Framing the Recalcitrance of Mavis Gallant’s ‘The Wedding Ring’
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On dirait que la littérature passe où l’expertise trouve un obstacle.
(Michel Serres)
- 1 My Hemingway-like metaphor is supported by a comment of Mavis Gallant’s in her introduction to Home (...)
- 2 ‘The Wedding Ring’ was first published in The New Yorker, June 28, 1969, and reprinted in The End o (...)
- 3 Austin Wright (‘Recalcitrance in the Short Story’, in Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, eds., Shor (...)
- 4 On frames, Ian Reid’s ‘Destabilizing Frames for Story’ is very stimulating. Since my topic is recal (...)
1Many of Mavis Gallant’s short stories challenge the reader by setting up a tension between elegant clarity and tantalizing opacity. When shown the tip of the iceberg, we have to imagine the submerged bulk, puzzling about what has been left out and figuring out the untold from the told.1 Although ‘The Wedding Ring’ is short, apparently uneventful, and not obviously ironic, it is one of the early stories which raises the greatest number of difficulties for decoding.2 I propose to examine these difficulties in the light of Wright’s concept of ‘recalcitrance’ which, however, I define more extensively than he does as what impedes or delays the reader’s progress.3 But whatever impedes, like whatever facilitates, the reading process, is perceived through the reader’s interpretative framing, the set of multiple assumptions, themselves derived from previous experience, which one brings to bear and modifies as one reads. My contention here is that looking at ‘The Wedding Ring’ through different frames4 we apprehend its recalcitrance – and respond to it – differently.
Yielding to Recalcitrance: Reading through a Referential Frame
2The obstacles offered by the form obtrude upon our attention at the very opening of ‘The Wedding Ring’. Of course, there is nothing unusual in this: ‘[i]n one’s first encounter with a new form’, as Austin Wright puts it (p. 117), ‘everything is recalcitrance’. Practised readers that we are, we do anticipate that the beginning of the short story will be resistant nor are we confident that even the plainest of questions raised by the title (whose wedding ring?) will necessarily be solved that early. But I am not sure, however, that we bargained for such a recalcitrant beginning:
On my windowsill, a pack of cards, a bell, a dog’s brush, a book about a girl named Jewel… and a white jug holding field flowers. The water in the jug has evaporated; the sand-and-amber flowers seem made of paper. The weather bulletin can be one of several: No sun. A high arched yellow sky, Or, creamy clouds, stillness. Long motionless grass. The earth soaks up the sun. Or the sky is higher than it ever will seem again, and the sun faraway and small’. (p. 126)
- 5 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, Structuralism and Linguistics and the Study of Literature, (...)
3The first two sentences are normally resistant; they both provide incomplete information which leads to questions such as: who is speaking? Who is seeing the windowsill? Is this room a little girl’s? Do all these ill-assorted objects belong to her, including the pack of cards? These dried-out flowers in a waterless jug seem to indicate careless housekeeping and a country environment, but do they? On the whole, however, these notations meet the reader’s usual expectation that the short story will produce a world which s/he will be able to recognize5 insofar as they provide elements for one’s construction, however provisional, of such a world. Later, when we discover that the setting is a summer cottage, and more precisely a room which mother and daughter share, our hypotheses about the disparate collection on the windowsill and the fading flowers will be only slightly modified. Together with the title, the first two sentences are an invitation to read through a realistic, referential frame, by which I mean that the communicative act seems to be centred on the context or referent. But then the contract which seemed to have been established changes drastically. When it comes to the ‘weather bulletin’ or bulletins – shouldn’t we query the phrase itself? – the proliferating indications are sometimes contradictory so that our attempts to construct the fictional environment are blocked. Even the style of the sentences becomes an impediment in the processing of the paragraph, because of its disruptions. There are arresting contrasts between the blunt ‘no sun’, the evocative but still telegraphic ‘or, creamy clouds, stillness’ and metaphoric sentences such as ‘the earth soaks up the sun’. What is the ‘long motionless grass’ doing in that sun/no sun paradigm?
- 6 Janice Kulyk Keefer, Reading Mavis Gallant, OUP (Don Mills, Ont., 1989), p. 71.
4As we go along, we often have to struggle with the sequence of words on the page, to pause and think and go back in order to build up our image of the fictional world and attempt interpretations. Many obstacles stand in our way; they range from the more obviously global to the more obviously local to which I will devote more attention. Global obstacles have to do with the frustrated expectations concerning both the macrostructure of the narrative and the fictional universe. For the reader accustomed to narratives with a strong logical order, the apparent lack of such a unified structure is a source of resistance: the two crucial incidents – the moment when mother and daughter wash their hair in a stream and the moment when the mother throws away her wedding ring – are causally and logically unconnected and in fact represent climaxes in two different stories, the story of the young I-actor’s relationship with her mother and the story of the mother’s marriage. One may even hesitate as to the narrative status of each; but, despite the title, the mother’s story eventually seems to be subsidiary to that of Jane, because of the perspective taken by the adult I-narrator (so from now on I will call it the subplot). On the whole, the global resistance of the fictional universe is the product of local effects which add up: so much is left unsaid about the situation and the characters that they appear resistant, and the world we have built from the I-narrator’s memories, complex and rich as it becomes in the reading act, remains somewhat elusive, precluding final interpretations. ‘In ‘The Wedding Ring’, writes Janice Kulyk Keefer, ‘the conspicuous absence of connections between incidents and emotions points to their presence offstage, as it were: poignantly inaccessible to the characters’.6 Inaccessible to the reader, as well, unless by an act of imaginative speculation.
- 7 ‘The constant jumps in time create chaos in the mind of the readers who constantly waver about the (...)
- 8 See Gérard Genette’s use of the term in Figures III, Seuil (Paris, 1972).
- 9 Theoretically, it is the narrative which is singulative, recounting once what happened once (or n t (...)
5Local recalcitrance depends on varied strategies which may prove more or less hindering to different readers. Resistance often proceeds from the handling of time.7 Yet the overall temporal sequence is clear enough: the action takes place during the summer weeks which Jane’s mother spends at their summer cottage in Vermont, first with her daughter, her nephew and a guest, then without the children but with her husband and other company. What events there are seem to be reported in chronological order. There are no major flashbacks, except in the mother’s conversation with the guest where these are motivated and unambiguous. Yet within the narrative units complex manipulations of time may induce mild dizziness. In a narration predominantly made in the present, tense shifts are not used in a conventional manner to establish easily perceived time differences, so that they often become disturbing. The present itself, assuming different values, may contribute to the reader’s puzzlement. The paragraph describing the I-narrator’s boy-cousin starts in a type of present which equates narrating time and narrated time: ‘The screen door slams and shakes my bed’. It shifts to various past tenses to relate actions more or less clearly located in the past, then confronts us with a strange kind of present, which, in the context, cannot signify a return to the present of the narrating act, the posited present of reference, but cannot be a habitual present either. ‘He discovers a towel abandoned under his bed by another guest, and shows it to each of us’. So when did this discovery occur? In this and other instances we are prevented from constructing a rigorous chronology of the fabula. Moreover it is often difficult to decide whether a present tense statement refers to a single scene8 or offers a summary of several scenes. ‘My mother remarks on my hair, my height, my teeth, my French, and what I like to eat, as if she had never seen me before’ (p. 127). This must be a habitual present. The scene must be iterative:9 surely she cannot have been talking about all these things at the same point in time; and so we are tempted to read the next sentence in the same way: ‘Together, we wash our hair in the stream’. Who knows whether they did this every morning? The hair-washing, however, generates the longest episode in the short story. So we retroactively read the sentence as a single occurrence. Meanwhile our construction of the fictional world has been delayed. Another jolting shift of tenses occurs towards the end. The father having arrived and the guest having ‘dissolved’, ‘[t]he children – hostages released – are no longer required’ (p. 128). Jane is sent off with her cousin to Boston: ‘I am to spend six days with my cousin in Boston – a stay that will in fact be prolonged many months’. The narrator seems to be identifying with the focalizer and adopting her temporal position in the first part of the sentence; but in the second part she exerts her narrator’s privilege of knowing the future. Then she returns to the present of the narration to give us a vignette of her mother who ‘stands at the door of the cottage in night gown and sweater, brown-faced, smiling’, of the tall field grass which ‘is cold with dew’, of the car the windows of which are frosted’, as though she were preserving the image in her mind, as though remembered and remembering selves were united in not wanting to leave the scene. Consequently departure is inscribed again in the future: ‘my father will put us on a train, in care of the conductor’. But the use of a present expressing habitual action (‘Both my cousin and I are used to this, [p. 11, Ibid.]) introduces yet another time level. Moreover, the last paragraph is disconcertingly in the preterit.
