‘The Moving Towards Words & Then from Them’: Circling Passages, Circling Quin

Abstract

Whilst her first two novels, Berg (1964) and Three (1966), were generally well-received, the publication of Passages (1969) signalled a turn in critical success for Ann Quin. Apart from one anonymous review in The Times which praised the lucid and direct expression of particular observations and moments in the novel, Passages generally didn’t fare well in contemporary appraisals. It was repeatedly accused of being too obscure and of elevating technique above content. Yet despite its critical failure, Passages is the novel Quin herself found most exciting. This article explores the multiplicity of meanings gestured towards in Quin’s third novel whilst at the same time reflecting on the process of conducting archival research in her papers. The piecing together of information to better understand Quin’s life and work mirrors the search for an ultimate(ly elusive) meaning in this novel which destabilizes the notion of a singular coherent self. Consisting of both textual analysis as well as personal reflections on the archival research process, this article weaves together criticism and memoir, drawing inspiration from Quin’s own description regarding the process of writing Passages in which she compared the moving to and from words to jazz improvisations. In doing so, this article adopts a circling approach, approaching both the novel in question and its author slantwise, suggesting that the space of not-knowing might nevertheless be a productive one in which to engage with Quin’s life and work.

Keywords:

• Ann Quin
• Avant-Garde Fiction
• experimental literature
• British 1960s fiction
• archival research

Introduction: ‘[I]f I Knew the Meaning I Wouldn’t Have Written It!!’

Quin began work in earnest on her third novel Passages whilst she was staying at the MacDowell Artists’ Colony in New Hampshire in May 1966. On a visit to New York in November 1966, she showed some of her work-in-progress to Don Hutter, the editor at her American publisher’s Scribners. Reporting on their discussion regarding the new novel to Diane and Robert Sward on 23 November 1966, Quin wrote that showing him the manuscript had been ‘an unfortunate mistake’ for they ‘[s]pent whole fucking lunch hour talking about it—with him [Hutter] saying things like: “but it hasn’t any sustaining thing, no characterisation like in Three one was right there with that couple and as for the style why use just periods when these could be commas”’ (Quin 1966a). Nevertheless, she continued work on the novel, explaining to her American editor that if it turned out a failure it wouldn’t matter for ‘it’s something I’ve just got to do’ (Quin 1966a). She returned to England in June 1967 with the manuscript half-finished—‘very much a book now, the shape of it really there’—and, a few months later, in November of that year, reported to her publisher Calder & Boyars that she had completed Passages (Quin 1967a, 1967b). After some delays, the novel was published in 1969.¹

While her first two novels, Berg and Three, were generally well-received, the publication of Passages signalled a turn in critical success for Quin. Apart from one anonymous review in The Times which praised the lucid and direct expression of ‘particular observations and moments’ in the novel (‘Lovers’ 1969), Passages was generally not well-received. It was accused of being too obscure, of elevating ‘technique above content’, leaving the reader to ‘muddle through annotated diary passages, dream sequences, split paragraphs and all sorts of stylistic mannerisms’ (Haworth 1969: 416). As Marion Boyars said, commenting on the general reception of Passages: ‘Ann Quin was now “work”, and reviewers found her difficult and daunting’ (Boyars: 5). The review in Queen magazine exemplifies this attitude which Boyars identified, commenting that:

Ann Quin wins awards and fellowships for her novels. Her writing is usually described as ‘exquisite’ and ‘lyrical’ and ‘intense’ and ‘compelling’. It is all of these things except compelling. I gave up halfway through Passages, a short discouraging book, which is almost certainly important, and just the thing for the French. (as quoted in Boyars: 5)

The French, however, were not interested; whilst Gallimard had translated Berg and Three, they refused Passages. It was also not taken up by Scribners (or any other American publisher) and the only other country which showed an interest and translated the novel was Germany. Yet despite Passages’ critical failure, it is the novel Quin herself found most exciting and according to Boyars she considered it ‘her most important book’ (Boyars: 5). As Quin wrote on 4 April 1969:

Poor reviews on Passages, apart from TLS (bless whoever did that one!) however did expect this. I think it is my favourite book if only because I don’t yet fully understand all the levels in the work! A bit like Beckett when asked what the meaning was in one of his books and he replied something like ‘if I knew the meaning I wouldn’t have written it’!! (Quin 1969)

In more recent appraisals of her work, Passages continues to both delight and frustrate readers. Thus Jesse Kohn, in an essay entitled ‘Pas Sages’ (2016) writes of the difficulties encountered in reading the novel: ‘I hear her [Quin’s] words, but they fill the air around me, surround me as indifferently as wilderness’, Passages being Quin’s novel ‘that spoke least to me’ (Kohn 2016: 160). Whilst Kohn nevertheless admits to loving the novel ‘with a thrilling unrequited and unrealistic love’, he struggles with its impenetrability (Kohn 2016: 160).

