristela through the somewhat nebulous geography of northern
Europe (Lozano Renieblas 1998: 85–111), the interpolated episodes con-
tinually thwart both the reader’s narrative progression and the heroes’
actual journey. In books III and IV, which see Auristela and Periandro
land in Portugal, travel through Spain and France, and finally reach
Rome, there are fewer interpolated stories, but the pair are witness to a
whole series of self-contained incidents along their route whose effect
is similarly to slow down the forward movement of the main narrative.
This switch from interpolated stories narrated by characters fortuitously
encountered to incidents directly witnessed by the protagonists them-
selves broadly mirrors the change in narrative structure between parts
I and II of Don Quixote, a change explained in that work by its fictional
author, Cide Hamete, in terms of his desire to be praised not for what he
has written, but for what he has not. This takes us directly to the issue
of narrative relevance central to digression.
9
10 Jeremy Robbins
The Persiles’ structure explicitly grapples with one of the abiding

preoccupations of early modern poetics, and of Cervantes’s fiction,
namely the prescription that narratives exhibit both unity and variety
(Riley 1992: 116–31). The key dilemma, then as now, is when prolixity
becomes digression, thus threatening or undermining unity. The digres-

sive nature of the Persiles is evident not simply in its use of episodes and
incident but in the overall arc of the work. Cervantes models the text
on what were, at the time of his writing, the phenomenally popular
Byzantine romances, rediscovered and translated in the sixteenth cen-
tury, and mined by theorists and writers alike for the ways they recon-
ciled both unity and variety and verisimilitude and the marvellous. (It
is worth emphasizing here that admiratio itself was sought not simply
in the number and type of incidents described, but also in the structure
of the narrative that seeks to combine them into a whole [Cascales
1975: 170; Riley 1992: 92; Forcione 1970: 33–4, 61–2, 65–6].) In the
prologue to the Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels, 1613), Cervantes
makes explicit his competition with that most digressive of Byzantine
romances, Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story, a work hugely admired and widely
imitated in the early modern period. Like the Ethiopian Story, the Persiles
begins in medias res, Cervantes plunging the reader into a nightmare
scenario of cannibals and captives. And again as in Heliodorus, the
events which led up to those depicted in the opening chapters are only
narrated at a much later stage: Periandro gives an extended narrative in
book II, chapters 10–20, which recounts how he ended up in the situa-
tion depicted in book I, chapter 1 – a back-narrative which also contains
various inset and incidental narratives – while Auristela waits until book
III, chapter 9 to say, briefly, how she ended up in the work’s opening
situation. The actual true back-history – the full identities of Auristela
and Periandro and the real reason for their pilgrimage – is deferred until
book IV, chapters 1 and 12. In a way typical of Baroque narrative excess,
the Persiles has, therefore, three beginnings, the last occurring at the
work’s very end.
The work’s digressive nature, together with its heavy emphasis on
coincidence and the marvellous, has led many critics to see it as deeply
flawed. Riley’s comments are not untypical: ‘The book is a welter of inci-
dent. Story crowds on story […] The temptation, successfully resisted in
the Quixote, to hang a story on almost every character overcomes him in
his last novel’ (1992: 125). The relationship between the whole work and
the teeming digressions that (threaten to) overwhelm it has been seen as
one of macrocosm to microcosm, with Forcione suggesting that ‘these
adventures follow a cyclical pattern, as a moment of struggle, bondage,
The Twists and Turns of Life 11
or “near-death” alternates with a moment of resurrection or triumphant

vision of the final goal of the quest. Thus all adventures repeat in mini-
ature the circular pattern of the entire quest’ (1972: 36–7; compare El
Saffar 1980). Wilson, commenting on how the inset stories are not inte-
gral to the plot, interprets this astutely as evidence of how the work is

‘a romance undergoing “novelization”, that is, penetration by the
nascent Renaissance novel that Cervantes was helping to create. These
novelistic subplots both modulate the allegory of the main romance plot
and tend to deflect readerly interest away from it’ (1991: 36).
In looking at one of the most digressive works of narrative produced
in Golden Age Spain, my aim here is to focus on the parallels drawn
within the text between narrative and digression on the one hand, and
a view of life itself as, essentially, digressive on the other. This parallel
between narrative and existential digression raises the second area I
propose to explore, namely the relationship between digression and
deferral, not simply in terms of individual episodes but of the whole
narrative.
The digressive nature of the text is apparent from the first book
onwards, but is explicitly foregrounded during Periandro’s long narra-
tion in book II in which he explains how he came to be in the situation
with which the Persiles begins. Here, in typical fashion, Cervantes has
various characters as well as the narrator pinpoint what are, for them, the
shortcomings of Periandro’s narrative as narrative. Given that this nar-
rative is itself a microcosm of the style of the work as a whole, Cervantes
offers here a metatextual critique, informed by the Aristotelian-inflected
theory of his day, of the Persiles. Central to the criticisms voiced is that
Periandro dwells at length on unnecessary incidents and details and,
in so doing, is tedious. Ironically, this point is made initially after only
one chapter of what will end up being a ten-chapter narrative.1 Even
Periandro eventually realizes that his narrative, told over several nights,
is wearying his listeners and resolves – twice! – to shorten it as far as he
can (II.15: 244–5, II.16: 248).2 The characters’ critical asides are tinged
with humour, as when Mauricio, listening to Periandro’s account of his
captaining a ship at night, says he bets Periandro will now describe at
length the appearance of all the stars in the night sky (II.14: 239). The
oddest moment of self-defence by Periandro for his discursive narrative
comes when Arnaldo suddenly declares that he has had enough:
‘There you can picture me, noble listeners, having become a fisher-
man and a matchmaker, rich with my sister’s presence, poor without
it, robbed by thieves, and raised to the position of captain to fight
12 Jeremy Robbins
them; for the twists and turns of my fortune have not a single place
to stop, nor any limits to contain them.’
‘No more’, said Arnaldo at this point. ‘No more, Periandro, my
friend. For although you never tire of telling your misfortunes, we
are weary of hearing them, since they are so many’.

To which Periandro replied:
‘Arnaldo, I am like that thing called “place”, which is where all
things fit and where nothing is out of place, and in me all misfor-
tunes have a place.’ (II.12: 226–7)
One way in which the Persiles, a text marked so forcibly by narrative

divergence, brings a sense of coherence to the whole is by being woven
through with references to convergence. This is one such moment. On
the one hand, Periandro asserts here ‘the absolute freedom and power
of the artist’ to order the narrative and to include or exclude material
as he sees fit (Forcione 1970: 205; also Wilson 1991: 86, 148, 155–6).
On the other, he seems to picture himself as the vanishing point, as it
were, of all the narrative orthogonals, and as a type of narrative monad
in which the entire world is enfolded, and thereby centred, on his
own, singular point of view. Important for my argument here is the
fact that the criticisms of Periandro’s meandering narrative arise not so
much because the characters are, in Forcione’s words, ‘preoccupied by
literary concerns’,3 though their criticisms are indeed framed in rela-
tion to the prevailing (largely Aristotelian) orthodoxy as Forcione has
analysed, but, rather, because they ardently wish not to be sidetracked
or deflected from achieving their own goals and desires. This point is
emphasized by being made twice in a single chapter, once by a charac-
ter, Mauricio (II.14: 239), and once by the narrator (II.14: 234–5). The
point is an obvious one, but Cervantes’s work explores all its narrative
and existential ramifications: digression leads to deferral, and impor-
tantly deferral of desire, and thereby to frustration, and this not simply
for the characters but also, potentially, for the reader. It is a comic but
dangerous game for an author to point out the longueurs of their own
narrative, but Cervantes is presumably confident in the fact that, while
deferring the reader’s desire to move forward with the main narrative
on one level, such digressions can be pleasurable in and of themselves:
for all the continual carping of certain members of Periandro’s audi-
ence, we are reminded time and again of the sheer pleasure that his
words (and equally his person) arouse in his audience (217, 227, 234,
242, 265).4 A further irony is that Periandro only finishes his narrative
once the travellers have fled Policarpio’s island, meaning the one person
who actually wanted to hear its end, Sinforosa, does not, as she remains
behind there.
The objection to Periandro’s narrative that it delays the characters’
achievement of their goals – and, by extension, frustrates a reader’s
desire for a forward-moving and purposeful narrative – is connected

with the early modern Christian conception of life as a pilgrimage
which is exploited across the work. The idea of peregrinatio is central to
the rise of the novel in early modern culture with, for example, the pica-
resque using the journey both as a mechanism to enable protagonists to
have a diversity of experiences beyond the quotidian and as a metaphor
for life itself, a process that reaches its apogee in Spain with Baltasar
Gracián’s allegorical masterpiece El Criticón (1651–57), which sets out
to show the reader ‘the course of your life in a discourse’ (Gracián 1993:
7). The long-standing Christian cliché of life as a wandering exile from
heaven is literalized in the Persiles: Periandro and Auristela’s trajectory
from the margins (Thule) to the centre (Rome) creates the novel out of
their literal wanderings, which take the form of a ‘pilgrimage’ precisely
because of their vow to travel to Rome, a vow often mentioned but
never explained until the narrative’s close.5 On three separate occa-
sions the Augustinian idea is repeated of restlessness being the defining
feature of the human soul (II.3: 170; III.1: 275; IV.10: 458), with peace
and stasis only being found when the soul returns to, and rests in, God,
our ‘centre’.6 Rome serves as the narrative centre to which Periandro
and Auristela are drawn – and for those critics who read the narrative as
an allegory of (Christian) life, it becomes the point where truth, peace
and Christian resolution are found. Certainly once in Rome, and with
Auristela’s receiving full instruction in the Catholic faith, the Christian
inflection of the notion of peregrinatio is taken further when she unex-
pectedly announces to Periandro that, rather than marry him, she plans
to enter a convent so that she can go to heaven ‘without any detours,
surprises, or worries’ (‘sin rodeos, sin sobresaltos y sin cuidados’, IV.10:
459). Auristela has recognized that life, since it necessarily involves the
unforeseen and the contingent, is not simply inconstant but deflective,
things and events constantly thwarting our desires and their fulfilment.
(She had previously been glad to learn, once in Spain, that their journey
could continue on land rather than by sea, given that her experience of
the sea had confirmed the accuracy of it as the symbol of inconstancy
[III.1: 278; III.4: 296; III.12: 366].) In deciding to marry Christ rather
than Periandro, then, she seeks precisely to avoid the inconstancy of
life. She recognizes that life’s very unexpectedness makes it, as she
has vividly seen over the two years of her journey, ‘digressive’, and
14 Jeremy Robbins
believes that the only way to avoid this is to withdraw from life.7 What
is important here is that Cervantes has her desire to avoid ‘detours’,
‘surprises’ and ‘worries’ unambiguously evoke the nature of the narra-
tive the reader has just traversed by specifically recalling not simply the
Persiles in general but Periandro’s microcosmic narrative in particular,

both being marked by their detours (literal and stylistic or narrative)
and surprises.
This parallel between life as accurately described by Auristela and the
narrative style of the Persiles is even more marked in her words in the
following chapter when she has to explain to their companions, none
of whom know that she and Periandro are actually lovers, both her
decision to enter a convent and Periandro’s departure on hearing of
this. Seeking to justify her decision, she asks rhetorically, ‘Isn’t it better
for me to leave the twisting paths and the uncertain roads and head
for the obvious shortcuts which clearly show us the happy destination
of our journey?’ (IV.11: 461). Her words recall criticism of Periandro’s
earlier errant narrative in book II; Rutilo, for example, had declared in
exasperation, ‘For God’s sake! […] Through what detours and with what
links you have pieced together your errant story, Periandro!’ (II.16:
248). Given the text’s Christian view of life as an unavoidable series of
unexpected twists and turns, as a wandering precisely because of the
soul’s distance from its ‘centre’, then a narrative which mirrors life must
itself consist of precisely such unexpected twists and turns. The diver-
sions that are life are central to narrative too, and a mimetic text must
therefore be digressive. What Cervantes suggests is that narrative, like
life, is essentially digressive, and just as taking a ‘shortcut’ in life means
not simply withdrawing from life, symbolized here by the convent, but
actual death, so an avoidance of digression in narrative would mean the
absence or end of narrative. The lesson which Auristela must accept in
Rome, the lesson as to life’s unpredictability, its refusal to proceed in a
linear fashion but, rather, circuitously as the contingent intervenes, is
embodied in the whole narrative’s structure such that the reader by this
point in the work has experienced similar frustrations on the narrative
level as Auristela voices on the existential level.
If the characters’ tortuous journey with all its reversals, twists and
detours is a reflection of a Christian conception of life as peregrinatio,
this raises the question of the end or purpose of the characters’ pilgrim-
age. Given that the characters are travelling to what is described on two
different occasions as the ‘alma ciudad de Roma’ (‘Rome, the city of
the soul’ [II.15: 243; IV.3: 426]), critics such as Casalduero, Avalle-Arce
and Forcione have read the Persiles as an allegory of the soul’s journey
through the trials of life towards the consolations of the Church and,
thence, heaven. However, as more recent critics have pointed out, there
is a problem with this view of the text as a Christian allegory, and that
is that the work thwarts, complicates and fails to fulfil the expectations
raised by precisely the Christian framing of the journey as a pilgrim-

age to Rome in fulfilment of a vow.8 Cervantes, in other words, has set
up a tension between our legitimate inferences (pilgrimage to Rome =
Christianity, therefore novel = in some way an allegory of life) and the
full truth of the journey which is deferred until the second to last chap-
ter (IV.12), a truth which casts a very different light on the purpose of
the pilgrimage and, thereby, on the Persiles itself.
Contrary to those critics who see Rome as, in Forcione’s words, ‘the
point at which all unfulfilled desire ends, the centre at which the soul
in its endless movements during its separation from God can find
repose’ (1972: 106), others have focused on how our expectations of an
absolute happy ending, a complete resolution, are thwarted. In this, of
course, they follow those repeated elements of the Persiles, already men-
tioned, which stress that there can be no total happiness, no genuine
repose, outside God, and thus none on this earth. Sacchetti, for exam-
ple, describes how the reader expects an ‘unconditional happy ending’,
but gets instead an ironic, ‘unfit’ ‘anti-climax’ (2001: 88), while Randel
discusses how on ‘reaching Rome [Auristela and Periandro] discover the
overreach of desire’ with the consequence that ‘the final cadence of the
Persiles does not radiate that ultimate meaning which had been synony-
mous with arrival; for arrival cannot ever be Arrival’ (1983: 168).9 Here,
though, I would like to focus on a broader narrative issue, namely the
related question of our expectation that the erratic journey – and thus
the errant narrative – serve a purpose.
It is only once Persiles and Auristela are in Rome that the entire
journey is revealed to be a subterfuge. While we know well before the
final book that the pair are not brother and sister, and that they are in
love, it is only two chapters from the work’s end that we learn their
full story: Sigismunda, sent by her mother to be brought up by Persiles’
mother to protect her from the dangers of war, is promised in marriage
to Persiles’ elder brother, Magsimino; Persiles also falls in love with her,
and becomes dangerously ill once she is engaged to his brother; his
mother learns the truth from Persiles, her favourite son, and, taking
advantage of Magsimino’s absence, persuades Sigismunda to transfer
her feelings to Persiles; Persiles and his mother then hatch a plot to
avoid Magsimino’s wrath when he returns – Persiles and Sigismunda
will leave and Sigismunda’s absence will be explained to Magsimino
16 Jeremy Robbins
on his return as being due to her having made ‘a vow to go to Rome to

learn there about the Catholic faith which in those northern parts was
somewhat damaged’ (IV.12: 467). What we have taken to be a religious
pilgrimage is thus suddenly revealed to be, at its inception at least, an
amatory subterfuge: the city’s heavy religious connotations yield to

earthly love; ‘Roma’ is reversed and becomes ‘Amor’. As in the Ethiopian
Story, so at the conclusion here our expectations of a happy ending –
essentially the marriage of the eponymous heroes – suffer a succession
of major, last-minute reversals: Auristela loses her beauty when a spell is
placed on her; on recovering, her decision to enter a convent prompts
Periandro to leave Rome; this leads him to learn of his brother’s immi-
nent arrival in pursuit of the pair and causes him to return to warn
Auristela; he is then stabbed by Hipólita’s jealous lover and, as he lies in
Auristela’s arms, seemingly mortally wounded, Magsimino arrives and
promptly expires, but not before giving them his blessing. All obstacles
now removed, the narrative ends, with a stunningly cursory summary
of their long and fruitful marriage.
But at the start of the final book, before we learn of this, the true
nature of their journey, Auristela displays an unexpected, practical side
to her character when, in her first intimate discussion with Periandro,
she voices concerns about their future. She does so on a hill overlooking
Rome, that is precisely at the point where their journey is coming to an
end, her vow is about to be fulfilled, and the reader expects there to be
nothing to prevent their marriage. There, she asks Periandro: ‘But tell
me, what will we do after we are tied by the same knot and our necks
are under the same yoke? We are far from our own lands, known by
nobody in these foreign ones, with no support to which, like ivy, we
can cling in our hardships’ (IV.1: 414). These practical concerns for their
material wellbeing bring to mind Clodio’s malicious comment regard-
ing the couple much earlier in the narrative when he criticizes precisely
their indifference to practical matters (‘to think that they will always
find kings to shelter them and princes to show them favours is out of
the question’ [II.5: 183]). On the one hand, given her obsession with her
own chastity, Auristela’s practical concerns can be read as the manifesta-
tion of an underlying fear of what has been so long deferred, namely
marriage and sexual union.10 On the other, we might see in this stark
contrast with the heroines of Byzantine romances, such as Charikleia in
the Ethiopian Story who is most explicitly not concerned with the absence
of material support,11 the emergence of the ‘novel’ at the exact point in
the ‘romance’ when we are expecting the culmination of a pure, ideal-
ized romance. But the precise reasons for, and understandable nature of,
these pragmatic concerns raised by Auristela only begin to emerge clearly

in chapter 6 when the narrator says that, after having received Christian
instruction, ‘she was looking to see if heaven would reveal to her some
light which would show her what she should do once married, because
she thought that to even think of returning home was a rash and stu-

pid idea since Periandro’s brother, to whom she had been promised as
a wife, seeing his hopes dashed, might take revenge for this offence on
her and Periandro’ (IV.6: 436–7). And they are only fully comprehensible
following the revelation in chapter 12 that the pilgrimage is an amatory
subterfuge, for that revelation underscores the fact that marriage will not
solve their problems and, even more unexpectedly for the reader, that
their tortuous journey has consequently resolved nothing, and could
never have resolved anything. They have simply deferred the problem.
Not only is the pilgrimage to Rome not a pilgrimage, but it is revealed
to be futile, since their arrival there cannot solve the practical problem
of what to do about Magsimino. The pilgrimage is both purposeful (to
go to Rome) and essentially futile, because once there, the same set of
problems awaits them that caused them to leave Thule in the first place.
Its only purpose is to put distance between the pair and Magsimino, but,
as Auristela acknowledges, the end of their journey therefore finds them,
for all intents and purposes, back where they started.
The entire pilgrimage itself, then, is simply a sustained act of defer-
ral. And if, as we saw in characters’ frustrations over Periandro’s end-
less mini-narrative in book II, digression amounts to a deferral of one’s
desired goals, then in its final pages, a text which contains so many
digressions is itself revealed to be in its entirety an act of digression
because a sustained act of deferral. For the teleological thrust of the
genre, romance, and its framing, pilgrimage, are subverted. The reader
has been compelled to undertake a journey through the endlessly errant
text to an end-point that suddenly becomes a reversal of our expecta-
tions of purpose and, hence, resolution. We have succumbed to what
Randel calls the ‘powerful seduction of the quest’ (1983: 165). Just how
strong these generic expectations are can be seen in critics’ description
of the narrative as Christian pilgrimage, with Rome as apotheosis, and
the attendant glossing over in silence of both Auristela’s real material
concerns and their implications both for us and for her and Periandro.
The thwarting of our carefully fuelled expectations of narrative pur-
pose is a peripeteia that impacts the reader far more than either of the
characters, precisely because, as is clear in book IV, Auristela has long
been aware of them, and Periandro is willing blithely to ignore them.
The end is not in Periandro and Auristela’s hands, as the seemingly
18 Jeremy Robbins
purposeful journey had made it seem, but in Providence’s. And like the
characters, having had our expectations dramatically reversed, we too
are in the hands of Providence, that is to say, of Cervantes.
The narrative, like the journey, is thereby on one level essentially
futile. And here we return to the characters’ reactions to Periandro’s nar-

rative in book II: the lack of narrative purpose, the revelation that the
Persiles in toto is pure digression, can create either frustration or pleasure.
What is revealed precisely by it being absent is the narratorial sleight
of hand which normally selects events given in a narrative precisely to
endow it, and them, with purpose and significance, precisely, and obvi-
ously, the very elements missing in so many events in our actual lives
as lived. (It is exactly this that Cide Hamete wishes to be praised for in
Don Quixote, Part II.) To use the language employed both metaphorically
and literally within the Persiles, a narrative is normally a short-cut to
meaning, and all twisting, forking digressions threaten this teleological
thrust. Where that purpose is lacking, all that remains is digression.
The end of the Persiles is a transitory moment of convergence on
meaning in an otherwise divergent and digressive text (and world). In
many ways, the reader’s relationship to the teeming, errant narrative is
akin to the viewer’s with the illusion created by one-point perspective in
a Baroque quadratura scheme. Just as with quadratura, so in the Persiles
the narrative threads, its orthogonals, only create a perfect vision of the
whole, in which all parts slot seamlessly into place, at the single spot
where they all converge – in the Persiles, significantly, this is the Catholic
centre, Rome, and, for the reader, the very end of the work. And as in
a quadratura scheme, so in life continual movement is necessary, the
impossibility of stasis meaning that the moment of totality – when real
and illusionistic architecture fuse (in quadratura) or when all is resolved
and makes sense (in narrative) – must pass, creating new and unexpected
configurations, further confusion and potential chaos. That sense of per-
fect understanding can only be momentary; its arrival heralds the end,
because after it must come more of the twists and turns of life.
Notes
1. Cervantes (1969: II.11: 217; compare II.14: 234; II.18: 259). All references are
to book, chapter and page number.
2. As Riley (1992: 121), Wilson (1991: 142–4) and Williamsen (1994: 68–70,
150–5) comment, these reactions reveal Periandro to be boastful and a bit of
a bore.
3. Forcione (1970: 187). Wilson (1991: 155) refers to Periandro’s ‘audience of
carping neo-Aristotelians’.
4. Forcione (1970: 187–211) reads Periandro’s narrative as a juxtaposition

between narrative pleasure and neo-Aristotelian rules.
5. The classic study is Vilanova (1949).
6. The chain of being and life as pilgrimage, which Avalle-Arce (1990: 10–14)
identifies as central to the allegory, fuse in this Augustinian idea. Compare
Forcione (1972: 142–3) and Baena (1996: 112).

7. On Auristela’s eventual ‘acceptance of man’s duty to participate in the life
cycle’, Forcione (1972: 76–7).
8. On Rome as anticlimax, see Wilson (1991: 122, 210); Baena (1996: 116,
128–30); Randel (1983: 162, 164, 168).
9. On unsatisfied and deferred desire, Baena (1996: 128–9).
10. Sacchetti sees Auristela’s justifications of her desire to enter a convent at IV.11
as ‘words of outstanding selfishness’ and reads her religious vows as insincere
(2001: 90, 111). However, although Auristela’s decision to enter a convent
may in large part be motivated by fear, of the future and of losing her chas-
tity, there is no reason to doubt the truth of her religious conviction, cleverly
juxtaposed in IV.10 with the full revelation of the true initial reason hatched
by Periandro’s mother in IV.12. As with the signification of Rome (symbolic
religious centre or locus of amatory intrigue, love and lust), there is a marked
critical tendency to view things as either/or, whereas Cervantes has no prob-
lem in viewing them as both/and. Significantly, it is only when actually in
Rome, and fully in the Church, that their love can be expressed in marriage.
11. See Heliodorus (1989, V.2: 447).
Bibliography
Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista. 1990. ‘Persiles and Allegory’, Cervantes: Bulletin of the
Cervantes Society of America, 10: 7–16
Baena, Julio. 1996. El círculo y la flecha: principio y fin, triunfo y fracaso del
‘Persiles’ (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and
Literatures)
Cascales, Francisco. 1975. Tablas poéticas, ed. Benito Brancaforte (Madrid: Espasa
Calpe)
Cervantes, Miguel de. 1969. Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Juan Bautista
Avalle-Arce (Madrid: Castalia)
El Saffar, Ruth. 1980. ‘Periandro: Exemplary Character, Exemplary Narrator’,
Hispanófila, 69: 9–16
Forcione, Alban. 1970. Cervantes, Aristotle and the ‘Persiles’ (Princeton University
Press)
—— 1972. Cervantes’ Christian Romance: A Study of ‘Persiles y Sigismunda’
Gracián, Baltasar. 1993. El Criticón, ed. Emilio Blanco, Obras completas, I (Madrid:
Biblioteca Castro / Turner)
Heliodorus. 1989. An Ethiopian Story, trans. J. R. Morgan, in Collected Ancient
Greek Novels, ed. B. P. Reardon (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University
of California Press)
Lozano Renieblas, Isabel. 1998. Cervantes y el mundo del ‘Persiles’ (Alcalá de
Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos)
20 Jeremy Robbins
Randel, Mary Gaylord. 1983. ‘Ending and Meaning in Cervantes’ Persiles y

Sigismunda’, Romanic Review, 74: 152–69
Riley, E. C. 1992. Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta)
Sacchetti, Maria Alberta. 2001. Cervantes’ ‘Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda’:
A Study of Genre (London: Tamesis)
Vilanova, Antonio. 1949. ‘El peregrino andante en el “Persiles” de Cervantes’,

Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras, 22: 97–159
Williamsen, Amy R. 1994. Co(s)mic Chaos: Exploring ‘Los trabajos de Persiles y
Sigismunda’ (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta)
Wilson, Diana de Armas. 1991. Allegories of Love: Cervantes’s ‘Persiles y Sigismunda’
2
Digressive and Progressive
Movements: Sympathy and

Sexuality in Tristram Shandy; or,
Plain Stories
Judith Hawley
The digressive nature of Tristram Shandy is notoriously challenging for

the reader and rewarding for the critic. Because Sterne as Tristram not
only digresses but theorizes about the significance of digression, Tristram
Shandy has become a useful illustration of narrative principles for a
range of critics and theorists. His squiggly experiments provide material
for studies of the nature of the novel and of narrative beginnings, mid-
dles and levels (Shklovsky 1965; Said 1975; Brooks 1984; Genette 1996).1
Tristram Shandy provides a prop to arguments in studies of literature as
different as Renaissance poetry and the modern Italian novel (Cotterill
2004; Santovetti 2007). There is disagreement among critics of Tristram
Shandy about what Sterne’s digressions amount to. There are those who
think that there is method in his madness (Baird 1936; Piper 1961) and
those who conclude he is crazily chaotic. Early critics dismissed Tristram
Shandy as a mess, even as imitators queued up to copy him (Bosch
2007: 259; for a selection of early responses, see Howes 1974: esp. 46–8,
119–24, 127, 138–9, 160, 168–9, 180–3). Samuel Johnson and Horace
Walpole dismissed his narrative experiments as gimmicks. Two recent
critics challenge Johnson’s pronouncement on the oddity of Tristram
Shandy by comparing him to his predecessors and successors (Keymer
2002; Bosch 2007). The tendency, since Nietzsche praised his squirrel-
ish liveliness, has been to view his transverse zigzaggery as a cause for
celebration. Wolfgang Iser (1988: 73), for example, declares Sterne a free
spirit who frees us from the ‘tyranny of teleology’.2
It is no wonder that there is no critical consensus: Sterne’s digressive-
ness is so various that he differs from himself. He exemplifies a principle
that Ross Chambers identifies: the multiplicity of options that the world
presents forces the manic digressive into delicious tergiversation and con-
tortion: ‘Digression introduces forks in the textual road that require us
21
22 Judith Hawley
either to hesitate, to opt for one path or the other, or (as Yogi Berra recom-
mends) to attempt to take both’ (Chambers 1999: 87).3 Sterne takes both
paths; Tristram Shandy is replete with paradoxes and contradictions. He
demonstrates that digression is, on the one hand, necessary to narrative
and, on the other, that it is a threat to it. If there were no digressions, the

narrative would short circuit; there would be no distance between A and
Z. Moreover, digressions are necessary for making sense of the story, but if
they go too far, the story gets left behind. Tristram frequently claims that
he must digress from his story in order to explain things to his readers.4
William Bowman Piper argues that Tristram’s digressions follow a number
of patterns and have logical narrative purposes. But the reader can be
more baffled after the explanation than before when, for example, he
explains that Toby’s modesty is the result of a blow. Even Tristram himself
gets lost in his explanations (for example, Sterne 1978, II.vii: 119, VI.xxiii:
558, VI.xxxvii: 565, VII.xiv: 595 and VIII.vi: 663). Tristram also claims
that there is aesthetic purpose to his digressive strategy: he manages the
transitions so that the scene changes are smooth and there is order and
harmony in his text (for example, Sterne 1978, IV.vi: 331, VI.xx: 533–4,
VI.xxix: 549–50, VI.xxxv: 562, IX.xii: 761–2, IX.xiii: 763–4 and IX.xiv:
765–6). Repeatedly, Tristram claims that he is in control of his narrative
and that his digressions have their own logic (for example, Sterne 1978,
II.vi: 116, II.xix: 169–70 and III.x: 197–8. Compare Swift 1958: 135).
However, he frequently cannot see any further than the end of his nose
and is uncertain about how to proceed or what he will write next (for
example, Sterne 1978, I.xiv: 40–2, VI.vi: 500 and VIII.ii: 656–7).
Digression, division and indecision are deep principles of life at
Shandy Hall and in Tristram Shandy as a whole. Paradoxically, they lend
integrity to Tristram Shandy because they infect all aspects of the text.
They govern the movement of characters through space and time as
well as driving Tristram’s pen. The characters in the story digress as well
as the narrator, Toby and Trim being the worst offenders. The forked
path is both a metaphor and a metonymy for life as it is lived and as
it is written in Tristram Shandy. The principle of duality is enshrined in
one of his most famous tropes: the machine. Tristram claims ‘our fam-
ily was certainly a simple machine’, but, because it was ‘set in motion
by so many different springs, and acted one upon the other from such
a variety of strange principles and impulses […] it had all the honour
and advantages of a complex one’. One of its oddities is that ‘what-
ever motion, debate, harangue, dialogue, project, or dissertation, was
going forwards in the parlour, there was generally another at the same
time, and upon the same subject, running parallel along with it in the
Sympathy and Sexuality in Tristram Shandy 23
kitchen’ (V.vi: 427).5 This fact enables Tristram to cut backwards and
forwards between the two sites (see V.vi: 427–V.xii: 439 and IX.xxiii:
778). In his first volume, Tristram had boasted to the reader of the
sophistication of his narrative machinery. Although ‘I fly off from what
I am about’, Tristram asserts, ‘I constantly take care to order affairs so,

that my main business does not stand still in my absence’ (I.xxii: 80).
The ‘master-stroke of [his] digressive skill’ lies in the uniqueness of his
method: ‘By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species
by itself; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled,
which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word, my
work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time’
(I.xxii: 80–1). It is progressive in more senses than one. First, Sterne by a
sleight of hand moves the story forwards by pretending that in the time
it has taken Tristram to recount a bit more, the story itself has moved
on a little. Second, our knowledge of Tristram progresses even when he
is not telling his own story. That is, when he tells us something about
Walter and Toby (or following digressions from their stories), he implic-
itly and obliquely furthers our understanding of Tristram himself.
There is another way in which Tristram Shandy is ‘progressive’. Horace
Walpole dismissively pronounced that ‘the great humour’ of Tristram
Shandy ‘consists in the whole narration always going backwards’ (Lewis
et al. 1951: 66–7). Yet it goes forwards too. Digressions forwards can be
achieved by means of smooth transitions, as when he finds himself in
Avignon because he has already described the trip down the Rhône (VII.
xli: 643–4), or, more often, by abrupt leaps (compare VI.xxxix: 568 and
VII.xxvi: 615). The reader is frequently disconcerted by finding himself
in the middle of the next scene. The crucial accidents in Tristram’s
early life are narrated in this way (for example, I.xxi: 70, III.xvi: 220,
III.xvii: 221, IV.xiv: 343, IV.xxiii: 360, IV.xxvi: 376, V.xvii: 449, V.xxx:
465, VII.xxix: 622 and IX.xx: 772). Sometimes Tristram employs simple
prolepsis, hinting at what he will tell later (for example, I.xv: 47), but
sometimes he reconciles his contrary motions by moving backwards
and forwards at the same time: he looks forward to looking back on
the deaths of Toby and Trim (VI.xxv: 544–5. Compare Tristram’s most
famous prolepsis: III.xxxviii: 278).
But, is shuttling back and forth along a temporal line really a digres-
sion? Tristram argues that a storyteller, ‘provided he keeps along the
line of his story,—he may go backwards and forwards as he will,—’tis
still held to be no digression’ (V.xxv: 457). Jeffrey Williams describes
Sterne’s plot as ‘shuttling’ and ‘oscillating’ and notes that ‘Hillis Miller’s
argument for the deconstruction of linear plot is borne out of this
24 Judith Hawley
constant shuttling action’ (1990: 1042). But I want to distinguish

between this mere oscillation which can be ‘held to be no digression’
and a true Shandean digression which is not only ‘progressive’ as well
as digressive, but is also sinuous, or moves from side to side or twists
around as well as back and forth. Shuttling motions do not get anywhere;

they cancel each other out. When Mrs Shandy simply repeats Walter’s
propositions back to him in the great bed of justice on the subject of
putting Tristram in breeches, ‘the dialogue stood still’ (VI.xviii: 528) and
Tristram considers that ‘to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and
the devil’ (VII.xiii: 593). To be digressive and progressive – that is to get
somewhere, to make progress – you have to step out of line.
To explore the difference between a mere shuttling digression and a
good bouncing Shandean progressive digression, I need to draw on two
of the most edifying scholars of the long way round, Ross Chambers
and Anne Cotterill. They enhance our understanding of the literary,
psychological and political possibilities of stepping out of line. I will
then follow one of the lines that wend their way across the fertile plain
of Sterne’s imagination. In his leisurely and expansive extended essay
on digression as a mode of being and writing, Chambers treats Sterne
as ‘the major progenitor’ of a sub-genre he dubs ‘modern loiterature’.
For him, digression is a critique of the order (including narrative and
temporal sequence) and authority it evades:
Any digression enacts (though it may not intend) a criticism, because,

once one has digressed, the position from which one departed
becomes available to a more dispassionate or ironic analysis: it must
have been in some sense inadequate or one would not have moved
away from it. (Chambers 1999: 15)
But, paradoxically, it can never be completely transgressive or lead to

complete textual chaos because ‘The swerve, however, is necessarily
defined by that from which it departs,’ that is, it reminds us of the law
for which it is the loophole (Chambers 1999: 86). It may be transgres-
sive, but it is a licensed departure, a necessary outlet or vent (to use a
term that has resonance in Tristram Shandy) for natural urges, the needs
and desires of the body, the attractions of the trivial which culture
represses but needs to have at its margins in order to mark itself off
from the unruly.
Anne Cotterill (2004), whose argument partly derives from Chambers,
examines an earlier era, ending with Swift (who deplored the licence
which digression allows the author). She argues that in the early modern
period, digression appealed particularly to writers who were marginal-

ized or politically excluded because it allowed them to make a number
of diversionary moves. Digression allows the writer, among other
things, to mount a defence against the powers that be, to pursue alter-
native lines of (literary) affiliation and descent, to dawdle in realms of

pleasure and indulge in forbidden desires, to avoid death by postponing
closure, to express scepticism, and to withdraw into the self and explore
an interior space.
Sterne likes to go out of his way and step out of line. A Shandean
digression is, I will argue, at once charitable and pleasurable, virtuous
and errant. Early in his Life, Tristram warns the reader that ‘when a
man sits down to write a history’, especially if he is ‘a man of the least
spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with
this or that party as he goes along’. He cannot ‘drive on his history, as
a muleteer drives on his mule,—straight forward […] without ever once
turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left’ because
he has a multitude of different documents to consult and materials to
include (I.xiv: 41). This combination of directedness (he has things
he needs to do) and distraction (views and prospects solicit his eye) is
characteristic of Tristram as a narrator. Moreover, that combination of
metaphors of the journey and of the archive is revealing about Sterne’s
use of digressions. When he describes a curve, he is not just interested in
the line, but in the area under the line. The traveller, leaving the path,
encounters something different and takes it along with him. When he
strays from the narrative straight and narrow, Tristram incorporates new
and heterogeneous material in his text.6
There are finer impulses at work in Tristram’s desire to deviate.
Sympathy and charity, not just wilful eccentricity, make him leave the
straight and narrow path. When he describes Toby going out of his way
to offer comfort and material support to Lieutenant Le Fever, while Mr
Yorick’s curate does nothing at all, Parson Sterne probably has in mind
the parable of the good Samaritan who crossed the road to aid the man
who fell among thieves while the priest and the Levite ‘passed by on the
other side’ (Luke 10:30–7).7 His digressiveness is an implicit criticism of
conventional morality. Immediately after his famous diagrams of his
plot lines and his mock promise that he will tell his story in a straight
line ‘turning neither to the right hand or the left’, Tristram ventrilo-
quizes proponents of rectilinearity:
This right line,—the path-way for Christians to walk in! say divines—
—The emblem of moral rectitude! says Cicero—. (VI.xl: 572)
26 Judith Hawley
Their rectitude is straight away undercut by the fact that this line is also
the most convenient for market gardeners:
—The best line ! say cabbage-planters—. (VI.xl: 572)8

Behind Sterne’s playfulness is a long and serious debate about the role
of the passions in ethics. The immediate context is the Latitudinarian
strand in the Church of England and the cult of sensibility which
shot through late eighteenth-century culture.9 Sterne himself was
trained up on the sermons of major proponents of these ideals includ-
ing Samuel Clarke, Isaac Barrow, Gilbert Burnet, John Tillotson and
Edward Stillingfleet. Latitudinarian – or ‘Broad Church’ – divines de-
emphasized the divisive doctrines that had split the Church in the
seventeenth century and downplayed rigid teachings about the sinful-
ness of man’s nature. Rather, their focus was on what bound society
together – sympathy – and on the social virtue of benevolence. Moral
action arises out of a sensation of fellow-feeling more than on law or
a sense of duty. According to them, sympathy and benevolence are
divinely instituted: feeling for other people induces a pleasurable sensa-
tion in the body, thus God rewards and encourages good behaviour. This
view of the importance of sympathy and the passions in moral action
was reinforced by developments in physiology, which allowed for a
new and more complex understanding of sensation. Moreover, narra-
tive is crucial to the cultivation of sympathy: stories of the sufferings
of others were supposed to awaken and strengthen the responsiveness
of the reader. Note how often Tristram’s digressions are interpolated
tales or scenes of suffering which induce a sympathetic response in
him which he tries to communicate to the reader. See, for example, his
quest – much interrupted and ultimately fruitless, of course – in search
of the tomb of the ‘two fond lovers’, Amandus and Amanda (VII.xxxi:
627–VII.xl: 643), or his anecdote about Toby and the fly (II.xii: 130–1),
which makes a reappearance (III.iv: 191), or the tale of ‘Poor Maria’ (IX.
xxiv: 780–4), a scene so popular that not only was it much represented
in fashionable prints and crockery (Gerard and Friant-Kessler 2008), but
that Sterne’s other alter ego, Parson Yorick (who repeatedly strays from
the straight and narrow on the trail of a pretty woman), made a detour
of ‘half a league’, ‘like the Knight of Woeful Countenance, in quest of
melancholy adventures’, in order to enquire after her on his sentimental
journey (Sterne 2002: 149–54).
Volume VII best exemplifies how vital digression is to Tristram’s life.
Volume VI ends, as we have seen, with yet another promise that he is
going to tell Toby’s story directly, but volume VII goes off on a tangent
and follows the adult Tristram on his travels. The whole volume is
a digression. Or rather it isn’t. The title page bears an epigraph from
Pliny the Younger: ‘Non enim excursus hic est, sed opus ipsum est.’
That is, this is not an excursion but my main work.10 Death knocks on

Tristram’s door so, to escape him, he scampers away on what Jacques
Berthoud calls ‘a lyrical dans macabre’ through France in search of
health (1984: 34). It is a digression from the main work in that Tristram
leaves Toby’s story aside to pursue his own. Yet it is very much part of
it in that it continues Sterne’s explorations of the workings of narra-
tive and the composition of the self. The structure of this volume as a
whole evokes the curving line of a Shandean digression. Tristram races
through southern England too fast to look about him; he slows down
a little when he reaches France, but still follows the most direct route
down to Provence.11 When he reaches Languedoc, his journey takes an
entirely different, a more languorous and sinuous course as he dawdles
from ‘the banks of the Rhône to those of the Garonne’ (VII.xlii: 645).12
Just like a river which, from its source at the peak, rushes pell-mell head-
long down the mountain, then zigzags more leisurely through its valley
stage, when it reaches its fertile plain (a plain ultimately of its own mak-
ing), no longer strongly impelled by the force of gravity, it slows down.
Meandering across the levels, changing its path over time, it shrugs off
traces of its former deviations in the form of ox-bow lakes.
Tristram eventually realizes that he has left Death behind and now
has ‘the whole south of France […] to traverse upon my mule at my
own leisure’ (VII.xlii: 645). As he changes ‘the mode of my travelling’,
he changes his narrative mode. Unlike ‘travel-writers’ who dread ‘one
unvaried picture of plenty’ (VII.xIii: 646) because it gives them nothing
to write about, Tristram relishes the prospect of loitering and straying
in search of a something noteworthy. What he finds is trivial in the
extreme but Tristram finds in these brief encounters enough material to
comprise a volume which he will
call my
PLAIN STORIES. (VII.xliii: 648)
He turns a flat and apparently empty terrain into a richly varied and
eventful arena by seeking encounters with all types of people without
discrimination – a man priming his gun, a drum-maker, a woman
selling figs and eggs, ‘beggars, pilgrims, fiddlers, fryars’, a woman in
a mulberry tree – demonstrating how broad-minded he has become
28 Judith Hawley
as he has expanded his heart and relaxed his attitudes in the course
of his journey. He then slows the narrative even further to explore an
encounter which is crucial to his book (or, at least, to my argument). On
the road ‘betwixt Nismes and Lunel’, Tristram comes across a group of
swains ‘preparing for a carousal’ to celebrate the vintage. One of them,

Nanette, a ‘sun-burnt daughter of Labour’ with a single tress of hair
hanging loose, separates herself from the group and invites Tristram to
join them in the dance.
This chapter is given prominence at the end of a markedly digres-
sive volume and symbolic ripeness because it weaves together numer-
ous strands of imagery and thematic concerns. We find here recurring
motifs such as the figure of the lame man, musical rhythms and har-
mony, a fetishistic focus on tendrils of hair, and on clothing and female
openings. Generically, it is a combination of idealizing sentimental
pastoral (‘The nymphs join’d in unison, and their swains an octave
below them—’ [VII.xliii: 650]) and Rabelaisian bawdy (‘They are run-
ning at the ring of pleasure, said I, giving him a prick—By saint Boogar,
and all the saints at the backside of the door of purgatory, said he’ [VII.
xliii: 649]). These contrary tendencies are held in a precarious balance:
Sterne teases the reader, challenging her to penetrate his innuendo. As
elsewhere, relations between male and female are figured in terms of
reciprocal motions of advance and retreat, here in the form of an intri-
cately patterned dance.
Sterne teases us with the possibility that Tristram might actually con-
summate his relationship with the supremely seductive Nanette, but
the narrator’s breathless passion, as elsewhere in both Tristram Shandy
and A Sentimental Journey, climaxes in verbal ejaculation in which he
turns away from the woman to utter an apostrophe which takes him
out of the situation. He removes himself further from the possibility
of consummation by dancing away, putting acres of distance between
himself and the ‘nut brown maid’ with her Freudian slit. Sterne leaves
us with a choice of possible readings here. On the one hand, this Plain
Story hints yet again at the impotence of Tristram (an inherited trait).
On the other, this dalliance has brought him back to life, created new
vigour in the narrative and restored him to a state in which he can pull
out ‘a paper of black lines, that I might go on straight forwards, without
digression or parenthesis, in my uncle Toby’s amours—’ (VII.xlii: 651).
On yet another hand, Tristram does not go on. Although he continues
‘I begun thus—’, the volume abruptly ends with another coitus inter-
ruptus. But when he begins the next, he is unable to tear himself away
from this scene.
Sterne’s wanderings of the heart are in some senses feminine in them-

selves, not just inspired by women. Arguably, digression can be placed in
the cultural category of the feminine. Dennis Allen argues that language
is phallic and prone to impotence but the text is vaginal and capable of
fertilization by the imagination, with ‘digression in particular serving

as the space fertilized by the imagination’ (1985: 664). If this is so, it
would be more precise to distinguish between female genital anatomy
(indented) and the feminine form (sinuous) and, I would add, feminine
sexuality (preferring delay to climax). This distinction is present in the
opening of volume VIII which finds Tristram sitting in Perdrillo’s pavil-
ion, unscrewing his ink-horn ‘to write my uncle Toby’s amours’, but,
‘with all the meanders of JULIA’s track in quest of her DIEGO, in full
view of my study window—’, he cannot go on ‘planting his cabbages
one by one, in straight lines […] without ever and anon straddling out,
or sidling into some bastardly digression’ (VIII.i: 656, 655). Tristram is
aroused by feminine slits, but is even more attracted by the distractive
powers of feminine meanders.
Tristram’s meandering line is related (perhaps parodically) to William
Hogarth’s lines of beauty and of grace, as critics have noted (for example,
Hillis Miller 2002: 167–8, 171–3, and Lamb 1989: 24–6, 147). According
to Hogarth, true beauty inheres in the waving line, ‘composed of two
curves contrasted’, while grace, a superior aesthetic principle, superadds
a third dimension: it twists as well as waves. The ‘precise serpentine
line, or line of grace’ can be represented by an eel, serpent, or ‘fine wire,
properly twisted round the elegant and varied figure of a cone’ (Hogarth
1971: 38–9).13 Because it suggests movement, it evokes the fourth
dimension, time, as well as space. Hogarth continues, ‘the serpentine
line, by its waving and winding at the same time different ways […]
may be said to inclose […] varied contents; and therefore all its variety
cannot be express’d on paper by one continued line, without the assist-
ance of the imagination’ (1971: 39).14 The waving line encloses ‘varied
contents’, like Tristram’s inclusion of heterogeneous material in his
digressions, but it also describes an empty space and thus figures the
masculine desire for the feminine. It can also signify the indirection and
postponement which characterize feminine desire. The line of beauty
is recalled in the widow Wadman’s sinuous seduction techniques. She
approaches Toby slowly, repeatedly; she advances in zigzags, sidles up
to him and wreathes herself about him in a series of subtle manoeuvres
(VIII.xvi: 675–8, VIII.xxiii: 705).
Cotterill (2004) similarly associates digression with femininity. She
argues that it allows the writer to withdraw into the self and explore
30 Judith Hawley
an interior, feminine, space. While digression was sanctioned as a rhe-

torical technique and had a strongly masculine role to play in the epic,
it was, in the violently disordered seventeenth century, a mark of the
feminine, the marginalized and dispossessed.15 Tristram Shandy has more
than its fair share of effeminate, emasculated or impotent figures. Sterne

repeatedly threatens his characters with genital mutilation (though the
observant and patient reader will discover in the last volume that the
character most often assumed to be a capon is perfectly fit for the mar-
riage state [IX.xxii: 776–7]). Not only do they fail to hit the mark sexu-
ally, they frequently fall short verbally and intellectually. Tristram has
his disappointments with Jenny (VII.xxix: 624) and with his story: when
he finally gets to his ‘choicest morsel’, he resigns his pen and laments
he begins to ‘feel my want of powers’ (IX.xx: 779). Yorick and Walter
both defeat themselves in argument, Walter because, although his
rhetorical style is violently masculine (‘skirmishing, cutting […] slash-
ing […] thrusting and ripping’), he always defends the most vulnerable
point. Yorick chooses to hobble himself: ‘for this reason, though he
would often attack him—yet could never bear to do it with all his force’
(VIII.xxxiv: 722). Walter also adopts a feminine subject position in that
his opinions are so errant: ‘His road seemed to lie so much on one side
of that, wherein all other travellers had gone before him’ (VII.xxvii: 617).
It is as if he rides his hobby-horse sidesaddle. Digression, as Chambers
argues, is a form of critique. Sterne rejects the masculinist end-driven
plot of novels such as Tom Jones. The Shandy males lack the virility of
Fielding’s hero anyway, but diversion is also a choice for Sterne: he pre-
fers dalliance. Tristram Shandy is all narrative foreplay.
An inadequate man is, of course, not the same as a woman. And I also
do not mean to imply that Sterne was a feminist, or even that he really
understood women. Indeed, the representation of women, including
‘Madam’ the reader, has been the subject of much debate (for example,
Ehlers 1981; McMaster 1989; Benedict 1992; New 1990). Tristram’s
portrayal of Janatone, part-description, part-fantasy, is a case in point.
He encounters the coquettish inn-keeper’s daughter when he is on his
excursion in volume VII and her sexy curves fit in with his narrative
meanderings. Tristram tells her: ‘thou carriest the principles of change
within thy frame […] e’er twice twelve months are pass’d and gone,
thou mayest grow out like a pumkin, and lose thy shapes—or, thou
mayest go off like a flower, and lose thy beauty’ (VII.ix: 589–90). While
this turn of phrase is a reminder of the Hogarthian line of grace with its
combination of form and motion, and while the description is apprecia-
tive of Janatone because of her difference from Sterne’s lanky narrator,
there is nonetheless something nasty-minded in Tristram’s lusting after

her while reminding her that she will get old and fat.
Moreover, Tristram Shandy is not fully feminized. Some stories are
told in a straight line and some characters do reach a climax, even if it
is only indicated through double entendre. Both of these are especially

true of the interpolated tales and particularly of Trim’s stories and
adventures. Trim and Bridget go all the way on ‘uncle Toby’s curious
draw-bridge’ (III.xxiv: 247) and in the widow Wadman’s kitchen (IX.
xxviii: 797–7). We can compare the climax of Trim’s tale about the
beguine (VIII.xxii: 703–4) and his account of how his brother Tom wins
the Jew’s widow with a sausage (IX.vii: 750–2). Trim is a fine example of
the convention of the virility of the lower orders. His robust coupling
seems a vulgar activity when set against the effete genteel dalliance of
the higher orders. But Tristram is not completely ineffectual. There is
still some lead in his pencil. However, when Sterne’s narrators do suc-
ceed in copulation, it strikes a false note as it destroys the precarious
balance between sensibility and sexuality, as it does the stairs of the
concert hall in Milan, when the Marquesina de F*** lets Yorick ‘enter’
(Sterne 2002: 77–8).
The ins and outs of Yorick’s affair with the Marquesina de F*** remind
us that there are as many phallic objects as there are vaginal and cervi-
cal spaces in Tristram Shandy. For every button hole, there is a button, a
nose for every crevice. There is, of course, a natural agreement or sym-
pathy between these forms. Sympathy and reciprocality are built into
the structure of Tristram Shandy. Sterne’s work is both digressive and
progressive; moreover, it goes in and out, back and forth and from side
to side. ‘In good truth’, says Tristram, ‘when a man is telling a story in
the strange way I do mine, he is obliged continually to be going back-
wards and forwards to keep all tight together in the reader’s fancy’ (VI.
xxxiii: 557–8). Tristram Shandy, then, is not completely feminine; there
is some masculine thrusting and even a few climaxes, but the sense of
freedom from both mechanical action and moral rectitude comes from
the feminine digressions. Feminine dalliance, Sterne implies, is better at
postponing death than masculine climax.
Yet, in celebrating what Hogarth called the ‘elegant wantonness
(which is the true spirit of dancing)’ (1971: 150), the Revd Laurence
Sterne crossed the line. Readers and critics who had applauded the first
instalment of Tristram Shandy when it was published anonymously,
deplored it when the profession of its author was revealed. They encour-
aged him to pursue the path of sentiment rather than sexual suggestive-
ness. But Sterne demonstrated how closely intertwined they were. His
32 Judith Hawley
friend Denis Diderot expresses the idea memorably: ‘There is a bit of

testicle at the bottom of our most sublime sentiments and most refined
tenderness’ (quoted in Gay 1977: 189–90). There is a flaw at the heart
of the Latitudinarian ideal of benevolence and the politely fashionable
cult of sensibility. Sympathy does not always lead to active charity:

doing good makes you feel good, but those feelings are more likely to
be inspired by the good-looking than the truly needy and might end
in self-regard.16 Tristram is attracted by the ‘insiduous’ Nanette, but he
flees from her slit and will not join in her carousal. In A Sentimental
Journey, Yorick encounters an apparently similar country dance, but it
differs in a crucial respect: ‘I fancied I could distinguish an elevation
of spirit different from that which the cause or the effect of simple
jollity.—In a word, I thought I beheld Religion mixing in the dance—’
(Sterne 2002: 159). In case we think Sterne is back on the straight and
narrow, the next and final chapter finds him sharing a bedroom with
two women and reaching out to them. Sterne exposes the flaw in sym-
pathy, but is happy to tolerate it.
Notes
1. See also Williams (1990), who argues that despite appearances, Tristram
Shandy ‘is a straightforward linear narrative that exactly follows chrono-
logical time’ because the real plot is Tristram’s act of writing his book which
stretches from March 1759 to August 1766 (1990: 1043). Sterne makes only
a very brief appearance in Kermode (1967).
2. See also Conrad (1978), Brady (1970), Harris (1982), Nuttall (1992) and
McMorran (2002). The literature on Tristram Shandy is extensive; I refer to only
a sample here.
3. Lawrence Peter ‘Yogi’ Berra (b. 1925) is a former Major League Baseball
player, famous for his Zen-like malapropisms.
4. There are so many examples of this sort of digression that the following is
just a sample: Sterne 1978, I.iii: 4, I.iv: 5–6, I.vii: 10–11, I.x: 17ff., I.xi: 25ff.,
I.xx: 65ff., I.xxi: 70ff., II.i: 93ff., II.ii: 97ff., III.vii: 194ff., III.xiv: 217–18, III.
xxxi: 256–III.xxxiii: 262, IV.xxvii: 349–51, V.xvi: 445–9, VI.xxiv: 541ff., VII.
xiv: 594–5 and VII.xxxi: 627ff.
5. This method is partly a borrowing from and parody of the narrative tech-
niques of the historian Paul de Rapin-Thoyras (1743–47), who is referred to
at the end of the previous chapter (V.v: 427). His History of England is a major
source for Tristram Shandy.
6. Compare other instances in which Tristram recommends the scenic route:
Sterne 1978, I.xx: 65, I.xxi: 74, III.xii: 214 and V.vii: 432. Tristram frequently
figures his book as a journey (see, for example, Sterne 1978, VI.i: 491). He
also likens the operations of the mind to travelling (see, for example, Sterne
1978, I.i: 2 and II.xix: 175). Compare the way Walter picks up ideas as some
gather windfalls in another’s orchard (III.xxxiv: 264) with the way Tristram
intercepts ideas in a kind of licensed theft or adultery (VIII.ii: 657).
7. Contrast: ‘Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life’
(Matthew 7:14). For the story of Le Fever and his son, see Sterne 1978, VI.vi:
499–VI.x: 513 and VI.xii: 517–VI.xiii: 520.
8. See Sterne (1984: 442–3) for the possible obscene associations of ‘planting’
and ‘cabbages’.
9. My account of sympathy, sensibility and benevolence draws upon the

following: Crane (1934), Brady (1970), Rousseau (1976), Mullan (1988),
Barker-Benfield (1992), Van Sant (1993) and Ellison (1994).
10. Sterne (1978: 444), slightly adapted from Pliny, Epistles (V.vi, I: 355).
11. Tristram travels via Calais, Boulogne, Montreuil, Nampont, Bernay, Nouvion,
Abbeville, Ailly au Clochers, Hixcourt (‘an error for “Flixcourt”’ according
to the Florida editors, Sterne 1984: 464), Pequignay, Amiens, Chantilly, St
Dennis, Paris, Fontainbleau, Sens, Joigny, Auxerre, Dijon, Challon, Mâcon,
Lyons, St Fons to Avignon.
12. His route takes in Nismes (Nîmes), Lunel, Montpellier, Pesçnas, Beziers,
Narbonne, Carcassonne, Castle Naudairy, and ends up in the fictional site
Perdrillo’s pavilion (Sterne 1978, VII.xliii: 651).
13. For Tristram’s references to Hogarth, see Sterne 1978, II.vi: 115, II.ix: 121 and
II.xvii: 141.
14. This passage is also discussed by Lamb (1989: 24). Sterne might also
have been influenced by Hogarth’s discussion and illustration of dancing
(Hogarth 1971: 146–51 and plate 2, ‘The Country Dance’).
15. Chambers identifies a specifically feminist loiterature which manifests and
celebrates ‘the sense of ça ne se dessine pas (the failure of things to take
shape)’ (1999: 37), but arguably all of the texts he studies demonstrate a
rejection of phallic directedness in their deferral of climax.
16. The idea that Sterne might have been sceptical about sentiment was first
broached by Dilworth (1948). Few have taken his arguments further except
Keymer (in Sterne 1994) and Goring (in Sterne 2001).
Bibliography
Allen, Dennis W. 1985. ‘Sexuality/Textuality in Tristram Shandy’, Studies in English
Literature, 25: 651–70
Baird, Theodore. 1936. ‘The Time-Scheme of Tristram Shandy and a Source’,
PMLA, 51: 803–20
Barker-Benfield, J. G. 1992. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-
Century Britain (University of Chicago Press)
Benedict, Barbara. 1992. ‘“Dear Madam”: Rhetoric, Cultural Politics and the
Female Reader in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy’, Studies in Philology, 89: 485–98
Berthoud, Jacques. 1984. ‘Shandeism and Sexuality’, in Laurence Sterne: Riddles
and Mysteries, ed. Valerie Grosvenor Myer (London: Vision and Barnes and
Noble), pp. 24–38
Bosch, René. 2007. Labyrinth of Digressions: Tristram Shandy as Perceived and
Influenced by Sterne’s Early Imitators, trans. P. Verhoeff (Amsterdam: Rodopi)
Brady, Frank. 1970. ‘Tristram Shandy: Sexuality, Morality and Sensibility’,
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 4: 41–56
Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York:
A. A. Knopf)
34 Judith Hawley

