Truth in the Gutter

Metonymy and Memory in Spiegelman’s Maus

Figure 1

Art Spiegelman ushers us into the second chapter of the second volume of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale with a visual pun. The title page contains mice, their partially-anthropomorphized mouths agape with torment, their eyes round with terror, surrounded by flames or gas (Fig. 1). The title, hand-drawn in Teutonic block letters, reads “Auschwitz: (Time Flies).” The “S” is bent and angular as in the Nazi logo. These letters hang above the image, and blend with it in conceptual (if not emotional) harmony. It could be a movie poster for our tacitly agreed-upon, collective narrative of the holocaust, with its cast of stock characters, images, and icons. But around the image—violating it, contaminating it—buzz drawings of flies (the “flies of time,” perhaps). They are the size they would be in our world, the wr­iter’s world, and they crawl over the image, over the blank space around the image, partially obscuring the genteel “Chapter Two” above it. They remind us that the text is a superimposition of the author’s own memories, experiences, and biases over the memories of his father. While the words are Vladek’s, the pictures are Spiegelman’s triply-mediated account of those words. The flies become a metonymy for many things at once: the corruption of memory by time; the rank, guilt-poisoned writer’s block preventing Spiegelman from completing the second volume; and the contamination of our culturally-ingrained holocaust iconography, which, the novel seems to suggest, we must carefully protect from becoming prurient melodrama instead of what it is—sacred cultural and personal truth.

Figure 2

Spiegelman inoculates against this corruption with his triple-narrative strategy—a strategy unique to comics. Through deliberate artificiality, he replaces brittle fact with lush Truth; not the surface truth of raw data, but the invisible Truth (in the Romantic sense) at the core of those data. The first narrative is Vladek’s recollection of the Holocaust. It is harrowing, largely chronological, and often recognizable in its iconography. The second, existing interstitially within the first, and often out of sequence, is Spiegelman’s record of obtaining his father’s story. His father in this narrative layer, unlike the hero of the Holocaust narrative, is domineering, difficult, manipulative, selfish, and sometimes cruel. At times, Spiegelman must wrest the narrative from his father’s clutches (clutches so strong that Vladek, who never throws anything away, has destroyed his wife’s journals—the only thing that could contradict his account of events). It could be a dirty business, to coopt someone’s greatest trauma and repurpose it to one’s own ends, but Spiegelman always fesses up, makes the theft transparent, creating a narrative tier that, while casting doubt on the accuracy of his father’s memory, serves not to contradict Vladek but to allow more than one reality to exist at once—to gently expose the fallibility and limitations of memory. In Figure 2, Spiegelman draws two tiers of time. The first, on the right side of the page, records a present-day conversation between Artie and his father in which Vladek recounts marching out of Auschwitz. On the left-hand side of the page, Spiegelman draws the marching prisoners, and includes an orchestra in the background, a fact about which he has read in other accounts of the camps. His father protests: “From the gate guards took us over to the workshop. How could it be there an orchestra?” (Spiegelman 54). Spiegelman grumbles that the facts are well-documented, but concedes by redrawing the march in a panel right below the first, filling in the orchestra’s space with marching prisoners. But the reader can see the tips of the instruments in the background. The ghost of the orchestra is still nestled there: Spiegelman keeps it as one amid a palimpsest of memories. In this way, he includes both his father’s lower-case “t” truth, and the lower-case truth of other survivor’s documented histories. In image form, these two truths, which should contradict one another, instead coalesce. Together, through the imperfection of each, they show that we can approach a capital “T” Truth, however asymptotically. And Spiegelman both complicates and resolves these interwoven tales with his third tier of narrative representation; a metanarrative that exists outside the story—outside of time itself.

In Understanding Comics, one of the most approachable textbooks on semiotics ever written, Scott McCloud tells us that simplified images, with detail stripped away, have a singular power to represent ideas rather than forms. He remarks that:

By de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favor of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts. Through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without… and through the cartoon the world within (McCloud 41).

