Armstrong on Suspended Sentences

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Writing and Reading: Intertextuality and the Anxieties of Inter- pretation in Mark McWatt's Suspended Sentences * —Andrew Armstrong [I]n McWatt's case it is a "mediated" Guyana, a landscape that is written to some extent intertextually, influenced as the poet's eye is by the pictures painted by those who came before [...] Perhaps the strongest influence on Me Watt is the fiction of Wilson Harris. In the writing of both, there [is] a pervasive faith in the possibility of redemption, a deep sense of human potential, however deeply buried. - Evelyn O'Callaghan In this paper I am paying critical attention to two short stories from Mark McWatt's first prose work. Suspended Sentences (2005) - "Still Life: Bougainvilla and Body Parts" and "The Tyranny of Influence" to demonstrate the ways that they thematise influence (the need to create) writing (the work that goes into the creative process), and reading (the challenge and anxieties of interpretation). In my analysis of these stories I will show how they dramatise the twin processes of form and content, and writing and reading within an intertextual framework. The stories in this collection are intertextual not only with other literary sources, but also contain images (both literally and implied) imported from the extra-literary arts, in this case, painting. This is seen in McWatt's use of an interarts dialogue in the stories mentioned above where the use of painting forms not only a framing device for the stories but also works as an example of pleonasm or self-reflexive or self-conscious representation. While the painting described in "Still Life" forms the denouement of the story, that in "Tyranny," namely, Antonello Da Messina's "The Dead Christ, Supported by an Angel", provides the setting and backdrop for the story - the plot unfolds inside of the painting. By employing such intertextuality in these stories, the narratives open a space that is more suited to the inclusion of the characters'/surrogate authors' use of memory, imagination and perception and the revitalisation of the hermeneutic role of the reader as integrated critic. I refer also to the ways that the stories (and the entire text), in illustrating the work of the writer and the creative process, draw on a number of sources and influences within what may be referred to as a "cross- cultural complex" (Harris 1983: 3). ' The title is taken from his poem "Suspension Bridge." Here the poet states: "And, as un- derstanding comes/to all who stand above/such mirrored passion, /I became attuned to the meaning of that act:/suspension /... Suspension of the constitution. Suspension of liberties, /of disbelief .../Suspended sentences, that left one free to come to grief ..." (See The Lan- guage of Eldorado 71 - 72). Vol 17, No. 1

description

Armstrong's analysis of Derek Walcott's Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement.

Transcript of Armstrong on Suspended Sentences

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Writing and Reading: Intertextuality and the Anxieties of Inter-pretation in Mark McWatt's Suspended Sentences *

—Andrew Armstrong

[I]n McWatt's case it is a "mediated" Guyana, a landscape that is written to someextent intertextually, influenced as the poet's eye is by the pictures painted by thosewho came before [...] Perhaps the strongest influence on Me Watt is the fiction ofWilson Harris. In the writing of both, there [is] a pervasive faith in the possibilityof redemption, a deep sense of human potential, however deeply buried.

- Evelyn O'Callaghan

In this paper I am paying critical attention to two short stories from Mark McWatt'sfirst prose work. Suspended Sentences (2005) - "Still Life: Bougainvilla and BodyParts" and "The Tyranny of Influence" to demonstrate the ways that they thematiseinfluence (the need to create) writing (the work that goes into the creative process),and reading (the challenge and anxieties of interpretation). In my analysis of thesestories I will show how they dramatise the twin processes of form and content, andwriting and reading within an intertextual framework. The stories in this collectionare intertextual not only with other literary sources, but also contain images (bothliterally and implied) imported from the extra-literary arts, in this case, painting.This is seen in McWatt's use of an interarts dialogue in the stories mentioned abovewhere the use of painting forms not only a framing device for the stories but alsoworks as an example of pleonasm or self-reflexive or self-conscious representation.While the painting described in "Still Life" forms the denouement of the story, thatin "Tyranny," namely, Antonello Da Messina's "The Dead Christ, Supported by anAngel", provides the setting and backdrop for the story - the plot unfolds inside ofthe painting. By employing such intertextuality in these stories, the narratives opena space that is more suited to the inclusion of the characters'/surrogate authors' useof memory, imagination and perception and the revitalisation of the hermeneuticrole of the reader as integrated critic. I refer also to the ways that the stories (andthe entire text), in illustrating the work of the writer and the creative process, drawon a number of sources and influences within what may be referred to as a "cross-cultural complex" (Harris 1983: 3).

' The title is taken from his poem "Suspension Bridge." Here the poet states: "And, as un-derstanding comes/to all who stand above/such mirrored passion, /I became attuned to themeaning of that act:/suspension /... Suspension of the constitution. Suspension of liberties,/of disbelief .../Suspended sentences, that left one free to come to grief ..." (See The Lan-guage of Eldorado 71 - 72).

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Me Watt's deployment of "the cross-eultural mind" (Harris 12) is integral to a read-ing of intertextuality in the stories selected for analysis here as it underscores boththe problematisation of representation (implied in the sub-title, "Fictions of Atone-ment") and the whole matter of the anxiety of interpretation implied in the maintitle, "Suspended Sentences". In addition, I wish to point out that the sub-title, "Fic-tions of Atonement", indicates fictions that highlight the tum in tum-of-the-centuryfictional representations as exploring "the possibility of redemption" for troubledpeoples and communities, cited in the above epigraph. I set out on the above bear-ing in mind, and drawing on, what Antonio Benitez-Rojo, in The Repeating Island

(1992) says of the Caribbean text:

[It] is excessive, dense, uncanny, asymmetrical, entropie, her-metic, all this because, in the fashion of a zoo or bestiary, itopens its doors to two great orders of reading: one of a sec-ondary type, epistemological, profane, diurnal, and linked tothe West - the world outside - where the text uncoils itselfand quivers like a fantastic beast to be the object of knowl-edge and desire; another the principal order, teleological, ritual,nocturnal, and referring to the Caribbean itself, where the textunfolds its bisexual sphinxlike monstrosity toward the void ofits impossible origin, and dreams that it incorporates this, or isincorporated by it (23).

