I was born in the circus. I play the flat man.
My voice is flat, my walk is flat, my ironies
move flatly out to sock you in the eye.
(Flatman [1st draft]—Anne Carson )
Og hun holdt altid hånden for munden, når hun snakkede, som om hun ville fange ordene
med hånden, inden de kom for langt ud og kunne ramme nogen. (“Skæve Marie”—Kirsten
Thorup)
By the time any reader growing up in English Canada is old enough to have her imagination
organized by high school English classes, she has probably begun to learn about the
differences between flat and round characters. Although a novel requires flat people
as well as round, she is told, the round ones in all their freshness and incalculability
are an author’s big achievements (Forster 81). They are the ones to identify with—they
are the most like you.
As the female reader becomes more familiar with the tragic lives of modern heroines,
however, she finds it less believable that an incalculability and freshness can be
found there, or that fiction will act as a mirror to her experience. Rather, she finds
her experience misrepresented or not represented at all. Although such heroines are
often complex and compelling, there is an over-arching predictability to how their
fates play out. Their suffering contributes to the recycling of female types, and
they are the sites upon which men work out the fears and desires of their particular
Age. It is true that people who have been without access to public discourse (women,
the poor, people of colour) have been portrayed as round characters, according to
conventions of character development; however, there remains a discrepancy between
the lives of people subordinated in a culture and how they have been represented in
fiction. As round characters they are still projections of the dominant ideologies
of the day and have confirmed, even through difference, the Ego of the privileged
reader. This reveals a flaw in the prevailing assumption that the round character
is, by definition, life-like. This character, as an embodiment of dominant discourse,
often does not account for the many varied voices in a culture that are always threatening
to rise up and puncture its skin.
Having been disappointed by the “well-rounded” heroine, female readers may become
more and more curious about the possibilities
of the flat character: in an act of mimicry, the usually subordinated character can
take an affirmative role. Re-imagined as a specifically female figure, the flat character
becomes an allegory for art’s cliched one-dimensional depiction of women, while also
acting as an agent for a self-conscious prose (prose that draws one to the surface
or the page and thus the constructedness of characterization). This figure’s potential
to “flatten” the “well-rounded” heroine, by drawing attention to the constructedness
of all characters in art, gives
the flat character a more complex role than it has had at any previous time: once
the life-like heroine is exposed as only a bundle of codes and conventions, she can
begin to be dismantled. This makes way for more experimentation with female characters
in art. The suggested violence of this is important to note. As the above quotation
from Anne Carson’s poem suggests, a slippage in language can have a violent effect
on the reader: ironically, it is not the fat man (round character), but the flat man (character) that is “striking.”
E.M. Forster, who coined the terms round and flat character in Aspects of the Novel, uses Moll Flanders as an example of a character who is round because her experiences
are true to daily life. She “gives us a slight shock…the thrill that proceeds from a living being” (66-67). However, Forster’s argument
for realist fiction—that Defoe delivers the hard facts
of living and not the author’s theory of morality (66)—does not take into account
the many assumptions and biases of both author and reader on how to compose and interpret
these facts.
Carson’s poem suggests that what makes a character real is not the successful transfer
of life to the page, but the confrontation between the reader and the page. There
is still that “slight shock”; however, it now comes from the reader realizing she
has stumbled on an l between the f and the a. Having her attention drawn suddenly to the surface of the page reminds her that
characters are not simply picked from life, but made out of language. As well, because
she has expected the circus character to be the fat man, the reader is made to see
the part she plays in actualizing and re-enforcing conventional characters and stereotypes. This
is the potential job of the flat character in contemporary fiction: appearing as the
unexpected subject, it shakes the habits of reading and writing which makes way for
further experimentation in characterization.
In this paper I will explore how contemporary women writers are making use of the
flat character’s potential. I will focus on short stories by Danish authors Kirsten
Thorup and Solvej Balle in whose stories flat characters are given a central place.
I will argue that this experimentation is relevant to feminist discourse by using
Hélène Cixous’s observation that a character is only a name we give to a restricting
set of ideological codes (384), and suggest that the use of flat characters by Thorup
and Balle allows for an almost anarchistic leveling of the codes that make up the
conventional female heroine. I will then argue, backed by the poetics of Canadian
poet Erin Mouré, that there is a hierarchy to the various components of a literary
work and that by redistributing the value given to these components these authors
allow for new ways of reading female characters.
If the reader pursues her niggling suspicions, she may be lucky enough to unlearn
what her early education taught her about the relationship between life and fiction.
Cixous points out in her essay, “The Character of Character,” that characterization
is not simply a transference of subjectivity to the page, because
a character is always produced by a restriction of the imaginary. (By “the imaginary”
Cixous means material “that is subordinate to” but also “enters into and supports”
the symbolic. We can think of it as a kind of disruptive but creative subconscious
activity.) This restriction is usually made by a consciousness “which conventionalizes,
evaluates, and codes so as to conform to set types, according
to cultural demand” (384). Forster unwittingly exemplifies this “aegis of masterdom”
(384) when he discusses the battle that goes on between an author and his characters.
He
comments nervously about the unruliness of characters, remarking that they are often
“engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book” and that if they are given
complete freedom they will “kick the book to pieces” (72). This seems to suggest a
fear of the “imaginary,” as it is conceived by Cixous. Forster needs the author to
be the master of the text,
and so asserts that a character must be entirely knowable by the author (69), a recognizable
figure to identify with and an agent to govern art in all its familiar, privileged
forms: that which, when combined, Cixous calls the “visible, delimited, framed [and]
comforting stage” (387).
When considering the difference between people in life and people in books, Forster
bases the division between them on the observation that “a novel is a work of art,
with its own laws, which are not those of daily life, and
that a character in a novel is real when it live in accordance with such laws” (69).
However, because Forster does not question who has made, and what defines, these
“laws of art,” this term “real” becomes problematic. Forster says a character is “real”
when its novelist “knows everything about it” (69). However, Forster’s author does
not interrogate his own limits of knowing—how his
own “character,” the subjective position he writes from, is also controlled by a greater
authority:
the language and concepts of the dominant ideology. The language we use in life, and
the language we confront in art carries the same biases and ideology. To separate
the laws of art from those of life, relieves the author from interrogating his role
as a go-between. As Erin Mouré points out, the argument for this separation-of-worlds
comes, curiously, “mostly from those whose norms are most transparently reflected
in the social order” (1994 18). By once again not addressing the biases of the author
or reader, Forster allows
the cultural norms to remain unchallenged which, in turn, allows the laws of art to
remain static, and the writer and reader to remain “locked up in the treadmill of
reproduction” (Cixous 387).
Forster tells us that characters are real because they are convincing; however he
fails to closely examine how a character becomes convincing (69). Of course, a character is convincing to a reader
because it fulfills the laws the reader has learned from society, not just art. As
Mouré tells us, “writing is always and forever a social practice. The varying discourses
in a society
either shore it up or challenge it. And ‘discourse’ isn’t something you walk away
from when you set down your pen” (1994 18). The laws of art and life have always been
mixed, and form a contract between reader
and writer which, as Mouré suggests, is a collaboration that should be constantly
questioned and re-examined. Forster never stops to ask which group of people is being
convinced by the “real” character; we should be aware that what is considered real
is something “that women have never inhabited as whole beings; it has never been formed
by [their]
desire” (1988 92).
Therefore, to create a figure in fiction that is real and convincing to members of
a female audience, we must not look only to the talent of the writer who can convince
through the unproblematized “rules of art,” but also to a writer who makes evident
in her character formation the difficult contract
real women have been forced to forge with the Symbolic: “the order of discourse” (Cixous
384). Women, in their relationship to discourse, resemble the flat character in its
relationship
to the text: it is the devalued figure whose meaning is understood only in relation
to others; while everything in a story tends to move around a round character, the
flat character is there only to serve the round one (Forster 71-81).
However, while the round character may appear to have more power in a story, its importance
depends upon the guarantee that it is ultimately knowable, and to that extent subservient
to the author and reader (Forster 69). The flat character, in its staunch refusal
to be rounded out, is free from such finitude—and, like a devalued historical individual,
has the ongoing exciting potential to rise-up and challenge social, linguistic or
aesthetic convention. In its flatness, it reminds us of what has been left out of
the story and that, as Mouré puts it, “language [is] a collection of assumptions…a whole collection of paradigms, and there’s no real rootedness in it apart from context,
from what you do with it” (Denisoff 128).
Erin Mouré has compared how a sentence is organized with how citizens are placed in
a culture; by doing this she reminds us that in Western Literature not only subject
matter, but also form and style, have been cultivated predominantly by a male tradition.
This essay will extend, to the realm of fiction, Mouré’s argument about the semantics
of the poetic line. For Mouré, the culturally devalued parts of language are female:
“as if the preposition is the woman’s sign because it is relational. But it can’t
get
anywhere, because in the language it has no power, & can’t exist alone” (1988 97).
The hierarchy in our social structure is mirrored in the way we read a sentence:
we read for nouns and verbs first. Their relationship to each other is where the “so-called
‘power’ of language resides” (1988 93). I suggest that there is also a hierarchy at
work when one arranges or analyzes the
elements of a story: setting and plot conventionally rely on, and so are subservient
to, the characters that occupy them or push them forward, respectively; and round
characters are generally valued over flat ones.
Forster reinforces this hierarchy when he suggests, in his playfully condescending
tone, that flat characters are servants to the author, that “they are very useful
to him [and]…have not to be watched for development” (74). While round characters are described
as having hearts and minds, flat characters
are “little luminous discs of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither” (74).
Forster’s rhetoric clearly shows that levels of power are involved when we talk
about how a story is organized, and that he thinks an author must try to maintain
authority over his characters.
Mouré proposes that we disrupt conventional language structures by making the disempowered
(female) elements central forces in a work. By re-arranging the hierarchy, one may
“change the weight and force” of a language. This will not “necessarily make a women’s speaking possible” but, Mouré suggests, “to move the force of any
language, create a slippage, even for a moment” will at least expose that language’s aim is always toward convention and cliché
and
this must constantly be challenged (1988 98).
In both Kirsten Thorup’s “Crazy Mary” and Solvej Balle’s “Alette V.” we find that
flat characters occupy a central position in the narrative. This is
rare, and the times we have seen it before—in the novels of Charles Dickens for example—the
characters have always been subservient to the author’s voice (Forster 76); this is
not the case in Thorup’s and Balle’s work. Jørgen Veisland says that Thorup’s characters
are marked by “an empowering solitude” which is “positively conceptualized; it is
a re-construction of the Self and a purging of dependency” (100). This empowering
solitude may be viewed as a direct result of their combined flatness
and centrality: Forster says the flat characters “remain in [the reader’s] mind as
unalterable for the reason that they were not changed
by circumstances; they move through circumstances” (74). We may view this arrested
development as a solitude that works as a means to break
away from social and narrative determinism. They refuse to grow, to appear lifelike,
which is also a refusal to represent the prevailing ideologies of their Age.
This solitude revolutionizes both the role of the flat character, and the role of
the heroine, and it is the key to the lure and power of Thorup’s and Balle’s characters.
The most striking element common to both stories is the characters’ lack of engagement
with the social world. In Balle’s “Alette V.,” Alette V.’s work as a street artist
requires that she be in constant contact with
people—but she feels akin to no one. She is constantly travelling to major cities
in cycles dictated by the seasons (not the market), and she never settles into a place
she inhabits. She seems to move amongst people and objects with equal indifference
and skill, never touching or disturbing things unnecessarily (1996 78-79). We never
hear mention of her having lovers, family, or friends.
Marie, from Thorup’s “Crazy Marie,” lives alone, near the poverty line, and presumably
in Copenhagen—though it hardly
matters since she seldom moves outside the few blocks in which she conducts the routine
of her life: from her job at the laundromat, to the flower store, to the supermarket,
to home. She likes to do the same thing every day and never demands anything of others
(1995 76-77). She takes lovers but does not particularly enjoy them. She is able to
save money but wants nothing. Her apathy acts as a parody of Forster’s flat character
that has “no pleasures” and “no private lusts and aches” (Forster 73). We are told
that Marie is not hurt when guests do not show up for dinner, repeatedly.
She waits for two hours and then clears the dishes away. In this way, she avoids becoming
the wounded, judgmental female type who acts as the moral centre for the story. Although
Marie is shocked into a confrontation with her bodily existence—her love-making is
followed by a splotch of red blood that disrupts her washing and whitening routine
at the laundromat—she remains a character who prefers disappearing, and she does not
want to be on her lover’s mind (1995 89).
As radical social outsiders, both Alette V. and Marie avoid the watchful expectations
of the male gaze and the conventions of female gender performance. Their solitude
(or rather, social ineptitude) has made them oblivious to the roles they are expected
to fulfill as women. The rich, white-haired gentleman who is Alette V.’s final client
is clearly a figure meant, at least in part, to represent the most powerful level
of society and its longstanding ideologies. However, his gaze that judges Alette V.
as mad and a monstrosity (1996 83) also falls upon the bronze cast Alette has made
of him, which in some mysterious way exposes this tradition of power and unnerves
the man of “høje alder” [great age] (1993 97; 1996 83). The dynamic between wealth
and poverty, power and powerlessness, is not lost on
the reader, but it is not what we most remember. Instead, we recall Alette V.’s unique
and antisocial goal and final act which does not allow one to view her as a victim
of her gender—although her death is a parody of the representation of woman-as-object.
I will return to this goal later.
Marie’s oddness also saves her from stereotyping and victimization. She does not like
to cook and so does not feel called upon to do more than dump a can of food on a plate
when she has male company. She does not register that her promiscuity may be perceived
as prostitution, or that her boss’s exploitation of her is part of the stigma of being
a woman in the blue collar workforce. Marie and Alette V. are so strange that we must
reconsider their social remove, which we might normally read as a naivety that has
led to victimization.
Female figures, especially, are expected to symbolize the hearth: the traditional
site of the quest narrative that the hero departs from and later returns to, transformed.
However, neither Marie nor Alette V. has any interest in making a home, and this is
emphasized throughout both stories. We cannot find this symbolic centre in either
narrative. Marie’s apartment is littered with mis-matched furniture: lamps are hung
where there is no need for them (1995 76). Alette V. takes lodgings in vacant lofts
and empty warehouses, and she “fore[tager] sjældent reparationer og føl[er] aldrig
trang til at forandre noget i
rummene” [rarely (makes) any repairs and never (feels) the urge to alter these rooms]
(1993 93; 1996 79). By its absence, the traditional site of femininity is exposed
as fraudulent. Most
of Marie’s possessions are from her childhood and Alette V. simply leads a nomadic
life, which makes it impossible to collect anything.
Both manners of living may be associated with youth, or, as previously mentioned,
an arrested development that suggests an inability to evolve. This state of arrest
is useful. The developed but problematic “I” of the narrative is confronted by the
adolescent “No,” that echoes the reader’s response to the dominant but insufficient
forms of characterization.
The un-homey feel of these places points to the vacuity the reader finds when he or
she pokes about for some kind of female interiority (depth of character). A work that
revolves around a centre, which is no centre—a metaphor that Jørgen Veisland notes,
is also present in Thorup’s novel Baby—suggests an “absence of meaning at the core of the social system” (91). In terms
of Thorup’s social realism, a meaningful and governing centre may be valuable,
but its absence points to the fictionality of centres around which we build systems
to live by, and brings us back to Mouré’s position on the arbitrariness of language
structures.
Marie and Alette V.’s lack of depth may be read as a parody of the passive, excluded
female voice; however, their flat refusal to be whole and knowable characters also
shifts attention to the liminal stage of development the modern female character is
in: her state of shock, her ontological crisis. Forster says that flat characters
are “constructed round a single idea or quality” (73). For our characters, that single
idea is not limiting but rather assertive and persuasive:
a resistance that in its succinctness draws attention to the new directions for female
characters.
Marie can be expressed by the single idea: “Hun var ikke sentimental med sig selv” [she
wasn’t sentimental about herself] (1989 49; 1995 76). This rejection of emotion may
be seen as a refusal to take on the role of romantic
victim that the reader may think fitting considering Marie’s circumstances. This simple
line also suggests a total rejection of the female figure of the Romantic tradition
that continues to influence modern writing. The social reality of Marie’s situation
allows a comparison to Emma Bovary, arguably one of the greatest heroines of both
the Romantic and Modernist tradition. Like Emma, Marie is both partnered with a foolish
man who is mediocre in his field, and seduced by a well-travelled dandy. As is the
case in Emma’s world, men cannot save Marie from the overpowering constraints of class
and gender. Marie and Emma both challenge what the reader expects from a heroine.
However, Marie has no romantic notions about herself, no imagined world. Madame Bovary
has, at least, desire. Marie resists even this.
According to the Romantic literary tradition, the main solution for a heroine who
indulges in passion is death. Romantic literature is littered with dead heroines who
function as repeated, punishing warnings to the female reader. Marie may be seen as
the embodiment of the trace that this tradition has left on the contemporary female
consciousness: desensitization, and a withdrawal from the Romantic imagination. As
has already been established, Marie shows complete disinterest in beauty, sensuality,
and the aesthetics of the material world.
Marie’s “total mangel på interesse for det materielle” [complete lack of interest
in material things] (1989 49; 1995 76) may be set against Alette V.’s disinterest
in the metaphysical. Alette V. may be
summed up in the idea that “Kunstner var hun ikke. Hun førte mennesker til tingenes
verden” [She was no artist. She conducted people to the world of things] (1993 92;
1996 78). Alette V.’s fixation on the materials from the ground cannot
be associated with the symbol of Woman-as-Earth-Goddess. Female intuition, and Woman’s
connection to the earth, are parodied by Alette V.’s scientific relationship to the
world of things:
Så snart hun var ankommet til [en] by…vandrede hun igennem gaderne, rørte ved en mur, mærkede gadernes skråning ned mod
havneområdet, hvordan hendes krop hurtigt vænnede sig til brostenenes hældning, aflæste
gadernes længde, sidegadernes beliggenhed. (1993 94)
[As soon as she arrived in (a) town she took a walk through its streets; touched a
wall; noted the way the streets sloped down to the harbour, how quickly her body adapted
to the tilt of the paving stones.] (1996 79)
Her response to the world is attuned, but reduced to subtle mechanics.
She disdains any characterization of herself as a sorceress, or the suggestion that
her work has to do with metaphysics, alchemy (the symbolic activity of turning base material into gold), or any kind of transformation other
than a material one (1996 86). Alette V. is content with cheap materials and the only
transformation that interests her is the way weather literally transforms the surfaces
of things. The transformation she will come to undergo herself is not psychological
or emotional, but physical. Her aim is the exact reversal of the Platonic ideal that
everything is moving forward to a transcendence of matter. Alette V.’s life-work moves
her away from the ideal and towards the real. She shows that any maker’s job is to
attend to her materials, to surfaces. When she attends to the formal working of bronze,
she does not attempt—as men throughout history have done—to obtain immortality for
herself through the hardness and durability of materials: she does not drink liquid
gold or build monuments to herself. By refusing to be either sensually involved with
the world, or to transcend it, Marie and Alette V., respectively, parody the ethereal/carnal
binary that has formed how women are represented in the West.
It is true that both Alette V. and Marie seem like characters with the potential
to be round: perhaps it is simply Alette V.’s, penchant for reason and science that
makes her emotionally aloof; perhaps Marie’s flat “personality” is merely a result
of her repression. Marie, in particular, strikes us as a psychological
character: she has an intense dream life; when she seems to be falling in love, she
becomes agitated and moves outside the imprisoning routine of her life. However, while
these suggestions of depth and change occur, a change of tone in the narrating voice
does not.
The deadpan narration in both “Alette V.” and “Crazy Marie” works as a reminder that
characters are not people, and that writing is not the world.
Each character’s frustrating refusal to be lively foils the reader’s attempt to subordinate
the character’s world to her own. The often short, unadorned sentences and lack of
emotional cues, keep the form and style in the foreground so that the tone of the
story becomes the true main character. Forster’s comment that the “really flat character
can be expressed in one sentence” (73) can thus be understood to mean that the character
is the sentence. There is nothing beyond the surface of the character or the page, except
perhaps another surface.
The narrating voices in these stories closely resemble each other. They claim to know
the thoughts of their subjects: the behaviours of the characters are closely, but
dispassionately, recorded as though these stories are case studies. Though a familiarity
is assumed by the narrator/psychoanalyst, the more information that is gathered about
the characters, the more mysterious they become. The tone acts as an impenetrable
mask and no deep secrets of the psyche are revealed. The clinical narration fuses
with the flatness of the character, so that any character development becomes ironic.
This correlation between the surface of the character and that of the work itself,
can be related to the Ancient Greeks’ use of the tragic mask: “The mask and face were
at one in their sufficiency; unlike the modern face and the
modern mask, they did not owe their interest to the further realities lying behind
them” (Jones 45). In both “Crazy Marie” and “Alette V.” the modern, psychological
sense of the mask is passed over for a re-interpretation
of the Ancient Greek mask that states rather than hints or hides. It is “an artifact-face
with nothing to offer but itself. It has…no inside. Its being is exhausted in its features” (Jones 45).
Marie’s physical details are so absurd, so unnatural, that we cannot mistake her for
a real person. Far from being a hot-blooded heroine, she is more like a puppet or
a paper doll:
Hendes læber var utrolig smukke og svulmende som en nyudsprungen rose, der var hæftet
på det blege lidt udviskede måneansigt, der ligesom svævede over kroppen …Hendes overarme var tynde som piberensere, og hendes lår var smalle og hule. (1989
50)
[Her lips were beautiful and full like a newly blossomed rose that had been fastened
to the pale, rather indistinct, moon-shaped face that seemed to float above her body…Her upper arms were as thin as pipe cleaners, and her thighs were skinny and bowed.]
(1995 76)
Her body is a de-sexualized stick that holds her circular mask-like face. Marie’s
face mocks two motifs commonly associated with idealized feminine beauty in the Romantic
tradition: the moon and the rose. The face dominates the description of Marie and,
like a Greek mask, seems to “surpass
…nature in its lucid isolation of essentials” (Jones 45). Marie’s face serves the same
purpose as the Greek mask did: to present a type. It
offers no hint of interiority, but rather reflects back to the world the Woman it
has constructed: full, sensual, an ethereal moon-woman floating over a malnourished
body.
Alette V.’s work fashioning portrait busts for the boulevardiers in major cities built on the European model involves her in the question of whether
a mask is all surface or works to conceal a depth. Her disinterest in the lives or
psychology of her clients, her renunciation of Mankind, comes with her realization
that people, rather than sharing her interest in the shifting material surface of
the world, “ønske[r] den hvide gips besjælet af deres egne træk og historiens ånd
i forening” [want…to see the white plaster enlivened by a combination of their own features and the
spirit of history] (1993 100; 1996 85). With the vanity of small-time Constantines,
and a little room in their suitcases,
Alette V.’s customers can see their own particular and vaguely classical faces staring
back at them from the mantles of their homes (1996 85). Alette V. disdains her customers’
need to see their likenesses reflected back to them in a mock permanence. The Greek
mask with its surface value counters this vanity that served empirical ends; it showed
“an imitation not of human beings but of action and life” (Aristotle as quoted in
Jones 14).
We know much more about Marie and Alette V.’s actions than we do their inwardness
(which is always suspect). Both characters are shown, in laconic description, spending
an inordinate amount of time performing daily mundane acts: Marie “gik ud og børstede
tænder og vaskede sit ansigt og tørrede det grundigt, så det blev
varmt og blankt. Hun åbnede vinduet, rullede gardinet ned og gik i seng” [went in
and brushed her teeth, washed her face, dried it thoroughly so it was shiny
and warm. She opened the window, rolled down the blind, went to bed] (1989 59; 1995
82); Alette V. “klædte sig af, foldede sit tøj sammen og lagde det på en stol…Hun indstillede et vækkeur til at ringe klokken 7.42 og satte det fra sig på gulvet
ved siden af sengen” [undressed, folded her clothes and placed them on a chair…She set an alarm clock to ring at 7.42 a.m. and put the clock down on the floor next
to the bed] (1993 103; 1996 88). This emphasis on action over thought and feeling
is in keeping with their roles
as flat characters.
I have said that both Marie and Alette V. pre-figure the concept of the multi-voiced
text. They are figures that mark a shift in how to view the concept of character.
However, the empowering solitude, the resistance to convention that is necessary to
this transition must inevitably give way to the need for community. Both stories are
introduced with quotations that allude to this inevitability. “Crazy Marie” begins
with the quotation: “Love will always find you / no matter where you hide” (D.S. as
quoted by Thorup in English 49). “Alette V.” is prefaced with the second law of thermodynamics:
“Legemer, der befinder sig i et lukket system,/ hvor der ikke tilføres energi, vil
søge mod/ større og større uorden” [Bodies held within a closed system / into which
no energy is introduced / will tend
towards greater and greater disorder] (1993 89; 1996 75).
The Canadian modernist writer Shelia Watson is often quoted for saying that those
with no art, no tradition or ritual, are driven in one of two ways: “either towards
violence or towards insensibility” (181-182). Marie and Alette V. are figures whose
actions illustrate that women have little
art, tradition or ritual that is informed by their desire. They have resisted the
conventions of others, but they have not yet firmly established their own communities.
This lack leads one to violence and the other to insensibility.
Marie kills her boss, the owner of the laundromat, by stabbing him through the neck
with an awl when he threatens to fire her for leaving work for a few hours—for straying
from her routine for the first time. We are told early on that no one could tell by
looking at Marie that she was in a state of expectation, of preparation that “gjorde
det nødvendigt for hende at leve så regelmæssigt og ensformigt som hun gjorde” [made
it necessary for her to live as quietly and monotonously as she did] (1989 53; 1995
78). She has been, we are told in the end, preparing for this violent act her whole
life.
She is the perfect emblem of a transitional female figure—repressed by the grand narrative,
and waiting. This final violent act, this hole she makes in the force that represses
her, echoes what Cixous refers to as the true subject piercing the narrative (384).
Marie has been having long conversations in her head with images on television and
with strangers she has seen on the street. This apparent insanity, this talking in
the head, may be interpreted as the subject longing for community, and awaiting the
many-voiced text.
Alette V. renders herself insensible to extremes by manipulating surfaces, manipulating
herself the way she would the materials of her reliefs. She becomes all mask: she
uses alcohol to open her pores of her skin to the cold Quebec air; she waits for her
body temperature to drop and then joins the world of inanimate things. Once Alette
V. becomes “en genstand mellem rummets andre genstande” [just one object among all
the other objects in the room] (1993 104; 1996 88) , we are reminded of the cool surface
of a modernist painting; one thinks of Piet
Mondrian who was both artist and mathematician and whose theory of art is similar
to Alette V.’s: the modern impulse in a world sickened by its own images and symbols
is to purge the world of metaphor. Alette V. assesses the relationship of things in
the room before she lies down. Her desire—like Mondrian’s—to reduce everything to
simple relationships of colour and form is mimetic of Balle’s style which also rejects
excessive description and obvious symbolism.
Both murder and suicide happen when the characters come to understand their place
and imprisonment within the social order. Once Marie’s senses intensify due to love,
and she notices her body has become flesh and blood (1995 86), she begins to taste
death in her mouth, “en tør askesmag” [a dry, ashy taste] (1989 68; 1995 88) and
feel her head (so mask-like before) turning into a skull (1995 88). The suggestion
seems to be that to accept love and community one must also accept mortality. It is
at this point, when Marie becomes “human,” that she explosively understands her subjugation
to male power, and kills the owner
of the laundromat.
It is when Alette V. is inspired to make portraits out of bronze—like Marie’s break
in routine, something she can’t go back on—that she first understands her place in
the social hierarchy. Her work cast in bronze has no market value as long as she lives
and sells on the street. She is suddenly forced to realize the limitations of selling
her work to the upper middle-class university crowd. They see her work as a novelty,
they do not share her love of the earthy world. Once this desire to change material
takes over, she is no longer able to migrate. By understanding their relationships
to others, by identifying with a community, by becoming slightly rounded, Marie and
Alette V., ironically, come closer to entrapment.
When Alette V. plans her final act, her body’s transfer into the world of objects,
she asks herself: “Hvordan undgik hun, at hendes passage tog sig menneskelig ud, at
den fik karakter
af en oprivende og alt for menneskelig handling” [How was she to save her passage
from seeming human, from assuming the nature of some
tragic and far-too-human-act] (1993 101; 1996 86). Alette V.’s desire to be seen
exclusively as a material form can be read as her desire
to remain an element of the story—in other words, she desires to retain her flatness:
she resists the empathy of the one who she imagines will find her (in our case, the
reader). Once she is dead we are told that “Enhver ville vide, at brugte de ordet
menneske om genstanden ved rummets ene væg,
var det et udtryk for manglende præcision, en vane, en mangel på sproglig nøjagtighed” [Everyone
would know that to use the word person of the object lying alongside one
wall of the room would betoken a lack of precision, a habit, a want of linguistic
exactitude] (1993 104; 1996 89). This “want of linguistic exactitude” is exactly the
problem that faces the liminal characters of Marie and Alette V..
Marie is called “skæv” [odd] and Alette V. is regarded as “syg” or “gal” [ill or
mad] (1993 98; 1996 83) for lack of better words, and due to a lack in how female
experiences and desires
are traditionally expressed.
However, as Veisland says of Thorup’s characters in general, Marie’s and Alette V.’s
abnormalities and “dialogue with death” are part of “the passage leading to a new
ontology, a new status for the subject” (97). Ironically, though Alette V. chooses
the stony world of eternal death over the everlasting
life of the spirit, we realize upon finishing “Alette V.,” the last story in the collection,
that it is her body that shows up in the morgue
in the first story of the book, which turns the collection into a continuous loop.
Alette’s death becomes a continuous life in language. This renewed sense of the flat
character has agitated the habits of reading so that Alette’s wish is fulfilled. We
cannot mistake her for human. Rather, as an object of the imagination, the flat character
can be viewed as a stiff sounding board for new ideas—a site for the possibility of
an endless refraction of the subject.