Press)
Conrad, Peter. 1978. Shandyism: The Character of Romantic Irony (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell)
Cotterill, Anne. 2004. Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford
University Press)

Crane, R. S. 1934. ‘Suggestions towards a Genealogy of the “Man of Feeling”’,
English Literary History, 1: 205–30
Dilworth, Ernest Nevin. 1948. The Unsentimental Journey of Laurence Sterne (New
York: King’s Crown Press)
Ehlers, Leigh A. 1981. ‘Mr. Shandy’s “Lint and Basilicon”: The Importance of
Women in Tristram Shandy’, South Atlantic Review, 46: 61–75
Ellison, Julie. 1994. ‘The Politics of Fancy in the Age of Sensibility’, in Re-Visioning
Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776–1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and
Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press)
Gay, Peter. 1977. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. II. The Science of Freedom
(1969, reprint New York: W. W. Norton)
Genette, Gerard. 1996. ‘Voice’, in Narratology: An Introduction, ed. Susan Onega
and Jose Angel Garcia Landa (London: Longman), pp. 172–89
Gerard, W. B. and Brigitte Friant-Kessler. 2008. ‘Towards a Catalogue of Illustrated
Laurence Sterne: Decorative Arts’, The Shandean, 19: 90–110
Harris, Elizabeth W. 1982. ‘Sterne’s Novels: Gathering Up the Fragments’, English
Literary History, 49: 35–49
Hillis Miller, J. [1978] 2002. ‘Narrative Middles: A Preliminary Outline’, in
Laurence Sterne: Longman Critical Readers (London: Longman), pp. 165–77
Hogarth, William. 1971. The Analysis of Beauty (London, 1753; reprint Menston:
Scolar Press)
Howes, Alan B., ed. 1974. Sterne: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge)
Iser, Wolfgang. 1988. Laurence Sterne: ‘Tristram Shandy’, trans. David Henry
Wilson (Cambridge University Press)
Kermode, Frank. 1967. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction
(Oxford University Press)
Keymer, Thomas. 2002. Sterne, the Moderns and the Novel (Oxford University
Press)
Lamb, Jonathan. 1989. Sterne’s Fiction and the Double Principle (Cambridge
University Press)
Lewis, W. S., Charles H. Bennett and Andrew G. Hoover. 1951. Horace Walpole’s
Correspondence with Sir David Dalrymple, The Yale Edition of the Correspondence
of Horace Walpole, vol. 15 (Oxford University Press)
McMaster, Juliet. 1989. ‘Walter Shandy, Sterne and Gender: A Feminist Foray’,
English Studies in Canada, 15: 44–58
McMorran, Will. 2002. The Inn and the Traveller: Digressive Topographies in the
Early Modern European Novel (Oxford: Legenda)
Mullan, John. 1988. Sentiment and Sociability (Oxford University Press)
New, Melvyn. 1990. ‘Job’s Wife and Sterne’s Other Women’, in Out of Bounds:
Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism, ed. Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), pp. 55–74
Nuttall, A. D. 1992. Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel
(Oxford: Clarendon Press)
Piper, W. B. 1961. ‘Tristram Shandy’s Digressive Artistry’, Studies in English

Literature, 3: 65–76
Rapin-Thoyras, Paul de. 1743–47. History of England, trans. and continued by
Nicholas Tindal, 3rd edn (London)
Rousseau, G. S. 1976. ‘Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins
of Sensibility’, in Studies in the Eighteenth Century III: Papers Presented at the

Third David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade
(University of Toronto Press), pp. 137–57
Said, Edward. 1975. Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books)
Santovetti, Olivia. 2007. Digression: A Narrative Strategy in the Italian Novel
(Oxford: Peter Lang)
Shklovsky, Victor. 1965. ‘Art as Technique’, and ‘Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic
Commentary’, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon
and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), pp. 3–24, 25–57
Sterne, Laurence. 1978, 1984. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
The Text, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New; The Notes, by Melvyn New, Richard A.
Davies and W. G. Day (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida)
—— 1994. A Sentimental Journey, ed. Thomas Keymer (London: Everyman)
—— 2001. A Sentimental Journey, ed. Paul Goring (London: Penguin)
—— 2002. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the
Bramine’s Journey, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, ed.
Melvyn New and W. G. Day (Gainesville: University Press of Florida)
Swift, Jonathan. 1958. A Tale of a Tub, to which is Added The Battle of the Books and
The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith,
2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
Van Sant, Ann Jessie. 1993. Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses
in Social Context (Cambridge University Press)
Williams, Jeffrey. 1990. ‘Narrative of Narratives (Tristram Shandy)’, Modern
Language Notes, 105: 1032–45
3
Little Dorrit: Dickens,
Circumlocution, Unconscious

Thought
Jeremy Tambling
‘I hope you have preserved the unities, sir?’ said

Mr Curdle.
‘The original piece is a French one’, said Nicholas.
‘There is abundance of incident, sprightly dialogue,
strongly marked characters – ’
‘All unavailing without strict observance of the uni-
ties, sir,’ returned Mr Curdle. ‘The unities of the drama
before everything.’
‘Might I ask you’, said Nicholas [...] ‘what the uni-
ties are?’
Mr Curdle coughed and considered. ‘The unities,
sir,’ he said, ‘are a completeness – a kind of universal
dove-tailedness with regard to place and time – a sort
of general oneness, if I may be allowed to use so strong
an expression. I take these to be the dramatic unities,
so far as I have been enabled to bestow attention upon
them, and I have read much upon the subject, and
thought much.’ (Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens 1999: 301)
The charge that Dickens is digressive and episodic, which appeared

in post-Jamesian criticism of the novel, did not characterize the nine-
teenth century so much, in comparison with attacks on the novels
as – despite, or because of their popularity – vulgar, exaggerating and
uneducated. That criticism is most associated with G. H. Lewes’s essay,
‘Dickens in Relation to Criticism’, discussing, in the Fortnightly Review
in 1872, the first two volumes of John Forster’s Life of Dickens. For
Lewes, ‘thought is strangely absent from [Dickens’s] works’ (quoted in
Ford and Lane 1961: 69).1 Forster replied to this, and also to Hippolyte
36
Dickens, Circumlocution, Unconscious Thought 37
Taine’s 1856 comments on Dickens as having ‘the imagination of a

monomaniac’ – which would imply in him the reverse of a digressive
tendency – in the second volume of his Life (‘Dickens as a Novelist’,
9.1), but a limitation in Forster’s reading of Dickens, arguing for him as
a humorist, will be noted below. Lewes tended to take the neatness of

the drama as a model for thinking about the novel; but Nicholas Nickleby
shows that Dickens was not so inclined to be reverent about anything
in the drama.2 Lewes’s, and others’ charges were implicitly ways of cri-
tiquing Dickens’s digressiveness, but to be episodic was the marker of
comic writing, and insofar as this was less ‘serious’, it did not matter
in Dickens, but rather proved the point, that he was better in the early
comic novels, which did not require thought.
I will discuss digression in Little Dorrit, a later, less episodic or comic,
but very rich novel, which first appeared in the same form as Pickwick
Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David
Copperfield, Bleak House and the later Our Mutual Friend – that is, as 20
monthly instalments, issued between December 1855 and June 1857.3
Though its complexity of plot has been criticized by various Mr Curdles,
this, in the style of Lewes’s criticism, slights the text’s difference from
previous novels: it is a novel about attempting to recover a repressed
past, as suggested by the Clennam watch with its letters DNF – Do Not
Forget (2.30: 808). To find it not digressive is, however, as an argument,
likely to sound like a version of Freud’s ‘kettle’ logic: (a) Little Dorrit is
not digressive, and where it seems to be so, it is all relevant; (b) it can
be nothing else but digressive, because that is the only way writing can
be; (c) it is digressive, and that is a marker of the text’s heterogeneity.
But to these defences can be added the point that the novel which
renames the Civil Service the Circumlocution Office puts digression at
its centre. That organization’s ‘perception’ of ‘HOW NOT TO DO IT’
(1.10: 119) imposes universal deferral and delay as a mode of proce-
dure, while silently breaking the name ‘Dorrit’ by taking out its centre,
an image for how Mr Dorrit the man is broken by the prison system.
‘How not to do it’ ensures that nothing is ‘done’, everything remains
in process. The narrative says that unfinished, undone business at the
end of Parliamentary sessions is standard, ‘but the Circumlocution
Office went beyond it’ (1.10: 120). That being so, the novel asks what is
‘beyond’ the laissez-faire principle. The fear that there may be no limit
to the ‘beyond’ is at the heart of Little Dorrit, creating its modernism,
and it matches something inherent in the book’s planning, which as
appears in Dickens’s letters of 1855, and in Sucksmith’s Introduction,
was marked by his ‘restlessness’; while the novel works through evoking
38 Jeremy Tambling
different spaces: Marseilles, Egypt, Chalons, Antwerp, the Swiss Alps,

Venice, Florence and Rome, and, as a more ghostly place beyond those,
repressed as far as knowledge of it goes, China.4 And the Crimea, the
actual place and sphere of action the novel starts from, never appears.
That sense of an absent centre associates with the anonymity of the

ungendering draft title, ‘Nobody’s Fault’. The gap – fault – which exists
must be filled; so in the chapter ‘Fellow Travellers’, Mr Meagles speaks
of himself and his wife ‘trotting about the world’, and Tattycoram as a
‘greater traveller’ than Captain Cook (1.2: 34–5). Miss Wade, who main-
tains her strangeness by keeping her first name in reserve, says that in
life ‘we shall meet the people who are coming to meet us from many
strange places and by many strange roads’ (1.2: 39). Her words empty
both sets of people – ‘we’ and ‘they’ – of significance: they only mirror
each other, as nobodies. ‘Home’, the title of 1.3, meaning Clennam’s
mother’s house, is the most unheimlich of all places in the book – the
woman at its centre is not even Clennam’s mother, and is strangely
unnamed by that point – and it imposes on the novel the necessity for
travel; while in Book the Second, the Dorrits go on tour, and in another
chapter named ‘Fellow Travellers’ meet Mrs Merdle and her son, and
the Gowans, thus suggesting that only digressive paths produce nodal
points, momentary centres.
I will illustrate these points through comments on the fourth number
of Little Dorrit, beginning with ‘Bleeding Heart Yard’ (chapter 12), contin-
uing with ‘Patriarchal’ (chapter 13) and concluding with ‘Little Dorrit’s
Party’ (chapter 14); I supplement these with comments on Miss Wade’s
chapter (2.21). In Little Dorrit 1.12, Clennam and Plornish the plasterer
settle a debt on behalf of Tip, Amy Dorrit’s improvident brother. Going
from Bleeding Heart Yard to ‘a stable yard in High Holborn’, where
they deal with Captain Maroon, of Gloucestershire, over money Tip
owes for a horse, and from there by coach over Blackfriars Bridge to
the Marshalsea in Southwark, Mr Plornish talks all the time, and digres-
sively, about poverty, and whose ‘fault’ it was:
And in brief his illogical opinion was, that if you couldn’t do nothing
for him, you had better take nothing from him for doing of it; so far
as he could make out, that was about what it come to. Thus, in a pro-
lix, gently-growling, foolish way, did Plornish turn the tangled skein
of his estate about and about, like a blind man who was trying to
find some beginning or end to it, until they reached the prison gate.
There he left [Clennam] alone, to wonder, as he rode away, how many
thousand Plornishes there might be within a day or two’s journey of
the Circumlocution Office, playing sundry curious variations on the

same tune, which were not known by ear in that glorious institution.
(1.12: 158)
Everything in this passage is digressive: the two journeys Clennam and

Plornish make which criss-cross London, north and south of the Thames,
including crossing a bridge, which install digression as necessarily
inherent in everyday urban life; the encounter with Captain Maroon,
who is never seen again in the text, but who has his own narrative
and indirect mode of doing business; and then Mr Plornish’s language,
which, like a talking cure, works by free association.5 His digressiveness
contrasts with that of Mr Dorrit, the prisoner whose language is marked
increasingly by hesitations and periphrases, forms of circumlocution,
and, as in his fictional account of Jackson and Captain Martin, told in
parabolic fashion in order to make Amy keep the attentions of John
Chivery, accompanied by hand-gestures which indicate that ‘he shrunk
before his own knowledge of his meaning’ (1.19: 244). Circumlocution
in Dorrit represses meaning and awareness of the shameful nature of
what is being said; whereas with Mr Plornish, it suggests puzzlement
and frustration. In Plornish’s speech appears the sense of both London
and working-class life as labyrinthine: Clennam has already spoken of
‘this labyrinth of a world’ (1.2: 33). Perhaps the labyrinthine includes a
reference, in the ‘tangled skein’, to Ariadne’s thread given to Theseus,
and then, via the musical reference to variations, which imply digres-
sions, the text arrives at an allusion to the Circumlocution Office,
whose apparent deafness compares with the blindness of those outside.
This government office, paired in the passage with the Marshalsea
prison, capturing – entangling – so many different lives, is the entropic
structure whose name and practice embody digressive tactics to defeat
inquiry, as when it attempts to deflect Clennam who, in chapter 10,
visits it repeatedly, and ‘wants to know’ about Mr Dorrit, and is sent
from branch to branch of different departments.
To this itemizing of forms of digression must be added the extraordi-
narily varied nature of the quotation, its own skeined nature and power
of variations on the ‘Nobody’s Fault’ theme of the text, and the point
that the difference between Plornish and the Circumlocution Office
is that he is not paid for his tangle of language whereas they are (the
lawyer in Bleak House chapter 1 is called Mr Tangle); that Plornish’s
‘tangled skein’ contrasts with the Circumlocution Office’s red tape, of
which ‘it had used enough to stretch, in graceful festoons, from Hyde
Park Corner to the General Post-Office’ (2.8: 543). The quotation shows
40 Jeremy Tambling
no superiority to Plornish; ‘foolish’ makes him sound like a holy fool,

an innocent, while ‘illogical’ must be read as ironic, for his own tan-
gle of words is only less than the Circumlocution Office’s power of
entanglement, and the prison is at the heart of the way it entangles,
as it is at the heart of the quotation. The Circumlocution Office is put

at the heart of London, while the Marshalsea prison’s status is to be a
decentred presence in this text, needing a digressive route to reach it,
since it is outside both Westminster and the City of London: unusu-
ally, considering Dickens’s practice, there is no reference in this novel
to Newgate, a visible and obvious presence within Dickens’s London.6
The prison is the novel’s symbol, as all critics since Lionel Trilling have
agreed, but its values have been assumed by the Circumlocution Office,
which, put at the centre, constitutes everything around it as the prison
which it keeps negligent guard over.7 (In 2.28, Ferdinand Barnacle even
comes to visit Clennam in the Marshalsea to see if the Circumlocution
Office was responsible for putting him there.) Mr Plornish must be
‘prolix’ because it is the nature of the Circumlocution Office and what
it represents to incite someone to explain it: like Chancery at the
heart of the fog of Bleak House, it is real, and yet it creates a decentred
system which requires anyone who would understand it to go round, in
every sense, because what it represents has neither ‘beginning or end’.
Circumlocution produces discourse; like Chancery, the office comprises
writing: minutes, memoranda and ‘ungrammatical correspondence’
which require interpretation, being illogical because outside the logos
of grammar, writing which goes ‘beyond’, and fails to clinch anything,
just as bafflingly as Middlemarch’s Mr Casaubon discovers, who, trying
to work out ‘the key to all mythologies’, is confined to the digressional
and the parergal.8 Like Plornish, Dickens can only be ‘digressive’, if a
distinction is maintained between that and writing which keeps to a
single strategy of progression. Dickens’s writing responds to the plural-
ity inherent in any situation, digressing because being as unable as Mr
Plornish to identify single causes for present discontents. And ‘illogical’,
a paraphrase for ‘digressive’, is significant: Mr Plornish may be illogical,
but that word implies the position of someone standing inside what
Foucault would call a discourse of truth, one which can place speech
outside that discourse (in this case, putting the working-class figure
outside it). To criticize Dickens for digressiveness would be to side with
those on the inside of ‘the truth’.
After the voice of Mr Plornish whose prolixity and illogicality is part
of his position outside a prolix and illogical system, comes a visit by
Clennam to the house of the landlord of Bleeding Heart Yard, Mr Casby,
and the meeting with his daughter, the widowed Flora Finching, even
more prolix, especially after discovering from Clennam, the returnee
from China, that he is not married:
‘O goodness gracious me I hope you never kept yourself a bachelor so

long on my account […] but of course you never did why should you,
pray don’t answer, I don’t know where I’m running to, oh so tell me
something about the Chinese ladies whether their eyes are really so
long and narrow always putting me in mind of mother-of-pearl fish
at cards and do they really wear tails down their back and plaited too
or is it only the men, and when they pull their hair so very tight off
their foreheads don’t they hurt themselves, and why do they stick
little bells all over their bridges and temples and hats and things or
don’t they really do it!’
‘Then it’s all true and they really do […] what a country to live in
for so long a time and with so many lanterns and umbrellas too how
very dark and wet the climate ought to be and no doubt actually is,
and the sums of money that must be made by those two trades where
everyone carries them and hangs them everywhere, the little shoes
too and the feet screwed back in infancy is quite surprising, what a
traveller you are!’ (1.13: 166–7)
This is an extraordinary Joycean writing, not least because, as with

Ulysses, it recycles the things which are on dit about China: it shows
knowledge as never more than that which is acquired through
unattributable sources, and what ‘they say’. There is nothing outside
the text: no knowledge which is not intertextual, by which I mean
knowledge produced out of indefinable secondary sources. Flora’s obvi-
ously digressive speeches about the Chinese offer, implicitly, a view on
the dominant Orientalist ideological discourse about Chinese society as
miniaturized, and infantile, hence ripe for further aggressive coloniza-
tion, and by focusing particularly on Chinese women, shows women as
marginal: Flora has been infantilized throughout her life no less than
the women who have been foot-bound: so has Pet Meagles, and so
has Tattycoram, and Amy Dorrit’s ‘littleness’ relates to the way she has
been systematically treated. Feet screwed back in infancy only relate to
other techniques of imprisonment basic to Little Dorrit. And Flora’s dis-
course is also fascinated by forms of beauty denied her: this is a China
of the mind, her own version of Calvino’s invisible cities. Her speech
is speculative, as when she deduces from the lanterns and umbrellas
42 Jeremy Tambling
that China must be dark and wet, and it is circumlocutive, making

journeys (‘I don’t know where I’m running to […] what a traveller you
are’). Leavis, saying that James could not have produced Flora Finching,
points out that, like Dickens, ‘Flora enjoys herself’ in ‘these astonish-
ing expressive flights’ (Leavis and Leavis 1970: 241). Plornish and Flora

both suggest a pleasure of the text which creates a complete world of
discourse, both doing so out of disappointment and from being outside
the sphere where language is officially created as a system of inclusion
and exclusion.
Nor has Dickens finished when Flora has appeared, for she is accom-
panied by Mr F’s Aunt, a ‘legacy’ from Mr Finching, a figure hobbling
Flora as much as any foot-binding would do. Her comments in chapter
13, all irrelevant to the conversation, comprise a cryptic digressiveness
the polar opposite of Flora’s, but equally complete:
‘When we lived at Henley, Barnes’ gander was stole by tinkers.’
‘The Monument near London Bridge [...] was put up after the Great
Fire of London; and the Great Fire of London was not the fire in
which your uncle George’s workshops was burned down.’
‘I hate a fool!’ (1.13: 159)
She apparently takes a dislike to Clennam, to whom she addresses this

‘sentiment, in itself almost Solomonic’, and has to be led from the
room, with a fourth utterance, ‘What he come there for, then?’ (1.13:
172–3). Perhaps she fears, as Flora hopes, that Clennam will marry
Flora. Certainly the intrusions are markers of paranoia, and perhaps
it is an anger displaced from Flora, who seems proud of her, as if the
Aunt was the symbol of what Flora had suffered; a supplement to
Flora’s supplementary narratives, and the voice of her aggression, just
as, in Bleak House, Mme Hortense is the aggressive unconscious of both
Lady Dedlock and Esther Summerson; the servant of one who offers
herself, later, to be the servant of the other, and the murderer of Mr
Tulkinghorn, the threat to both mother and daughter. In such examples
of minor characterization, the novel gets its fullest meaning, through
supplementary figures. The first two statements of Mr F’s Aunt are sug-
gestive for a sense of how private and public histories juxtapose, how
knowledge is an impossible combination of unattributable details and
facts which can never be verified, and of public knowledge (the Great
Fire and the building of the Monument) which has no relevance to the
subject speaking. Such information as she has is nonetheless equally

paranoid knowledge: the Monument had an inscription which blamed
the Catholics for starting the Fire, and Mr F’s Aunt clearly and equally
wants to blame somebody for the fire in the workshops. One form of
baseless knowledge constructs another; memory, which the novel tries

to recall is, as with the Monument, of nothing except of something
wholly precise (the gander, not the more generic goose) which stands
entirely outside logic or meaning. Utterance, which is wholly digressive,
based on fragments of events, but which constructs a family history,
comes out of such a mad knowledge formed by ressentiment.
Flora and Mr F’s Aunt are mad, and that condition is part of the
‘beyond’ which is constructed by the society whose two poles are the
prison and the Circumlocution Office. While Mr F’s Aunt, in contrast to
Flora, has no circumlocution in her language, she brings out something
basic which is also the feature of the Circumlocution Office: language
has no grounding except in its own excess: as Ferdinand Barnacle tells
Clennam, ‘I can give you plenty of forms to fill up’ (1.10: 130); while
this makes all speech digressive, it means that a political decision is
at the heart of that which determines what is mad and what not, and
what is digressive or not: the digressive being excluded like madness.
The novel, however, will make no such distinction, that being its
achievement, but its question is whether speech remains locked inside
its own prison, self-obsessed, indeed monomaniacal, or whether it can
go beyond it, however digressively. One of the most self-absorbed is
John Chivery, with his fantasies about marrying Amy and becoming
the bourgeois husband, being both inside the prison, where he will live
and work, and which will give him security, and outside it (as turnkey);
his digressive fantasy is to write his epitaph, which he does twice in
1.18 alone: an achievement in circumlocution, he enjoys the language
which keeps him in a psychic prison, and he is mad enough to think of
himself as already dead.
This fourth instalment of Little Dorrit shows something else: the
novel’s modernism is inseparable from awareness of city-space, and its
form corresponds to negotiating the city and city spaces, which is what
any walker in London does: digression is necessary because the city
offers no direct routes, and the city’s existence constructs a memory,
and an unconscious, and so a narrative, for its walkers. Chapter 13
concludes with a long walk for Clennam, accompanied by Mr Pancks,
from Casby’s house, including the encounter with Cavalletto, before
Clennam reaches his lodgings in Covent Garden. The following
chapter, ‘Little Dorrit’s Party’, shows Amy and Maggy – a brain-fevered
44 Jeremy Tambling
figure whose existence, in her lunacy and confused distinction between

girl and woman, reproaches any idea of a normal progression or nar-
rative – walking the streets all night. Returning from Covent Garden,
where they have visited Clennam, to the Marshalsea, and finding they
have been locked out, they return across London Bridge and around the

north side of the river, both west and east, before returning south, to the
prison, and to St George’s church in Southwark. The passage includes
the encounter with the prostitute who says she is ‘killing herself’ (1.14:
191): there is an increasing heterogeneity within ‘going astray’; and it
inheres in city-life, in ‘the great capital’ (1.14: 194).
The fourth number has dramatized the lives of several women, each
of whom, Flora, Mr F’s Aunt, Amy, Maggy and the prostitute, make
alternative narratives necessary: some lives cannot be told in ways that
conform to a single logic. In Bleak House chapter 3, ‘A Progress’, Esther
Summerson’s first-person narrative begins by her saying that she is not
clever, perhaps as a strategy; this is digressive in its isolation from the
other history in the text, and reflects on her sense of being different,
because illegitimate, having no name: a figure who has internalized her
anxiety. Miss Wade is a fuller study of a woman who cannot be inte-
grated with others in bourgeois society, as appears from her difference
from the others in ‘Fellow Travellers’; while her lesbianism separates
her, Dickens gives her a chapter of her own narrative, a written account
of her life (‘The History of a Self-Tormentor’). Intending her at one stage
to have had a father in prison (like Amy Dorrit), he then intended that
Miss Wade should tell her story to Clennam when he met her (in Book
the Second, chapter 20). Forster, who disliked the chapter, possibly for
its feminine subversiveness, commented that ‘Dickens rightly judged
his purpose to have been, to supply a kind of connection between the
episode and the story’ of Little Dorrit, and quoted a letter from him:
I don’t see the practicality of making the History of a Self-Tormentor,

with which I took great pains, a written narrative. But I do see the
possibility [he saw the other practicability before the number was
published] of making it a chapter by itself, which might enable me
to dispense with the necessity of the turned commas. Do you think
that would be better? I have no doubt that a great part of Fielding’s
reason for the introduced story [for example, ‘The Man of the Hill’
in Tom Jones, to which Forster alludes], and Smollett’s also, was, that
it is sometimes really impossible to present, in a full book, the idea it
contains (which yet it may be on all accounts desirable to present),
without supposing the reader to be possessed of almost as much
romantic allowance as would put him on a level with the writer. In

Miss Wade, I had an idea, which I thought a new one, of making
the introduced story so fit into surroundings impossible of separa-
tion from the main story, as to make the blood of the book circulate
through both. But I can only suppose, from what you say, that I have

not exactly succeeded in this.9
Dickens’s awareness of eighteenth-century digressiveness, as in A Tale

of a Tub, or Tristram Shandy, is obvious, but the issue in Little Dorrit is
not now one of marking digressions as opposed to progressions. Miss
Wade must remain marginal, unnamed even; woman’s autobiography,
as derived from Charlotte Brontë, being a new and different form, which
Dickens adopts. The number-plans which Dickens wrote to sketch out
how the novel would go, and which reveal his planning, had included
‘Miss Wade’s Story’ in chapter 21, adding ‘Unconsciously laying bare all
her character’ (2.21: 895). The new freedom caused by the omission of
what James Joyce calls ‘perverted commas’ as a result of the writing of
an independent chapter means the disappearance of any metalanguage
by which Miss Wade can be criticized.10 Whereas before, Clennam’s
reactions would inevitably have commented on Miss Wade, that now
disappears, and there is absolutely no comment made on the ‘History of
a Self-Tormentor’. That, of course, allows for an ironic reading, as in the
case of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, where the male ‘I’ speaks
throughout as the voice of ressentiment, but it is not a necessary one:
Dickens’s own inclination to lay bare her character has now disappeared
as a critical gesture, and in the way she speaks for herself, the reader can
make her own judgement. The first lines of Miss Wade’s account, ‘I have
the misfortune of not being a fool. From a very early age I have detected
what those about me thought they hid from me. If I could have been
habitually imposed upon, instead of habitually discerning the truth,
I might have lived as smoothly as most fools do’ (2.21: 693), recall the
sentiments of Mr F’s Aunt. The woman who ‘hates a fool’, a divisive
statement which would exclude Plornish from her consideration, has the
sense that she is being practised upon; similarly, Miss Wade recognizes
that the only way to survive in ‘Society’ (1.20: 258) is to be ‘a fool’; it
is her misfortune to be different, and not to be different. Dickens links
the two digressive figures, and by doing so both brings into question
what is meant by ‘the main story’ and makes the text give more weight
to the presence of the woman. Of course the woman who thinks she is
not a fool may be the more so in that she is deceiving herself, but in
Miss Wade’s thinking and disclosures, the digressive text becomes the
46 Jeremy Tambling
unconscious of the ‘main story’.11 The idea of digression is eliminated

when the main narrative is subtended by another which lifts the repres-
sion inherent within it, that which makes it narratable; to consider Miss
Wade’s story as digressive, even exaggerative, could suggest a fear that it
yields too many discomforts, and supplements the main text in the same

way that Adorno says that ‘in psychoanalysis, nothing is true except the
exaggerations’ (1978: 49). The remark tips Little Dorrit towards being
seen as a psychoanalysis of ‘Society’; and the logic of psychoanalysis
knows neither ‘digression’, nor single plot, nor single subject.
Miss Wade’s story is not circumlocutory, but its cryptic nature may
impose the limitation that she assumes too readily what ‘the truth’ is
that she discerns. She ends with how Henry Gowan abandoned her;
since he is connected to the Barnacles, to her sexual anger must be
added what she also perceives, that is, the power of snobbery which
has also marginalized her as an ‘orphan’ with whatever euphemisms
lie behind that. Her single-minded obsessiveness, which is of the
prison, applies the point only to herself, however, that she has been
patronized, said to have an ‘unhappy temper’ (2.21: 695). The snob-
bery which keeps the Circumlocution Office in business is also within
the Marshalsea, which exists as a parody of the class-system which it
embodies; and when the Dorrit party arrive in Venice, Amy reflects that
‘this same society in which they lived, greatly resembled a superior sort
of Marshalsea’ (2.7: 536). And so in Rome, ‘everything seemed to be
trying to stand still for ever on the ruins of something else – except the
water, which, following eternal laws, tumbled and rolled from its glori-
ous multitude of fountains’ (2.7: 536). The ‘restlessness’ which is the
concomitant of Dickens’s writing – which nonetheless also tumbles and
rolls and is multitudinous – attends the knowledge that digression is the
only progression; there can be no single truth to be found in circum-
locution. In the novel, such restlessness moves the Dorrit family on, as
it moves on all tourists, and it is generated from the oppressive snob-
bery of Mrs General, which they have bankrolled, and her guide-book.
Amy, however, knows that one situation unfolds itself in another, or is
folded in another. Seeing ‘the ruins of old Rome’ she sees London and
the Marshalsea: this urban landscape becomes the unconscious ghost-
ing her vision (2.15: 639). Yet no single character in Little Dorrit can
trace each event’s every connection, and Dickens’s ‘restlessness’ suggests
that this point applies to writing the text also; that it cannot know its
beginning; which suggests the defeat of memory, which looks back, and
forward, to ruins, nor the fearful extent of the abyssal ‘beyond’ which
awaits in the present and future.
Notes
1. The same volume contains Lionel Trilling’s 1953 essay on Little Dorrit. For
comments on Lewes, see Ford (1955: 149–54); for Hippolyte Taine, see
Collins (1971: 337–42); for contemporary nearly universal negative reviews
of Little Dorrit, see also Collins (1971: 356–401). Collins’s Dickens quotes

George Eliot on Dickens (Westminster Review, in 1856), which includes refer-
ence to Little Dorrit (1971: 343).
2. See Grunhut (1948: 491–511).
3. Quotations are from the Wall and Small edition (2003; volume, chapter and
page numbers). See also Sucksmith’s Introduction (1979) to Little Dorrit for
the novel’s inception, and Dickens’s ‘restlessness’, discussed throughout,
Butt and Tillotson (1957) for the changes that took the novel from being
called ‘Nobody’s Fault’ to Little Dorrit, and Philpotts (2003).
4. I discuss China’s relevance for Little Dorrit in Tambling (2004: 28–43 and
104–13).
5. For this passage, see Meckier (1967: 51–62).
6. On digression as that which London imposes, see Tambling (2008); for
Dickens and digression with relation to Oliver Twist, see Tambling (1996:
43–53).
7. See Trilling’s Introduction in Dickens (1953).
8. I discuss this, and George Eliot’s response to Fielding’s digressions, in
Tambling (1990: 939–60).
9. See Sucksmith’s Introduction (in Dickens 1979: xxxvi–xxxvii) and chapter
8.1 in Forster (1928).
10. See MacCabe (1979: 14).
11. For psychoanalytic material in the novel, see Trilling in Dickens (1953) and
Bergler (1957: 371–88); see also earlier work on Little Dorrit and Miss Wade
in Tambling (1995: 98–128).
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor. 1978. Minima Moralia, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London:
Verso)
Bergler, Edmund. 1957. ‘Little Dorrit and Dickens’ Intuitive Knowledge of Psychic
Masochism’, American Imago, 14: 371–88
Butt, John and Kathleen Tillotson. 1957. Dickens at Work (London: Methuen)
Collins, Philip. 1971. Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul)
Dickens, Charles. 1953. Little Dorrit (Oxford University Press)
—— 1979. Little Dorrit, ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
—— 1999. Nicholas Nickleby, ed. Mark Ford (Harmondsworth: Penguin)
—— 2003. Little Dorrit, ed. Stephen Wall and Helen Small (Harmondsworth:
Penguin)
Ford, George H. 1955. Dickens and his Readers: Aspects of Novel-Criticism since 1836
Ford, George H. and Lauriat Lane. 1961. The Dickens Critics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press)
48 Jeremy Tambling
Forster, John. 1928. The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T. Ley (1872–74; reprint
London: Cecil Palmer)
Grunhut, Morris. 1948. ‘Lewes as a Critic of the Novel’, Studies in Philology, 45:
491–511
Leavis, F. R. and Q. D. Leavis. 1970. Dickens the Novelist (London: Chatto and
Windus)

MacCabe, Colin. 1979. James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London:
Macmillan)
Meckier, Jerome. 1967. ‘Sundry Curious Variations on the Same Tune’, Dickens
Studies, 3: 51–62
Philpotts, Trey. 2003. Companion to Little Dorrit (London: Croom Helm)
Tambling, Jeremy. 1990. ‘Middlemarch, Realism and the Birth of the Clinic’,
English Literary History, 939–60
—— 1995. Dickens, Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold (London:
Macmillan)
—— 1996. ‘Dangerous Crossings: Dickens, Digression and Montage’, Strategies of
Reading: Dickens and After, Yearbook of English Studies, 29: 43–53
—— 2004. ‘Opium, Wholesale, Resale, and for Export: Dickens and China’,
Dickens Quarterly, 21: 28–43, 104–13
—— 2008. Going Astray: Dickens and London (London: Longman)
4
Concerning Metaphor, Digression
and Rhyme (Fetish Aesthetics and

the Walking Poem)
Ross Chambers
Ça a l’air de rimer. (Apollinaire, ‘Lundi rue Christine’)
In culture, defined as it is by the incest taboo, desire inevitably becomes

a mediated phenomenon, as René Girard so ably and amply dem-
onstrated.1 That is, it becomes a figural formation. It requires an act
of displacement (away from the forbidden primal object) and, simul-
taneously, a certain acquiescence in an act of substitution whereby the
alternative object of desire acquires a fragile equivalence, despite its dif-
ference, in relation to the inaccessible ‘ideal’, producing an illusion of
their identity – a quasi-identity, if you will. Which is to say that desire,
as it exists in culture, is necessarily fetishistic in character, but also that
a fetish is a figure that combines the effects of digression with those of
metaphor. It is also to say that fetish is not a perversion but a norm.
My interest, then, is in the way the fetishizing aesthetics of modernity
mobilizes this joint dynamics of desire – its dependence on a certain
solidarity of digressive displacement and metaphoric equivalence – in
the interest of creating an aura of beauty that owes its power to forms
of mediation not at all dissimilar from those at work in religious, sexual
or commodity fetishism. I have written elsewhere about fetish aesthe-
tics; here it is the confluence of digressive displacement and metaphoric
substitution in the production of poetic form that I will try to demon-
strate.2 For a metaphor, as its Greek name indicates, operates a kind of
displacement, albeit one that elides the mediation that makes it possible,
so that similarity is foregrounded over difference and an effect of ‘trans-
port’ (metaphor’s Latin twin) or rapture is produced by the perception
of an unexpected equivalence, the unlooked-for mutual substitutability
of two terms. Conversely, digression’s ‘stepping away’ (the sense of its
Latin name) foregrounds its mediatory function in the production of
49
50 Ross Chambers
difference. But as such, digression elides the perception of equivalence

that is inevitably entailed (vide Derrida) in the perception of difference,
in the way that metaphor elides the difference entailed in the produc-
tion of similarity. So metaphor is a kind of (accelerated) digression,
and digression something like a (deferred or stretched-out) metaphor.

Displacement implies substitution and substitution displacement.
In what follows, it is the walking poem’s enactment of this figural
dynamics of desire that I will try to trace. How does this genre perform
the solidarity of metaphor and digression in the production of a form of
aesthetic beauty and pleasure? I will propose an amble through readings
of a few examples of the urban walking poem, attending in particular
to the concurrence it seems regularly to construct – not unlike the
interdependence of melody and harmony in music – between a certain
reliance on chance, whose figure is digressivity, and an affirmation of
necessity, of which metaphor is the model. The digressive linearity of
an apparently aimless stroll, indicative of an attitude of disponibilité
towards happenstance, resolves into a moment of unexpected epiphany
that makes manifest the harmony of metaphor. So, it is as if the reward
of a certain abandonment to diversion, diversity and dispersal can be
the revelation of an order, pattern or meaning inherent in the disorder
and noise of chance – but a revelation that, crucially, is itself condi-
tioned by randomness and unpredictability. The harmonious moment
is less a prize to be expected than it is a grace awarded as a consequence
of the commitment to digressivity I call disponibilité.
And remarkably, a quite similar pattern emerges in the evolution of
the genre itself, which appears governed in turn by a dynamics of drift
or displacement and equivalence or substitution, as walking poems
differentiate and disperse, but in doing so end up ‘rhyming’ with one
another. For, as we will see shortly, it is Baudelaire’s insight into what he
terms the chanciness of rhyme that seems most aptly to characterize the
mutual dependency, the confluence of the epiphanic coincidence and
the loiterly stroll – that is, of metaphor and digression – as if the same
joint dynamics that describes the workings of desire was, not coinci-
dentally, at work in the life of culture.
So, although I do not propose to do a formal history of the urban walk-
ing poem – one would have to go back at least as far as Juvenal, whose third
satire concludes as an account of the perils of walking in Rome by night – it
is at least worth pausing a moment or drifting a bit from my main pur-
pose, to notice that the modern walking poem has its roots in the era that
turned, as it were simultaneously, to the rapture of the sublime, but also,
as English- and French-speakers tend to forget, to the ironies of what
Concerning Metaphor, Digression and Rhyme 51
Friedrich Schlegel called permanent parekbasis, the endless digressivity of

Romantic irony. These roots lie, of course, in the craze for nature-walking
that took literary inspiration from the Rousseau of the Rêveries du prome-
neur solitaire and the Confessions, and soon thereafter from the poetry of
Wordsworth and his contemporaries and imitators. But they lie too in the

shift of the walking-craze from country to city that began in France with
writers like Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Rétif de la Bretonne and quickly
developed into the phenomenon, part-literary and part-journalistic, of
flâneur writing, a prose genre that Baudelaire eventually adapted into verse.
All of which matters to my present topic because the country-to-city shift
of the walking poem parallels the shift from an aesthetics of sublimity and
natural supernaturalism to an aesthetics of artificial supernaturalism and
fetish, a shift that is interpretable, therefore, as an effect of the new, ration-
alizing, capitalist and industrial culture that, in France, followed the era of
revolution and Napoleonic imperialism and resulted in the rapid growth
of cities. (When I say shift, of course, I mean to imply a historical digres-
sion, more a matter of process and drift than of the kind of change that is
perceived as an event, but productive of the kind of rhyme Baudelaire had
in mind when he spoke of flânerie as herborizing on asphalt.)
Rhyme (‘Le soleil’)
How to capture the atmosphere of the city? Such is Baudelaire’s ques-

tion. Atmosphere, for him, is a privileged word: it refers, of course, to
the air we breathe but cannot see, but by extension therefore to all the
unnoticed phenomena of the city to which only poets are attentive: the
noise of traffic, the electric energy that develops in a crowd, the ‘secret
presence’ (Walter Benjamin) of poverty and the poor, like the street
people (beggars, prostitutes, entertainers) in whose eyes a mute message
is to be read. But atmosphere also describes the aura that arises in the
fetish object from the exchange of qualities that brings the inaccessible
into the domain of the accessible, and in the poem from its form, the
crucial component of beauty in an aesthetics of fetish.
At the outset of the ‘Parisian Pictures’ section of the 1861 Fleurs du mal,
two poems, ‘Paysage’ and ‘Le soleil’, are strikingly juxtaposed, and the
juxtaposition strongly suggests that, in order to grasp the atmosphere of
the city, a panoramic approach is wrong-headed.3 The wide view of the
city from the poet’s high window leaves him enclosed in the ‘chaude
atmosphère’ of a protected ‘chez soi’ in which the city spectacle can safely
be transformed, by imagination and dream, into a pastoral ‘landscape’, as
the poem’s ‘I’ clings to what he calls ‘mes églogues’. The ‘chez soi’, in other
52 Ross Chambers
words, is that of a self-sufficient subjectivity, the Sartrian en-soi. The alter-

native, addressed in ‘Le soleil’, is to take a partial, or sampling, because
close-up approach, sallying forth into the ‘vieux faubourg’ or proletarian
street. It is as if the street can do duty for the city as a whole, pars pro toto,
in whose atmosphere it shares. For there is another kind of ‘warm atmos-

phere’ out-of-doors; this atmosphere is supplied by the sunshine that is
everywhere at work, equalizing city and country but also the humble and
the rich, the powerless and the powerful, and thus, by implication, the
‘faubourg’ and the ‘ville’; ennobling in this way the ‘basest things’, as if
by the action of a fetishizing metaphor. The sun, in short, is the model for
the poet’s pursuit of beauty. For a rhyme such as ‘valets’/’palais’, which is
strategically situated at the poem’s conclusion, likewise creates a metaphor
of sorts, ennobling what is base, generating an atmosphere.
But there is a problem. For it is obvious that rhyme does not work as well
as the sun in this respect. Rhyme is chancy, hit-or-miss; and this chanciness
(‘les hasards de la rime’) means that many rhymes in the poem, although
they bring together words that make strikingly unlikely partners (‘béquilles’
and ‘jeunes filles’, ‘chloroses’ and ‘roses’), do not necessarily ennoble the
base, or do so only feebly, even though they constitute a kind of metaphor.
But then their metaphoricity is dubious also, because it depends on the
connecting role that is played in verse by the element of extension and
intermediacy that is the line. Unless it is just a filler (or ‘cheville’), the line’s
basic task is to construct a context of semantic betweenness – to work a
modulation – that naturalizes, or renders plausible, the juxtaposition at
line’s end of the unlikely rhyming partners that otherwise have only the
accident of phonetic resemblance in common. Which makes rhyme not
the miracle of simultaneity a metaphor purports to be, but rather the out-
come of a kind of digression, one that entangles it in extension, occupancy
of a certain amount of time and space; and thus more a matter of explo-
ration than of rapture. And the true motivation of the poet, then, is not
simply to find a rhyme that works the magic of fetish, but also to stumble
onto the ideal coincidence of a perfect rhyme and a perfect verse. That is
why, in the concluding distych of the first strophe of ‘Le soleil’, and as if to
balance or correct the clumsy metrical stumble of 11.1–2, the words ‘mots’
and ‘vers’ are made to ‘rhyme positionally’, at the caesura:
Stumbling over words as over paving stones

Sometimes bumping into lines long dreamt of.
(It is as if the ‘words’ that make metaphor were being declared equiva-
lent to paving stones, while it is the ‘lines’ of verse corresponding to
digression that equate to the transforming dream implied by ‘rêvés’.)
Nevertheless stumbling and knocking into things is a large part of

what a poet does, as the presence of the words ‘trébuchant’ and ‘heur-
tant’ at the head of these lines implies (they rhyme too, in the same
positional sense that ‘mots’ and ‘vers’ rhyme). That is why the poet’s
gait, as he makes his clumsy way ‘le long du vieux faubourg’ (travers-

ing the extent of the street), is described as a ‘fantasque escrime’ – a
loony fencing around – by contrast with the precision and efficacity,
the impartiality also, of the ‘cruel’ sun which ‘frappe à traits redou-
blés’ – strikes doubly – by means of its equalizing rays. These two mar-
tial metaphors do suggest a degree of nobility on the poet’s part as well
as on the sun’s; but they also point to his subjection to accident and
chance, the randomness of intermediacy, in humiliating contrast with
the sun’s immediate and universal access to town and country, poor-
houses and palaces. Metaphor is the example the sun sets; in response
the poet can offer only digressiveness. He has renounced the solar or
panoramic view by becoming a walker, an explorer of intermediacy;
and dependent as he is, therefore, on chance, his resources consist
only, on the one hand, of a certain outgoingness or disponibilité, a
willingness to explore (‘Flairant dans tous les coins [...]’) and, on the
other, of reliance on happy accident (‘Trébuchant [...]’; ‘Heurtant [...]’;
‘les hasards de la rime’), which is ultimately, of course, another aspect
of disponibilité.
In short, his relation to the beyond is dependent on the chanciness
of an epiphany; and if epiphany is the revelation of a rhyme as a meta-
phoric event or experience together with the long dreamed-of line that
makes it ‘work’, it occurs only as the outcome of a willingness to explore
the world of extension, striking out in all directions and at random –
a willingness, that is, to digress. Wandering cannot guarantee wonder-
ment, but it is wonderment’s necessary precondition – and meanwhile,
I would add, it has pleasures of its own. That makes fetish aesthetics,
subsumed by the rhyme as metaphoric rapture, a ‘noisy’ phenomenon
that is itself subject, therefore, to drift. For it presupposes a certain comp-
licity in the poem’s reception, and with that requirement of complicity
the possibility of ironic distancing. Thus the genre of the walking poem
becomes, itself, a poem that wanders.
Complicity (‘The Day Lady Died’)
Midday, midsummer, mid-year in mid-town Manhattan: we are in

medias res. The lunchtime stroll ‘up the muggy street beginning to sun’
is under way already.4 Frank has a dinner invitation on Long Island in
the evening; but for now it is preparatory errands that are on his mind.
54 Ross Chambers
He needs to get a shoeshine, not knowing ‘the people who will feed me’,
and gifts for Mike and Patsy. He does not say so, but Mike Goldberg,
a painter, and his wife Patsy Southgate are the friends who will intro-
duce him to his hosts. With them, he is in the middle of a complex
relation of swerving desires, a textbook illustration of Girardian tri-

angularity. Patsy is Mike’s wife, as I said; but it was as Frank’s friend
that she had been initially drawn to her husband (Frank presumably
being sexually unavailable to her as a gay man); while Frank’s infatu-
ation with Mike, similarly unavailable as a sexual partner, then led to
his being attracted, ironically enough, to Patsy ... Like the ‘personist’
poem he once described in a mock manifesto as ‘Lucky Pierre’ – the
poem inserted between two persons and doubly gratified as a conse-
quence – Frank O’Hara is in the middle of this three-way of digressive
desires; and the poem we are reading, itself so pointedly situated as an
account of intermediacy, is his gift to the friends from whom his own
intermediacy’s double gratification is derived.5 Or so one can surmise;
again he feels no need to say so.
When ‘The Day Lady Died’ begins, then, he is already launched on
a wandering walk along and around a section of Sixth Avenue. In the
course of it he stops for ‘a hamburger and a malted’, checks ‘an ugly
NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets/in Ghana are doing
these days’, pops into the bank for cash, then quandarizes at length in
a bookshop over the right gift for Patsy, before moving off the avenue
to ‘stroll into the PARK LANE/Liquor store’ for Mike’s gift of Strega
(no hesitation there), then back to the avenue and a tobacconist’s for
‘a carton of Gauloises and a carton/of Picayunes’ (these also doubtless
intended as gifts for everyone at the evening’s dinner). Frank has a
‘things to do’ list in his head – lunch, bank, gifts, shoeshine – but the
list allows for a good deal of pleasant meandering, and even some indul-
gence in ‘quandariness’, in anticipation of an also pleasant evening. But
suddenly a new and unforeseen digression occurs as a consequence, and
the shoeshine forgotten, the poem that began in intermediacy and the
enjoyment thereof ends, with an abrupt change of mood, in a moment
of aesthetic and emotional epiphany – a gratification of a new and
unexpected order.
For the casual mood of disponibilité is displaced, now, at the sight of a
face glimpsed on a newspaper, by a flood of grief and an experience of
memory that entails a sense of intense immediacy, of rapture:
[I] casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with
her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
Tiny details matter a lot here: the dropped line-end, the speaker’s inabi-
lity to pronounce the name represented only by ‘her’ and ‘she’, even
the unusual and isolated comma marking a significant pause following
the word ‘Picayunes’, in a poem that relies heavily on the conjunctive
smoothness of ‘and’ to make its transitions. All these are devices that
recruit our readerly complicity, a complicity that borders on partici-
pation, in the breathtaking event that is the news of Billie Holiday’s
death.
That is, and to say it technically, this last digression has stumbled
upon a rhyme, a wonderful, epiphanic rhyme, of the kind Baudelaire
knew to be rare. The rhyme, indeed is double. There is first the simul-
taneity of a moment in the present and a moment from the past that is
produced by the experience Proust called involuntary memory. Present
continuous verbs (‘I am sweating’, and ‘and thinking’) coincide here
with past tenses (‘she whispered’, ‘I stopped breathing’), the transition
between them being mediated by a gerundive (‘leaning’) and the con-
junction ‘while’. But this rhyme – call it the rhyme of memory – has at
its heart (like Proust’s memory of Combray) an experience of extension
and intermediacy, a kind of walk: ‘while she whispered a song along
the keyboard/to Mal Waldron and everyone’. And as a consequence the
phrase concerning her song itself rhymes, therefore, with the ramble
along the avenue that occupies the greater part of the poem, musical-
izing and aestheticizing the walk, as it were, and retrospectively enno-
bling it, Baudelaire-fashion, as by a metaphor. This is the second rhyme,
in which the walk is redeemed, then – given depth and significance – by
Lady’s remembered song, whose loose structure it shares, while her
offering of the song ‘to Mal Waldron and everyone’ specifies what is
only implicit in the poem, that it too has the aesthetic character of a
gift, one that is both presented in personal circumstances (that is, to
Mike and Patsy), and simultaneously offered to all. Call this the rhyme
of art.
But how exactly does a ‘whispered’ song reach ‘everyone’? It sounds
contradictory. Of course, Lady’s voice, at the end of her life, was
breathy as she gasped for air, her singing reduced to a series of brief
56 Ross Chambers
phrases linked, as if by the poem’s ‘ands’, by quick intakes of breath.

Its persistence, the heroism of its ‘ongoingness’, was part, then, of what
made it compelling. But also the remembered song’s sotto voce quality
offers insight into the sparseness of O’Hara’s own diction, its unpreten-
tious reliance on everyday words and casually colloquial syntax, its

understated simplicity. For to whisper is to engage the hearer’s most
concentrated attention; and the trope of litotes, or understatement,
the sotto voce that results from a deliberate thinning of the resources
of language to their indispensable essence, has a similar effect. It too
works a kind of enticement, an entrapment and an entrancement. It is
a device, that is, to maximize readerly involvement and complicity. We
might remember in this connection that Holiday, that evening at the
Five Spot, was whispering her song along the keyboard in contraven-
tion of a court order barring her from giving public performances, and
taking advantage therefore of the relative intimacy of a jazz-club that
was frequented very largely by fellow-spirits: painters, poets, musicians.
Outside lay the puritanical America of the 1950s, in which phenomena
like the New York School or the West Coast ‘Beat’ generation were rare,
self-conscious and barely tolerated anomalies. Such would be the kind
of complicity that the song, and the poem, presuppose.
But now let us return to the Mike-Patsy-and-Frank trio and the pat-
tern of complicities that made it work. If we see it, as probably O’Hara
did, as a kind of microcosm of the movement of poets and painters
that was the School, the sense in which this poem understands there to
be a kind of equivalence between the figure of Patsy, in the threesome,
and that of Billie Holiday in relation to the School, becomes patent.
Patsy disappears from the poem after her gift is finally bought, only to
reappear, in the form of that spectral ‘her face’, on the front page of the
New York Post, in the way that Holiday’s Five Spot performance, forgot-
ten although it had so entranced Frank that he ‘stopped breathing’,
suddenly resurfaces now and causes him to break into a sweat. So Patsy’s
role in relation to Mike the straight painter and Frank the gay poet is
equivalent to the role played, in relation to the group of mostly male
painters and poets, some gay some straight, that was the School, by jazz
music, perhaps specifically blues, and its particular embodiment, Lady.
It is the role of mediation in each case, the role of the Muse.
And now the gift of Verlaine ‘with drawings by Bonnard’ falls into
place, not only because it combines poetry and pictorial art, but also
because Verlaine’s bisexuality, which leaned strongly towards homo-
sexuality, and his pioneering invention of a new kind of poetic dic-
tion, the casual, apparently formless and meandering, low-pitched or
‘whispering’ style he summarized as ‘De la musique avant toute chose’,

make the French poet the New York poet’s alter ego, as Lady is the alter ego
of Patsy Southgate.6 And Patsy thus becomes something like the Muse
of a poetry of whispered music: a complicitous voice drifting along a
keyboard.