I will demonstrate in my analysis below, how Me Watt's writing encourages a multi-textured reading that links the "profane" with the "ritual" and the "epistemological"with the "teleological" in the use of its multi-tempoed rhythms and multi-temporalmovements. I am looking specifically at the ways that these stories, in their vari-ous forms of intertextuality, allow for an interrogation of the reliability of memoryand the past - the ways that individuals, cultures, nations and continents definethemselves. In addition, the use of multiple 'authors' may well be pointing towardwhat Michael Dash, in his study of Caribbean literature in a New World context,identifies as "the transformative power of a collective imaginaire" (101). But first,in laying out a conceptual framework for my analysis, I make some general com-ments on the collection. Suspended Sentences immediately calls to mind the dualrelationship (implied in the title) between language and narrative, language andlandscape (in the ways that the stories mine Guyana's landscape like an archiveof memories and re-presenting this archive's contents for careful consideration)language use and linguistic situation and that between the use of the sentence and

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the whole project of writing. The book's title speaks on the one hand, to the judi-cial or legal use of the term sentence as a 'verdict' handed down in a court of law(in this case, a two-year suspended sentence on a group of dehnquents, who aresentenced to write a short story on their newly independent Guyana). On the otherhand, the title points to the use of language as a 'surrogate' or fill-in for 'reality';the ways that language is employed to construct narratives - in this sense languageas 'referral.' But it also points to language as 'deferral,' not only in the sense thatthe sentences are deferred by the 'judge' but also in the sense that language defersmeaning by suspending meaning or the meaning-producing process in words. Thisalso points to the idea of 'excess.'

The collection is underlined by a framing device; that of stories purportedly told bya group of tellers or voices (the use of the constructed or surrogate author employedby Jorge Luis Borges for example ^ ). The surrogate writers function as a metanarra-tional device that frames the ten stories. Each story is suspended from the other by,in some cases, a variety of generic conventions, from realist ("Two Boys NamedBasil", "Still Life: Bougainvilla and Body Parts", "A Lovesong for Miss Lillian","The Bats of Love"), to non-realist or supernatural ("Uncle Umberto's Slippers","Alma Fordyce and the Bakoo", "The Visitor"), to surrealist ("Afternoon WithoutTears", "The Tyranny of Influence") to suspense ("The Celebration"). The storiesare also suspended by the deployment of different narrative modes and 'voices'- comic, playful, ironic, subjective, intertextual, which prompts an associationalglance to the Bakhtinian terms "dialogic," "polyphonic" and "camivalesque." Forwhat the reader encounters in this collection is a dialogue of genres, styles, modesand moods in the ways that the stories both adhere to the 'classic' feature of theshort story - focus on a single event and a single effect, thus remaining close to itsprimal mythic source (May 1) - and broaden its focus to include a more dialogicapproach. The eleven stories in the collection, each told by a different 'author', arethemselves framed between an "Introduction" (9-10), a brief author's 'biography'titled "The Gang" (11-13) and an afterword called "Remainders" which recountsthe 'current' status of each member of "the gang" (245-250). In this manner, thenarrative does not begin with the first story nor end with the last, but rather beginsbefore and continues beyond the actual 'text'. Yet these sections are not extra-textual, but rather part of the body of the text, as they help to further point to themetafictional and metanarrational aspect of the work:

^ For example, the use of the surrogate or fictive author and editor recalls Borges's in the story "Tlon,

Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," in Labyrinths, 3-18..

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Additionally, the use of eleven stories purportedly told by eleven different authors,as a framing device, reminds readers of Boccaccio's Decameron in his choice oftenpeople to tell ten stories as a means of 'entertainment' or diversion during the BlackDeath in Florence, Italy. Suspended Sentences also speaks to the work of the writeras wordsmith - one who deals in language or the art/act of building a narrative withsentences. In this regard, the text is both self-conscious and self-referential, as isindicated in the book's preface:

The idea of writing a book of short stories, purportedly by dif-ferent authors and within a narrative frame, first occurred to mein 1989, when I remember discussing it briefly with David Da-bydeen, who thought that it would prove too difficult to maintaindistinctions between the styles/voices of the storytellers. He was(is) probably right, but I wasn't concerned too much with that, Ijust wanted to try it if/when I got the chance (v).

McWatt's seemingly low-key comment here however, should not mislead the read-er into believing that this is a mere exercise in literary self-indulgence. On the con-trary, the collection of stories engages not only with the textual practice of the post-colonial West Indian writer, but also with such issues as the link between writingand territory, form and function and art and the imagination. In addition, the storiesthematise and dramatise deeper (wider) issues having to do with self and the im-agination, inner and outer worlds, being and belonging, conquest and civilization,myth and history, the links between fiction and essay, the nation of Guyana at thethreshold between centuries, and the place of West Indian writing in a larger, moreglobal context. McWatt's stories moreover, demonstrate the ways that indigenoustraditions of storytelling merge with more postmodernist techniques in revealinga pattem of writing (composition) that invites a pattem of reading (interpretation)that cannot be contained within a single theoretical approach. In short, the storiesinvite the reader to 'read' the complex social resonance of narrative 'telling' withinthe atomised space of the short story in the various movements between myth, real-ism and impressionism. Moreover, in many of the stories in this collection, there isa combination of genres and narrative techniques. For example, in "Alma Fordyceand the Bakoo", the narrative embraces the (social) realism of the everyday alongwith the fantastic style of folklore. Similarly, in "The Tyranny of Influence", thestory is modelled on Harold Bloom's critical 'masterpiece' The Anxiety of Influence(1973), but plays on the Judeo-Christian myths of the creation and the crucifixionof Christ while tapping into the primal mythic source of the short fiction form. "Still

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Life: Bougainvilla and Body Parts" and "Afternoon Without Tears," although indialogue with other 'texts' (the former with the "still lifes" ofthe Dutch Golden agepainters, the latter with Wilson Harris's Ascent to Omai), are stories that draw onthe psychological aspect of the nineteenth century short story form made famousin such (impressionistic) works as Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's BlackVeil" and "Young Goodman Brown" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat".

