AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen “The Times are the Times of a Black Split Heart”: The ‘Post-War’ in Stevie Smith’s The Holiday Florian Niedlich This article investigates the concept of the ‘post-war’ in Stevie Smith’s The Holiday (1949). The novel depicts the years after the end of World War II as a dismal time of suspension, marked by paralysis, corruption and, above all, an acute uncertainty with regards to England’s role in world politics and to what exactly constitutes ‘Englishness’. The analysis will show that this uncertainty is symptomatic of a still more profound cultural uncertainty, thus locating the post-war within the larger framework of modernity. Moreover, it will be argued that the changed society of the post-war is experienced by the protagonist not as completely negative, but as having liberating aspects as well, which will lead to an investigation of the feminist dimension of the novel. The ensuing study of the unusual narrative of The Holiday, particularly of its blurred boundaries and fragmentation, will ascertain a correlation between form and content of the novel through three different interpretations of the eccentricity of the narrative: as a reflection of the chaos of the post-war, as a reaction to the complicity of language in the cruelties of the war and its constitutive role in the production of reality, and, lastly, as a challenge to the symbolic order and an undermining of the phallogocentric logic of the dominant, male discourse that comes close to an écriture féminine. 1. Introduction The end of the Second World War, the deadliest military conflict in human history, certainly marks a historical turning point with far-reaching and lasting consequences. In the aftermath of the war, the political landscape of the world changed fundamentally as nations were divided, created, occupied - their borders redrawn. International organizations were founded, wideranging decolonization came under way, and the United States of America and the Soviet Union emerged as the world’s sole remaining superpowers, Florian Niedlich 62 1 All parenthetical references are to this edition. whose escalating rivalry and enmity towards each other were soon to lead to the conflictual bipolar division of the world known as the Cold War. At the same time, the war was, of course, also of psychological import. It was, above all, the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and its concentration camps, mass killings, and the genocide of the European Jews that had disastrous effects on the morale of the people and shattered their belief in many of the tenets and values of ‘enlightened’ occidental societies. In terms of literary history, the war and its aftermath may be said to have ushered in an increasing turning away from, or transformation of, (high) modernist forms of writing, which would find many different expressions and eventually bring about the literature and art commonly referred to as postmodernism. It is precisely against the backdrop of these significant political, psychological and literary developments that Stevie Smith’s novel The Holiday (1949) will be read. In doing so, this paper will investigate the book’s central concept of the ‘post-war’ and locate it within the larger framework of modernity. In a second step, the analysis will be extended to the formal level, through an examination of the novel’s unusual narrative, which seems hard to classify. It will be argued that its eccentricity is at the same time a fundamental reaction to the post-war, the expression of a growing skepticism towards, or concern with, language that somewhat anticipates the ‘linguistic turn’ in the humanities, as well as an example of what feminist thinkers such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have called an écriture féminine. 2. ‘The Devil of a Middle Situation’ Stevie Smith’s novel The Holiday is set one or two years after the end of World War II, in a period that is repeatedly referred to in the text as the ‘postwar’. Celia Phoze, the narrator and protagonist of the book, states: “It cannot be said that it is war, it cannot be said that it is peace, it can be said that it is post-war; this will probably go on for ten years.” (Smith 1949/ 1999: 13) 1 Even though the war is evidently over and peace has been established, the majority of the population of England (and, of course, of other countries as well) is nevertheless still suffering from dire living conditions and bitter hardships and thus does not experience the peace as what it is actually meant to be, i.e. a time of harmony, tranquility and relief. In addition, “[d]ominating nations still strive to keep others in their subordinate places. America and Russia have replaced Britain’s power, but other than that, the world is still remarkably similar to the world at war.” (Severin 1997: 43) As Caz, Celia’s much loved cousin, puts it: “[T]here [is] a lot of the war left over “The Times are the Times of a Black Split Heart” 63 2 The portrayal of this paralysis links Stevie Smith to (other) modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, who wrote of a different paralysis more than 30 years before. from