These critical appraisals and the so-called ‘difficulties’ encountered in reading Passages stem from the fact it’s so unlike a novel as we know it: there is not much in the way of plot, it is not ordered according to teleological, linear time and characters do not possess a singular stable self. Indeed, Quin, in the process of writing her novel, reports in a letter that ‘the way I seem to be going now it seems the writing is v. [sic] far removed from the novel’ (Quin 1966b).

This article is interested in exploring the multiplicity of meanings of Quin’s third novel whilst at the same time reflecting on the process of conducting archival research in her papers. The piecing together of information to better understand Quin’s life and work mirrors the search for an ultimate(ly elusive) meaning in this novel concerned with destabilizing the notion of a coherent self. Consisting of both textual analysis as well as personal reflections on the archival research process, this article weaves together criticism and memoir, drawing inspiration from Quin’s own description regarding the process of writing Passages: ‘The moving towards words & then from them, v. [sic] much like jazz improvisations’ (Quin 1966b). In doing so, it adopts a circling approach, approaching both the novel in question and its author slantwise, suggesting that the space of not-knowing might nevertheless be a productive one in which to engage with Quin’s life and work. In the spirit of Passages, a circuitous novel which resists a single definitive reading, this article then is invested in the opening up of possible avenues for further exploration rather than the pursuing of one single coherent line of enquiry. By integrating personal reflections on the archival research process, it highlights my own role as researcher in the attributing of meaning to a person’s life and work whilst acknowledging the impossibility of ever fully understanding or knowing one’s subject, a concern which Passages similarly explores in its portrayal of the decentred self.

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Brussels, November 2020

Sometimes the doing of my research seems so utterly quotidian, the question of why I am doing it can catch me unaware. And, all of a sudden, I’ll find myself not knowing any more, not being able to articulate why I’m spending so much time on a very small selection of writers. Why indeed do I spend weeks, months, years, poring over texts, writings, archival material relating to the experimental women writers I’m studying?

Quin is the writer I’ve been researching longest. (I always call her Quin in my head, not Ann, thinking that Quin suits her tremendously). I first encountered her work whilst studying in Strasbourg in 2010, living in a small apartment near the cathedral. The walls in that apartment were very thin; my flatmate and I were at all times aware of each other’s presence, our comings and goings; our bedrooms even shared a door which we always kept closed.

Over the years I’ve travelled to various places to carry out research in Quin’s papers. Not having her own archive, her papers are scattered around, in the archives of ex-lovers, in the papers of her publishers, in a Carmelite Friary near London, in boxes in friends’ houses. I wonder what she would think of us, her researchers, rifling through personal papers, correspondence, drafts of novels, articles; what she thinks of the hunting for clues, hints.

Through this (re)search I catch glimpses into her life, into her writer’s life, into a specific moment of time. I’m wondering now if it is these glimpses I’m chasing, the pinning down of a moment of realisation: this, for example, was what it was like to be writing experimentally as a woman in the sixties. Yet when I try to articulate what it might have been like, the specificity slips away; despite my best attempts, I am never able to state:

this

 here

is what it was like.

A Succession of Images

Passages opens with the sentence: ‘Not that I’ve dismissed the possibility my brother is dead’ (Quin 2009: 5); a woman in search of her missing brother travels through an unidentified Mediterranean country with her lover, a man. The blurb of the novel suggests that its form ‘reflect[s] the schizophrenia’ of the unnamed characters. Split into two different styles of narratives, the first consists of an account which the woman appears to be writing whilst the second is a diary—apparently written by the man—which, the blurb further informs the reader, is ‘annotated with thoughts that accompany the entries’. The novel is divided into four different parts; the first and third consisting of the woman’s narrative whilst the second and fourth represent the man’s diary entries. These different narratives are layered in order to present divergent subjectivities as well as different perspectives on the same events. Passages is structured, like Quin’s previous novel Three, around the absence of a third person: in this case, the woman’s brother. There are suggestions he might have been a member of a political party and that this might have caused him trouble in the country the man and woman are travelling in which is under the control of a brutal dictatorial military regime.² What exactly has happened to the woman’s brother remains unclear; at points it would appear he might have been imprisoned, possibly tortured or even killed, but this is never confirmed. The reader of Passages is presented exclusively with the subjective writings of the two wandering protagonists who appear both separate yet connected, the lover described on the blurb of the book as ‘a masculine reflection’ of the woman. As thus becomes apparent, and as the blurb signals, Passages is fundamentally concerned with the interrogation and fluidity of selfhood through a reflection of two separate yet connected subjectivities.