- 10 One cannot, however, make too much of her silence on this point since she fails to name her cousin (...)
6Several other strategies of recalcitrance concern the unsaid – implications, ellipses, non sequitur. Of course, the first strategy may come into play because of something said, as in the guest ‘is still careful, still courts my favour’ (p. 126, italics added), the ‘still’ presupposes that he is going to stop being careful. Once drawn, the inference raises questions concerning the ‘plot’ – is this the germ of a future narrative incident? The answer is no. Manu’s questions concerning the interrelationships within the mother-child-lover triangle will remain unanswered. Incidentally, the young man the mother is in love with is always called ‘the guest’. Though the designation is evident, and never a source of ambiguity, the narrator’s refusal to name the guest and even make his status absolutely clear excites the reader’s imagination.10 Though narrative ellipses are a condition of storytelling, their number is unusually high in ‘The Wedding Ring’ so that one is frequently arrested by what amounts to a non sequitur between sentences and between paragraphs. The most striking example occurs towards the end: ‘He and Jane are like sister and brother’, she says – this of my cousin and me, who do not care for each other//Uncut grass. I saw the ring fall into it’ (p. 128). Another important narrative gap is signalled by a blank between two paragraphs. The mother was taking a walk in the sun with, and confiding in, the guest and, after just a small interval on the page, the sun has dropped and here is the father letting ‘a parcel fall on the kitchen table’ while the guest ‘must have dissolved’ (p. 128). But the most puzzling lacunae concern the father, his ‘secrets’, which however are introduced by a surmise, as if it were he who had secrets’, and above all his presence (or absence) in the final act. Was he part of the weekend party, ‘the chosen audience’, for which the mother makes her grand gesture and throws away her wedding ring? Or was he by then already away and the casting off of the ring a public confirmation of an earlier more private break up? Our reception of her gesture hangs partly on this point which the narrator does not see fit to communicate, thus, of course, raising the question of her own reasons for keeping silent. It is as if the discarded ring was less the symbol of a broken marriage than that of a destroyed family circle.
- 11 Final recalcitrance is, according to Wright (p. 124) a feature which distinguishes the short story (...)
- 12 See Austin Wright, pp. 115-129.
- 13 Ibid.
7In fact, resistance, of all kinds, is conspicuous in the story’s last paragraph.11 Apart from the lacunae just mentioned, ‘The Wedding Ring’ exemplifies several kinds of ‘final recalcitrance’ as analysed by Wright (pp. 124-127). The story almost ends in an ‘unresolved contradiction’: ‘Uncut grass. I saw the ring fall into it, but I am told I did not – I was already in Boston’ (p. 128). The narrator opposes her own flat assertion, ‘I saw the ring fall into it’, against the affirmation, reported in indirect style, of unnamed others. My word against theirs. (Or is it her mother’s?). The active and transitive ‘I saw’ would seem to bear stronger witness than the passive ‘I am told’. But the present, ‘I am told’, creates some ambiguity and the ensuing relation of the scene itself seems to indicate that the narrator was not an observer: ‘she would love to make an immediate, Russian gesture, but cannot. The porch is screened so, to throw her wedding ring away, she must have walked a few steps to the door and then made her speech, and flung the ring into the twilight in a great spinning arc. The others looked for it next day, discreetly, but it had disappeared’ (pp. 121-129, last emphasis the text’s). The use of modals and the shift in tenses from present to past suggest that the narrator is imagining the scene rather than reporting/reliving it. Yet being told that she did not see the ring fall also means that she was told something of the scene. Is she substituting a story based on what she was told for a story that she personally experienced? This hypothesis is less likely than the conclusion that the scene is a pseudo-memory. But it is part of the uncertainty which the last paragraph induces in its raising of major issues about the working of memory. Nor does recalcitrance stop there. For one thing, if the throwing away of the wedding ring is a fitting ending, to the extent that it is the most dramatic event narrated, and that it implies a double closure – the end of a marriage, the ending of the narrative – yet the mother’s gesture, Russian-like or not, affords no new clarification of what has been going on. It is ‘an unexplaining explanation’12 from which we must draw our own inferences. Finally, the conclusion to the incident (and to the short story) evinces ‘a modal discontinuity’13 which is totally unexpected. To begin with, the use of the preterit is already a disruption in the dominant tense system and a sign that the discourse of memory takes on a new tack. But there is a more radical disruption.
8Until then, the remembering self was an adult narrator who told things largely from the perspective of her childish self but did not exclude comments from the point of view of her more knowledgeable self. In both cases, focalization, being limited to what either could have observed or experienced, was therefore restricted in scope. In the last sentences, however, the narrator relates, without resorting to any modalizer, the fate of the ring, of which she can have no knowledge since it ‘disappeared’.
it slipped under one of those sharp bluish stones, then a beetle moved it. It left its print on a cushion of moss after the first winter. No one else could have worn it. My mother’s hands were small like mine. (p. 129).
- 14 See Danièle Schaub, Fragmented Worlds: Narrative Strategies in Mavis Gallants Short Fiction, Unpubl (...)
9She reports ‘facts’ like an ‘omniscient narrator’ in a traditional narrative. But the breach in the narrative contract is all the more striking since these details sound suspiciously like inventions. So again our construction of the referential world is hampered. Indeed this sudden shift in the narrative stance operates a change of mood and opens a new fictional world – that of children’s stories and fairy tales where inanimate things have a life of their own, animals play a part in the action, and everything is miniaturized. Like in a fairy tale, there is a lost object which (like the princess’s slipper) can fit one person only, because (but the relation of causality is supplied by the reader) ‘my mother’s hands were small’. Besides the story leaves us with this ultimate contradiction: since the narrator’s hands are just as small as her mother’s what are we to make of the statement ‘no one else could have worn it’? Ring and hands acquire a symbolic relevance which becomes a challenge, and an obstacle of a new order, to interpretation. Shall one then conclude that, with its various discontinuities and rejections of conventions of coherence, the last paragraph ‘highlights the overall incoherence’ of ‘The Wedding Ring’?14
10Yet is the story really incoherent? Of course not. To survey the obstacles that prevent our easy construction of the fictional world as I have done so far is simply one of those didactic freedoms which scholarly essays may take. In fact I have cheated by not taking into account the multiple adjustments we make to our anticipations and hence to the areas of opacity we encounter. Thus, even the opening, the first locus of disorientation, offers a clue (‘the weather bulletin can be one of several’) whose importance may perhaps elude us at first, because of the windowsill – a feature of the decor that sustains and emblematizes the reader’s referential frame – but we should be distracted only for a time. If we ignore this early signal that the story is not a traditional narrative supposedly reporting a chain of events as remembered, and even reconstructed, by the I-narrator, then we will be puzzled by all the indeterminacy of the weather – which represents the breaking of the tacit conventions of that form. In fact, what is adumbrated here and confirmed later is that the illusion which the text seeks is not that of a lost and recreated world, but the illusion of the re-creation of that world. In short, narrator and reader embark on a memory trip. Once we consider the narration as a memory trip, we see it through a different frame from what I called the referential frame. Within this new frame, discontinuities and unexpected connections appear to be directly produced by the very discourse of memory, and, being thus motivated, they are at once more readily ‘reduced’ and more easily integrated as signifying elements in the overall interpretation.
Reducing Recalcitrance: the Memory Act Frame
- 15 Neil Bessner, The Light of Imagination, Mavis Gallant’s Fiction, University of British Columbia Pre (...)
11If one regards the process of remembering as, in Neil Bessner’s comment on other stories,15 both ‘a subject to be explored and ‘the central technique employed to tell the story’, one can readily expect that the particular ‘logic of narration’ will not be sequential and causal but associative and unsystematic. Hence there is no need to look for a plot, but it becomes necessary to scrutinize the gaps between the rambling notations, and perhaps the trajectory of memory. Sometimes the reader can work out a link between apparently disconnected statements. For instance the narrator tells how, at night, she watched, from her bed, her mother playing cards in the next room, and concludes: ‘The single light on the table throws the light against the black window. My cousin and I each have an extra blanket. We forget how the evening sun blinded us at suppertime…’ (p. 127). At first incongruous, the idea of the blanket seems called forth by the mention of the black window, suggesting night and cold, in contrast with that other light, the blinding sun of the daytime. The peculiar treatment of time, too, is related to the characteristics of memory which is not a linear, chronological process but might rather be described as a spatial, non-chronological one. Significantly, all the disconnected sentences describing the boy-cousin juxtapose, in their jumble of tenses, different time-levels as if chronology were irrelevant, and in truth, the temporal sequence of his actions does not really matter to memory. On the other hand, looked at closely, the statements all concern his place in the new environment (his bed, the things he unpacks) and his responses to it (his making the outhouse tidy, even his fear of his aunt, the mistress of the house). Under the circumstances, it is not simply impossible, it is useless to try and establish a chronological fabula. Often, when the narrative seems particularly disrupted, it is because the syntagmatic dimension recedes to the background and the paradigmatic dimension imposed by the working of memory assumes more importance.
12As the process of remembering is not a smooth and even flow, it takes on different narrative forms. Sometimes memory freezes an image – the windowsill, ‘the bubbles of soap (which) dance in place, as if rooted, then the roots stretch and break’ (p. 127) in the stream when mother and daughter wash their hair, the father suddenly there, when the sun drops and the leaves turn blue, dropping a parcel of meat on the kitchen table, the mother standing at the cottage door. But, with the exception of the bubbles which are integrated into a scene, most of these vignettes appear and disappear abruptly, The sudden gesture of the father soon gives way to remarks about what happened to the guest. ‘Did the guest depart? He must have dissolved, he is no longer visible’ (p. 128). Even the fixed image of the windowsill cannot find a single stable contextual frame; it is attached to floating recollections of different kinds of summer weather, from which memory refuses to choose. Strangely enough, this range of possibilities, after the solidity of specification in the description of the heterogeneous objects, may strike the reader either as indicative of memory’s freedom or as suggestive of loss, so that the indeterminacy of the list of bulletins, even when decoded as a strategy of memory, still contaminates the reader’s interpretation. Although the narration never again attempts such disorienting synthetic arrangements as in the description of the weather, the remembering process often condenses aggregate recollections of a person or of a pattern of life. The sketch of the mother brings together the child’s impressions and the adult’s later memories. ‘My mother is a vixen. Everyone who sees her that summer will remember, later, the gold of her eyes and the lovely movement of her head.... She can be wild, bitter, complaining, ugly as a witch, but that summer is her peak. She has fallen in love’ (p. 126). In a referential narration, one might have expected ‘everyone who saw her that summer’, which would have neatly set her effect on people in the past and would have backgrounded the act of narration, or, in order to emphasize the enunciation, one might conceivably have had ‘everyone who saw her this summer I am speaking of’. In the evocation of memory, however, if the summer is marked as an exceptional moment of the past, ‘that summer’, the woman’s circle and the woman herself are vividly made present in a conflation of times. Or the narrator remembers the tenor of their life: ‘At night, we hear the radio – disembodied voices in a competition, identifying tunes. My mother, in the living room, seen from my bed, plays solitaire’, etc. (pp. 126-127), but the remembrance of a succession of similar nights may reactivate a vision, Thus the above-quoted paragraph after a digression on the cousin and the age of the guest, goes on: ‘My mother and I, for the first and last time ever, sleep in the same bed. I see her turning out the cards, smoking, drinking cold coffee from a breakfast cup’ (Ibid.). Again this seems disjointed, but one may argue that remembrance of the mother’s emotional absence, implied in the extraordinariness of the physical contact between the two, ‘the first and last time, ever’, is an incitement to conjure up her presence in the memory act. For if in the first sentence, ‘sleep’, is a present of habitual action and the ‘I’ the younger, experiencing and remembered self, in the second sentence, tense and pronoun, though grammatically the same, have different values. Because the description of the mother playing cards has just been supplied a few lines above, one is tempted to read the repetition as difference: the ‘I’ no longer referring to the experiencing self but to the remembering one and ‘see’ to the narrating present, meaning ‘I see her now in my mind’s eye’. Thus, within the space of a few sentences, memory changes registers from recollecting to mentally reliving the past. A reverse effect is achieved when the tableau which, when the children depart, frames together the mother standing ‘at the door of the cottage’, ‘the tall field grass’ and the car windows frosted with dew is followed by an announcement of the next step in their voyage, then by a general comment: ‘My father will put us on a train, in care of the conductor. My cousin and I are used to this’ (p. 128). The disruptive future and the allusion to a pattern of (relative) dereliction cut short the emotional potentialities of the farewell tableau. Memory keeps bringing up flashes of the past the emotional charge of which is implicitly different. But since the narrator sticks to her detached, sometimes ironic stance, it is the reader who has to field all the shifts and turns and attempt to decode them.
- 16 To quote from M.M. Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays, translated by Caryl Emerson and (...)
13Similarly, shifts in focus of perception and the sliding of voices are easily motivated by the remembering self’s contradictory wish to identify, as far as possible, with her younger self, and at the same time to retain the safe distance of her adult self. The ensuing disruptions or the confusions in the discourse of memory do not necessarily make for smooth reading. At times, the child’s voice emerges clearly: ‘I may look funny with this hat on, but at least I shall never be like a rusty old stove lid’ (p. 126); yet one often stops to wonder which of the two I’s ‘sees’ or which ‘speaks’. Utterances may be dialogic,16 one Jane breaking into the voice of the other. On occasion, in the ‘double-voicedness’, one even perceives an alien utterance: ‘The children – hostages released – are no longer required. In any case their beds are needed for Labor Day weekend’ (p. 28), If the narrator seems directly responsible for the hostage metaphor, and perhaps the verb ‘required’, the third-person phrasing, which she has never used, the designation ‘the children’ sound like another voice – the mother’s, the parents’? – which is heard even more clearly in the statement about the beds, memory merges utterances into its own discourse, The turbulence of memory, even when it ceases to be really disorienting, often keeps arresting our attention. Yet the split between the remembering self and the remembered self may on occasion generate irony which can be a source of clarification or of opacity. An example of the first kind shows the narrator’s willingness to acknowledge the quirks of memory that depend upon perception. With an interpolated commentary, she sets up a counterpoint between what the young I-focalizer perceived and what the adult I knows. ‘Years later we will be astonished to realize how young the guest must have been – twenty-three, perhaps twenty-four. My cousin, in his memories, shared his room with a middle-aged man’ (p. 127). The irony is obvious and mild (but is also perhaps an oblique incitement to question all the memories focalized through young Jane). A subtler and potentially more sarcastic instance is likely to cause the reader to pause. Under her mother’s prodding, Jane goes and fetches a hat only to find on her return that her mother has not waited for her: ‘The cots are empty: my mother is gone. By mistake, she is walking away through the goldenrod with the guest turned up from God knows where. They are walking as if they wish they were invisible, of course, but to me it is only a mistake, and I call and run and push my way between them’ (p. 127). If the first ‘by mistake’ may be ascribed to the younger focalizer, misreading the situation, the repetition-cum-variation ‘to me it is only a mistake’ (emphasis added) seems, together with the adverbial ‘of course’, to introduce a change of focalizers: it is now the remembering self that looks back at the remembered self as if she were still present, and while seemingly identifying with her, she ironically implies that this memory of ‘only a mistake’ does not convey the reality of what happened. The mother’s betrayal of the child, however, is never spelled out and the idea becomes the reader’s responsibility.
14Speaking of Gallant’s work in general, Siemerling makes a comment that applies fairly well to ‘The Wedding Ring’:
- 17 Winfried Siemerling, ‘Perception, Memory, Irony: Mavis Gallant Greets Proust and Flaubert’ in Essay (...)
Gallant’s work often operates between... the existence of single, sharp images sometimes evoked by a mnemonic object, such as Proust’s madeleine, and the vagaries of a more-than-unreliable memory which is often defined by a need to forget’. In those vagaries, the narrator may question memory, as we have just seen but, conversely, she may apparently want to give her credentials; she underlines that as a child she was aware of the need to fix things in her memory: ‘In a delirium of happiness I memorise ferns, moss, grass, seedpods.17
- 18 One may even regard this manoeuvre as the mother’s second attempt to send the child away after an u (...)
15Interestingly, this occurs at the beginning of the same core episode, the ‘blissful moment when mother and daughter wash their hair, which ends with the mother’s abandoning her daughter and joining the guest. The analytically-minded reader may wonder whether Jane’s memory of memorizing tiny elements of the decor is not some kind of ‘screen memory’. The suspicious reader may think that the mother has engineered the meeting with the guest; by commenting on the effects of the sun on her hair (positive) and on her daughter’s (negative) and saying that Jane’s hair should be ‘covered-up’, she efficiently sends her away in search of a hat. A manoeuvre that is itself a cover-up – covered up by the narration.18 Thus to the reader who imagines much ‘more than what meets the eye’, the whole incident illustrates how selective and probably distorting the narrator’s memory is, We get a glimpse here of ‘the need to forget’. For us, however, the resistance lies partly in our not knowing whether the narrator is wilfully reticent or not.
- 19 From a different perspective, Schaub who insists on the ‘incoherence’, ‘confusion’, ‘chaos’ of the (...)
- 20 p. 19, pp. 24-25.
16For a full view of the diegetic vagaries of memory and imagination, however, we must turn to the mother’s telling the guest about her lack of roots. To give the story greater power, or because she really believes what she is saying at the moment, she gets rid of an extra parent: ‘I never felt I had any stake anywhere until my parents died and I had their graves, Their graves were my only property. I felt I belonged somewhere// Graves? What does she mean? My grandmother is still alive’ (p. 128). Here again, incidentally, one discerns a shadow of opacity (not in the lack of connections, however, which here is unambiguous: we do ‘hear’ young Jane’s voice). One perceives a slight discrepancy between the introductory explanation with the humorous formula (‘she gets rid of an extra parent’), which I would ascribe to the more critical narrator, and on the other hand the child’s open (but tacit) puzzlement: ‘Graves? What does she mean?’ In any case, the import of the conversation is the mother’s inventive way of dealing with her memories: she both repeats impressions which Jane, like (her cousin) at a musical comedy, know(s) by heart, or something near it’ (p. 128) yet she has radically transformed them by fantasying herself as completely orphaned. To this extent, the passage becomes a self-reflexive comment on the ‘Wedding Ring’. Memory may be largely fictional – a fiction which, however, is not gratuitous. The mother’s fabricated memories enable her either to enhance her life story to impress her young lover or to fulfil some psychological need to forget, it would seem, her own mother and the very estrangement which she is trying to articulate. Moreover it is a fiction that strikes the mother as ‘the truth’, to her ‘astonishment’. That the conversation should be so woven into the narrator’s memories that she can quote it verbatim, testifies to its importance, hinting that perhaps, as a child she was dimly aware of parallels, Pausing to evaluate its relevance, the reader can consider it as a mise en abyme. The mother’s reminiscing reflects the I-narrator’s ellipses, condensations and fabrications, almost a caricature announcing the pseudo-memories which serve as closure to the memory trip. But it thereby questions the narrator’s memories, at once throwing light and casting a shadow of uncertainty on them. What if the memory act, in spite of all its omissions and distortions, did bring out ‘the truth’? What are the narrator’s motives? Does she seek through her inventions to give greater power to her own narrative? Does she want to believe in the pseudo-memories which at least make her a witness to the climactic moment of that summer when her family broke up – a symbolic moment from which, exiled in Boston, she was excluded? Making up facts about the lost ring, she endows it with a magic aura and recovers it as a trace – a ‘print on a cushion of moss’; she reinvents it as memory itself. And the liberating effect is that she can assert her resemblance to her mother. But again, what is involved in that affirmation about the smallness of their hands? To sum up, in such an interpretative frame, much of the recalcitrance of ‘The Wedding Ring’ is naturalized as part of the inconsistencies, gaps, distortions and re-creations of memory and consequently reduced.19 Some of the recalcitrance, though recuperated as a signifying element, must necessarily remain unresolved, as when we justify narrative gaps as resulting from the need to forget. In any case, the reader’s progress is constantly slowed down, and occasionally perturbed by various kinds of jolts. The main point, however, is that the so-called ‘incoherence’ of the narrative now appears as ‘discoherence’, that is to say, as the working of coherence within incoherence or, as the case may be, of incoherence within coherence. I misappropriate the word ‘discoherence’ from Jean Ricardou,20 though not the concept, which allows him to ‘think the contradictory multipolarity’ in Claude Simon’s Triptyque with which Mavis Gallant’s story certainly cannot be compared. I retain the term as enabling us to escape the old coherence/incoherence opposition, which does not seem to fit stories like ‘The Wedding Ring’ or ‘The Pegnitz Junction’. Lest my previous line of argument should have led to misunderstanding about this term, let me add that, as proposed here, discoherence is not a residue of recalcitrance. Both are, of course, strongly linked, insofar as discoherence may be a source of recalcitrance and insofar as, conversely, analysing discoherence may reduce recalcitrance. In short, discoherence is a factor of textual dynamics which is not to be eliminated but to be performed in the reading act, often drawing attention to the textual surface and preventing the reader from closing off the interpretive process and settling into stabilized interpretations.
- 21 On the theme of the return home in Gallant see Bessner.
17Discoherence, needless to say, is not tied to the frame which I have just been using and which I must now discard. This frame, emphasizing how the memory act shapes the narration, discounts the fact that, by the same but reverse movement, the text generates the illusion of the memory trip. Memory as artifice is artifice as memory, So again we must change frames in our apprehension of the short story. In fact, while a text may draw attention to its being an artefact in many different ways, here, it is largely discoherence which signals the artifice. Just as the first frame positing a world recollected in tranquillity by a distanced narrator was blocked by what one at first took to be the incoherence of the narration, now the second frame positing a world being reconstructed under our eyes, as it were, by a remembering consciousness, is proved to be somewhat inadequate, too, by the kind of discoherence that informs it and which shapes the text as we read it into an aesthetic artefact. For instance, the tonal rupture of the ending, with its shift to the preterit and its fairytale atmosphere, undermines the coherence of the memory act but also ensures the opening out of the short story onto widely-shared realms of the imagination. Paradoxically, it is the ending, though told in the preterit, which is both a return ‘home’21 and an acknowledgement that the only home we can return to is a dream world.
Coming to Terms with Recalcitrance and Discoherence
18Within the apparent disorder of the associative ebb and flow of memories too many rhetorical and semiotic processes are at work for all to be examined. They weave the fragmentary, the disconnected, into the unity of story but at the same time they do not cancel the impact of the discontinuous.
- 22 See Ian Reid, ‘Destabilizing Frames for Story’ in Lohafer and Clarey, p. 347.
- 23 His presence in the night scenes, when the mother plays solitaire, however, is implied: he is not m (...)
19In the first place, the global apprehension of the text may sometimes be furthered by the working of continuity factors within the elements of discontinuity. Thus, while the narrative strings out a character’s discrete memories, it unifies them through the creation of what seems to me a modern chronotope which one might entitle ‘holidays at the cottage (or the country house, etc.)’ and which is recognizable in a number of verbal and cinematographic narratives. (A matricial literary example might be Katherine Ann Mansfield’s ‘At the Beach’ – and a deflated, satirical and adult-centered version, Fay Weldon’s ‘Weekend’). Rather than the concept of script, I prefer to use in this case the concept of chronotope, though both are extra-textual ways of framing,22 because the latter is defined, not by its type of action or thematic content, but by the nature of its represented time – in this case a limited span set apart from ordinary life – and of its represented space – in this case a place also removed from the characters’ normal locus of activity and likely to attenuate the inside/outside opposition: The in-betweenness and the limitedness, which characterize this particular chronotope, preclude, or at least hinder, the deployment of a full plot but foster patterns of growing awareness and discovery. In ‘The Wedding Ring’, the setting, though never described at length, looms large in the narrator’s memories, testifying to its determining importance. Images of the house (the windowsill, the sleeping arrangements) and the long grass, the river, haunt the discourse of memory. Outside is brought inside with the jug of ‘field flowers’, and inside activities are carried outside when mother and daughter wash their hair in the stream. The sounds of inside and outside merge when they sunbathe on cots ‘dragged out in the long grass’, and ‘the sounds of this blissful moment are the radio from the house; my cousin opening a ginger-ale bottle; the stream persistent as machinery’ (p. 127); the guest’s presence is felt both inside and outside, e.g., in the card scene,23 in the walk through the goldenrod; and the ring rests on a ‘cushion of moss’. In ‘The Wedding Ring’ there is, according to type, no overt plot to speak of, and the covert subplot – the mother’s relationship with her guest – largely depends on the time-space, or is at least facilitated by their isolation in a Vermont cottage, while the husband is presumably in Montreal. The pattern of awareness is clearly discernible even though it is split between the two Is, whose respective roles are less easily distinguishable. The child-focalizer gets glimpses of the situation; but the comment on the mother’s having fallen in love is probably the narrator’s view of the summer’s events, It is the child who notices that the guest ‘seems to have replaced [her father] in everything except in authority over me’ (p. 126). It is through the adult narrator’s focus of perception that the final incident is reported, although her account of the fate of the ring may well prolong childish imaginings. Whatever the case, the fuller (though incomplete) revelation of the summer’s consequences is delayed until the end, in conformity with narrative conventions, rather than with the laws of memory, and it is thereby more ostensibly revealed as a formal closure. The chronotope is a storytelling template, which, even if the reader cannot give it its Bakhtinian name, reconnects at a macro-level the fragmented, disconnected incidents stirred up by the memory act. The discoherence reveals the aesthetic nature of the narrative.
- 24 Starting from an analysis of Maupassant stories, Antonia Fonyi (‘La Nouvelle de Maupassant: le maté (...)
20A similar working of continuity within discontinuity is achieved when the reader perceives a resemblance between two unconnected moments. The short scene with the cousin at the movies and the conversation between the mother and the guest constitute an intratextual doubling of a basic situation when a listener or spectator has to listen or look at something he or she already knows. Since we have already been shown that the cousin at the movies ‘always knows what is going to happen’ (p. 126), we would probably discern the duplication, even if it were not underlined by the narrator herself who says of her mother’s topic: ‘like my cousin at a musical comedy, I know it by heart, or something near it’ (emphasis added, p. 127). The two moments bear no causal relation but their similarity structures the narrative,24 similarly, one might add, the mother’s love of scenarios, hinted at here, cannot determine or foreshadow her last theatricals, but is thematically related to them.
- 25 There is no scope here to deal with the story’s self-reflexiveness, which is important although ‘Th (...)
21This same conversation plays an important part in the processing of the text since the snatches of talk shape into a hypo-story which functions as a central mise en abyme of the main story, Insofar as the mise en abyme requires multiple decoding, the hypo-story is resistant, yet, ultimately, its recalcitrance makes for greater understanding. For while the mother’s reminiscences reflect something of the I-narrator’s memory work, as I have shown, they also reflect, beyond the ostensible teller, the hidden scriptor’s practice. To that extent, its implicit intentions and explicit distortions are a metafictional25 illustration of the use of memory and imagination as artifice in Mavis Gallant’s work, signalling to us the principle of order operating within the apparent surface disorder. At the semantic and thematic level, the hypo-story offers the reader telling parallels with the themes of the main story. The mother explains her ‘lack of roots’ by her childhood: ‘My parents didn’t get along and that prevented me from feeling close to any country.... I was divorced from the landscape as they were from each other. I was too taken up wondering what would happen next’ (p. 128). Only with her father’s death was she ‘free of their troubles’. Although these confidences are a disruption of Jane’s story, they in a sense repeat what is shown of her childhood: her parents’ estrangement, her being shipped from one country to another, etc. At the same time, the discrepancy between the mother’s readiness to talk about some of her feelings and the narrator’s reticence, the ironic dryness with which she reports, almost immediately afterwards, the departure of the ‘hostages released’, becomes a possible clue to Jane’s unexpressed emotions. This enables the reader to infer that she too must have wondered what was going to happen next, and to decode, with reasonable confidence, the irony of the narrator’s dispassionate statements. ‘No longer required’ easily translates as ‘unwanted’ and in spite of the positive note of ‘released’, the word ‘hostage’ implicates the child unwillingly in the parental conflict. To the extent that the mother’s story says the unsaid in the daughter’s story, or at least part of it, it builds such a foreboding of a repetition of the past and present in the future that, although we know nothing of the narrator’s present situation, we are prepared, when the story is over, to imagine her rootless and metaphorically ringless. The mise en abyme therefore greatly furthers our global processing of ‘The Wedding Ring’ while it leaves us pondering about the I-narrator’s reticence.
- 26 Speculations about the time of writing can only concern ‘The Wedding Ring’ since the Linnet Muir st (...)
- 27 Kulyk Keefer, p. 105.
- 28 Lorna Irvine, Sub/version, ECW Press (Toronto, 1986), p. 143.
- 29 ‘The character I called Linnet Muir is not an exact reflection. I saw her as quite another person, (...)
- 30 Of course, the characters in the Linnet Muir cycle are also recalcitrant; and one might as well say (...)
22Another way of dealing with ‘The Wedding Ring’ as a recalcitrant text is open to the Mavis Gallant aficionado, who can then frame a new aspect of discoherence, for this story may be read through the grid of the Linnet Muir cycle. Of course The New Yorker publication of ‘The Wedding Ring’ predates that of the first Linnet Muir story by six years26 and since Mavis Gallant did not give her heroines the same name, she doubtless did not regard the Linnet stories as a continuation of ‘The Wedding Ring’. Nevertheless the reader, free to roam backwards and forwards within Gallant’s oeuvre, may be tempted to make connections between the isolated Jane story and the Linnet Muir stories. The earlier narrative ushers in the figures which will appear in the later ones – the expendable child, the unmaternal mother, already here ‘an admirer of Russian novels’ and a lover of week-end parties, the remote, inscrutable father, their disintegrating marriage, and more generally, it introduces the variations on those Gallantian themes – ‘the dereliction of adults and the vulnerability of children’,27 the exploration of memory and imagination – which the Linnet cycle embodies so brilliantly. In ‘The Wedding Ring’, the I-actor has not yet begun ‘the struggle to separate from the mother’, which Irvine28 sees as propelling Linnet’s adventure. Nor perhaps has the I-narrator quite acquired the sense of herself as ironic fiction-maker or as mediator between memory and history which Linnet will achieve. Yet, in spite of such differences, the story fits so well into the Linnet Muir cycle, as an illustration of the heroine’s early phase – a summer scene with the focus on the mother, paralleling the winter scene with the focus on the father of ‘Voices Lost in Snow’ – that the reader who has in her mind a timeless map of Mavis Gallant’s work unconsciously fills in some of the information gaps in ‘The Wedding Ring’. She may imagine that Jane’s father’s ‘secrets’ have to do with those of Angus Muir – and why not with the gnawing disease he silently suffers from in ‘Voices Lost in Snow’? Needless to say, such precise reconstruction is not valid since, while fictionalizing, it would seem, the same partly autobiographical material,29 the author has kept the two fictional worlds apart. Nevertheless reading Jane’s story within the frame of Linnet’s diminishes to some degree the recalcitrance offered by the characters though perhaps, in the feedback, increasing that of the relevant themes, whose persistence and variations then present even more of a challenge to the reader.30 Within the discontinuous stories one can sense a principle of continuity, the cohesion of the desire to write the resistant, insistent past, if nothing else.
23In the second place, local effects solicit the reader’s zeal, as discoherence (like incoherence) promotes attention to the textual surface. Thus unrelated paragraphs which jump from one topic to another are perceived to be linked not mimetically, in reproduction of memory’s vagaries, but rhetorically, through metonymy which is often spatial, e.g. one moves from window to door to the people dwelling in the house in the expository part of the narrative, or, in the hair-washing scene, from the grass in the stream pool to, ‘the long grass’ around the house to the goldenrod field beyond. This metonymical sliding may even be reinforced by the frequent return of a signifier from one paragraph to the next, where it is often placed at the beginning. ‘Windowsill’ in paragraph one generates ‘window’ in paragraph two, ‘front door’ in paragraph two generates ‘screen door’ in three; ‘my mother’ which figures prominently in the last sentence of paragraph three (‘he is ready for anything except my mother, who scares him to death’ [p. 126]) triumphantly introduces the fourth paragraph, ‘My mother is a vixen’. A more complex example may be found at the beginning of the central scene in the vivid metaphor of the roots applied to the bubbles of soap dancing in the stream until ‘the roots stretch and break’, which is echoed in the next paragraph by the metaphor of the mother’s ‘lack of roots’. The latter is such a worn figure of speech (as such, befitting the occasion since the mother ‘is developing one of her favourite themes’ [p. 127]) that our attention would normally hardly be arrested by it. But its proximity to the striking image of rooted bubbles revives it and invites the reader to explore its connotations. Two disjoined narrative segments, whose only link seems to be temporal succession, are united by the recurrence of location/dislocation, permanence/impermanence.
24Another aspect of the micro-circuitry of the text is its play with sonorities and the materiality of print, Phonetic and literal repetitions are frequent devices used to establish linkages between the unconnected. To give a minor, but significant, example, the list of the objects which the cousin has unpacked is heterogeneous from a referential point of view but finds a unity in its alliterations: ‘he has unpacked a trumpet, a hatchet, a pistol and a water bottle’ (p. 126). A more complex scheme of repetitions is developed in the references to the mother. First, in her portrait, two series of phonemes or letters are associated with her two faces: to her seductive face corresponds a proliferation of Os, ‘the gold of her eyes, the lovely movement of her head’, ‘the bloom women sometimes have... when they have fallen in love’, while her less appealing side generates quite a sampling of Is: ‘She can be wild, bitter, complaining, and ugly as a witch but that summer is her peak. She has fallen in love’ – Here the aural/visual repetitions strengthen the coherence of the dissociation set up by the paragraph. Yet the dissociation is twice annulled by a reversal: this appears first in the introductory image: ‘she is a vixen’, which, in context, seems to be positive. Yet, with that dangerous I, how can one ignore the termagant hiding behind the female fox? It is also perceptible in the metaphor of the ‘peak’, which in spite of its sound, refers to the triumph of her seductiveness. Thus discoherence operates within the double pattern. Furthermore this particular play of letters and sonorities recurs throughout. There is an abundance of Os when the mother leaves her daughter to meet her lover: ‘the cots are empty, my mother is gone... she is walking away through the goldenrod with the guest turned up from God knows where’ (p. 127). The echo of the earlier portrait is all the more resonant because ‘goldenrod’ expands ‘gold’ (‘the gold of her eyes’). On her husband’s return, we are told that ‘to show that she is loyal, has no secrets, she will repeat every word that was said’ (p. 128). The play of sonorities, with the phrase ‘no secrets’ thrown into relief by the sentence structure, is a counterpoint to the overt meaning, Lastly, in the relation of her theatrical gesture, the Is and Os are again in competition: ‘The porch is screened so to throw her wedding ring away, she must have walked a few steps to the door and then made her speech, and flung the ring into the twilight, in a great spinning arc’ (p. 128). The witch side seems to win, if the Is are associated with it as in the first example. Yet, if one notices the presence of the word ‘wedding ring’, which itself contains two Is out of three vowels, one may interpret it as the generator of the series in the sentence, which then acquires different overtones. There is no need to speculate on those. My purpose in bringing up such details is to show that, within the lack of logico-causal connections other circuits are at work and discoherence keeps refracting the reader’s perspectives.
25At a lexical level, a vegetal paradigm is developed, associated with the chronotope of the summer residence, from the ‘field flowers’ in the jug, ‘the field full of goldenrod’, the woods, ‘the ferns, moss, grass, seedpods’, to the ‘cushion of moss’, and, above all, the recurrent variations on ‘the long motionless grass’ ending on the abrupt mention of ‘uncut grass’ which introduces the throwing away of the wedding ring. Locally, the notation ‘uncut grass’ is partly a shorthand for the scenery, characteristic of the chronotope in its implicit contrast with mowed suburban lawns and it realistically offers some advance reason for why the ring cannot be found. But ‘uncut grass’ as a synecdoche for the narrator’s landscape of memory may also enter into intratextual relation with the graves that are a synecdoche for the mother’s only imaginatively possessed space – a connection facilitated if one reads in the phrase, as through a palimpsest, a line from Whitman’s Song of Myself celebrating the grass as ‘the beautiful uncut hair of graves’. In any case, brief as they are, the recurrent references to the long grass create a pastoral and elegiac continuity across the fragmented memories, which start with dried flowers in a jug.
- 31 According to Ricœur (‘On Narrative’, in W.J.T. Mitchell, On Narrative, U. of Chicago Press [Chicago (...)
- 32 On elegy and mourning in Mavis Gallant’s fiction see Karen E. Smythe (Figuring Grief, Gallant, Munr (...)
- 33 This is one of the dialogic occasions when beyond the narrator’s voice we ‘hear’ the experiencing s (...)
- 34 Certain of the ‘we’s’ through which she tries to establish identification are suspect: ‘When he dis (...)
- 35 The mention of the cousin’s fear of his aunt, which no event in the narrative justifies, is perhaps (...)
- 36 See Siemerling: ‘This attitude towards memory, of course, is a form of irony that belies the notion (...)
- 37 The statement ‘to show that she is loyal, has no secrets, she will repeat every word that was said’ (...)
- 38 The ambiguity of her position has given rise to different emphases in the interpretations of her na (...)
- 39 In this story of mother-daughter relationship, the male figures remain shadowy. Yet even the guest, (...)
26Finally, in an act of configuration, ‘grasping together’ those echoes and similarities, one may outline patterns,31 such as, for instance, the consistent exploration of the inconsistencies, power and failures of memory or an elegiac thread of impermanence and loss.32 Yet I would rather briefly investigate another line of thought that arises from a configurational arrangement. At the macro-level, the pattern of ‘The Wedding Ring’ may be abstracted as the play with the category ‘junction’ and its two terms, conjunction and disjunction. In the action, scattered episodes evoke objects which have been disjoined from their owners (the abandoned towel, the ‘mysterious, lost objects’, which the boy cousin is always diving for in the darkness of the cinema). These examples of unintentional disjunction culminate in a reversal, the climax of the intentional casting off of the wedding ring which becomes the ultimate literal lost object of the story. Even the minor cases of loss hint at different affective investments in objects: while the boy obviously cares about his possessions, the towel was not missed and the ring, significantly, is looked for not by the mother but by ‘the others’, More importantly, much of the main ‘plot’ deals with Jane’s efforts to be conjoined with her distant mother, sharing her opinions (‘We expected him to be homesick for Boston’ [p. 126]),33 wishing to identify with her,34 and not really accepting her rejection, as when she ‘push[es] her way’ between her mother and the guest, Nevertheless, the conjunction is actualized once when they wash their hair together. In spite of this unique moment, the mother, for her part, is bent on disjunction from her daughter as far as possible. She keeps her at a distance: though she remarks on her hair, teeth, French etc., she remains, most of the time, unconcerned by her daughter, though conscious of her deficiencies and difference. Finally she packs her off to Boston so that the little girl’s longing for acceptance and recognition (conjunction) is frustrated in the plot. Conversely the subplot shows the mother entering upon a new conjunction with the guest, which involves disjunction from her husband and from her daughter, though details reveal that she has never been close to the child at any time. By throwing away the wedding ring, an emblem of bonding, she symbolically completes the pattern of disjunction she has carried out during the summer holiday. The theatricality of her gesture – accomplished in front of a ‘chosen audience’ – confers a solemnity on her act of separation. From this angle, everything is coherent, even if part of the coherence depends on events that must have occurred offstage. But we only get a view of such a (reader-reconstructed) pattern through a discoherent narration which sets up a much more complex dynamics of junction/disjunction. The narrator’s memory act which recovers Jane’s quest is itself a quest, but is of necessity different and differently motivated, Without hazarding guesses about the ‘unconscious’ motives of a paper being, and taking into account only the words on the page, we may say that the memory act, which conflates two Is, two times, is an attempt, on the part of the narrator-rememberer, to deny the temporal disjunction between present and past and to some extent the disjunction with the mother. But the paradox of memory is that it also enables her, with its elisions, distortions and inventions, to fictionalize the past and thereby distance herself from the mother. Like the ring whose disappearance is a fact which is remembered yet has to be imagined, the story has to be remembered/invented if it is to release the narrator. For in the past looms the fascinating ‘vixen’, the ‘witch’ who scared the little male cousin and perhaps the little girl,35 but who can now be reduced to words. The rememberer-narrator is led to assume discrepant, sometimes contradictory, stances – now identifying with her younger self in her admiration for the vital mother, now being slightly ironical towards this deluded young self36 and implicitly much more detached from the denying mother, now obliquely insisting on the maternal deficiencies. In short, the vagaries of memory enable her to immerse herself again in the unique experience of communion with the mother, in the lustral and short-lived bubbles of that ‘delirium of happiness’. She also imaginatively re-experiences her mother’s lack of love and her duplicity and can therefore dismiss her.37 In other words, she embodies the discoherence of remembering in forgetting, of forgetting in remembering.38 Even if it were always possible to distinguish the remembering I from the remembered I, the ambiguities in the narrator’s position would contribute to the discoherence of the story. Nevertheless there is a pattern within all these shifts, another twist of discoherence. The remembering I’s quest, which involves a complex movement of dissociation from – and reconciliation with – the mother figure, finally ends not in disjunction and frustration as did young Jane’s quest but in conjunction and quasi-identification: ‘My mother’s hands were small, like mine’ (p. 128), However, here again, the reader who is attempting to deal with the textual artefact becomes suspicious of that final revelation or at least has to enter into a sort of dialogue with it. For one thing, as far as the pattern of conjunction and disjunction is concerned, the reading process cannot be stabilized with that last image, however strong and unexpected a formal closure it may be. For the reader the overall pattern is the chiasmatic reversal of the younger self’s story and the adult self’s story around the axis of the mother figure. In the system of the work, this chiasmus functions, in spite of its symmetry, in a discoherent fashion since it entails that the final statement has no particular priority and cannot totalize the meaning of the narrative. Mavis Gallant’s strength in this story, as in many others, is that each character is granted her own perspectives, through whatever changes the narrative may take her.39 This last claim to resemblance is ambiguous: assuredly the narrator can invent/imagine the mother’s moment of liberation in (fictive) real life, showing that she accepts her as a woman with desires. However, this sign of conjunction is subtly undermined by the fact that she now appropriates her mother’s past triumph. She turns it into a triumph of her own, which she achieves through her role as narrator-rememberer, but which she clinches by an argument from life, the smallness of their respective hands. Our awareness of the text as artifice invites us to question her mastery, since she is not the author, and therefore to ponder the choice of hands as a metonym of physical resemblance. The dialogic text has already brought together and opposed a physical trait present in mother and daughter. The narrator calls her mother’s hair ‘a true russet’ (p. 126), the mother fears, or so she implies in direct speech, that her daughter’s hair may turn ‘like a rusty old stove lid’ (p. 127). What hair fashion magazine would not indeed identify the two as very different shades of hair, one positive, the other negative? Yet ‘russet’ and ‘rusty’ share the colour seme brown, together with most of their letters and phonemes, so that the reader, remembering the flattering ‘true russet’, cannot help finding the mother’s satirical criticism of her daughter’s hair rather ironical. Yet the narrative which has made a point of discreetly bringing out this resemblance between mother and daughter now chooses another part of the body as a link between them. The reasons for this choice appear to have less to do with the narrator’s psychology than with textual expansion and consistency. The word ‘hand’ is referentially called for by the ring, which naturalizes its abrupt appearance; but it is also metonymically related to the fairy tale world, and intertextually to the stories in which the smallness of hand (or foot) is a test which qualifies the heroine. Finally, the hand is, in many mythologies, associated with power and with language. The very aptness, richness and consistency of the final image works discoherently in the contextual fragmentation and discontinuity of memories.
27In conclusion, ‘The Wedding Ring’ images dislocation – whether the dislocation of a family or that of memory – yet stages fugitive moments of reconciliation, whether remembered, or invented.
- 40 Michel Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit, François Bourin (Paris, 1991), p. 79.
- 41 ‘La troisième personne donne donc une fondation de tout le réel extérieur, de l’objectivité dans so (...)
28Imaging a moment of fusion with the mother, it keeps losing her, as it shows her always already lost, recoverable only in the lying/truthful storying of memory. The discoherent text encourages a suspicious and hesitant reading, a questioning dialogue which cannot rest in certainties and cannot claim the mastery which, in this view, it denies the narrator. Yet as the text makes us work, it increases the pleasure of interaction. Its recalcitrance becomes a source of joyful empowerment even as it confronts us with our limits – as readers and as persons. Its discoherence teaches us to pass through what Michel Serres calls ‘la tierce place’ the third place which is ‘neither that nor its contradictory’,40 where ‘la troisième personne’, the third person, (p. 82 seq. et passim.) can be generated, circulating between you and I, this culture and that, the Same and the Other, the fictional and the non-fictional, and thus giving a foundation to the external real.41
Notes
1 My Hemingway-like metaphor is supported by a comment of Mavis Gallant’s in her introduction to Home Truths: ‘fiction, like painting, consists of entirely more than meets the eye: otherwise it is not worth a second’s consideration’ (XII).
2 ‘The Wedding Ring’ was first published in The New Yorker, June 28, 1969, and reprinted in The End of the World and Other Stories, edited by Robert Weaver, McClelland and Stewart (Toronto), 1971. It has drawn little critical attention, two rare exceptions being Michelle Gadpaille’s short discussion (p. 46) and Danièle Schaub’s longer one in Fragmented Worlds: Narrative Strategies in Mavis Gallants Short Fiction, Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation (Bruxelles, 1994), pp. 50-55.
3 Austin Wright (‘Recalcitrance in the Short Story’, in Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, eds., Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, Louisiana UP [Baton Rouge, 1989], p. 116) who has developed the concept, defines recalcitrance as ‘what impedes or delays perception, of the form of a work, granted that one should regard ‘the form of a work not as a fully realized entity but as an emergent hypothesis of reading’.
4 On frames, Ian Reid’s ‘Destabilizing Frames for Story’ is very stimulating. Since my topic is recalcitrance, I did not deem it necessary to go into the distinction between his four kinds of framing, although all would apply.
5 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, Structuralism and Linguistics and the Study of Literature, Routledge and Kegan Paul (London, 1975), p. 189.
6 Janice Kulyk Keefer, Reading Mavis Gallant, OUP (Don Mills, Ont., 1989), p. 71.
7 ‘The constant jumps in time create chaos in the mind of the readers who constantly waver about the exact chronology of the statements’, Schaub, p. 52.
8 See Gérard Genette’s use of the term in Figures III, Seuil (Paris, 1972).
9 Theoretically, it is the narrative which is singulative, recounting once what happened once (or n times what happened n times) or iterative, recounting once what happened n times (Genette, p. 146, seq.).
10 One cannot, however, make too much of her silence on this point since she fails to name her cousin as well. The significant figures in her memory are not persons but relations to Ego, mother, father, cousin and the less easily placed guest.
11 Final recalcitrance is, according to Wright (p. 124) a feature which distinguishes the short story from the novel since ‘the ending of a short story aggravates recalcitrance by cutting off our expectations for clarification’, a feature which has become ‘prominent in this century’.
12 See Austin Wright, pp. 115-129.
13 Ibid.
14 See Danièle Schaub, Fragmented Worlds: Narrative Strategies in Mavis Gallants Short Fiction, Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation (Bruxelles, 1994), p. 53.
15 Neil Bessner, The Light of Imagination, Mavis Gallant’s Fiction, University of British Columbia Press (Vancouver, 1988), p. 18.
16 To quote from M.M. Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, U. of Texas Press (Austin, 1981).
17 Winfried Siemerling, ‘Perception, Memory, Irony: Mavis Gallant Greets Proust and Flaubert’ in Essays on Canadian Writing: Mavis Gallant Issue, N° 42 (Winter 1990), pp. 131-153, p. 127, italics mine.
18 One may even regard this manoeuvre as the mother’s second attempt to send the child away after an unsuccessful one: ‘Her ‘Never look straight at the sun’ seems extravagantly concerned with my welfare’ (p. 127), but Jane does not go and get sunglasses: ‘Through eyelashes I peep at the milky-blue sky’ (Ibid.).
19 From a different perspective, Schaub who insists on the ‘incoherence’, ‘confusion’, ‘chaos’ of the story sees that disruption as symbolic: ‘The intentional inconsistency of the narration matches the lack of unity and relationships within the protagonist’s family, Capers and somersaults between sentences and paragraphs point out the loose links between the characters, their estrangement from one another and their own alienation from life’ (p. 55).
20 p. 19, pp. 24-25.
21 On the theme of the return home in Gallant see Bessner.
22 See Ian Reid, ‘Destabilizing Frames for Story’ in Lohafer and Clarey, p. 347.
23 His presence in the night scenes, when the mother plays solitaire, however, is implied: he is not mentioned but the mother addresses remarks to someone who can only be him.
24 Starting from an analysis of Maupassant stories, Antonia Fonyi (‘La Nouvelle de Maupassant: le matériau de la psychose et l’armature du genre’ in Maupassant Miroir de la Nouvelle, Colloque de Cerisy, PU Vincennes [Saint Denis, 1988], pp. 71-85) detects in the short story a structure peculiar to the genre: ‘c’est une répétition à deux termes, analogiques plus souvent qu’identiques, Elle fonctionne comme une paire de rimes: le premier terme, en position faible, peut passer inaperçu parce que sa fonction est d’appeler le second dont l’effet frappant est tributaire de l’écho qu’il fait au premier. C’est ce second terme, en position, forte, qui constitue le centre. Dans une nouvelle, il peut y avoir plusieurs répétitions de ce type, plus ou moins importantes ou évidentes’ (p. 77). Interestingly the same micro-scene at the movies generates two of these repetitions: the second taking place, in reverse form, when later the mother repeats that in her dislocated childhood she was ‘too taken up wondering what was to happen next’ to grow roots. In the first repetition, artistic experiences find an analogue in ‘real life’; in the second, the certainties of cinematographic and theatrical forms are not reproduced in ‘real life’.
25 There is no scope here to deal with the story’s self-reflexiveness, which is important although ‘The Wedding Ring’ certainly does not present itself as metafiction.
26 Speculations about the time of writing can only concern ‘The Wedding Ring’ since the Linnet Muir stories were written in the mid-seventies and published ‘with unusual promptness, each appearing soon after it was received’, says Gallant in the preface to Home Truths Selected Canadian Stories, Macmillan of Canada (Toronto, 1981), XXII.
27 Kulyk Keefer, p. 105.
28 Lorna Irvine, Sub/version, ECW Press (Toronto, 1986), p. 143.
29 ‘The character I called Linnet Muir is not an exact reflection. I saw her as quite another person, but it would be untrue to say that I invented everything’ (Home Truths, XXII).
30 Of course, the characters in the Linnet Muir cycle are also recalcitrant; and one might as well say that ‘The Wedding Ring’ helps us to understand them better. a signifier with different signifieds, which creates a semantic cluster of location/dislocation, permanence/impermanence.
31 According to Ricœur (‘On Narrative’, in W.J.T. Mitchell, On Narrative, U. of Chicago Press [Chicago, 1981], p. 175), the ‘configurational dimension’ is the antithetic force to the ‘episodic’ dimension ‘which characterizes the story as made out of events’. ‘The configurational arrangement (which) makes the succession of events into significant wholes that are the correlate of the act of grouping together’, is a ‘reflexive act through which ‘the whole plot may be translated into one ‘thought’’, which in narrative contexts ‘may assume various meanings’’.
32 On elegy and mourning in Mavis Gallant’s fiction see Karen E. Smythe (Figuring Grief, Gallant, Munro and the Poetics of Elegy, McGill-Queen’s UP [Montreal, 1992]), who, however, does not mention ‘The Wedding Ring’.
33 This is one of the dialogic occasions when beyond the narrator’s voice we ‘hear’ the experiencing self’s and the mother’s.
34 Certain of the ‘we’s’ through which she tries to establish identification are suspect: ‘When he disappeared the first day, we thought we would find him crying with his head in the wild cucumber vine’ (p. 126).
35 The mention of the cousin’s fear of his aunt, which no event in the narrative justifies, is perhaps a displacement of the experiencing I’s own fear. Or perhaps the male of the species fears witches more?
36 See Siemerling: ‘This attitude towards memory, of course, is a form of irony that belies the notion that irony must represent a cold or despairing principle. Rather it is a positive view which takes into account some of the complexities involved in the matter, and shows similarities with the concept of irony Friedrich Schlegel developed’ (p. 134). ‘Yet the ironic structure of Gallant’s approach to the pitfalls of memory implies the twofold assertion typical of any irony: the experience of limits is, after all knowledge’ (p. 143).
37 The statement ‘to show that she is loyal, has no secrets, she will repeat every word that was said’ (p. 127) is in my eyes deeply ironical. Not that it is completely antithetical; it cannot be decoded into ‘she is not loyal’, but it hints that loyalty has many aspects and varied limits.
38 The ambiguity of her position has given rise to different emphases in the interpretations of her narrative, Thus Grazia Merler in Mavis Gallant: Narrative Patterns and Devices, the Tecumseh Press (Ottawa, 1978), reads in ‘The Wedding Ring’ ‘almost a reconciliation with and praise of the mother figure mysterious, attractive even if very theatrical’ (p. 27); Michelle Gadpaille (p. 46) is more aware of the child’s ‘world of great hurt and dislocation’, but also sees the grown-up daughter’s ‘final reconciliation and forgiveness’ (p. 46).
39 In this story of mother-daughter relationship, the male figures remain shadowy. Yet even the guest, seen and not seen from the perspectives of the child-observer and the adult rememberer, has an activity offstage – secret appointments as well as desires and expectations (why else court this reluctant little girl?)
40 Michel Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit, François Bourin (Paris, 1991), p. 79.
41 ‘La troisième personne donne donc une fondation de tout le réel extérieur, de l’objectivité dans son ensemble, unique et universelle, en dehors de tout sujet en première et deuxième personne’ (Serres, p. 85).
Top of pageReferences
Bibliographical reference
Simone Vauthier, “Framing the Recalcitrance of Mavis Gallant’s ‘The Wedding Ring’”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Special Issue 5 | 2003, 95-118.
Electronic reference
Simone Vauthier, “Framing the Recalcitrance of Mavis Gallant’s ‘The Wedding Ring’”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies [Online], Special Issue 5 | 2003, Online since 06 April 2022, connection on 19 February 2025. URL: http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/ces/11764; DOI: https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/1247o
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