To Lost Space and Darkness, To You ... With Love,

Elizabeth Bowen

An Essay by Martyn Holland

Copyright: 2007

'As things were – dead or living the letter-writer sent her only a threat.' [1]

The Land Has I

If '[t]he uncanny has to do with a strangeness of framing and borders, an experience of liminality'[2], then Bowen's liminality is so charged and weighted that it is constantly succumbing to breaches and influxes from neighbouring worlds.  She exhibits that Irish 'idea of there being a contiguous world, a world coterminal with our own, into and out of which some may move.'[3]  A haunting vacuity riddles her writing.  Compartmentation cannot sustain and everything is a harkening back within a ghostly voluptuousness.  The notion of worlds-apart becomes unfeasible and in Bowen the action is localised on the border between them; our attention is often drawn to floors, doors, walls and ceilings that bulge and bulk under the weighty presence of accumulated repression, of the past coming back to surround us, of death returning to sheath us.  Like O'Brien, Bowen casts her fictional light on the (haunted) frame as that which separates us from the text.  Her art is an ethereal, shining glass in which we glean the silhouette of our own metaphysical privation.

***

On the threshold then, Bowen fictionalises a repression that cannot endure.  For Freud, repression entails aloofness and its essence 'lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious.[Freud's emphasis]'[4]  It requires of us a constantly repeated letting go, or looking askance, as we isolate ourselves on the edge of, but also within, acres of dead psychical country.  It lays us open to a siege and we sense darkness all around us.  All that is withdrawn and supposedly departed 'proliferates', and takes on

"extreme forms of expression, which when they are translated and presented to the neurotic are not only bound to seem alien to him, but frighten him by giving him the picture of an extraordinary and dangerous strength of instinct."[5] 

Withdrawn from the eye, from 'I'; the repressed lurks, just beyond imagination and memory, ready to sweep us into its wasteland.  Not quite Eliot's wasteland however.  For, Maud Ellmann describes this as a specifically Irish one in comparison with her modernist contemporaries in that Bowen's 'originates in the Anglo-Irish landscape of her childhood, where 'emptiness' was the prevailing impression of the countryside surrounding her ancestral mansion Bowen's Court.'[6]  Thus her fiction touches on Burkean fears of suppressed and dispossessed cultural forces.  Lilia typifies this Ascendancy obsession in A World of Love when she imagines 'spies everywhere' and announces 'No, I never shall trust this country.'[7]  She also senses the fragility of present identity and can feel negation bearing down upon her.  She is described as 'an absolute absence'[8] moving 'with a sort of superior smoothness, as though trollied…'[9]  Superiority is couched between the non standard intensifying adverb that simultaneously downplays any position of stability and at the same time the colloquial suffix threatens to cart her away from the land with indignity.  Thus, what McCormack calls 'negative presence'[10] manifests itself everywhere in Bowen texts, which themselves spring forth from 'the paradoxical position of the Anglo-Irish, ensconced in a country to which they could never belong.'[11]  Home is where the heart was, home is where the heart can never settle; always fleeing.   

          Always yearning for elsewhere, for beyond, Bowen highlights the otherness of love, its desire in flight; endlessly returning to a constantly postponed destination that is the epitome of familiarity.  Freud summarises:       

"This unheimlich place…is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.  There is a joking saying that 'Love is home-sickness".[12]

The uncanny is that figure motioning to us from within a relegated landscape.  'Love is a yearning for a country' says Cixous, and just as the Famine dead (loitering beneath the Irish literary landscape) throw into confusion who is writing (to) whom, love in Bowen is a haunted text in which we, the present, both pursue and take flight.  In 'The Demon Lover', 'Mrs Drover went round to her shut-up house to look for several things she wanted to take away.'[13]  Encircled, we also spiral downwards into Bowen's romances that are transformed, by a lingering nothingness, into uncanny ghost stories. 