Complicity, then, complicity ‘avant toute chose’. To breathe the muggy
air ‘beginning to sun’ of Sixth Avenue in July 1959, or the doubtless foul
air of the Five Spot some weeks earlier, was to be engaged, as Baudelaire
might have put it, in an intense ‘atmosphere’ of complicity. And in the
way that Lady sings complicitously to Mal Waldron and on to everyone,
so a poem like ‘The Day Lady Died’, which in the first instance expects
the complicitous reading of Patsy and Mike, also depends, if it is to
‘work’, on finding a complicitous readership. And ultimately, then, it is
the walking poem’s adherence to an aesthetics of fetish – with the com-
plex negotiations that fetish implies between digression and a thematics
of intermediacy on the one hand, and on the other metaphor and its
attendant poetics of rapture – that enforces its dependency on readerly
complicity. Not only the complicity of the sous-entendu, available for
instance to Patsy and Mike, but also that of the willing suspension of
disbelief, or the ‘I know perfectly well ... but nevertheless’, the generic
complicity in which ‘everyone’ may participate. For if the mobility of
desire that I call disponibilité is indispensable to the genesis of a fetish,
complicitous reading is essential to its reception. The poem cruises
(along) the street, then, whispering to its potential readers, as Lady
whispered her song to Mal Waldron (her accompanist) and everyone.
That it shares something in this respect with the (largely) gay male
genre of social interaction called cruising – a similarly pedestrian prac-
tice – is surely the point of the oddly insistent, six-line episode of deli-
cious ‘quandarizing’ in the bookshop over a gift ‘for Patsy’. Cruising is
surely the exemplary genre that mobilizes disponibilité and the mobility
of desire, on the one hand, and complicity on the other. Cruising the
shelves, in view of gift-giving as a symbolic three-way with Patsy, Frank
goes first for Verlaine/Bonnard, then contemplates ‘Hesiod, trans.
Richard Lattimore’ a moment (a potential four-way?), moves on to
Brendan Behan and Genet, then finally back to Verlaine ‘after practi-
cally going to sleep with quandariness’. The poem is laying bare its
device here, embedding its code (as we would have once said). It wants
to lull our senses with its diversity and variability, to put us off guard, to
send us practically to sleep with quandariness, so that we can complici-
tously follow our own desire, the critical faculty in abeyance; it wants
to be cruised as it cruises us.
58 Ross Chambers
But the episode also reveals, albeit inadvertently, that the actual
condition of our complicitous adherence is ultimately generic. Were I
attuned to other genres but not to this one – if I were not part of the
culture of the walking poem and it of mine – the very question of my
going along so willingly with its devices and contrivances would simply

not arise. But instead, I suspend my disbelief and go with the poem’s
flow, because that is the condition of enjoyment of a walking poem,
which I have learned to know as the site of an interaction of poetic
disponibilité and readerly complicity, a conjunction that makes for a
blissful textual encounter.
Irony (‘Afternoon Papers’)
But if complicity is a function of genre, it follows that the withholding

of one’s complicity must similarly be governed generically. I cannot
withhold a complicity whose tug I have not to some degree experi-
enced as possible. Generic change arises, of course, as an inevitable
consequence of the noise that inheres in any shared channel of com-
municative interaction. But if genres change because they can, people
historically situated at a distance from the source of generic influence
to which they are nevertheless subject – colonial and former colonial
subjects, for example – are especially well placed to experience the form
of ambivalence, of uncomfortable or reluctant complicity that consists
of recognizing the conventionality of certain generic presuppositions
while simultaneously undergoing their coercive power. And thus, for
example, a poem by the Sydney poet John Forbes, ‘Afternoon Papers’,
offers itself, not at all as a refutation of the walking poem and its fet-
ishizing aesthetics, but nevertheless as a site of ironic resistance to that
aesthetic and the conventions on which it rests.7 And it does so most
specifically by making pointed reference – in its title, its reference to a
‘picture of a girl’ in an afternoon paper, its remark that
No one starts crying in Martin Place

although a few are asleep –
to ‘The Day Lady Died’.8 For this, at first glance, is a thoroughly digres-
sive walking poem, but one without an actual walk (in the sense implied
by Baudelaire’s ‘Le long du vieux faubourg [...]’ or O’Hara’s ‘up the
muggy street [...]’ and ‘along the keyboard [...]’). And equally it appears
to lack the culminating digression into rapture that I have been calling
epiphany. There is apparently no rhyme.
And yet this poem is strangely faithful to the tradition in the very
means of its resistance, for it marshals an atmospherics of Sydney – the
Sydney of the booming 1980s – as if by way of a deflationary response
to the electric atmosphere of Baudelaire’s 1850s Paris, at the threshold of
a certain modernity, and the excitement of post-World War II New York,

in the era when it was wresting leadership of the art world from Paris,
a capital of the twentieth century displacing the capital of the nine-
teenth. By contrast, the myth of Sydney to which ‘Afternoon Papers’
subscribes attributes to the city a certain double-sided and apparently
contradictory but comfortable materialism, that of a city prosperous
and hard-working, not to say money-grubbing, but also hedonistic and
lazy, sun- and beach-loving, a city intensely drama-shy, suspicious of
epiphany and inclined to cultivate, instead, the values of ordinariness
and happy mediocrity, and so anti-aesthetic even as it deploys a certain
elegance and glamour in the interest of attracting tourism dollars. It
is allowable in Sydney to acknowledge the natural beauty of the city’s
extraordinary site, and even to deplore its desecration by a history of
haphazard urbanization – but only so long as one takes care not to be
seen to rise above the level of the crowd by displaying undue sensitivity,
insight, discrimination, or even wealth.
So ‘Afternoon Papers’ responds to poems like ‘Le soleil’ and ‘The Day
Lady Died’ with a kind of ‘yes, but not here’ that is implicit in the con-
tented bathos of its conclusion:
But with even a hint of sunshine

or the picture of a girl suggesting the beach,
a market survey’s worth of city workers
eat their lunchtime sandwiches in peace.
But it is simultaneously haunted, in the way this quatrain is haunted by

a near-rhyme, by what it appears to decry; and inhabited, therefore, by
both the ghost of a walk and a phantom of epiphany – something like
a return of the repressed (‘phantom’ and ‘epiphany’ being in any case
etymological kin). I mean that, a poem of near-absolute disponibilité, it
seems able to move freely and unpredictably among a number of sites
that Sydneysiders recognize as lying within no more than a square kilo-
metre of one another at the city’s centre: the harbourside, nearby office
buildings, Martin Place, then the Opera House and back to Martin Place
again (the probable site of those folkdancing displays of lines 16–17),
‘restaurants revolving overhead’ and thence to the Archibald Fountain,
a Victorian folly in, yes, Hyde Park (for London is also on the list of
60 Ross Chambers
metropolitan cities the poem ‘remembers’). Losing any trace of linearity

in order to become directionless, the walk exists, but in the form of that
essence of poetic walking that is digressivity. And as for epiphany – the
possibility of rhyme, metaphor, rapture arising, as we have seen, as
one implication of digressiveness – the very idea seems rejected out of

hand – or at least segregated or quarantined – in the dismissive com-
ment about ‘prima donnas not worth their keep/throw[ing] fits at the
Opera House’. But if it is belied too by that final line extolling the placid
scene of workers munching ‘in peace’ on lunchtime sandwiches as they
dream of the ‘beach’, a slightly closer look at the rather careful struc-
tural organization that underlies the poem’s surface drift shows that
rhyme is far from absent.
For it is in three parts, corresponding to the long first sentence and
relatively short final sentence, which are connected by two central sen-
tences whose topic is grief and whose double function is to reference
‘The Day Lady Died’ and to wander the city of Sydney. As they do so,
they traverse a space of reflective intermediacy that links, in a kind of
rhyme, the indoors busyness of city workers, described in the first sen-
tence, with the solace of outdoors leisure, sandwich-eating and dream-
ing of the beach, described in the final sentence. The two components
of Sydney’s characteristic atmosphere, the city’s myth, are thus brought
into relation: the city’s passionate attachment to commerce, the mak-
ing of money, and its equally passionate fondness for leisure, of which
beach-going is a standard metaphor, are made to rhyme semantically as
indoors and outdoors, working hours and lunchtime respectively, the
latter redeeming the former like Baudelairian sunshine ennobling what
is base. But the poem also suggests that what is common to them is
an undemonstrative or ‘private’ grief, a muted grief both like and very
unlike the dramatic displays to be seen at the Opera House, or in poems
like ‘The Day Lady Died’. A grief that is in the same relation to the prima
donnas’ fits at the Opera House as the ghost of the walk and the phan-
tom epiphany to its discreet rhyming structure. It is all very Sydney
in its muting of the overtly aesthetic – a sign of ambivalence arising
from simultaneous fascination and disabusement, a kind of suspicious
enthralment to the generic models of beauty understood, in the words
of another Forbes poem (‘Watching the Treasurer’), as ‘beautiful lies’.
So I think of these inner connective sentences of the poem’s own
rhyming lunchtime sandwich as a pseudo-Wordsworthian moment of
reflective wandering. Lonely as a cloud, given the ‘million’ kept ‘off
the street’ by their employment, the poet strolls the city, observing the
absence of overt signs of grief and regretting the absence of transcendent
assuagement of private grief like that once provided by the Olympian

gods, now superseded as providers of a panoramic vision of the city by
revolving restaurants atop tall buildings. But the rhyming initial and
final sentences also make a rather more direct comment than this on the
aesthetics of the fetish – that is, of rhyme – in its relation as an ‘artificial

supernaturalism’ both to the sublimity of ‘natural supernaturalism’ and
to the lost transcendence of the sacred that shadows the sublime. For
their rhyming of Sydney commercialism and Sydney hedonism suggests
a rhyming of nature and culture, in which ‘even a hint of sunshine/or
the picture of a girl suggesting a beach’ produces the idyllic spectacle
of ‘a market survey’s worth of city workers’ enjoying the outdoors ‘in
peace’, among the city’s tall towers. For, as we know, the accommoda-
tion of nature to culture is what defines desire under the cultural regime
of incest taboo and makes it fetishistic in character, the desired object
being a culturally acceptable substitute for the natural, incestuous object
that has become unavailable, and thus a product of the figurality of
metaphor and digression: a matter of rhyming.
So it matters that ‘Afternoon Papers’ opens on a metaphor of fit,
where ‘fit’ refers both to what is fitting and to what is well combined.
The opening words: ‘The city fits the Harbour’, which rhyme water and
land as the natural and the artificial, then develop as a simile, indeed a
double simile, of good tailoring (‘the way a new suit/fits a politician like
applause’), and the mention of applause resolves in turn into an anthro-
pomorphic refiguration of the harbour as ‘a drowned valley/[...] glad we
are here, moving/tons of paper around [...]’. If fetish is a matter of mak-
ing supposedly incompatible terms – the accessible and the inaccessible,
the lowly and the elevated, the immanent and the transcendent – into
differences that can be rhymed, or tailored to fit, then what we see in
these lines is the poet actively engaged in that work of making things
fit by means of figuration, and implicitly describing the work of poetry
as such an engagement: the fabrication of fetish as a matter of mise en
forme, mise en forme as the device that produces the epiphany of a rhyme.
Such an engagement, as we have now seen at some length, entails the
digressive elaboration of a metaphor that we see enacted in these very lines,
which start from the metaphor of the ‘fit’ of the harbour and city. So
the poem’s initial lines work like the line of verse, the ‘vers rêvé’ that, in
Baudelaire, is necessary to produce the wonderful ‘fit’ of a rhyme. But
they also echo the structure of the poem as a whole, which similarly
works a conjunction of workaday and lunchtime, beach-loving Sydney
by means of an intervening stretch of urban wandering. No wonderment
without a wandering, no fit without tailoring.
62 Ross Chambers
So we might notice how, in Forbes’s poem, the singular verb ‘fits’ of

the opening line (‘The city fits the Harbour’) fits with the plural noun
‘fits’ that describes the drama confined to the Opera House (‘prima
donnas [...]/throw fits at the Opera House’), doing so across the exten-
sion of 13 lines of verse. At a thematic level, this rhyming suggests

a reconciliation, ironic to be sure, between the fetishist aesthetics of
epiphany that Baudelaire associates with ‘les hasards de la rime’, and
the much more discreet, but still fetishizing, mode of making disparate
words fit that Forbes favours, something like the half-rhyming of ‘beach’
and ‘peace’ in the concluding quatrain that seems to encapsulate this
poet’s reserved complicity with and ironic participation in the aesthetics
of the walking poem. ‘Afternoon Papers’ is one more whispered phrase
along the keyboard of a genre-history that, in its modern incarnation,
has been the story of the aestheticization of the urban by a form of
artificial supernaturalism displacing the natural supernaturalism of the
sublime. An aestheticization that draws its energy and power from the
secret kinship of the metaphoric and the digressive as twin figures of
transformative transport, and as a consequence displays the dynamics of
genre as a matter of the metaphoric proximity and digressive distance –
the complicity and irony on the part of both writers and readers – that
makes one whispered phrase rhyme with another.
Notes
1. See Girard (1961).
2. On fetish aesthetics, see Chambers (2008a and 2008b).
3. ‘Paysage’ and ‘Le soleil’ are respectively poems LXXVI and LXXVII in Les
Fleurs du mal (Baudelaire 1975).
4. See O’Hara (1964: 25–6 and 1971: 325).
5. All information about the personal background of ‘The Day Lady Died’ is
drawn from Gooch (1994).
6. The Verlaine quotation is from ‘Art poétique’, in Jadis et naguère (Verlaine
1969: 261–2).
7. See Forbes (2004: 126).
8. The primary target of the Martin Place comment, however, is a poem by Les
Murray, ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’.
Bibliography
Baudelaire, Charles. 1975. Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Paris:
Pléiade), I, pp. 82–3
Chambers, Ross. 2008a. ‘Modern Beauty: Baudelaire, the Everyday, Cultural
Studies’, Romance Studies, 26.3: 249–70
—— 2008b. ‘On Inventing Unknownness: The Poetry of Disenchanted

Reenchantment (Leopardi, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Justice)’, French Forum,
33.1–2: 15–36
Forbes, John. 2004. Collected Poems, 1969–1999 (Blackheath, Australia: Brandl
and Schlesinger)
Girard, René. 1961. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset).

Translated as Deceit, Desire and the Novel by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1966)
Gooch, Brad. 1994. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York:
HarperCollins)
O’Hara, Frank. 1964. Lunch Poems (San Francisco: City Lights)
—— 1971. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (New York:
Knopf)
Verlaine, Paul. 1969. ‘Art poétique’, in Œuvres poétiques, ed. Jacques Robichez
(Paris: Garnier), pp. 261–2
5
Henry James, in Parenthesis1

Ian F. A. Bell
My cue is taken from Ezra Pound’s interview with Donald Hall for The
Paris Review in 1962:
I’ll tell you a thing that I think is an American form, and that is the
Jamesian parenthesis. You realize that the person you are talking to
hasn’t got the different steps, and you go back over them […] The
struggle that one has when one meets another man who has had a
lot of experience to find the point where the two experiences touch,
so that he really knows what you are talking about. (Quoted in Dick
1972: 95)
Pound, as one of the earliest and most astute sustained readers of James,2
has him as ‘weaving an endless sentence’ in Canto VII (1973: 24), and
James’s biographer, Leon Edel, makes the point more expansively in his
account of the novelist’s habit of dictating his later works, ‘filled with
qualifications and parentheses; he seemed often, in a letter, to begin
a sentence without knowing what its end would be, and he allowed
it to meander into surprising twists and turns’ (Edel 1977, 2: 231). To
meander, as we shall see, is an important form of digression, encourag-
ing a new voice ‘in his use of colloquialisms, and in a more extravagant
play of fancy, a greater indulgence in expanding metaphors, and great
proliferating similes’ (Edel 1977, 2: 231). Such expansions and prolifera-
tions at the behest of the meandering impulse belong to the ‘endless
sentence’ of James’s final two decades. Here, we are, of course, firmly in
the territory of the archetypical digressive text – Tristram Shandy:
When a man is telling a story in the strange way I do mine, he is

obliged continually to be going backwards and forwards to keep all
64
Henry James, in Parenthesis 65
tight together in the reader’s fancy […] there is so much unfixed and
equivocal matter starting up, with so many breaks and gaps in it.
(Quoted in Iser 1988: 76)
Metaphors and similes, particularly in their extended versions, have

that degree of digression that permits figurative language to be simul-
taneously parallel to the main text and providing a vivid (always a
crucial term in the Jamesian lexicon)3 alternative. James’s essay of 1888
on Robert Louis Stevenson chooses a metaphor from clothing to write
of the ‘direct observation’ by which ‘character’ is constituted:
He [Stevenson] makes his appearance in an amplitude of costume.

His costume is part of the character of which I just now spoke; it
never occurs to us to ask how he would look without it. Before all
things he is a writer with a style – a model with a complexity of curi-
ous and picturesque garments. It is by the cut of this rich and becom-
ing frippery – I use the term endearingly, as a painter might – that he
arrests the eye and solicits the brush […] he wears a dress and wears
it with courage, with a certain cock of the hat and tinkle of the supe-
rogatory sword. (James 1984a: 1232–3)
The metaphor permits an absolute integration of self and style (it is

harmonious to that extent) and performs such unity by a particular
knowingness about its own procedures whereby the digressive nature of
the metaphor digresses from itself: it is interrupted by a further figure
(‘he is curious of expression and regards the literary form not simply
as a code of signals, but as the key-board of a piano’) before returning
to the trope of clothing – ‘the dictionary stands for him as a wardrobe,
and a proposition as a button for his coat’ (James 1984a: 1232–3). And
James is prepared to be playful about his knowingness; writing of the
‘gallantry’ of Stevenson’s style ‘as if language were a pretty woman, and
a person who proposes to handle it had of necessity to be something of
a Don Juan’ (1984a: 1232–3). James is similarly playful about the self-
consciousness of figurative language in the 1905 essay on Balzac where
he considers Jane Austen’s ‘unconsciousness’:
as if, at the most, for difficulty, for embarrassment, she sometimes,

over her work-basket, her tapestry flowers, in the spare, cool draw-
ing-room of other days, fell a-musing, lapsed too metaphorically, as
one may say, into wool-gathering, and her dropped stitches, of these
pardonable, of these precious moments. (1984b: 118)
66 Ian F. A. Bell
Here, the joke resides not only in a technical foregrounding of meta-

phorical behaviour itself, but in the elaborate punctuation which can
veer towards the parenthetical and in an acknowledgement (‘as one
may say’) of the oral underpinnings of digression (to which I shall
return, but it is worth noting here that figurative language tends to

become more prominent in the ‘endless sentence’ of the later prose
where James was increasingly reliant on dictating his work).
More substantially, we might feel, James continues a version of the
metaphor in his Preface to Roderick Hudson where he considers the gen-
eral situation of the artist as presenting
the plain moral that a young embroiderer of the canvas of life soon
began to work in terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of that surface, of
the boundless number of its distinct perforations for the needle, and
of the tendency inherent in his many-coloured flowers and figures
to cover and consume as many as possible of the little holes. The
development of the flower, the figure, involved thus an immense
counting of holes and a careful selection among them. (1984b:
1041)
Embroidery and sewing are entirely appropriate for the ways in which
digressive metaphor ebbs and flows, weaving itself in and out of the
main narrative to illustrate not only one of digression’s principal fea-
tures but also an abiding tenet of James’s entire aesthetic – his sense of
art as relational, famously proclaimed in the same Preface:
Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite prob-

lem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own,
the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. (James
1984b: 1041)
His relational embroidery marks the mobility of both writing and read-
ing and its geometry is dedicated to appearance. Much earlier, in ‘The Art
of Fiction’ in 1884, a more elaborate equation for the tensile compact of
the factual and the factitious is offered. The ‘supreme virtue’ of a novel
caught in one of James’s more striking parentheses (striking because
of its potentially contradictory nature), the ‘air of reality (solidity of
specification)’ (James 1984a: 53).4 Here is the characteristic Jamesian
vocabulary of resistance to the seemingly given, whereby the writer pro-
duces ‘the illusion of life’, an art that ‘competes with life’ in which the
necessary ‘solidity’ is preserved through the taking of notes – ‘He cannot
possibly take too many, he cannot possibly take enough’ (James 1984a:
53).5 I shall return to this tension later (briefly rehearsed, it is between
the ‘Romance’ form in Hawthorne and the factual plenitude in Balzac),
but here the relational system of things is allied to their limitless-
ness – ‘Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms’, expressed

through a donatively engineered metaphor:
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an

immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken
threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching
every air-borne particle in its tissue. (James 1984a: 52)6
An ‘endless sentence’ indeed, and the resistance to closure in favour of

the more oblique possibilities offered by metaphoric digression makes a
return in the Preface to The American:
The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and

under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length,
in the more or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by
the rope we know where we are, and from the moment that cable
is cut we are at large and unrelated: we only swing apart from the
globe – though remaining as exhilarated, naturally, as we like, espe-
cially when all goes well. The art of the romancer is, ‘for the fun of
it’, insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him.
(James 1984b: 1064–5)
Again, there is a distinct playfulness here (his sense of the liberations

permitted by the digressive romance ‘for the fun of it’) as James delights
in the knowing artfulness of his text (‘There are drugs enough, clearly –
it is all a question of applying them with tact; in which case the way
things don’t happen may be artfully made to pass for the way things
do’) and in the ‘ingenuity’ of the ‘hocus-pocus’ by which Christopher
Newman’s ‘adventure’ is portrayed (James 1984b: 1064–5).
One of the most useful ways of approaching James’s meandering is
through William James’s The Principles of Psychology, in particular the
chapter on ‘The Stream of Thought’, where he complains of our ‘invete-
rate’ habit of ‘not attending to sensations as subjective facts, but of
simply using them as stepping-stones to pass over to the recognition of
the realities whose presence they reveal’ (James 1971: 48). Attending to
sensations as ‘facts’ which are ‘subjective’ (Henry’s version in ‘The Art
of Fiction’ is a ‘direct personal impression’ [James 1984a: 52]) and not
68 Ian F. A. Bell
merely as temporary solidities, is a matter not only of epistemology but

of language:
language works against our perception of the truth. We name our

thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if each knew its own thing

and nothing else. What each really knows is clearly the thing it is
named for, with dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought to
be named after all of them, but it never is. (James 1971: 54–5)
William James’s preference is for the ‘transitive’ aspects of thought and

word as opposed to their ‘substantive’ aspects, their ‘places of flight’
rather than ‘resting places’ (1971: 55–6), because it is in the former
that we find the relational nature of subjectivity. So caught up with the
‘substantive’ are words and thoughts that the ‘thousand other things’
become suppressed, and with a wonderful scepticism about ‘existing
language’, James claims: ‘We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if,
a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of
blue or a feeling of cold’ (1971: 57–8). His conjunctive lexicon resists the
empiricist ‘error’ of ‘supposing that where there is no name no entity
can exist where, consequently’
all dumb or anonymous psychic states have, owing to this error, been
coolly suppressed; or, if recognized at all, have been named after the
substantive perception they led to, as thoughts ‘about’ this object or
‘about’ that, the stolid word about engulfing all their delicate idiosyn-
crasies in its monotonous sound. (James 1971: 58)
For William James the referential and representational stolidity and

monotony of ‘about’ is inimical to the relational openness of conjunc-
tive (and digressive) possibilities. Here is a perceptual proclivity that he
recognizes as a ‘definite’ and ‘distinct’ form of consciousness, under-
stood as transitive and unavailable to the illusory comfort of stolid
articulation. It sees ‘psychic transitions’ which are ‘always on the wing’
and ‘not to be glimpsed except in flight’, transitions which ‘lead from
one set of images to another’, maintaining the ‘feeling of direction’ sup-
pressed by ‘full presence’, and James asks:
has the reader never asked himself what kind of mental fact is
his intention of saying a thing before he has said it? It is an entirely
definite intention, distinct from all other intentions, an absolutely
distinct state of consciousness, therefore; and yet how much of it
consists of definite sensorial images, either of words or of things?

Hardly anything. (James 1971: 60)7
The project here, as for the ‘radical empiricism’ of James’s thought

more generally, is to give body, as it were, to this kind of ‘mental fact’,

to its sensorial elusiveness, and he is quite clear about his ambition to
enflesh ‘these rapid premonitory perspective views’:
‘tendencies’ are not only descriptions from without […] they are
among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from
within, and must be described as in very large measure constituted of
feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them
at all. It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague to its proper
place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the atten-
tion. (James 1971: 61–2)
It is the experientiality of the vague that orchestrates to a great extent

James’s ideas of subjectivity which in turn underwrite his commitment to
the relational character of things – a character neglected by the predilec-
tion for the substantive at the expense of the transitive, for the definite
image rather than projective vagueness. With every image, he argues,
goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of
whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The
significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo of penumbra
that surrounds and escorts it. (James 1971: 62)
Within the Jamesian philosophy, as he claims in a later essay, ‘A World

of Pure Experience’, his ‘experienced relations’ must be accounted as
‘“real” as anything else in the system’; the most important members of
‘conjunctive relation’ are the forms of ‘continuous transition’, and it is
these which resist the substantive and the definite, the ‘resting places’
of thought which lead to the anaesthetization of abstract thinking
(James 1971: 1160).
The hallmark of relations, conjunctions and transitions is that simul-
taneously they are nominatively vague and experientially real. William
James’s ‘Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic?’ argues that while we ‘live’ in
conjunctions, our state is literally transitional and that
We can not, it is true, name our different living ‘ands’ or ‘withs’

except by naming the different terms towards which they are moving
70 Ian F. A. Bell
us, but we live their specifications and differences before those terms
explicitly arrive. (James 1971: 1204)8
More is involved here than a sustaining of a freshly considered real-

ity and a questioning of stabilities and their legitimating boundaries.

A cue is given by the metaphor of the ‘mosaic’ that James develops
for his philosophy: ‘In radical empiricism there is no bedding; it is as
if the pieces clung together by their edges, the transitions experienced
between them forming their cement’; he admits the partiality of the
metaphor, but is keen to maintain that it ‘serves to symbolize the fact
that Experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges’ (James
1971: 1180). These edges take boundaries and borders of conjunctive
relations away from the monotony and stolidity of confinement and
limit towards the more open, and more vague arena of liminality and
permeability – the potential for alterability which may challenge the
hierarchies and authorities of both traditional philosophy (for William)
and narrative and logic (for Henry). William’s advocation of the vague
feeds into Henry’s admiration for Alphonse Daudet’s capacity for being
‘truthful without being literal’ and having a ‘pair of butterfly’s wings
attached to the back of his observation’ (1984b: 239, 242), and it is not
difficult to picture William in the ‘car’ of the deeply ambiguous ‘balloon
of experience’ prescribed by Henry. The digressive lexicon associated
with the relational ‘vague’ that I have tried to sketch here (tendency,
halo, conjunction, transition, edge, permeability, liminality) is captured
by this wonderful metaphor for Henry’s meanderings: it is not under
the balloon itself that the writer swings but under ‘that necessity’ of its
being tied to the earth. Engagement and disengagement interfere with
each other remarkably here, and that interference dissuades us from the
‘documentary’ form of knowledge that may be associated with repre-
sentation. The ‘fun’ and ‘hocus-pocus’ that register the knowingness of
the metaphor are extended into the ‘gambol’ of ‘frolic fancy’ differenti-
ated from the decision-making process of ‘a board of trustees discussing
a new outlay’ (James 1984b: 1057–8) – a brilliant trope for subvert-
ing those forms of knowledge and authority permitting encumbered
representation and a faith in the ‘substantive’ which instigate ‘resting
places’ and suppress the permeable conjunctions of the ‘transitive’ and
the relational. ‘Really, universally, relations stop nowhere’ is one of the
greatest Jamesian lessons – his, in Bakhtin’s phrase, ‘dialogic imagina-
tion’ – which counters singularity, opens words and things to what is
other, rather than freezing them into manipulable categories, which is
sceptical of binaries and schismatic perception, of interpretation and
fixed definition, is committed to the liberties of alterability and which

persuades a dispersive and mobile selfhood (however difficult and
painful that may be) against the forms of totality and authoritarianism
associated with autonomous selfhood, where the effort to construct a
unified self depends always upon the suppression of others. For James,

being is fixed and objects or landscapes are solid only on a temporary
and provisional basis, as a means of getting about, as points of depar-
ture.9
The knowingness of the ‘fun’ James has with figurative language sug-
gests a self-reflectivity that, again, is a feature of the digressive text. The
sheer bulk of his critical writing10 suggests a general commitment to a
seemingly endless questioning of the relations between self and text, but
there are specific moments when digression is recognized formally in its
own right. The opening chapter of Washington Square (1880), for exam-
ple, concludes with a vignette of the central female character, Catherine
Sloper:
She grew up a very robust and healthy child, and her father, as he
looked at her, often said to himself that, such as she was, he at least
need have no fear losing her. I say ‘such as she was’, because, to tell
the truth – But this is a truth of which I will defer the telling. (James
1965: 8)
This is quite extraordinary narrative disturbance: the slippage from ‘said

to himself’ and ‘I say’ is a strident interruption of flow, and while James
promises to ‘defer the telling’ of the ‘truth’, of course it is never given.
Less strident, but rather more complex, is the account of Austin Sloper’s
choice of location in the Square itself. The house is built in 1835,
embodying ‘the last results of architectural science’ (James 1965: 16)
within a city that is moving rapidly northwards with ceaseless inven-
tion (James 1965: 25); the house, claiming resistance to all this bustle
as an ‘ideal of quiet and genteel retirement’, paradoxically shares this
modernity, but the narrative disguises its newness. With the warm glow
of a backward glance, James reminds the reader that he is proposing a
retrospective history on behalf of his contemporary situation. He under-
lines his proposal by itemizing the area’s ‘repose’ through acts of domes-
tic memory, ingenuously foregrounded as a ‘topographical parenthesis’,
which fudge the conditions of history by naturalistic colouring and an
association with the notion that the area expressed ‘the look of having
had something of a social history’ (James 1965: 16). Since Sloper’s move
to the Square occurred at its virtual nascence, it could only exhibit such
72 Ian F. A. Bell
a look from the retrospective of the late 1870s, the period of the novel’s
composition. The ‘topographical parenthesis’ is thus displayed formally
as a warning against the elisions whereby nostalgia and memory both
interfere with and expand the experience of history. In a sense, the
parenthesis functions as a form of textual waste; an echo of what is

left behind by the main narrative but remaining within it as a trace
whereby past and present are given a simultaneity within consciousness
while maintaining temporal distance.11 Parentheses indicate two textual
events simultaneously, and the reader is asked not only to probe the
relation between them but also that simultaneity itself: they are both
textually present and textually (typographically) marginalized.
James was increasingly alert to fiction’s self-reflexivity as he matured
as a writer. ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884) applauded ‘signs of returning
animation’ to theorizing of the novel, arguing famously that ‘Art lives
upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety, upon
the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints’ (James 1984a:
44–5). And digression is one of the principal tenets of this refreshed
animation; as Iser notes, it ‘is meant to lay bare the narrative fabric’
(1988: 71). By resisting the illusory comprehensiveness of the full body,
the full text – and thereby querying issues of control and meaning – it
declares itself as belonging to a world of unbounded possibilities. John
Lennard quotes Puttenham on parenthesis to good effect as the ‘first fig-
ure of tolerable disorder’, and, thinking of Sterne’s attack on Newtonian
determinism and T. S. Eliot’s attack on relativity, argues elegantly: ‘The
relationship between a parenthesis and its context is exactly a contrast
between absolute meaning, typographically isolated, and a relative mean-
ing, typographically interposed’ (Lennard 1991: 50, 212). In addition to
Lennard and Iser, masterly and exhaustive discussions of the challenges
to order orchestrated by digression have been accomplished by Anne
Cotterill (2004) and, in particular, Ross Chambers (1999).12 What is
rather neglected in these accounts is the way in which, for James, these
challenges are invariably at the behest of one of his most persistently
advocated lessons – that of freedom for both text and reader.
The extended metaphor that is the ‘balloon of experience’ in the
Preface to The American incorporates not only digression’s capacity for
critique and unsettlement but also to specific liberations:
the experience here represented is disconnected and uncontrolled

experience – uncontrolled by our general sense of ‘the way things
happen’ – which romance alone more or less successfully palms off
on us […] There is our general sense of the way things happen – it
abides with us indefeasibly, as readers of fiction, from the moment

we demand that our fiction shall be intelligible; and there is our
particular sense of the way they don’t happen, which is liable to
wake up unless reflexions and criticism, in us, have been successfully
drugged. (James 1984b: 1064–5)

By ‘intelligible’ here is intended that anaesthetization of faculties whereby
the world is unproblematically seemingly there, unquestioningly is.
Throughout his career, Henry James held fast to the principle announced
in ‘The Art of Fiction’ that ‘the good health of an art which undertakes so
immediately to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free. It lives
upon exercise, and the very meaning of exercise is freedom’ (1984a: 49).
We should note that the ambition here is to ‘reproduce’ and not ‘repre-
sent’, the latter belonging too comfortably to that form of mimesis which
James viewed always with considerable scepticism. Indeed, in the 1888
essay on Robert Louis Stevenson, he mounted a defence of non-realistic
forms in these terms: ‘The breath of the novelist’s being is his liberty, and
the incomparable virtue of the form he uses is that it lends itself to views
innumerable and diverse, to every variety of illustration’ (1984a: 1248).
The diversity and variety of these forms are an integral aspect of digres-
sion in that they permit a series of alternatives that can be accommodated
only awkwardly within ‘realistic’ structures and so offer themselves as
newly reproducible. Iser puts it well: ‘The event defies referentiality as it
transgresses rules and shatters expectations, issuing forth into incalcula-
bility. Thus, by replacing the journey as the plot-line, digression enables
life to make itself present as a discontinuous sequence of events, refusing
to allow the drawing of any connected thread’ (1988: 73).
The opposition here between ‘referentiality’, and ‘incalculability’
registers James’s willingness to confront the risk of alienating the novel
as a social force, a willingness that may be inferred more generally from
his interest in the complex of Novel/Romance, the material/immate-
rial, that may be schematized in his negotiation of the possibilities
represented by Balzac and Hawthorne respectively (and to which I shall
return). The ‘geometry’ of his artistry, announced in the Preface to
Roderick Hudson, is read by Leo Bersani in order to argue for its distances
and abstractness as more closely ‘reproducible’ than the conventional
psychology of novelistic realism:
It’s as if he came to feel that a kind of autonomous geometric pat-

tern, in which the parts appeal for their value to nothing but their
contributive place in the essentially abstract pattern, is the artist’s
74 Ian F. A. Bell
more successful representation of life […] The only faithful picture of

life in art is not in the choice of a significant subject (James always
argued against that pseudorealistic prejudice), but rather in the illus-
tration of sense – of design-making processes. James proves the nov-
el’s connection with life by deprecating its derivation from life; and

it’s when he is most abstractly articulating the growth of a structure
that James is also most successfully defending the mimetic function
of art (and of criticism). (Bersani 1969: 54)
Here, Jamesian freedom is to be understood ‘in the sense of inventions

so coercive that they resist any attempt to enrich – or reduce – them with
meaning’ (Bersani 1969: 57–8). It suggests the principle of re-composition
not only on behalf of James’s own practice but also on behalf of the
liberty of both his characters and his readers. James’s analyses of his
craft, his geometry of fiction and human behaviour are means of self-
reflection, enabling his fictions to display their own process, to escape
mystification, and to make themselves available for interventions by
others. By maintaining this possibility for imagining alternative worlds
(a key lesson from Hawthorne), James refuses to appropriate the freedom
of his readers by resisting the potential of fiction to compete with a
familiar world. His predilection for ‘magnificent and masterly indirec-
tion’ points liberty in style and behaviour as equally guaranteed by the
digressiveness of the oblique angle (James 1967: 118).
The possibility of alternatives creates a different sense of movement
which, by its meandering and digressive nature, disturbs the control-
ling and hierarchical movement of linear narrative with another bid for
comprehensiveness – the naturalness of thinking within and beyond the
linear. Of course, we never actually think within the organized gram-
mar of complete sentences: the categories and boundaries of thought
are invariably permeable as, indeed, is the office of parentheses which,
by their casualness (as a kind of afterthought), approximate to the oral
(later, to take on a kind of literalness as James developed the habit of
dictating his works). Parentheses (unlike the recognizable punctuation
of semi-colon, colon or period) are, by virtue of their oral allegiances,
more akin to the spontaneous and the natural which formed such an
important part of James’s view in ‘The Art of Fiction’ for the novel as
‘a living thing’, an ‘organism’. In a review of Alphonse Daudet’s Mon frère
et moi in 1882, he expressed his admiration in precisely these terms:
The bright light, the warm water, the spontaneity and loquacity of
his native Provence have entered into his style, and made him a
talker as well as a novelist. He tells his stories as a talker; they have

always something of the flexibility and familiarity of conversation.
(1984b: 216)13
More closely, in his review of Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street in

1914, we have ‘the value of the offered thing, its whole relation to us,
is created by the breath of language’ (1984a: 159), the ‘breath’ which
underwrites a proximity to the meandering of digression (talking as
having that fluidity of the ill-discipline and instability of the tongue)
and informs James’s simultaneous fascination with and scepticism for
dialect (a discourse in which he self-confessedly fell short) in the Preface
to Daisy Miller:
the key to the whole of the treasure of romance independently gar-

nered was the riot of the vulgar tongue. One might state it more freely
still and the truth would be as evident: the plural number, the vulgar
tongues, each with its intensest note, but pointed the moral more
luridly. Grand generalised continental riot or particular pedantic, par-
ticular discriminated and ‘sectional’ and self-conscious riot – to feel
the thick breath, to catch the ugly snarl, of all or of either, was to be
reminded afresh of the only conditions that guard the grace, the only
origins that save the honour, or even the life, of dialect: those prec-
edent to the invasion, to the sophistications, of schools and uncon-
scious of the smartness of echoes and the taint of slang. The thousands
of celebrated productions raise their monument but to the bastard
vernacular of communities disinherited of the felt difference between
the speech of the soil and the speech of the newspaper, and capable
thereby, accordingly, of taking slang for simplicity, the composite for
the quaint and the vulgar for the natural. (1984b: 1279–80)
To disentangle this particularly ‘endless sentence’ (proliferating with

those subordinate clauses that so often serve the office of parentheses)
is not to the purpose of the present exercise save to recognize that it is
the very energy of the ‘vulgar’ tongue which both attracts James’s inter-
est and prompts his rather patrician distaste: this is ‘dialect with the
literary rein loose on its agitated back and with its shambling power of
traction, not to say, more analytically, of attraction, trusted for all such
magic might be worth’ (1984b: 1279).14
James’s playful handling of figurative language belongs to his insis-
tence that fiction be, above all, ‘interesting’ (throughout ‘The Art of
Fiction’, for example), and I would suggest that ‘interest’ here belongs in
76 Ian F. A. Bell
part to the digressive habit in Sterne’s sense: ‘Digressions, incontestably,

are the sunshine; – they are the life, the soul of reading’ and the digres-
sive writer ‘brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail’ (quoted
in Iser 1988: 72). Sterne’s ‘sunshine’ registers digression as distinctly
pleasurable in its interrupting or deferring the forward thrust of narra-

tive (for example, the ‘happy endings’ James dismisses so sternly in ‘The
Art of Fiction’ [1984a: 48]). As Anne Cotterill notes, ‘The departures of
digression always postpone ends’ (2004: 4). This is the delightful delec-
tation of delay, taking pleasure in its own unfulfilment (desire once sat-
isfied ceases its desirability). The Preface to The American offers a telling
contrast between the ‘real’ and the ‘romantic’:
The real represents to my perception the things we cannot possibly

not know, sooner or later, in one way or another; it being but one
of the accidents of our hampered state, and one of the incidents of
their quantity and number, that particular instances have not yet
come our way.
Fairly unproblematically, the ‘real’ is understood as invariably quantifi-

able, a recognizable world. By comparison,
The romantic stands, on the other hand, for the things that, with all
the facilities in the world, all the wealth and all the courage and all the
wit and all the adventure, we never can directly know; the things that
can reach us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our
thought and our desire. (1984b: 1062–3)
By ‘romantic’, James intends the model of Hawthorne, as we shall see;

and the point here is exactly a disjunction between the order of ‘quan-
tity’ and that of ‘desire’. For Cotterill, the pleasure here verges on the
erotic: ‘Digressive speaking appears to tap and channel the energy of
forbidden, disruptive emotions, while it toys with the tension between
exposure and concealment’; she goes on to argue in this context for the
idea of digression as holiday – ‘Digressions seem to promise a forbidden,
“stealthy” pleasure in the freedom of stepping not only aside from, but
also out of, stated bounds’ – and picks up on the notion of delay whereby
they ‘seem to be necessary when one’s subject cannot be stated directly
but must be arrived at “little by little”’ (Cotterill 2004: 30–1). James
provides a fine example of such delay in his account of Isabel Archer’s
‘extraordinary meditative vigil’ in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady,
whereby the ‘representation simply of her motionlessly seeing’ becomes
the ‘landmark’ of her realization about the truth of her circumstances

(1984b: 1084). Ross Chambers takes a rather sterner view. Recognizing
that digression is ‘licensed’ by the pleasure it gives, it is ‘a mode of pleas-
ure which can function as a pleasurable relaxation of constraint only to
the extent that it remains connected with, and hence governed by, the

constrictions of discipline, system, cohesion, and linearity that it seeks
to relax’ (1999: 19). But here he has in mind critical rather than creative
activity for which indeed a more relaxed view is germane. I favour the
‘meander’ Edel discerns in James’s style as a term for digression’s perme-
ability (Edel 1977, 2: 231),15 its changing of direction, of moving back-
wards and forwards that is both liberating but also a source of anxiety
in that the movement may be sensed as undetermined and without any
form whatsoever. I want to suggest, at the risk of schematization, that
the issue of the parenthetical James may most productively be sketched
through his sense of the two novelists who inform his aesthetic most
powerfully – Hawthorne and Balzac (recognizing that Turgenev and
Flaubert have only a slightly less potent influence) – to follow the hint
offered by the opposition between the ‘real’ and the ‘romantic’ already
identified from his Preface to The American.
For James, it is a tensile relationship, attracted equally by the ‘extrava-
gant’ plenitude of Balzac and the ‘poetic’ precinct of Hawthorne’s
Romance, but equal also are the competing dissatisfactions found in
each: while Balzac is problematized by size, Hawthorne is problematized
by shadow (a model for the consanguinity of constraint and relaxation).
The key term for Hawthorne, announced in his Preface to The House of
the Seven Gables, is ‘latitude’ in relation to both style and theme, guar-
anteeing the liberation of both text and reader (1995a: 3–4) from the
constraint of mere novelistic realism. The ‘charm’ of the novel for James
was ‘of the kind that we fail to reduce to its grounds […] It is vague,
indefinable, ineffable’, and its portrayal of contemporary American life
is to be found in ‘the indirect testimony of his tone […] of his very omis-
sions and suppressions’ (1967: 118–19). Such indirection and obliquity
is an ‘inevitable tendency’ to ‘divergence, to following what may be
called new scents’ (1967: 127) or, as ‘The Art of Fiction’ puts it, this is
‘The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication
of things’ (1984a: 53).
The imaginative resource James finds in Hawthorne is a fresh version
of the ‘picturesque’, finding in the ‘landscape of the soul all sorts of
fine sunrise and moonlight effects’ (1967: 88) and in a review of 1866,
he celebrates a freedom of enquiry that is ‘profoundly self-conscious’
where characters ‘obtain a notion of the relation of their virtues to a
78 Ian F. A. Bell
thousand objects […] and, owing to their relations with these objects,
they present a myriad of reflected lights and shadows’ (1984b: 434–5).
From this freedom emerges a self-consciousness that depends upon
recognizing relations, two principal features of the digressive adven-
ture. The final image here is telling, bespeaking not only complexity,

diversity and colour, but also a world that is potentially fragile: lights
and shadows are attractive but simultaneously deceptive because their
reflections come close to the realm of appearance, performance, mir-
ror, surface and social gambit (the risk James takes with his version of
Hawthorne’s New England in The Europeans of 1878).
While James applauds Hawthorne’s resistance to ‘literal exactitude’, he
also faults The Marble Faun where ‘the element of the unreal is pushed
too far’ (1967: 129, 152, 154). Nevertheless, he finds the inhabitants of
The Blithedale Romance as ‘not afflicted with a Gallic passion for complete-
ness’ and regards America’s youthfulness and experimentation as lead-
ing to a sense of ‘relativity’ which ‘replaces the quiet and comfortable
sense of the absolute as regards its own position in the world which
reigns supreme in the British and in the Gallic genius’ (1967: 85, 142).
Completeness and the absolute are exactly the points of resistance for
the digressive temperament which James finds in the ‘experience’ of the
Romance form in his Preface to The American: ‘experience liberated, so
to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt
from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it’ (1984b: 1064).
The ‘Gallic passion for completeness’ is, of course, best exemplified by
Balzac, a story that is too familiar to warrant rehearsal here, but it is
notable that James’s first essay on Balzac in 1875 attended to this very
issue: ‘His great ambition and his great pretension as a social chronicler
was to be complete’ (1984b: 34). An essay of 1902 again attends to the
sheer scale of the Balzacian enterprise in largely approving terms, but
noting that its density can suffer from ‘that odd want of elbow-room’
(1984b: 91) and in 1905 remarking that his ‘extravagance is also his great
fault’ (1984b: 126). It is at this very point in the later essay that Balzac’s
enterprise takes on a distinctively digressive and Hawthornesque tone,
allowing his readers to ‘live vicariously – succeed in opening a series of
dusky passages in which, with a more or less childlike ingenuity, we can
romp to and fro’ (1984b: 127). James’s ‘romp’ returns us to the know-
ing playfulness of his figurative language. In the Preface to What Maisie
Knew, he tackles the notion of ‘theme’ with considerable élan:
Once ‘out’, like a house-dog of a temper above confinement, it defies

the mere whistle, it roams, it hunts, it seeks out and ‘sees’ life; it can
be brought back but by hand and then only to take its futile thrash-
ing. (1984b: 1159–60)
This witty simile points the joyfulness of digressive behaviour, freed

momentarily from the constraints of the actual and returning to it with

the possibility of transformation. Digression’s ties to the actual are never
severed, but it enables a revisiting with fresh eyes, playing with a release
from formula but also with a code of sorts of its own. With Hawthorne in
mind, James writes of Turgenev’s ‘vividness’ in 1874 as remaining ‘imagi-
native, sportive, inconclusive, to the end’ (1984b: 997). If resistance to the
illusion of completeness in all its forms is the principal feature of James’s
transformative digression, it carries also elements of the self-reflexive, the
relational, the oral, the erotic and the playful. If the case of Balzac provides
the ground of the exercise then the case of Hawthorne offers its comple-
mentary latitude for both writer and reader. For James, in short, the size of
Balzac is held in productive tension with the shadow of Hawthorne.
Notes
1. I am grateful to Theresa Saxon for the acute punctuation of my title.
2. See his 1918 essay for The Little Review (Pound 1963: 295–338).
3. His responses to Turgenev are an apposite example (James 1984b: 968–1034).
4. The phrase is repeated in his essay on Turgenev in the same year, albeit less
problematically: ‘He cared, more than anything else, for the air of reality’
(1984b: 1011).
5. ‘Try to be someone on whom nothing is lost’ was his advice to the aspiring
novelist.
6. It is but a short step to recognizing how the life of a text depends upon this
view of the relational: ‘A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like
any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think,
that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts’ (James
1984a: 54).
7. Both brothers would be in sympathy with Emerson’s essay on ‘Experience’
where he claims: ‘Nature hates calculators; her methods are salutatory and
impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic movements are such; and the
chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate; and the mind
goes antagonising on, and never prospers but by fits’ (Emerson 1981: 338).
8. It is here that he recognizes the idea of flow assumed by the ‘doctrine of the
reality of conjunctive relations’ in which these relations are ‘parts constitu-
tive of experience’s living flow’ and not ‘as they appear in retrospect, each
fixed as a determinate object of conception, static, therefore, and contained
within itself’. It is against this ‘relationalistic tendency to treat experience
as chopped up into discontinuous static objects’ that radical empiricism
‘protests’. He offers a similar argument in ‘A World of Pure Experience’
(James 1971: 1181).
80 Ian F. A. Bell
9. I have attempted to sustain this reading in Bell (1991).

10. The two-volume Library of America edition of his critical works lists more
than 300 essays, prefaces, notes and commentaries, excluding the essays on
art and drama and the travel writings.
11. As Wolfgang Iser has argued, ‘measurable time runs forward, which is contrary
to the time of the subject. For his time is not a linear movement, but it is a

ceaseless re-emerging of the past from whatever may be the standpoint chosen
in the present’ and that digression ‘signalises subjectivity as “comprehensive”
time, i.e. as an unending interpenetration of past and present’ (Iser 1988: 77).
In a fascinating paper on the Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, Amber K.
Regis (2007) writes of the various sources and multiple perspectives contribut-
ing to the text: ‘Symonds saw this supplementary and digressive textual practice
as the only means to represent the self.’ For Regis, the inclusion in the original
text of letters, anecdotes, diaries and various other forms of printed material
(excavated with wonderful diligence) precludes that singleness of voice, deny-
ing alternative versions of the self, produced by the illusion of ‘generic fixity
and unified subjectivity’. (I have had the benefit of an advance copy of ‘Erasing
Digression from the Memoirs of John Addington Symonds’, and I am grateful
for help and advice in the drafting of the present essay.) James’s playfulness in
turn belongs to that rather neglected area of his aesthetic, the concern with
surface and performance, of which the best example in the early fiction is the
figure of Eugenia in The Europeans of 1878 (see Bell 1991: 147–72).
12. In Loiterature, in addition to wide-ranging and impressive scholarship,
Chambers treats his subject with great wit.
13. An essay of the following year repeats the point: ‘His manner is the manner
of talk’ (James 1984b: 231). Of Hawthorne himself, James claimed in 1879:
‘The tone of his writing is often that of charming talk – ingenious, fanci-
ful, slow-flowing, with all the lightness of gossip, and none of its vulgarity’
(1967: 97). Cf. the account of Turgenev in 1884 (1984b: 1008).
14. The clearest example of the ‘riot’ in an American context would be Whitman,
and it is worth noting how dismissive James was in his review of Drum-Taps
in 1865 (1984a: 629–34).
15. It is a term favoured also by Cotterill as she develops the image of the
labyrinth or maze in opposition to the straight line. She quotes Angus
Fletcher – ‘The loss of direction is a lost sense of direction […] The thinking
of the labyrinth is the problem of the labyrinth. It is not so much a trial
of strength as a kind of perceptual skill. The meandering passage promotes
always a thinking into one’s state of mind’ – and goes on to quote Thomas
Greene on straight lines where meandering ‘diverts and entangles these
lines, thus rendering explicit a half-conscious fear that human experience is
indeed an entanglement of lines, of progressions, of sequences, we had been
led to expect to remain distinct’ (2004: 9).
Bibliography
Bell, Ian F. A. 1991. Henry James and the Past: Readings into Time (London:
Macmillan)
Bersani, Leo. 1969. ‘The Jamesian Lie’, Partisan Review, 36: 53–79

Press)
Cotterill, Anne. 2004. Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford:
Clarendon Press)
Dick, Kay, ed. 1972. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (Harmondsworth:
Penguin)

Edel, Leon. 1977. The Life of Henry James, 2 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin)
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1981. Selected Writings of Emerson, ed. Donald McQuade
(New York: Modern Library)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1973. The Scarlet Letter (Harmondsworth: Penguin)
—— 1995a. The House of the Seven Gables (London: Dent)
—— 1995b. The Marble Faun (London: Dent)
Iser, Wolfgang. 1988. Tristram Shandy (Cambridge University Press)
James, Henry. 1965. Washington Square (Harmondsworth: Penguin)
—— 1967. Hawthorne, ed. Tony Tanner (London: Macmillan)
—— 1984a. Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers
(New York: The Library of America)
—— 1984b. Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces
to the New York Edition (New York: The Library of America)
James, William. 1971. William James: The Essential Writings, ed. Bruce Wilshire
(New York: Harper and Row)
Lennard, John. 1991. But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parenthesis in English Printed
Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
Pound, Ezra. 1963. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber
and Faber)
—— 1973. The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions)
Regis, Amber K. 2007. ‘Erasing Digression from the Memoirs of John Addington
Symonds’ (unpublished conference paper, Textual Wanderings: The Theory
and Practice of Digression in Literature, Leeds Humanities Research Institute,
University of Leeds, 30 November)
6
A Slice of Watermelon:
The Rhetoric of Digression

in Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with
the Dog’1
Peter J. Rabinowitz and Corinne Bancroft
‘Passed in silence’
In September 1846, Johann Gottfried Galle and Heinrich d’Arrest first

observed the planet later called Neptune. Except among astronomers,
this event barely registered at the time, and even now, it has had no
impact on literary studies. It was surely not in Chekhov’s mind when he
introduced a curious non-event a quarter of the way through ‘The Lady
with the Dog’ (1899). After a week’s suave flirtation, Gurov, a practised
ladies’ man, finally makes it into the hotel room of the inexperienced
Anna Sergeyevna; but he finds her response to their sexual encounter
‘odd and disconcerting’. Anna pulls out the cliché, ‘You will never
respect me anymore’; Gurov finds himself at a loss. ‘On the table was a
watermelon. Gurov cut himself a slice from it and began slowly eating
it. At least half an hour passed in silence’ (1979: 225).
Why do we align these two unconnected events, one a historical
moment that passed by almost unnoticed and one a fictional moment
in which nothing happens?2 And why, for that matter, talk about
Chekhov’s fiction in a book on digression? ‘Everyone knows’ that
Chekhov’s plays are full of digressions – one might even argue, with
only a dash of hyperbole, that their scenes of conversational non-con-
nection are nothing but digression. The mature stories, in contrast, are
lean and direct, with none of the self-conscious flamboyance usually
associated with digression; and they do not expand the scope of fiction
in the manner of such digressive experiments as Tristram Shandy or Pale
Fire. Surely we are rowing upstream?
Perhaps. But given the nature of the subject, study of digression inevi-
tably pushes against the current, and we ask you to bear with us as we
make three interrelated points that we hope will justify our eccentric
82
A Slice of Watermelon 83
choices. First, digression itself – a category that, like ‘the novel’, resists
definition – has more eddies and inlets than we often realize, and some
of those less dramatic eddies are just as resonant as the detours that
usually serve as exemplars. Second, the discovery of Neptune provides a
template for understanding a rarely noticed and undertheorized subset

of such modest digressions. Third, this half-hour blank – a blank that
appears an interpretive irrelevancy, a minor detail of no significance – is
the story’s key moment, and thinking about it in terms of digression
not only gives insight into ‘Lady with the Dog’, but also casts light on
Chekhov’s fiction more broadly.
‘The most complicated part’
Since digression has a wide range of meanings, we would like to begin

with a series of distinctions that situate our rarely noticed type of digres-
sion and our perspective on it.
First, we are talking specifically about a type of narrative digression.
Digressions in poetry, philosophy and elsewhere operate according to
different laws and have different kinds of effects.
Second, we are concerned with digressions in narratives, not with
digressive narratives such as the class of texts Ross Chambers has dubbed
‘loiterature’. Loiterature is a genre (Chambers 1994: 20); digression is a
technique. Furthermore, our inquiry into this technique is grounded
in post-classical narratology (in particular, rhetorical narrative theory)
rather than post-structuralism. That is, as we believe appropriate in an
essay on Chekhov, we are leaving aside the metaphysics, the jouissance,
or the subversive political potential of digression.3 Rather, we are con-
cerned with digression’s rhetorical potential as a way of guiding reader
experience. In analysing this rhetorical potential, we will be relying on
the schema set out in Before Reading, which charts four types of rules
that readers apply as they make sense of texts: rules of notice (which
tell us where to direct our attention), rules of signification (which allow
us to draw meanings from the details we notice), rules of configuration
(which allow us, as we read, to create larger patterns out of details we
have noticed, and thus to develop expectation and a sense of closure)
and rules of coherence (which allow us, once we have finished a text,
to ascribe more generalized meanings, including thematic meanings, to
the work as a whole) (Rabinowitz 1987).
Third, we are distinguishing digression from transgressions more gen-
erally. Narrative digressions are a subclass of swerves that run against
the expectations set up by the narrative so far and that thus challenge
84 Peter J. Rabinowitz and Corinne Bancroft
the reader’s understanding of the rules (particularly rules of configura-

tion) in effect; transgressions are provocative violations of more general
protocols (political, social, sexual) established outside the text. The two,
of course, overlap: Lucky’s explosion in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
breaks the play’s momentum, and does so in socially transgressive ways.