the fighting times” (8). In this context, it is telling that, with relative ease, Smith, in order to find a publisher for her book in the aftermath of the war, changed the setting from ‘war’ to ‘post-war’. It is this “being in the middle of things without the turning point yet come” (156), this “devil of a middle situation” (54), that is the main reason for the characters’ continual feelings of hopelessness and despair. “[W]hy do we cry so much? ” Caz asks - and the novel is very tearful indeed - and Celia responds: “It is the war, [...] and the war won, and the peace so far away.” (155) The post-war thus emerges as a kind of overwhelming vacuum - with reference to the title of the novel one might speak of a ‘holiday’ from history - a state of suspension and limbo, whose main characteristics are social paralysis, corruption, and a profound uncertainty permeating almost all areas of life. One of the things that Celia laments again and again throughout the novel is what she perceives as an absolute stagnation of Western societies, particularly England. She repeatedly condemns the futility of everyday life and work in a society that has no direction, expresses her longing for social reform and attacks people’s pettiness and general aversion to change: “[W]e seem to do nothing but a lot of things that are nothing. For we are not prepared to give up our way of life, for we have no bloody revolution since three hundred years, for we have this disgusting temporising mind, we will give up a little but not everything[.]” (53) Yet, Celia also recognizes the utter lack of any vision of a real alternative: “But where can one get this idea of a new world, and how can one believe it? ” (92) What is more, even people who, like Celia, wish for what her friend Tiny at one point calls “the clean sweep” (15) are nevertheless afraid of change and desirous of stability, too. This becomes clear when Celia, in the passage quoted above and in a fashion that is characteristic of the novel as a whole, immediately contradicts herself, after having called for a revolution, by switching to another position when she asks: “And why should we give it [i.e. “our Western way”] up, pray[? ]” (54). Here, as throughout the novel, Celia, who says of herself: “I tie up my own pride and advantage with England’s, I have no integrity, no honesty, no generous idea of a better way of life than that which gives cream to England.” (92), emerges as an allegorical embodiment of the English nation, paralyzed by “fear of action and so inaction” (142). This paralysis, which is further symbolized by Celia’s stagnant relationship with Caz, was, just like a general feeling of hopelessness and gloom, a central aspect of England’s post-war culture of austerity 2 . Another aspect of the post-war that Celia identifies as impeding change is what she regards as the corruption of English society: “How can we have a revolution and make a new world when we are so corrupt? ” (131) On the Florian Niedlich 64 3 It should be noted, however, that the novel almost never adopts a clear-cut position on the social and political issues it discusses. Instead, it just juxtaposes contradictory positions without ever offering any closure. The aspects listed here, though, seem to be criticized rather unequivocally by the implied author of the text. one hand, this corruption is linked to concrete matters such as a general lack of virtue and integrity of the people (“People govern, they are knaves, they are governed, they are simpletons.” [134]), the rise of a callous business ethic (cf. e.g. 58), capitalism, and consumerism (cf. e.g. 42, 144) 3 . On the other hand, Celia’s almost obsessive longing for innocence and the fact that this sense of corruption recurs throughout the entire narrative create the impression that it also transcends the immediate socio-political context and give it a quasi-mythic/ -religious dimension. “[T]he times are the times of a black split heart” (143), says Celia’s Uncle Heber after she has told him about her “wish[ing] for innocence more than anything, but [being] conscious only of corruption” (143), and it becomes clear that, in a way, this corruption is one that applies to humanity as a whole, that it is part of the modern condition of mankind, having lost its innocence in the unparalleled cruelties of World War II. However, the characteristic of the post-war with which the novel is most preoccupied is an uncertainty with regards to England’s changed role in world politics and to what exactly constitutes ‘Englishness’. The characters of the book argue about a wide variety of matters and problems related to these subjects such as the impending granting of independence to India, England’s relationship with America, the allies’ criticism of England’s colonial politics, the English law, and the English classes. There is no room here to discuss this in detail. What is striking about all these debates, though, is the fact that a conclusion is almost never reached. While Caz contends that “[the English] are right to quit India” (94), Celia sees English identity (as well as her own) closely bound up with India and its other colonies (cf. 100) and therefore states that “[i]t is not so simple as that [...]