Modern Hauntings

The story of the 'I' and of temporality as bound in ghostliness and the history of modernity as clouded in an air of otherness.  These were some of Bowen's concerns.  Natural heir to Le Fanu, she anachronistically dragged his themes into the Twentieth Century.  McCormack describes them:

"Le Fanu's characters were usually haunted by the past, but some of at least Bowen's will be haunted in the present tense – and by it…the ghost story also challenged the usual assumptions which readers of fiction make about personality – about its contours, its claim to uniqueness..."[14]

Bowen sees modernity as merely another conduit for the pervading sense of otherness that constantly threatens to envelop us.  Her liminality, coupled with sensitivity towards the uncanny that she inherits from Irish Gothic, means that, as Bennett and Royle put it, her 'work is concerned with formations and dissolutions, approaches and departures, within the very presence of the present, within the self-identity of the same.'[15]  Bowen conjures up these phantoms within the 'self-identity' of the written word itself.

In a preface to Lady Cynthia Asquith's collection of supernatural stories The Second Ghost Book (1952) Bowen concurs with Anthony Vidler's image of the uncanny as 'a metaphor for a fundamentally unliveable modern condition'[16].  There is something about modernity that is particularly susceptible to the phantasmatic and Bowen describes how

"The universal battiness of our century looks like providing [ghosts] with a propitious climate – hitherto confined to antique manors, castles, graveyards, crossroads, yew walks, cloisters, cliff-edges, moors or city backwaters, they may now roam at will…The advance of psychology has gone their way; the guilt complex is their especial friend."[17]

Bowen casts the ghost in to the role of analyst as, 'their manifestations are, like their personalities, oblique and subtle, perfectly calculated to get the modern person under the skin.'[18]  They not only loom at us but they are able to undermine us; they know us moderns all too well, for they have had infinite time with which to practice the strange art of modernity. 

          Thus, in an age of vacuous epistemological comfort, of secularisation and of all encompassing knowledge, in which escapism is thwarted by realism, the ghost lurks in its new guise as the uncanny.  Since 'the whole world is mapped out in routes and railways, networked by press and radio' and 'there are no 'other lands'' we impulsively long to unravel the moment, as well as ourselves, both of which we find encrypted within the present.  Our timeless recourse to the escape of a féth fiada immerses us within the world of a more personal longing and we shift 'our desire for the ideal 'elsewhere' from space to time.'[19]  The levelling of modern identity that caused O'Brien to flee into the signifier in Bowen leads 'many down strange paths.'[20]  That is, there is a certain nullity about the modern world that blinds us and we flee and we 'cling[s] to personal memory as a life-line', we deposit ourselves within the bank-vaults of our memory in the hope that we may shore up funds for the future fruition of the self.  A willed repetition, a constant invocation of the same since: '[t]o re-live any moment, acutely, is to be made certain that one not only was but is.'[21]  But it is therein that this modern plight makes the ghostly, the revenant figure and the return of the repressed all the more intense as 'hostile or not, they rally, they fill the vacuum for the uncertain 'I'.[22]  They rally to our cause just as we stumble over backwards into the past, into a deathly figure. 

'The Back Drawing Room'

Exhibiting Bowen's 'negative presence', 'The Back Drawing Room', written in 1926, tells of a negative revenance where an absent or reflective ghost stands as a reminder of displacement and fragility.  'The Back Drawing Room' tells of a complacently modern group of pseudo-intellectuals indulging an anonymous guest in his recounting of an apparently supernatural experience he had during his travels in Ireland.  Ellmann argues that

"In 'The Back Drawing-Room', to go back into the innermost recesses of the house is to go back into 'the depths of time, where the spectres of the past come back to haunt the living.'  It is also to go back to Ireland and Irish Gothic."[23] 

The storyteller is described as 'an umbrella that an absent-minded caller has brought into the drawing room.'  Ellmann's 'innermost recess' is also that part of the characters that exists unknown to them and the storyteller's facelessness allows for an unconscious projection.  Objectification and anonymity allows him to act as a vehicle for the suppressed thoughts and fears of his hosts.  The Ireland he tells of is 'a dream oppressed and shifting, such as one dreams in a house with trees about it, on a sultry night.'  Thus, the narrative centres around a vortex of the unreal and just as the characters whimsically indulge in their theosophist speculations, flirting with the supernatural, they also brush tantalisingly close to the secret space of fiction.  Listening in a whimsical haze, they leave their bodies and travel to distant lands of displacement.