But Stavrogin’s description of raping a child in Dostoevsky’s The Devils
is transgressive without being digressive; the guest list in Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby is digressive without being transgressive.
Even once we have narrowed the field this way, of course, we face a vari-
ety of narrative swerves. There are lurches on the level of story (the inter-
polated Flitcraft story in Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon) and deviations on
the level of discourse (the shifts of style and perspective in Doris Lessing’s
Briefing for a Descent into Hell). There are positive deviations: surpluses,
elements that no one would miss if they had not been included. There are
also (something less often studied) negative deviations, gaps where the
text wobbles because something important has been left out or skimmed
over. Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, for instance, indulges in such
lavish detail that few readers complain that anything is missing. But the
novel is also pierced with moments where key events are mysteriously
elided: the narrator’s initiation into sex with an otherwise unmentioned
cousin (1993, II: 208–9), his trip to Germany with his grandmother (1993,
II: 406), his duels (1993, III: 485; V: 387). There are deviations that work
primarily on the level of configuration – there are deviations that con-
tinue to trouble the level of coherence (there is no way to make the death
of Owen Taylor cohere with the rest of Chandler’s The Big Sleep).
To narrow in on the particular kind of digression we find in ‘Lady
with the Dog’, we need one further distinction. First, we have narrative
cadenzas: moments where the narrative pauses so that an author, narra-
tor or character can give a virtuoso performance that offers pleasure on
its own. The Gatsby guest list is a canonical instance; one might argue,
too, that – for all its importance on the level of coherence – ‘The Grand
Inquisitor’ is a cadenza on the level of configuration. Traditional clas-
sical cadenzas – however far they modulate over their course – get us
nowhere new, since they return us to the point where we began. Often
left to the performer to improvise, they can be shortened, lengthened,
snipped out or substituted without major structural harm. Second, we
have true narrative modulations, during which the narrative slides into
new terrain. For the rest of this essay, we will be dealing primarily with
a special subclass of modulation.
What makes it special? This brings us back to 1846. The discovery
of Neptune improved our understanding of the solar system, but it
represented a methodological advance as well. Whereas the planets

closer to the sun were discovered through optical observation, Neptune’s
existence and location were initially established indirectly. Uranus did
not move as Newton’s laws seemed to predict – and by examining its
deviation (or, to use the more technical term, its perturbation) from

its expected orbit, astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier was able
to determine the invisible gravitational force working on it and to tell
Galle and d’Arrest where to look. Since the digressions in which we are
interested here are something of this sort, we will term them perturba-
tive digressions.
Like the deviations in Uranus’s orbit, perturbative digressions have
a crucial doubleness: they are unexpected and at first inexplicable;
but they point to something otherwise invisible that allows us deeper
understanding of the universe they inhabit. Thus, in formal terms, they
can be described as apparently unmotivated (or significantly under-
motivated) deviations from the textual norm, including apparently
unmotivated changes in what James Phelan calls local ‘tensions’ and
‘instabilities’ (1996: 30). More important for our purposes, though,
in rhetorical terms they invoke a rule of signification that we call the
Rule of Causal Extrapolation: perturbative digressions are to be read as
invitations to figure out the unseen force or hidden motivation that
produces them.
Thus, perturbative digressions are distinguished from normal changes
in plot direction because they are apparently unmotivated. In Pride and
Prejudice, Elizabeth changes her attitude towards Darcy, but there is no
mystery about why; likewise, we understand why Raskolnikov turns
himself in. They are distinguished from plot filler – for instance, what
Seymour Chatman (1978) calls ‘satellites’ as opposed to ‘kernels’4 – not
only because they are modulations rather than cadenzas, but also, more
important, because they are invitations to serious reinterpretation of
what is driving the plot. In Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Kazbich tells
how he escaped from the Cossacks. The nominal point of this story-
within-a-story is to tout the quality of his horse; but since we already
know the horse’s value, this passage serves as a satellite to garnish
established facts with local colour, not as an invitation to interpretive
labour. Perturbative digressions may be disguised as satellites, but are
counterintuitively kernels because, despite their subtlety, they play a
twofold function, not only moving the plot forward, but also changing
its direction.
At the same time, perturbative digressions differ from narrative com-
promises because we are intended to give them notice. The Devils is full
of awkward narrative shifts, but these result from competing needs that
require mutually contradictory means. Dostoevsky wants to explore how
the understanding of momentous events is coloured by perspective and
how gossip affects community transmission (most conveniently done
with a narrator involved in the action); at the same time, he wants to

explore the private psychology of his most tormented characters (most
conveniently done with omniscient narration). He solves the problem
inelegantly by lurching from one technique to another – but far from
offering these jolts as an invitation to interpretation, he intends the
inconsistencies to go unnoticed.
The invitation to interpretation does not mean that the force behind
the digression will be found. Some perturbative digressions, like the
negative digression of Miles’s discharge from school in James’s Turn of the
Screw, remain ambiguous. But in such cases, the impossibility of interpre-
tation remains part of the rhetorical point. And in all cases, perturbative
digression represents the author’s trust in the reader – trust that the
reader will both recognize the invitation and follow it up. The subtler the
perturbation, the greater the trust – and few perturbative digressions are
as subtle as the half-hour of silence as Gurov eats his melon.
‘Every individual existence revolves around mystery’
‘You will never respect me anymore’ – we know immediately where this

is going. A long uncomfortable silence following awkward sex seems
only to emphasize that the affair with Anna will be, like Gurov’s other
liaisons, temporary – perhaps briefer than most since as Gurov listens,
he is ‘bored to death’ (1979: 225). If we notice the silence at all, it is
because Gurov’s response seems rudely inappropriate, a mini-cadenza
recapitulating his patronizing dependency on the ‘lower race’ (1979:
222).5 After this brief pause, the plot line seems to return to normal.
A romantic visit to Oreanda gets their affair back on track, and this sec-
tion closes with the mutual understanding of the transitory nature of
their Yalta affair.
Yes, we still know where this is going: we have read stories about vaca-
tion adultery before and have met wolves like Gurov and dissatisfied
women like Anna. More important, we have read other Chekhov stories
and we develop expectations by applying rules of configuration we have
learned from a familiar Chekhovian plot structure: a character lives
a predictable existence; something (a death, a love affair, a marriage)
happens that ought to bring about change; life nonetheless continues
as it was.
In this case, however, life does not continue as it was. As their affair
continues against all odds, Gurov has, in the final pages, a revelation
about the ‘double life’ that is the subject of so many Chekhov stories. It
is at this point that we most clearly understand that we have had a major
modulation. It is not simply that Gurov describes the secret kernel (зерно)

of his existence (his love for Anna) using positive, albeit corny, adjectives
(‘important, interesting, essential […] sincere’) and distinguishing that
genuine self from the ‘husk’ (оболочка) of his inauthentic performances
in daily life (1979: 233). It is not simply that he comes to recognize – in
opposition to traditional bourgeois ethical principles – that his real truth
is separate from and opposed to his professional and family activities,
that, as Janet Malcolm puts it, ‘a lie […] can be the fulcrum of truth of
feeling, a vehicle of authenticity’ (2001: 38). More important, he applies
this broad ethical realization both to himself and to others. By the end
of the story, he grants strangers the benefit of the doubt, ‘always assum-
ing that the real, the only interesting life of every individual goes on as
under cover of night, secretly’ (1979: 233). This shift from the disgust at
the habitual false performances and the ‘savage manners’ (1979: 229) of
his peers and previous lovers to the generous concession that they may
also have some kernel underneath indicates that Gurov has begun to
come to terms with the complexity of performance norms, and is now
able both to resist them and to resist judging others.
On the surface, this revelation seems the turning point in the story,
the moment where Gurov comes into his own. But in fact the trajectory
has been altered long ago, even though the evidence is subtle at first.
Gurov may begin as what Donald Rayfield calls ‘a cynical enchanter’
(1999: 172), but we see an unexpected tremor of difference already
as he sees Anna leave Yalta. It is more pronounced upon his return to
Moscow. He cannot forget Anna; in fact, she becomes clearer in his
mind. What instigates this swerve? Is the half-hour of silence a pertur-
bative digression, a modulation shifting the orbit of the story?6 If so,
the Rule of Causal Extrapolation asks us to examine it, as Leverrier did
Uranus’s perturbation, to discover what hidden force caused it. What
did Gurov see in Anna that caused him to spend half an hour silently
eating a watermelon when he could have dismissed Anna’s doubts eas-
ily or left the room? What pulled him off his trajectory of short-lived
inauthentic affairs, first sending him like a madman to S. in search of
a woman who had appeared but an awkward summer fling and event-
ually leading him to deep ethical insight?
As we have said, the silence is placed so unostentatiously (clearly
not in a privileged position) and gets so little textual attention (in
Russian, seven words describe a half-hour) that it does not initially

attract much attention. On rereading, though, it seems to evoke several
rules of notice. A long awkward silence during a sex scene and this
departure from Gurov’s established norm is arguably a slight rupture,
usually a call for attention (Rabinowitz 1987: 65–75). In addition, there

is a general rule that elements establishing a continued pattern are to
be noticed. While it is difficult to apply this rule when we first read
the page, looking back at the scene in terms of the later husk/kernel
metaphor, it is retrospectively clear that Anna’s response to their love-
making is an early manifestation of that theme. Gurov recognizes its
resonance almost immediately, because it disrupts his pattern. In the
past, he has categorized women – and hence controlled his emotions
towards them – according to the acts they choose to put on: whether
they view sex as a simple pleasure, a metaphysical breakthrough or a
predatory battle, their outer performances, rather than their true selves,
define them.7 Anna, at this moment, is radically different, and Gurov
is thrown off by her innocence and sincerity; ‘the naïve accents, the
remorse, all was so unexpected’. At first, this is so unfamiliar that he
nearly interprets it backwards: only her tears suggest that she is not
‘jesting or play-acting’ (1979: 225). In fact, what is key here is that she
is not trying to pretend or to convince Gurov she is anything she is not.
She is a non-performer – probably the first he has encountered. It is this
non-performance that, gently at first, pulls him out of his orbit.8
Or, more accurately, it is Gurov’s recognition of Anna’s difference that
causes the shift – his recognition that there is another way of leading
one’s life, and that he too might escape from performance. This is cru-
cial: the Neptune here is internal, not external; Gurov stops, reflects,
and works with Anna towards taking agency in his own life.
Anna plays the pivotal role in helping Gurov change his trajectory in
three distinct ways: she shows him that people can act without perform-
ing; she explains her insight into the double life; and she is patient while
he struggles to understand. Not only does her refusal to perform stop
Gurov in his tracks, but, in addition, the self-contradictory and unflat-
tering way she explains it helps him to understand her, even if it bores
him at the time. Following the half-hour of silence, she says (in words
similar to those he will later use to describe his kernel) that she was
‘devoured by curiosity’, that she desired ‘something higher’ and needed
to escape ‘like a madwoman’ (безумная) from her flunky husband (1979:
225). Although he may not realize it at the time, Gurov’s thoughts as
he decides to pursue her demonstrate at least partial understanding of
this speech: ‘there was nowhere to escape to, you might as well be in
a madhouse (в сумасшедшем доме)’ (1979: 229). When he finds her in

S., she concedes that they share something essential that draws them
together: ‘I lived on the thoughts of you’ (1979: 232). But this does not
lead her (as it leads the title character of ‘Ariadne’) to bohemian flaunt-
ing of unconventional behaviour. Rather, Anna is careful to preserve

the husk of her married life, begging Gurov to leave but simultaneously
promising that she will come to him in Moscow. Here, Anna presents
an inarticulate but profound acceptance of the deception intrinsic to
the double life.
Chekhov’s stories often document the power of inertia to congeal
performance into habit, the tendency of the husk to solidify until
the kernel is no longer accessible. From other Chekhov stories – and
nineteenth-century Russian fiction more generally – readers reasonably
expect the rigid strength of these social norms to trap Gurov and Anna
and pull them apart, back to their respective ‘husk’ lives (as it does
Alekhin and his Anna in ‘About Love’) or to destroy them (as nearly
happens to Laevsky and Nadezhda in The Duel until they are saved by a
deus ex machina). What is striking in this story is that this rigidification
is averted. Instead, while the ending is hardly upbeat (‘the hardest, the
most complicated part was only just beginning’) (1979: 235), Chekhov
does give us some confidence that his characters are prepared to face the
future. In Chekhov’s world, this is a considerable victory.
‘As people who are very close and intimate’
A considerable victory – and a rare victory as well. While socially rigidi-

fied performances often determine the lives of Chekhov’s characters,
what is special about ‘The Lady with the Dog’ is the turn during that
moment of silence. Other stories portray opportunities for the same
kind of modulation. But in most cases, as we have suggested, these
opportunities are missed.
For instance, at the beginning of ‘The Man in a Case’, Burkin describes
the power of Belikov, the local teacher of Greek, to push people into a
shell or case (фуґляр) by forcing them to perform certain social rituals
and assent to social norms. In ‘Gooseberries’, Ivan Ivanich describes the
way his brother Nikolai’s obsessive commitment to an inflexible image
of a country estate – symbolized by the presence of gooseberries – rules
his life and destroys his moral fibre. Each of these stories leads to a
major event that ought to change things. In ‘The Man in a Case’,
Belikov dies. Since everyone has blamed his reign of fear for keeping
them in line, they treat his funeral as a ‘great pleasure’, comparing the
liberation brought upon by his death to ‘childhood, when the grown-

ups went away and we could run about […] enjoying perfect freedom’
(Chekhov 1979: 184). In ‘Gooseberries’, Ivan Ivanich clearly expects the
sour berries to reveal to his brother that his country-estate quest is itself
a performance. But for some reason nothing happens.

If we had never read ‘The Lady with the Dog’, the stasis in ‘The
Man in a Case’ and ‘Gooseberries’ might plausibly be interpreted to
mean that change is simply impossible. Personal performances have
become so frozen that alternative ways of life can be imagined, but
not achieved. Despite the townspeople’s belief that Belikov’s death will
liberate them, the return to old ways suggests that their unimaginative
rigidity comes from internalized norms rather than from the enforcers
they blame. In ‘Gooseberries’, Nikolai’s cramped vision has blinded him
to material reality. It is thus easy to come to the pessimistic reading that
habitual performance is stronger than the individual’s willpower. But
with ‘The Lady with the Dog’ as a countertext, one can read the stories
in another way. Is it possible that these other characters, too, had the
power to change things?
If so, why are these clearer opportunities for modulation missed while
the subtler opportunity in ‘The Lady with the Dog’ actualized? Perhaps it
is partly a matter of chance. The stars align for Gurov for three reasons:
he recognizes the power of performance and the double life it implies; he
pauses long enough to act on his recognition; and, absolutely essentially,
he has Anna, someone to share it with.9 Failure in any of these three
areas seems to result in losing your opportunity for change.
Thus, some characters, like the protagonists of ‘The Teacher of
Literature’ and ‘House with a Mansard’, simply do not see through the
performances of the sisters they meet, and, as a result, fail to realize they
have fallen for the wrong one.
Others fail to pause and think. In ‘Gooseberries’, there is an awkward
silence after Ivan’s rant. But unlike Gurov, the characters in the frame
narrative refuse to engage, using the silence instead to dismiss any
potential revelation. ‘It was not interesting to listen to the story of a poor
clerk who ate gooseberries, when from the walls generals and fine ladies
[…] were looking down from their gilded frames. It would have been
much more interesting to hear about elegant people, lovely women’
(1979: 193). The power of the paintings to arrest thought is chilling.
But the most poignant stories are those where the characters come
close to breaking free but cannot do so because they lack the neces-
sary companionship. At the end of the frame narrative in ‘The Man
in a Case’, Ivan makes a comment that is nearly an epiphany about
performance, but Burkin simply goes to sleep. Although Alekhin and

Anna, in ‘About Love’, recognize non-performance in each other, they
cannot bring themselves to discuss it, let alone extend the revelation
as Gurov does to strangers in the street. Rather than talking it over,
Alekhin is content to imagine what Anna is thinking: ‘If she abandoned

herself to her feelings she would have to lie, or else to tell the truth, and
in her position either would have been equally terrible and inconven-
ient’ (1979: 199–200). And although, at the end of the story, he realizes
‘how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered
us from loving was’ (1979: 201), he chooses even then not to act, lock-
ing himself in the standards of a community of performers. What sets
Anna and Gurov apart is their mutual understanding, most tenderly
represented at the end of the story where, rather than comforting Anna
inauthentically as he did in Yalta, he now shares her concerns and seri-
ously addresses them with her.
Is this analysis of digression in ‘The Lady with the Dog’ too subtle?
We said earlier that perturbative digression is a rhetorical technique that
relies on trust between author and reader. We might more accurately
have used the word ‘intimacy’ rather than ‘trust’, since intimacy is,
among other things, the ability to communicate without the need for
words. What could be a more appropriate rhetorical technique for what
is arguably Chekhov’s most intimate major story, a story with essen-
tially only two characters (even the dog of the title has but a ghostly
presence in the text)? In the end, then, while ‘The Lady with the Dog’
opens up insight into Chekhov’s moral universe thematically, it rein-
forces that insight rhetorically, by inviting readers to participate in the
kind of intimacy that the story celebrates.
Notes
1. This work would not have been possible without a strong community of nar-
rative-theory friends, including Jamie Barlowe, Alison Case, Dana Luciano,
Alan Palmer, James Phelan, Cynthia Port, Brian Richardson and Priscilla
Walton, not all of whom realized how they were helping out at the 2009
Narrative Conference in Birmingham. Thanks as well to Nancy Rabinowitz
for close reading, to Seth Major for advice on physics and to Michael Harwick
for research assistance.
2. Most critics pass over it in a silence less interesting than Chekhov’s. De
Maegd-Soëp (1987) emphasizes the scene, but neglects the half-hour. Rayfield
points to Gurov’s tendency to eat or drink when Anna cries (1999: 209), but
similarly short-changes the silence. See also Creasman, who focuses instead
on Gurov’s more dramatic ‘flights of emotion’ (1990: 257). Fulford, unusu-
ally, stresses the strangeness of the silence, but his interpretation (‘Anna
is paralyzed by shame’ and ‘Gurov has nothing to say to her’) (2004: 337)
underestimates the half-hour’s impact.
3. See Chambers’s claim that ‘digression is culture’s inevitable reminder that its
law is not unique and so not necessarily as legitimate as one might like to
think’ (1999: 89). Nor are we sympathetic to the recent religious rereadings
of Chekhov (for example, Butler 2008). For a sharp critique of the religious

approach, see McSweeny.
4. Other theorists use other terms, but Chatman’s are deliciously appropriate to
this essay.
5. Gurov is so comfortable with women that he ‘could even be silent in their
company without feeling the slightest awkwardness’ (Chekhov 1979: 222).
This silence with Anna, however, is not one of those comfortable occasions.
6. For a different reading, see Malcolm: it is a ‘mark of the cold roué that he
is’ that ‘only deepens the mystery […] of his later transformation’ (2001: 9).
Significantly, she stresses the watermelon, which she sees as an Edenic refer-
ence (2001: 162) rather than the silence.
7. Our position is not identical to, but not inconsistent with, Linaker’s claim
(2005), in the wake of such critics as Judith Butler, that Chekhov recognizes
gender as performative. In our reading, Chekhov recognizes the way women
‘perform’ their sexuality; but he is less concerned with troubling gender in
particular than with analysing social conventions more generally.
8. Greenberg suggests that Anna is a displacement for Gurov’s ‘unconscious
attraction to his adolescent daughter’ (1991: 126), an argument that ties in
with Smith’s more general claim that Chekhov’s heroines are attractive for
their ‘childlikeness’ (Smith 1973: 77). While unconscious incest may be part
of the initial attraction, it is hard to see Anna as childlike at the end. Nor does
incestuous desire in itself explain the qualities the relationship has.
9. For a different interpretation, see Porter: ‘they have so little to talk about’
because they ‘have little in common’ (1977: 53). We are more in tune with
Rayfield, who notes that ‘despite all the squalor of “affairs” […] the commit-
ment of one human being to another’ allows us to break out of isolation and
‘get round the uselessness of words for communication’ (1999: xvi).
Bibliography
Butler, Pierce. 2008. ‘The Church Bells of Easter: Chekhov and the Path of
Conversion’, Commonweal, 24 October, pp. 20–4
Chambers, Ross. 1994. ‘Strolling, Touring, Cruising: Counter-Disciplinary
Narrative and the Loiterature of Travel’, in Phelan and Rabinowitz, pp. 17–42
—— 1999. Loiterature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press)
Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press)
Chekhov, Anton. 1979. Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw, trans.
lvy Litvinov, Constance Garnett and Marian Fell (New York: Norton)
Creasman, Boyd. 1990. ‘Gurov’s Flights of Emotion in Chekhov’s “Lady with a
Dog”’, Studies in Short Fiction, 27: 257–60
De Maegd-Soëp, Carolina. 1987. Chekhov and Women: Women in the Life and Work
of Chekhov (Columbus: Slavica Publishers)
Fulford, Robert. 2004. ‘Surprised by Love: Chekhov and “The Lady with The
Dog”’, Queen’s Quarterly, 111: 331–40
Greenberg, Yael. 1991. ‘The Presentation of the Unconscious in Chekhov’s Lady
with Lapdog’, Modern Language Review, 86: 126–30
Linaker, Tanya. 2005. ‘A Witch, a Bitch or a Goddess? Female Voices Transcending
Gender as Heard and Recorded by Chekhov, Mansfield, and Nabokov’, Slovo,

17: 165–78
Malcolm, Janet. 2001. Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random
House)
Phelan, James. 1996. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press)
Phelan, James and Peter J. Rabinowitz, eds. 1994. Understanding Narrative
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press)
Porter, Richard N. 1977. ‘Bunin’s “A Sunstroke” and Chekhov’s “The Lady with
the Dog”’, South Atlantic Bulletin, 42: 51–6
Proust, Marcel. 1993. In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff,
Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: Modern
Library)
Rabinowitz, Peter J. 1987. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of
Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; reprint Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 1998)
Rayfield, Donald. 1999. Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov’s Prose
and Drama (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press)
Smith, Virginia Llewellyn. 1973. Anton Chekhov and the Lady with the Dog (Oxford
University Press)
7
‘Let’s Forget All I Have Just Said’:
Diversions and Digressions in

Gidean Narratives
David H. Walker
For Gide, the essence of writing novels is to lose sight of the shore,
disdaining those who hug the coastline: creation requires the authentic
artist to ‘navigate for days and days without any land in sight’ (Gide
2009b: 435, 528). Given also his attachment to ‘inconséquence’ in his
characters1 and adventitious happenings in the development of his
narratives (Gide 1966: 56), Gide’s fictions are particularly susceptible to
defying the predictable, the relevant, in pursuit of the kind of erratic
outgrowths that can be grouped under the heading of ‘digressions’.
A classic instance occurs early in The Vatican Cellars when the narrator
apologizes for embarking on a passage which may not have a bearing
on the business in hand:
At this point, despite my desire to recount only the essential, I cannot

let Anthime Armand-Dubois’s wen go unmentioned. For as long as I
have not learned more surely to distinguish the incidental from the
necessary, what else should I ask of my pen but exactness and rigour?
And who indeed could affirm that this wen had no share, no weight, in
the decisions of what Anthime called his free thought? (Gide 1952: 8)
The narrator is conscious of the need to be relevant, to be thematically

consistent. But to obey this requirement would entail a choice he feels
ill-equipped to make. He is, after all, still in the opening stages of the
novel and is entitled to the conceit that he does not yet know where
he is going, what will turn out to have significance. The passage high-
lights criteria that conventionally preside over what to include and
what to exclude; notably, here, whether or not a certain physiological
feature might have a function in determining human behaviour and
might thereby corroborate a thematic or ideological premise. And in the
94
Diversions and Digressions in Gidean Narratives 95
absence of a decisive understanding of such issues, the passage implies,

the realist narrator includes things because they are there. As heir to
the fin de siècle’s scorn for the novel, Gide is duty bound to show that
he does not take too seriously the genre’s claim to referential fidelity or
authority. Hence these lines are typical of the classic self-conscious text,

defying convention by introducing an extradiegetic digression in order
to raise questions about its own method and validity.
This is a standard example, taken from a novel purporting to be open-
ended, whose storyline comes into being as we read it. But Gide is well
known also for his récits, retrospective narratives in which his protago-
nist-narrator recreates in the first person a story he or she has already
lived. In this form the digression takes on a different function, as the
narrative strategy is bound up with a more or less conscious need to
vindicate a view of events which are already complete in the past. Here
digression is bound up with stories that tell half-truths by redistribut-
ing emphases between incidents. The minister-narrator of La Symphonie
pastorale provides a good illustration. In recounting the story of how he
came to welcome into his family home a blind orphan whom he subse-
quently falls in love with, the pastor aims to make of the tale an innocu-
ous morality, highlighting questions of education, child development
and theology. The first part of the text is a retrospective retelling of how
she came to stay and how the pastor initiated her education; the second
part is more properly a diary in which the pastor records his day-to-day
dealings with the girl and with his own family. Towards the end of part
one is a section introduced by the pastor as if it were a departure from
his main narrative:
Gertrude was a very eager reader; but as I wished as far as possible

to keep in touch with the development of her mind, I preferred
her not to read too much – or at any rate not too much without
me – and especially not the Bible – which may seem very strange for
a Protestant. I will explain myself; but before touching on a question
so important, I wish to relate a small circumstance which is con-
nected with music. (Gide 1963: 35–6)
The upcoming episode is announced as of little significance, merely an

afterthought having a bearing on music (the pastor and Gertrude have
recently attended a performance of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony). In
fact the ‘small circumstance’ in question consists of the pastor’s stumb-
ling upon his son giving music lessons to Gertrude; on discovering he
had a rival for the girl’s affections, he has compelled Jacques to leave
96 David H. Walker
home and abandon plans to propose marriage to her. The memory of

this outcome is in the pastor’s mind as he begins recounting the event,
which means he is being duplicitous (or insensitive to his son’s pain)
in seeking to make of it a mere digression. But even before he has
embarked on this anecdote, it has fulfilled the function of a digression

in that it serves to deflect attention and defer the need to explain the
suspicious claim that he has sought to restrict Gertrude’s reading and
above all to control her reading the Bible. Here, therefore, the digressive
strategy is charged with significance as it is used by a culpable narrator
to dubious and misleading ends.
Gide’s third-person narrators are never quite so concerned to elude
guilt. On the contrary, they exercise their freedom with some non-
chalance. Having inserted into The Vatican Cellars a passage on Anthime’s
wen in possible defiance of the rules of relevance, the narrator sub-
sequently rounds on his hero Lafcadio as the latter contemplates rescuing
a family from a house fire: ‘Lafcadio, my friend, here you need the pen
of a newspaper reporter – mine abandons you! Do not expect me to retail
the confused exclamations of the crowd, the cries’ (Gide 1952: 56). Here
he refuses the extraneous material that Lafcadio’s actions would entail.
He can take or leave digressions as the spirit moves him, it would seem.
In this sense, digressions are part of Gide’s ludic stock in trade. Indeed he
applied the playful label ‘sotie’ to many of his texts, conceding the design-
ation ‘first novel’ only to The Counterfeiters. But this narrative features
a narrator of particularly flamboyant intrusiveness, whose interjections
constitute a key element in the text (Walker 1986). Two instances will
give a flavour. When at a particularly dramatic moment Laura collapses,
overcome with emotion, onto a chair which proves unequal to the task
it is called upon to fulfil, the narrator suspends the action: ‘Here there
occurs a grotesque incident, which I hesitate to recount,’ and there fol-
lows a proliferating parenthesis offering a disquisition on the particular
weaknesses of the chair and, among other details, its similarity to a bird
bending its leg up underneath its wing (Gide 1966: 117–18). This digres-
sion is playing with the mechanisms of suspense while giving free rein
to the self-generating dynamic of literary expression. If such passages
show the narrator deliberately drawing attention to narrative metalepsis,
there is a further form of digression which undermines its own status. As
Bernard reads the diary he has purloined from Edouard’s suitcase, three
chapters reproduce the text that he reads. At the end of the second of
these, ‘Bernard had to stop reading for a moment,’ we read. There fol-
lows a commentary by the narrator on his state of mind; then: ‘Let us
move on. All I have said above is merely intended to introduce a little air
between the pages of this diary’ (1966: 106). Retroactively the narrator
reduces his intervention to the status of a mere digression, an insignifi-
cant aside to the ongoing process that is the stuff of the narrative.
In fact Gide was already practising such techniques a quarter-century
earlier, in Prometheus Misbound (Le Prométhée mal enchaîné) of 1899,

a text whose wit and artistry are underestimated, in my view. It pro-
vides spectacular examples of the uses to which digressions can be put.
The construction of a plot is the very stuff of this text; it is the explicit
concern of the café-waiter, a character who acts as a kind of master of
ceremonies or novelist within the text. His function in life is to bring
people together by seating strangers at the same table, so that they may
interact with one another, enabling him to study ‘the relations between
personalities’ (Gide 1953: 106–7).
However, despite this concern for relations, the structure of Prometheus
Misbound, as its very title suggests, is disjointed. The text falls into three
parts, and is divided throughout into both numbered and titled chap-
ters; but the two types of chapter are not homologous, and do not fit
into any overall structural frame. Those with titles are interrupted by
divisions corresponding to the sequence of numbered chapters; and
similarly, they themselves follow a sequence which cuts across the
flow of the numbered chapters. No sooner do we embark on reading
a sequence whose coherence is implied by its title or number, than
our progression is sidetracked by a heading promising a sequence of
a different kind. Thus the two sets of sequences represent alternating
digressions from each other. Holdheim (1959) argues that the sequence
of numbered chapters traces and corresponds to the interplay between
events and between characters, while the chapters with titles high-
light the individual, subjective and essentially separate state of each
character. The lack of fit between the two systems suggests a kind of
incompatibility between two views on human reality, a tension between
two distinct domains in which human reality is played out.
When the three characters Damocles, Cocles and Prometheus, seated
together at the same café table, embark on their acquaintance by intro-
ducing themselves, their conversation turns on one recurring theme:
the manner in which a chance event can constitute a turning point
dictating someone’s destiny. What has befallen each character, as the
reader pieces together while digesting their separate stories, is that they
have been picked out as playthings by Zeus, the ‘millionaire’ banker,
who personifies the random influences which impinge indifferently
on human beings and the rest of the universe. We learn that he has
fortuitously selected Cocles to address an envelope to the person whose
98 David H. Walker
name first came into his head, and to be the recipient of a mighty slap
in exchange. Damocles in turn receives by mail a 500-franc note in the
envelope Cocles addressed to him as ‘a perfect stranger’ (Gide 1953: 115).
A point to observe is that the original encounter between Zeus and Cocles
occurred through the adventitious conjunction of Zeus dropping a hand-

kerchief and Cocles being in the vicinity. Moreover, Zeus at first merely
thanks Cocles ‘and was about to continue his way, when, changing his
mind, he leaned towards the thin person’ (1953: 101). He could just as
easily have proceeded on his way, and none of what follows would have
happened. The very existence of the story is fortuitous: its substance is
a digression from what was about to happen otherwise. Moreover, the
motif of alternative paths for the narrative is highlighted in subsequent
events. Cocles, who first incurs a vicious slap from Zeus and then loses
an eye when Prometheus’s eagle swoops down into the café, responds
positively and actually does surprisingly well out of his misfortunes;
he becomes the beneficiary of a public appeal and sets up a hostel for
one-eyed people, appointing himself its director. On the other hand, the
windfall which comes Damocles’s way unexpectedly provokes in him an
enfeebling guilt, a sense of responsibility which prompts him to dispose
of the money at the first opportunity (on a glass eye for Cocles, among
other things); thereafter he succumbs to distress and remorse at the
thought of the unknown person who had been deprived of the cash, and
dwindles to death as a result. Not only are these two characters presented
as illustrations of alternative outcomes from the same random event;
we can also see that while the one could just as easily have received the
banknote and the other the slap, so too extreme distress might have been
more likely to flow from Cocles’s mischance while great happiness could
more readily be imagined to ensue from the large sum of money that
falls into Damocles’s lap. The pairing of these individual stories serves
to illustrate a model of narrative structure which stresses the fact that
any story consists of a series of moments at which digressive bifurcations
occur. Thus a typical narrative sequence starts with the possibility of a
certain action or event: confronted by a closed door and no answer to
our knocking, we may break the door down – or we may not.2
The story proceeds, after posing the possibility or virtuality of an
incident, via the realization (or otherwise) of the incident, and its result.
What characterizes the stories of Damocles and Cocles is that though
they conform to this process, they are shadowed, as it were, by the
unrealized virtualities which, rather than being superseded by the actual
course of events, remain in our minds because they are invested with
a greater weight of plausibility. The sequence which realizes itself does
not conform to primary patterns of narrative verisimilitude. Indeed it

ostentatiously avoids a more conventional storyline which the reader is
tempted to compose in his or her own mind on the basis of the ‘over-
coded, ready-made paths’, as Umberto Eco calls them, deriving from our
past experience of the kind of thing which normally happens in stories:

loss of an eye triggers misfortune while acquisition of money produces
an increase in happiness (see Eco 1981: 214–16). This branching narra-
tive presents its two paths as entirely contingent, and just as likely – on
balance, marginally more likely – to have produced different outcomes.
What is stressed by this type of narrative structure is that events and
actions do not necessarily produce the results we might expect. The
‘Epilogue’ to the book confirms this idea through its evocation of
Pasiphaë who hoped that consorting with a bull might result in her
producing a child of Zeus as happened to Leda after her adventure with
the swan: instead of which she merely gave birth to a calf. In a sense we
are here in a version of Borges’s ‘Garden of Forking Paths’, a tale in his
Labyrinths: the storyline we read represents a digression from the more
compelling one which for that very reason remains within our minds.
Elsewhere in the story, another pair of parallel paths emerges, linking
in this case the fate of Damocles and that of Prometheus. The crucial
analogy lies between the remorse which is devouring Damocles and the
eagle which feeds on Prometheus’s liver. The significance of the parallel
derives chiefly from the outcome of each story: Damocles dies from what
is eating him, while Prometheus quite literally makes a meal of his eagle,
overcoming the enfeebling conscience it represents. Here too, then, the
narrative presents forking paths leading from the same initial ingredients,
implying that for one set of events which occurs there is an equally possi-
ble though diametrically opposed alternative. Thus the plot of Prometheus
Misbound is conceived in such a way as to highlight the contingency
governing human affairs. None of these things had to happen, and they
could well have happened differently. They were largely ‘adventures’, in
the sense of unpredictable occurrences,3 and therefore deny validity to
structures involving exclusive unilinear connections between groups of
events.
‘See how today everything somehow links up (tout s’enchaîne), yet
instead of explaining itself becomes still more complicated,’ complains
Cocles when the bare facts are initially revealed and corroborated by the
separate narratives of each protagonist (Gide 1953: 116). This allusion to
the title of the text calls for further consideration. What we notice in the
first part of Prometheus Misbound is that the protagonists offer projections
of their experience in the form of narratives: each contribution is headed
100 David H. Walker
‘The Story of [...]’. But narrative cannot accommodate the chance inter-
action and digressive outcomes which characterize a large part of this
experience: its structure transforms open-ended, multivalent gratuitous-
ness into one-dimensional teleological necessity; so neither singly nor
together – after four different versions of the salient events – can the

various narrators provide a satisfactory account of what has happened to
them. Such specious connections as they can suggest by means of nar-
rative merely complicate matters rather than explaining their situation.
The whole sequence, the entire ‘chronique’, remains mal enchaîné.
A noticeable exception to the pattern in part one is the fact that
Prometheus’s contribution is not announced as ‘The Story of […]’, but
simply with the words, ‘Prometheus Speaks’ (Gide 1953: 118). We may
perhaps suppose that he has no (hi)story because he does not exist in
the same contingent world as the others, being a mythological stereo-
type who has merely strayed into Paris from the Caucasus of legend; or
alternatively, that he has had no ‘adventures’ in the short time he has
been there. (The dramatic incidents his eagle precipitates suffice for it to
have an ‘histoire’.) More to the point perhaps, anything he has to con-
tribute has ‘so little connection’ (1953: 118), and therefore would not
fit into the system of relations the others are seeking to construct out of
their experiences.4 Prometheus’s more relevant contribution will come
later; and it is significant that even then he continues to avoid narrative
but adopts a different form of discourse, that of the public lecture. This
represents another attempt to come up with an explanatory discourse
aimed at integrating subjective experience and the external world.
Prometheus’s lecture highlights once more, with particular force,
the problems involved in speaking about the contingent quality of
human reality. In the absence of a principle in which to ground moral
discourses, Prometheus’s lecture exhibits features of another attempt at
coherence, complementing those patterns of narrative coherence we
have already seen discredited: here logical connections take over from
cause and effect connections. They are no more effective: Prometheus
ties himself up in the circular logic of the pétition de principe (begging
the question) in seeking to demonstrate how people should conduct
their lives. In fact Prometheus’s lecture stands as a satire of rational
approaches to contingency. From the outset he invokes the standard
methods of classical rhetoric in support of his case, and already the self-
conscious asides hint at the digressions to come:
My lecture, gentlemen, has three points; (I felt there was no need

to reject this style of construction, which suits my classical turn of
mind.) – And with this as an exordium, I will now announce, in

advance and without meretricious disguise, the first two points of
my discourse. (1953: 135)
The rhetorical questions, apostrophes and rhythmic sentence structures

that follow all stem from the same source and stand as flourishes
intended to keep the audience’s attention while camouflaging the
impossibility of his core purpose. Their comic futility is underlined
by the caricatural digressions represented by Prometheus’s recourse to
fireworks and obscene photographs, which he circulates at moments
when his public is losing interest; and by tricks his eagle performs as
diversions ‘after every tedious portion’ (1953: 134). Here we see that
digressions have a role – largely phatic – and a value – entertainment
value – in discourses other than narrative.
By the conclusion of Prometheus’s lecture, therefore, we have been
presented with critiques concerning the discourses employed to speak
of gratuitousness. But the end of Prometheus’s lecture is not the end
of his story; and this text has more to say on the matters it has raised.
The third part of Prometheus Misbound recounts the illness and death
of Damocles. These events have a considerable impact on Prometheus,
since the death of Damocles was in part due to the influence of
Prometheus’s own lecture. A transformed Prometheus appears at the
funeral of Damocles and presents an oration which appears to exem-
plify a discourse better suited to engage with gratuitousness. It is an
‘Histoire’, but its form is that of narrative fiction. It does not recapitulate
the lives of the protagonists, but transposes their concerns into a nar-
rative structure which is symbolic, rather than referential. It concerns
Tityrus, the erstwhile protagonist of the fiction-within-the-fiction of
Paludes (1895), who devotes himself to an idea sown, in the form of a
seed in the midst of his marshlands, by Ménalque. The seed grows into
a tree which dries out the marshes, making them suitable for cultivation
and bringing an ever-increasing burden of obligations for Tityrus as he
takes on a workforce, administers the resulting population, supervizes
the local economy, appoints office staff, a judiciary and so on. Finally,
the commitment becomes too much for him and, prompted by his wife
Angèle, he breaks the ties that bind him to his tree and heads for Paris.
There Angèle in turn is captivated by the pastoral pipes of the naked
Mœlibeus (like Tityrus and Menalcas a character from Virgil’s Bucolics)
and leaves for Rome, disappearing arm in arm with him into the sunset.
The story is judged highly amusing and is enjoyed by all the listeners,
although Cocles remarks: ‘Your story was charming, and you amused
102 David H. Walker
us extremely […], but I didn’t quite grasp the connection’ (1953: 171).
‘If there had been more of a connection, you wouldn’t have laughed so
much,’ Prometheus replies: but Cocles’s question implies that this ora-
tion is merely a digression. At the same time it makes another crucial
reference to links, connections and relationships, which run like a motif

through the text as a whole. Narrative discourses reconstitute history
in unilinear cause and effect sequences which do not explain reality;
rhetoric and logic encapsulate moral questions within the articulations
of circular arguments; does Prometheus’s fictional narrative offer a more
appropriate ‘enchaînement’ of the text’s elements?
The first thing to note is that though at first it appears to be a digres-
sion from the ongoing narrative around it, the ‘Story of Tityrus’ is a
mise en abyme; it relates to the main narrative via structural parallels
and metaphorical cross-references rather than in any linear or logical
way. Passing motifs echo allusions encountered earlier in Prometheus
Misbound: for example the seed parallels the slap, banknote and eagle
in that it engenders proliferating obligations. Numerous other cross-
references mark the establishment of sense via associative networks,
and ground the mal enchaîné text in which this digression is embedded
in a homogeneous composition. So much so, suggests Helen Watson-
Williams, that the incoherence which is the raison d’être of the overall
work is almost invalidated: ‘The effect of Gide’s transposition is […] to
reduce the dispersed and apparently digressive story of Prometheus to
its main outline’ (1967: 52). Above all, the fiction is itself gratuitous;
it represents therefore humanity’s appropriate response to the contin-
gency of the universe. Prometheus both prefaces and follows his story
with the words: ‘Let’s forget all I have just said’ (Gide 1953: 163, 171).
This is perhaps the ultimate formulation of a pointless digression: he
could just as easily not have said anything. He has produced a discourse
which does not arrogate to itself a false impression of logical, moral or
mechanical necessity.
Prometheus declares after the company have eaten the eagle that he
has kept all its feathers; and the narrator, in the final lines of the nar-
rative, announces: ‘It is with a pen made from one of them that I have
written this little book’ (1953: 173). The remark extends the scope of
the debate about the eagle and its uses beyond the world of the diegesis,
and prompts us to consider the relationship of the author to the fic-
tion. This relationship is of course already inherent in the portrayal of
Prometheus’s development into a storyteller; but in Prometheus Misbound
can be seen clear indications of Gide’s own developing aesthetic of the
novel (Goulet 1981). Already he is presenting a highly self-conscious
example of the genre, setting out to question novelistic conventions

through its form as well as its content. Most notably for present pur-
poses, transitions in the story are handled with a cavalier disregard for
coherence and consistency, as we have seen in connection with the two
contradictory systems of chapter divisions. The leitmotif ‘while we’re

on the subject, here is an anecdote’ marks transitions which inaugurate
digressions and highlight the actual lack of connection between the
elements thus linked (Fillaudeau 1985: 108); and when the same phrase
is uttered by characters within the story after initially being established
as an instrument of the narrator (Gide 1953: 105, 107, 163) it provokes
a subtle kind of disjunction since the overlap between the language of
the narrator and that of the characters suggests a narrative metalepsis,
or blurring of levels in the narrative hierarchy, which takes digression
further as a challenge to conventional consistency of technique.
Frequently the narrator breaks into the fabric of his fiction with digres-
sive remarks which draw our attention to the fact that the text is an
artificial construction: ‘The reader will allow us […] to pay no further
attention for the present to a person of whom he will see quite enough
in the sequel’ (1953: 102) he says in conclusion to the opening sequence.
Later, he brings an episode to a close with the remark: ‘The end of this
chapter can present only a much inferior interest to the reader’ (1953:
122); and one chapter heading actually reads: ‘A Chapter to Keep the
Reader Waiting for the Next’ (1953: 131). Elsewhere the narrator admits
he is not omniscient and introduces a new chapter with the words: ‘Not
having known him personally, we have promised ourselves to speak only
briefly of Zeus […] Let us report simply these few phrases’ (1953: 151).
Similarly, the chapter titles interrupt the flow of the narrative – reinforcing
the impression of a narrative which is mal enchaîné or digressive – to tell
us what is coming while paradoxically postponing its arrival:
Damocles said:
THE STORY OF DAMOCLES. (1953: 110–11)
All these devices are typical of a certain kind of self-conscious digres-

sive fiction, drawing on eighteenth-century models such as Diderot’s
Jacques le fataliste, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or Fielding’s Tom Jones. Gide’s
most significant contribution to the trend is generally held to be The
Counterfeiters, but Prometheus Misbound can be seen to anticipate the tech-
niques of the later text by a quarter of a century. The interactive aspects
of digressions are foregrounded, held up for scrutiny: ‘Gentlemen, I see,
from the absence of your amazement that I am telling my story badly,’
104 David H. Walker
says Damocles (1953: 112) and the phatic aspects of digressions – used
as ingredients to maintain the reader’s attention – are satirized in the
fireworks and photographs which Prometheus distributes during his
lecture.
Hence Prometheus Misbound can be seen to be flamboyantly self-con-

scious, flaunting its own digressions. It highlights in its burlesque way
the interpenetration of forms and structures which are used convention-
ally to create an impression of a seamless reality. Here the resolutely
disjoined – mal enchaîné – structure through which they are presented
makes of Prometheus Misbound a forerunner of those modern texts of
which Jonathan Culler has written: ‘In place of the novel as mimesis we
have the novel as a structure which plays with different modes of order-
ing and enables the reader to understand how he makes sense of the
world’ (1975: 238).
Notes
1. ‘Inconsistency. Characters in a novel or play who act all the way through
exactly as one expects them to […] This consistency of theirs, which is held
up to our admiration, is on the contrary the very thing which makes us
recognize that they are artificially composed’ (Gide 1966: 295).
2. Bremond has developed a model of narrative as bifurcating possibilities
(1981: 66–83). This theory of narrative structure is discussed in Rimmon-
Kenan (1983: 22–8) and Bal (1985: 19–23).
3. The influence of the ‘roman d’aventures’, theorized most notably by Jacques
Rivière in 1913, was openly acknowledged by Gide. See O’Neill (1969).
4. In quotations from the standard English translation, words or phrases under-
lined indicate modifications made in the interest of accuracy or to restore
relevant nuances present in the original.
Bibliography
Bal, Mieke. 1985. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans.
Christine van Boheemen (University of Toronto Press)
Bremond, C. 1973. Logique du récit (Paris: Seuil)
—— 1981. ‘La logique des possibles narratifs’, Communications, 8: L’Analyse struc-
turale du récit (Paris: Seuil), pp. 66–83
Cancalon, Elaine D. 1981. ‘Les Formes du discours dans Le Prométhée mal
enchaîné’, Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide, 9.49: 35–44
Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul)
Eco, Umberto. 1981. The Role of the Reader (London: Hutchinson)
Fillaudeau, Bertrand. 1985. L’Univers ludique d’André Gide (Paris: José Corti)
Gide, André. 1952. The Vatican Cellars, trans. Dorothy Bussy (London: Cassell)
—— 1953. Marshlands and Prometheus Misbound, trans. George Painter (London:
Secker and Warburg)
—— 1963. La Symphonie pastorale and Isabelle, trans. Dorothy Bussy

(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books)
—— 1966. The Counterfeiters, trans. Dorothy Bussy (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Modern Classics)
—— 2009a. Romans et récits, œuvres lyrique et dramatiques, ed. Pierre Masson,
I (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’)

—— 2009b. Romans et récits, œuvres lyrique et dramatiques, édition publiée sous
la direction de Pierre Masson, II (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’)
[English versions of texts referred to in this edition are my own.]
Goulet, Alain. 1981. ‘Le Prométhée mal enchaîné: une étape vers le roman’, Bulletin
des Amis d’André Gide, IX, 9.49: 45–52
Holdheim, W. W. 1959. ‘The Dual Structure of Le Prométhée mal enchaîné’, Modern
Language Notes, 74: 714–20
O’Neill, Kevin. 1969. André Gide and the Roman d’Aventure, Australian Humanities
Research Council Monograph 15 (Sydney University Press)
Rimmon-Kenan, S. 1983. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London:
Methuen)
Walker, David H. 1986. ‘Continuity and discontinuity in Les Faux-Monnayeurs’,
French Studies, 40: 413–26
Watson-Williams, Helen. 1967. André Gide and the Greek Myth (Oxford: Clarendon
Press)
8
Errant Eyes: Digression, Metaphor
and Desire in Marcel Proust’s

In Search of Lost Time
Margaret Topping
What can I say? Life is too short and Proust is too long.
(Anatole France)
Perhaps it’s just me, but I can’t understand how some-

one can spend thirty pages describing how he tosses
and turns in bed before falling asleep. (Manuscript
reader for Ollendorf)
[T]he whole thing could be cut by half, by three-

quarters, by nine-tenths. (Jacques Madeleine)1
Considering that the beginning and end of Marcel Proust’s In Search

of Lost Time were written in preliminary form as early as 1911 to cre-
ate the symmetrical diptych of ‘Time Lost’ and ‘Time Regained’, one
might provocatively argue that the 3000-page, seven-volume novel into
which these initial two volumes organically evolved in the period until
Proust’s death in 1922 is largely composed of digressions from this tele-
ological frame.2 As the sampling of critical evaluations above suggests,
readers have often condemned Proust’s narrative and stylistic wander-
ings: errancy has been perceived as error.
Proust’s errancy encompasses not only grand narrative sweeps such
as the novella within the novel, ‘Swann in Love’, or the prolonged
reflection on grief in the penultimate volume, The Fugitive; it also draws
in more localized intradiegetical digressions: the narrator/protagonist
may, for instance, encounter another character and, through a series
of associative leaps, guide us far from our point of departure – in a
gesture, a word, a facial expression – to some social or psychological
meditation, some past or future moment, some seemingly unconnected
106
Errant Eyes 107
person or place. The dynamic mobility of the text thus becomes a

source of readerly disorientation. Moments such as these generate some
of the novel’s most tantalizing stylistic digressions too, in the form of
sentences which, over dozens of lines, pile subordinate clause upon
subordinate clause. How then should the reader seeking, like Anatole

France, to make Proust shorter and life longer respond? Pierre Bayard,
in his study of Proustian digression, tackles this question by tentatively
opposing ‘necessity’ and ‘utility’ (1996: 26). Thus, while Proust’s sty-
listic meanderings may not be necessary to the grammatical integrity of
the main clause within which they are embedded nor, indeed, to the
novel’s broader ‘plot’, they are ‘useful’ as a means of elaborating ideas.
Yet to categorize these errant moments as merely ‘useful’ is to flatten
out Proust’s multi-levelled, multi-directional and polyphonic text. It is
also to imply that such ‘digressions’ are not integral to Proust’s vision,
whereas it is precisely these moments of ‘deviation’, I would argue, that
prompt a freshness of perception in the reader, challenging him/her, as
Ross Chambers proposes in Loiterature, to see in ways that run counter
to the ‘disciplined and the orderly, the hierarchical and the stable, the
methodical and the systematic’ (1999: 10). Digression, for Chambers,
‘blows up’ linearity (1999: 118), replacing ‘a simplifying sense of order’
with a ‘dehierarchizing disorder’ (1999: 119). Crucially in relation to
Proust, though, Chambers argues that ‘linear pro-gression from point to
point is not incompatible with, and in fact can be seen to generate, clog-
ging, slippage and blowing up – the delights of di-gression and multi-
dimensionality’ (1999: 124). The teleological movement of the Search
from ‘time lost’ to ‘time regained’ is thus not antithetical to a peripatetic
journey. Indeed, the peripatetic may be its very condition.
As an illustration of the functions and effects of digression in the Search,
this chapter focuses on the motif of the wandering eye, the desiring gaze
which roams throughout the novel, frequently transformed through an
intense metaphorization by Proust. Bayard hesitates to classify metaphor
as digression (1996: 59–69, 127), yet Proustian metaphor links sugges-
tively to the mechanics of ‘loitering’ as understood by Chambers: in its
Bakhtinian synthesis of high and low, sublime and trivial, comic and
tragic, and in its reliance on incongruous juxtapositions, Proustian meta-
phor tests and stretches moral codes, social conventions and readerly
expectations. As Proust writes, in terms echoed in Chambers’s celebration
of the figure’s capacity to embody ‘similarity in difference’ (1999: 120):
One can list infinitely in a description all the objects that figured in
the place described, but the truth will begin only when the writer
108 Margaret Topping
takes two different objects, establishes their relationship, the ana-

logue in the world of art of the unique relation created in the world
of science by the laws of causality, and encloses them within the nec-
essary armature of a beautiful style. Indeed, just as in life, it begins
at the moment when, by bringing together a quality shared by two

sensations, [the writer] draws out their common essence by uniting
them with each other, in order to protect them from the contingen-
cies of time, in a metaphor. (Proust 2002, VI: 198)
Metaphor produces ‘continuity-in-disjunction’ (Chambers 1999: 120):

beneath the surface impression of distance and disconnection (Bayard’s
‘écart’ [1996: 139]), one finds unexpected resemblance, surprising ‘cross-
ties’. Metaphors thus serve to generate some new ‘truth’, both individu-
ally and in their relationship to the wider web of metaphorical allusion
on which the novel is constructed. Structural and metaphorical arches,
spanning up to 3000 pages, are the cohesive forces of the Search: beneath
a façade of superfluity or excess, they cumulatively stimulate and create
the development of character and situation in the novel, and are thus
integral to its forward – if not exclusively forward-looking – movement.
As regards the specific motif under discussion here, Proust, it gradu-
ally becomes clear, devotes sustained attention to certain characters’
eyes; yet what may seem like no more than an arbitrary ‘excess of narra-
tive zeal’ (Bayard 1996: 44) is, I would argue, a carefully contrived riddle
for the reader, the answer to which is the character’s homosexuality.
The reader is initially forced into the same blind stance as the naïve
young narrator/protagonist, a figure who rarely suspects a character’s
outward (hetero)sexual identity may be deceptive. However, the voice
of the mature extradiegetical writer can be heard whispering in the
background, planting clues – appreciated only in retrospect – that we
may have to reconsider our assumptions. Excess thus becomes essential,
not only revealing hidden identities, but also playing out, and play-
ing with, contemporary perceptions of homosexuality as ‘exceeding’
conventional moral boundaries, as departing (digressing) from societal
‘norms’.3 This motif, that is itself grounded in mobility, thus illustrates
that digression in the novel is a deliberate, selective and dynamic device
which advances, rather than impedes, the narrator’s search and ultimate
epiphany.
Proust’s descriptions of his characters’ eyes are ingeniously diverse,
ranging from the piercing, birdlike variety of the Guermantes to those
of M. de Cambremer which are as unpleasant to behold as a surgical
operation (Graham 1966: 71, 58). Yet these are mere fleeting references
Errant Eyes 109
in contrast to Proust’s prolonged focus on the eyes of characters who

are ultimately revealed to be homosexual. The ‘flaw’ in the disguise that
contemporary societal prejudice has obliged homosexuals to assume
is, for Proust, the eyes, the traditional site of self-betrayal. Thus, their
eyes are variously ‘as active as those of a painter sketching’, or those of

a hungry animal; the signals they emit to other homosexuals are like
lighthouses, or stars; and ‘the intensity of such gazes [for Proust] makes
them seem almost corrosive’ (Graham 1966: 82).
Within this paradigm, no character’s eyes betray more than those
of that singularly complex, contradictory and carnivalesque figure, the
baron de Charlus. Our first encounter with him, in In the Shadow of
Young Girls in Flower, is immediately preceded by his nephew Saint-Loup’s
boastful pronouncements on Charlus’s enthusiastic heterosexuality. An
expectation of linear character development is thus deliberately created
only to be defied by Proust’s subsequent digression, discussed below, into
the nature of Charlus’s gaze. In a fitting play of dual identities, Proust is
both ‘mystificateur’ and heuristic detective: he may leave clues for the
still naïve reader and narrator/protagonist, but he cannot solve them on
our behalf. The rectification of this illusion and the acquisition of knowl-
edge are thus deferred pending the reader’s and the young narrator/pro-
tagonist’s deciphering of both the textual digression and the experience
respectively.
The narrator recounts: ‘I was walking back to the hotel when, right
in front of the Casino, I had a sudden feeling of being looked at by
someone at quite close quarters’ (Proust 2002: II, 332). This as yet
unidentified figure is cast in the role of the observer, the voyeur, while
the narrator is the observed, the vu. He continues:
[He was] staring at me with eyes dilated by the strain of attention.