At this juncture it is useful to distinguish three different narrative personae, orgroups of personae in the text: the author Mark McWatt, the writer and hterarycritic and Professor of Literature, whose authorial presence as both creative writerand literary critic can be readily detected throughout the text; the ghost-writers orto employ a term from Wilson Harris, "character masks" invited by the author toact as his surrogates and to help establish the triadic organization ofthe text; finally,the narrators, created by the surrogates, who are created by the author, who alsoact as voices/consciousnesses for the author. In this sense these voices becomeentangled, much like the surrogates and the eventual reader, in the myriad voices/perspectives of the text - for example, the Gerry Fung created by Terrence Wongin "The Visitor" or the Ovid Pearson created by Geoffrey DeMattis in "Still Life:Bougainvilla and Body Parts", or the finest example of this creativity, the MarkMcWatt created by Mark McWatt in "The Celebration" - all of whom are createdby Mark McWatt, the author. Me Watt's technique here is reminiscent ofthe Italiannovelist Umberto Eco in The Name ofthe Rose (1980) - a text deeply influencedby the Borgesian technique of multiple surrogates ' - in crafting a narrative which,in Eco's own words, is an "Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French ver-sion of a seventeenth-century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a Germanmonk toward the end of the fourteenth century" {Rose A). Or as he states in hisPostscript to the novel: "So I wrote [...] setting my narrative on a fourth level ofencasement, inside three other narratives: I am saying what Vallet said that Mabil-lon said that Adso said" {Rose 512). Me Watt's "level[s] of encasement" in thiscollection highlight such issues as literary indebtedness, influence, intertextuality- all vital to the processes of writing and reading discussed in this essay. The col-lection follows the technique of texts within texts within a text; or voices embeddedwithin other voices within an authorial voice. All of this emphasizes the ways thatstories, texts and subjectivities are entangled, further dramatizing the processes ofintertextuality and intersubjectivity as mirroring, where the personal is reflected inthe textual and vice versa.

' In fact, Borges's presence is invoked in the novel in the person of Jorge of Burgos, the blind guardianofthe library. As Eco notes in the Postscript: "library plus blind man can only equal Borges." See TheName ofthe Rose, 515.

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What we have here is the playful nature of the act of writing as a game, masking andunmasking, entangling and disentangling, where double fictitious personae write ornarrate the author's story. This doubling paradoxically problematises and enhancesthe text's structure and reinforces its mirroring process. The framing device of thesurrogate authors works to highlight the constructed and contingent nature of nar-ratives where one story depends on another, one storyteller draws on another adinfinitum. At the end of all this is the way that writing, revealed in the sentence, (re)structures consciousness (Ong 1982).

Suspended Sentences thus speaks to a particular linguistic issue - that of the placeof the sentence in its referential function as "the first and simplest unit of discourse"(Ricoeur: From Text to Action 108). In McWatt's text, the "suspense that defers thereference" means that the text "is free to enter into relations with all the other textsthat come to take the place of the circumstantial reality referred to by living speech"(FTA 109) and also by the various texts that the reader brings to the act of readingany single work. Here, as already mentioned, we have the relation of text to text -inter and intra textuality. Moreover, it highlights the process of reading as partialand indeterminate, and invites the reader to function as facilitator or negotiator be-tween the various voices, styles and genres in the text. It is this intra and intertextu-ality that suspends the text, from text to text in its referential function and to whichI now tum in my analysis of writing, reading and intertexuality in the stories.

I tum first to "Geoffrey DeMattis's" "Still Life: Bougainvilla and Body Parts",where the processes of writing and reading are dramatised in the letters of a con-cemed father, Ovid Pearson, writing home from Canada to his wife Saskia on the'well being' of their daughter, Yasmin. This is a story that explores the personalrelationship between a father and his daughter and her personal and professionallives, a young man and his wife-to-be, and the interpersonal links between familiesthrough marriage and relationships. At the sub-textual level, this is a story of thecreative process; of art and the artist or how to know the artist in the art and the actof creation.

Employing the personal but limited mode of the letter format, the story however,extends the narrative perspective by employing the trope of memory (recall) towiden the story's narrative range. The narrative is syncopated, often pointing be-yond its own narrow scope - for even as it explores the present, it also looks back tothe past through the frame of memory. The syncopated rhythms in the story work tocurb the "refrain of home, distending its limits to accommodate intersubjective dis-

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tance" (Omhovere 274). The letters are a bridge which seeks to 'limit' or managethe distance between Guyana and Canada, 'homes' and 'aways' and presence andabsence. In one sense then, the letters seek to remove remote distance. Ovid writesdown the events that transpire on this visit to Canada in "letters" to his wife, so that,in his own words "you can read it all like a story when I retum" (140). However,even as Ovid writes the happenings in Canada, conceming his daughter and herrelationship with her boyfriend Augie, he is drawn, through memory, to another,earlier relationship: that of a young Ovid Pearson and Saskia Samlalsingh. Thesememories both complement and extend Ovid's current narrative, and provide acontrasting read from the troubled relationship of Yasmin, who is struggling notonly in her personal relationship, but also to complete the art project for her profes-sor. At one level, or within one frame, the story is constmcted around the relation-ship between a male writer (Ovid) and a female reader (Saskia). As implied author,Ovid anticipates a reader, Saskia, who will understand and correctly interpret his'text.' However, the process of reading is here deferred or suspended, as Saskia'sreading has to await Ovid's retum to Guyana. This deferral of reading further un-derscores the whole matter of the anxiety of interpretation, as it is the impliedreader, Saskia, who has to await the reading of the letters, while the real reader haseasy access to them (via Ovid's 'open' account). In fact, by withholding immediateaccess to the text from Saskia, the writer (Ovid) creates an anxious reader who iskept absent from the text until his retum, so that author and text retum as 'one'.Ovid is not only the writer/author of the letters he is their postman/distributor aswell. Fulfilling these twin roles, the male writer asserts his authority in influencingthe reading practices of his female reader, and thus, in no small manner, influencingher interpretation of the letters.

The beginning of the story, "My dear Saskie" not only implies intimacy betweenthe implied author and the implied reader, but also draws the reader into the storyby attempting to bridge the distance between author and reader. In fact, the twinconcept of implied author/implied reader within the text is suspended between theactual author and the actual reader. So that we might say that the implied writercreates a mirror image of another persona, the implied reader, which the actualreader is implicitly asked to play along with. At another level, the plot also sur-rounds the relationship of a female artist (Yasmin, Ovid's and Saskia's daughter)and her lover, Augie at the personal level, and that between Yasmin and her male artprofessor, Rob, at the professional level. Both of these 'relationships' are read andinterpreted for the reader by Ovid as writer/reader within the story. These intersect-ing relationships weave a webwork of inter and intratextuality that (dis)places the

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reader on a number of levels. The text thus underscores the often complex relation-ships between real persons playing roles both in the act of writing and in the act ofreading.

In 'reading' Yasmin's and Augie's troubled relationship, the actual reader notes thatwe are never allowed direct access to Yasmin's story. It is mediated through Ovid'snarrative (letters). In fact, the Yasmin/Augie relationship is framed within that ofOvid and Saskia, as parents and precursors, and the story's structures facilitates thiswith the present (Ovid's letters to Saskia, observing Yasmin and her relationships)being written in normal font, and the past (recollections of the early relationshipof Ovid and Saskia) written in italics. To further encase the Yasmin/Augie 'story'within the Ovid/Saskia narrative, the story often has Ovid overhearing arguments/quarrels between Yasmin and Augie and then commenting on them in his letters tohis wife:

It seemed they would carry on all night. Probably a good thing. Ithought that they were actually arguing for a change and I went backto bed. I doubted I would sleep, but the next thing I knew it was almostnine o'clock, when I awoke to Yasmin's voice (156).

Further on, he tells Saskia, in his reported account of the final relationship-endingargument that Yasmin reminds him of both of them (her parents). Here, where Yas-min tells Augie: "Don't worry about offending my father; I'm not the result of im-maculate conception, he knows all about sex and, in any case is in no position toobject to what I say or do," Ovid tells Saskia: "Here she seemed like you, Saskie,"and goes on to observe that "Earlier, when she had called him 'vestibular' I realized[...] that she sounded like me" (157-158).

In his reading of the daughter's piece of art, titled "Still Life: Bougainvilla andBody Parts" the father recognises the "terrifying beauty" and savagery of the work.This piece of "grotesque realism" underscores what Ovid sees as "the impossibilityof really knowing someone and ofthe absolute mystery of personality and imagina-tion" (164). It also underscores the question in the topic of this paper: "How can weknow the dancer from the dance?" In this case, how to know the artist from the art,or more precisely to this collection: How can we know the writer(s) from the text?Can we separate the writer from his work? But it is Ovid's description of the pieceof art that catches the reader's imagination. The description of the painting, occur-

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ring at the end of the story metaphorically suggests the answer to the questionsabove. As a piece of seemingly objective description, Ovid's 'reading' of the paint-ing is unsurpassed in its expressionist portrayal of all that is beautiful and terrifyingabout both life and art. Behind Ovid's description, a vivid piece of art criticism, liesa kind of visual intertext with, or sub-text to, the act of writing (his 'personal' let-ters to Saskia which provide the story's framing device). The descriptive narrativehere also invokes thé presence of Mark McWatt the author, as hterary critic; for itis an example of what the viewer or 'reader' sees, appreciates and comments on. Itis a clear and concise philosophical evaluation/critique of the painting. But moreto the point is the observation that Ovid's description and analysis of the paintingis the high point of the story. It is here that the story's intensity is amassed as itmoves towards its ending. It is here too that the reader witnesses the delineation ofwhat George Lukács, commenting on the short story, terms "the strangeness andambiguity of life" (52), in Ovid's summary of the work as encapsulating "the abso-lute mystery of personality and imagination" (164). Likewise, Yasmin's painting,or rather, Ovid's 'reading' of it, emphasizes the point made in Mary Rohrberger'sstudy of the short form, namely that there is a metaphysical element to the shortform that takes its concems beyond the everyday world:

The metaphysical view that there is more to the world than that whichcan be apprehended through the senses provides the rationale for theshort story which is a vehicle for the author's probing of the nature ofthe real. As in the metaphysical view, reality lies beyond the ordinaryworld of appearances, so in the short story, meaning lies beneath thesurface of the narrative (Qtd. in May 118).

Although this "view" is not limited to the short fiction form (it can also be wit-nessed in drama, poetry and the novel) it is perhaps better or more forcefully real-ised in the compressed form of the short story.