. The rest of the world is very unanimous to say the English should quit India [...]; but why, please? ” (125) Similarly, whereas Celia proclaims that “[t]he English law is above the world, [...] it is not to be bought, it is strong, flexible and impartial” (126), Caz counters this assertion by reminding her of the cruelty of laws like the “Emergency Whipping Act” (126) effective in India and of the corruption that is in actual fact part of the legal system (cf. 130). Only very rarely does the novel offer a closure to discussions like these. This lack of a coherent attitude of the implied author, along with other factors, has led some critics, such as Romana Huk, to the conclusion that what the novel shows is “the break-up of ‘Englishness’ itself” (2005: 196). While this assertion seems to be more accurate than that made by Kristin Bluemel, who declares that in her novels, Smith constructs “a new, nonrevolutionary, nonaristocratic, non- “The Times are the Times of a Black Split Heart” 65 imperial ideal of Englishness” (2004: 52) that she finds embodied in Celia’s beloved Lion Aunt (Bluemel 2004: 64), the truth possibly lies just in-between. The novel certainly illustrates how, with the decline of the British Empire, the loss of England’s superpower status, and its hurt pride due to its misery in spite of its victory, core elements of the received ideal of Englishness are being fundamentally called into question, so that the very concept is radically unsettled. Yet, the concept itself is never entirely ‘broken up’. Instead, it is upheld by the narrative itself, which is always negotiating its various elements, probing into different fields, searching for something to hold on to; by the implied author, who is anxious - like Celia, though not as frantic and chauvinistic - to preserve and save it. This process, however, is an unfinished one. It does not result in the creation of a whole new ideal as Bluemel claims. The uncertainty Celia and the other characters feel about England and Englishness is symptomatic of a still more profound cultural uncertainty. Celia states: “Everything in this world is in fits and splinters, like after an air raid when the glass is on the pavements; one picks one’s way and is happy in parts.” (143) What is brilliantly expressed in this passage is a feeling that is characteristic of modernity/ modernism: that of the loss of a sense of wholeness, meaning, order and certainty as the traditional bases of Western societies were increasingly being questioned by thinkers such as Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Frazer and - emphasized in the phrase just quoted - as people’s faith in them was shaken by the experience of the First and Second World War. Accordingly, reality was perceived as fragmented, relative, and exceedingly complex. As Celia puts it: “Always there are these under-tugs and cross currents, nothing is simple, nothing to be settled.” (130) She laments this loss of the old world several times, for instance when she says of modern love stories that, in contrast to those of the Victorian era such as Tennyson’s “Maud”, they “are never, oh, never right, but also are never wrong in the simple noble way of going wrong” (177), or when she maintains that modern life “does not give dignity in suffering” (181) anymore. In this context, Celia’s ubiquitous death wish - as well as her longing for madness (cf. 25) and her idealization of the war (cf. 183f.) - can be read as the result of an overwhelming desire to be free from this uncertainty and the concomitant responsibility of permanent sense-making. (Death, after all, is at least one certainty.) She herself realizes: “I am happy when I am unconscious.” (51) Celia’s enthusiasm about her holiday at her Uncle’s in Lincolnshire has to be understood in a similar way. It is a time that, she expects, will bring her “blessed calm” (56) and peace, i.e. a temporary relief from the chaos and confusion of life in the post-war. Just like the post-war, then, the holiday represents a state of suspension, albeit a positive one. However, it is also possible to read it as an extended death fantasy. Romana Huk rightly points out that “most of what ‘happens’ [...] in this latter Florian Niedlich 66 4 In a curious way, the novel’s last scene seems to play out in a calm and peaceful way the sermon about the death of the soul that Celia read out loud a little earlier (cf. 198f.). The scene and the sermon are linked through the motifs of repentance, the blanket and the “friendly hand to raise [one] up ‘with customary and domestic kindness’” (198f.) (later embodied by Caz), through the blessings and Celia’s final spoken word, Amen. half of the novel after the cast’s arrival on holiday [...] is dream-like” (2005: 201), and Celia herself once states that “it is like a dream” (149). It is during her holiday that Celia feels that “death is certainly very near” (161), that she tells Caz of her memory/ dream of falling into a stream and hitting her head on an underwater snag (cf. 163f.), and that she makes a suicide attempt (cf. 102f.). In a conversation with his cousin, Caz compares life to a railway station - “the train of birth brings us in, the train of death will carry us away” - and accuses Celia of being “romantic about death”, i.e. of imagining the train of death as “an excursion train” (155) and of hoping “that something may come up that is beautiful scenery and a country day” (163). Against this background, it is telling that Celia and Caz do actually take a train to leave for Lincolnshire and that a few days after their arrival, they are “off for an excursion to the sea”, where Celia admires the “magnificent scenery” (149, emphasis added). This association of the holiday with a state of near-death is further emphasized when Celia, giving a reason for signing a letter written to friends in London with ‘Sailor’, says: “Because I left them, [...] I sailed away. Oh, Death.” (150), and in the scene of Tiny’s departure from Lincolnshire towards the end of the novel, the symbolism of which clearly suggests a return to life from the realm of death (cf. 186ff.), and in which Tiny expresses his fears that Celia, for her part, might “not come back”, but instead “have a longer holiday” (187). In light of what has so far been said, the very end of the book may be understood as the climax and fulfillment of this death fantasy as a state of complete unconsciousness is finally reached 4 . In terms of a more literal reading, however, “the ending to the novel is obviously and deliberately ‘too tidy by far’” (Huk 2005: 208). It presents “a wished-for but [only] tenuous sleep that is far less genuinely peaceful than Beckettian” (Huk 2005: 211). Similarly, the holiday as a whole after all turns out not to be as tranquil and soothing as Celia hoped it would be, but instead shows the characters as still being restless, sad and despaired. There is, in the end, no escape from the desolate world of modernity. While Celia longs for such an escape and mourns for the old certainties, she also - and again, reminiscent of the contradictory modernist movement as a whole - actively participates in the breaking away from the established values, rules, conventions and traditions of Victorian society (cf. e.g. 142f.). Indeed, the decline of the old social order is experienced by her not solely as disorienting and frightening, but also as partly liberating. “[A]n answer suffocates” (145), she says; now that it is gone, new ways of looking at the world, new conceptions of social organization, etc. become possible. “The Times are the Times of a Black Split Heart” 67 5 Though arguably not an attribute of the implied author, this chauvinism is still problematic, since Celia is the character to voice most of the feminist arguments in the text. Particularly questions of femininity and the social conditions of women are repeatedly addressed by the novel. When Celia observes that “most women, especially in the lower and lower-middle classes, are conditioned early to having ‘father’ the centre of the home-life, with father’s chair, and father’s dinner, and father’s Times and father says” (28), the novel rather openly criticizes the oppressive nature of traditional, patriarchal family structures, and when she reports how a tombstone recording “the death of Thomin Krak, his business in life, his gifts to charities, his many dutiful sons and daughters” only “speaks last of all of Elizabeth his wife[,] [...] only to say: ‘And of his wife Elizabeth.’” (164), it is the social marginalization of women that comes under attack. The novel counters this marginalization by having a woman as its protagonist, a woman who even though she asserts that “it is not right or natural” (142) not to marry, i.e. though she has to a certain extent interiorized the gender role ascribed to her and the demands connected with it, refuses nevertheless to do so and thus also challenges this role. Another instance of this rejection of received gender roles can be found in Celia’s contempt for what she calls “the fashion girl” and her love for the un-girlish, tomboy-like “grubby girls, [...] with the hair in their eyes, and the pastel-coloured features screwed in absurd concentration” (123). One may trace other manifestations of this feminist impetus in Celia’s rejection of ‘pure’ reason and logic (“what can be observed and classified, free from the emotions, free from the past, [...] it is nonsense” [194]), things traditionally associated with masculinity, in favor of the (more feminine) emotions (cf. 66), and in what can be read as an ironical deconstruction of masculinity in the following passage: “There’s the masculine thing in that [i.e. the war], I said laughing, Es ist ausgeziechnet [sic]. Or whatever it is.” (184) Whereas, a little earlier, she seemed to be serious about fighting being something masculine, this idea is somewhat subverted here. Apart from the use of the derogatory word thing and the note of condescending indifference in “Or whatever it is”, it is above all Celia’s laughing that creates a sense of subversive irony and undermines the meaning of the words being spoken, just like the orthographic mistake in the German word ausgezeichnet breaks up its proper meaning. However, while the novel certainly has a decidedly feminist impulse, it can, on the whole, not be considered a straightforward feminist text. Womanhood is not the subject of the book, as Sanford Sternlicht contends (1990: 25), but just one of many, and several others, such as the loss of the Empire, are equally or more important. Moreover, there are again too many contradictions and inconsistencies to label the novel ‘feminist’. Particularly Celia’s chauvinism 5 and the novel’s praise of the lower middle class as the Florian Niedlich 68 6 For an account of the characteristics of intermodernist texts cf. Bluemel 2004: 5f. 7 Nünning’s discussion is of Smith’s first book, Novel on Yellow Paper. 