At times, they seemed [to be pierced] with intense darting glances of
a sort which, when directed towards a total stranger, can only ever
be seen from a man whose mind is visited by thoughts that would
never occur to anyone else, a madman, say, or a spy. He flashed a
final look at me, like the parting shot from one who turns to run,
daring, cautious, swift and searching; then having [looked] all about,
with a sudden air of idle haughtiness, his whole body made a quick
side-turn and he began a close study of a poster. (2002, II: 332)
This prolonged extract – in particular, the oddly diffuse second sen-

tence – far exceeds the basic line of action that relates how Charlus
stares at the young narrator, then turns away. Yet it is this expansiveness
which situates the passage – the work of a quintessentially arch Proust –

firmly within the proleptic logic of the narrative as a whole, for it baits
the reader and, indeed, the young intradiegetical narrator/protagonist,
with early, if still dim, intimations as to Charlus’s true sexual identity:
as Martin Jay highlights, ‘the dilation of the pupil can unintention-

ally betray an inner state, subtly conveying interest or aversion on the
part of the beholder’ (Jay 1993: 10). The ambiguity of the emotion
betrayed by Charlus’s involuntary external reaction – interest or aver-
sion? – aptly reflects the young narrator’s and indeed first-time reader’s
inner confusion as to what Charlus’s gaze implies. What the narra-
tor/protagonist is aware of are the contradictory impulses contained
within the stranger’s gaze: it is at once daring and cautious, swift and
searching, these quasi-oxymoronic formulations auguring the dualities
and contradictions which will gradually emerge within Charlus’s nature
as a whole. The very eclecticism of the images deployed further marks
the narrator/protagonist’s search for some anchoring point to explain
what he sees, while the images themselves suggest how, long before the
discovery of a single character’s homosexuality, Proust is already subtly
rehearsing his open scrutiny of homosexual mores within society in
Sodom and Gomorrah: the images of piercing and of firing a shot may, for
instance, be open to a psychoanalytic reading, while beneath the surface
incongruity of a juxtaposition of madmen and spies, we detect underly-
ing commonalities centred on the hidden, the marginal and the subver-
sive which herald the social identification of homosexuals as outcasts
later in the novel. Yet as if to mark Charlus’s own abrupt resumption
of control, these metaphorical digressions into his obscurely revelatory
gaze are halted by a stylistic transition to the neutral verb ‘to look’ (in
‘having [looked] all about’).4 As Jay further explains, the eyes may be
the locus of an unintentional self-betrayal, but ‘there is [also] a learned
ability to use the eyes to express something deliberately […] Ranging
from the casual glance to the fixed stare, the eye can obey the conscious
will of the viewer in a way denied other more passive senses’ (1993: 10).
The tension between the voluntary and the involuntary gaze, between
digression and a straightforward linearity, is emblematic of the pressure
placed on the homosexual man within Proust’s novelistic universe to
disguise his true nature.
Subsequent encounters with Charlus in this second volume of the
novel are similarly dominated by his gaze, but as if to echo the narrator/
protagonist’s, and indeed reader’s, nascent intuition as to his sexual
identity, what was mere observation evolves by often unexpected
associative leaps of the kind analysed by Bayard (‘sauts’ [1996: 66])
Errant Eyes 111
into more penetrating analysis of the psychological significance of this

physical characteristic. We read:
Although M. de Charlus was careful to keep a hermetic seal on

the expression of his face, to which a faint dusting of powder gave

something theatrical, his eyes were like a crack in the wall, or a loop-
hole in a fortification, which he had been unable to close up, and
through which, depending on one’s position with regard to him, one
felt oneself to be suddenly in the line of fire of some inner device
that seemed potentially perilous, even for the person who, without
having it completely under his control, carried it about with him in
a state of permanent instability and readiness to explode; and the
expression of his eyes, circumspect and incessantly uneasy, left on
his face, whatever its fineness of design and construction, deep marks
of fatigue, including dark circles hanging low under them, and made
one think of an incognito, a disguise adopted by a powerful man
threatened by some danger, or at times just of an individual who was
dangerous, but tragic. (Proust 2002, II: 341–2)
With its layering of clause upon clause, its seemingly unruly excursus
into the disparate metaphorical worlds of the theatre, architecture,
weaponry, disguise and adventure, the entire extract cumulatively
emphasizes the increasing triumph of involuntary over voluntary gaze,
laying the foundations for Charlus’s progressive degeneration and loss of
self-mastery in the course of the novel. The reader likewise experiences
disorientation and a loss of mastery when confronted with this gram-
matically and conceptually complex sentence, for if digression – to recall
Chambers’s image – can be visualized as an escalator that progressively
disrupts linearity, we as readers ‘find [ourselves] skipping back to early,
emergent parts of the climb’ (1999: 123) in order to make sense of it. For
readers confronted with Proust’s monolithic text, this ‘skipping back’ is
required not just to early parts of a given extract, but to earlier threads
in the metaphorical web of images of the errant eye. Beneath the impres-
sion of wayward digression, however, lies narrative control, a crafted-
ness which not only enhances Proust’s positioning of the homosexual’s
public persona between performativity (as implied in the theatre meta-
phor) and automation (suggested in the image of the inexorably ticking
bomb), but also lays the foundation for future moments in the novel.
The structural allusion to the eyes as cracks and loopholes, for instance,
prefigures the architectural eye, the oeil-de-boeuf through which the
narrator, in Time Regained, witnesses Charlus’s masochistic degradation
as he is shackled and whipped in Jupien’s male brothel (Proust 2002,

VI: 123). Yet these ‘digressions’ have more than a proleptic function
in that they also disturb the conventional order, for while the physical
toll taken on Charlus’s eyes by this battle between his true nature and
his now fissured disguise could be interpreted as an endorsement of

the contemporary medical identification of homosexuality as a disease,
Proust’s tone is surely marked by a call for empathy and compassion for
this ultimately tragic figure. Although grounded in ambivalence, there-
fore, the digression at least opens up the possibility of an alternative to
contemporary prejudices.
If, as Martin Jay proposes, ‘the life of vision is one of endless wander-
lust, and in its carnal form the eye is nothing but desire’ (1993: 10), this
desiring gaze is at its most blatant, its most involuntary, in the following
description of Charlus’s rapt attention to one of Mme de Surgis le Duc’s
handsome sons:
Not only were his eyes, like those of a Pythoness on her tripod, start-
ing from his head, but, so that nothing might come to distract him
from labours that required the cessation of the simplest movements,
he had […] put down beside him the cigar which, a short while before,
he had had in his mouth but which he no longer had the necessary
freedom of mind to smoke. On remarking the two crouched divini-
ties borne on its arms by the chair set facing him, you might have
thought that the Baron was seeking to solve the riddle of the Sphinx,
had it not been rather that of a young and living Oedipus, sitting in
that selfsame chair, where he had installed himself in order to play.
(Proust 2002, IV: 93)
Mediated by the classical myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx, the descrip-
tion stresses Charlus’s helpless fascination with the young man. I have
speculated elsewhere on a possible source for Proust’s emphasis on
Charlus’s fixed stare, for while Oedipus may be a fitting symbol of for-
bidden love, the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx is not, in its various
textual retellings, characterized by any spellbound gaze. The source,
I have suggested, may be Gustave Moreau’s Oedipe et le sphinx, mak-
ing this an interaesthetic rather than narrowly intertextual borrow-
ing (Topping 2000: 44–58, 143–4). As such, the range of engagement
demanded of the reader is extended. Each of Bayard’s ‘subject[s] who
make associations’ (1996: 94) creates the text afresh. Yet the mobility
produced by the subjectivity of digression also raises the spectre of a fail-
ure of recognition on the part of an inattentive reader.5 A second reader
Errant Eyes 113
may detect different ekphrastic echoes here; a third may detect none. As
Bayard points out, the textual metaphor exists whether it is deciphered
or not (1996: 127), whereas the possible further digression I have identi-
fied into a subtextual layer of visual reference may be overlooked. What
is potentially lost, though, is the dramatic fixity, the fitting impression

of a suspension of time for Charlus, which seeps in through the possible
evocation of the medium of painting. Pierre-Louis Mathieu’s description
of this particular work draws out these dramatic qualities: ‘It is between
the side-long gaze of this woman […] and the gaze of the man […] that
the drama of this motionless confrontation is played out. There is an
underlying eroticism in this sketch of a monstrous coupling between
man and beast, the latter’s lips parted and ready for a deadly kiss’ (1977:
85). Moreau’s already hyperbolic representation of the myth may thus
have been transformed by Proust into something akin to caricature,
as the writer plays with the comic potential of deliberate incongruity
in imagery. Fittingly, too, comparison with the Moreau painting adds
further nuances to Charlus’s gender ambiguity and to Proust’s concep-
tion of homosexuality as an intersex, as, within the logic of the image,
Charlus initially assumes the role of Oedipus, only to abandon this posi-
tion for that of the Sphinx. Gender boundaries thus blur, for although
the Sphinx was not always depicted as female, in Moreau’s art this leg-
endary creature has the face and naked breasts of a woman, and thus
becomes the sensual seductress.
Yet while the textual image creates an immediate impression of
humour, which is potentially magnified by the incongruity of Charlus’s
embodiment as a figure in Moreau’s painting, this apparent ‘gap’ (écart)
also conceals a subtle, but potent, resemblance.6 For what are the impli-
cations of casting Charlus in the role of Oedipus (among others), that
is, in the role of an epic figure whose tragic destiny is beyond his con-
trol? Might Proust not be suggesting that this is what tragedy means in
the modern world? That a figure defined by forces beyond his control
should be condemned? The dominant role of fate in Oedipus’ incarna-
tion as a symbol of forbidden love seems to imply that homosexuality
is neither a choice nor an illness to be cured, but is rather inherent
to the individual.7 The tragic-comic tone may betray traces of unease
about (his own) homosexuality on Proust’s part, but this metaphorical
digression nonetheless hints that Proust may be testing moral codes and
subtly contesting prevailing ones.8
A consideration of Proust’s handling of the lesbian gaze – as embodied
in the figure of the narrator’s lover, Albertine (a figure who is increasingly
shrouded in suspicions of lesbianism or, at least, bisexuality) – provides
a telling counterpoint to this analysis of the homosexual’s errant eyes,

for the contrast between these two paradigms underlines the deliberate-
ness of Proust’s digressions. In a metonymic extension of her early
association with the unrestrained atmosphere of Balbec, Albertine’s eyes
are likened to the sky or the sea, while elsewhere they are compared to

butterfly wings and precious – although often flawed – jewels (Graham
1966: 67). The boundlessness of both sky and sea, and the sugges-
tions of the transitory and the ephemeral contained in the reference to
butterfly wings seem to herald her resistance to complete possession
by the narrator, while the image of a flawed precious stone betokens
an absence of complete translucency. In other words, the lesbian gaze
appears to invert the operation of the male homosexual gaze, digress-
ing from the patterns drawn out above: Albertine’s eyes are symbols
of her impenetrability, not markers by which the narrator can retro-
spectively grasp her sexual nature. In a further inversion, the lesbian,
unlike the male homosexual who generally assumes the role of desiring
‘voyeur’, is more commonly cast in the role of observed. The young
narrator famously spies on the sadistic scene enacted by Mlle Vinteuil
and her (female) lover in their house at Montjouvain, and any number
of examples, including the entirety of The Captive, depict the closely
guarded Albertine denied the role of ‘voyeur’ in the narrative.9 On the
few occasions when the narrative does grant her the identity of desiring,
observing subject, the writer’s attention to her eyes is not as sustained
as with the male homosexual gaze, marked by relatively few stylistic
digressions. She looks at Mlle Bloch and her lover, for example, with
‘[a] sudden and profound attentiveness’ (Proust 2002, IV: 203). Not only
are these terms almost identical to those appearing in Proust’s descrip-
tion of Charlus’s first stare at the young narrator,10 but the description
evolves no further. Moreover, her gaze is usually indirect (she watches
these known lesbians via a mirror), or is curbed by the presence of the
narrator: ‘there had come into my loved one’s eyes that sudden and pro-
found attentiveness […] But Albertine had at once turned her gaze […]
back on to me’ (2002, IV: 203). The sequence of actions – attentive stare
followed by turning away – echoes strikingly Charlus’s early gaze at
the narrator, yet Proust’s account is not reinvented as metaphor in the
case of Albertine, and only the mere facts are offered. In intradiegetical
terms, this seemingly uneven balance of power may be explained as the
inevitable symptom of the narrator/protagonist’s obsessive surveillance
of Albertine and her acute awareness of that surveillance; but Proust’s
handling of the lesbian gaze might also be adduced in support of those
critics who accuse the writer of eclipsing lesbian desire in favour of a
Errant Eyes 115
detailed scrutiny of male homosexuality and of creating lesbian char-

acters who are fraudulent, little more than thinly disguised men.11
Viewed from this perspective, male homosexual characters appear to be
invested with a power in the text that Albertine is denied.
However, an alternative interpretation of this non-digressive con-

struction of the lesbian gaze might propose that her gaze can be read
as denoting ‘impotence’ or ‘lack’ only from the outsider perspective of
the uncomprehending heterosexual narrator/protagonist. If, in viewing
Albertine, the role he appropriates for himself is always that of subject,
of voyeur, then from his perspective alone is she objectified, allocated
the role of vue, and, in fact, it is his powerlessness to penetrate lesbian
desire that these images betray. The use of near-identical terms to
describe both Charlus’s and later Albertine’s desiring gazes can thus, and
in contrast to the previous interpretation offered, be read as the narra-
tor’s attempt unsuccessfully to assimilate lesbianism to male homosexu-
ality. As if to reflect the inadequacy of this assimilatory position, words
fail and the description of Albertine’s gaze stops far short of the detailed
and repeated teasing out of every aspect of Charlus’s eyes. The power
of digression is lost, replaced by genuine stasis. As such, the absence of
digression conveys how Gomorrah remains a tantalizing enigma for the
desiring heterosexual male subject, the epitome of alterity, indeed, of
what cannot even be visualized.12
To sum up, then, in accompanying Proust on his peripatetic jour-
ney through the desiring gaze, I hope to have illustrated that his
errancy is not to be equated with error, but, rather, that his digressive
meanderings are part of a consciously crafted network of hints and
reminiscences – one of many in the novel – which moves the narrative
forward. Uncovering and deciphering these networks is one of the read-
er’s primary tasks and the novel’s principal pleasures. Digression and a
teleological progression may seem unlikely bedfellows, but the apparent
‘écart’ between them masks an underlying compatibility which allows
room for slippage, seepage and uncertainty and which is appreciated
only when the reading, interpreting subject completes his/her task.
In contrasting the deliberate ‘excess’ of Proust’s treatment of the male
homosexual gaze to the ‘underwriting’ that marks his dramatization of
the lesbian gaze, my aim has been not only to emphasize the control-
led nature of his digressions, deployed or withheld to achieve particular
effects, but also to suggest that Proust has not conflated Sodom and
Gomorrah, that he does not see them as parallel phenomena, as crit-
ics have sometimes argued. Digression thus offers a conscious means
of suggesting their difference and thus contests existing assumptions,
both critical and social. We have also seen how Proust’s digressions in
portraying the male desiring gaze may, beneath a façade of irony or
an apparent confirmation of contemporary stereotypes surrounding
homosexuality, reveal a subtle testing of conventional moral codes. Key
to conveying this challenge is the way that Proust plays with the read-

er’s expectations and the way he transforms the homosexual’s errant
eyes into unexpected metaphors. While we have seen a range of forms
of digression in the course of this discussion – grammatical ‘disruption’
through Proust’s lengthy, disorienting sentences, intertextual and inter-
aesthetic allusion, subtle oscillations between the voices of the mature
narrator/writer and the young narrator/protagonist – it is perhaps meta-
phor above all that has the capacity to prompt a freshness of vision, and
thus to generate the productive challenges to existing hierarchies and
accepted systems of thought that Chambers celebrates in his analysis of
loiterature: ‘Delay and indirection […]’, he proposes, ‘become at once
sources of pleasure and devices of provocation’ (1999: 11). Proust’s
digressions into the world of the errant eye render the gaze of his own
readers mobile, provoking us to see differently.
Notes
1. Cited in Bayard (1996: 11–12). My translations.
2. For the genesis and development of Proust’s novel, see Feuillerat (1934) and
Finch (1977).
3. Although my conclusions aim to counter some of the criticisms of Proust’s
treatment of homosexuality, my purpose here is not to rehearse the debates
already explored in a range of excellent studies, including Rivers (1983),
Ladenson (1999) and Carter (2006).
4. The verb ‘regarder’ in French follows on from such evocative phrases as
‘percer’ ‘fixer [les] yeux’, ‘lancer une suprême oeillade’ (Proust 1987–89,
II: 110).
5. Bayard argues that ‘digression is a subjective phenomenon and, as a
result, only the reading subject is in a position to recognize its existence’
(1996: 121).
6. See Bayard chapter 5 (1996).
7. For contemporary views of homosexuality in these terms, see Rivers (1983).
8. Space does not permit a detailed examination of all the homosexual char-
acters on whose eyes Proust focuses, but one might mention in passing his
attention to Saint-Loup’s monocle (an accessory increasingly associated
with homosexual characters) or the suggestive parallels between Legrandin’s
and Charlus’s gaze. This resemblance is based on an apparent digression
from sexual desire into social desire, for it is in the context of his social
snobbery that Legrandin betrays himself, his homosexuality being revealed
only much later. By focusing on Legrandin’s eyes, however, and particularly
the eyes as a locus of self-betrayal, Proust establishes a link between this
Errant Eyes 117
would-be social climber and Charlus. By subjecting their gazes to a very

Proustian ironic scrutiny, the author is thus not only dangling evidence of
their respective ‘vices’ before us – social and sexual desire are essentially the
same for Proust – but he is also intimating that they share the same ‘vice’.
For examples of Proust’s equally digressive descriptions of Legrandin’s gaze,
see, for instance, 2002, I: 126–8. Comparison between these pages and

Proust’s descriptions of Charlus’s gaze reveals a common use of the verb
‘percer’, similar shadows under their eyes, both gazes’ seemingly independ-
ent will and both gazes’ conflicting impulses, a dialectic which is embodied
stylistically, in both cases, in the use of quasi-oxymoronic structures or
expressions. In retrospect, therefore, the two characters can be inserted into
a coherent pattern of specular/sexual imagery.
9. ‘I held Albertine captive with my eyes’ (Proust 2002, IV: 493); ‘my adhesive
gaze could not be removed from Albertine’ (2002, IV: 493).
10. While the published English version translates the terms of Charlus’s gaze as
‘swift and searching’, the original French text is closer to the description of
Albertine’s gaze: where Albertine’s is ‘brusque et profonde’ (Proust 1987–89,
III: 198), Charlus’s is ‘rapide et profonde’ (1987–89, II: 110).
11. Notable among these critics is Natalie Clifford Barney, whose position is
summarized in Ladenson (1999: 4–5).
12. See Ladenson (1999: 53) on this point.
Bibliography
Carter, William C. 2006. Proust in Love (New Haven: Yale University Press)
Press)
Feuillerat, Albert. 1934. Comment Proust a composé son roman (New Haven: Yale
University Press)
Finch (Winton), Alison. 1977. Proust’s Additions: The Making of ‘A la recherche du
temps perdu’, 2 vols (Cambridge University Press)
Graham, Victor E. 1966. The Imagery of Proust (Oxford: Blackwell)
Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press)
Ladenson, Elisabeth. 1999. Proust’s Lesbianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press)
Mathieu, Pierre-Louis. 1977. Gustave Moreau: Complete Edition of the Finished
Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings, trans. J. Emmons (Oxford: Phaidon)
Proust, Marcel. 1987–89. A la recherche du temps perdu, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,
4 vols (Paris: Gallimard)
—— 2002. In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols, trans. various, ed. Christopher
Prendergast (London: Penguin/Allen Lane)
Rivers, Julius E. 1983. Proust and the Art of Love (New York: Columbia University
Press)
Topping, Margaret. 2000. Proust’s Gods: Christian and Mythological Figures of Speech
in the Works of Marcel Proust (Oxford University Press)
9
Virginia Woolf and Digression:
Adventures in Consciousness

Laura Marcus
The development of Virginia Woolf’s fiction is frequently framed, as it

was by Woolf herself, as a movement away from the more conventional
realist modes of the first two novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night
and Day (1919), to the experiments with the novel form, the search for
‘new names’, as she wrote in her 1927 essay ‘Poetry, Fiction and the
Future’ (Woolf 1994: 435), and new shapes for the novel, inaugurated
in her third novel Jacob’s Room (1922). Her early short stories played a
crucial role in this process of reinvention. Writing in her diary of her
plan for Jacob’s Room to be a novel without ‘scaffolding […] all crepus-
cular’, Woolf stated that she conceived of three of the stories written in
the late 1910s and early 1920s – ‘The Mark on the Wall’, ‘Kew Gardens’
and ‘An Unwritten Novel’ – as ‘taking hands and dancing in unity’
(Woolf 1981: 13–14).
The steps of this dance were formed by Woolf’s experiments with
wandering, digressive narrative voices and her explorations of con-
sciousness and subjectivity, including the possibility, or impossibility,
of entry into minds other than one’s own. ‘The Mark on the Wall’ was
the first text to be hand-set and printed on the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press,
along with Leonard Woolf’s ‘Three Jews’, with which it was bound into
a volume entitled ‘Two Stories’ (1917). ‘The Mark on the Wall’ traces
the journey of the wandering mind, as it uses the eponymous ‘mark’
as a starting point for its adventures in consciousness: ‘How readily our
thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a
blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it’ (Woolf 2003: 77). Woolf’s
use of the ellipsis, in this story and throughout her work as a whole,
signals her attraction to narrative open-endedness and incompletion,
which she found in particular in Russian literature (including the work
of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov). In ‘The Mark on the Wall’, as
118
Virginia Woolf and Digression 119
in her other stories of this period, the use of ellipses also suggests a
self-consciousness, undoubtedly heightened by a new awareness of the
processes of compositing and printing, about the role of punctuation
marks in beginning, suspending and ending ‘trains of thought’: ‘there’s
no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking

at a mark on the wall’ (Woolf 2003: 82). Composition, compositing, and
the play of the mind are brought into a new relationship.
The directions of the narrator’s thoughts are a return to a form of
primitive or primeval consciousness – the insect’s eye view of the world,
as Woolf was to describe it in the late 1930s, when she was reading the
work of Freud – which becomes closely identified with the ‘subcon-
scious’ mind. Perceptual uncertainty – the indeterminate identity of
the ‘mark’ – gives the mind freedom to wander. The threat to this free
association comes with forms of authority connected in the story to ‘the
masculine point of view’, identified with social hierarchy and milita-
rism – ‘generalities’ are linked to ‘Generals’ – and reminding us that the
story was written and published during World War I. The mind’s adven-
tures are thus an escape from the realities – or insanities – of the period.
A direct reference to the war, from an external voice which conclusively
identifies the nature of the mark, brings the story, and the narrator’s
wandering consciousness, to a halt:
Someone is standing over me and saying – [...] ‘Curse this war! God
damn this war! … All the same, I don’t see why we should have a
snail on our wall.’
Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail. (Woolf 2003: 83)
The snail, like the oyster, is a recurrent image in Woolf’s writing of a

vulnerable organism protected by its carapace, the shell serving as both
home and defence, and contrasted, as in her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting’,
with an unhoused and wandering consciousness. The self lives inside a
shell, which is all that others know us by; it is the function of the new
literature, Woolf suggests, to open up the depths of consciousness within
the self: ‘Suppose the looking-glass smashes, the image disappears, and
the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there
no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other peo-
ple – what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world
not to be lived in’ (Woolf 2003: 79). In ‘Street Haunting’, the self leaves
behind its shell – the house and habit – to become an oyster-eye of per-
ception in the crepuscular city. As in Woolf’s day-in-the-life-of-the-city
novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), movement in and around the London streets
120 Laura Marcus
opens up imaginative possibilities, digressive spaces of fiction and fan-

tasy. In ‘Street Haunting’ she describes the pleasures of communing with
the volumes (‘wild books, homeless books’) in a second-hand bookshop:
there is ‘a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a
word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime’ (Woolf

1994: 488).
In ‘The Mark on the Wall’, by contrast with the representation of
the ambulatory, aleatory adventures of Woolf’s walkers in the city, the
narrator remains housed within a room, undertaking her thought-
adventures from an armchair in front of a fire. This recalls a much
earlier narrative, Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey Round My Room (1795),
in which the author (on whom Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was a powerful
influence), confined to his chambers for 42 days as a punishment for
duelling, extols the delights of travelling without leaving home:
There’s no more attractive pleasure, in my view, than following one’s

ideas wherever they lead, as the hunter pursues his game, without
even trying to keep to any set route. And so, when I travel through
my room, I rarely follow a straight line: I go from my table towards
a picture hanging in a corner; from there I set out obliquely towards
the door; but even though, when I begin, it is really my intention
to go there, if I happen to meet my armchair en route, I don’t think
twice about it, and settle down in it without further ado. (De Maistre
2004: 7)
De Maistre’s digressive text – one of the works which exemplifies, for

Ross Chambers, the category of ‘loiterature’ – plays with the concept of
narration as ‘excursion’. The paintings on the walls of the room lead
to stories and imaginings which become lengthy digressions from the
course of the journey round the room. De Maistre recreates his armchair
as a ‘post-chaise’: he tips it backwards and uses it to move around his
room, until it overturns. This, he writes, ‘has done the reader the serv-
ice of shortening my journey by a good dozen or so chapters’, as the
narrator is propelled in front of his desk, ‘and there was no longer time
to make any reflections on the number of engravings and pictures that
I still had to get through, and which might have lengthened my little
excursions on painting’ (De Maistre 2004: 47).
Journey also elaborates a metaphysical system in which we can find an
anticipation of Woolf’s meditations on self and other and on the nature
of reflection (interiority becoming figured as a form of mirroring) in
‘The Mark on the Wall’, as in many of her short fictions. De Maistre
represents a division of self into ‘the soul and the beast’ (2004: 9) (‘the
beast’ not to be identified with the non-sentient body), and provides
this example as illustration:
When you read a book, sir, and a more agreeable idea suddenly

strikes on your imagination, your soul straight away pounces on it
and forgets the book, while your eyes mechanically follow the words
and the lines; you come to the end of the page without understand-
ing it, and without remembering what you have read. – This comes
from the fact that your soul, having ordered its companion to read
to it, did not warn it of the brief absence on which it was about to
embark; as a result, the other continued to read even though your soul
was no longer listening. (2004: 10)
As Andrew Brown notes, De Maistre ‘indulges in a fanciful reprise of

Cartesian dualism […] the experience of being alone will naturally lead
to an obsession with “reflection” (indeed, in the Journey, with mirrors)
and with the sense of doubling that is forced on anyone who can think
but not act, or is obliged, for company, to talk to himself’ (Brown in De
Maistre [2004: xiii]). We might also see Journey as a ‘fanciful reprise’ of
Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637), which constitutes a search for
epistemological certainty taking place in the solitude of a poêle (‘stove-
heated room’), and in which the ability to construct ‘a method’ is said
by Descartes to derive from his keeping to the straight road of reason
and reflection: ‘those who go forward only very slowly can progress
much further if they always keep to the right path, than those who
run and wander off it’ (Descartes 1968: 27). (‘Method’ derives from
the Greek hodos, road or way.) De Maistre seems to mock this wisdom
in his claim that ‘I rarely follow a straight line.’ Woolf, too, plays with
Descartes’s terms in A Room of One’s Own (1929), charting her meander-
ings and the progressions of her ‘trains of thought’ along roads and
routes that are far from straight: ‘For truth […] those dots mark the spot
where, in search of truth, I missed the turning up to Fernham [...] I spare
you the twists and turns of my cogitations, for no conclusion was found
on the road to Headingley, and I ask you to suppose that I soon found
out my mistake about the turning and retraced my steps to Fernham’
(Woolf 1993b: 14).
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf extends the question of gender and
modes of thinking which she had opened up in ‘The Mark on the Wall’.
A Room of One’s Own takes the form of a journey – from a fictionalized
‘Oxbridge’ to London – in the course of which the narrator seeks to
122 Laura Marcus
develop her thoughts on women and fiction. It opens with a ‘but’, as if

Woolf had intervened in the middle of a discussion with an apparent
digression: ‘But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and
fiction – what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to
explain’ (Woolf 1993b: 3). As the narrator points out, discussion of the

‘two questions’, ‘women and fiction’, could lead anywhere or nowhere;
she has elected instead to begin with a conclusion – that ‘a woman must
have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ – and ‘to
develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought
which led me to think this’ (1993b: 3–4).
A foregone conclusion could suggest a rigidly analytical or logical line
of argument, but Woolf transgresses this, placing emphasis on the jour-
ney taken by thought. Exploring the path of associations is the textual
ideal, but from the outset, the structures and institutions of patriarchy
and privilege are represented as a bar or barrier to the free play of the
imagination. The ‘I’ of the narration (‘“I” is only a convenient term for
somebody who has no real being’) is sitting on the banks of the river in
the University town, ‘lost in thought’, as ‘the river reflected whatever it
chose of sky and bridge and burning tree’ (1993b: 5): ‘Reflection’ here,
as in the short stories, conjoins the definitions of the word as both
meditation and mirroring; ‘Thought’, the narrator continues, ‘had let
its line down into the stream,’ and catches an idea, as one might catch
a fish: ‘Put back into the mind, it [...] set up such a wash and tumult of
ideas that it was impossible to sit still’ (1993b: 5):
It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across
a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me [...] His face
expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came
to my help; he was a Beadle, I was a woman. This was the turf; there
was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here [...] in
protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in suc-
cession, they had sent my little fish into hiding. (1993b: 5)
Women’s creativity and imaginative life are thus represented as forms

of trespass. It is only in the garden of the women’s college – poor as that
institution is by contrast with the plenty of the men’s college in which
the narrator lunches – that freedom, at dusk, is glimpsed: ‘The gardens
of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild and open, and in
the long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung, were daffodils and blue-
bells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times, and now wind-blown and
waving as they tugged at their roots’ (1993b: 5).
‘I thought’, Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own, ‘how unpleasant it is

to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in’
(1993b: 21). Throughout the text, thought’s freedom is represented in
contrast to ‘the trained mind’ of the university-educated man. Sitting
in the British Museum Library, overwhelmed by the quantity of litera-

ture on the theme of ‘woman’, Woolf’s narrator observes that: ‘The stu-
dent who has been trained in research at Oxbridge has no doubt some
method of shepherding his question past all distractions till it runs into
its answer as a sheep runs into its pen [...] my own notebook rioted with
the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings’ (1993b: 25–7). Doodling
in the margins, ‘drawing a picture where I should, like my neighbour,
have been writing a conclusion’, wool-gathering rather than ‘shepherd-
ing’ a thought into, and by means of, a ‘pen’, the narrator discovers that
she has, in fact, identified a ‘submerged truth’: that the work she has
been reading, by men writing on the topic of woman, was created out
of anger, and has induced anger in her. It is this ‘one fact of anger’ that
is then followed in the numerous places in which it is to be found, in a
patriarchal England (1993b: 30). Woolf’s Three Guineas, published some
ten years later, pursues the question of men’s anger and women’s fear,
and the workings of patriarchy and privilege, in the context of the rise
of Fascism and the threat of war. The text is written as a letter, answer-
ing a male correspondent’s query as to how women are to prevent war:
it concludes with the answer that ‘we can best help you to prevent war
not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding
new words and creating new methods’ (1993b: 272).
Throughout her writing life, Woolf explored the possibilities of con-
ceptual and generic innovation, as her desire to find ‘new names’ for
the novel reveals. As she was completing and revising To the Lighthouse
in 1927, she began to record in her diary her desire for ‘an escapade
after these serious poetic experimental books whose form is so closely
considered. I want to kick up my heels & be off’;
It struck me vaguely, that I might write a Defoe narrative for fun.

Suddenly between twelve & one I conceived a whole fantasy to be
called ‘The Jessamy Brides’ – why, I wonder? I have rayed round it
several scenes. Two women, poor, solitary at the top of the house [...]
Everything is to be tumbled in pall mall. It is to be written as I write
letters at the top of my speed: on the ladies of Llangollen; on Mrs
Fladgate; on people passing. Sapphism is to be suggested. Satire is to
be the main note – satire & wildness [...] And it is to end with three
dots ... so. (Woolf 1982: 13)
124 Laura Marcus
The ‘fantasy’ would be realized in Orlando (1928), though the two poor,
solitary women would be replaced by the patrician splendour of the
eponymous hero/heroine.
Orlando was an escapade, or an escape, not only from the ‘serious
poetic experimental’ novels but from the work of literary history Woolf

was attempting to write: never completed, it would be published in
essay form under the title ‘Phases of Fiction’. Orlando is itself a literary
history of a kind, as Woolf moves through the ‘styles’ of the Elizabethan
and Jacobean ages, the Enlightenment, the Romantics and the Victorians,
and into the ‘present day’. The concept of a ‘Defoe narrative’ bears on the
text’s play with, and between, the genres of autobiography and fiction,
fact and fancy. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was also a powerful influence.
Lytton Strachey had indeed suggested to Woolf, after she had completed
Mrs Dalloway, that she write a Shandean narrative, and elements of this
emerge in Woolf’s play with silences, digressions and parentheses which
radically disrupt the narrative. As in Jacob’s Room, Woolf adopts the
strategy of a narrator-biographer with limited omniscience, who follows
in the footsteps of his/her subject but, on occasions, finds that doors are
closed, and narrative time must be whiled away while the biographer
waits. Through all his/her other vocations – courtier, ambassador, soci-
ety lady – Orlando remains a writer, and Woolf further plays with the
difficulties that this represents to the biographer, who must fill in time
while the writer writes. Orlando even starts living his/her life as if it
were a book; we are told of one life event or ‘episode’ that ‘she skipped
it, to get on with the text’ (Woolf 1993a: 177).
A central trope of the text is that of suspension or pause. Death does
not come to Orlando, who is alive throughout the four centuries of
text-time, first ‘as a man’ and then ‘as a woman’, but he/she undergoes
periods of amnesia, trances and death-like states, during which time is
suspended. These states are, the narrator writes, dark mysteries which
disrupt the biographer’s ‘first duty [...] which is to plod, without looking
to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth, unenticed by flowers;
regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the
grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads’ (1993a: 47).
Pauses, or holes, in time and in texts, create narrative swerves, devia-
tions from the ‘plod’ from birth to death which is, Woolf suggests, the
accepted form of conventional biography. In ‘revolutionis[ing] biogra-
phy in a night’ – Woolf’s aspiration for her text – she not only parodies
the ‘deathly’ mode of traditional biographies, which bury their subjects
rather than bringing them to life, but opens up the complexities of
biographical and narrative temporalities (Woolf 1977: 429). Orlando
lives through the centuries, but does not retain or contain the totality
of time: while images from the past persist in the present, he/she for-
gets as much as he/she remembers. The holes in time created by states
of suspension are also structures of repression, which hollow out an
unconscious for the text: ‘a pool where things dwell in darkness so deep

that what they are we scarcely know’ (Woolf 1993a: 132). The opacity of
these issues is made denser, and the satire at times sharper, by Woolf’s
historicizing, and hence relativizing, of the terms in which metaphysi-
cal questions can be posed, and human subjectivity understood: ‘Had
Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and
then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what
nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these
questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story’ (1993a: 49).
Woolf’s most overtly and self-reflexively digressive texts – those
which point to and play with narrative digression – are those in which
questions of male and female identity and the troubling of the bounda-
ries between gender categories are also made most explicit: A Room of
One’s Own and Orlando are again the central examples here. The ‘nature’
of androgyny, at the heart of both texts, finds its rhetorical dimension
in Orlando in the extensive use of simile. The language of simile is a lang-
uage of approximation, clothing or veiling reality, and a way of turn-
ing one thing into another, enacting ‘the strangest transformation[s]’
(1993a: 39). It is also closely identified with the narrative workings of
digression, as in the extended epic or Homeric simile.
In Woolf’s numerous essays, we find further levels to the play of digres-
sion in her work, inseparable from the particular forms of discursivity
exemplified in the essay form and in ‘essayism’. A number of recent crit-
ics have drawn Woolf’s essays into the conceptual frameworks established
by Theodor Adorno, in his ‘The Essay as Form’ (1958), itself in dialogue
with Georg Lukács’ ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay’ (first published
1958). For Adorno, the essay, anti-Cartesian in all its aspects, ‘suspends
the traditional concept of method’ (we recall De Maistre’s and Woolf’s
satirical play with Cartesian thought and their refusal to take the straight
path of reason), and ‘freely associates what can be found associated in the
freely chosen object […] The essay abandons the main road to the ori-
gins, the road leading to the most derivative, to being, the ideology that
simply doubles that which already exists’ (Adorno 1984: 159). Proceeding
‘methodically unmethodically’, in Adorno’s phrase, the essay, or ‘essay-
ism’, becomes identified with fragmentation, discontinuity, transgression
and digression. These attributes become identified not only with Woolf’s
‘essayism’ but with her ‘feminism’: in particular, her commitment to
126 Laura Marcus
ways of thinking and writing differently, which are in turn inseparable

from her interrogations of the question of male and female ‘difference’
and the uncertain but crucial issue of what women, in changed material
and cultural circumstances, might ‘become’.
The Essais (the term coined from the French ‘essai’, ‘attempt’) of

Montaigne, often held to be the first ‘modern’ writer, were, from the
outset, a significant influence on Woolf. In 1903, a year before she
published her first essay, she was writing to her brother, Thoby Stephen,
to thank him for his gift of Cotton’s translation of Montaigne: ‘I always
read Montaigne in bed, and these books will do beautifully’ (Woolf
1975: 66). Her essay on Montaigne, published in her 1925 collection
of essays The Common Reader, points to the exceptional nature of his
self-portraiture and to the complexities, and the self-contradictions, of
his concepts of the good life: ‘Movement and change’, Woolf glosses
Montaigne, ‘are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conform-
ity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves,
contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the
most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks
or says. For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order’ (1984:
63). This call for ‘order’, seemingly at odds with the call for absolute
freedom of thought and action, is explained by Woolf through the
importance Montaigne placed on the guidance of ‘un patron au dedans’
(1984: 63), which she defined, in post-Freudian terms, as ‘an invisible
censor within […] this is the censor who will help us to achieve that
order which is the grace of a well-born soul’ (1984: 63). We might
extend this model of selfhood to writing, and more specifically, to
the genre of the essay itself: digression (parekbasis, excursion), and
the following ‘of the most fantastic fancies’ (1984: 63), is a departure
followed by a return, to the place where a topic, or a self, is (provision-
ally) grounded.
In his essay ‘On Books’ Montaigne wrote that it was only ‘chance’
which put order into his writings: ‘As my thoughts come into my head, so
I pile them up […] Even if I have strayed from the road I would have every-
one see my natural and ordinary pace. I let myself go forward as I am’
(Montaigne 1958: 160). His discussions of literature, Montaigne added,
‘are not matters about which it is wrong to be ignorant, or to speak casu-
ally and at random’ (1958: 160). This is echoed in Dr Johnson’s image of
‘the common reader’, who differs, as Woolf noted, from the critic and the
scholar. She took this figure up in the Preface to The Common Reader – ‘he
is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and
ends he can come by, some kind of whole – a portrait of a man, a sketch
of an age, a theory of the art of writing’ (Woolf 1984: 1) – and it shaped

her writerly and readerly self-image as a literary ‘outsider’.
Woolf’s essay ‘On Reading’, or ‘Reading’, written in 1919 and pub-
lished posthumously, speaks back to Montaigne’s ‘On Books’. In
Orlando the recurrent trope of ‘the pause’ (which I have linked to the

workings of digression) is frequently invoked in relation to literary
composition – the biographer must wait while Orlando writes. In the
essay ‘Reading’, an immersion in books leads both to a form of time-
travel – the past comes alive as the narrating ‘I’ reads the Elizabethans
and traces a lineage of English literature – and to the creation of a
continuum between book and world, in which, to borrow the words
of Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was
Calm’, ‘the reader became the book; and summer night/Was like the
conscious being of the book’ (Stevens 1983: 358). In Woolf’s essay, the
reader’s eye and brain finally become saturated and the mind takes a
departure from the pages, which becomes an excursion, a parekbasis.
Dusk falls for the reader/narrator, the ‘I’, of Woolf’s essay, and the scene
moves from the library to the woods and the eventual capture of a great
moth: ‘There was a flash of scarlet within the glass. Then he composed
himself with folded wings. He did not move again’ (Woolf 1988: 152).
From this scene the narrative returns to the daylight and to ‘another
sort of reading’ – that of the work of Sir Thomas Browne (whose Urn
Burial appeared in 1658, and is one of Orlando’s many intertexts) and of
Cervantes, which Woolf’s narrator defines in the terms of estrangement,
difficulty and ‘the region of beauty’ (Woolf 1988: 59).
The central section of ‘Reading’, describing the journey to the woods,
the luring of the insects with sugar and the capture and killing of the
great scarlet moth, is an excursion from the history of books which the
body of the essay explores. It is a night-scene, which seems to dissolve
the self-certainties of the day: ‘What is it that happens between the hour
of midnight and dawn, the little shock, the queer uneasy movement, as
of eyes half open to the light, after which sleep is never so sound again?
Is it experience, perhaps – repeated shocks, each unfelt at the time,
suddenly loosening the fabric? breaking something away?’ (1988: 152).
Woolf would use the same imagery (whose appropriateness she ques-
tioned in the essay, for its suggestion of destruction rather than creativ-
ity) in Jacob’s Room, and in the central section of To the Lighthouse, ‘Time
Passes’, in which she depicted a world without a perceiving subject. The
duration of ‘Time Passes’ is both one night and a period of ten years in
the empty house, vacated after the death of the mother, Mrs Ramsay,
during which time war breaks out and the world tosses and turns in the
128 Laura Marcus
nightmare of history. The war is heralded by ‘ominous sounds like the

measured blows of hammers dulled on felt, which, with their repeated
shocks still further loosened the shawl and cracked the tea-cups’ (Woolf
1992: 145), the words themselves a reverberation from ‘Reading’ and its
image of the tree that falls in the night, creating a ‘hollow rattle of sound

in the deep silence of the wood’ (Woolf 1988: 152). Both the essay and
the novel are formed of three parts. In To the Lighthouse, ‘Time Passes’
is a ‘passage’, interlude or interval (of a kind that became increasingly
central to Woolf’s fiction, as in The Waves and The Years) between the
two separate days whose activities constitute the first and last sections
of the novel, and this is also the structural role of the moth-hunt in
‘Reading’. The world of the night, Woolf seems to suggest in both texts,
is an interruption of the diurnal world, breaching the familiar surfaces of
dailiness and opening up a rent in the fabric of being. Digression is thus
constituted as a mode of interruption or breaching. It also, paradoxically,
becomes a way of reaching into the very heart of things.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor. 1984. ‘The Essay as Form’, New German Critique, 32
(Spring–Summer), 151–71
Bowlby, Rachel. 1997. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf
(Edinburgh University Press)
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. 2003. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere
(Cambridge University Press)
Descartes, René. 1968. Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe
(Harmondsworth: Penguin)
De Maistre, Xavier. 2004. A Journey Round My Room, trans. Andrew Brown
(London: Hesperus)
Montaigne, Michel de. 1958. Essays, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth:
Penguin)
Snaith, Anna. 2000. Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (London:
Macmillan)
Snaith, Anna and Michael Whitworth, eds. 2007. Locating Woolf: The Politics of
Space and Place (London: Palgrave Macmillan)
Stevens, Wallace. 1984. Collected Poems (London: Faber)
Woolf, Virginia. 1942. The Death of the Moth (London: The Hogarth Press)
—— 1975. The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1888–1912, ed.
Nigel Nicolson (London: Chatto and Windus)
—— 1977. A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1923–1928, ed.
Nigel Nicolson (London: Chatto and Windus)
—— 1981. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2: 1920–1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell
—— 1982. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell
—— 1984. The Common Reader: First Series, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The
Hogarth Press)
—— 1988. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie
(London: The Hogarth Press)
—— 1992. To the Lighthouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin)
—— 1993a. Orlando (Harmondsworth: Penguin)

—— 1993b. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Harmondsworth: Penguin)
—— 1994. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4: 1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie
(London: The Hogarth Press)
—— 2003. A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick (London:
Vintage)
10
Stealing the Story: Robert Walser’s
Robber-Novel

Samuel Frederick
The Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956), known mostly for his
eccentric novels and short stories, insisted that his prolific output in
the genre of his choice, the short prose piece, ultimately amounted to
nothing more than ‘one long, plotless, realistic story’ (1986b: 322). This
statement is in its seeming contradictoriness extremely revealing. For,
on the one hand, most of Walser’s prose work is indeed conspicuously
lacking the dynamics and determinations of plot. Even those pieces
that at least initially or ostensibly conform to the expectations of narra-
tive – and a good portion of them simply do not – end up preoccupied
with something other than the story, and in the process undermine or
neutralize the mechanisms of plot progression. The apparent story in
Walser’s work is either lost in a barrage of excessive narratorial reflection
or abandoned as a result of the narrator’s thematic promiscuity.1 Walser’s
self-characterization is in this regard felicitous: his is a genuinely ‘plot-
less’ prose. And yet he maintains that what he is writing is not simply
prose, but narrative: a ‘realistic story’. This paradox – that his works are
at once ‘stories’, though they contain no plots – describes the governing
logic of Walserian narrative. His ‘stories’ are only ever told by a process
of deferral, digression, dismissal, or denial of the story. Walser’s narra-
tives come to be despite but also by virtue of the narratorial impulses that
appear to prevent them from being, those that want to dispense with
plot or at least render its teleological tendencies null and void.
But isn’t the ‘plotless story’ an oxymoron? How can we speak of a
story in the absence of plot? What else is a story if not its progression
towards the end that defines its dynamic and grants it design, if not
purpose?2 Walser’s work as a whole can be read as a series of implicit,
experimental answers to these questions, his storyless stories as alterna-
tives to the plot-centred narrative. Instead of reading selections from his
130
Stealing the Story 131
large corpus of short prose – a form that lends itself more easily to the
jettisoning of plot – the following analysis of Walserian digressivity and
its resulting plotless narration will focus on one of his novels, a form
even more beholden to the strictures and expectations of plot progres-
sion. Perhaps as a challenge to its prevailing form, to its all-too-familiar

reliance on narrative necessity, the novel becomes for Walser the site
of some of his most extreme digressivity, an occasion for him to test to
what degree and to what length plotlessness can be maintained with-
out a collapse into non-narrative. The novel becomes the critical space
where Walser most rigorously demonstrates that only in suspending
plot is he able to forge anything like narrative at all.
The only novel-length incarnation of Walser’s late period experi-
mentation, The Robber, is one of the most outrageously eccentric and
utterly aberrant artifacts of modernism, a cultural phenomenon already
famous for its celebration of the new, the unusual and the unconven-
tional. And it is, importantly, an artifact, no mere book; a work that is
anomalous both as a linguistic and narrative construct, and as a textual
object, as a manuscript comprised of the material and materiality of
paper and writing itself. The Robber was written in the summer of 1925,
a time during which Walser wrote on scraps of paper, backs of letters,
used calendar pages, envelopes, even business cards, in a penciled cur-
sive averaging 1 millimetre in height. These texts (which, along with
this novel, consisted of poetry, short prose and dramatic scenes) took
over 17 years to decipher, though they fill only six volumes. The so-
called Robber-Novel (it bears no title in Walser’s hand) was found among
these ‘microscripts’, spread across merely 24 pages of finely penciled
script, appearing more like pages awash with grey: murky, enigmatic,
impenetrable (see Figure 1).3 (The novel, of course, is not nearly as short
as its manuscript suggests: transcribed and placed in standard typeface,
Walser’s two dozen microgrammed pages multiply nearly sixfold to fill
out over 140 pages.)
As if this minuscule materiality could only give birth to a novel that
mirrored its grapho-formicating paper landscape, an apparent restless-
ness that is in fact static, a blur of ashen alphabet in strings of nearly
formless, leaden inscriptions, Walser’s last novel skirts the boundaries of
its own form, moving forward without ever really progressing, almost
succumbing to its own digressive mania. For The Robber is a work of
nearly unrelenting asides, a novel that sacrifices story in its onslaught of
hesitations, prolepses, deliberations, non sequiturs, meta-commentary,
retractions, contradictions, exhausting inattentiveness, apologies and
a seemingly limitless supply of other dilatory tactics. The announced
132
Figure 1 One of the Robber manuscript pages. The image has been reduced in
size to fit the page. Original dimensions approx. 129 ⫻ 212 mm. (© Keystone/
Source: Robert Walser-Stiftung)
intention of telling a story (which has nothing whatever to do with an

adventurer or criminal, as the title might suggest) is, nonetheless, its
apparent backbone, even if it is an infirm, scoliotic support. This ser-
pentine, even labyrinthine, structure is repeatedly shown to be feeble
and fragmentary, by no means sufficient for holding the text together

as narrative, in the conventional sense. The story elements found here
among an inchoate concatenation of narrative material are simply
not allowed to assume the shape of a plot. For this reason the novel
defies summary: the events contained in it (and yes, there are events
recounted here) are not provided the necessary causal or even temporal
interconnections and determinations that would result in any familiar
narrative design, however crude or confusing. Therefore even events
that might constitute the building-blocks of a plot become digressions
themselves by virtue of the fact that they contribute nothing to any
story structure or intention.
An example of how Walser treats such potentially plot-productive
material can be gleaned in the following excerpt:
And while two such schoolmates were scaling these so formidable

bourgeois rungs, the Robber now paid a visit to Fräulein Selma so as to
inquire courteously as to whether or not she might, for example, be in
any way in need of him. ‘What can I do for you?’ she asked. She was
drinking her coffee over the newspaper. One must add that Fräulein
Selma lived largely without meat, that is, consumed a skimpy, delicate
diet, in other words voluntarily submitted, in culinary matters, to the
most well-thought-out limitations. She also, incidentally, let a room
to a Russian girl who was a student. (2000: 94–5)
Coming in at the tail end of a two-page-long digression about two of

the Robber’s schoolmates (who appear to have no bearing on his life,
except that they became respectable members of the bourgeoisie, while
he did not), the narrator shifts mid-sentence to the Robber’s visit with
Fräulein Selma. Instead of making this visit the occasion for character
development or for attempting to establish the relationship between
these two figures (a relationship that elsewhere has explicit romantic
overtones, which however remain unexploited), Walser isolates the
encounter, providing neither context nor motivation. The pivotal ques-
tion addressed to our eponymous ‘hero’, one that has all the potential
for setting a series of plotted events in motion, is given tantalizingly in
direct discourse, but then abruptly suspended. It does not, as far as we
know, remain unanswered; it is, however, left unnarrated while we shift
from what might be a meaningful interaction to a banal description of
134 Samuel Frederick
what Fräulein Selma was doing at the moment she asked her question.
This description, however, does not serve as a transition back to the con-
versation, but rather compels the narrator (‘One must add […]’) to stray
further from the narrative situation by mentioning Selma’s vegetarian-
ism. Not only is this dietary fact inconsequential, the narrator insists

on repeating it in three different, increasingly verbose variations: Selma
lived ‘largely without meat’ becomes ‘consumed a skimpy, delicate diet’
and, lastly, in a baroque version of the first, rather succinct, expression:
‘voluntarily submitted, in culinary matters, to the most well-thought-
out limitations’. Each restatement is not only increasingly wordy, but
also increasingly imprecise (neither mentions a specifically meatless
diet), so that each protracted iteration is further removed from the con-
tent of the original digression. And as if these unnecessary reformula-
tions were not sufficiently dilatory or off-topic, the narrator proceeds by
adding – ‘incidentally’ – that a Russian student boards with Selma. We
have up to this point not heard of this student, and will only encounter
her once again, in passing. The Robber’s visit, then, is not just cut off
and diverted to trivialities, these trivialities are proliferated by narratorial
discursiveness. Neither does our storyteller’s circuitousness simply trail
off before he returns us to the narrative situation already introduced.
Instead, after his remark about the Russian lodger, his excursus abruptly
ends, and with it ends the entire section (the novel is separated into 35
chapter-like divisions). This sharp caesura, furthermore, is not followed
in the next section by information about what had transpired between
the Robber and Selma while the narrator was unsuccessfully meandering
through variations on vegetarianism. Rather, the situation – itself only
a possible plot seed – is fully abandoned, left to fall between the fallow
cracks of the novel’s disconnected digressions.
If there is one candidate that might be said to have out-shandied
Tristram Shandy, this is it. For despite its slim size, in particular next to
Shandy’s impressive girth, Walser’s novel is even more radically digres-
sive and dilatory. Moreover, it is lacking that which makes Sterne’s
masterpiece more than just an ingenious display of the fabula interrupta.
Simply put: The Robber has no Uncle Toby. We are, therefore, denied
those master strokes of characterization that are central to Sterne’s
achievement and that contribute to his novel’s greatness and renown as
palpably as its famed digressiveness. Walser’s is a novel of utterly empty
characters. Even its titular hero is a cipher, neither presented with an
inner life (let alone a complex one), nor shown to perform any heroic
acts. As one of the novel’s figures remarks to him, ‘you are entirely lack-
ing in character’ (Walser 2000: 87), by which she does not just mean he
lacks moral grounding. Neither is he empty of qualities but brimming

with ideas, like the figure of Ulrich whom Robert Musil – incidentally
a great admirer of Walser – thought best suited for the modern novel.
When Walser’s narrator is not stealing his stage time in circumlocu-
tionary excess, the Robber (who is not even given a name) can only be

glimpsed stealing across the page like a spectre, as fleeting and insub-
stantial as the story to which he is supposed to belong. Without plot,
without character what are we left with? Nothing, really. And it is upon
this nothing that Walser appears to erect his novel. Indeed, nothing is
there from the very start:
Edith loves him. More on this later. Perhaps she never [nie] should
have initiated relations with this good-for-nothing who has no
money. It appears she’s been sending him emissaries, or – how shall
we put it – ambassadresses. He has lady friends everywhere, but noth-
ing ever comes of them, and what a nothing has come of this famous,
as it were, hundred francs! Once, out of nothing but affability,
benevolence, he left one hundred thousand marks in the hands of
others. Laugh at him, and he’ll laugh as well. This alone might make
a dubious impression. And not [Nicht einmal] one friend to show for
himself. In ‘all this time’ he’s spent here among us, he’s failed [nicht
gelungen] – which delights him – to gain the esteem of gentlemen.
Can you imagine [Ist das nicht] a more flagrant lack of talent? (Walser
2000: 1 and 1986a: 11)4
As if responding to a challenge, Walser digresses from the novel’s story

not just after its first sentence, but after the novel’s first three words.
Though betraying the necessity for the semblance of plot in order to
instantiate his digressive gesture, Walser reduces this plot to its barest
minimum: subject, verb, object. And he promptly dismisses it in just as
many words, at least in the original German: ‘Hiervon nachher mehr’
(‘More on this later’).5 With the most extreme economy, these opening
two sentences of the novel enact a limit-case of digressive storytelling in
announcing and performing in its first six words the novel’s governing
principle. And as if to acknowledge and even to celebrate this nearly
absurd narrative reduction, which leaves the reader with next to nothing
by way of a story, Walser’s narrator sprinkles the following few sentences
with a series of ‘nothings’ (nichts), ‘nots’ (nicht), a ‘never’ (nie), as well as
‘no money’ (kein Geld) and a final ‘lack of talent’ that we are to assume
will contribute to the stuff of the story. Unable to orient ourselves in
this breathless opening, we are left instead with the repetition of nichts,
nichts, nichts, nichts in close succession, followed – after a short, two-

sentence breather – by nicht, nicht, nicht, in only slightly larger intervals,
which together appear to be parsing out the novel’s structural principle,
subliminally intoning its aesthetic of negation.
When we turn to the actual content of the novel we do not find noth-

ing, of course, but we do find nothing in the way of novelistic material,
which is to say: there is no coherent story here. Or rather, there is just
enough story to make palpable how unimportant that story is. On
the one hand, Walser is parodying plot.6 In the novel’s fifth sentence
(quoted above), the reader is introduced to a ‘famous […] hundred
francs’, without further explanation. It is as if the public and readerly
attraction of this plot point about 100 francs has by the very start of
the novel already run its course. They were famous, but now they have
‘come to nothing’, like so much else ostensibly important to the story
the narrator intends to tell. We find out later that the Robber inherited
these 100 francs from his uncle, and that this seemingly generous act in
fact led to the series of events that the narrator attempts to – but ulti-
mately wishes he did not have to – relate: ‘Ah, how clear it is to me now
that this entire story is the fault of no one other than the mediocrity of
this Batavian uncle’ (Walser 2000: 120). The giving of 100 francs – itself
a trivial act – thus sets into motion one event after the other, each of
which is shown to be arbitrary, not teleologically motivated and there-
fore (for any pretence of plot) uninteresting. Cause may lead to effect,
but each chain of causal relations does not necessarily make a plot; in
fact, as the novel makes abundantly clear, causes will always lead to
effects, to endless effects, but these are also endlessly ordinary. They will
only ever ‘come to nothing’.
And therefore Walser’s novel not only tells us ‘nothing’ by way of a
story, it also lacks any edifying content: ‘I am constructing here a com-
monsensical book from which nothing at all can be learned’ (2000:
4–5). Though the story of this novel has been overgrown by rampant,
seemingly uncontrollable digressivity, the narrator tells us here that we
should not even be looking for that which is frequently to be found in
a novel’s digressive passages, namely, didactic or instructive discourses.
If ‘nothing’ is to be learned from the book, and, as the narrator admits,
the story itself ‘will come to nothing’, what impulse hides behind the
narrator’s insistence to keep on writing? And, more importantly, why
do we bother to keep on reading? The answer (to both questions) lies
in Walser’s particular means of exploiting that nothing for narrative
ends. ‘Nothing’, the novel’s very lack both of story and edifying dis-
course, becomes part of its marshalling of negation for the means of
narrativization. It is the very absence of story that proliferates the text

that, despite and by virtue of its plotlessness, takes on a different kind
of narrativity altogether.
We can begin to better grasp the logic of this deviant narrativity
by turning to some of the numerous self-reflexive moments in which

Walser allows his narrator to speculate on writing itself:
You’ve no idea what a pile of things I have to tell you. A stalwart

friend might perhaps be necessary, that is, important for me, though
I consider friendship unfeasible: it seems too difficult a task. On this
specific point various reflections might be made, but my little finger
cautions me to avoid verbosity. Today I gazed into a marvelous thun-
derstorm whose tumultuous strength delighted me. Enough, enough.
Already I’m afraid I’ve bored the reader atrociously. (2000: 5)
In this passage the narrator acknowledges his dilatory mania, except

that in doing so he also perpetuates it – one of the supreme ironies of
Walserian digression. Our storyteller not only introduces a digression to
comment on his digressivity, he also digresses within the digression that
itself only exists by virtue of his excessive digressions. Since that ‘pile of
things’ he has to tell us itself consists mostly in digressions that delay
the story of the Robber, the narrator is effectively delaying his further
delays of the story in reflecting on his propensity to delay. In this way
the novel’s proliferation of nothings feeds back into itself. ‘We’ll do well
to add nothing more to this sentence’ (2000: 121), the narrator later
notes, only dimly aware, it seems, that in saying he will add ‘nothing
more’ to the sentence, he is in fact adding more to the sentence. Except
that what he is adding is really only ‘nothing’ – or rather, nothing except
to comment that nothing will be added. Similarly the narrator remarks
after a brief description of a pretty woman: ‘This woman’s significance
for us is absolutely nothing’ (2000: 49).7 She means ‘nothing’ to the
narrator and to his story, and yet he writes about her, again suggesting
that in some way ‘nothing’ itself is that which is mysteriously and pro-
ductively significant for the novel.
Even though he claims the Robber’s story is a priority, the narrator
insists that he is doing the right thing by continuing to relate trivial
nothings:
Once, in that other restaurant, he dined on chicken while sipping