Figure 3

Spiegelman leverages this phenomenon throughout the novel by rendering different races and nationalities as different animals, and by creating the world in simple, blocky, crosshatched line drawings. But nowhere do we see this effect used to such perfection as in Spiegelman’s third tier, in which he creates a pure “world within,” and lets it both interact with the world outside and exist free of it. The flies, which are now operating on numerous levels through visual pun, follow us from Chapter 2’s title page into the chapter itself, as does the assertion that “Time Flies…” We are confronted with the artist, slumped over his drafting table. He isn’t a mouse, but a man in a mouse mask (for to expose the artificiality of the storytelling is a classic metanarrative strategy). Flies circle around him, and after a few panels we pan back to see that the drafting table rests on a pile of emaciated human/mouse bodies (fig. 3). The flies have become a triple metonymy—for the passing of time, for artistic stagnation, and for the feeling Artie has that his book has defiled the dead. We have reached a narrative level that exists outside of temporal logic: this is an artist visually grappling with interior demons in the purely sensory space where emotions intersect with ideas. He gives us a unique front-row seat to someone else’s timeless reservoir of identity, the place in which we wrestle with and invent ourselves, and this space can best be explored through the tension between words and images. The words here give one set of data—we learn Vladek has died, that several years have elapsed since the publication of the first volume of Maus, and that it was a critical and commercial success—but combined with the images we see an entirely different data set: we see an identity ripped asunder; a success that feels like murder; a profound guilt that the author has profited from his family’s tragedy. Such conceptual tripling isn’t accomplishable with words alone. Only the interplay of images and words can weave so many layers together.

Spiegelman elbows in on truth by braiding these multiple localized and highly personal narratives together, including his own. French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard would approve. It is what, in “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,” he calls “small narrative.” He offers “small narrative” as an antidote to “grand narrative,” or history-by-consensus, which tends to calcify into overly-simplistic tropes of good and evil, written and maintained by the victors (or survivors) of any given conflict. He insists that:

Consensus has become an outmoded and suspect value… We must thus arrive at an idea and practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus… it must be local, in other words, agreed upon by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation… limited in space and time (Lyotard 504).

Figure 4

Spiegelman fights the over-simplification of the past through, paradoxically, simplification: his images are metaphoric and metonymic—they are, in other words, so simple they are patently “untrue.” Men are not mice; we do not live in a sketchy black-and-white world; and the swarms of reporters stepping over the dead bodies in Spiegelman’s apartment amidst buzzing flies are there only in Artie’s imagination (Fig. 4). In the same image, these reporters, who cheapen and trivialize the war in their quest for profit, lob their solicitations at a masked Artie, while he shrinks and shrinks until he is child-sized, emitting an infant’s “WAH!” This is not strict verisimilitude, we all know, but we also see how it gets at something deeper, something that exists on a purely experiential level, and that collapses the strict hierarchy we like to maintain between “history” and “emotion.” Simplified forms, as McCloud notes, illustrate the complexity of the concepts.

Spiegelman is wise to use the comics form to tell his threefold tale: comics offer what other mediums can’t, in that the reader becomes a collaborator. McCloud makes much of what he terms the “gutter,” or the space between the panels in a cartoon, as a space where readers commit “closure.” “Comics panels fracture both time and space,” he says, “offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (McCloud 67). What better way to reconstruct a shared Truth than to make the reader complicit by asking her to add her own interpretations to a story at risk of becoming clichéd by concensus? McCloud remarks that comics is, “…a medium where the audience is a willing and conscious collaborator and closure is the agent of change” (65). If the project is to present multiple, local, Lyotardian “small narratives” in order to patchwork facts and feelings into a unified (if sometimes contradictory) history, the best way to do so is to make the reader an aider and abettor. History, in our postmodern world, must be apprehended in aggregate, not by consensus, or we risk corrupting it, and the most honest way of getting at it is asking us all to participate. This is our story, Spiegelman seems to say—all of our history. The Truth, in other words, is hidden in the gutter, among the flies.

Works Cited

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.” Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Cahoone. Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996. 481-513.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1993.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus, A Survivor’s Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began. Pantheon Books. 1991.