8 Cf. the fact that Celia and Caz have been understood by several critics as two parts of the same person or consciousness. For such a reading cf. e.g. Plain 1996: 81. backbone and fiber of the nation (cf. 104ff.), together with its skepticism towards intellectuals (cf. 146f.), is strangely at odds with the book’s feminist ideas. 3. “This Horror of Words” From that of an Arnoldian Victorian to that of a proto-poststructuralist, Stevie Smith has received many, often contradictory labels. Indeed, her narratives, which appear simultaneously conventional and experimental and which bear the marks of realist as well as modernist and, at times, postmodernist modes of writing, do not properly fit into existing categories. This has led Kristin Bluemel to introduce the useful term ‘intermodernism’ to designate “a kind of writing [that, like Smith’s, is] grounded in the experiences of England’s working-class and ‘working middle-class’ cultures [and] that does not fit the familiar frameworks” (2004: 2). Bluemel asserts that “certain non-modernist texts of the 1930s and 1940s can be read to best advantage as cultural products of a single intermodernist impulse or movement rather than as products of distinct periods” (2004: 4) 6 . Another critic, Ansgar Nünning, has placed Smith among a group of writers he calls ‘eccentric monologists’, whose writings, according to him, form a neglected line of development of the English novel insofar as they are neither predominantly concerned with the creation of a plausible fictional world and the telling of a story nor with undermining the mimetic illusion but with the act of narration itself (cf. Nünning 2000). 7 In the following analysis, some of the elements that account for The Holiday’s being so hard to classify will be investigated. The most striking formal aspects of Smith’s ‘intermodernist’ novel are its blurring of boundaries and fragmentation. Both occur on several levels. The peculiar absence of quotation marks in the text continually blurs the boundaries between thought, speech and action as well as between the different characters, particularly Celia and Caz 8 . This difficulty to distinguish between the two is still increased by the fact that one of them repeatedly uses a word or phrase the other has thought, spoken or written a little earlier (cf. e.g. “survival lump” [125] and “lump of survival” [128] or “this evil feeling in this beautiful house” [195] and “a feeling of evil in this house” [198]). Furthermore, the boundary between dream and reality in the novel is hazy at times, too. This is especially the case in the holiday-section of the book, which has an overall dream-like atmosphere, and the surrealist passage in which Celia “The Times are the Times of a Black Split Heart” 69 relates an unlikely memory to Caz, who concludes that “[i]t was a dream”, to which Celia replies: “No, no.” (164) It may be added that the boundary lines between fiction and (extra-textual) reality, to a certain degree, are blurred as well, namely through Smith’s rather thinly disguised portrayals of her literary contemporaries George Orwell, Inez Holden and Mulk Raj Anand and of herself in her text (cf., e.g., Bluemel 2004: 9ff.). A last major instance of this technique of blurring boundaries can be found in Smith’s merging of prose and poetry. Not only does she incorporate a number of poems into the novel, but more importantly, she even turns the prose itself into poetry (see discussion below). The above-mentioned fragmentation is realized on more than one level as well. It is not only the traumatized and rootless characters that are fragmented, but also the consistency and coherence of their monologues and conversations and indeed the narrative as a whole are permanently disrupted by rather abrupt breaks and changes of subject, making the latter appear more like an amalgam of relatively separate fragments than as one homogeneous whole. As has already been pointed out, even the implied author of the text is drastically fragmented: Through its characters, the novel constantly contrasts irreconcilable attitudes to all kinds of subjects (frequently even in the same character) without ever providing any conclusion. Therefore, Celia’s remark that “[a]lways there are these under-tugs and cross currents, [that] nothing is simple, nothing to be settled” (130), which has been quoted earlier, may also be understood as a self-reflexive comment on this inconclusiveness of the novel. Read in this way, the quotation sheds light on the relation between form and content of the book. The blurred boundaries and