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

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.

Keywords:

• Elizabeth Bowen
• fabulation
• Félix Guattari
• Gilles Deleuze
• lines of flight
• post-interpretation
• post-representation

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.