To retum to Ovid's 'reading' of Yasmin's painting, he sees the intertextuality withthe seventeenth century Flemish still lifes of the likes of Jan Davidsz De Heemand Willem Claeszoon Heda of the Dutch Golden Age. But as with the best inintertextuality, the latter version alters, 'rewrites' and repositions the earlier one,creating a kind of palimpsestual tension. In Geoffrey's story, Ovid's interpretationof Yasmin's painting sees a departure from those of De Heem or Heda. Wheretheir scenes "are wholly domestic," in Yasmin's "there's real violence ... like thescene of a terrible murder, a desecration of the purity of the white flowers, with

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the profusion of blood ... the way it makes clear that the severed parts were fiungwith some force onto the table, spattering blood and puckering the tablecloth"(163-164). While in the De Heem paintings there is a sense of bounteousness andbeauty, a wholeness, or sublimity even, in Yasmin's painting, mirrored for us byOvid's excellent reading, there is that mood of dissonance and the fragmentary, acounter-sublime perhaps. The beauty of the bougainvillas, cast in the innocence oftheir 'whiteness,' is disturbed by the spatters of blood and the body parts, arrangedin a "meticulously, grotesquely reahstic" form. Here Yasmin's act of daemoniza-tion, to employ the Bloomian term, violates the domesticity or homeliness of theDe Heemian 'world' in a process that can only be described by the Freudian termunheimlich or "unhomely." Thus "Bougainvilla and Body Parts" is a much moreforceful and impressionistic work than its predecessor or precursor. Of course, thisis all mediated or mirrored for us through the double intertextuality of Geoffrey'swriting and Ovid's reading of the painting.

Ovid connects the scattered parts in his interpretation of the piece as demonstrating"the impossibility of really knowing someone" (the partial and contingent natureof knowledge and representation); "and of the absolute mystery of personality andimagination" (164). Ovid's reading also demonstrates the cross-culturahty thema-tised both in the story and in the painting. This is a notion of cross-culturahty thatHarris sees as "an opening to a true and variant universality of a blend of parts wecan never wholly encompass, though when we become aware of them we mayceaselessly strive for an open unity that they offer ... [to] forestall the tyranny ofone-sided being" (Ghose 2002). Ovid, as reader, may function within the conceptofthe reader/critic as arbitrator, trying to incorporate ideas from various sides in anongoing circle. Here we invoke the Ricoeurian idea of the reader/critic as integrat-ing critic, focusing on assimilating competing models in his work - the way thatOvid brings together the scattered parts or models in Yasmin's painting. The criticin this regard is not only bridging distance, but also at times aboHshing distancethrough the same process of integration and assimilation.

This takes us back to the earlier point on Ricoeur and his structuralist approach tothe referential function. Ricoeur sees this referential suspension as suspending ref-erence to the world behind the text and focusing on a behaviourial inventory of theinterconnections of parts within the text. Ovid's reading of his daughter's painting,forces us as readers to look behind the world referred to and to attempt to 'con-nect' the parts ofthe painting and the ways that the painting 'mirrors' or representsaspects of Yasmin's life and art her troubled relationship with Augie and her anxi-

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ety to complete the painting for her professor. The painting moreover, representsboth the passion and the clarity of vision of Yasmin the artist; the culmination ofthe artistic effort and the demonstration of the artistic vision. The terror and thebeauty of the artistic vision are captured in the bloody body parts against the whiteof the tablecloth and the beauty of the white flowers. But this aspect of the story(Yasmin's painting), in its cultural-historical thematisation, may also be pointingto the ways in which the symbolic representation of the bougainvilla as exotic isriveted from its exoticism by the 'brutality' of the bloody body parts as themselvesrepresentative of conquest and plunder. But the painting may also be interpreted asbeing intensely personal, as indicated in Yasmin's own 'summary' of it: "I knowit's wild and violent [...] But for me it was also exhilarating, cathartic" (164). Inthis manner the painting may represent both the "exhilarating and cathartic" act ofcreation and the "wild and violent" aspects of the human imagination reminiscentof Poe's "The Black Cat." The story is a complex meditation on acts of representa-tion and reading in the ways that it draws on the pictorial image within the writtenmedium of the short story.

This intertextuality, drawing on different artistic media (the intermediary), is againseen in "Alex Fonseca's" story "The Tyranny of Influence" - drawing on HaroldBloom's seminal work. The Anxiety of Influence - where reference to the fifteenthcentury paintings of the Italian artist Antonello Da Messina provides a framingdevice or template for the emplotment of the story. The story, which is really ameditation on art and the creative process, is of a painter who falls into Antonello's"The Dead Christ, Supported by an Angel" and embarks on a dream joumey in themuddy stream of the painting's background, that takes him back not only to An-tonello's fifteenth century, but also to a fifteenth century Guyana of conquest andfurther upstream to a Guyana five hundred years later. Here, the painter discoversthat "the bleached skulls in the muddy stream" (217) are really those of slaughteredAmerindians. In his joumey upstream, as he comes closer to the present, the painterencounters an Amerindian woman, with whom he fathers a 'miracle' son (bom andgrown to a five-year old moments after conception) whom he names Antonello.The painter awakes from his dream in his studio in Georgetown to paint a restoredand re-storied world for his 'son' - the future of Guyana.

Not only do the paintings in this story provide a framing device in the figurativeand technical sense of the constmction of the story, they also do so in the immedi-ate, literal sense, as the artist protagonist in the story draws his inspiration from"a framed print high on the wall" of Antonello's "The Dead Christ, Supported by

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an Angel" (217). McWatt's use of the frame or tableau here provides a site for thespectacle, inviting the reader perhaps to explore the spectatorial, non-verbal aspectsof (pre-literate) representation. This literary manoeuvre emphasises the dialogicalquahty of the work, which always engages other positions/media/interlocutors ina form of dialogic exchange. The writer, in his intertextuality with earlier texts(which are themselves intertextual with other prior texts), is implicated in a mythof origins, which is, however, already deconstructed by being reconstmcted in themanner in which it is presented (Antonello's painting). The story then plays onthe tension between inheritance and innovation. Correspondingly, the framed printgenerates a background for the reader/viewer against which he/she can perceivethe events and (re)imagine the world of the .story, however unfamiliar it may be.The frame thus creates a setting for the story which is sufficiently confined for itto be told in its entirety (when the artist, and by extension the reader, steps outof the painting, the story must of necessity, be concluded), and to contain a 'lo-cal' environment against the 'imported' story behind the Antonello painting. Thebackground of the Antonello painting with its trees and skulls floating in a river, ablend of the real and surreal, is a meaningful backdrop against which Alex/McWattjuxtaposes his 'mythical' and 'real' characters. In this manner the use of the framehere helps in creating tension between the imaginary and the real, the familiar andthe unfamiliar and between the close and the remote. This tension, according toAlexis Tadié, comes "to define the work of fiction in the tale, and hence in the shortstory" (Tadié 239-240).

This framed print of Antonello's painting leads moreover, to the development ofan important point here based on the German word Bildung: namely, that the rootterm bild (form, picture or image), takes us into the consideration of other relatedterms within art and the creative process. Here we have the interrelations of Urbild- 'original' (Antonello's painting), Vorbild -model (the figure of the dead Christ),and Abbild - copy (the framed print) interwoven within the larger concept of Ein-bildungskrafl - imagination (Truth and Method, Translators' Preface xiii). This em-phasises two important points: firstly, the theme of art or writing and the creativeprocess as vital to cultural 'growth;' and secondly, the whole process of becomingor the coming-into-being of societies and individuals within societies.

This link to the Bildung is significant for Guyana in particular and the Caribbean/Americas in general, as it underscores the processes through which 'New World'civilisations negotiate the past and live out their lives in the present. One of thetasks confronting present day Guyana in our postcolonial world, illustrated in Mc-

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Watt's fiction(s), is the need to heal or mend the "social deformity" that has af-flicted the culture of the country. However, the concept of Bildung as culture isproblematised within the Caribbean and its literature in the sense that there is nosingle, unmixed 'family' line, either textually or contextually, or any uninterruptedtemporal flow. In fact, as with Guyana, there has been a confluence of ethnicitiesand influences, crossings and translocations, improvisations and acts of promis-cuity, that have produced a truly "supersyncretic" or mongrelised culture. In thisregard, we may see Bildung not as an arrival at a fixed point, but as a repeated be-coming. And as Benitez-Rojo points out, this culture "has no beginning or end andis always in transformation, since it is always looking for the way to signify whatit cannot manage to signify" (20).

To retum to the symbol of the dead Christ as figure of atonement; I must stress thatit dramatizes the subtheme/subtext of the collection: "fictions of atonement" andemphasises the theo-logical force behind the story, "The Tyranny of Influence".The words "flctions of atonement" are mirrored, as in a glass, on the front coverof the book where a 'pastiche' of photographs of Guyana is framed. In "Tyranny",through the device of a painter falling into a dream state, the narrator tells a storythat, while it emphasises the creative work - 'beginning' 'process' and 'achieve-ment,' more importantly meditates on the theme of regeneration, particularly na-tional regeneration, a topic of particular relevance to his native Guyana:

The dissolution of the flesh continues until soon there is clean boneand skull like the skulls in the river below the falls and in Antonello'spainting, and the painter thinks that perhaps this operation will re-deem the river and the skulls and perhaps the whole country will beabsolved of its historic guilt and continuing sin and sorrow (221).

While the painter in his dream state may be in Antonello's fifteenth century, he isnevertheless in Guyana making a joumey spanning five hundred years (218). Whatwe have here, as in Victor's "Aftemoon Without Tears", is less a case of time be-ing supplanted by space, than of time merging with or becoming entangled withinspace. There is the sense here of the temporal and the spatial becoming entangledat a crucial counterpoint through the shifting of temporal axes within the course ofthe narrative. In "Tyranny" the narrative voice/perspective frames the story withina small span of time in the present - a few hours perhaps (the first axis) - thatcontains lai-ger time periods: five hundred years to the time of Antonello's paint-ing (the second axis) which is itself extended back to the time of the dead Christ

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(the third axis). Through this compression of time within revolving axes, the storynot only illustrates the temporality of art and "the hierarchical levels that form thedepth of temporal experience" (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative II 101) but also themerging of the theo-logical within the logical portrayed in the linking of time toetemity through the refiguration of the dead Ghrist that prefigures the resurrected or'etemal' Christ (thus completing the cycle of atonement). Antonello's representa-tion of the figure of the dead Christ bome by an angel, transforms the body of theChrist into aesthetic artefact by severing 'Christ' from historical reference and plac-ing him within an atemporal, "etemal" realm. We might say that Christ's temporalsuspension exemplifies the work of art and the artist. For Christ, the original artist/poet/writer is dead and bome away. The 'tyranny' of his influence having beensuspended, there is now room for a new artist, the 'mixed' son of the union betweenthe painter and the Amerindian woman.

Here too, in the figure of the dead Christ, which invokes the image of the cross assymbol of retribution and atonement, we have a fine, even literal use of the cross-cultural in the translocation of the cross or the Christ of the cross, to Guyana. TheHebrew or Jewish Christ of the New Testament, transposed on to Antonello's canvasas an Italian Christ, becomes a Guyanese or Antillean Christ, "a dead weight thatthe angel cannot budge," and without "ascetic, skeletal beauty [or] halo" (S.S. 217),and a symbol of regeneration for a community haunted by a conquistadorial legacy.The dead Christ encountered by the artist inside of the painting is "a more desperateand untidy version of the figure in Antonello's painting" (220); and it is this Christ,whose dead, heavy body prefigures "the one that will become the flesh and boneof the resurrection" (221). This act of daemonization, in keeping with Bloomianintertextuality, is the imposition of a counter-subhme that re-forms and re-positionsthe figure of the Christ (seen in the birth of a son, the new Christ) and points towarda world, a Utopian space perhaps, where atonement, with its high price of humansuffering is no longer needed. In fact, we may go on to infer that the 'retum' of thedead Christ in Guyana symbolizes another aspect of Bloom's revisionary ratio,Apophrades, or the retum of the dead, in which the later work (that of the painter)reworks the earlier work of Antonello, to the effect that we see the fonner workin its relation to the latter work, and not vice versa. In this context, to draw on anobservation made by Carlos Fuentes on the novel, "all great works of [art] containboth the tradition they spring from and add to and the new creation that depends asmuch on preceding traditions as tradition, if it is to remain in good health, dependsupon the new creations that nourish it" (Fuentes). In the latter case, the painter'swork goes beyond that of its precursor, Antonello's painting (tessera).

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Through the self-purgation of the painter in his meeting with the Amerindianpeople, in re-visiting the conquistadorial 'moment' (the skulls in the stream), thepainter is emptied of original infiuence (Kenosis) and engages in a powerful act ofre-creation or re-genesis. Hence,the tyranny of infiuence (tradition) is broken whenindividuals and cultures recognize and build on the interrelationships between thepast and the present, the old and the new. The story thus explores, in the languageof Benitez-Rojo, "the possibility of arriving at a Utopian time in which conflictover [ethnicity and power] does not take place, that is, where [these] lose [their]ancient memory" (20).

McWatt's writing in this story, in drawing on the interrelationship between theworld of mimetic representation and mythic construction, the world of Guyanaand that of Antonello's painting in a transtemporal relationship with a much olderworld, re-emphasises a point made by Nana Wilson-Tagoe on Harris, namely that:

To go deep into the unconscious and the past in this way is to inhabitcross-cultural traditions and myths that nourished writing and boreupon the great pre-Columbian sculptors. It is in effect to constructa world that penetrates the beginnings of language, sculpture, andpainting, a multitextured background of known and unknown pres-ences within which economic and pohtical bonds of material time aredeflated (109).

This statement, referring to Harris's construction of the joumey in Palace ofthePeacock, is of even greater significance to "The Tyranny of Influence", as thepainter/protagonist, like the crew in Harris's novel, also makes a transtemporaljoumey. He too goes back to a time of loss and injury due to the traumas of con-quest in a rehearsal of a moment that threatened the eclipse of a whole community,and transforms the terror of historical/material time through the infusion of mythicconsciousness and time. Conscious of psychic dislocation as a consequence of ahistory of conquest, the painter/artist sees the need for regeneration. Hence, theact of procreation between the painter and the Amerindian woman (shades of Har-ris's Mariella of Palace.of the Peacock or Magda of The Whole Armour, or AlejoCarpentier's Rosario of The Lost Steps) not only re-enacts and re-positions the'ancient' story of the birth of the Christ as the second Adam, but also restages/re-hearses what Harris sees as the cross-cultural and infinite potentialities that residewithin the womb of space. In Palace ofthe Peacock the joumey moves between theDerridean arche and telos, origin and end, in the transformations and substitutionswithin the narrative. Like Harris's Palace, therefore, McWatt's "Tyranny"

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explores the "immateriality of freedom" by freeing both death (the end) and pro-creation (origin) from the laws of linear time, by figuring them as retum or rehears-al. In addition, the reference to the Antonello paintings points to the fact that thepast or the representation of the past is not static, that tradition's influence is nowfreed from its 'tyranny' by the constant revisions, re-writings and re-positioningsof a more global postmodem age. The writing here emphasises the fact that thetask of reading and interpreting literary texts exists within "terms of contextual-ity [in which] the dogmatic past, with its unquestioned authority of tradition, hasbeen [...] replaced [...] by a plastic historical past that is constantly questioned andreshaped according to criteria evolved by the present" (Calinescu 1). "Tyranny's"intertextuality with Palace of the Peacock moreover, focalises the theme, expressedat the end of the latter text, of "a longing ... to see the indestmctible nucleus andredemption of creation" where the traveler (reader) is asked to undertake a crossing"however distant and removed" {Palace 101).

In "Tyranny", there is such a crossing from the real or the recognized to the non-realand re-cognitive, or to borrow from Wilson-Tagoe (1998) from "mimetic represen-tation" to "mythic constmction" (110). Here there is a "transforming joumey" thatre-enacts the conquistadorial theatre of early Amerindian conquest by Europeanpowers. Hence, we are presented with two contrasting joumeys; "a joumey of con-quest inspired by greed" symbolized in the skulls in the stream, "and a search forperfection inspired by innocence and love" (Wilson-Tagoe 110), symbolized in thestory's closing image of a father/painter painting "a lovely world ... without crosseswhere [the son] can live for ever and ever" (McWatt 226). The ending of the story,"with a painter standing in front of a canvas, slowly filling it with the world he iscreating for his only begotten son ..." (226) - resonances of the Son of Milton'sParadise Regained - moreover may emphasise the role that art can play in the re-generation of nations and civilizations, not in a retum to a world of pure origins, butthrough a fearful working out of the traumas of history. Edouard Glissant's com-ments on Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps are informative here:

One must come to terms with loss of time past, accept one's time,ultimately try to estabhsh the best synthesis of the strengths of thisAmerica (rediscovered during the descent in search of time past) andpower of the modem world [...] ultimately to express, to know thatone belongs to one's time. Not one without the other (Qtd in Dash1998: 85)

Perhaps, like Harris, the "father" of Guyanese writing, McWatt is also attemptingto explore the language of the unconscious, dream states and paraxial worlds thatare only partially recognised. In all his works, Harris is consciously writing againstabsolutes. For example, there is a terrifying presence in Palace of the Peacock thatseeks to pull the dead/undead/resurrected crew back into the abyss of absolutes

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- the absolutes that caused their deaths in the first place, epitomised in Donne'sproclamation early in the novel: "Rule the land ... and you rule the world" (23).This is a stated desire to control not only the "land" but also history, to 'man-age' the history of a conquered people. Donne is thus the overlord of the absolute,the archetypal conquistador, "the last landlord" (22), whom Harris recreates in hissubsequent fictions - the figure of Columbus, Dante, Jones, Camival Lord Death.Donne, the creator/destroyer resurfaces in all of Harris's fictions to explore theunfinished genesis ofthe imagination. This may also speak to the creative/destruc-tive impulse resident within Caribbean cultures/art. This terrifying presence is alsoreahzed in Suspended Sentences in "The Visitor", where a seemingly innocuouspolitico-religious 'cult' is ruling a Guyana of 2070, under one composite religionand one "dougla" ethnic identity. What appears to be a comfortable and accommo-dating confluence of 'tribes' and factions, is in fact a mask for a sinister and fright-ening author/itarianism that builds itself on absolutes. In "The Visitor" the author/narrator creates a dystopian vision grounded in reference to a real Guyana, which,while it appears to be a free and democratic society - "We defer to the individual'sown perception of self (127) - is really a guise for repressiveness. Additionally,the story draws on science fiction motifs reminiscent of Huxley's Brave New Worldin building the narrative. Here, the use ofthe non-real is that ofthe marvelous as anunknown phenomenon; a future world that allows an examination ofthe metaphys-ics of violence as normatively substituted into matters of democracy, morality, civilsociety, free trade and the other metacodes of a postmodem globalism. However,the story also offers possibilities for renewal in its constmction of a future Guyana,"a much altered Guyana" (120) that frighteningly underscores the hopes of thepresent Guyana of 1969. It is in this future that Gerry realizes just how much Guy-ana really means to him: "He longed for his home and his family and friends - forthe Georgetown, the Guyana he knew and had never realized how much he loved"(137). The possibilities are found in the lack that the future creates - hence the needfor the 'old' Guyana and the possibilities residing in its diversity.

This "pervasive faith in the possibility of redemption" imbued in "a deep sense ofhuman potential, however deeply buried" according to Evelyn O'Callaghan (fromthe epigraph above), underlines this collection and is thematically and structurallydramatised in the two stories analysed here. Both stories thematise a trial of theself, self-awareness, self-purgation, self-consciousness, that is essential to the workof "redemption." Hence, the trial which the painter undergoes in "Tyranny", muchlike Gabriel's in Victor Nunez's "Aftemoon without Tears," is of a purgatorial orbitter nature that emphasises the theme of atonement as the vital link in the recon-nection of man to environment, of race to race, of present to past, in the retrieval oflost or damaged worlds. This trial ofthe self enables a recreation and reconstitutionof mind and context that culminates in the expression of a restored (re-storied)world: a world that not only generates new stories and new myths perhaps, but thatalso re-visions and re-enacts deterministic versions of 'received' history/historiog-

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raphy and re-positions itself in relation to a more global world culture.

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Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the PostmodernPerspective. Trans. James E. Maraniss. London: Duke U.P., 1992.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. NY: OUP, 1973.Calinescu, Matei. "Hermeneutics or Poetics" The Journal of Religion, 59,1

(1979), 1-17.Crews, Frederick C. Ed. Great Short Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. NY: Harper

& Row, 1967.Dash, J. Michael. The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Con

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Brace,1983.Fuentes, Carlos. "In Praise of the Novel." 16 Mar 2007

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Harris, Wilson. Palace of the Peacock. London: Faber, 1960.. Ascent to Omai. London: Faber, 1970.. The Womb of Space: The Cross Cultural Imagination. Connecticut: Green

wood, 1983.Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. NY: Harper, 1932.Lukács, George. The Theory ofthe Novel, trans. Anna Bodtock. Cambridge,

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. "Reading the Language of the Imagination: Critical Approaches to WilsonHarris's Jonestown." Paper presented at the 17th Annual Conference onWest Indian Literature. UWI Mona, Jamaica April 1998.

May, Charles E. The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice. NY: Routledge, 2002.

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O'Callaghan, Evelyn. "Blood and Fire!: Guyanese Writers on Contem-porary Guyana" Paper presented at the 16th Annual Conference on WestIndian Literature. Caribbean Writers Institute, University of Miami April1-4 1997.

Omhovere, Claire. "Roots and Routes in a Selection of Stories by AlistairMacLeod". Marta Dvorak and W.H. New, eds. Tropes and Territories:Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writing in Context.Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2007. 271-290.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe. NY: Harper & Row,1970.

Ricoeur, Paul. The Conflict of Interpretations. Illinois: Northwestem U.P., 1974.Time and Narrative 2, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer

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and John B. Thompson. Illinois: Northwestem U.P., 1991.Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.Tadié, Alexis. "Under the Banyan Tree: R.K. Narayan, Space, and the Story-Teller"Marta Dvorak and W.H. New eds. Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction,

Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writing in Context. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2007.231-243.

Wilson-Tagoe, Nana. Historical Thought and Literary Representation in WestIndian Literature. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1998.

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