the fragmentation in and of the text reflect the uncertainty, complexity and the sense of a loss of wholeness characteristic of the suspended state of the post-war. Similar to the characters, who feel lost and desperately try to ‘make sense’ of the changed world in which they are now living, the reader likewise feels lost, namely in a textual world that is equally confusing. In this context, Celia’s task at the Ministry appears like a metafictional comment on the reading process: decoding. However, the unconventional formal aspects of the narrative can still be interpreted along different lines. In one of her comments on writing, Celia states: One wishes [...] to be admirable, to write something that is truly noble, but the times are wrong, they are certainly wrong, at least in the West they are wrong. And there are too many words, there is too much about it and about, one has this horror of words - ‘I’ll be dumb’ - but no, one must not be dumb. Somebody should speak up. (53) What is this “horror of words”, this fear of, as she puts it somewhere else, “[her] word that could be a burden” (8)? As Romana Huk rightly points out, Florian Niedlich 70 9 Even though Huk explicitly mentions the linguistic turn, she nevertheless fails to recognize its wider implications beyond language’s being a ‘bearer of violent forces’ with regard to Smith’s novel. 10 “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” (Derrida 1967: 227) 11 Perhaps one could even go so far as to see in the novel’s concern about there being “too many words” and its relatively extensive use of marked and unmarked intertextual references an anticipation of certain postmodern theories dealing with the exhaustion of literary forms and possibilities as put forward by John Barth, Umberto Eco and others. It has to be said, however, that Smith’s work is, of course, still very far from the highly self-reflexive, metafictional, parodic writing that these authors have in mind. 12 In how far the adjective feminine works only metaphorically to designate a certain discourse and kind of writing subversive of the symbolic order and in how far it points to an actual link to femininity has been a subject of much controversy. “Smith’s characters seem to be plunged into what has been called ‘the linguistic turn’: that post-ideology-wars moment when fears of language itself as the coercive bearer of either violent forces or weakened consciousness in culture began to clearly emerge” (2005: 188) 9 . Similar to the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who famously declared that there should be no poetry after Auschwitz, Smith seems to have realized the complicity of language in cruelties like war and mass murder and to feel the need for a new kind of literary response. She refuses to resort to silence (“one must not be dumb”, “[s]omebody should speak up”), but also recognizes that a nonreflective use of language and traditional literary forms is no longer possible and puts the consequences drawn from this recognition into practice in her novel. From the awareness of this complicity of language it is but a small step to the constructivist view brought about by the linguistic turn in the more narrow sense of the term - i.e. the linguistic turn in the humanities - namely that language constitutes reality. Apart from a reading that construes Celia’s “horror of words” as the result of an insight into the corruption of language or of profound doubts about the possibility of linguistic/ literary representation of the modern world, it may also be taken to express such a consciousness of the crucial role of language in the production of reality. There are “too many words”; so many, that is to say, that no objective world, primary truth or essence is to be discovered ‘behind them’. As Jacques Derrida put it: “There is nothing outside of the text” 10 (Derrida 1976: 158). The signs are all there is. We do not have access to any reality outside signification. In this context, the blurring of the boundary lines between ‘reality’ and ‘text’, spoken words, thoughts and actions, etc. that has already been described might also be understood as a sign of this realization on the author’s side 11 . Finally, one can consider Smith’s unusual narrative an example of what feminist critics, particularly from France, have called an écriture féminine, i.e. a type of writing that is characteristically ‘feminine’ 12 . Completely different from ‘masculine’ language, such writing challenges the patriarchal system by “The Times are the Times of a Black Split Heart” 71 13 “Il faut que la femme s’écrive: que la femme écrive de la femme et fasse venir les femmes à l’écriture” (Cixous 1975: 39). 14 “[c]’est en écrivant, depuis et vers la femme, et en relevant le défi du discours gouverné par le phallus, que la femme affirmera la femme autrement qu’à la place à elle réservée dans et par le symbole c’est-à-dire le silence.” (Cixous 1975: 43) 15 For the following cf. Kristeva 1986a: 89-136. 16 “[…] une reprise du fonctionnement propre à la chora sémiotique dans le dispositif du langage […]” (Kristeva 1974: 48). 