The plurality of meanings the title suggests echo the multiple entry points into the novel; in a first instance, the novel namely traces the ‘passages’, the movements, of the two itinerant characters across the unnamed country in which they find themselves. Rather than simply denoting an onward movement, a passage can equally relate to movements which go ‘across, or past’ (‘Passage’). Indeed, it is also a dressage term which signifies the action of moving sideways in riding, thus emphasizing the non-linearity of the novel and its interest in encompassing circumference of experience, focusing on its liminal and outer edges, in preference to the presentation of any forward-moving plot. The novel in effect stages the ‘giving passage’, allowing access to the inner minds of its characters who are continually on the move, passing through places, travelling across water and land. Interrelated here is the sense of the word ‘passage’ as ‘the action of causing something to go past, across, or through’ in the sense of ‘transmission’ or ‘transference’ (‘Passage’). Thus, the man asks: ‘What of madness—can one take on another’s’ (Quin 2009: 39), alluding to the transference of mental states between himself and the woman. In the more archaic sense of ‘an exchange of amorous relations between two people’, the title points to the relationship between the two travellers which is equally in a state of flux, flitting between understanding and misunderstanding, companionship and antagonism. It denotes the in-limbo state in which the characters find themselves; they are engaged in ‘a transition from one state or condition to another’ as everything around and within them is in a perpetual state of process (‘Passage’). In order to represent this state of fluidity, the novel can be understood as consisting of the equivalent of musical passages as its structure appears to borrow heavily from jazz improvisation patterns in which new or varying melodies are created over a continuously repeating cycle of chord changes. Finally, the title also evokes and alludes to ‘rites of passage’, pointing to the references to mythical ritualistic behaviour found throughout the novel which, in turn, reflect the characters’ transitory state of being in their search to attain a more meaningful position within their inner and outer worlds.

The woman’s narrative in Passages consists of paragraphs, sometimes whole, sometimes broken off, which are largely concentrated around perceptions and moments, refusing the presentation of a linear unfolding of events. Thus at one point the woman recounts peering into a room from a balcony at a party:

Again behind glass I saw

what did I see, for when that scene reappears it merges with a dream, fallen back into slowly, connected yet not connected in parts. So what I saw then was as much a voyeur’s sense. And since has become heightened. Succession of images, controlled by choice. I chose then to remain outside. Later I entered, allowed other entries. In that room a series of pictures thrown on the walls, ceiling, floor, some upsidedown. Only afterwards could I see things. More so now in specific detail. Objects in that room

a wooden fish, mobile, its shadow a crescent moon spinning. Black underwear, boots, whips. (Quin 2009: 24)

The middle paragraph is concerned with apprehending what is happening on the level of memory, unpicking it, conscious of its associative nature as the memory mingles with a dream, ‘connected yet not connected in parts’. What both appear to share is a voyeuristic element; the action of peering into a room, behind glass, triggers a memory of a dream—or perhaps it is the action of writing it down which prompts the memory. Indeed, this middle paragraph can be understood as being representative of the writing process within Passages itself; rather than presenting a narrative driven forwards by the development of plot, we are instead given a ‘succession of images’ which are ‘controlled by choice’ by the characters writing them down. The element of ‘choice’ is intriguing in this respect for it implies a selective and conscious process; the characters are in fact presented as, and consist for the reader of, a succession of images to which they thus submit. Indeed, the woman and the man often describe both themselves and the other in terms of acting out images; the woman describes the man as a ‘High Priest’, noting his ‘[s]ubmission to the image’ (Quin 2009: 8) whilst the man informs us that the woman is ‘playing at Antigone’ (Quin 2009: 34), that ‘men are delighted’ with the ‘image’ of her when she acts like a child whilst he, at one point, entertains an ‘[i]mage of myself as Bar-Lgura, the Semetic demon sitting on the roof and leaping down on them all’ (Quin 2009: 37). As such, the selves presented in Passages never purport to be more than a succession of different, disparate images with the fragmented passages and diary entries reflecting this fragmentary nature of the self.