          Mrs Henneker, the hostess of the soirée, is the embodiment of a timeless lack.  We meet her 'having taken her place among them, inevitably they had begun to discuss the larger abstractions.'  We see here an example of Bowen's syntax that, 'constantly ambushes our ontological security.'[24]  Mrs Henneker looms in all her negative aspect, yet eternally motional, presented amidst a periphrastic and lumbering cloud of not only anonymous but pluperfect ghosts as the past progressive 'having taken' is awkwardly set against the past perfect 'they had begun.'  Like Lilia, she floats through a temporal space that is not her own. 

A nervous, social rigidity is a constant trope in the narrative and a strange duplicitous objectification constantly lurks, just to the edge of the character's interactions.  Prosopopoeia is reversed as Miss Eve is said to have contracted a 'slight vibration…from her fiddle-strings; Lois nods 'at the fire like a mandarin'[25] and 'the young man with the horn-rimmed glasses' is described as 'sitting bolt upright and staring inexorably…like an owl.'  Figurative epiphanies of their corporeality, they are all statues of their own otherness or, the Other as taxidermist.

The anti-climatic culmination of the anonymous 'little man's' narrative is also a moment of haunting pathos.  He tells of his subsequent discovery that the house, in which he encountered a ghostly woman with no face, was burnt by Catholic insurgents two years prior to his experience.   Furthermore, the family have merely moved away to Dublin, 'or England.'  How can they be, any more than plants one's pulled up?  They've nothing to grow in, or hold on to.'[26] 

Although Bowen is in some respects Gothicising her descendant's Irish history where, as Corcoran reminds us, 'the Anglo-Irish dispossessors are themselves dispossessed by the violent (Republican) forces', there is slightly more than his further claim that the audience's 'ghosthood is similarly a matter of being in two places at the same time… a death in life…'[27]  For, Mrs Henneker's reaction is one of catalepsy, as we witness her 'silent, staring at the fire.  She did not raise her lids…and only held her hand out, offering it vaguely in perfunctory valediction as others rose to go.'[28]  Bennett and Royle dwelling at some length on its appearance in Bowen's novels, describe catalepsy as

"a hypnotic state in animals 'shamming death', the instinctive dramatisation of death by animals in certain life-threatening situations…Whether as states of trance, absent-mindedness, or forgetting, etc., catatonia in general (and cataplexy in particular) disrupts the distinction between fiction and the real by presenting the body not only as a fiction of death, but also – even before that – a fictional body."[29]

Thus, Mrs Henneker exhibits the unnerving nature of a being that is intimately fused with the discordance of a spectral nature; she is poised so perilously on the edge of an abyss.  An abyss that is manifested in this case through the process of story telling, literature; it comes from within the text.  But it also resonates with something interior to Mrs Henneker herself 'She did not raise her lids', connoting sleep, silence, inner peace.  Taking Ellmann's summary one step further, then, the story can also be read as a specula example of diversionary meta-fiction.  It is a powerful evocation of the danger that Morash saw lurking in Famine literature's dabbling in deathly prosopopoeia.  Fiction, by the inherently ghostly transaction that it sets up with us, also renders us 'frozen in death.' [30]    

Spectral Gleam

Bowen's style is like the storyteller in 'The back Drawing Room.'    It presents a facelessness that conceals our transaction with something that is forgotten or banished and there is often a divergence between her white-washed style and syntax and the teeming presence of our inner engagement with her texts.  'In the Square' (1941) tells of a character's return to a familiar London house that is now, on the surface, absent in its abandonment, amidst the desolation of the Second World War.  By contrast, the 'dark interior was a cave of sound.'[31]  This is typical of Bowen's dualist narratives, where the action is often centred on the internal, on what is apparently concealed.