17 “C’est ainsi que nous pouvons penser d’ailleurs toutes les ‘déformations’ poétiques de la chaîne signifiante et de la structure de la signification: elles cèdent sous l’assaut des ‘restes des premières symbolisations’ (Lacan), c’est-à-dire des pulsions que la phase thétique n’a pas pu relever pour les enchaîner en signifiant/ signifié.” (Kristeva 1974: 47) subverting the symbolic order and dismantling the phallo(go)centrism embedded in language itself (e.g. in its hierarchical binary oppositions). As Hélène Cixous, one of the main proponents of this concept, puts it: “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing” 13 (1981: 245); “[i]t is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other that that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence.” 14 (1981: 251) The work of Julia Kristeva has had great influence on this idea of écriture feminine, too 15 . Kristeva makes out two inseparable modalities of the signifying process, which is also the process of the formation of the subject: the ‘semiotic’ and the ‘symbolic’. Whereas the former designates a manifestation of heterogeneous libidinal energies, connected with the pre-oedipal and pre-linguistic stage, in which the stable ‘thetic’ subject is not yet constituted, the latter denotes the fixation of meaning in/ through language, repression of drives and of the relation with the mother, and the emergence of the unitary social subject; it guarantees the normative, rational world of the symbolic order. It is the subversion of this order to which Cixous and Kristeva devote themselves. While for Cixous this is clearly a struggle of a marginalized femininity against patriarchy, the gendered dimension is only implied in Kristeva’s work. Kristeva argues that it is in the poetic language of literature - particularly in avant-garde writings that demonstrate a new self-reflexive practice she calls ‘text’ - that “a resumption of the functioning characteristic of the semiotic chora within the signifying device of language” 16 (1986a: 103) takes place. All poetic ‘distortions’ of the signifying chain and the structure of signification may be considered in this light: they yield under the attack of the ‘residues of first symbolizations’ (Lacan), in other words, those drives that the thetic phase was not able to sublate by linking them into signifier and signified. 17 (Kristeva 1986a: 103) Florian Niedlich 72 18 Trans.: ‘[Cixous and Kristeva] advocate a writing that undermines and transforms the Symbolic Order - the ‘Law of the Father’ - by introducing into the text the repressed libidinality that underlies all structures of meaning. For both this becomes possible through a reactivation of the pre-oedipal, pre-linguistic phase that is also a retrieval of the connection with the mother.’ Of course, Cixous’s as well as Kristeva’s theories can be - and have been - criticized for a number of reasons, such as, for example, their partial adherence to the kind of binary thought they actually set out to subvert or for conceptions that, despite their declared efforts to avoid this, appear somewhat essentialist. Unfortunately, there is no space to elaborate on this here. 19 Even though she refers mainly to Novel on Yellow Paper, Civello was the first to draw attention to several of the aspects just mentioned. Lena Lindhoff sums up: [Cixous und Kristeva] plädieren für ein Schreiben, das die symbolische Ordnung - das ‘Gesetz des Vaters’ - unterläuft und transformiert, indem es die verdrängte Triebhaftigkeit in den Text einbringt, die allen Sinnstrukturen zugrunde liegt. Bei beiden wird dies möglich durch eine Aktualisierung der präödipalen, vorsprachlichen Phase, die auch ein Wiederfinden des Bezugs zur Mutter ist. (2003: 115f.) 18 To a certain degree, the narrative of The Holiday seems to be the kind of writing Cixous and Kristeva have in mind. While the semiotic can never manifest itself outside of the symbolic - which is why the semiotic that precedes symbolization is only a theoretical assumption - it nevertheless subverts the symbolic through its very articulation; so to speak ‘from inside’. It breaks up the fixed meanings and the logical and rational structure of language by pluralizing meaning and introducing rhythm, the irrational, illogical and heterogeneous into it. Even though Smith’s novel surely does not go so far as to allow an absolute free play of meaning and to “revel in the pleasures of open-ended textuality” (Moi 2002: 106) as certain modernist and postmodernist works can be said to do, the semiotic disruption of the symbolic is nonetheless evident in her narrative technique. She creates a certain rhythm and musicality in her text through the frequent use of repetition, anaphora and epiphora, alliteration and other figures of speech and devices that make her prose very poetical; she disturbs syntax and ignores the rules of punctuation; she makes the transitions between passages abrupt and (seemingly) irrational, using “associational, rather than causal, logic” (Civello 1995: 114) 19 . It is this “heterogeneous, disruptive dimension of language”, this “fluid motility of the semiotic” (Moi 2002: 161, 164) found in the text that links Smith’s novel with the excesses of signification of écriture féminine. In addition, Smith