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Glasgow, July 2016

I am writing about Passages and wondering whether the unspecified Mediterranean country its characters travel through could perhaps be Greece. Quin had commented on the similarity of the village she lived in in New Mexico with the Greek villages she encountered during her trip there in the summer of 1964. Whilst doing archival research on Quin in the summer of 2014, in the reading room of the Lilly library at Indiana University, I encountered a hastily scribbled postcard from her, written during her travels to her publishers, asking for money, making clear that she had got caught up in what she refers to as ‘Istanbul riots’, that she is desperate to get out of the situation (Quin 1964). By the time she’s working on Passages it is 1966 or 1967 and she’s staying in Placitas, New Mexico.

I google ‘Placitas’ and watch a short video entitled ‘Welcome to Placitas, New Mexico!’ uploaded by ‘La Puerta Real Estate Service Live’. Placitas looks incredible, vast; the shot pans across powerful plains, huge mountains loom against the skyline, and I can see why Quin loved it there so. She writes in her letters about the amazing landscape she encounters in New Mexico. She associates American writing with a particular sense of place, quoting Robert Creeley when writing about it as ‘an active spatial term which differs from what has been assumed its European equivalent. Space, as physical ground, not sky’ (Quin 1967c). I am intrigued by this and puzzled. A video of wild horses in Placitas is suggested to me next and I start watching it: ominous grey skies hang above the mountains as the herd of horses inquisitively circle the tourists feeding them carrots, folding their ears back if they get too close.

Myth, Intertext and Marginalia

In Passages, the physical discontinuity and the spatiality of the text are highlighted in the gaps between paragraphs; each short segment can be seen as constituting an independent text in its own right as the spacing functions as a kind of physical disintegration of the text that went before. They are ‘connected yet not connected in parts’, entertaining a similar relationship to the diary entries of the man. These entries are annotated in the margins with annotations ranging from Talmud-like sayings (the man is of Jewish heritage), excerpts from various books, descriptions of objects to personal reflections. Not all entries have corresponding annotations. Brian Evenson and Joanna Howard have pointed out that it is often possible to detect a thought or image which might have provoked the entry (Evenson and Howard 2003: 62), as, for example, when a contemplation of Dionysian rites, penned down in the margin, is juxtaposed with the memory or fantasy of a threesome the man recently experienced:

Here the annotation in the margins is taken directly from Jane Ellen Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) when she quotes Clement of Alexandria describing the barbarous rituals of the Bacchae. Harrison’s study functions as the main intertext in Passages with multiple annotations in the man’s diary entries copied word for word from Prolegomena. Mostly these concern descriptions of rituals (as in the passage quoted above) or descriptions of pictorial representations on Hellenistic vases or reliefs. The juxtaposition of the ritualistic behaviour of the female attendants of Dionysus with the description of the threesome the man is experiencing suggests the man is similarly entering into contact with his Dionysian side and his darker unconscious desires, played out in the sadomasochistic scene whilst under the influence of a ‘pill’ he has taken. Indeed, the god Dionysus is alluded to multiple times within Passages, and usually in relation to a certain ‘madness’ aligned with him and his followers.

Patricia Waugh, writing about 1960s Britain, has observed that a revival of a certain ‘myth’ of artistic madness took place in countercultural circles at the start of the decade, in particular the idea that artistic creativity is an outgrowth of individual psychopathology. Building on Alfred Alvarez’s work in The Savage God (1972), Waugh identified the main source for this ‘myth of the artist’ as originating in Nietzsche’s writings in which ‘Dionysus comes to stand as a symbol of psychic renewal through a self-dissolution involving an ecstatic release of the instincts in primordial ritual’ (Waugh 2006: 179–80). Quin would have been familiar with this representation of the god Dionysus, having read anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) which characterized cultures as either Apollonian or Dionysian, depending on whether they valued restraint and modesty as opposed to ostentation and excess. Waugh has pointed out the influence of Nietzsche on influential anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s work, which she argues is ‘pervaded with the metaphor of the Dionysian as daybreak, of madness as breakthrough, liberation and renewal, as much as breakdown, enslavement and existential death’ (Waugh 2006: 179). In this context, the idea of the creative individual whose art is grounded in neurosis, pain and suffering, put forward in Edmund Wilson’s influential essay ‘Philoctetes: The Wound and the Bow’ (1965), gained currency in 1960s Britain, evident in the numerous works published during the decade which dealt with ideas of creative madness.³ As such, Passages can be situated within a certain framework of literature which explored the concept of madness as a breakthrough by writers who, to put it in Waugh’s terms, ‘were searching for a justification of art as an antidote to an instrumentally rationalist culture of mediocrity and conformism’ (Waugh 2006: 179–80).

Whilst in the passage quoted above the links between the annotation and the main diary entry can be traced, at other times connections are much vaguer, as, for example, when a quotation referring to a ‘Siren invasion’ is juxtaposed with a description of flowers and plants, followed by a reflection on what will happen after leaving the country:

Here the annotation is an altered version of Henri Michaux’s phrase ‘[t]he camel invasion took place with regularity and sureness’ from his prose poem ‘Intervention’ (1930), collected in Selected Writings: The Space Within (1968). The reference to Michaux’s playful poem, which describes how the narrator intervenes in the natural ecology of the French city Honfleur by introducing camels into its environment out of boredom (before leaving the place to deal with the ensuing chaos), is fitting in the way in which Passages incorporates a certain surrealist sensibility into its descriptions. Quin’s prose poetry sections, in Three as well as in Passages in the sections of the woman’s narrative, invite parallels to Michaux’s poetry which is sometimes versified but often in prose. In My Properties, Michaux creates an image of a purposeless life in which man has to create and find his own meaning, probing the question of personal identity, a concern equally explored in Passages, as this article will go on to discuss. Furthermore, as the title of a selection of his work published in 1944, The Space Within, makes clear, Michaux, like Quin, is interested in looking inward and was equally concerned with exploring the inner self through fantasies, dreams as well as drug-induced experiments.⁴ Thus, whilst at first glance the annotation in the margin doesn’t appear to be related to the main section, by probing further and teasing out the intertextual references, connections and parallels with the texts in the margins start appearing. By replacing the word ‘camel’ with ‘siren’, Quin ensures the margins continue to reference ancient cultures (predominantly by references to Greek mythology, but equally to Jewish traditions) whilst nevertheless infusing these with more modern influences. Other intertexts referenced in the margins include Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber, The Dictionary of Word Origins by Joseph T. Shipley, a letter from Keats (recording a conversation with Coleridge about dreams), the Romantic epic poem ‘Orlando Furioso’ by Lodovico Ariosto (translated by John Harrington), Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus and The Bull of Minos by Leonard Cottrell. Not all the annotations are quotations as personal observations and thoughts are also occasionally recorded in the margins. The majority of the annotations in the man’s diary sections thus self-consciously enter into dialogue with a range of texts, most of which reference Greek and Jewish myths. As Sebastian Groes has noted, many writers in Britain in the 1960s were interested in myth; according to him, this interest is

at once a reaction to the kitchen-sink realism of the writing of the 1950s and a (perhaps regressive) return to the Modernist interest in classical mythology – one might think of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and W. H. Auden – in response to the mediatized, technological and anti-metaphysical mythologies of modernity, which Debord, McLuhan and Roland Barthes analysed. (Groes 2016: 8)

Anthony Burgess, referring to this increasing interest in myth in the period in relation to his own writing, commented that ‘I think my own novelistic future depends more and more on digging into mythical roots, the mythical expression of human behaviour, rather than the naturalistic expression of what we see around us’ (as quoted in Groes 2016: 8). Passages, as the juxtaposition of mythic references in the margins with present-day actions in the main body of the text illustrates, is equally concerned with exploring in what ways mythical expressions of human behaviour inform or can illuminate the present human condition.

The form and structure of Passages rely heavily on the use of repetition and multiple viewpoints in order to produce a certain effect of depth. Time is not portrayed in chronological order, but instead is almost rendered stagnant, as a murky waiting time in which things are always the same, in a constant state of stasis in the face of deterioration. In this respect, parallels with Samuel Beckett’s work can be drawn whilst French nouveau romancier Alain Robbe-Grillet’s statement that time ‘no longer passes’, referring mainly to his own work, but also identifying a trend in the French ‘new’ novels, is equally applicable to Passages (Robbe-Grillet 1963: 133, my translation). It appears to have stopped running, referred to explicitly in the woman’s narrative: ‘What’s the time then? He twisted her wrist round. Your watch has stopped must have stopped’ (Quin 2009: 8). Past and present thus become blurred, and when analepses occur, as they do quite frequently in Passages, it is not at all clear where these start or end. Memories continually intrude upon the present, tainting it, as do fantasies and dreams, and often it isn’t possible to distinguish between them. By giving primacy to the recording of phenomena, rather than being concerned with their explanation or cause, Passages explores how reality appears to the characters, portraying their phenomenological experiences.

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Brighton, November 2014

I am going to a conference in Brighton called ‘Legacies of the Avant-Garde: Experimental Writings 1960–2014’. My sister, who is living in London, and I had decided to make a trip of it. We meet at Brighton station around 5 pm the day before the conference and rush to catch an art exhibition which marks the fifty-year anniversary of the publication of Quin’s first novel Berg, before it shuts at 6 pm.

The artist Anna Deamer has recreated an imaginary film set for Berg. Everything, down to the smell of cigarette- and coffee-stained furnishings, has been thought of to the minutest detail; bottles of hair-restoring cream in a trunk, cat hair on the sofa next door, the abandoned dummy lying on the floor, shattered china teacups. Entering the rooms feels like entering Quin’s fictional world - it is quite astounding. The next day, as part of the conference, I am to visit it again. I meet Anna Deamer who shows me a huge photo album containing much of her research, including a photo of the partition between Quin’s childhood bedroom and her mum’s room, probably the inspiration for the seedy seaside bedsit Greb lives in.

The morning of the conference my sister and I have a cold cooked breakfast at our hotel whilst a family next to us complains to the staff about the poor meal and service. We leave most of the food on our plate, worried it isn’t cooked properly and go back up to our nice sea-facing room. I have some time before the conference starts and my sister needs to do some work.

I go out with Quin’s old address in my pocket, the early morning sea air rushing at my face as I walk along the wide promenade, trying to find the house her mother lived in, the place Quin stayed at during her last summer.

Arriving at the house is underwhelming. I take a picture of the outside, feeling like I should. I don’t stay in front of it long, conscious this is now someone else’s home, has been other people’s homes, has been made over, transformed and on this November morning it appears as nothing but a nondescript house. On the way back to the hotel I try to walk partly along the sea, but the pebbled beach makes it difficult and through my shoes the stones feel hard and obstinate.

Ontological Insecurity

The employment of the term ‘schizophrenia’ on the blurb of Passages in the late sixties points to the influence of the theories of Glaswegian psychoanalyst R. D. Laing. As such, the novel can be understood as reflecting concerns of sixties culture in its exploration of the schizophrenic experience. Indeed, as Waugh has pointed out, Laing’s ideas formulated in The Divided Self (1969) were extremely influential in the 1960s countercultural movement in Britain:

His notion that insanity is not an abandonment of the real but a potentially intelligible attempt to achieve ontological security through the expression of a self fragmented by the pressures and violences of a competitive and exploitative society was one of the most influential theses to come out of the radical movements of the sixties. (Waugh 1995: 6–7)

In The Divided Self Laing insists that the schizophrenic person must be understood within a social context and suggests that their behaviour and thought patterns, when viewed in such a context, are reasonable and understandable. Quin, as a subscriber to Alexander Trocchi’s sigma portfolio would have received R. D. Laing’s paper entitled ‘The Present Situation’ as part of sigma Nr 6 in December 1964 and would have been aware of Laing’s basic arguments. Both the man and the woman in Passages can in fact be understood in Laingian terms as suffering from ‘ontological insecurity’, a concept Laing explores in The Divided Self and which he interprets as lying at the root of schizophrenic behaviour. According to Gavin Miller, Laing’s ‘ontological insecurity’ can be understood as ‘a genre of personality’ which ‘revolves around the sufferer’s threatened and precarious sense of existence’, and which can cause the ontologically insecure individual to have ‘difficulty in maintaining a sense of personal continuity’ (Miller 2004: 46). Thus the woman records the man observing: ‘How is consistency ever possible I have no sense at all who I was yesterday, he said, fingers traced the outline of my mouth, face’ (Quin 2009: 68). In the corresponding diary entry of the man we find in the margins: ‘Can be any one of these, according to whim/projection. What is it/shall it be for today’ (Quin 2009: 38). Opposite the annotation follows a list of possible roles the man can assume: lover, husband, brother, father, guardian, prophet, mystic, writer, addict, semi-god, beast. According to Laing, the ontologically insecure person is ‘compulsively preoccupied with the sustained observation of his own mental and/or bodily processes’ (Laing 1969: 122), reflecting the ways in which the characters’ narratives function as compulsive examinations of their own behaviour. The fact that the man and woman’s narratives often flit between pronouns, referring to themselves in the first person as well as in the third person, can further be illuminated by a reading of Laing’s explanation of the schizophrenic experience. Laing points out that a schizophrenic individual experiences themselves ‘as “split” in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on’ (Laing 1969: 17), and goes on to give an example of a schizophrenic’s experience of this phenomenon:

One of the fragments of the self generally seems to retain the sense of ‘I’. The other ‘self’ might then be called ‘her’. But this ‘her’ is still ‘me’. Rose [a patient] says, ‘She’s me, and I’m her all the time’. One schizophrenic told me: ‘She’s an I looking for a me’. (Laing 1969: 158)

Thus, the switch in pronouns evident in the following passage from the woman’s narrative in effect signals the woman’s experience of herself as split:

He was in the same position as she had left him. Though she knew he must have rolled, turned many times in the night. I held the shell and fell asleep. (Quin 2009: 15)

It isn’t possible to identify these different selves as the narrating self and experiencing self, for they inhabit the same time frame. The woman twice refers to her lover as ‘a shell’, as if he possesses no real self, but is simply ‘[a] shell held close’ (Quin 2009: 68). The man also refers to himself in the third person, as evident in the following passage, though the question of whom he’s writing about remains decidedly ambiguous:

He lifted the bottle to his dry lips, and saw himself quite clearly in that moment as she must see him often: heavy, blotched, air of uncertainty in hotel corridors, trains, streets, harbours, waiting rooms, parks. Suspicious, hostile. Persistent talking in idiot fashion, or worse: insistent silence, preoccupied with concerns she would call indulgent, metaphysical, calculating. He straightened up, straightened his tie, and hoped he gave her his ‘High Priest’ look. (Quin 2009: 40)

The reference to his ‘High Priest’ look, however, appears to confirm he must be writing about himself, as the woman had previously referred to her lover in a similar manner in her narrative: ‘He gave his High Priest look from his Zen position in the middle of the bed’ (Quin 2009: 9). The use of quotation marks in his piece when she doesn’t use any suggests these are her words, her terms, which he adopts in order to talk about himself. The use of different pronouns to refer to the man and woman disorients the reader as the questions of narrative mood—who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective?—and narrative voice—who is narrating?—are often decidedly ambiguous; indeed, they imply a conception of the self as a concrete whole, an idea that is contested by both the man’s and woman’s narratives which deconstruct the supposedly binary oppositions of self and other, or the binary opposition of the self as a binary (i.e. experiencing self and narrating self). Instead Passages appears to entertain a plurality of transitional voices, of possible precarious selves which refuse to be contained within one single representation of the self, reflecting the schizophrenic’s experience of a fragmented self.

Whilst Laing’s ideas regarding schizophrenia were gaining currency in 1960s Britain, they were also being explored in the United States. Gregory Bateson, who expressed respect for the views of R. D. Laing, was a prominent name in the treatment and theorizing of schizophrenia in America in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Wood 2013: 146). He was married to Margaret Mead, an anthropologist whose work Quin reported having studied whilst attending classes at the University of New Mexico, and whose thoughts on schizophrenia in different cultures show signs of Bateson’s influence. Like the work undertaken by Laing, Bateson’s treatment and study of schizophrenic patients focused on ‘the embeddedness of the individual in social worlds’, representing schizophrenia as ‘primarily a disorder of intrafamilial communication’, whilst seeing ‘elements of the sacred and the scientific coalesce in the individual’s experience of psychosis’ (Wood 2013: 149).

By designating the characters as suffering from ‘schizophrenia’ in the novel’s blurb, Passages thus engaged with the 1960s idea of schizophrenia as a condition caused by pressures of an external environment and interpersonal experiences on an individual. In The Politics of Experience (1972 [1967]), Laing suggests that in order to understand schizophrenia we should read into it ‘its etymological meaning: Schiz—“broken”; Phrenos—“soul or heart”’ (Laing 1972: 106). As he makes explicit, ‘schizophrenia’, ‘in this existential sense, has little to do with the clinical examination, diagnosis, prognosis and prescriptions for therapy of “schizophrenia”’ (Laing 1972: 106). To label her characters as suffering from the condition was also to signal to the reader an interest in exploring inner states; as Laing explained in his article ‘What is Schizophrenia?’, published in the New Left Review in 1964, every person lives in two worlds: an inner and an outer world, and the people who are labelled ‘schizophrenic’ are those who have retreated into their inner world:

The person who has entered this inner realm (if only he is allowed to experience this) will find himself going, or being conducted—one cannot clearly distinguish active from passive here—on a journey. This journey is experienced as going further ‘in’, as going back through one’s personal life, in and back and through and beyond into the experience of all mankind, of the primal man, of Adam and perhaps even further into the being of animals, vegetables, and minerals. (Laing 1964)

In this article Laing posits that the label ‘schizophrenia’ can be understood as ‘one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light beg[ins] to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds’ (Laing 1964). Laing appears to suggest that if this journey into the inner realm of the mind is taken, if one pursues this so-called ‘madness’, it is highly probable that some form of enlightenment will have been reached through which the individual is able to come back from this madness as a more enlightened person.

The schizophrenia of Quin’s characters then, must be understood within a very specific cultural and political understanding of the term. It denotes that both characters can be understood as ‘ontologically insecure’ individuals who are experiencing a breakdown in relation between thoughts, feelings, and actions. They experience their self as fragmented or fundamentally split and at times appear to suffer from delusions or hallucinations. Yet both characters also define themselves by their so-called ‘madness’ and are interested in exploring the mental states it induces. There are allusions to the taking of psychedelic substances and the ritualistic depictions in the margins explore parallels between their states and those achieved by the Dionysian frenzy of ancient rituals. Drawing on the popular theories of the so-called ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement, anthropological studies of ritual in Ancient Greece and countercultural interest in drugs as a means to experience alternative mental states, the schizophrenia of the characters refers broadly to the inner journey they are both undertaking and documenting. Yet this does not represent a merely solipsistic endeavour. Indeed, by employing the term ‘schizophrenia’ to refer to the characters’ condition, Passages suggests that the context in which they are experiencing the condition has an important role to play. External factors contribute to their sense of self as split and to thus simply dismiss Passages, as most reviews did, as being too inward-looking is to offer a reductive reading of the novel.

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Glasgow, July 2016

Quin apparently lived in an adobe house in Placitas. I google ‘adobe house’ and find out it is one of the earliest building materials, made from earth and organic matter. I look for images of adobe houses in Placitas, imagining her living there. I remember a Facebook page set up for Quin, written as if Quin herself was posting from beyond the grave. A friend of Quin’s – ‘Larry Someone’, if I’m not mistaken – set it up; he used to live in Placitas and they knew each other while she was staying there. I google ‘Larry Placitas’ and stumble upon an image of Quin reading. I’m familiar with this photo, it’s one of the ones that comes up first when anyone googles Quin. I click on it and see it is captioned ‘audio’. I had known Quin and her lover had recorded a radio show at the University in Iowa and had sent various emails trying to track the recording down, but to no avail – there was no record of her speaking in any of the audio files that hadn’t disappeared. I had tried finding fragments of Quin’s television appearances but no luck there either. I click on the link and am redirected to an audio extract of Quin reading her second novel Three.

I start listening – her voice is so unlike what I imagined, and yet not. I’m not sure what I had imagined she would sound like. She sounds posher than I would have anticipated, I think, and I remember her writing of her mother sending her to a Catholic convent school, in order to learn how to say ‘gate’, not ‘giate’ (Quin 1966c: 63). I stop the recording, wanting to purchase it as an mp3 file before something happens to it and it disappears. Suggested price is $7 and I pay $10. I download it. The recording had been uploaded a month ago.

I listen to the tape recording when I get home later on that day. Quin reads from the beginning of Three. But before she begins there are a couple of seconds in which she utters a few unscripted words as she looks for the page she wants to start from:

‘oh this is here –ya’. Deep breath. Sound of pages turning. ‘Okay?’

Then Quin starts reading from her second novel and I’m listening in my kitchen, following the words in the Dalkey Archive Press edition I own. The recording is thirty-six minutes long and ends abruptly – something must have happened to the recording, then, or in the forty years since. I restart it and listen to the very start of the recording a few times, thinking that something is located there in that brief moment in time which captures the specificity of Quin, in the mid-to late sixties, about to read to her friend in the small adobe house she’s renting in the foothills of the Sandia mountains.

Acknowledgements

The research for this chapter was financed by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Correspondence in the Calder & Boyars archives shows that the novel was a challenge for the typesetters with the printers referring to it as a ‘rather difficult title’ (Donald Smart at Northumberland Press Limited to Meredith Ittner at Calder & Boyars Publishers, 5th June 1968, Calder and Boyars Archives, Box 103).

2 The woman writes: ‘No I don’t belong to the Party, my brother might have done—I don’t know’ (Quin 2009: 10).

3 Writing elsewhere, I have listed Quin’s Passages as one of the novels which can be situated ‘in a particular strand of sixties literature which explores the concept of divided selves and / or madness, including Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), Angela Carter’s Several Perceptions (1968), […] Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall (1969)’ and Anna Kavan’s Ice (1967) (Van Hove 2019: 117).

4 Michaux published three books between 1956 and 1959 which dealt with his experiences with mescaline: Miserable Miracle, L’infini turbulent and Paix dans les brisements.