Outside, the grass wilts because it is 'paid for by people who had gone' and Bowen's tendency to cancel-out her own narrative shines forth.  The square, we are told, 'was completely empty, and a whitish reflection, ghost of the glare of midday, came from the pale-coloured facades.'[32]  The gradable adjective modified by an intensifying adverb that is 'completely empty' introduces a lingering vacuity and in 'whitish reflection' the suffix disrupts an already futile imagery; irregularities in syntax make for an infinite reading experience.  Rupert, the protagonist sees the scene as a 'dazzling breach' and Bowen's style, which Ellmann describes as one of 'knottedness,'[33] induces her own variation on Muldoon's 'world-scrim'[34].  Rupert encrypts himself within this constantly retreating absence, 'in the confined sound of his taxi driving away' and he is delivered into the hands of a memory as into a fleeing tomb.  Dazzlingly, he breaches a world ruled over by the war dead, he presents himself to the negation of fiction. 

A World of Love

Reading Bowen's cavernous words, we make an unconscious attempt to forge a transaction with the dead, we go in search of a lost region of identity that has been misplaced, scattered in the verbose terrain of O'Brien's rugged narratives.  Aided with only her spectral gleam we are somehow aware beforehand of the futility of a search and yet we go on.

          In A World of Love, Bowen again blinds us with an unearthly radiance and at the dawning of the narrative our strange radiant reading flickers on uncertainly, like the switching on of the haunted lamp:

"The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before.  There was no haze, but a sort of coppery burnish out of the air lit on flowing fields…This light at this hour, so unfamiliar, brought into being a new world – painted, expectant, empty, intense.  June, of a summer almost unknown; for this was a country accustomed to late awakenings, to daybreaks humid and overcast.  At all times open and great with distance, the land this morning seemed to enlarge again, throwing the mountains back almost out of view in the south of Ireland's amazement at being cloudless."[35]      

Modifiers glitter in this passage half-resplendent with an uncertain light, a sense of radiance tinted by a debilitating absence.  'The sun rose'; 'daybreaks'; 'wakenings' are undermined respectively by 'still pale'; 'humid and overcast'; and 'late'.  There is a lingering and wispy uncertainty about the adjectives that brings to mind the half-light of a morning consciousness foggy (féth fiáda as a wake) from sleep.  '[C]oppery burnish', and uncertainties such as 'sort of', 'seemed to' leave the narrative itself  teetering over the 'cliff of limestone overhanging the river'; at any moment we might plunge into catalepsy and Bowen transforms the uncanny coming to light into a liminal moment of blurred and sleepy apparitions. 

Within this glare there is a sense of submergence.  Antonia wakes in a room where 'Here or there, sun spattered the carpet, rents in the curtains let through what were to be when the sleeper woke shafts of a brightness quite insupportable.'[36]  Elsewhere we encounter Jane in Lady Latterley's bedroom, which is besieged by a light: 'uncannily deepening without darkening, leaned through the too-large windows – a blinding ray presently splintered over the dressing table.'  The uncanny is this strange commingling within visibility, placing 'special emphasis on …what comes to light, on what is revealed to the eye.  The uncanny is what comes out of the darkness'[37].  Blinded, beside herself, Latterly complains of an unfamiliar light: 'I can't see myself, you see!  I can't see a thing!'[38]  An anguish of perspective as we are reminded of the sacrifice that the blind poets make and similarly, McCormack notes that 'In the world of romance, the blind are seers and the crippled are saints.  Somehow, their disability closes the gap between past and present, between knowledge and emotion.'[39]  Thus, these moments of bright-blindness go hand in hand with the sense of an unloosening and a bifurcation. 

          Amid the epileptic canopy of light, silhouettes and darkness that is A World of Love, ghostly figures subliminally register in the text, irascibly haunting and fraying.  Antonia is agitated by the disembodied apparition of Lilia into her catatonic luminary scene where 'a step caught a creaking floorboard.  A big blonde woman inched herself in…'[40]  Lady Latterley's drowning self asks the spectral Jane 'Oh, so that's where you've always been, is it – not here?  Why has nobody told me you existed?'[41]  More importantly this is also followed by the appearance into the narrative of the dead Guy behind the letters that Jane has found in a trunk, who manifests himself at the party with the help of Jane's overactive and alcohol fuelled imagination.  Thus, all this flickering has the aura of 'negative presence.'

***

          A World of Love is an epistolary romance that unfolds in an impossible privacy.  A flirtation with the runic personality that haunts texts (as in Muldoon) and Jane asks, wandering, 'So I suppose it is Cousin Guy?  I wondered, but I'd never have thought one could tie up a "G" into such a knot.'[42]  Flirting with the textual, as we have seen, is a vertiginous feat, flirting with the dead through words make spectres of our present self.  Bennett and Royle sum up this process in Bowen where

"life itself is deeply, indeed inextricably, penetrated by text, what she calls 'livingness' by writtenness…fiction is the second self, the other, the familiar stranger, the doppelganger…sense of identity as itself constructed by fiction."[43]

The trunk of letters is discovered in the attic, garret of a stowed away consciousness, where 'the flame of Jane's candle consumed age in the air; toppling, the wreckage left by the past oppressed her – so much had been stacked up and left to rot; everything was derelict…'  A flickering fragility of the self that springs from a history that now opens up beneath it like a chasm.  The past participle behaves ambiguously, misleadingly dormant while the gerund slices into the syntactical unit, evoking a perpetual falling into fragmentation and decay, a constant leaving behind.  The 'stir', disrupting silence and emanating from 'within herself', indicates that what is brought to candlelight (flammable, disruptive repressed energy) is from an inner abyss.  The scene culminates: 'Her shadow lay on a trunk…out of it, having been wedged in somewhere, tumbled the packet of letters.  They fell at her feet, having found her rather than she them.' [44]  Jane's epistle love is born of this 'tumbling' inclination to dissolution.  She encounters a lost part of her, 'her shadow', physical embodiment of a lost space, as literally, the 'origin which is also an end'[45] of the written word.  Home space, negatively present; love finds us not quite at home in the text:

"In other words, love is not a matter of position, whether of subject or object and therefore of opposition, but of an address that does not originate from any home, as it were.  An address without home, without the property of a subject from which it is sent and to which it returns, love always brushes up against the uncanny, the unheimlich, the un-homelike.  Love brings with it the un-homelike because it is the experience of the sudden or not-so-sudden arrival of the other who expropriates address, which is to say appropriates it, expropriates it: When I say 'I love…', it is always the declaration of the other at my address."[46]

Reading A World of Love we expropriate the address of the fictional Other as well as finding ourselves strangely dispossessed by textual foregrounding.  The repetition of the demonstrative determiner, (namely 'this', as can be seen in the opening passage quoted above) has the effect of rendering it a pronoun that then slides into anaphoric reference, spilling off the page and thus including us in the text.  Thus, Bowen forges a silent transaction with the reader, she points to an incorporeal point, 'here', which swivels round and sees us searching for a hidden referent, around which we sway.

"The particular secret of the place where Jane lay was that it was pre-inhabited.  An ardent hour of summer had gone by here – yes, here, literally where she was, to her certain knowledge."[47]

And, most evocatively, Maud, tacitly drawing attention to the physicality of the very paper we are reading interrogates Jane:

         " 'What are you pretending about that tree?'

'This tree?' Jane guiltily dropped her hand.

'Just wondered what you were making up,'"[48]

***

Throughout her writing Bowen 'remains aware of the primeval impulses battering at the bastions of modernity'[49] and her fiction delights in the fact that the repressed and the forgotten, has been, all this time edging closer and closer to us.  She dresses her ghosts up in familiarity, encrypting her liminality within everyday objects exploiting 'the horror latent behind reality: for this reason, they prefer prosaic scenes – today's haunted room has a rosy wallpaper.'[50]  Fiction intrudes into 'reality', where it robs and plunders and then re-presents the objects it finds therein to our susceptible reading mind.  Freud described how the author, lulling us into a false sense of security only to leave us vulnerable to an even more intense encounter with the uncanny, 'is in a sense betraying us to the superstitiousness which we have ostensibly surmounted.'[51]  In O'Brien, we glimpse surmounted animistic influences at work in his experimental style, at the exact moment we find ourselves divulged, by him, to our own otherness.  Bowen's opaque liminality betrays our desires for that eternity that we find only in the part of ourselves that dabbles with mortality.  She too practices a 'realism of the unreal' and her words glitter obliquely, inclining us to be charmed by the glint of her style, only to be confronted with the spectre that stalks her fiction in silence and light-heartedly, in darkness.