transgresses the boundary lines between genres - another departure from and attack on male writing - and, through the blurring of boundaries and fragmentation that have already been discussed, avoids closure and the adaptation of a fixed position, a strategy that has often been understood as a genuinely female one. Finally, Smith’s text is “The Times are the Times of a Black Split Heart” 73 20 … “invente la langue imprenable qui crève les cloisonnements, classes et rhétoriques, ordonnances et codes” … “submerge, transperce, franchisse le discours-à-réserve ultime” (Cixous 1975: 48). filled with numerous marked and even more unmarked intertextual references, which makes her text, in Kristeva’s terminology, very ‘dialogical’. This does not so much, as Romana Huk contends, evince her examination of her own imprisonment in the circulating discourses of her culture (cf. Huk 2005: 1-30 and 212f.), as create an intersection where texts meet and endlessly negotiate meaning (cf. Kristeva 1986b). Thus, The Holiday can be read as Smith’s attempt to “invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes” and to “submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse” 20 (Cixous 1981: 256). 4. Results Smith’s novel The Holiday introduces the concept of the post-war to characterize the years after the end of World War II in England. It has been shown that the novel depicts this period as a dismal time of suspension, marked by paralysis, corruption and, above all, uncertainty. It was primarily through an investigation of this uncertainty that the post-war could be placed within the more general context of modernity. With regards to the heroine’s holiday two different, though related, readings have been proposed: one that construes it as a longed for but ultimately futile escape from the confusion of the postwar and one that understands it as an extended death fantasy. Moreover, the analysis has shown that the changed society of the post-war is experienced by the protagonist not as completely negative, but as having liberating aspects as well. This has lead to an investigation of the feminist dimension of the novel, which has brought to light several manifestations of a decidedly feminist impetus, but in the course of which it has also become clear that the text nevertheless cannot be considered a forthright feminist one. In the ensuing study of the unusual narrative of The Holiday, several formal aspects, particularly the techniques of blurring boundaries and fragmentation, have come under scrutiny. A correlation between form and content of the novel has been ascertained through three different interpretations of the eccentricity of the narrative: as a reflection of the chaos of the post-war, as a reaction to the complicity of language in the cruelties of the war and its constitutive role in the production of reality, and, lastly, as a challenge to the symbolic order and an undermining of the phallogocentric logic of the dominant, male discourse that comes close to an écriture féminine. Florian Niedlich 74 Just like the post-war, then, Smith’s novel emerges as highly complex, multi-faceted and, to some extent, contradictory. References Bluemel, Kristin (2004). George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Civello, Catherine A. (1995). “Stevie Smith’s Écriture Féminine: Pre-Oedipal Desires and Wartime Realities”. Mosaic 28: 2. 109-122. Cixous, Hélène (1975). “Le rire de la méduse”. L’Arc 61. 39-54. - (1981). “The Laugh of the Medusa”. In: Elaine Marks / Isabelle de Courtivron (eds.). New French Feminisms: An Anthology. New York: Schocken. 245-264. Derrida, Jacques (1967). De la grammatologie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. - (1976). Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP. Huk, Romana (2005). Stevie Smith: Between the Lines. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kristeva, Julia (1974). La révolution du langage poétique: L’avant-garde à la fin du XIX e siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. - (1986a). “Revolution in Poetic Language”. In: Toril Moi (ed.). The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia UP. 89-136. - (1986b). “Word, Dialogue and Novel”. In: Toril Moi (ed.). The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia UP. 34-61. Lindhoff, Lena (2003). Einführung in die feministische Literaturtheorie. Stuttgart: Metzler. Moi, Toril (2002). Sexual/ Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge. Nünning, Ansgar (2000). “‘Great Wits Jump’: Die literarische Inszenierung von Erzählillusion als vernachlässigte Entwicklungslinie des englischen Romans von Laurence Sterne bis Stevie Smith”. In: Bernhard Reitz / Eckart Voigts-Virchow (eds.). Lineages of the Novel: Essays in Honour of Raimund Borgmeier. Trier: WVT. 67-91. Plain, Gill (1996). Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Severin, Laura (1997). Stevie Smith’s Resistant Antics. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P. Smith, Stevie (1949/ 1999). The Holiday. London: Virago. Sternlicht, Sanford (1990). Stevie Smith. Boston: Twayne. Florian Niedlich Neuphilologisches Institut Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg