350
Views
0
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
ARTICLES

‘Nothing but a Pack of Cards’: Semi-fictitious Persons and Flopping Jellyfish in Elizabeth Bowen

Pages 1-14 | Published online: 09 Mar 2011
 

Taking the wildly conflicting critical evaluations of Elizabeth Bowen's final novel, Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes (1969) as its starting-point, this essay argues against ‘interpreting’ both the novel and its ‘monstrous’ heroine in conventional representational terms, to argue, instead, for an appreciation, or experience, of both novel and protagonist as instantiations of a process of becoming along Deleuzian lines. Rather than seeing Bowen's final novel as a (failed) attempt to do what the Anglo-Irish writer's previous work would have suggested this text to do as well, the novel and its eponymous heroine are approached as Bowen's rigorously ethical effort to, first, obviate the opposition between living and writing, and second, to show, rather than claim, that art and life are indissolubly connected. Drawing on both Gilles Deleuze's notion of the ‘traitor-prophet’, whose function is to call both the world of dominant signification and the established order into question, and on Deleuze's counterpart Félix Guattari's concept of the work of art as an activity of ‘unframing’, the article ultimately suggests that the novel's effect, beyond representation and, indeed, through its own and its protagonist's language, is the ‘undoing’ of the reader, opening up a realm of virtual becoming that is neither reassuring nor to be captured in the chains of signification.

Notes

1Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes, New York: Anchor Books, 2003. Hereafter referred to as ET.

2Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977, p. 225.

3Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 139.

4The term fabulation, popularised by Robert Scholes in The Fabulators (1967), refers to a mode of modern fiction that openly delights in its self-conscious verbal artifice, thus departing from the conventions of realism.

5Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Athlone Press, 1987, p. 41.

6Elizabeth Bowen, The Little Girls, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

7Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September, London: Vintage, 1998.

8Elizabeth Bowen, Friends and Relations, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

9Douglas Hewitt, English Fiction of the Early Modern Period, 1890–1940, London and New York: Longmans, 1988, pp. 196–7.

10Douglas Hewitt, English Fiction of the Early Modern Period, 1890–1940, London and New York: Longmans, 1988, p. 198.

11Rosalind Miles, The Female Form: Women Writers and the Conquest of the Novel, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 30.

12Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation. Critical Case Studies, London and Totowa, NJ: Vision & Barnes and Noble Books, 1981, p. 191.

13Neil Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004, p. 11.

14Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1995, p. xiii.

15Lee, Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation, p. 206.

16Patricia Craig, Elizabeth Bowen, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1986, p. 135.

17Bennett and Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel, p. xv.

18Maud Ellman, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow across the Page, Edinburgh University Press, 2003.

19Bennett and Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel, p. xiv.

20Ellman, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 204.

21Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return, p. 4.

22Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return, pp. 8, 131.

23Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return, p. 141.

24Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return, p. 144.

25Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return.

26Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, London: Penguin Books, 1998.

27Elizabeth Bowen, Pictures and Conversations: Chapters of an Autobiography with Other Collected Writings, London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books Ltd., 1975, p. 61.

28Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 36.

29Ellman, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 212.

30Ellman, Elizabeth Bowen.

31Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 5.

32Carroll, Alice's Adventures, p. 133.

33Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. xiii.

34Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 2, 3.

40Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Power Publications, 1995.

35Ellman, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 206.

36Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 216.

37Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 221.

38Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 223.

39Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

41Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return, p. 144.

42Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 131.

43Simon O'Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, p. 92.

44Carroll, Alice's Adventures, p. 16.

46Bowen, Pictures and Conversation, pp. 58, 59.

45Bowen, Pictures and Conversation, p. 60.

47O'Sullivan, Art Encounters, p. 92.

48Carroll, Alice's Adventures, p. 114.

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.