Dôle. We say this only because, at the moment, nothing of more
weight occurs to us. A pen would rather say something improper than
lie idle even for an instant. This is perhaps a secret of quality literature,
in other words, the writing process must work on impulse. (2000: 54)
For the narrator, therefore, it is perfectly proper to ‘say something

improper’ (that is, something irrelevant and with no bearing on the

story) because the ultimate narratorial impropriety is to ‘lie idle even
for an instant’. Silence – saying nothing – is to be avoided at all cost,
even if that means filling the page with nothing, that is, trivialities.
‘It’s best we say nothing’ (2000: 64), the narrator writes several pages
later, acknowledging that ‘saying nothing’, paradoxically, does not
equate with pure silence or the blank page. To say nothing – to tell
nothing – manifests itself as loquaciousness, the narrator’s unceasing
digressivity. Walter Benjamin referred to this quality of Walser’s prose as
its ‘Geschwätzigkeit’ (1991: 327), its garrulousness. It is indeed the per-
formance of narrative voice that permeates so much of Walser’s prose.
Here the narrator reminds us he is writing (‘the pen’), and yet that this
process is and ought to be driven by ‘impulse’. We need to ask, however:
towards what is that impulse directed? Or is it only directed back at
itself? Is the narrator of The Robber only writing for the sake of writing,
or does he mean to sustain our interest in something like a story? And,
most decisively: is there, for him, a difference?
To begin answering these questions we should consider one of the
narrator’s favourite techniques: the anticipatory prolepsis. We already
saw this mode of the introduction and delay of a plot point in the first
two sentences of the novel, where the space between that introduction
and its postponement was brought to an extreme minimum: ‘Edith
loves him. More on this later.’ The novel abounds in such prolepses:
‘More will be said of this at some later point’ (2000: 20); ‘I’ll elucidate
later the reason for this’ (2000: 28); ‘We’ll want to return, by and by,
to this’ (2000: 49). Scores of examples could be provided; the anticipa-
tory prolepsis appears on almost every other page. It is an essential part
of the novel’s logic of narrative proliferation through plot negation,
of the narrator’s proclivity for ‘saying nothing’ through excess verbi-
age. Characteristically, the narrator reflects on his need to delay and,
unsurprisingly, provides conflicting reasons for his compulsive dilatori-
ness. On the one hand, he has his readers in mind:
On some later occasion we shall elucidate, illuminate this. Much

in these pages may strike the reader as mysterious, which we, so to
speak, hope, for if everything lay spread wide open to the understand-
ing, the contents of these lines would make you yawn. (2000: 41)
The narrator here claims to be delaying the details and explanations of

his story strategically so as to assure sustained interest on the part of the
reader. He is cognizant of the reader’s expectations, and does not want
us to be bored. This strategy would seem to make sense in terms of the
conventional dynamics and desires of reading narrative, except that the

narrator rarely fulfils his proleptic promises (that is, much of what he
promises to reveal later is never returned to) and elsewhere claims to be
simply ‘filling time’:
The Robber now came to a house that was no longer present, or, to say
it better, to an old house that had been demolished on account of its
age and now no longer stood there, inasmuch as it had ceased to make
itself noticed. He came, then, in short, to a place where, in former
days, a house had stood. These detours I’m making serve the end of
filling time, for I really must pull off a book of considerable length,
otherwise I’ll be even more deeply despised than I am now. Things
can’t possibly go on like this. Local men of the world call me a simple-
ton because novels don’t tumble out of my pockets. (2000: 74–5)
The Robber’s perambulations – a central motif in Walser’s work as a

whole, and one intimately related to his digressivity – manifest them-
selves on this page as the ramblings of the narrator who traces and
retraces his steps in his seemingly futile attempt to express the absence
of a particular architectural structure. This passage again displays one of
the structural paradoxes of the novel: its narrator is occupied with relat-
ing that which is really nothing (here quite literally: the space where a
house had once stood), and in doing so ends up unfurling sentence after
sentence in the service of that nothing. To what end? That of ‘filling time’,
the narrator freely admits, appealing to his reputation as a less-than-pro-
lific writer. But if ‘filling time’ is really his motive, why doesn’t he fill
time with those shards of story that he so liberally tosses aside for the
supposed purpose of keeping his readers interested? On the very same
page he rejects such a story – ‘the Robber once treated an unemployed
person to a sausage. Perhaps we’ll return to this later’ (2000: 75) – in
favour of further reflection on the Robber’s meanderings.
Ultimately it becomes clear that there is little difference between the
narrator’s notion of ‘filling time’ with ‘detours’ and those repeated sus-
pensions of story elements inaugurated by the anticipatory prolepsis. To
suspend a story does not and really cannot come down to any true ces-
sation of the novel’s progress, which is why narrative digression always
brings us closer to the end of the book, even if it moves us further from
the end of the story. Suspensions of story in The Robber coincide with
those ‘detours’ that only fill time because, as the narrator frequently
demonstrates, to narrate suspension – the discontinuance of narration –
is to keep on narrating something, anything, or (as he would like it)
nothing. And this nothing that fills both the time and space of the novel

does not simply delay plot development and the fulfilment of proleptic
promises for a later time, it does so almost perpetually. For even those
plot points to which the narrator does in fact return (and these are few)
are revealed to be of little importance, primarily because Walser has man-
aged to shift this novel’s narrative weight from the centre to its periphery
so that it moves by constantly circling around the centre towards which
it always points, even though this centre is shown to be empty. To delay
plot ‘in the interest of sustaining interest’ (2000: 31), as the narrator of
The Robber claims to be doing, becomes for Walser a kind of pleasurable
deferral that exposes the tautology of narrative suspense, and then neu-
ters it. Interest leads to interest, which generates more interest, ultimately
leading nowhere. Without the end to give meaning to the sequence,
without the fulfilment of that which is postponed, narrative teleology is
short-circuited and sent into a self-perpetuating loop. In The Robber this
circular movement appears as a dynamic circuitousness that generates
the paradoxical narrative logic of the novel, one in which nothing itself
is repeatedly covered up and simultaneously perpetuated.
This perpetual, pleasurable (and productive) circling points to Walser’s
alternative notion of narrative desire. Typically digression grants us those
crucial moments of ‘satisfaction and reassurance’, as Derek Attridge notes,
in returning and importantly ceding to the main narrative. Digressions
maintain the ‘order and wholeness of the text’ in being temporary,
in always ultimately bringing the reader back to the story they had
abandoned in a manner that grants us ‘the sweet pleasure of relevance’
(Attridge 1988: 222). That Walser denies the readers of The Robber this
crucial satisfaction by no means undermines the novel’s pleasurability.
In fact, he claims it makes the pleasure of the text possible in the first
place. Walser is seeking to redefine our relation to narrative by insisting
on the satisfaction that can be had from perpetually postponing plot, not
in order to maintain suspense, but in order to heighten and take pleasure
in the unfulfilled desires of narrative. The narrator of The Robber equates
narrating nothing (or trivialities) with filling time and sustaining interest
because for Walser the unfulfilled desires in fact fulfil in remaining unful-
filled. In this novel and in much of his prose Walser insists that we take
pleasure in being denied pleasures, just as the Robber ‘take[s] pleasure in
robbing [himself] of pleasure’ (2000: 95), in part because if our desires
were to be fulfilled, they would also be annihilated.
In this way, Walser’s digressivity is importantly not destructive of

narrative. It does not, for example, neutralize the generic markers of
narrativity, reversing the centre–periphery relation of plot to excursus
so that the text ‘can be read for something other than the narrative’, as
Attridge suggests of the radically digressive work (1988: 228). Neither do

Walser’s digressions lose their quality of digressivity in diminishing the
influence of the plot against which they must define themselves. Walser
maintains a productive tension between digression and plot that affirms
the former’s subversiveness while insisting on the narrativity generated
from its restless process of plot-negation. This activity of subversion
is – within the text – a perpetual movement (circular, tracing out the shape
of the nought), one that cannot come to a halt or reach completion lest it
merely accede to the usurped position of plot whose dynamic it is seeking
to annul.8 In insisting on telling stories freed from the influences of plot,
as he does in The Robber and in much of his narrative work, Walser ges-
tures towards relocating narrative dynamics from plotting to the active
efforts to thwart that plotting. Plot is therefore necessarily always present
in his work as that which is being deferred or playfully deconstructed,
that which must be suspended to inaugurate a new mode of (plotless)
narrativity. The inverted logic of negation underlying these narrative
movements is not only structurally pivotal to Walser’s work, it is also one
of its principal thematic preoccupations. In The Robber, in particular, we
find one of the most apt formulations of this governing paradox: ‘To be
able to fall asleep, then, one should make the effort to remain awake. One
shouldn’t make an effort to sleep. To be able to love, one should make an
effort not to love’ (2000: 119–20). To be able to tell a story, we might add,
one should make the effort not to tell a story. And this is precisely what
Walser has done. Except that not telling a story is for him no mere priva-
tion of activity; it is an ‘effort’. In The Robber the story has therefore not so
much been left untold as it has been actively stolen. The novel has been
forged not out of the absence, but out of the absenting, of story. Thus,
in stealing the story Walser succeeds in negating normative narrativity,
thereby setting in motion an elusive new mode of narrativity whose locus
is neither in plot nor in digression, but in their dialectical interaction.
Notes
1. Throughout the chapter I use ‘story’ not only in a somewhat untechnical,
descriptive sense – following Walser’s usage – as roughly synonymous with
narrative itself (in whatever guise), but also, normatively, as the content
readers typically expect from a narrative, its plotted events and characters.
The slippage between these two notions of story is – as we will see – itself a
product of Walser’s idiosyncratic narrative mode. I therefore do not mean by

‘story’ the structuralist-narratological or Russian Formalist notion of the raw
material of ‘plot’. This raw material I call the ‘story elements’ or ‘events’.
2. See Peter Brooks’s famous theory of plot (1984).
3. On Walser’s writing as process and its visuality, see Siegel (2001: 103–25).
4. Emphasis mine; Bernofsky’s translation slightly altered to reflect repetition of

‘nichts’.
5. This first digression is also importantly a verbless sentence. The syntactical
unit of progression has been excised, action itself suspended.
6. On Walser’s parodying of trivial literature, see Fuchs (1993: 103–32).
7. Bernofsky’s translation altered slightly.
8. The literature on Walser’s digressivity (which is surprisingly small) tends to
fall into the trap of supplementarity by positing exactly such a reversal of
the story–digression dichotomy that would ultimately only recentre the mar-
ginal digression in the former position of the central story. See, for example,
Annette Fuchs (1993: 89ff.), or Susanne Andres, who insists on the collapse
of primary and peripheral narrative strands – to claim that everything in The
Robber is digression – without acknowledging that this collapse would result
in our inability to recognize digression as digression, let alone identify the
text as narrative (1997: 154). A more sophisticated reading of Walser’s digres-
sivity is explored by Peter Utz (1998: 369–423).
Bibliography
Andres, Susanne. 1997. Robert Walsers arabeskes Schreiben (Göttingen: Cuvillier
Verlag)
Attridge, Derek. 1988. Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press)
Benjamin, Walter. 1991. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhäuser, II: Aufsätze Essays Vorträge (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp)
Fuchs, Annette. 1993. Dramaturgie des Narrentums. Das Komische in der Prosa
Robert Walsers (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag)
Siegel, Elke. 2001. Aufträge aus dem Bleistiftgebiet. Zur Dichtung Robert Walsers
(Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann)
Utz, Peter. 1998. Tanz auf den Rändern. Robert Walsers ‘Jetztzeitstil’ (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp)
Walser, Robert. 1986a. Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet, ed. Bernhard Echte and Werner
Morlang, III: ‘Räuber’-Roman, ‘Felix’-Szenen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp)
—— 1986b. Sämtliche Werke in Einzelausgaben, ed. Jochen Greven, XX: Für die
Katz: Prosa aus der Berner Zeit 1928–1933 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp)
—— 2000. The Robber, trans. Susan Bernofsky (Lincoln and London: University
of Nebraska Press)
11
Negotiating Tradition: Flann
O’Brien’s Tales of Digression

and Subversion
Flore Coulouma
Talking about Flann O’Brien and digression might be called a pleo-

nasm: all his novels and chronicles are known to realize the full comic
potential of systematically digressive tales. The question, therefore, is not
whether Flann O’Brien’s writing is digressive, but rather, how digression
as a theme and structural device contributes to his ambivalence towards
tradition and authority through his complex representation of language
and discourse.
First, let us follow Flann O’Brien’s example by bringing in the author-
ity of the dictionary here:
Digression:
1. The action of digressing, or turning aside from a path or track;
swerving, deviation.
b. fig. Moral deviation or going astray.
c. Deviation from rule.
2. Departure or deviation from the subject in discourse or writing; an
instance of this.
3. Astron. and Physics. Deviation from a particular line, or from the
mean position; deflexion; e.g., of the sun from the equator, or of
an inferior planet from the sun. (OED)
We immediately note that the most common meaning of digression

comes second to the spatial sense of digression and its corollary, the
moral sense of going astray. Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and The
Third Policeman similarly show how space, morality and language are
interrelated: the metafictional games of back and forth between oral
speech and the written word give pride of place to the notion of space.
143
144 Flore Coulouma
In the novels, the fragmented linearity of the page reflects the breaking
down of discourse, as well as a chaotic perception of the world.
We will first examine digression as a feature of the oral tradition, and
focus on At Swim-Two-Birds as marked by oral tradition while subverting
the common perception of narrative structure. We will then analyse the

spatial metaphor of digression in The Third Policeman and its emblem-
atic figures: the landscape, the road and the bicycle. Finally, we will
address the linguistic and political dangers of digression, to show how
Flann O’Brien’s ambivalent satire purposefully avoids all definite judge-
ment on what digression and discourse should be, and lets us decide
for ourselves.
Digression and the oral tradition
Flann O’Brien’s digressive writing is part and parcel of his inscription

in a literary tradition of orality and addresses the complex relationship
between orality and literacy. O’Brien acknowledged his admiration of
Joyce’s capacity to ‘[set] down speech authentically’ (1993: 103). On the
other hand, O’Brien’s acute awareness of the artificiality of writing gives
scope and depth to his comedy. Digression as a form of diversion and
linguistic loitering thus finds its natural place within Flann O’Brien’s
narratives of orality.
The Irish bardic tradition is the one most obviously featured in At Swim-
Two-Birds, with Flann O’Brien’s parodic tribute to Finn Mac Cool and King
Sweeney, but it can also be traced structurally in the other novels and
chronicles. Flann O’Brien’s games with orality also hail from Laurence
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Tristram himself famously acknowledged the role
of digression within a story (Sterne 1996: 50). For Tristram and Sterne, and
indeed for Flann O’Brien, a good novel needs to be digressive, to avoid the
dullness of a straight storyline. For Flann O’Brien, digression is primarily
a feature of orality and physical utterance: digression is a game led by the
teller of the tale, with which readers/listeners must comply. This neces-
sarily entails, as with all oral interaction, elaborate interactive rules with
the reader, so as to deceive playfully his or her expectations while never
losing sight of the plot. Digression is therefore an essential part of Flann
O’Brien’s language games, and constitutes a metanarrative device in his
reflections on the workings of language and conversation.
Closer to home, Flann O’Brien’s digression recalls Joyce’s stream of con-
sciousness writing. In O’Brien’s work, however, such loitering of discourse
always stems from conversations, be they imaginary or actually taking
place in the narrative. Let us now examine the function and structure of
Negotiating Tradition 145
digressions in At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien’s first and most digressive

novel.
At Swim-Two-Birds: unsettling traditional narrative

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chew-
ing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the
privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant expression.
I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activity. One
beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree
with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and
inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter
a hundred times as many endings. (O’Brien 1967: 9)
This incipit defines the mental process of digression as stepping aside into
a different sphere of thought. Here, the very act of digression lies in the
contrast between the narrator’s perception of reality (which is also the
frame narrative) and his recurrent reminiscences which develop into their
own stories. According to the narrator, the plot and its digressions only
appear not to be related, while they are in fact part of the author’s plan.
More than a mode of creative thought, this makes digression the very
condition of the process of writing a novel. In At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann
O’Brien’s digressive imagination generates the infinite mise en abyme of
embedded stories, as each anecdote from a character features another
character with more stories to tell; At Swim is a conscious dialogue of
digressions. By blurring the limits of narrative levels and the distinction
between fiction and reality, its first-person narrator takes digression to
its extremes, justifying his theoretical assertion to the reader in the first
paragraph of the novel.
As a meta-novel consciously playing with its own digressiveness,
At Swim regularly features reminders to the reader, with an ironically
inverted ratio between the main plot and its digressions. By the end
of the novel, the frame narrative only comes up as a series of brief bio-
graphical reminiscences of the narrator, while embedded stories (about
Trellis, Finn and Sweeney) are foregrounded in the book. Unsurprisingly
enough, when Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien’s real name) gave the first
draft of his book to his friend Niall Sheridan, passages featuring Finn
Mac Cool were even longer and more numerous, and Sheridan himself
shortened the draft by about a fifth (Cronin 1989: 85).
One of the metanarrative games is that each subplot can be read as
a main line from which other anecdotes digress. Thus, the embedded
146 Flore Coulouma
story of the Red Swan Hotel characters is presented as a traditional plot

with ‘one beginning and one ending’:
Synopsis, being a summary of what has gone before, FOR THE BENEFIT OF NEW
READERS: DERMOT TRELLIS, an eccentric author, conceives the project of

writing a salutary book on the consequences which follow wrong-
doing and creates for the purpose THE POOKA FERGUS MACPHELLIMEY
[…] Now read on.
Further extract from Manuscript. (O’Brien 1967: 60–1)
Strictly speaking, should we consider this excerpt a digression from the

main first-person narrative? Or, should we say that the passage quoted
previously, now a mere reminiscence, is itself a digression? There is no
definite answer to this, but rather, an ironic reversal of the traditional
view that a story must have a single linear structure.
For the two main author-characters in At Swim, what constitutes a
proper story goes hand in hand with the materiality of the book: the first
and last pages define its limits and the manuscript spatially embodies the
story. Ironically, such materiality is no guarantee that the main thread of
a story can be retained forever, as it is subjected to the difficulty of safe-
keeping the manuscript itself. Halfway through the novel, one extract is
abruptly interrupted by another biographical reminiscence, as the first-
person narrator has lost part of his manuscript. The story branches out
into another direction, in a comical display of how fragile and inconse-
quential the concept of linear story is:
It happens that a portion of my manuscript containing an account (in

the direct style) of the words that passed between Furriskey and the voice
is lost beyond retrieval. I recollect that I abstracted it from the portfolio
in which I kept my writings – an article composed of two boards of
stout cardboard connected by a steel spine containing a patent spring
mechanism – and brought it with me one evening to the College in
order that I might obtain the opinion of Brinsley as to its style […] In
the many mental searches which I conducted subsequently in an effort
to ascertain where the manuscript was mislaid in the first instance,
I succeeded in recalling the circumstances of my meeting and dialogue
with Brinsley with perfection of detail and event. (O’Brien 1967: 50)
This passage shows how losing the plot provides the narrator with
another story, his encounter with Brinsley. Ironically, material
precautions are no protection against the narrator’s own carelessness:

the stout cardboard and patent spring mechanism, reminiscent of
Pandora’s box, are no match for the narrator’s compulsive need to remove
extracts and bring them together with other narrative fragments (for
example, from the press) as props for a conversation with his friends.

The narrator’s inability to keep it together is in fact perfectly relevant
if we consider his theory of the novel at the heart of At Swim. Digression
can be said to be a logical consequence of the narrator’s polyphonic
definition of the ‘satisfactory novel’ as a ‘work of reference’ (O’Brien
1967: 25). Intertextuality and referentiality in literature necessarily dis-
turb any linear approach to a story, since it privileges the paradigmatic
over the syntagmatic axis of discourse. Every segment of the story
refers back to its own narrative, and the story itself becomes a dialogue
between digressive, often dissenting, narratives and voices. Or, as Ross
Chambers puts it, digression defines a ‘theory of versatility grounded
[…] in uncenteredness’ (1999: 23).
The narrator’s theory in At Swim has been viewed as postmodern
referentiality (Hopper 1995), but I believe that it really belongs to a
tradition that places orality at the centre of the act of storytelling. As
the previous examples show, the many digressions in the narrator’s sto-
ries derive from interruptions by the voices of his friends or his uncle.
All the stories are framed in dialogues, which echoes the folk tradition
of tale-telling. Trellis’s characters are gathered around the fire in the
evening and tell each other stories punctuated by interruptions and
questions. Their digression is a natural part of the dialogic process, as
much as it is an expected effect of any tale sung from memory. As in tra-
ditional bardic poetry, stories revolve around recurring phatic formulas
(such as the ubiquitous ‘do you tell me now?’ or ‘do you know what I
am going to tell you?’) and have a great scope for variation (Lord 1968).
Tales unfold and vary according to the reaction of the audience, and all
digressions are welcome, as long as there is a proper end. This explains
why Finn’s convoluted rambling still makes for good stories to his audi-
ence of working-class, hard-boiled Dubliners:
His stories are not the worst though, I’ll say that, said Lamont, there’s
always a head and a tail on his yarns, a beginning and an end, give
him his due […] I mean to say, said Lamont, whether a yarn is tall or
small I like to hear it well told. I like to meet a man that can take in
hand to tell a story and not make a balls of it while he’s at it. I like
to know where I am, do you know. Everything has a beginning and
an end. (O’Brien 1967: 63)
148 Flore Coulouma
Lamont’s severe assessment of a good storyteller is ironically debunked,

since his naive insistence on having ‘a head and a tail’ to any story gives
way to a quasi-infinite potential for digression within the story itself,
according to the fancy of the bard and the accidents in the perform-
ance. The story thus becomes an endless journey. When Finn relates

the adventures of King Sweeney wandering through Ireland, his stories
resemble explorative travelling and map out Flann O’Brien’s geography
of digression.
Mapping digression: the syntax of digression
Flann O’Brien’s language games mostly revolve around the relation

between orality and the written word, sometimes through the use of
visual techniques. One recurring joke in the chronicles is transcribing
onomatopoeic sounds, or using Irish spelling conventions to transcribe
English and vice versa:
AAAAHOOOO!
Do not, good reader, be intimidated by that spectacular title of mine.
It is nor just another dose of compulsory Irish. It is my attempt to
represent a yawn. (O’Brien 1987: 161)
However primordial, orality is always represented indirectly, due to

the radical discrepancy between oral speech and the written word: one
unfolds in time, and the other on the space of the page. This is where
digression comes in, as a realistic representation of dialogic speech and
as a main theme in O’Brien’s stories. In At Swim, digressive speech trans-
lates as parenthetical excerpts in the main body of the text. The Third
Policeman features two simultaneous stories running parallel, with the
De Selby anecdotes appearing in the footnotes, mirroring the first-per-
son narrative in the main body of the text.
From its very first paragraph, The Third Policeman defines itself as a
digressive novel:
Not everybody knows how I killed old Philip Mathers, smashing his
jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship
with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers
down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-
pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.
(O’Brien 2001: 2)
As Jean-Jacques Lecercle has shown in his linguistic analysis of the incipit,

the first sentences of a novel set the pragmatic rules it will follow (or play
with), and thus largely define the reader’s expectation of what the story
will be in terms of genre and plot (1996: 9). Here the two, very long first
sentences are already digressive in their syntactic structure, so as to reflect

the narrator’s convoluted mode of thought. The narrator interrupts his
address to the reader half way with a digressive clause: ‘but first it is better
to speak […]’. This incipit starts with a double implicit statement: 1) my
story is not new information (‘not everybody knows’, that is, I am telling
the story only for those who still don’t know); 2) because this first clause
is pragmatically unintelligible without a broader chronological context,
the purpose of the next clause (‘but first […]’) will be to make explicit the
underlying story. Thus the digressive structure of this sentence mirrors
that of the novel as a whole: it is a flashback, a temporal digression told by
the narrator from the afterlife. Within this story-as-digression or digres-
sion-as-story, the narrator tells a tale of wandering, as physical motions
and journeys again mirror his confused and digressive thoughts.
Mapping digression: narratives of exploration
In typical metanarrative fashion, walking along the road prompts the

narrator in The Third Policeman to ‘reflect upon the subject of roads’
(first digression) and to ponder De Selby’s teachings on the same topic
(second digression, with footnotes):
The road was narrow, white, old, hard and scarred with shadow. It ran
away westwards in the mist of the early morning, running cunningly
through the little hills and going to some trouble to visit tiny towns
which were not, strictly speaking, on its way […] I found it hard to
think of a time when there was no road there because the trees and
the tall hills and the fine views of bogland had been arranged by wise
hands for the pleasing picture they made when looked at from the
road. Without a road to have them looked at from they would have
a somewhat aimless if not a futile aspect.
De Selby has some interesting things to say on the subject of roads.
(O’Brien 2001: 37)
The narrator describes a winding road. The sense of direction, ‘away

westwards’, seems infinite, as it goes forever towards sunset and death,
and warns the reader of the narrator’s fate. It is more of a Deleuzean
150 Flore Coulouma
ligne de fuite than a straight line linking together fixed destinations.

Like a digressive line of thought, the narrator’s road takes unexpected
turns which can seem inconsequential or illogical at first (‘tiny towns
[…] not [...] on its way’). However, these very twists and turns of the
road enable the narrator to take in the beauty of the landscape, and to

reflect back on the importance of the road itself, as the necessary device
revealing the beauties of the world. Digression and straight line cannot
be defined without one another: just as digressions give purpose and
existential justification to the line of the road, so the road itself makes
sense of the chaos of the world. Such a binary structure is prominently
featured in Flann O’Brien’s writing to which liminality and ambiva-
lence are central.
The road then, is the vantage point from which the landscape can
be admired and examined. Again, despite its apparent triviality, the
perception of the landscape is far from straightforward and seems as
blurred and confused as the infinity of turns that the description of the
road suggests:
There was nothing familiar about the good-looking countryside

which stretched away from me at every view […] Everything seemed
almost too pleasant, too perfect, too finely made. Each thing the eye
could see was unmistakable and unambiguous, incapable of merg-
ing with any other thing or being confused with it. (O’Brien 2001:
39–40)
This passage offers a good definition of Flann O’Brien’s digressions

as discrete fragments only brought together by the perception of the
reader/viewer. Taking in all the elements of such a landscape finally
helps the narrator recollect fragments of his own life while his eyes
roam the landscape.
There is also an unmistakable sense of wonder attached to the men-
tal and spatial wandering of the narrator. As he ponders the uncanny
unfamiliarity of the quasi-supernatural landscape, he cannot help but
feel the elation of the explorer, all the more so since he is on a quest for
his elusive black box:
I was clearly in a strange country but all the doubts and perplexities
which strewed my mind could not stop me from feeling happy and
heart-light and full of an appetite for going about my business and
finding the hiding-place of the black box. (2001: 40)
This sense of geographically explorative pleasure comes to a head with

the narrator’s encounter with the bicycle, and their escape from the
barracks:
How can I convey the perfection of my comfort on the bicycle, the

completeness of my union with her, the sweet responses she gave
me at every particle of her frame? […] She moved beneath me with
agile sympathy in a swift, airy stride, finding smooth ways among
the stony tracks, swaying and bending skilfully to match my chang-
ing attitudes, even accommodating her left pedal patiently to the
awkward working of my wooden leg. (2001: 196)
Apart from the obvious sexual subtext and the theme of impotence
conveyed by the narrator’s wooden leg, this excerpt points to the idea
of digression as explorative pleasure, in both a geographical and a senti-
mental sense. The bicycle enables the narrator to find his way through
space; we know the narrator is as much lost in space and time as he is
in language. This is due partly to his own incapacities, and his wooden
leg can be no substitute for what Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has called the
‘missing limb syndrome’ to describe the loss of the native tongue and
the difficulty of writing in the colonial language (quoted in Caroll 2003:
8). Here the narrator has lost his identity and, with it, his ability to ver-
balize and explain his confused perception of the world, relying only,
for that purpose, on the nonsensical corpus of De Selby’s aphorisms.
Finding the bicycle literally frees the narrator, and gives him the power
to roam, which brings us back to the elation of digression as a form of
negotiating the accidents of discourse and taking in all the possibilities
of a wandering mind and body.
The flexible (and feminine) bicycle stands in stark contrast with the
stiffness of the wooden leg and of the intolerant compartmentalization
of the voices of authority, be they academic (De Selby and his critics) or
judiciary (the policemen). De Selby is the cause of the narrator’s mur-
der of Old Mathers, and subsequent damnation, while the policemen
are his executioners. The bicycle on the other hand allows him to let
himself go, which in terms of language and discourse means to embrace
the spontaneity of digression as liberating rather than pathological or
abnormal. In this sense, Flann O’Brien reverts here to the ambiguous
opposition between orality and literacy. The symbols of written author-
ity, De Selby’s volumes and the policemen’s notebooks, are mere instru-
ments of the death of language, while the bicycle’s silent acquiescence
152 Flore Coulouma
paradoxically brings us back towards an ideal of cooperative conversa-

tion and to the immediacy and authenticity of orality.
The bicycle metaphor shows the poetical power of digression. Such
poetical dimension is to be found with equal relevance in At Swim-Two-
Birds’ Sweeney, the legendary king condemned to roam ‘through the

length of Ireland’. In Sweeney’s case, however, the epiphanies of digres-
sion are soon outnumbered by its dangers, and we will now examine
them. Indeed, for many characters in Flann O’Brien’s novels, what lurks
beneath the beauty of digressive tales is schizophrenia and alienation.
Losing the plot?
Losing the plot is a favourite theme of Flann O’Brien, both literally

and metaphorically. More than just an excuse for jokes, it betrays the
underlying fear at the heart of O’Brien’s conception of language and
his fascination with nonsensical discourse. For O’Brien, language means
identity, and the loss of the native language entails a physical loss of
one’s tongue (that is, ability to talk) and of one’s mental integrity, further
linking verbal expression to sanity. In this context, digression becomes
an ambiguous, potentially dangerous device. Although digression may
be conducive to the elating sense of a complete freedom of the language,
it remains fundamentally deceptive. In his novels and chronicles, Flann
O’Brien’s satire of the discourses of authority deflect the idea that lan-
guage can be perfectly referential and that it can be perfectly mastered
and used. The dangers and excesses of digression show that there is no
such thing as complete linguistic freedom, a point made all the more
poignant because Flann O’Brien wrote within the context of linguistic
colonialism. His narrators and characters never fully appropriate their
own tales, because the language they speak is not their own.1
In The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds, two characters fall
victim to the overpowering force of digression: Trellis, the stay-in-
bed author whose own characters attempt to kill him, and The Third
Policeman’s first-person narrator. In both cases, the characters’ inability
to curb digressive speech leads to mental alienation and schizophrenia,
whereas their digressions take on an independent life and become full-
blown narratives in their own right.
In The Third Policeman, footnotes begin when the narrator starts his
solitary journey with a visit to the house of his victim, in search of the
black box. Timing is essential here for, once on the road, the narrator
has lost all memory of his own identity (‘I don’t even know my own
name’ [O’Brien 2001: 17]). As he becomes aware of his memory loss, the
narrator develops a form of schizophrenia symbolized by the digressive

footnotes and by the voice of his independent and strong-willed soul,
Joe. As a result, the narrator exists only through other voices and loses
his power of decision and analytical thought, although he remains
aware of his shortcomings and maintains his ironic posture throughout

the novel. Any attempt at expressing a dissenting opinion is crushed by
the otherwise benevolent voices in his head:
I felt, for no reason, that his [Joe’s] diminutive body would be hor-
rible to the human touch – scaly or slimy like an eel […]
Why scaly?
I don’t know. How can I know why I think my thoughts?
By god I won’t be called scaly […] I’m leaving.
What?
Clearing out. We will see who is scaly in two minutes.
These few words sickened me instantly with fear although their
meaning was too momentous to be grasped without close reasoning.
(2001: 131–3)
Joe comically illustrates the form of linguistic authoritarianism to which

the narrator has fallen victim. The narrator cannot live without his
voices since they provide the missing limbs he needs. With them gone,
he is dead, as Joe cunningly remarks: ‘Before I go I will tell you this.
I am your soul and all your souls. When I am gone you are dead’ (2001:
133). De Selby’s discourses represent the narrator’s lifetime work and, as
such, his sole existential and philosophical justification, even though
his life has become an illusion (he is dead and in hell).
At Swim-Two-Birds offers a more comical version of some of the dan-
gers of digression, when Trellis, the author, faces mutiny from his own
characters. In full revolutionary mode, the characters overturn Trellis’s
plot and impose their own stories, writing Trellis in as the hapless target
of their vengeful determination:
Greatly excited, they suggest that he [Orlick, Trellis’s son with one of
his fictional characters] utilize his gift to turn the tables (as it were)
and compose a story on the subject of Trellis, a fitting punishment
indeed for the usage he has given others. (O’Brien 1967: 164)
The characters have rebelled because their author does not handle his
story properly. Digression is used excessively in the novel to very effective
comic results but it is shown within the embedded story to be a sign of
154 Flore Coulouma
weakness. Here, the overall narrator’s point of view remains purposefully

ambiguous. The different narrative levels in At Swim present digression at
once as subversively liberating and oppressively dehumanizing (literally
so: the characters decide to turn Trellis into a rat before slicing him up).
The final twist in the novel re-establishes the liberating power of chaos

and digression when the maid accidentally throws parts of Trellis’s manu-
script into the fire, and unwittingly destroys all the rebellious characters.
The politics of digression
Our quick study of digression in At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third

Policeman leaves us with the fundamental inconclusiveness of Flann
O’Brien’s writing. He explicitly uses digression as part of the Irish bardic
tradition as well as to represent oral interactions and thought processes
more realistically. The result is both poetical and comical, and can be
said to belong to a well-established tradition of digressive satire and
tales, from bardic poems to Sterne to Joyce (Booker 1995).
Still, digression serves another, more subversive purpose, in O’Brien’s
satire of literary and academic authors. It points out their inner contra-
dictions and shows that the very notion of a single plot is a fallacy. For
Flann O’Brien, no author or critic can keep a story straight, either struc-
turally or in terms of meaning and truth. The lesson to authors (including
O’Brien himself) is not to try to do away with digression and nonsense,
since they will only return in the narrative with a vengeance. Digression
as a satirical device disturbs the notion of authority in discourse, as it
is traditionally linked to stability and fixity. In this sense, O’Brien’s use
of digressive anecdotes in his Irish Times chronicles is also part of his
political satire at a time when the question of straight talk was still an
avatar of the question of language.
Flann O’Brien’s playful use and meta-commentary on digression can-
not therefore be interpreted without taking into account his diglossic
vision of language as a whole.2 As a bilingual author who chose very
early on to write exclusively in English (soon after An Béal Bocht, pub-
lished in 1940), O’Brien was aware of his ambiguous position as a native
speaker of Irish writing in the colonial language. For an Irish author
writing in English, he said, there is always an ‘unknown quantity that
enables us to transform the English language’ (quoted in Clissmann
1975: 238). Digression works at the level of O’Brien’s narratives as the
unknown quantity that enables him to transform and subvert narrative
traditions and to resonate as a truly unique voice within the canon of
twentieth-century Irish literature.
Notes
1. Flann O’Brien’s view of language regularly echoes Stephen Dedalus’s inter-
view with the English dean of studies at his school, and his painful realization
that ‘the language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine […] His
language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech’

(Joyce 1996: 215).
2. Diglossia refers to a context in which two languages are used for different
socio-economic situations. It can refer to two dialects of a single language
(high v. low dialect), or to two completely different languages, one of which
has official status and symbolically dominates the other (English v. Irish in
pre-independent Ireland, for instance).
Bibliography
Booker, M. Keith. 1995. Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire (Syracuse
University Press)
Caroll, Clare, ed. 2003. Ireland and Postcolonial Theory (Cork University Press)
Press)
Clissmann, Anne. 1975. Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction to his Writings
(Dublin: Gill and Macmillan)
Cronin, Anthony. 1989. No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien
(New York: Fromm International)
Hopper, Keith. 1995. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Postmodernist (Cork
University Press)
Joyce, James. [1916] 1996. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London:
Penguin)
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. 1996. ‘Combien coûte le premier pas? Une théorie
annonciative de l’incipit’, in L’Incipit, ed. Liliane Louvel (Poitiers: La Licorne),
pp. 7–17
Lord, A. B. 1968. The Singer of Tales (New York: Atheneum)
O’Brien, Flann. [1939] 1967. At Swim-Two-Birds (London: Penguin)
—— [1964] 1993. The Dalkey Archive (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press)
—— [1967] 2001. The Third Policeman (London: Flamingo)
—— [1977] 1987. The Hair of the Dogma (London: Grafton Books)
Sterne, Laurence. [1760–67] 1996. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman (Ware: Wordsworth Editions)
12
‘Going On’: Digression and
Consciousness in The Beckett

Trilogy
Edmund J. Smyth
Any attempt to elaborate a poetics of digression in European fiction must

take account of Samuel Beckett’s unique contribution to the limits and
potentialities of this narrative strategy. The fictional narratives of Samuel
Beckett are especially preoccupied by digression and discontinuity: the nar-
rators in Beckett’s fiction are engaged in a perpetual endeavour to explore
the meanderings of a disintegrating consciousness, and thus deviate from
any unified concept of subjectivity, in order to translate the fragmentation
of the self in a discourse characterized by repetition, instability and frac-
ture. Beckett’s adoption of this narrative structure has become extremely
influential in modern and contemporary fiction, especially in the nouveau
roman movement of writers (many of whom were also published by his
French publisher, Les Editions de Minuit), who sought to contest omnis-
cience, traditional linear narrative, plot and character-based fiction (in
the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon and Robert Pinget the
Beckettian influence is particularly tangible). The enduring impact of the
Beckettian monologue is evident in the works of writers as diverse as Paul
Auster, J. M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald and James Kelman. Arguably, Beckett’s
variation on the internal monologue presents an extreme case in the
development of modern fiction. This chapter examines the way in which
digression in Beckett’s trilogy is used as the principal narrative device that
serves to foreground both the workings of consciousness and the pre-
dominance of discours over récit in narratological terms, a discourse which
presents a vivid formal and stylistic metaphor for disintegration.
The Beckett Trilogy, as these novels have collectively come to be known
in English, is made up of Molloy (1950), Malone meurt (Malone Dies; 1951)
and L’Innommable (The Unnameable; 1952). These works were, in fact,
written between 1947 and 1949, during his ‘frenzy of writing’ (Knowlson
1996: 358), as he came to terms with metaphysical darkness, failure,
156
‘Going On’ 157
powerlessness and hostility towards conventionalized language. Molloy

was the first novel which Beckett wrote in French (if the, at this point
unpublished, Mercier et Camier is excluded), mainly in an attempt to depart
from the erudite and punning modes of writing which characterized his
earlier prose works in English, and as part of a desire to attain simpli-

city and a sense of the strangeness of language and existence. As James
Knowlson comments, ‘French offered him the freedom to concentrate on
a more direct expression of the search for “being” and on an exploration
of ignorance, impotence and intelligence’ (1996: 357). Before writing
Molloy, he wrote three short stories in French: ‘L’Expulsé’ (‘The Expelled’),
‘Premier amour’ (‘First Love’) and ‘Le Calmant’ (‘The Calmative’) which
anticipated many of the themes he would develop in the trilogy. Waiting
for Godot was also, of course, being elaborated during this period.
It is evident that the trilogy departs from narrative convention. Any
identifiable ‘story’ and ‘character’ quickly dissolves in favour of disconti-
nuities, inconsistencies and implausibilities at every level. Molloy, which
is divided into two parts, contains only the most rudimentary histoire:
at the opening, the narrator is in his mother’s bedroom, and is engaged
in an attempt to tell the story of how he got there; then in part two,
Moran, an investigator of some kind who has been instructed to find
Molloy, at the end of this quest seems to kill someone whom he himself
resembles. Molloy seems to have become part of Moran, and vice versa.
In Malone Dies, the narrator, a reincarnation of Molloy, confined to bed,
stressing that his death is imminent, becomes preoccupied with the lives
of the individuals in the rural area where he is living; as in the previ-
ous volume, another ‘character’ is created (Macmann) into whose mind
he seems to merge. Then in The Unnameable, the confined and appar-
ently limbless unnamed narrator (who is presented as little other than a
denatured voice) seems to live in a claustrophobic world between light
and dark; he also invents personages named Mahood and Worm, who
in turn appear to be variations of himself. In The Unnameable narrative
incoherence becomes significantly more pronounced, and makes even
fewer concessions to lisibilité in Barthesian terms. Whereas both Molloy
and Malone Dies contain elements of cohesion (in part two of Molloy
even detective story elements are used to some degree), the final volume
asserts bodily and psychological disintegration, leaving only the voice
of a disembodied consciousness, in which even the first-person pronoun
becomes suspect (anticipating the torrent of speech issuing from Mouth
in the play Not I [1973]). Any attempt to outline the ‘plots’ of the trilogy
is thus bound to be futile, such is the extent to which they resist sum-
mary, by endlessly digressing, proliferating and undermining their own
158 Edmund J. Smyth
status as linear and coherent in traditional terms. The text of the trilogy,
taken as a whole, then, progressively demonstrates the impossibility of
conventional modes of narrative organization. It becomes impossible
even to assert that the discourse can be attached to an identifiable nar-
rator, such is the extent to which there is a merging and confusion of

names, identities and consciousnesses. What is highlighted in the clos-
ing pages is the pressing and anguished irrepressible desire to continue
telling stories, despite the assaults on the self and the disintegrating
subjectivity: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (Beckett 1979: 382). It is impos-
sible to locate these narratives in a definable, realistic spatio-temporal
or geographical location or context: they occur in beds, urns, vases, in
unnamed countries, roads, bogs, the seaside, forests and plains.
We can see the various processes of disintegration throughout the
trilogy as it develops. In Molloy, the narrator starts off on a bicycle and
is then on crutches. Although engaged on a journey, the narrator is
constantly being sidetracked into telling other stories, most of which
appear to be unconnected. Although the journey theme provides a basic
narrative framework, there are so many non sequiturs and unrelated and
unmotivated episodes that this quest structure breaks down: why does
he end up at the house of the woman known as Lousse? Has he been
imprisoned there in some sense? How does he come to be transported to
his mother’s house? Has he been affected by ending up in a ditch? What
is the explanation for the murders which seem to have been perpetrated?
Does Moran kill someone who resembles himself? The ontological status
of the episodes recounted is constantly being undermined, and there are
no obvious links and explanations between these micro-stories, other
than the unregulated workings of a subjective consciousness attempting
to shape an account of its existence, but hampered by a deficient memory
and increasing physical incapacity. Even as his narrative begins, Molloy
underlines the extent to which he may be just elaborating a fiction, thus
casting uncertainty over the whole narrative. The narrator indulges in
constant speculation, and the narrative structure is characterized by a
series of repetitions and bifurcations. The novel starts to digress almost
immediately: we are given an account of a meeting between two men,
‘A’ and ‘C’, but whose ‘story’ is quickly discarded, and does not appear
later in the narrative. Observing the comings and goings of A and C in
the manner of an investigator (presaging Moran’s detective role in part
two), Molloy wonders if he is not confusing different occasions:
And perhaps it was A one day at one place, then C another at another,
then a third the rock and I, and so on for the other components, the
‘Going On’ 159
cows, the sky, the sea, the mountains. I can’t believe it. No, I will not
lie. I can easily conceive it. No matter, no matter, let us go on. (Beckett
1979: 15)
Shortly after this, a lengthy account is given of his obsession with the

sucking stones. Setting off to see his mother on a bicycle, he will encoun-
ter the police, then will spend time with Mrs Lousse, before returning to
look for his mother, despite losing interest at several points, while pro-
gressively becoming more and more subject to physical decomposition.
In part two, Moran increasingly comes to resemble Molloy by the end of
the novel. The quests of both men end in failure, in that Molloy does not
manage to see his mother; Moran returns home without having found
Molloy. If we pursue a reading of the text as stream of consciousness
(which Beckett would seem to invite in the initial stages), the narrative’s
multiple digressions can thus be read or recovered as a consequence of
the unreliability of the narrator’s grasp over his own discourse, memory
and identity. In this reading, the persistence of the processes of inven-
tion and fiction-making will come to overtake memory. Molloy will
be unable to fulfil his search for his mother just as Moran’s quest for
Molloy will have to be abandoned – they are forced to depart from their
tasks, either by circumstance or, more likely, by the imperatives of their
narratives. As Rónán McDonald has stated: ‘The goal or the end of both
narrative quests unravels before our eyes, like a metaphor for the aban-
donment of the principles of story-telling itself’ (2006: 95).
Furthermore, the stream-of-consciousness reading on closer inspec-
tion will itself prove inadequate. As Michael Sheringham has demon-
strated in a masterly analysis of the structure of the text (1985), the
existence of so many parallels, echoes, contrasts which exist between
parts one and two of the novel suggests that we have to consider the
way in which textualization in fact transcends interior monologue. The
parallels between the Molloy and Moran characters and stories are of
course numerous: for example, the experience of disintegration, debili-
tation and failure, concern with family relationships, journeys, physical
violence, the sense of being pursued and victimized by a mysterious
agency and messengers. However, this system of internal parallels and
echoes between the two parts of the novel in fact invites the reader to
consider the unity of the text as a whole, which is primarily conveyed
through the emphasis on a writing presence. Thus, we must pursue
an approach to the text which respects the circularity of the narrative,
despite the fact that the novel is divided into two apparently discrete
parts: we are encouraged to read part one again after reading part two.
160 Edmund J. Smyth
Above all, Sheringham highlights the numerous references to the activ-

ity of narration, and the manner in which the text provides a running
commentary on its own processes and on the performance of the nar-
rators. It is certainly the case that there is an increasing preoccupation
with the disintegration of self: towards the end of the novel there is

a recognition by the narrator of ‘the great changes I had suffered and
of my growing resignation of being dispossessed of self’ (Beckett 1979:
137). Throughout, we become attuned to the text’s self-reflexivity as
a result of the numerous references to writing: Molloy is being given
money to scribble on some pages; Moran is attempting to produce a
report on his quest for Molloy. The Moran narrative in the second part
contrasts initially with the kind of style used in part one, in that it seems
to promise the precision and detail characteristic of a report, especially
when compared with the long rambling paragraph which occupies part
one (‘My report will be long. Perhaps I shall not finish it. My name is
Moran, Jacques. That is the name I am known by. I am done for. My son
too. All unsuspecting’ [1979: 84–5]); however, this coherence will also
evaporate, and by the end of Moran’s narrative we have rejoined Molloy’s
narrative in part one. Part two opens with the words ‘It is midnight. The
rain is beating on the windows. I am calm’ (1979: 84); however, the very
last words of the novel contradict this: ‘It was not midnight. It was not
raining’ (1979: 162), and Moran/Molloy is far from being calm. Thus
the whole intervening narrative is in effect cancelled out, and we are
left with a palpable impression of a fiction. The circularity of the novel
is thus apparent – the end of Moran’s narrative in effect occurs before
Molloy’s narrative. The narrator(s) of Molloy is plagued by the uncertainty
of memory, which casts doubt on the status of the narratives and stories
being elaborated.
In Malone Dies, there is only one voice, immobile, and left with few
possessions (linking him with the earlier narrators and with previous
Beckett characters), and the narrator relies on the use of a stick to fulfil
his needs. He is in his room, meditating on the approach of death, and
passes the time telling the story of Sapo/Macmann; and as in Molloy,
there are many stories concerning violent death. This ‘digression’ in
fact constitutes the major narrative element, and comes to dominate
the diegesis. In common with the merging of characters we found in
Molloy, Macmann seems to end up in an institution like that in which
Moran is telling his story, telling himself numerous stories as distrac-
tions from the inevitability of death and the textual extinction provided
by narrative silence. As in the previous volume, stories are commenced
then interrupted, and there occurs a transformation of one character
‘Going On’ 161
and voice into another (here Sapo mutates into Macmann, who in turn
merges with Malone). Unlike the first part of Molloy, however, there are
shifts in paragraphs, often alternating between first and third person,
thus contesting the grammatical and existential status of the pronoun:
the narrative flow becomes less univocal. Our reading of this novel

directs us back to Molloy, such is the extent to which there is thematic
continuity and parallelism of incident and situation: the narrator, for
example, ends up in an institution of some kind, in which he is a kind
of victim of an anonymous authority. It is evident that the narrator
is becoming preoccupied by the nature of language itself: ‘Words and
images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying clashing, merging, end-
lessly’ (1979: 182), which can almost be taken as a mise en abyme of the
whole narrative and linguistic process in the trilogy. His attempts at an
inventory and ordering of experience quickly fall apart, thus underscor-
ing the coherence of his own narrative: ‘What tedium. And I call that
playing, I wonder if I am not yet again talking about myself’ (1979:
174). Multiple intrusions, diversions and distractions occur as the novel
proceeds in a narrative that loses authority and coherence. His attempt
at an inventory and the four stories he tells himself are interrupted,
despite the plan he had conceived at the outset. Only the first of these
stories (the Sapo narrative) is in any sense undertaken in detail, and he
inevitably digresses away from the other three, despite his best efforts to
maintain the linear narrative line. There are of course numerous cross-
references, echoes and parallels with the first volume; for example, the
story concerning the relationship between Moll and Macmann echoes
that between Molloy and Lousse in Molloy (the consonance in syllables
also invites this comparison). Like Molloy, he does not know how he
had come to be in this institution; he feels a compulsion to write an
account of his adventures. Stressing the lack of unity in his own story,
he does not provide the reader with explanations: ‘I have tried not to
reflect on the beginning of my story. There are things I do not under-
stand. But nothing to signify, I can go on’ (1979: 174), as his narrative
cancels itself out. His reference to ‘losing consciousness’ (1979: 168)
can be read metaphorically as the diminishing hold he has over his dis-
course (‘I have lived in a kind of coma. The loss of consciousness for me
was never any great loss’ [1979: 169]). In the last lines of the novel, the
language and syntax disintegrate as his death seems ever more immi-
nent, and his story collapses under the weight of its unreliablity.
In The Unnameable, the flux of language is particularly intense: in
this novel there is only a single paragraph, with very minimal punc-
tuation and an increasingly fractured syntax. Whereas in the previous
162 Edmund J. Smyth
novels a psychological realist reading is invited by providing a stream-

of-consciousness motivation, in The Unnameable fewer reading cues
and concessions to readerly recuperation are provided, thus making
the text one of Beckett’s most demanding yet central works. What we
are presented with is in fact a crescendo of language: syntactically, the

sentences grow longer and longer, and words and referents become
divorced. Dissonances and diverging perspectives are presented in a
non-hierarchized narration, from which linearity and traditional narra-
tive unity are absent. The impression is created of a speaker who barely
has control over his own narrative, as contradictory and proliferating
stories are slipping constantly outside his grasp.
The novel begins with an assertion of powerlessness in both phys-
ical and narrational terms: ‘Where now? Who now? When now?
Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them
that. Keep going, going on’ (1979: 267). This volume is entering into
a dialogue with the two previous novels, with an assumption of the
reader’s familiarity with the rest of the trilogy. Rubin Rabinovitz has
demonstrated in a study of the use of repetition in the trilogy that ‘This
is the very antithesis of aimless rambling [...] The novels of the trilogy
are painstakingly organized and meticulously crafted’ (1990: 64), such
is the extent to which the reader is invited to compare, contrast, review
and discern the links between the constituent novels. Indeed, The
Unnameable surely constitutes the most radical of the three works: as
Sinead Mooney has commented, ‘all the appurtenances of fiction have
been abandoned’ (2006: 35). This is an even more subversive text without
the narrative frameworks, however fractured, of Molloy and Malone Dies:
crucially, there is no sense at all of a linear development or the logic of a
consciousness. The text, instead, foregrounds the fragmentary, while the
narrator is speaking endlessly of himself, admitting that he is inventing
a sequence of stories and embellishing fictions which generate ever more
fictions, as the adventure with language continues unabated. Indeed,
such is the ‘breathless’ pace, that we have the sense that the narrative
cannot stop, and that the observations, micro-stories and speculations
will proliferate endlessly. The narrator seems in fact barely even a human
consciousness: described as ‘a big, talking ball’ and ‘a liquefied brain’
(Beckett 1979: 280, 269), and that he may even be in a jar of some kind
in a legless and armless state of complete immobility. Inevitably, there
are references to his previous incarnations: ‘All these Murphys, Molloys,
and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer
for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should
have spoken of me and of me alone’ (1979: 278). All of these voices and
‘Going On’ 163
‘characters’ throughout the trilogy become metamorphosed. Mahood in

his crutches becomes transmogrified into the narrating ‘self’; returning
from his travels, the one-legged Mahood finds that all his next-of-kin
have died of food poisoning. However, this story is undermined by the
narrative voice: ‘But enough of this nonsense. I was never anywhere but

here, no one ever got me out of here’ (1979: 297).
Perhaps the most disconcerting incarnation is the creature in the
jar across from a restaurant, which is one of the major stories being
recounted. After this, the next major digression is the almost ten pages
which are devoted to the account of Worm being born. We have an
equivalence mooted between Basil, Mahood and then Worm: ‘Perhaps
it’s by trying to be Worm that I’ll finally succeed in being Mahood,
I hadn’t thought of that. Then all I have to do is be Worm. Which no
doubt I shall achieve by trying to be Jones’ (1979: 311–12). Just like
the authority figures from the previous novels, they become in various
ways representatives of the normal social order, and exist as the narra-
tor’s surrogates and delegates: ‘It was he who told me stories about me,
lived in my stead, issued forth from me, came back to me, entered back
into me, heaped stories on my head’ (1979: 283). These other presences
are depicted as tormentors and ‘vice-existers’, with whose voices he
is locked in discursive combat. All of these ‘characters’ blur into each
other; Mahood’s voice mingles with his own: ‘It is his voice which as
often, always, mingled with mine, and sometimes drowned it com-
pletely’ (1979: 283). There is a concerted contestation of the identity of
the narrating first person: ‘Do they believe it is I who am speaking [...]
To make believe I have an ego of my own’; and later ‘Is there a single
word of mine in all I say? No, I have no voice’ (1979: 317, 329); ‘It is not
I who am speaking [...] Where do these words come from. That pour out
of my mouth, and what do they mean’ (1979: 340). These statements
can be seized upon by post-structuralist critics who will argue that the
notions of the self are determined by language and that the self does not
exist prior to language. In this concluding volume, the impossibility of
a rational ordering of experience is underlined. All is invention: ‘all lies,
God and man, nature and the light of day, the heart’s outpourings and
the means of understanding, all invented, basely, by me alone’ (1979:
278–9). Despite having a ‘traumatized’ consciousness, faulty memory
and bereft of emotional contact with humanity, the narrator insists that
he will go on: ‘there was never anyone, anyone but me, anything but
me, talking of me, impossible to stop, impossible to go on, but I must
go on, I’ll go on, without anyone, without anything, but me, but my
voice’ (1979: 374).
164 Edmund J. Smyth
What is striking about this novel is the compulsion to continue nar-

rating, which is prepared by Molloy’s comment in the first volume of
the trilogy: ‘And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a name-
lessness often hard to penetrate’ (1979: 30–1). These words from the
opening of the trilogy are in effect translated into the final volume

of the trilogy, again suggesting the way in which the trilogy has to be
considered as a single entity. However, the narrator here seems even
more extreme: ‘A far more agonised, confused and desperate voice than
in the first two novels of the trilogy’ (McDonald 2006: 104). There is
the sense of a culmination if we consider the position of the narrator
in this volume compared with the previous two; however, far from
offering closure or explanation, it is the circularity of the trilogy that is
stressed. The complex relationships between text, voice and conscious-
ness are problematized in this novel; specifically, the origin of discourse
is queried: ‘It issues from me, it fills me, it clamours against my walls,
it is not mine, I can’t stop it, I can’t prevent it, from tearing me, rack-
ing me, assailing me. It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and
must speak, that is all I know’ (Beckett 1979: 281). It is the imperative
to speak which emerges, despite the ravages of the narration and the
physical disembodiment.
It has been observed on many occasions that Beckett is grappling with
the problematics of the Cartesian subject (the philosopher Guelincx
is referred to in Murphy). When the narrator in The Unnameable states
‘I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me’ (1979: 267),
Beckett is departing from the Cartesian mind–body dualistic tradition
in Western humanism. In his essay ‘Beckett and the Philosophers’,
P. J. Murphy provides a timely reassessment of the ways in which Beckett
is entering into a debate with such questions at least implicitly in his
works. It is of course the case that early criticism of Beckett is grounded
in the existential and metaphysical implications of the narratives. In his
essay ‘Consciousness and the Novel’, David Lodge presents a masterly
account of the ways in which modern fiction ‘represents’ conscious-
ness, and locates Beckett’s interior monologues as works whose ‘narrator
seems to be a consciousness totally deprived of sensory input’ (2002: 82).
In The Art of Fiction, Lodge introduces the chapter on aporia using the
opening section of The Unnameable: ‘All we have is a narrative voice talk-
ing to itself, or transcribing its own thoughts as they occur, longing for
extinction and silence’ (1992: 221). Lodge is able to use the Beckettian
self-cancelling and contradictory discourse as an object lesson in the nar-
rative trope of aporia. The continuity and coherence of consciousness is
radically contested in this final volume in particular, but apparent to a
‘Going On’ 165
lesser degree in the first two novels. As Paul Davies has said, ‘Beckett’s
narrators embody the emergency of the Cartesian consciousness, split
off not only from the environment but also from its own organism [...]
Beckett’s lost, blind, will-less, impotent, dried-up tramps and wanderers
are the casualties of Cartesianism’ (1994: 45). The reading of the text

as unmediated stream of consciousness, however, is of course a psycho-
logical realist means of naturalizing and recuperating the work, which
otherwise seems to defy a specific origin in consciousness, by ostenta-
tiously undermining the notion of a direct link between text and voice.
A new generation of critics, attuned to the way in which the trilogy
foregrounds the lack of a fixed centre, voice and consciousness, has
focused on how the trilogy proclaims a suspicion of language: in The
Unnameable, words become castigated: ‘the words swarm and jostle like
ants, hasty and indifferent, bringing nothing, taking nothing away, too
light to leave a mark. I shall not say I again, ever again, it’s too farcical.
I shall put it in its place, whenever I hear it, the third person, if I think
of it’ (Beckett 1979: 326). Leslie Hill (1990) has analysed how Beckett’s
fiction anticipates those concerns about language and textuality with
which Derrida would be preoccupied. Indeed, as Iian Wright has argued,
Beckett’s narrators are ‘at work in a deconstructionist activity – fore-
grounding their own textuality, decentring the texts they inhabit, sub-
verting subject positions, denaturalizing language’ (1983: 71). In this
respect Beckett is anticipating the deconstructionist proposition that
the ‘I’ that speaks differs from the ‘I’ that is spoken of. Along similar
lines, David Lodge has rightly commented that ‘Beckett was a decon-
structionist avant la letttre’ (1992: 221). Postmodern readings of Beckett
will concentrate on the problematics of language articulated in the texts
(Trevise 1990; Uhlmann 1999; Watson 1991); as Rónán McDonald has
put it, Beckett’s fiction is susceptible to a range of subtle postmodern
readings: ‘There is no self anterior to the speaking self; language makes
the self, it does not simply reflect it’ (2006: 121). Selfhood becomes con-
tested in the trilogy; the ‘I’ becomes indeterminate and detached from
consciousness, and is instead a pure narrative device – a voice without a
consciousness, a discourse without an origin, an impersonal text with-
out a narrator of a conventional first-person kind.
In exploring the relationship between digression and consciousness,
the trilogy can be recruited to chart the transition from a modernist
towards a postmodernist aesthetic in literary-historical terms, in the
sense that the decentred consciousness is precisely what is conveyed
(McHale 1987; Smyth 1991). We have shifting narrative viewpoints,
the disintegration of linear plot, an affirmation of writing, and a lack
166 Edmund J. Smyth
of fixed character and finality. Patricia Waugh identifies a postmodern

fiction as one which plays on the gap between the linguistic ‘I’ and
the existential ‘I’: ‘To conceive of subjectivity as contextual, fluid, rela-
tional, constituted and annihilated through language, is to recognise
that as one writes the self one’s self is also similarly written’ (1992: 65).

Arguably, the trilogy’s problematization of the concept of a unified con-
sciousness constitutes a challenge to the Enlightenment and humanist
idea of the centrality of the mind: perhaps this is the most radical fea-
ture of the work. By detaching consciousness from the notion of a fixed
identity, the trilogy contests this basic tenet of the Western philosophi-
cal tradition. In post-structuralist literary theory, the human subject is
constructed by the discourses in which it is situated. The philosopher
Daniel Dennett has maintained that consciousness is an epiphenomenon
or illusion, and refers to the ‘pandemonium’ of brain activity (1993). It
could be argued that the representation of the functioning of conscious-
ness in the trilogy mirrors this, in that the narrative nature of human
consciousness means that human beings are ‘condemned’ to tell stories.
The trilogy boldly collapses the previously linked categories of language,
consciousness and selfhood. However, it would be dangerous to assert a
narrowly mimetic view that the trilogy represents consciousness in such
an unmediated way, for this ignores the emphasis on writing and the
manner in which the trilogy has been constructed as a single entity. As
we have seen, there are numerous echoes, parallels and correspondences
between its constituent parts, and the three enter into a dialogue with
each other, with the concluding volume being seen as a development
from the previous two, however inconclusive the ending may appear.
For a narrative that may initially seem to focus on subjectivity, the link
between language and the self is dissolved, and is replaced by a more
fluid ‘identity’: there can be no self before the creation of narrative, and
consequently no totalized selfhood (Durozoi 1972; Mayoux 1982). It is
tempting to see The Unnameable as a ‘decline into narrative anarchy’
(Mooney 2006: 39): in this reading, the disintegrating body becomes
a structural metaphor for the disintegrating text, bereft of unity, and
capable of multiplying and permutating endlessly, utterances without
an origin, resisting textual and psychological totalization.
It is evident that Beckett, in his heightened adoption of digression, is
advancing upon the modernist experiments of James Joyce and Marcel
Proust. However, we find in the trilogy a departure from the essential-
ism of Proust, that is to say, the notion of an irreducible essence despite
the ravages of time and space. Beckett’s use of the digressive internal
monologue is clearly derived in large part from the adventures in
‘Going On’ 167
form of first-person narration in modernist fiction. The novels which

make up The Beckett Trilogy are not, however, confessional narratives,
highlighting the rich exploration and completeness of the inner self.
Instead, Beckett’s contribution to this device is to remove the valoriza-
tion of interiority which had come to characterize the digressive interior

monologue in modernism. Far from celebrating the inner life, Beckett
depicts the multiple and unstable ego, bereft of a solid and recognizable
identity or personality. Beckett departs from the modernist emphasis on
interior monologue as the basis for the creation of character. The ‘logic’
of the interior monologue provides only a partial (psychological realist)
reading for the text; what now has to be considered is the manner in
which the trilogy resists being reduced to an individuated and unmedi-
ated stream of consciousness, by its foregrounding of the writing process
and its emphasis on competing discourses and voices. Paradoxically, in
order to develop new reading strategies, the ‘unity’ of the trilogy as a
whole needs to be re-examined, as a result of the existence of numerous
internal parallels and correspondences. Digression is an integral part of
the diegesis in the three novels, foregrounding fragmentation and dis-
continuity. The trilogy exceeds the limits of the representation of con-
sciousness in fiction and it subverts totalizing fictions of the self. ‘The
stream of consciousness has turned into a stream of narration,’ as David
Lodge has summarized the distinction between Joyce’s modernism and
Beckett’s postmodernism (1990: 44).
Bibliography
Beckett, Samuel. 1979. The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable
(London: Picador)
Davies, Paul. 1994. ‘Three Novels and Four Nouvelles: Giving up the Ghost Be
Born at Last’, in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. John Pilling
(Cambridge University Press), pp. 43–66
Dennett, Daniel. 1993. Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin)
Durozoi, Gérard. 1972. Beckett (Paris: Bordas)
Hill, Leslie. 1990. Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge University Press)
Knowlson, James. 1996. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London:
Bloomsbury)
Lodge, David. 1990. After Bakhtin (London: Routledge)
—— 1992. The Art of Fiction (London: Penguin)
—— 2002. Consciousness and the Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press)
Mayoux, Jean-Jacques. 1982. ‘Molloy: un événement littéraire, une œuvre’,
in Molloy, by S. Beckett (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, édition double),
pp. 243–74
168 Edmund J. Smyth
McDonald, Rónán. 2006. The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge

University Press)
McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge)
Mooney, Sinead. 2006. Samuel Beckett (London: Northcote House)
Murphy, P. J. 1994. ‘Beckett and the Philosophers’, in The Cambridge Companion
to Samuel Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge University Press), pp. 222–40

Rabinovitz, Rubin. 1990. ‘Repetition and Underlying Meanings in Samuel
Beckett’s Trilogy’, in Rethinking Beckett, ed. Lance St John Butler and Robin J.
Davis (London: Macmillan), pp. 31–67
Sheringham, Michael. 1985. Beckett: ‘Molloy’ (London: Grant and Cutler)
Smyth, Edmund J. 1991. Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction (London:
Batsford)
Trevise, Thomas. 1990. Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature
Uhlmann, Anthony. 1999. Beckett and Postmodernism (Cambridge University
Press)
Watson, David. 1991. Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (London:
Macmillan)
Waugh, Patricia. 1992. Practising Postmodernism: Reading Modernism (London:
Arnold)
Wright, Iian. 1983. ‘What Matter Who’s Speaking? Beckett, the Authorial Subject
and Contemporary Critical Theory’, Southern Review, 16.1: 59–86
13
Straight Line or Aimless
Wandering? Italo Calvino’s

Way to Digression
Olivia Santovetti
I am not devoted to aimless wandering, I’d rather say

that I prefer to entrust myself to the straight line, in
the hope that the line will continue into infinity, mak-
ing me unreachable. I prefer to calculate at length the
trajectory of my flight, expecting that I will be able to
launch myself like an arrow and disappear over the
horizon. (Calvino 1988: 47–8)
Digression was not the typical feature of the Italian writer Italo Calvino.
His predilection for linear writing, the ‘straight line’, was frequently reaf-
firmed by the writer himself: his temperament, as he confessed in Six
Memos for the Next Millennium, prompted him to ‘keep it short’ (Calvino
1988: 120) and his stories tended to ‘go down straight as a plumb-line’
(1991: 133). And yet, no other writer in Italian literature has given so
much thought to the elaboration of the strategy of digression as Calvino.
This is evident in his appreciation of digressive authors (including Ariosto,
Sterne, Diderot and Gadda), in his memorable definition of digression as
one of the ‘pleasures of lingering’ (1988: 46) and finally in his original
experimentation in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979). This novel can
be seen as an attempt – a carefully planned or ‘calculated’ attempt – of
a partisan of the linear plot to come to terms with a digressive pattern
of writing. Here, Calvino deliberately employed digressions to under-
mine and dismantle the plot – by breaking its linearity and showing its
status of artifice – and at the same time to emphasize its irreplaceable
function – by restoring the Aristotelian formula of the plot as ‘organi-
zation of the events’ in the narration (Aristotle 1996: 11). In Calvino’s
writing, linear plot and digressions stand as two poles of an opposition
that, together with other pairs of opposites (including order/disorder,
169
170 Olivia Santovetti
lightness/weight, quickness/delay, sunny/opaque, detachment/participa-

tion), constitute a binary logic at the core of his oeuvre. The binary logic
provided creative constraints for a writer who defined himself and his
work through dichotomy, as ‘a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury’,
and whose work ‘reflects these two impulses’ (Calvino 1988: 53).

I will analyse Calvino’s use of digression through three definitions of
digression. The first is explicitly formulated by Calvino in the Norton
lecture on ‘Quickness’: digression as ‘a strategy for putting off the end-
ing’ and maintaining the potentiality of the beginning (1988: 46). The
second is alluded to in Calvino’s apology of the work of Carlo Emilio
Gadda – the quintessential digressive author in Italian literature – with
which he opens his final lecture on ‘Multiplicity’: digression as the
means through which the narrative text recreates the multiplicity of the
world. The third definition is, I will argue, implied in the self-reflexive
vocation that ran through all of Calvino’s production, fiction and non-
fiction: digression as a technique of critical detachment through which
the text reflects on itself and calls into question the reader.
Digression as a strategy for maintaining the potentiality

of the beginning
In Six Memos, Calvino describes digression and pays homage to its

inventors: ‘Laurence Sterne’s great invention was the novel that is com-
pletely composed of digressions, an example followed by Diderot. The
digression is a strategy for putting off the ending, a multiplying of time
within the work, a perpetual evasion or flight. An evasion from what?
From death, of course’ (1988: 46). Narratively speaking, to escape death
means to be able to prolong the preliminaries indefinitely, to maintain,
against the definitiveness and completeness of the end, the potentiali-
ties of the beginning. This is the aim of Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night
as stated by the writer Silas Flannery, Calvino’s alter ego in the novel:
I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that

maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning,
the expectation still not focused on an object. But how could such
a book be constructed? Would it break off after the first paragraph?
Would the preliminaries be prolonged indefinitely? Would it set the
beginning of one tale inside another? (1981: 177)
The answers to these questions is If on a Winter’s Night itself. The

novel tells the story of a fictional reader whose reading is continuously
Straight Line or Aimless Wandering? 171
interrupted and rerouted; his frustrating experience in getting hold only

of beginnings, incipits, of books is mirrored in the real readers, who have
to deal with a plot – the one in which the reader is protagonist – that is
interrupted to allow the interpolation of the incipits. The plot is developed
in 12 chapters, which faithfully follow a linear Aristotelian formula, with

a hero (the Reader), a heroine (the Female Reader), a clear beginning, mid-
dle and end, with a happy ending. However, the plot is interrupted by ten
major digressions, which are the ten incipits the Reader protagonist begins
but never finishes reading. The incipits are interleaved between chapters
and constitute an autonomous story that is detached from the main plot,
but also intertwined with it. The structure at the macro level, characterized
by the unusual combination between chapters and incipits, can be seen as
an application, exact and rigorous, of the strategy of digression. However,
digression is also and increasingly present, and in an apparently more
spontaneous way, within each interpolated story or chapter where the
different narrators interrupt the narration and introduce their comments
and reflections. The adoption of a digressive model is openly acknowl-
edged by Calvino as he underlines that ‘the interruption of the plot’ is ‘the
structuring motif of [his] novel’ (1991–94, II: 1390). The writer uses inter-
ruption and digression as devices through which to emphasize, preserve
and multiply the narrative potential which he sees concentrated in the
beginning: a book that is only an incipit, as Silas Flannery fantasized.
Indeed, the beginning or incipit expressed for Calvino the quintes-
sence of the potentialities of literature. It is significant that Calvino dedi-
cated the first of the Norton lectures to the problem of beginning and
ending (‘Cominciare e finire’). It began with a series of definitions of
the function of beginning, of which two are of interest here. The first is
the definition of the beginning as the entrance to a different world, the
written world; prior to the beginning there exists only the ‘non-written
world’ where we live (Calvino 1995: 735). Silas Flannery had expressed
this idea as ‘the incipit seems to open the passage from one world to the
other, from the time and space of here and now to the time and space
of the written world’ (Calvino 1981: 176–7). For Flannery/Calvino the
beginning was the first space where fiction and reality confronted each
other. I argue that this definition of beginning bears an analogy with
the mechanism of digression. Digressions, too, are a threshold since, by
interrupting the sequence of the plot, they divert the attention from
the narrated events to the narrative process itself and stimulate an
awareness of the problematic relationship between the fictional text
and reality, between narrator and readers, and between two different
temporalities, that of the narrated story and that of the narrating.
The second definition of beginning is related to the idea of expressing

the maximum of potentiality and energy: it is the ‘moment of detach-
ment from the potential multiplicity’ (Calvino 1995: 735), the ‘passage
from the universal to the particular’, where the writer feels the ‘need to
leave the vastness of the cosmos, in order to dedicate all his/her atten-

tion […] to the detailed representation of a single story’ (1995: 738).
However, this exalting, creative and promising moment – whose poten-
tiality is immortalized in the Sternean image, so recurrent in Calvino’s
work, of the white page on which anything can be written – is also the
crucial moment of choice: ‘We have the possibility of saying everything,
in all the possible ways, but we have to say one thing and in one parti-
cular way’ (1995: 734). Few other writers ‘have had such an acute and
almost painful sense of the choice which pervades the activity of writ-
ing’ (Barenghi 2007: 62). The choice in Calvino is always accompanied
by anxiety and regret: something will be discarded and lost. Hence the
suggestive and melancholic reflection in the end of the famous ‘1964
Preface’ to The Path to the Spiders’ Nests: ‘A book written will never con-
sole me for what I have destroyed writing it’ (1991–94, I: 1204). This
feeling was expressed on many other occasions by Calvino, including in
the Norton lectures (‘Cominciare e finire’ [1995: 748] and ‘Exactitude’
[1988: 68]). A dense page in the fifth interpolated story, ‘Looks down
in the gathering shadow’, of If on a Winter’s Night also deals with the
idea. Here, though, the nostalgic tone is supplanted by a bold narrator
who explains all the advantages of ‘a trick of the narrative art that [he
is] trying to employ’ (Calvino 1981: 109). This trick is digression. After
an adventurous life the narrator has time for recollection. In this reverie
are stated the terms of Calvino’s project in If on a Winter’s Night. One
element that is considered is the density of material to be told. The way
this density is realized is by writing a story that produces around itself a
feeling of ‘saturation of other stories, which [he will] tell or who knows
may already have told on some other occasion’ (1981: 109). The space
that this saturation creates is important: ‘a space full of stories’ where
the reader ‘can move in all directions’ (1981: 109). The actual story that
the narrator tells is not as important as what he is leaving out of the
main narration:
In fact, looking in perspective at everything I am leaving out of the

main narration, I see something like a forest that extends in all direc-
tions and is so thick that it does not allow light to pass: a material,
in other words, much richer than what I have chosen to put in the
foreground this time, so it is not impossible that the person who
follows my story may feel himself a bit cheated, seeing that the
stream is dispersed in so many trickles, and that of the essential
events only the last echoes and reverberations arrive to him; but it is
not impossible that this is the very effect I aimed at when I started
narrating, or let’s say it’s a trick of the narrative art that I am trying

to employ. (1981: 109)
A digressive and multiple narration, one that is ‘dispersed into many

trickles’, is a strategy deliberately adopted by the narrator in order to
preserve the narrative possibilities at his disposal,
which, if you look closer, is the sign of real wealth, solid and vast, in
the sense that if, we’ll assume, I had only one story to tell, I would
make a huge fuss over this story and would end up botching it in
my rage to show it in its true light, but, actually having in reserve a
virtually unlimited supply of narratable material, I am in a position
to handle it with detachment and without haste, even allowing a
certain irritation to be perceptible and granting myself the luxury of
expatiating on secondary episodes and insignificant details. (1981:
109–10)
By avoiding a focus on a single story, the narrator has the advantage

not only of handling the story with more detachment but also of not
exhausting its potentiality. This is the key concept. In the original
Italian Calvino used the verb ‘bruciare’, burn, for what in the English
translation has been translated as ‘botch’. The verb ‘burn’ would have
been more precise because the reader would have not missed the link
with the last line of the ‘1964 Preface’ where Calvino spoke with regret
and sadness of all the material that he had to ‘distruggere’, destroy,
almost as a sacrifice, in order to tell his single story. With a digressive
pattern of writing the sacrifice is no longer required, the extra material
can find expression in ‘secondary episodes’ or apparently ‘insignificant
details’ (1981: 110). Through digression the novel recharges itself and
becomes a ‘machine for multiplying narratives’ (1988: 120).
Digression as a strategy to recreate in the narrative text

the multiplicity of the world
By multiplying narratives within a single text, digressions achieve

another important result, which is that of paralleling in the narrative
structure the wayward discontinuity and multifariousness of life. This
definition of digression is not explicitly formulated by Calvino but

is implied in his observations on digressive authors, primarily Carlo
Emilio Gadda. Gadda, says Calvino, ‘tried all his life to represent the
world as a knot, a tangled skein of yarn; to represent it without in the
least diminishing the inextricable complexity’ (1988: 106). Gadda’s

digressive style matched his vision of the world as inextricable multi-
plicity. Calvino paid homage to Gadda by beginning his Norton lecture
on ‘Multiplicity’ with a long quotation from That Awful Mess on Via
Merulana (1957), because it provided an ‘excellent introduction to the
subject of [his] lecture – which is the contemporary novel as an encyclo-
paedia, as a method of knowledge, and above all as a network of con-
nections between the events, the people, and the things of the world’
(1988: 105). He stated that If on a Winter’s Night was that type of novel,
albeit in the condensed and modular form that is most in line with his
tendency to ‘keep it short’. Calvino’s aim was ‘to give the essence of
what a novel is by providing it in a concentrated form’, ‘to sample the
potential multiplicity of what may be narrated’; the word he used in
relation to these structures is ‘hyper-novel’, intending with ‘hyper’ to
convey the ‘sense of infinite possibilities’ (1988: 120). Calvino’s digres-
sion in If on a Winter’s Night, by branching in multiple directions, aimed
to recreate in narration – or at least suggest – the ‘infinite possibilities’.
Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s Calvino wrote several pieces
that made explicit the link between digression, multiplicity and the
hyper-novel. Three are particularly interesting: the travel essay ‘The
Form of the Tree’ (1976), in which Calvino made clear his fascination
for a digressive pattern of writing; ‘La Poubelle Agréée’ (1974–76), an
essay where he explored the implication of what is left out or thrown
away; and finally the short story ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ (1967).
In ‘The Form of the Tree’ Calvino described a gigantic tree said
to be 2000 years old that he saw during his trip to Mexico. Calvino
approached the tree and tried to grasp the secret of a time-resistant liv-
ing form: ‘The first sensation is that of an absence of form: a monster
that grows – one would say – without any plan, the trunk is one and
multiple […] The trunk seems to unify in its actual perimeter a long
story of uncertainties, germinations and deviations’ (1995: 600). Does
this imply, wondered a bewildered Calvino, that the secret of lasting is
in abundance? – ‘Is it through a chaotic waste of matter and shape that
the tree is able to give itself a shape and maintain it? Does it mean that
the transmission of meaning is ensured in the excess of manifestation,
in the profusion of expressing ourselves, in throwing away, whatever
happens?’ (1995: 602). Here, the writer has taken the place of the
traveller, and the interrogative refers more generally to literature as the

human activity conveying meaning, and implies questions of method-
ology, poetics and style. He reflected on a different pattern of writing,
a different style, which through its many deviations, digressions and
linguistic deformations – the ‘throwing away, whatever happens’ so

distant from his controlled and calculated style – attempted to reflect
reality as a multiplicity.
Written in the same period, ‘La Poubelle Agréée’ returns to the idea
of the ‘throwing away’ – it is a piece on the daily routine of domestic
rubbish. The writer dwells on the different meanings of ‘throwing away’
and makes the remark that ‘only by throwing something away can I
be sure that something of myself has not yet been thrown away and
perhaps need not be thrown away now or in the future’; this makes
the ‘gesture of throwing away […] the first and indispensable condition
of being, since one is what one does not throw away’ (1993: 103–4).
Evidently, the discourse, as in the case of ‘The Form of the Tree’, has
moved to a different level and instead of household waste Calvino is
speaking of identity: by expelling something that is no longer mine
I proceed towards a more precise definition of myself. Once again
Calvino detects a dichotomy: the daily routine of the dustbin is a rite
of purification, but it also alludes to a ‘descent below ground’, ‘my own
personal funeral, to postpone it if only for a little while, to confirm that
for one more day I have been a producer of detritus and not detritus
myself’ (1993: 104). In writing, the same idea is at the base of Tristram
Shandy’s postponing the end of his book through digressions in order
to cheat death: ‘the more I write, the more I shall have to write’ (Sterne
1984: 341–2). Digression could be considered as production of extra
material, detritus, that is essential to the self being alive and to the nar-
rative for not reaching its final destination. Calvino concludes by mak-
ing explicit the parallel with the process of writing: ‘Writing’, he says,
‘no less than throwing away, involves dispossession, involves pushing
away from myself a heap of crumpled-up paper and a pile of paper writ-
ten all over, neither of the two being any longer mine, but deposited,
expelled’ (1993: 125).
Could the ‘deposited, expelled’ material be recovered and reused? This
is the ambitious idea behind Calvino’s hyper-novel, as a way in which
the novel can attempt to replicate the multiplicity of reality. The word
hyper-novel appeared for the first time in Calvino’s short story ‘The
Count of Monte Cristo’ (1967) and in the essay ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’
(1967). In both pieces the hyper-novel is described as a structure that
‘contains all possible variants’ (1987: 26). This structure – as the narrator
of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ elucidated – rejected the single or linear

plot in favour of a multiplication of the plot, a multiplication which may
assume either the form of a zigzag line or that of a whirling spiral:
Arranging one after the other all the continuations which allow the

story to be extended, probable or improbable as they may be, you
obtain the zigzag line of the Monte Cristo of Dumas; whereas con-
necting the circumstances that prevent the story from continuing
you outline the spiral of a novel in negative, a Monte Cristo preceded
by the minus sign. (1983: 151)
The new plot hypothesized by Calvino is based, once again, on a para-

dox: it should include that which the actual novel has left out, it should
account for the variants that had been discarded, for the possibilities that
had been left unfulfilled – in short, it should contain its own negation,
the ‘novel in negative’. The hyper-novel should also include the story of
itself, of its own making. This brings us to a third definition of digres-
sion, as Calvino, with a characteristic twist in the narration, breaks down
the wall of fictional illusion and brings the readers around the table of
the novelist Alexandre Dumas, who is depicted in the frenzy of his crea-
tion: ‘Dumas selects, rejects, cuts, pastes, interposes’ (1983: 149).
Digression as a technique of critical detachment through

which the text reflects on itself and calls into question
the reader
The depiction of a fellow writer, Dumas, at his desk caught in the act
of sorting out his material, is a sign of the self-reflexive vocation which
runs through the entire work of Calvino and which finds its most
original expression in If on a Winter’s Night. Digression, by definition,
is an interruption into the sequence of the plot which has the effect of
provoking the critical detachment of the reader, who finds him/herself
shifting their attention from the narrated story to the narrative process.
Calvino knew very well that one of the great advantages of adopting a
digressive model was being able ‘to handle’ his material ‘with detach-
ment’ – as put by the narrator of the fifth interpolated story of If on a
Winter’s Night (1981: 110).
Calvino began to use digression as a technique of critical detachment
after his neorealist phase. The focus on the mechanisms of narration
is evident in The Baron on the Trees (1957), where Calvino explored
the passion of reading and the dynamics of storytelling and where he
devised a memorable finale à la Cervantes in which the novelistic illu-

sion is dispelled by reminding us of its status of artifice, its being made
of ink on the page:
Ombrosa no longer exists. Looking at the empty sky, I ask myself

if it ever did really exist. That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and
froth, minute and endless […] was embroidered on nothing, like this
thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming
with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps. (1980: 284)
In The Non-Existent Knight (1959) the self-reflexive game is deliberately

exposed: from chapter IV the intrusions of the nun narrator – usually
at the beginning of the chapter – increase steadily: from digressions no
longer than a page in chapters IV, V and VI to two and four in chapters
VIII and IX. The last two digressions are not only the longest but also
the most dense: in the first the narrator openly shows herself as the
puppeteer behind the stage who manipulates the narration:
On my paper I trace a straight line with occasional angles, and this

is Agilulf’s route. This other line all twirls and zigzags is Gurduloo’s.
When he sees a butterfly flutter by, Gurduloo at once urges his horse
after it, thinking himself astride not the horse but the butterfly, and
so wanders off the road and into the fields. Meanwhile Agilulf goes
straight ahead, following his course. (1980: 345)
The modes of travelling of the two characters embody once again

the binary logic at the base of Calvino’s narrative and constitute also,
incidentally, a self-evident metaphor of the two modalities of writing,
‘digressive and progressive movements’ (Sterne 1984: 81). In the long
digression of chapter IX the narrator continued her observations on
plot construction to the point of confessing candidly that she would
prefer to indulge in her philosophical meditations on the act of narra-
tion rather than waste her time in following the plot: ‘What the vul-
gar – and I too until now – considered as the greatest of delights, the
interweaving adventures which make up every knightly tale, now seem
to me pointless decorations, mere fringes, the hardest part of my task’
(Calvino 1980: 357). This is a narrator who is completely converted to
the cause of digression.
In the 1960s, the influence of a digressive and self-reflexive pattern
of writing became very evident in Calvino’s work. First of all, it visibly
affected the style of his non-fiction work. Characteristically limpid and
articulated in paratactic and brief sentences, this now leaned towards a

more convoluted and meditative style in order to reflect the complexity
and indecipherability of reality. This is seen in the 1964 Preface of The
Path to the Spiders’ Nests and the 1960 ‘Introduzione inedita ai Nostri
Antenati’ (‘Unedited introduction to Our Ancestors’): here Calvino’s way

of arguing was eminently digressive and circular, involving readjust-
ments of the focus of his argument: ‘It is better if I go back to the thread’
(1991–94, I: 1189); ‘I must restart from the beginning. I got myself in
the wrong direction’ (1991–94, I: 1191). The linearity was also broken
by abundant – or ‘mannerist’, as described by Martin McLaughlin (1998:
157) – use of parentheses, through which Calvino inserted doubts, clari-
fications, corrections, even self-mocking comments.
Reflection on the narrative text became one of the most recurrent
topics in Calvino’s essay writing. In ‘The Novel as Spectacle’ (1970),
Calvino observed that ‘never before has this human act of telling a
story, always operative at all stages of a civilization, been so often ana-
lyzed, dismantled, and reassembled in all its most basic mechanisms’
(1987: 194). Self-reflexivity, he continued, was both the most eminent
feature of contemporary and experimental literature and the main
object of critical studies. Calvino believed that the invaluable advantage
of self-reflexivity was that of ‘re-establishing communications between
the writer, who is fully aware of the mechanisms he is using, and the
reader, who goes along with the game because he, too, knows the rules,
and knows he can no longer have the wool pulled over his eyes’ (1987:
194–5). The centrality of reading is explicitly argued in ‘Cybernetics
and Ghosts’ (1967), a sort of manifesto of the new Calvino: ‘Once we
have dismantled and reassembled the process of literary composition,
the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading’ (1987: 15).
From this moment onwards the appeal to the cooperation of an active,
responsible reader dominated Calvino’s essay writing. It culminated in
his last novel, If on a Winter’s Night, which is a successful attempt to
establish, on the basis of a shared awareness of the narrative rules, a new
relationship with the reader.
In conclusion, digression did not come naturally to Calvino. It was

a strategy deliberately adopted to put into practice a conception of
literature that developed after his abandonment of neorealism and
which he finalized in If on a Winter’s Night. Digression, as he succinctly
described it, multiplied time within the novel; this operation had the
advantage of putting off the ending and therefore maintaining the
potentiality of the beginning, and at the same time of making available
within the novel an ‘unlimited supply of narratable material’ (Calvino

1981: 110). This formulation recalls the appeal to variety advocated by
digressive authors including Ariosto and Sterne. Calvino’s postmodern
term was ‘multiplicity’: thereby, digression allowed the novel to ‘sam-
ple the potential multiplicity of what may be narrated’ (1988: 120).

The sampling took the form of ten different types of fiction in If on a
Winter’s Night, ten being enough, said Calvino, to ‘convey the meaning
of multiplicity’ (1991–94, II: 1393) Digression was linked to multiplic-
ity not only as a strategy to include the ‘novel in negative’, that is the
discarded, potential and possible variants, but also because by inter-
rupting and disrupting the linearity of the plot, the novel resembles
the heterogeneous, unpredictable and mutable character of life (1983:
151). The Reader of If on a Winter’s Night experiences the book, frag-
mented by digressions, as no longer ‘something solid, which lies before
you, easily defined, enjoyed without risks’ but as ‘a real-life experience,
always elusive, discontinuous, debated’ (1981: 32). Hence, a zigzag and
digressive pattern of narration is – to adopt the words Calvino used
to describe Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste – ‘the only, authentic image of
the living world, which is never linear nor stylistically homogeneous’
(1999: 108). The appeal to the authenticity of the representation indi-
cates that behind digressions there is a thirst for knowledge: the more
the representation breaks the canons of a ‘realistic’ narration (with the
intrusive presence of the narrator in the fiction, and with the confusion
between the fictional and the real) the closer the writer feels he has
come to reality. I have elsewhere described this attitude in the terms of
‘anti-realistic realism’ (Santovetti 2007: 234). This is what informs the
conception of the literary work that Calvino began elaborating from the
1960s onwards, as a ‘map of the world and of the knowable’, a challenge
to understand the world (1987: 32). This conception was then further
elaborated in the Norton lectures with the notion of the novel as ‘open
encyclopedia’, ‘method of knowledge’ and a ‘network of connections’
(1988: 105). The function of literature in contemporary society is to
keep the challenge open, to pursue the process of understanding, the
search for a method, in spite of and because of the overwhelming chaos.
Finally, the process of understanding, the mapping ‘of the world and of
the knowable’ (1987: 32), must necessarily include the analysis of its
own mechanisms of representation and must acknowledge and reflect
on the fact that ‘books are made of words, of signs, of methods of con-
struction’ (1987: 99). Digression, among other self-reflexive strategies,
lays bare the rules of the narrative game and, in so doing, testifies to
‘the critical manner in which literature regards itself’ (1987: 99). This
critical awareness does not influence literature alone but society in gen-
eral in as much as literature becomes ‘one of a society’s instruments of
self-awareness’ (1987: 97).
Bibliography

Almansi, Guido. 1971. ‘Il mondo binario di Italo Calvino’, Paragone, 22: 95–110
Aristotle. 1996. Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin)
Barenghi, Mario. 2007. Italo Calvino, le linee e i margini (Bologna: il Mulino)
Calvino, Italo. 1980. Our Ancestors, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (London:
Picador)
—— 1981. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, trans. William Weaver (London:
Secker and Warburg)
—— 1983. Time and the Hunter, trans. William Weaver (London: Abacus)
—— 1987. The Literature Machine: Essays, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Secker
and Warburg)
—— 1988. Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press)
—— 1991. I libri degli altri. Lettere 1947–1981, ed. Giovanni Tesio (Turin: Einaudi)
—— 1991–94. Romanzi e racconti, ed. Mario Barenghi, Bruno Falcetto and Claudio
Milanini, 3 vols (Milan: Mondadori)
—— 1993. The Road to San Giovanni, trans. Tim Parks (London: Jonathan Cape)
—— 1995. Saggi 1945–1985, ed. Mario Barenghi, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori)
—— 1999. Why Read the Classics?, trans. Martin McLaughlin (London: Jonathan
Cape)
Cases, Cesare. 1958. ‘Calvino e il “pathos della distanza”’, Città aperta, 7–8: 33–5
McLaughlin, Martin. 1998. Italo Calvino (Edinburgh University Press)
Santovetti, Olivia. 2007. Digression: A Narrative Strategy in the Italian Novel (Bern:
Peter Lang)
Sterne, Laurence. 1984. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed.
Melvyn New and Joan New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida)
14
Roving with a Compass:
Digression, the Novel and the

Creative Imagination in
Javier Marías
Alexis Grohmann
As regards a novelist’s approach to his or her work, that is, the method
of writing or process of creation of a work, there seem to be two classes
of novelists: on the one hand, those who form a more or less clear plan of
their novels in advance of their writing them and then execute their plan
in the course of it; and, on the other hand, those who devise no such plan
and work not on the basis of any great number of preconceived ideas,
but, rather, proceed irregularly, as Samuel Richardson put it in 1751. The
former, he wrote, conceive ‘an agreeable plan, write within its circle, and
go on step by step with delight, knowing what they drive at. Execution is
all they have to concern themselves about’ (quoted in Allott 1959: 144).
The latter, with whom Richardson aligned himself, have no such plan,
know not (or not entirely) what they drive at and proceed rather errantly,
feeling about in the darkness that envelops them, so to speak.
Among this latter class of writer is the contemporary Spanish nov-
elist Javier Marías, who on repeated occasions has explained that he
has no interest in knowing in advance what his novels will be about.
As he expounds in a short but revealing piece entitled ‘Roving with
a Compass’ (‘Errar con brújula’, also translatable as ‘Erring with a
Compass’), he lacks a vision of the future and an aim:
Not only do I not know what I want to write, nor where I would
like to get to, nor do I have a narrative project that I can formulate
before or after my novels have come to exist, but I do not even know,
when I begin one, what it will be about or what will happen in it, or
how many characters there will be, not to mention how it will end
[…] The truth of the matter is that nowadays I still continue to write
181
182 Alexis Grohmann
without much purpose and without an objective worth mentioning.

(Marías 1993: 91)
There are writers, he adds, who know from the outset what they want
their text to be like and what they will write about; they are novelists

who ‘work with a map, and before setting out are already familiar with
the territory they have to traverse: they confine themselves to covering
this ground, secure in the knowledge of possessing the means by which
they are to do so’ (1993: 92). On the rare occasion when Marías has seen
the route in advance, in the case of the odd short story, he has admitted
to having the feeling of merely transcribing, writing out something, and
he has found this tiresome (1993: 92). That is why he prefers, instead,
to work with a compass, as he puts it:
Not only do I not know what my purpose is and what I would like to
or will write about on each occasion, but I am also entirely ignorant
of the representation, to employ a term that can encompass both
what one calls ‘plot’, ‘storyline’ or ‘story’ and its formal, stylistic, or
rhythmical appearance, as well as its structure. (1993: 92)
Moreover, writing blindly or in the dark (‘escribir a tientas’) and this

‘not knowing’ (‘no saber’) allow him to settle himself in digressiveness
or errancy (‘errabundia’), something that critics frown upon, according
to Marías, ‘granting great importance to what is “pertinent” or “essen-
tial” to the story, as if everything that appears in a narrative should be
useful information and directed at one and the same end’ (1993: 92–3).1
Furthermore, as he has said elsewhere, ‘sometimes in literature as in life,
one does not know what is part of a story until the story takes shape and
is complete and finished’ (2008: 125). This makes eminent sense: unless
one is already in possession of all the facts, of the whole story, before
actually writing the story, how can one know what will turn out to be
related (to it) and what not? As Marías puts it, Cervantes, Sterne, Proust,
Nabokov, Bernhard or Benet ‘have been masters of this errancy of texts
or of the art of drifting, digression, the aside, the lyrical interpolation,
the prolonged and autonomous affront and metaphor, respectively’;
however, it cannot be said, he adds in defence of digression in litera-
ture, that this tendency is gratuitous in any of their cases, or that it is
not pertinent or essential to the story; what is more, it is precisely such
digressive dispositions that actually make narrative possible in each case
(1993: 93). And he concludes, with reference to the novel he had just
finished at the time, A Heart So White (1992), that the reason he found
Roving with a Compass 183
out what this novel of his was about – but only after he had completed
it – was that,
as happens when reading the authors mentioned, whilst I was writ-

ing I found myself obliged to stop due to an aside, a digression or

an interpolation: my interest as a writer is not very different to my
interest as a reader: as such, I want to be forced to stop and think,
and as long as this is the case I don’t really mind what story I am
being told. At the end of the day, what is narratable in a novel is only
what can also be said in a few and interchangeable words. Novels,
however, tend to consist of many words and precisely these are not
interchangeable. (1993: 93; original italics)
So, in the case of Marías, the significance of this errant process of

creating a novel, this need to feel his way in the darkness that is the
unmapped novel, to find his way in uncharted territory, is threefold: it
sheds light on the processes of the creative imagination; it is this errant
process that facilitates a formal digressiveness, a digressive style of writ-
ing;2 and it is ultimately related to the freedom of the novel per se.
If a work is already complete before being written, before being
created in written language, then written language and the imagina-
tive and inventive processes become inessential.3 Instead, through
the method or approach adopted, the process of the novel’s unfold-
ing, its becoming while he writes, is what ensues and what appeals to
Marías (Marías 1989: 26). The work cannot be preconceived, planned
or forecast – it can only become. What this errant process allows him
to do – by resisting a mapping of the way, a plotting of the work, an
imposition of a structure in advance, and by preferring the uncertainty
of not knowing what it will be about – is to suppress a natural human
tendency to impose pattern that, according to Anton Ehrenzweig’s
study of the psychology of the creative imagination, is so detrimental
to the creative effort; this errancy thus breaks what Ehrenzweig calls the
‘pernicious rule of preconceived design’ (1967: 49).
As Ehrenzweig says in his discussion of the functioning of the creative
ego and the role, within that, of the differentiated and undifferentiated
modes in the creative search (for an image or an idea), such a search
involves the scrutiny of ‘an astronomical number of possibilites’, and
the correct choice cannot be made ‘by a conscious weighing up of each
single possibility’; ‘if we could map out the entire way ahead, no fur-
ther search would be needed. As it is, the creative thinker has to make
a decision about his route without having the full information needed
184 Alexis Grohmann
for his choice’ (1967: 35–7). This is a dilemma, he adds, that belongs to
the essence of creativity. Marías’s errant writing process flows in just this
way, abandoning exact visualization or mapping, since that would only
lead one entirely astray (1967: 36). This errant operation effects just what
Ehrenzweig says is necessary in the creative process: the ‘clouding’ of

consciousness in order to make the right decision (1967: 38). This points
to the ‘yielding’ of reason that is necessary in the work of the creative
imagination, a way of ascertaining that reason does not constrain the
imagination, because it is ‘a bad thing and detrimental to the creative
work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas
as they come pouring in – at the very gateway as it were’, as Freud affirms
in The Interpretation of Dreams by quoting Friedrich Schiller (1976: 177).4
The errant method of Marías allows him to ‘move and make interim
decisions without being able to visualize the precise relationship with
the end product’, which, according to Ehrenzweig, is exactly what the
creative artist has to do (1967: 47). Each stage of the process imposes
new choices and decisions that could not have been foreseen at an ear-
lier stage; it is not that the writer is unconcerned about the effect of the
interim decisions taken on the end product or about the final outcome as
a whole; it is just that ‘he must be able to bear the suspense’ (1967: 48).
Marías’s errant way of proceeding enables him to do just that. The value
of the interim choices, the motifs, fragments, episodes or digressions pur-
sued, the value of every element opted for, is discovered errantly in the
(digressive) process of writing and is only revealed at the end, when every-
thing gradually becomes associated and acquires significance as part of
an interrelated whole (even if the literary work can never really be wholly
and properly elucidated). The structure has to be imperfect and the artist
needs to resist the ‘law of closure’ that will strive to ‘round off the work
prematurely’.5 The errant method in particular is very well suited to pre-
venting such closure, and allowing the writer to work with the incoherent
fragment, the disruptive form element – what is a digression if not pre-
cisely such a disruptive form element in writing? – since, not least, such
disruptive, unruly devices break hold of mannered formulae and stem the
rush to predetermined solutions (Ehrenzweig 1967: 48–53). Too deliber-
ate a handling of elements would be detrimental for the creative process
and there is a real need to frustrate preconceived intentions and an over-
precise visualization, argues Ehrenzweig (1967: 56), something which
Marías’s creative errancy and his digressiveness permit him to achieve
fairly ‘naturally’, since this way of proceeding is part of the normal tech-
nique employed, his way of writing, a method that allows the mature art-
ist to keep his intentions flexible enough, and it is also ‘natural’, for that
matter, in that the digressive mode appears to be no less than the mind’s
primary, inherent, instinctive, spontaneous way of operating.6
The creative errancy and the concomitant formal digressiveness (the
digressiveness of the form, of his writing, that is) provide Marías
with the (welcome) ‘accident-inviting’ means necessary, according to

Ehrenzweig, to disrupt the flexible planning of the artist, in the conver-
sation between the writer and the medium that the process of creation
and writing can become, especially in the case of a mature artist (who
may be less inclined to view the unruly element as unwelcome); ‘true
craftsmanship does not impose its will on the medium but explores its
varying responses’ in the conversation between equals that the process
of creation thus develops into (Ehrenzweig 1967: 58). An excessive pre-
occupation with pattern, structure or plot, with an individual element,
episode, even an aside or digression and a need for fully conscious con-
trol of the medium would blind the writer to the transformations taking
place as all the various elements coming to make up the work evolve
into a more complex total structure, a growth that cannot be foreseen or
predicted in any way from the nature of the particular. The number of
possible choices open to the artist are not limited in the creative work,
unlike in a game played in which choices are limited strictly by the rules
of that particular game; there are no limiting rules in creative work,
argues Ehrenzweig, since the work, as Marías shows, ‘creates its own
rules which may only be known after the work is finished’ (1967: 39).
II
This is particularly so in the case of Javier Marías’s Dark Back of Time

(Negra espalda del tiempo [1998]). Presented by the author as a ‘false
novel’, it seems to have created its own rules that have allowed it to
take the ‘irregular’ form it has. That is one of the reasons why Marías
called it a ‘false novel’, because it is not to be construed as a novel in
the mould of previous ones.
A generically errant text, part-memoir, part-biographical narrative,
part-essay, with an element of fiction, Dark Back of Time proposes or pre-
tends – as the first-person narrator, who bears the name ‘Javier Marías’
and appears to be the author himself (in as far as narrator and author
of a literary work can be ‘the same’), explains in the opening section or
chapter – to
tell what happened, or was ascertained or simply known – what hap-

pened in my experience or in my fabulation or in my knowledge – or
186 Alexis Grohmann
perhaps all of it is only consciousness that never ceases – as a result of

the composition and circulation of a novel, a work of fiction. (Marías
2001: 8–9)7
The novel referred to here is Marías’s All Souls (Todas las almas [1989]),

set in Oxford and inspired by, and drawing on, Marías’s own expe-
riences in the city where he worked as Lector in the Sub-Faculty of
Spanish at the university in the early 1980s. It was read by many as a
roman à clef, and fiction and reality were often conflated to such an
extent that the fiction ended up having a considerable effect on the
empirical reality of the author, which is what he sets out to recount in
Dark Back of Time. And he proposed to do this, despite the profound
distrust of certainty that all of Marías’s narratives evince and the
extreme scepticism regarding the possibility of reproducing the world
through writing that is expressed in the first two pages of Dark Back
of Time:
Language can’t reproduce events and shouldn’t attempt to […]

Words – even when spoken, even at their crudest – are in and of
themselves metaphorical and therefore imprecise, and cannot be
imagined without ornament, though it is often involuntary […]
Fiction creeps into the narration of what happened, altering or
falsifying it. The time-honoured aspiration of any chronicler or sur-
vivor – to tell what happened, give an account of what took place
[…] – is, in fact, a mere illusion or chimera, or, rather, the phrase and
concept themselves are already metaphorical and partake of fiction.
‘To tell what happened’ is inconceivable and futile, or possible only
as invention. The idea of testimony is also futile and there has never
been a witness who could truly fulfil his duty. (2001: 8)
This notwithstanding, Marías places himself in Dark Back of Time ‘on

the side of those who have sometimes claimed to be telling what really
happened or pretended to succeed in doing so’ (2001: 8).
But he does his telling through an errant creative process and a
digressive form. His narrative holds for him ‘the diversion of risk, the
risk of narrating something for no reason and in almost no order, with-
out making an outline or trying to be coherent’ (2001: 9). His story is
profoundly digressive, so much so that this time he not only purports
to wander without any compass in the process of its creation, but the
story he discovers has no beginning nor any ending and may, indeed,
not even be a story at all:
The elements of the story I am now embarking upon are entirely capri-
cious, determined by chance, merely episodic and cumulative – all
of them irrelevant by the elementary rule of criticism, none of them
requiring any of the others – because in the end no author is guiding
them, though I am relating them; they correspond to no blueprint,

they are steered by no compass, most of them are external in origin and
devoid of intention and therefore have no reason to make any kind of
sense or to constitute an argument or plot or answer to some hidden
harmony, and no lesson should be extracted from them (nor should any
such thing be sought from real novels; above all, the novels themselves
should not want it) – not even a story with its beginning and suspense
and final silence. I don’t believe this is a story, though, not knowing
how it ends, I may be mistaken. I do know that the beginning of this
tale lies outside it, in a novel I wrote some time ago, or before that (in
which case it’s even more amorphous), in the two years I spent as an
impostor in the city of Oxford, teaching entertaining but on the whole
quite useless subjects at its University […] Its ending must also lie out-
side it, and will surely coincide with my own, some years from now, or
so I hope. Or it may happen that the ending survives me. (2001: 9–10)
It is true that both its beginning and ending lie outside of Dark Back of
Time, and the work ends with the promise of more to come: ‘A great
deal has yet to be told, some of it recent and some still to come, and
I need time […] I am going to stop now and say no more for a while’
(2001: 335–6). It seems unlikely, though, that this promise will be kept,
and, consequently, the tale remains fittingly imperfect.
So, as the narrator insists, Dark Back of Time is not really a true novel,
a true fiction (Marías 1998: 11), only a ‘false’ one at best; it tells a story
with no real ending or beginning, a story which, in truth, may not be a
story at all, and attempts to recount what really happened, though the
narrator acknowledges readily this is not possible. (Marías’s literature
is governed by paradox.) As a matter of fact, at one point the narrator
goes as far as admitting: ‘I don’t know what it is that I am doing nor
why.’8 What, then, is he doing? Well, he speaks, ‘among other things,
of several dead men, real ones’, among them the now obscure poet
and former King of Redonda John Gawsworth (whose Kingdom Marías
eventually reveals he has inherited), the ill-fated writer Wilfrid Ewart,
killed by a stray bullet in Mexico, or the adventurer Hugh Oloff de Wet,
men whom he never knew, ‘thereby becoming a kind of unexpected
and distant posterity for them’, their ‘memory’; ‘I will be their ghost’,
he concludes (2001: 12). As a ghost, then, Marías proceeds to tell us
188 Alexis Grohmann
of these errant ‘wanderer[s] into nothingness’ (‘errabundos hacia la

nada’), as de Wet is described (2001: 284), and he does so appropriately
digressively: ‘I must make a digression’, he announces at the very begin-
ning of the fifth section, ‘– this is a book of digressions, a book that
proceeds by digression –’, he immediately interpolates in a metanar-

rative echo of Tristram Shandy’s famous analysis of the two ‘contrary
motions’ of his art of writing (‘In a word, my work is digressive, and it
is progressive too, ––and at the same time’ [Sterne 1967: 95]).9 And he
also tells of a particular conception of time, a time ‘that must be differ-
ent for someone who began writing and reading in reverse’ (being left-
handed, he started writing from right to left [2001: 300]), a perception
of moving through ‘the other side of time, its dark back’, a time that
has not existed, that awaits us and ‘also the time that does not await us
and therefore does not happen, or happens only in a sphere that isn’t
precisely temporal, a sphere in which writing, or perhaps only fiction,
may – who knows – be found’, a time in which, also, ‘the living and the
dead, can speak to each other and communicate’, the only dimension
they have in common (2001: 301).
Dark Back of Time, through its irregular nature, through the creative
errancy and digressiveness it lays bare, is in many ways a fairly novel
form that pays tribute to the novel form, a celebration of the freedom
of the form that is the novel, a freedom that characterizes some of the
best novels in the history of the genre, from Cervantes’s Don Quixote or
Persiles, through Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, to Proust’s Remembrance. This
freedom is directly related to their digressiveness. Javier Marías has said
that Sterne’s work also taught him that ‘everything could be made to
fit into this flexible genre called novel, provided it was done gracefully’
(2009). Dark Back of Time is indeed sui generis, generically and otherwise,
and, to draw a parallel with an equally magnificently ‘irregular’ work
from another continent and century, in formal terms very much like
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, in that Dark Back, too, is an ‘odd book,
professing to be a novel; wantonly eccentric; outrageously bombastic;
in places charmingly and vividly descriptive’, as was said of Melville’s
work at the time.10 And just as Ishmael was said to be, the narrator
Marías is carefully ‘careless about “narrative”, offhand about consist-
ency, resistant to completion or closure’ (yes, ‘carefully careless’, the
oxymoron must stand since the carelessness is, as we have had the
occasion to observe, the result of a modus operandi), and ‘does not care
to approach his writing task “methodically”’, opting, instead, to wander
with – or even without – a compass. And if Dark Back of Time is indeed
‘wild, unconnected, all episode’, digressive and lacking ‘cohesion’, as
Melville’s work was said to be, even though it does ultimately show, like
the most truly free and digressive novels, how everything in the world
is interconnected in one way or another, then, like Melville’s work,11
it, too, is therefore no different to the world, and so, as the narrator of
Dark Back of Time explains,

if the reader should wonder what on earth is being recounted here or
where this text is heading, the only proper answer, I fear, would be
that it is simply running its course and heading towards its ending,
just like anything else that passes through or happens in the world.
(2001: 287)
Notes
1. Marías is probably thinking here of Spanish critics, though there also seems
to be a tradition of disregard for the digressive and episodic element in
English literature, the most notable and extreme example perhaps being
Anthony Trollope’s assertion that ‘there should be no episodes in a novel.
Every sentence, every word, through all those pages, should tend to the
telling of the story. Such episodes distract the attention of the reader, and
always do so disagreeably’ (quoted in Allott 1959: 233). Apart from Sterne,
as Judith Hawley reminds us in her essay in the present book (and also
Cervantes), Fielding, too, seems regularly to have attracted much criticism,
notably for the episode of ‘The Man of the Hill’ in The History of Tom Jones
(for instances of such criticism, see Allott 1959: 227–55).
2. If Marías’s work is begun without premeditation and ‘becomes’ as he
writes, then this is also true of his style – that is, it also applies at the level
of his sentence – which is a ‘loose style’ of writing very much along the
lines described by Morris Croll in his study of the Baroque style in prose
(in Sir Thomas Browne and other seventeenth-century writers): ‘Its pur-
pose is to express, as far as may be, the order in which an idea presents
itself when it is first experienced. It begins, therefore, without premedita-
tion, stating its idea in the first form that occurs; the second member is
determined by the situation in which the mind finds itself after the first
has been spoken; and so on throughout the period, each member being
an emergency of the situation. The period – in theory, at least – is not made;
it becomes. It completes and takes on form in the course of the motion of the
mind which it expresses’ (Croll 1972: 111; my italics). And it is the move-
ments of such a mind that we are invited to follow as readers, more than
the realities presented or the topic at hand; the primary focus of such an
errant, ‘loose’ and ‘free’ prose style will always be the course of the motion
of the mind perceiving the world. For reasons of space, I cannot elaborate
on this intricate way in which style and creative imagination are interwo-
ven in Marías; I have, however, discussed this in more length elsewhere
(Grohmann 2002).
190 Alexis Grohmann
3. As Maurice Blanchot put it once, ‘if the work is already present in its entirety
in the writer’s mind and if this presence is what is the essence of the work
(the words being here considered as inessential), then why should there be,
any longer, a need for him to produce it? Either the work is, as an interior
project, all that it will ever be, and the writer, from that moment onwards,
knows everything he can ever hope to learn from it and will let it lie in its

twilight, without translating it into words, without writing it – but then he
will not write it, he will not be a writer; or, becoming aware that the work
cannot be projected but only realized, that it has no value, no truth and
reality other than through the words that develop it in time and inscribe it
in space, he will set to writing it, but starting at nothing and with a view to
nothing – and, paraphrasing Hegel, like a nothingness working in nothing-
ness’ (1949: 296).
4. It has long been argued that the workings of the imagination are based, to
a significant extent, on unconscious, inspired, intuitive, dream-like, sponta-
neous, or other, analogous processes of association that make it a unifying
force; these processes of association are not generally deemed to be gov-
erned by the intellect, reason or the conscious mind and the imagination is
therefore taken to operate, to a certain degree, independently of reason and
rational, conscious thought; hence, the imagination entails freedom (from
practical considerations and purpose) and is determined in the act of percep-
tion and free in aesthetic creativity, as Kant sought to demonstrate (see Kant
1924, esp. section 43; see also Starobinski 1970, for an overview).
5. ‘The “law of closure” postulated by the gestalt theory will always tend to
round off and simplify the images and concepts of conscious thought. It
makes it difficult, if not impossible, for rational thought to handle “open”
material without rounding it off prematurely. A second revision will tend to
impart to such material a greater precision and compactness than it actually
possesses. This can lead to wrong results’ (Ehrenzweig 1967: 39). In a sense,
the errant processes and the digressive form of the writing naturally, that is,
through their very nature, by diverting attention through the accidental or
to the seemingly insignificant detail, say, tend to disrupt and destroy ‘the
good gestalt’ of the material and stem the processes of secondary revision or
elaboration, thus allowing for an exploration of the complexities radiating
across the work.
6. On the one hand, digression represents a continuity of thought through the
processes of association that lead from one element to the next, whether by
way of contiguity or resemblance between the elements, as Pierre Bayard con-
cludes in his study of digression in Proust (Bayard 1996: 23). But, as Bayard
also suggests, it is reasonable to assume that the natural tendency of the
mind is to create such links in general (1996: 124); and this is substantiated
time and again in studies of digression and the processes of association. This
is why, for example, Ross Chambers speaks of the ‘naturalness of loiterature’,
maintaining, for instance, that a digressive style of writing ‘seems somehow
natural – or at least more natural than disciplined argument or the tightly
controlled narratives that we nevertheless tend to get so caught up in. It’s
more in tune with the complexity of things and the tangled relations that
join them’ (1999: 31; original italics). And Arthur Koestler, in his fascinating
study of the creative process, explains that conscious controls and reason
are necessary to maintain the disciplined routines of thought but that they
become an impediment to creativity because they block more primitive and
natural levels of mental organization and functioning, which are digressive
(1964); ‘during strenuous effort to concentrate’, he says, ‘one seems literally
to “feel” inside one’s head the expenditure of energy needed to suppress
diversional thoughts which keep popping up like jacks-in-the-box’, and he

goes on to quote James Clerk Maxwell, who once remarked that ‘“a great part
of our fatigue often arises, not from those mental efforts by which we obtain
the mastery of the subject, but from those which are spent in recalling our
wandering thoughts”’; all this seems to indicate that these are ‘our preferen-
tial matrices of ideation’, concludes Koestler, that is, in lay terms, this is our
natural, uninhibited way of thinking (Koestler 1964: 645–6).
7. Most subsequent quotations are of this 2001 English translation of the
novel, unless I have provided my own for the purposes of greater precision,
in which case I cite explicitly the original text of 1998.
8. Here, too, the English translation of the Spanish is a bit too vague for our
purposes and I have slightly modified it (‘no sé qué es lo que estoy haciendo
ni por qué lo hago’ is what is said [Marías 1998: 73]).
9. As it happens, the allusion to Sterne is not entirely accidental: Marías translated
literature in English for many years (among others, prose texts by Sir Thomas
Browne, Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats and poetry
by Robert Louis Stevenson, Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner and John
Ashbery), and also Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy into Spanish (which won
him Spain’s National Prize for Translation in 1979), and he has repeatedly
declared that the latter is his favourite work and the work that has had the
most profound influence on his own writing (mainly as a result of the act of
‘re-writing’ that translation represents), because, apart from Sterne representing
for Marías the most genuine inheritor of Cervantes (more so than any Spanish
author), Sterne taught him ‘the freedom and daring’ of writing and how ‘to
expand or delay time or, in other words, how to contrive to give existence in the
novel to that time that in real life never has the time to exist’ (Marías 2009).
10. This is what one of the first reviewers of The Whale said, quoted by Tony
Tanner in his ‘Introduction’ to the Oxford World Classics edition of Moby
Dick (in Melville 1998: vii).
11. See Tanner (in Melville 1998: xxv–xxvi).
Bibliography
Allott, Miriam. 1959. Novelists on the Novel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul)
Babb, Howard, ed. 1972. Essays in Stylistic Analysis (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich)
Blanchot, Maurice. 1949. La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard)
Press)
Croll, Maurice. 1972. ‘The Baroque Style in Prose’, in Babb, pp. 97–117
Ehrenzweig, Anton. 1967. The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of the
Imagination (London: Phoenix Press)
192 Alexis Grohmann
Freud, Sigmund. 1976. The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Penguin)

Grohmann, Alexis. 2002. Coming into One’s Own: The Novelistic Development of
Javier Marías (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi)
Kant, Immanuel. 1924. Kritik der Urteilskraft (Leipzig: Felix Meiner)
Koestler, Arthur. 1964. The Act of Creation (London: Penguin)
Marías, Javier. 1989. ‘La magia de lo que pudo ser’, Quimera. Revista de literatura,

87: 24–31
—— 1993. ‘Errar con brújula’, in Literatura y fantasma (Madrid: Siruela),
pp. 91–3
—— 1998. Negra espalda del tiempo (Madrid: Alfaguara)
—— 2001. Dark Back of Time, trans. Esther Allen (London: Chatto and Windus)
—— 2008. ‘Para empezar por el principio’, in Lecciones y maestros. II Cita inter-
nacional de la literatura en español, 16, 17 y 18 de junio de 2008 (Fundación
Santillana), pp. 109–33
—— 2009. ‘Javier Marías’, Mercurio. Panorama de libros, ‘La huella de los mae-
stros’, June, revistamercurio.es
Melville, Herman. 1998. Moby Dick; or, The Whale (Oxford University Press)
Starobinski, Jean. 1970. L’Oeil vivant II: la relation critique, Paris: Gallimard
Sterne, Laurence. 1967. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
(London: Penguin)
15
The Sense of Sebald’s Endings …
and Beginnings

J. J. Long
The texts of W. G. Sebald are digressive in myriad ways. Ontologically,

they shift vertiginously between fact and fantasy, between documen-
tary solidity and self-conscious fictionality. Generically, the discourses
of history, biography, novel, essay, autobiography and travel writing
combine to create hybrid forms. Typographically, a lack of paragraph
breaks facilitates a free-flowing discourse unconstrained by the dis-
cipline of the paragraph, while a refusal to use speech marks means
that shifts between speakers are not always marked. Furthermore, the
progression of the verbal text is constantly interrupted by the insertion
of visual material: photographs, reproductions of paintings, facsimiles
of handwritten documents, and so on (see Horstkotte 2009). If, as Ross
Chambers argues in what has become a central reference point in any
discussion of digression, a primary function of the digressive is to make
the reader aware of the permeability of contexts (1999: 12), then this is
precisely what Sebald’s texts effect. Irruptions of fantasy, imagination,
dream and invention perpetually interfere with the texts’ ostensible
solid grounding in verifiable reality. Generic hybridity produces a con-
stant shifting of the interpretative frames within which Sebald’s texts
can be understood, while techniques of embedded quotation and the
reproduction of visual material relativize, respectively, the centrality of
the primary narrator and the verbal medium: anything can always be
represented otherwise.
Digression in Sebald, however, occurs not only at the level of onto-
logical instability, generic interference, or typography, but at a nar-
ratological level. Sebald’s most obviously digressive text is The Rings of
Saturn, purportedly the narrative of a walking tour along the Suffolk
193
194 J. J. Long
coast, but in fact a wide-ranging meditation on a plethora of subjects

whose relationship to the physical environment of coastal Suffolk is at
times clear, at times tenuous. Sebald’s text owes much of its digressive
charm to the fact that it ‘re-literatizes’ the dead metaphor contained
in the word ‘digression’, a derivative, as many commentators remind

us, of the Latin ‘dis-gradi’, a stepping aside. The narrator’s walking tour
involves a series of deviations and recursions, errors and loops that
lead to no determinate goal, and this structure of walking is congruent
with the digressive narrative to which it gives rise. For Claudia Albes,
The Rings of Saturn is a decentred text, not only in the sense that the
narrator’s spatio-temporal co-ordinates are repeatedly decentred by the
chronotopes of other stories, but also in the sense that the dense net-
work of meanings that accrues around each signifier turns the text into
a rhizomatic structure from which there is no escape, and within which
there is no hierarchy (2002: 290–1). But as I have sought to argue else-
where, The Rings of Saturn cannot help but reinforce the sense of linear-
ity and narrative progression from which it so insistently deviates (Long
2007: 144–6). While the narrator may end his narrative inconclusively,
the narrative itself does reach a home of sorts, for ‘Heimat’ is the final
word of the German text. It is, admittedly, a lost ‘Heimat’, the one left
behind by the departing souls of the dead. In extremis, then, the book
figures arrival in terms of new departure. But the text has to end, as does
the narrator’s walk. As Chambers notes, the ‘negentropic constraints of
a cultural order’ – an order that includes narrative syntax – ‘cannot be
dispensed with if only because they are part of the very definition of
the digressive, as that from which it departs’ (1999: 104). In this model,
digression, no matter how radical, is a disruption that ends up confirm-
ing what it seeks to undermine.
This is not, however, the only way of understanding digression in
Sebald’s work. Indeed, his most interesting contribution to a poetics
of digression may be both more widespread and more subtle than the
combination of ambulatory thematics and digressive discourse that
combine so felicitously in The Rings of Saturn.
II
Theories of digression tend to assume the primacy of plot and the ability
of the reader to distinguish between a main plot and the textual matter
which is in some sense extraneous or tangential to it. This is certainly
the case in traditional poetics, for which digression is an error within
discourse and, therefore, in need of correction. But even in more recent
The Sense of Sebald’s Endings ... and Beginnings 195
theoretical works that celebrate digression, the presupposition of a more

or less stable relationship between the main plot and that which devi-
ates from it persists. For Chambers, this relationship is configured in
terms of linearity and dilatoriness, the former allied with culture, order,
discipline, and the latter with nature (albeit a nature-within-culture),

pleasure and desire. Desire is also central to Peter Brooks’s conception
of digression. Rather than positing digressive or ‘loiterly’ writing as a
discrete object of study, however, Brooks understands digression to be
the very precondition of narrative in the first place. ‘The desire of the
text (the desire of reading)’, he writes, ‘is […] desire for the end, but
desire for the end reached only through the at least minimally compli-
cated detour, the intentional deviance, in tension, which is the plot of
narrative’; he continues:
Deviance, detour, an intention that is an irritation: these are charac-

teristics of the narratable, of ‘life’ as it is the material of narrative, of
fabula become sjužet. Plot is a kind of arabesque or squiggle toward
the end. (Brooks 1984: 104)
Deviance and detour here are synonymous with digression.

For my purposes, the crucial aspect of Brooks’s work is less the central-
ity of detour to narrative than the confident association of digression
with the narrative middle (Brooks 1984: 139). His account of narrative
is predicated, ultimately, on the stability of beginnings and end-points,
the latter being immanent in or intended by the former, and narrative
consisting precisely in what delays arrival at the end. In this sense, Brooks
shows his debt not only to a Freudian model of human life, but to Roland
Barthes’s notion of the hermeneutic code. The typical narrative, Barthes
argues, proceeds by posing an enigma and then working towards its
resolution. The middle of the narrative, the ‘dilatory space’, is expanded
by means of what he terms ‘hermeneutic morphemes’; these may take
the form of partial, false or decoy responses, equivocation, and such like,
and sustain the reader’s desire for the end (Barthes 1970: 215–16). The
intentionality inherent in such a conception of beginning is addressed by
Edward Said in his book Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975). Writing
of various eighteenth-century thinkers, such as Rousseau, Kant and Vico,
Said comments that their investigations are conditioned by
a necessary certainty, a genetic optimism, that continuity is possible

as intended by the act of beginning. Stretching from start to finish
is a fillable space, or time, pretty much there but, like a foundling,
196 J. J. Long
awaiting an author or speaker to father it, to authorize its being.

(1975: 47–8)
The notion that the middle is a fillable space lodged between start and
finish and awaiting transformation into discourse articulates clearly the

conception of the narrative middle that we encounter in Brooks.
The question posed by some of Sebald’s quirkier narratives, though,
is this: what happens to our understanding of digression in texts whose
beginnings and end-points do not exist in a determinate intentional
relationship that is amenable to analysis in terms of desire and dis-
charge, or enigma and resolution? This question can be best explored by
means of a reading of Sebald’s story ‘All’estero’, the second narrative in
his first book of prose, Vertigo (Sebald 1999), first published in German
as Schwindel. Gefühle. in 1990.
III
‘All’estero’ can be loosely described as a travel narrative that recounts the

narrator’s experiences of two trips to northern Italy. The first takes place
in October 1980, the second – which to an extent repeats the first – in
late July and early August 1987. John Zilcosky has argued that, whereas
in conventional narratives travellers get lost in order to find their way
home, Sebald’s texts dramatize an insistent failure to get lost in the first
place. Ostensible disorientations lead back to uncanny returns and a
sense of the omnipresence of home. Like all of Sebald’s travel narra-
tives up to and including The Rings of Saturn, ‘All’estero’ overturns what
Zilcosky sees as the ‘master trope’ of travel writing, namely the ‘fear of
getting lost and the desire to find one’s way’ (2004: 102–9). A narrato-
logical implication of Zilcosky’s argument is that conventional travel
narratives rely, like the forms of fictional narrative analysed by Brooks,
on a structure that is fundamentally teleological: the moment of arrival
and reorientation is presupposed and intended by the disorientation
that constitutes the conventional starting point of travel narratives,
while the narrative middle consists of the errancy – detour in a literal
as well as a textual sense – that defers the moment of arrival. If Sebald’s
texts overturn the dominant paradigm of travel writing at the level of
thematics, we might expect a similar disruption to exist at the level of
narrative structure, and in order to investigate this we might as well
begin at the beginning.
The first sentence of ‘All’estero’ reads: ‘In October 1980 I travelled
from England, where I had then been living for nearly twenty-five
years in a county which was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna,
hoping that a change of place would help me get over a particularly
difficult period in my life’ (Sebald 1999: 33). A more accurate render-
ing of Sebald’s prose would, however, be: ‘Back then – October 1980 it
was – I travelled from England, where I have now been living for nearly

twenty-five years.’ Massimo Leone has noted that the opening para-
graphs of Sebald’s texts frequently combine temporal precision with
vagueness concerning the narrator’s motivations (2004: 96). Yet there
is more to the beginning of ‘All’estero’ than this. The very first word
of the German text, ‘damals’ (‘back then’, ‘at that time’), is a deictic
form whose meaning is contingent on the specific temporal context of
its use. Its unmediated presence in Sebald’s text implies that what we
read is in fact the continuation of a discourse that is already underway.
This is one of the many disorientating strategies employed by the nar-
rator throughout his text (see, for example, Klebes 2004; Wohlleben
2006), as the text presupposes a reader who can supply the referent of
the term ‘damals’ as well as the context that allows ‘damals’ to signify
at all. More interesting and relevant for the current discussion, though,
is the fact that rather than a beginning as inauguration, we have here
a beginning as continuation – or, indeed, as middle. If digression is a
property of narrative middles, as both Brooks and Chambers argue, the
fact that the beginning of ‘All’estero’ is already constituted as a kind of
middle immediately alerts us to the possibility that digression might
reside also in beginnings, and this possibility is repeatedly realized as
the text progresses.
The therapeutic promise of a change of place, for example, turns out
to be illusory: the narrator notes that once he has arrived in Vienna,
he becomes listless and at a loss as to how to fill his time (Sebald 1999:
33), and nowhere else in the text does travel permit the narrator to
get over the dark days that were the initial motivation for embarking
on the journey. Drawing on the structuralist distinction between story
and discourse, we might say that the narrative discourse immediately
dramatizes the abandonment of the hope that had motivated the start
of the story and reorientates reader expectations concerning the likely
result of the narrator’s travels. The very act of beginning thus entails a
moment of digression, for the intention of the journey fails to coincide
with the intention of the text, the goal announced by the former being
immediately renounced by the latter.
It is no coincidence that the opening episode of the text is saturated
with terms that express a lack of direction: ‘without aim or purpose’,
‘traversing of the city’, ‘wander aimlessly’, ‘aimlessly wandering about’
198 J. J. Long
(Sebald 1999: 33–6). The impasse in which the narrator finds himself at
the level of the represented world exists in a curiously congruent rela-
tionship with the condition of the text itself, for the very opening of
the narrative is entirely lacking in directionality. By this, I do not mean
merely to repeat my earlier point concerning the therapeutic value of

travel, but to note that the whole Vienna episode does not point for-
ward to events to come. It fails to fulfil normative expectations of narra-
tive beginnings. If it incites desire at all, it is not in the sense developed
by Barthes and those writing in his wake such as Brooks: there is no
founding enigma and no intentionality towards the end that might be
identified as such in this opening episode – unless, that is, we reconfig-
ure the problem in metanarrative terms and see the very irrelevance of
the Vienna episode as constituting the text’s founding enigma.
Even this critical manoeuvre, however, cannot fully integrate the
Vienna episode, a fact that becomes particularly apparent once the
second part of the narrative has commenced. As I noted briefly above,
the structure of ‘All’estero’ is ostensibly repetitive: the narrator sets
out in 1987 with the explicit intention of checking his rather sketchy
memories of the 1980 trip and attempting to write some of them down.
As we will see below, the logic of repetition is persistently undermined
by the logic of the detour. But repetition is also only partial: there is no
repetition of the sojourn in Vienna, and the second part of the narrative
begins with the narrator’s taking the night train from Vienna to Venice
(Sebald 1999: 97). The opening Viennese episode, then, falls outside the
repetitive structure on which the formal integrity of the narrative as a
whole would seem to depend. As the narrative of ‘All’estero’ progresses,
it singularly fails to resolve the question as to the relevance of Vienna
for the subsequent narrative. There is no necessary relationship between
the Vienna episode and that which comes later, and no sense in which it
might contribute to an economy of plot. This is to say that the beginning
of the text is already digressive with respect to what comes after it.
IV
Such a realization is, of course, a product of retrospection: the digressive

character of the beginning is not clear at the outset but becomes evident
only as one’s reading of the text proceeds. Theorists of narrative, from
Benjamin to Brooks and beyond, have noted the role of the end as the
guarantee that all that precedes it will be meaningful. Brooks goes so
far as to claim that all narratives rely on the anticipation of ultimate
retrospective understanding (1984: 34). In this light, the ending of
‘All’estero’ emerges as highly problematic, for it is itself explicitly fig-

ured as a digression: ‘By way of a postscript, I should perhaps add that
in April 1924, the writer Franz Werfel visited his friend Franz Kafka in
Hajek’s laryngological clinic in Vienna, bearing a bunch of roses and
a copy of his newly published and universally acclaimed novel with a

personal dedication’ (Sebald 1999: 135–6). The final page is then taken
up with brief comments on Kafka’s last days in a nursing home in
Klosterneuburg, and a discovery that a previous owner of the narrator’s
copy of the Werfel novel in question had chosen the Pyramids of Giza
as the insignia on his ex libris plate (1999: 136–7).
The postscript is structurally akin to digression in that it stands out-
side of the text while being an integral part of it, and this structural
kinship is emphasized in ‘All’estero’ by the digressive nature of the
content of this particular postscript. Taking as its cue Salvatore’s own
self-confessedly digressive discourse on Verdi’s Aida, the passage moves
without mediation to Werfel to Kafka to the narrator in a way that is
associative rather than logical – association being the very hallmark of
the digressive novel, and ironically thematized as such in the opening
pages of Tristram Shandy. The postscript of ‘All’estero’ does not fulfil the
function that Brooks attributes to the end: it does not offer ‘retrospec-
tive understanding’. If we choose to discount the postscript and seek
to locate the ending of the text proper at an earlier moment, the same
point obtains. Immediately prior to the postscript, the narrator awakes
in his room in the Golden Dove hotel in Verona, while being unable
to explain how he got there. Before that, he has a vision of an open-air
performance of Aida that he had attended as a child in Augsburg. And
before that, he sits in a café making notes on the conversation he has
just had with Salvatore. No matter how far back one seeks to locate the
ending of the narrative, then, nothing quite suffices in Brooks’s terms.
The ending of ‘All’estero’ is similar to many of Sebald’s other endings,
which exist in a digressive relationship to the narrative they purport
to complete. The other quasi-autobiographical narrative in Vertigo, ‘Il
ritorno in patria’, ends with the narrator’s hallucination of an empty,
post-apocalyptic landscape and his recall of Samuel Pepys’s account of
the Great Fire of London. In The Emigrants, the final story ends with a
description of a photograph of three Jewish girls in the Lodz ghetto,
taken by the ghetto accountant Walter Genewein in 1940 and finally
exhibited publicly in the late 1980s (Sebald 1997: 235–7). The Rings of
Saturn ends with a meditation on a Dutch custom, allegedly noted by
Thomas Browne, of draping black crepe over the mirrors and paintings
in the houses of the recently deceased (1998: 296). In Austerlitz, the
200 J. J. Long
narrator revisits the fortress at Breendonk and paraphrases sections of

Dan Jacobson’s family history Heschel’s Kingdom (Sebald 2001: 412–15).
None of these endings is amenable to analysis in terms of an economy
of plot, and all of them represent a stepping away rather than a resolu-
tion or conclusion.

To term Sebald’s texts ‘open-ended’, however, would be to ignore
the precise function of these endings. The point can be illustrated with
‘All’estero’ but could as easily apply to any of the other Sebald texts
mentioned above. The postscript to ‘All’estero’ constitutes an attempt
to establish links between diverse entities, or, as the narrator himself
puts it, ‘to draw connections between events that lay far apart but
seemed to me to be of the same order’ (1999: 94). As other critics have
noted, ‘All’estero’ owes its coherence to a dense web of repetitions of
motifs and the omnipresence of coincidence, which is itself a form of
repetition (for example, see Atze 1997; Fuchs 2004: 87–93; Long 2007:
105–6; Loquai 2005: 245–6). In this regard, it corresponds to what Ross
Chambers identifies as a more general characteristic of digressive nar-
rative:
It is organized […] by relations of resemblance and contiguity, meta-

phor and metonymy, rather than the formal unity of argument or
the narrative of event. Such a style is often more concerned with
the, often obscure, ‘coherence’ of experience […] than it is respect-
ful of patterns that are more strictly designed and thus ‘cohesive’.
(1999: 31)
The endings of Sebald’s texts represent neither the logical outcome of

the foregoing narrative nor a conventional denouement of a putative
‘plot’, but rather operate metaphorically, condensing certain motifs and
thematic strands that have been running through the text. In ‘All’estero’,
for example, the book by Franz Werfel constructs a connection between
the narrator and Kafka, whose traces he has been following through-
out the story: the repeated references to jackdaws, the two boys in the
bus, the surmise that Kafka might have used the urinals at Desenzano sta-
tion, the allusions to Kafka’s story ‘The Hunter Gracchus’. Furthermore,
the fact that Kafka died in a nursing home in Klosterneuburg reminds
us of Clara’s grandmother Anna Goldsteiner’s death in the St Martin’s
home at Klosterneuburg in the early part of the text (Sebald 1999: 46).
(The name ‘Goldsteiner’ also hints at Jewish provenance to reinforce the
link yet further.) At the same time, the opera Aida functions as a relay
between Werfel, the narrator’s childhood, and the recent conversation
with Salvatore, providing a compressed recapitulation of what the text

has frequently implied, namely that the narrator’s life is governed by
patterns of equivalence, repetition and similarity that exceed the repre-
sentational capacities of linear narrative.
The same kind of Verdichtung occurs in the closing paragraphs of The

Emigrants, Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn. However, a comparison
between this latter text and ‘All’estero’ will show that while Chambers’s
view of the ‘cohesiveness’ of the associative text works well with refer-
ence to The Rings of Saturn, it works less well in the case of ‘All’estero’
because the very repetitions that would seem to construct a certain
coherence of experience are themselves prey to derailment and detour.
In The Rings of Saturn, as I have argued elsewhere, digression is control-
led by the pervasive metaphorical similarities that exist between the
various episodic narratives that constitute the bulk of the text (Long
2007: 142–4). It is this that prevents the dilatoriness of the narrative
from degenerating into complete incoherence, but is also central to the
philosophy of history that Sebald’s narrator explicitly espouses as his
narrative draws to a close. History, he claims, blindly stumbles from one
misfortune to the next and consists of nothing but calamities (Sebald
1998: 256, 295). By this time, though, the fabric of the narrative dis-
course has already shown that every event replicates both every other
event and the wider process of history, of which the individual event
is merely an epiphenomenon. Thus the asyndetic structure of the text
does indeed convey a sense of historical and biographical coherence. In
‘All’estero’, by contrast, there is significantly less faith in this kind of
narrative structuration.
Repetition is the explicit goal of the second part of ‘All’estero’: ‘In the
summer of 1987, seven years since I had fled from Verona, I finally
yielded to a need I had felt for some time to repeat the journey from
Vienna via Venice to Verona’ (Sebald 1999: 81). As we have already
seen, though, there is no repetition of the sojourn in Vienna, and this
inaugural failure of repetition at the level of narrative discourse corre-
sponds to the narrator’s inability to repeat experiences at the level of the
represented world. His second visit to northern Italy is in fact repeatedly
disrupted by detours. Firstly, he does not proceed directly from Venice
to Verona. Possibly as a result of seeing a rat scamper along the gunnels
of a barge and plunge into the canal, he decides to travel to Padua to
visit Scrovegni’s Arena Chapel (1999: 83). When he finally does board
202 J. J. Long
a train to Verona, his motives for doing so have changed somewhat:

not only does he wish to shed light on his own experiences of seven
years before, but he wishes to learn something about the afternoon that
Kafka spent there in September 1913 (1999: 84). But he is inexplicably
paralysed as the train pulls into the station at Verona, and alights only

in Desenzano (1999: 85). From here, the narrator proceeds to catch a
bus to Riva, but having been mistaken for a pederast by the parents of
the twin Kafka-lookalikes and subjected to incessant sniggering by the
boys themselves, he gets out at Limone instead (1999: 90). After a night
in Limone, he declares: ‘I had decided to go over to Verona after all’
(1999: 98), but his passport has been given to another departing guest
in error, necessitating an unscheduled visit to the German consulate in
Milan (1999: 103–14).
In one sense, this structure is precisely that developed by Brooks in
Reading for the Plot: the second section of ‘All’estero’ opens with an
explicit intention, but the arrival at Verona is deferred by a series of
unplanned detours or digressions that constitute the middle of this
particular narrative segment. At the same time, ‘All’estero’ would seem
to problematize Chambers’s suggestion that the digressive text depends
for its coherence on patterns of repetition or similitude. Rather than
working in concert in this text, digression and repetition work against
each other, the desire to repeat being constantly thwarted by a failure
to stick to the intended path.
VI
At the heart of ‘All’estero’ is a narrative that does lend the text a degree
of cohesion. Indeed, it is narrative cohesion of the most conventional
kind: that of crime and detection. The crimes of the Organizzazione
Ludwig, a group that claims responsibility for a series of murders in
northern Italy and about which the narrator reads in October 1980
(Sebald 1999: 78), are finally ‘solved’ (1999: 129–32) when the narrator
meets with Salvatore Altamura and hears about further murders and
the eventual arrest of the two men responsible. However, this detective
story stands in stark contrast to the remainder of the narrative, which
possesses no such clear linear progression and no definitive ending. In
effect, it is a framed tale that stands as what Chambers elsewhere terms
an ‘anti-model’ of the overall text (see Chambers 1984). As we have
seen throughout this chapter, ‘All’estero’ is digressive to a degree that
forces a rethinking of narratological accounts of digression. Rather than
a property of a middle that is located firmly between beginning and
end, Sebald’s text suggests that beginnings and endings can themselves
exist in digressive relationships to middles. This is not to say, of course,
that the middle of Sebald’s narrative is not also digressive. In fact, it is
in many respects quite radically digressive, to the extent that digression
even undermines the structures of repetition that, in Chambers’s view,

can compensate for weak narrative cohesion by communicating a sense
of an obscure but perceptible coherence of experience.
In many of Sebald’s later texts, patterns of repetition, metaphorical
similarity, and hermeneutic structures of enigma and resolution come
to play a much more prominent role in the construction of the narra-
tive. They are much more amenable to understanding in terms of what
Peter Brooks identifies as the ineluctable double logic of narrative:
The metaphoric work of eventual totalization determines the mean-

ing and status of the metonymic work of sequence – though it must
be claimed that the metonymies of the middle produced, gave birth
to, the final metaphor. The contradiction may be in the very nature
of narrative, which not only uses but is this double logic. (1984: 29)
‘All’estero’, however, thwarts the work of metaphoric totalization, for

the coherence striven for by the end of the text and its Verdichtung of
certain recurrent topoi is, as I have hoped to show, subverted by the
structures of digression that resist the drive towards metaphorical recu-
peration. The ultimate effect of this, I think, is to produce a text that
is ultimately unable to contain the potential of narrative to succumb
to the threat of dilatoriness and randomness. Digression is all-perva-
sive and as such cannot be seen as something that delays arrival at or
wanders from the point of the narrative, but must rather be seen as the
point. In this sense, the Schwindelgefühle – the sense of both dizziness
and of having been conned or swindled – provoked by the text are not
merely a result of isolated narrative devices, but of a profound and
radical distrust in the capacity of narrative to organize and represent
human experience. This is an aspect of Sebald’s work that has, perhaps,
not been adequately remarked upon by critics who have found that his
later prose responds more directly to current academic concerns with
memory, the Holocaust, trauma and travel. While the later texts are
self-reflexive to a high degree and continually cast doubt on the process
of representation per se, none of them is as sceptical as ‘All’estero’. My
title implies that this chapter will have elucidated the sense of Sebald’s
endings and beginnings, but what ‘All’estero’ calls into question is the
very notion that the narrative has a sense at all.
204 J. J. Long
Bibliography
Albes, Claudia. 2002. ‘Die Erkundung der Leere. Anmerkungen zu W. G. Sebalds
“englischer Wallfahrt” Die Ringe des Saturn’, Jahrbuch der deutschen
Schillergesellschaft, 46: 279–305
Atze, Marcel. 1997. ‘Koinzidenz und Intertextualität. Der Einsatz von Prätexten

in W. G. Sebalds Erzählung “All’estero”’, in W. G. Sebald: Porträt, ed. Franz
Loquai (Eggingen: Isele), pp. 146–69
Barthes, Roland. 1970. S/Z (Paris: Seuil)
Chambers, Ross. 1984. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of
Fiction (Manchester University Press)
—— 1999. Loiterature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press)
Fuchs, Anne. 2004. Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte. Zur Poetik der Erinnerung
in W. G. Sebalds Prosa (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau)
Horstkotte, Silke. 2009. Nachbilder. Fotografie und Gedächtnis in der deutschen
Gegenwartsliteratur (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau)
Klebes, Martin. 2004. ‘Infinite Journey: From Sebald to Kafka’, in W. G. Sebald:
A Critical Companion, ed. J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (Edinburgh University
Press), pp. 123–39
Leone, Massimo. 2004. ‘Textual Wanderings: A Vertiginous Reading of
W. G. Sebald’, in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, ed. J. J. Long and Anne
Whitehead (Edinburgh University Press), pp. 89–101
Long, J. J. 2007. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity (Edinburgh University
Press)
Loquai, Franz. 2005. ‘Vom Beinhaus der Geschichte ins wiedergefundene
Paradies. Zu Werk und Poetik W. G. Sebalds’, in Sebald: Lektüren, ed. Marcel
Atze and Franz Loquai (Eggingen: Isele), pp. 244–56
Said, Edward W. 1975. Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books)
Sebald, W. G. 1990. Schwindel. Gefühle. (Frankfurt a.M.: Eichborn)
—— 1997. The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill)
—— 1998. The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill)
—— 1999. Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill)
—— 2001. Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton)
Wohlleben, Doren. 2006. ‘Effet de flou. Unschärfe als literarisches Mittel der
Bewahrheitung in W. G. Sebalds Schwindel. Gefühle’, in W. G. Sebald: Politische
Archäologie und melancholische Bastelei, ed. Michael Niehaus and Claudia
Öhlschläger (Berlin: Erich Schmidt), pp. 127–43
Zilcosky, John. 2004. ‘Sebald’s Uncanny Travels: The Impossibility of Getting
Lost’, in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, ed. J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead
(Edinburgh University Press), pp. 102–20
Index

absenting of story in Walser’s Robber- unity and connections in, 162,
Novel, 141 166, 167
Adorno, Theodor, 46 Waiting for Godot, 84, 157
‘The Essay as Form’, 125–6 beginnings
aesthetics see fetishist aesthetics Calvino on potentialities of,
Albes, Claudia, 194 170–3, 178
Allen, Dennis, 29 and narrative middle, 195–6
‘anti-realistic realism’, 179 Sebald’s digressive beginning,
anticipatory prolepsis, 138–40 196–8, 202–3
aporia and Beckett Trilogy, 164 see also ending(s): and beginnings
Ariosto, Ludovico, 169, 179 Bell, Ian, 5
Aristotle, 169 Benet, Juan, 182
association and digression, 3, 8, benevolence in Tristram Shandy, 25,
190n.4, 199, 201 26, 32
free association, 39, 119 Benjamin, Walter, 51, 138
and Proust, 106, 110–11, 112, Bernhard, Thomas, 182
190n.6 Bersani, Leo, 73–4
and Woolf, 119, 122, 125 Berthoud, Jacques, 27
see also connections bifurcation and narrative, 21–2,
Attridge, Derek, 140, 141 98–9
Auerbach, Erich, 3 biography and Woolf’s Orlando,
Augustine, St, 13 124–5
Austen, Jane, 65, 85 Blanchot, Maurice, 190n.3
Auster, Paul, 156 Borges, Jorge Luis, 99
Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista, 14–15 Bremond, C., 104n.2
‘Broad Church’ theology, 26
Balzac, Honoré de, 65, 67, 77–9 Brontë, Charlotte, 45
Bancroft, Corinne, 7 Brooks, Peter, 1, 195, 196, 198, 202,
Baroque style in prose, 189n.2 203
Barthes, Roland, 195, 198 Brown, Andrew, 121
Baudelaire, Charles, 2, 5, 50, 58, 61 Browne, Thomas, 199
‘Paysage’, 51 Byzantine romances and Cervantes,
‘Le soleil’, 51–3 10, 16
Bayard, Pierre, 3, 107, 108, 110–11,
112–13, 190n.6 cadenzas in narrative, 84, 85
Beckett, Samuel Calvino, Italo, 6, 7, 169–80
The Beckett Trilogy, 6, 156–67 The Baron on the Trees, 176–7
L’Innommable (The Unnameable), ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, 174,
156, 157, 161–5, 166 175–6
Malloy, 156, 157, 158–60, 161, ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’, 175–6,
164 178
Malone meurt (Malone Dies), 156, ‘The Form of the Tree’, 174–5
157, 160–1 ‘hyper-novel’, 174–5
205
206 Index
Calvino, Italo – continued cities and walking

If on a Winter’s Night, 169, 170–3, Dickens’s Little Dorrit, 43–4
174, 176, 178, 179 ‘walking poem’ and metaphor,
The Non-Existent Knight, 177 50–62
‘The Novel as Spectacle’, 178 Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’, 119–20
The Path to the Spiders’ Nest Preface, Coetzee, J. M., 156

172, 178 coherence rules of reading, 83, 84
‘La Poubelle Agréée’, 174, 175 cohesiveness in Sebald’s texts, 200–1
Six Memos, 170 comic writing and episodic, 37
Cartesianism see Descartes, René complexity of world, 3–4
Casalduero, Joaquín, 14–15 Calvino and multiplicity of world,
Causal Extrapolation Rule and 170, 173–6, 179
Chekhov, 85, 87 duality of life at Shandy Hall, 22–3
Cervantes, Miguel de, 7, 182 interconnectedness, 4, 7, 189
Don Quixote, 3, 5, 9, 188 complicity and walking poem, 53–8,
Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, 62
1, 5, 9–19 configuration rules of reading, 83,
Chambers, Ross, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 72, 84, 86
147 connections
digression as criticism, 24, 30 Calvino on multiplicity, 174
disruption of linearity, 107, 111 in Gide’s work, 100, 101–2, 103
feminine in digression, 33n.15 interconnectedness of world, 4, 7,
‘loiterature’ as genre, 83, 120 189
metaphor and digression, 107, 108 lacking in Walser’s work, 133–4
naturalness of ‘loiterature’, 190n.6, and Sebald’s work, 200
195 see also association and digression
pleasure and digression, 3, 77 consciousness and digression, 6–7
and Proust, 107, 116 Beckett Trilogy, 156, 158, 159, 160,
and Sebald, 193, 194, 200, 202, 203 163, 164–7
and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 21–2 consciousness as impediment to
chance, 7 writing, 190–1n., 190n.46
in Gide’s Le Prométhée mal enchaîné, and postmodern novel, 165–6
97–8 William James’s ‘Stream of
and rhyme, 55 Thought’, 67–70
Baudelaire’s ‘Le soleil’, 51–3, 61, Woolf’s short stories, 118–20
62 contingency and Gide’s work, 100, 102
Chandler, Raymond: The Big Sleep, 84 convergence in Cervantes’s Persiles
Chatman, Seymour, 85 and Sigismunda, 12, 18
Chekhov, Anton: ‘The Lady with the corrective tendencies, 2–3
Dog’, 7, 82–92 Cotterill, Anne, 24–5, 29–30, 72, 76,
China and Orientalism in Little Dorrit, 80n.15
41–2 Coulouma, Flore, 6
Christianity Creasman, Boyd, 91n.2
Cervantes’s Persiles and Sigismunda creativity, 4, 7–8
allegory of soul’s journey, 14–15 psychology of creative imagination,
and peregrinatio of life, 13–14 183–5
rectilinearity and morality, 25–6 critical detachment: Calvino, 6, 170,
Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit, 176–8, 179–80
37, 39–40 criticism: digression as, 24, 25–6, 30
Index 207
Croll, Morris, 189n.2 Diderot, Denis, 32, 169, 170

cruising and O’Hara’s poem, 57 Jacques le fataliste, 103, 179
Cuddon, J. A., 2 digression
Culler, Jonathan, 5, 104 as criticism, 24, 25–6, 30
definitions, 143
d’Arrest, Heinrich, 82, 85 as intrinsic to narrative, 1, 2, 3, 14,

Daudet, Alphonse, 70, 74–5 22, 195
Davies, Paul, 165 types of digression, 83
De Maegd-Soëp, Carolina, 91n.2 as Weltanschauung, 4
death as end to digression, 3, 27, 31 Dilworth, Ernest Nevin, 33n.16
Calvino discontinuity, 7
and postponement of, 175 discourse
and potentialities of beginning, and Beckett’s work, 156, 158,
170 164–5, 166
deconstructionism in Beckett’s The and Sebald’s ‘All’estero’, 197
Unnameable, 165 displacement: digressive displacement
deferral and delay and metaphoric substitution in
anticipatory prolepsis in Walser’s poetry, 49–62
Robber-Novel, 138–40 disponibilité, 51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59
Calvino and potentiality of the Dostoevsky, Fyodor
beginning, 170–3, 178 The Devils, 84, 85–6
in Cervantes’s Persiles and Notes from Underground, 45
Sigismunda, 11, 12, 13, 17 duality in Tristram Shandy, 22–3
Circumlocution Office in Little Dumas, Alexandre, père, 176
Dorrit, 7, 37, 39–40
feminine and digression, 29 Eco, Umberto, 99
pleasure of, 76, 116, 140 écriture feminine, l’, 5
Dennett, Daniel, 166 Edel, Leon, 64, 77
Derrida, Jacques, 165 Ehrenzweig, Anton, 183–5
Descartes, René, 2, 121, 125, 164, 165 Eliot, George: Middlemarch, 40
desire Eliot, T. S., 72
and digression in Tristram Shandy, ellipses in Woolf’s work, 118–19, 123
24, 25, 29 embedded stories see interpolated
for end, 12, 15, 195 stories
errant eye in Proust, 107–16 embroidery metaphor of Henry James,
and fetishistic, 49, 57 65, 66
and prolonging pleasure, 3, 5, 140 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 79n.7
detritus and ‘throwing away’ in ending(s)
Calvino, 175 and beginnings, 1
Dickens, Charles Calvino, 170–1, 178–9
Bleak House, 39, 40, 42, 44 Marías, 186–7, 189
contemporary criticism, 36–7 O’Brien, 145, 146
Little Dorrit, 7, 36–47 and deferral, 3, 5
Circumlocution Office, 37, 39–40 desire for, 195
circumlocution and as digression in Sebald, 198–203
supplementary characters, 39, expectation of ‘happy ending’,
41–3 15–16, 76
Miss Wade’s story, 44–6 and retrospective meaning, 198, 199
Nicholas Nickleby, 36, 37 see also death
208 Index
epiphany, 5–6, 108 gender

in Chekhov’s stories, 90–1 digression as mark of feminine,
in walking poems, 50, 53, 54, 58, 4–5, 29–31
59, 60, 62 simile and gender in Woolf’s
errancy, 1, 4 Orlando, 125
Cervantes’s Persiles and Sigismunda, Woolf’s feminism, 121–3, 125–6

9, 14, 15, 17, 18 Genewein, Walter, 199
Marías’s writing style, 181–9 geometry of fiction in Henry James,
Proust and errant eyes, 106–16 73–4
‘essayism’ and Woolf, 125–6 Gide, André, 94–104
excursion, 2, 120, 126, 127 The Counterfeiters, 96–7, 103
eyes: errant eyes in Proust, 107–16 Le Prométhée mal enchaîné, 5, 6,
97–104
‘false novel’ of Marías, 185, 187 La Symphonie pastorale, 95–6
feminine and digression, 4–5 The Vatican Cellars, 94–5, 96
in Tristram Shandy, 29–31 Girard, René, 49
feminism: Virginia Woolf, 121–3, Gracián, Baltasar: El Criticón, 13
125–6 Graham, Victor E., 109
fetishist aesthetics, 49, 51, 53, 57, 58, grammar: stylistic digression in
61, 62 Proust, 107
Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones, 44, 103, Greenberg, Yael, 92n.8
189n.1 Grohmann, Alexis, 6
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 84
flâneur writing, 51 Hall, Donald, 64
Flaubert, Gustave, 5, 77 Hammett, Dashiel: The Maltese Falcon,
Fletcher, Angus, 80n.15 84
flexibility of novel as genre, 188 ‘happy endings’, 15–16, 76
Forbes, John: ‘Afternoon Papers’, 58–62 Hawley, Judith, 4
Forcione, Alban, 10–11, 12, 14–15 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 67, 74,
forking paths and narrative, 21–2, 77–9
98–9 Heliodorus: Ethiopian Story, 10, 16
Forster, John, 36–7, 44–5 hermeneutic code and narrative, 195,
Foucault, Michel, 40 203
fragmentary in Beckett’s The Hill, Leslie, 165
Unnameable, 162, 167 historians and multiplicity of options,
Frederick, Samuel, 6 25
freedom and novel form, 4, 12, 72–3, history in Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, 201
188–9 Hogarth, William, 29, 31
Freud, Sigmund, 184 Holdheim, W. W., 97
frustration of reader, 12, 13 Homer: The Odyssey, 3
Fulford, Robert, 91–2n.2 homosexuality and errant eyes in
‘fun’ of language digression in Henry Proust, 108–16
James, 67, 70, 71, 78–9 humour see comic writing and episodic
‘hyper-novel’ and Calvino, 174–5
Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 169, 170, 174
Galle, Johann Gottfried, 82, 85 identity and Beckett Trilogy, 163, 166
gaze and homosexual characters in imagination, 4
Proust, 109–15 psychology of, 183–5
lesbian gaze, 113–15 incipits, 149, 171
Index 209
‘inconséquence’ in Gide’s characters, language

94 Beckett, 157, 161–2, 165
interconnectedness of world, 4, 7, 189 O’Brien, 144, 152–3
internal monologue and Beckett, 156, see also speech
159, 164–5, 166–7 Latitudinarianism, 26, 32
interpolated stories ‘law of closure’, 184

Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night, 171 Leavis, F. R., 42
Cervantes’s Persiles and Sigismunda, Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 149
9, 10–11 Lennard, John, 72
O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, Leone, Massimo, 197
145–6, 153–4 Lermontov, Mikhail Yurevich: A Hero
in Woolf’s work, 127–8 of Our Time, 85
interpretation lesbian gaze in Proust, 113–15
digression as aid to, 7 Lessing, Doris: Briefing for a Descent
and perturbative digressions, 7, into Hell, 84
85–6 Leverrier, Urbain Jean Joseph, 85
interruption and digression Lewes, G. H., 36, 37
and potentiality of beginnings in life
Calvino, 171–3, 178 digressive nature, 73, 195
in Woolf, 127–8 Calvino’s multiplicity, 179
Iser, Wolfgang, 21, 72, 73, 80n.11 Little Dorrit, 39
multiplicity of options and
Jacobson, Dan, 200 Tristram Shandy, 21–2, 25
James, Henry, 5, 7, 64–80 Persiles and Sigismunda, 11,
‘The Art of Fiction’, 66–7, 72, 73, 13–14
74, 75 limitlessness in James, 67
on Hawthorne and Balzac, 77–9 Marías and futility of testimony,
The Portrait of a Lady, 76–7 186
Turn of the Screw, 86 Sebald and capacity of narrative to
Washington Square, 71–2 represent, 203
James, William, 7–8, 67–70 Linaker, Tanya, 92n.7
Jay, Martin, 110, 112 linearity and digression
Johnson, Samuel, 21, 126–7 Calvino, 169–70, 177–8, 179
journey mechanism and digression, disruption of linearity, 107, 111
13 rectilinearity and morality in
Little Dorrit, 38–9 Tristram Shandy, 25–6
travel in Sebald’s ‘All’estero’, 196–8, Lodge, David, 164–5, 167
201–2 ‘loiterature’, 24, 83, 107, 116, 120
travels in Tristram Shandy, 27–8 naturalness of, 190n.6, 195
Joyce, James, 144, 166, 167 loitering, 51, 107, 144
Ulysses, 5 Long, Jonathan, 6–7
Juvenal, 50 Lukács, Georg, 125
Kafka, Franz, 199, 200, 202 Mackenzie, Compton, 75

Kelman, James, 156 Maistre, Xavier de: A Journey Round
‘kernels’ and plot, 85, 87 My Room, 120–1
Knowlson, James, 157 Malcolm, Janet, 87
Koestler, Arthur, 190–1n.6 manuscripts see writing process
Kundera, Milan, 2 Marcus, Laura, 4
210 Index
Marías, Javier, 6, 181–91 and types of digression, 83

Dark Back of Time, 185–9 see also beginnings; ending(s); plot
A Heart So White, 182–3 narrator in Beckett’s The Unnameable,
as translator, 191n.9 162–4, 165, 166
Mathieu, Pierre-Louis, 113 naturalness
Maxwell, James Clerk, 191n.6 Henry James on Daudet, 74–5

McDonald, Rónán, 159, 165 of ‘loiterature’, 190n.6, 195
McLaughlin, Martin, 178 nature-walking of Romantics, 51
meandering negative digressions, 84, 86
Henry James, 64, 67, 70, 74, 75, 77 Neptune, discovery of, 82, 83, 84–5
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 27, 29, 30 Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, 151
Melville, Herman, 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 21
Moby Dick, 2, 188–9 night and uncertainty in Woolf,
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 51 127–8
metaphor and digression nothing and Walser’s Robber-Novel,
errant eye in Proust, 107–16 134–8, 140
James and parenthetical, 65–6 notice rules of reading, 83, 88
in poetry, 49–62 nouveau roman movement, 156
middles: Sebald and narrative
middles, 195–6, 197, 202–3 O’Brien, Flann, 143–55
Miller, Hillis, 23–4, 29 At Swim-Two-Birds, 6, 144, 145–8,
modulation of narrative, 84, 85, 87 152, 153–4
Montaigne, Michel de: Essais, 126–7 The Third Policeman, 143, 148–53,
Mooney, Sinead, 162 154
morality and rectilinearity in Tristram Odysseus, 3
Shandy, 25–6 O’Hara, Frank: ‘The Day Lady Died’,
Moreau, Gustave: Oedipe et le sphinx, 53–7, 58, 60
112, 113 options
multiplicity Marías and psychology of creativity,
Calvino and multiplicity of world, 183–4, 185
170, 172–3, 173–6, 179 multiplicity of options and Sterne’s
Marías and psychology of creativity, Tristram Shandy, 21–2, 25
183–4, 185 oral tradition and O’Brien’s At Swim-
of options and Sterne’s Tristram Two-Birds, 6, 144–5, 147–8,
Shandy, 21–2, 25 151–2, 154
see also complexity of world order and digression, 24, 72, 107, 126,
Murphy, P. J., 164 140, 194, 195
Musil, Robert, 135
paralleling structure of narrative
Nabokov, Vladimir, 182 Beckett, 159
narrative Calvino, 173–4
digression as intrinsic to, 1, 2, 3, 14, parekbasis (excursion), 2, 51, 126, 127
22, 195 parentheses
disintegration of narrative Calvino, 178
progression, 6–7, 157–8, 165–6 James, 64–80
narrative digressions, 83–4 passions and moral action in Tristram
narrative middles and Sebald, Shandy, 26
195–6, 197, 202–3 past: digression and narrative views
prolixity and threat to unity, 10 of, 95–6
Index 211
Pepys, Samuel, 199 psychoanalysis and Little Dorrit, 46

peregrinatio concept, 13 psychological realism and Beckett,
performance and Chekhov’s stories, 162, 165, 167
88, 89, 90–1 psychology of the imagination,
peripeteia in Cervantes’s Persiles and 183–5
Sigismunda, 17–18 Puttenham, George, 72

perturbative digressions and Chekhov,
7, 85–6, 91 quadratura scheme, 18
Phelan, James, 85 Quintilian, 2
picaresque and journey mechanism,
13 Rabinovitz, Rubin, 162
pilgrimage in Cervantes’s Persiles and Rabinowitz, Peter J., 7, 83
Sigismunda, 13, 17 radical empiricism, 69–70
Pinget, Robert, 156 Randel, Mary Gaylord, 15, 17
Piper, William Bowman, 22 Rapin-Thoyras, Paul de, 32n.5
pleasure and digression, 3, 5, 12, 76, Rayfield, Donald, 87, 91n.2, 92n.9
77, 116, 140, 169 reading rules, 83–4
Pliny the Younger, 27 ‘real’ and ‘romantic’: Henry James on,
plot 76, 77
Calvino and linear plot, 169–70, realism: ‘anti-realistic realism’, 179
177–8 récits in Gide, 95
disintegration of narrative reflection and Woolf’s work, 120–1
progression, 6–7, 157–8, 165–6 Regis, Amber K., 80n.11
‘satellites’ and ‘kernels’, 85, 87 relational in Henry and William
Walser’s ‘plotless’ prose, 130–1, 136, James, 66–70, 77–8, 79
141 repetition
see also progression and digression Beckett, 156, 158, 162
poetry, 49–62 Marías, 196, 198
political marginalization and Sebald, 198, 199, 200, 201–2, 203
digression, 25 restlessness, 13
Porter, Richard N., 92n.9 Dickens, 37, 46
post-structuralist literary theory, 166 Rétif de la Bretonne, Nicolas Edme, 51
postmodern novel rhetoric
Beckett, 165–6 desire to correct digression, 2–3
disintegration of narrative perturbative digressions and
progression, 6–7, 157–8, 165–6 Chekhov, 7, 85–6, 91
Pound, Ezra, 64 rhetorical narrative theory, 83
progression and digression simile and gender in Woolf’s
Dickens’s Little Dorrit, 46 Orlando, 125
Proust’s A la recherche, 115 rhyme
Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, 194 and chance in Baudelaire, 51–3, 55,
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 23–4 61, 62
Walser’s Robber-Novel, 139–40 and ‘fit’ in Forbes’ ‘Afternoon
prolepsis in Walser’s Robber-Novel, Papers’, 61–2
138–40 Richardson, Samuel, 181
Proust, Marcel, 55, 166, 182 Riley, E. C., 10
A la recherche du temps perdu (In Rivière, Jacques, 104n.3
Search of Lost Time), 3, 4, 84, Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 156
106–17, 188 Robbins, Jeremy, 5
212 Index
‘romantic’ and ‘real’ in James, 67, 76, Smollett, Tobias, 44

77–9 Smyth, Edmund, 6
Romanticism and walking poem, 50–1 space and digression in O’Brien’s The
Rome as destination, 13, 14–15, 16, Third Policeman, 149–52
17, 18 speech
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 51 digressive speech in Little Dorrit,

Rule of Causal Extrapolation and 41–3
Chekhov, 85, 87 Henry James on Daudet’s
rules of reading, 83–4 spontaneous style, 74–5
O’Brien and oral tradition, 6,
Sabry, Randa, 2 144–5, 147–8, 151–2, 154
Sacchetti, Maria Alberta, 15, 19n.10 Spitzer, Leo, 3–4
Said, Edward, 195–6 Sterne, Laurence, 7, 72, 169, 170, 179,
Santovetti, Olivia, 6, 7 182
‘satellites’ and plot, 85 digressions as sunshine, 76
Schiller, Friedrich, 184 A Sentimental Journey, 26, 28, 32
schizophrenia and digression in Tristram Shandy, 2, 4, 21–33, 64,
O’Brien, 152–3 103, 134, 175, 188, 199
Schlegel, Friedrich, 51 influence of, 120, 124, 144
Sebald, W. G., 1, 156, 193–203 lack of critical consensus, 21
‘All’estero’ (Vertigo), 6–7, 196–203 multiplicity of options and
Austerlitz, 199–200, 201 digression, 21–2, 25
The Emigrants, 199, 201 progression and digression,
Rings of Saturn, 193–4, 201 23–4
‘Il ritorno in patria’ (Vertigo), 199 rectilinearity and Christian
self see consciousness; identity; morality, 25–6
subjectivity sex and sexuality in, 28–32
self-consciousness and digression, 6, Stevens, Wallace, 127
7, 95, 100–1, 102–4 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 65, 73
self-reflexivity of fiction, 6 storytelling
Beckett, 160 Beckett Trilogy, 158, 160–1, 163
Calvino and critical detachment, and narrative structure in At
6, 170, 176–8, 179–80 Swim-Two-Birds, 147–8
James, 72, 79 Strachey, Lytton, 124
sensibility cult, 26, 32 stream of consciousness and Beckett
sewing metaphor and Henry James, Trilogy, 159, 162, 165, 167
65, 66 stylistic digression in Proust, 107
sexuality and digression subjectivity, 6–7, 100, 112–13
homosexuality and errant eyes in Beckett Trilogy, 158–9, 164–5
Proust, 108–16 postmodern novel, 165–6
in Tristram Shandy, 28–32 William James’s ‘Stream of
see also feminine and digression Thought’, 67–70
Sheridan, Niall, 145 subversiveness, 4, 6, 7, 83, 141, 154
Sheringham, Michael, 159–60 Sucksmith, Harvey Peter, 37
signification rules of reading, 83 supplementary characters in Little
simile and gender in Woolf’s Orlando, Dorrit, 39, 40–2
125 swerves and narrative digressions,
Simon, Claude, 156 83–4
Smith, Virginia Llewellyn, 92n.8 Swift, Jonathan, 24
Index 213
Symonds, John Addington, 80n.11 Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’, 119–20

sympathy and digression in Tristram Walpole, Horace, 21, 23
Shandy, 25, 26, 32 Walser, Robert: Robber-Novel, 6,
130–42
Taine, Hippolyte, 36–7 wandering and walking poem, 53, 61
talking see speech Watson-Williams, Helen, 102

Tambling, Jeremy, 7 Waugh, Patricia, 166
‘throwing away’ in Calvino, 175 Werfel, Franz, 199, 200–1
time Williams, Jeffrey, 23–4
digression and narrative views of Wilson, Diana de Armas, 11
past, 95–6 Woolf, Leonard, 118
and Marías’s Dark Back of Time, 188 Woolf, Virginia, 4, 118–28
in Woolf’s Orlando, 124–5, 127 The Common Reader, 126–7
see also deferral and delay Jacob’s Room, 118, 124
Topping, Margaret, 4 ‘The Mark on the Wall’, 118–19,
transgressions and digressions, 83–4 120
transhistorical nature of digression, Orlando, 124–5, 127
4, 7 ‘Reading’, 127, 128
transnational nature of digression, 4 A Room of One’s Own, 121–3, 125
Trilling, Lionel, 40 ‘Street Haunting’, 119–20
Trollope, Anthony, 189n.1 Three Guineas, 123
Turgenev, Ivan, 77, 79 ‘Time Passes’, 127–8
Wordsworth, William, 51
unity in narrative, 10 Wright, Iian, 165
Beckett Trilogy, 162, 166, 167 writing process
in Beckett Trilogy, 160, 166, 167
Verlaine, Paul, 56–7 loss of manuscripts in O’Brien’s At
voyeurism in Proust, 114 Swim-Two-Birds, 146–7, 153
and ‘throwing away’ in Calvino,
Walker, David, 5, 6 175
walking as digressive context Walser’s manuscript form of
Dickens’s Little Dorrit, 43–4 Robber-Novel, 131, 132
Sebald in Rings of Saturn, 193–4
‘walking poem’ and metaphor, Zilcosky, John, 196
50–62

Alexis Grohmann & Caragh Wells (Eds.) - Digressions in European Literature - From Cervantes To Sebald (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) PDF

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Alexis Grohmann & Caragh Wells (Eds.) - Digressions in European Literature - From Cervantes To Sebald (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) PDF

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Digressions in European Literature

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

COMING INTO ONE’S OWN: The Novelistic Development of Javier Marías

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

EL COLUMNISMO DE ESCRITORES ESPAÑOLES (1975–2005) (Edited with

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

10 Stealing the Story: Robert Walser’s Robber-Novel 130

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Ian F. A. Bell is Professor of American Literature at the University of

In retirement from the University of Michigan, where he was Marvin

Flore Coulouma is a Lecturer in English Linguistics at the University of

Samuel Frederick is Assistant Professor of German and Film at Clemson

Alexis Grohmann is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University

Judith Hawley is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature in the

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Gadda and Calvino. Her monograph, Digression: A Narrative Strategy in

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Jeremy Tambling is Professor of Literature at the University of

Margaret Topping is Reader in French at Cardiff University. Her

David Walker is Professor of French at the University of Sheffield. He

Caragh Wells is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies in the School of

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

this errancy is not an entirely inappropriate purposive lack of method

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Pierre Bayard sums it up, ‘rhetoric’s dream is that digression not be

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

forms of digressive writing may then be linked to l’écriture feminine,

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

within a text, as Chambers suggests in his discussion of the ‘epiphanic

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

narrative in Sebald’s first book of prose, Vertigo – ostensibly a travel nar-

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

In his last work, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, historia setentrional

The Persiles’ structure explicitly grapples with one of the abiding

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

or “near-death” alternates with a moment of resurrection or triumphant

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

One way in which the Persiles, a text marked so forcibly by narrative

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

on his return as being due to her having made ‘a vow to go to Rome to

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

these pragmatic concerns raised by Auristela only begin to emerge clearly

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

4. Forcione (1970: 187–211) reads Periandro’s narrative as a juxtaposition

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Randel, Mary Gaylord. 1983. ‘Ending and Meaning in Cervantes’ Persiles y

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

The digressive nature of Tristram Shandy is notoriously challenging for