Landscape and Loneliness

Images of Alienation in Adrien Tomine’s “Translated, from the Japanese,”

The bullet train shoots through Tokyo. Snow sidles down from the hazy ochre sky above the electrical wires, and the muted scene expresses a world in winter. Cold seeps off the page. The handwritten text that hovers far above the drab cityscape (in a sky that takes up 4/5 of the page) is close and so neat it’s almost right- as well as left-justified. It clearly expresses, like the scene, a heart in winter. The text begins a circumspect and somewhat cagey second-person narration indicating that the speaker is a parent, taking her child to California against the wishes of her family. But we get a sense of distance and loneliness from this first panel, a sense that the text alone doesn’t reveal. Or perhaps that the visual of the text reveals.  Though she mentions people, this world is free of them. The only life in the image is the life of machines.

Tomine blends clarity in word and image with mystery, and this has something to do with the way the words and images interact. The images are meticulously drawn, and evoke a certain kind of commercial art. They feel vaguely instructional, like the diagrams that show airplane passengers how to disembark in case of a water landing. Perhaps that’s what this story is: a representation of a state of emergency, carefully rendered, but about which its characters are in denial, and toward which their hearts are frozen. The words throughout the… (what do we call this? A graphic short story? A series of vignettes? A visual haiku? I can’t find an apt term) …the words throughout the piece acknowledge some form of confusion and heartbreak, but mother and child interact with people in nearly every panel in a normal, neighborly way. The Osaka professor sitting next to the child on the plane is kind and generous, and we get quite a bit of detail about him in the text; the stewardess mistakes him for the speaker’s husband, and when they disembark, he becomes again the stranger that he was before the flight; the child’s father, from whom, we learn, the speaker is estranged, embraces the child and has made arrangements for the two of them to stay in California; the family drives together, eats together, and the speaker makes reference to the birthday party the child will enjoy the following day. But juxtaposed with the images, this text betrays the speaker’s internal loneliness, which her interactions with the other characters cannot penetrate. Combined with the images, the text shows us a world of precision and cleanliness, but an empty world, a world of supreme isolation, bereft of humanity. We get no faces on the plane, just physical details of the space and the tops of heads. When our speaker reports that the professor “laughed very much at the strange things you said” (Tomine 77) all we see is an airplane tray table littered with candy and a notebook; when she asks the man to look after the child, we see the overhead baggage compartment, and in the bottom left corner the top of someone’s head; the closest we come to seeing the child is his/her arm, clutching a child’s blanket, while in a separate seat the speaker holds a cup of coffee, cut off by the image border. When our speaker looks at the world, the story suggests, she sees only fragments of objects, the gorgeous heartache of everyday things. In this way the images defy their verisimilitude: they appear true to life visually, but, filtered through the speaker’s emotional state, they have been unpeopled to an unrealistic degree. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud analyzes the way abstraction takes us out of the real world: “By de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favor of the idea of form,” he says, “the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts. Through traditional realism the comics artist can portray the world without… and through the cartoon the world within” (41). In this case, however, we are confronted with extreme realism in the images, but with elisions we can’t square with realism. The speaker’s mind rejects the people around her. But does she admit that to us when she speaks? She can’t. This character is crippled by her inability to get through the frozen landscape of her emotions, and the world she observes reflects her inner state. This cognitive dissonance foreshadows the revelation on the final page.

The barely-perceptible shadow of death lurks here and the devil, as always, is in the details. The second-to-last panel is of a light fixture, seen from below. The lamp’s cover is missing, exposing its innards. There are fittings for two bulbs, but only one bulb present. “I fell asleep in my clothes on the floor beside you,” says the narrator, “listening to the sound of your breath” (Tomine 81). The fixture, we assume, is what she’s looking at as she lies there awake beside her sleeping child. Reporting about a broken marriage and an impending abandonment, what her brain registers is a broken object with two of its parts missing. The story that is implied in this image is not the one the narrator tells us (that two things will soon be missing from her own life). McCloud says that, “The platonic ideal of the cartoon may seem to omit much of the ambiguity and complex characterization which are the hallmarks of modern literature, leaving them suitable only for children. But simple elements can combine in complex ways… great power is locked in [a] few simple lines. Releasable only by the reader’s mind” (45). Tomine’s brown-drab world has, if anything, more complexity than a true-to-life image would. His images, combined with his words, show, experientially, a very specific mind in crisis, a coy mind, a mind struggling with the unnameable.

We are left with the most beautiful panel in the piece. A view of San Francisco, at night, green fog rolling in above a city warm with lights. But we, the speaker and the reader, are on the other side of an unbridgeable divide: the dead, dark-olive Bay separates us from the life on the other side. Eight stars peek out above the cityscape. Here we get the revelation that the images foreshadowed: “I wonder how old you are now,” says the speaker. “How long have I been gone?” (82). She is no longer with her child. There is the same clarity… and the same mystery. Is she dead? Has she hidden the note for the child to find? Why doesn’t she know her child’s age? We, like the speaker, are exiled, on the other side of the cold Bay—a divide as metaphorical as it is literal—and our hearts remain in winter.

I highly recommend Adrian Tomine's collection of illustrated short stories from which this story comes, titled Killing and Dying.

Cited Sources

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1993. Print

Tomine, Adrian. Killing and Dying. US: Drawn and Quarterly, Client Publisher of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 2015. Print

Never Quite Disclosed

Epistemological Hijinks in the Poems of Emily Dickinson

“Literature is not religion, and it doesn’t address itself to belief. But if we shut the vision of it completely out of our minds… something goes dead inside us, perhaps the one thing that it is really important to keep alive.”
— Northrup Frye, The Educated Imagination

Emily Dickinson wrote during a revolution in epistemology. Scientific inquiry, from the time of Francis Bacon, had endeavored to uncover the stable, static, unchanging design behind God’s universe. But what was becoming increasingly clear, from Charles Darwin onward, was that the scientific method uncovered, despite itself, not nature’s divine stability but its chaotic stochasticity. Scientists and theologians of the time scrambled to reevaluate knowledge itself: why we gather it and to what purpose to put it. Enter Emily Dickinson, educated in both theology and the sciences, and highly observant of the way the inner (spiritual) life interacts with the natural world. She joins the debate on the one hand as a Victorian scholar, representing 19th century religious ideas of an unchanging, stable, and discoverable Truth with a celestial creator, and on the other as a naturalist who doesn’t just accept but celebrates contingency, chance, and change. She places the two worldviews in tension by employing metaphors that destabilize rather than coordinate the world—emphasizing, rather than reducing, difference—in an attempt to suggest that it’s process, not product, that gets us closest to the divine.

In her article “The Apparatus of the Dark: Emily Dickinson and the Epistemology of Metaphor,” Michelle Kohler notes that the scientific method had “…long held the promise of gradually revealing a fixed, divine order to the material world” (61). But, she goes on to say, these methods were dismantling the very ideas of permanence and fixity they were meant to reinforce. In response, she notes, “Dickinson seeks a new way of thinking about revelation that embraces process and provisionality” (Kohler 61). Let us examine poem 1140 as an exemplar of this phenomenon. The poem starts without surprise: “The Lightning is a yellow fork” (Dickinson 457). Forks and lightening are an oft-paired metaphor, and represent the way lightening branches into frightening and destructive “tines.” But the poem veers dramatically from the expected in the next few lines: “From tables in the sky / By inadvertent fingers dropt / The awful Cutlery.” This lightening fork, far from being a representation of God’s terrible power (a cliché the reader is primed to expect), is actually a domestic, almost womanly metaphor of mislaid flatware. This fork is dropped by accident from a heavenly table during, we have no choice but to presume, a heavenly meal. Even in God’s “mansion,” accidents happen. Randomness reigns supreme. Note what Dickinson chooses to capitalize. The Fork, the Table, and the Cutlery, are given proper noun status, while the “fingers” and the “mansions” of God are generic. The poem employs the passive voice: the Fork is dropped. God is undermined as the agent. It is the mistake, the movement, the downward motion, as well as, to a certain extent, the end viewer’s ability to see the metaphor, that Dickinson emphasizes. Further, the reader is asked to imagine this accident as revealing a spiritual truth. But it is the falling object’s accidental disclosure, not the object itself—the God-made lightening, table, mansion, or observer—that delivers this spiritual truth.  The cutlery is dropped from “…mansions never quite disclosed / And never quite concealed,” and the moment of observation causes “The Apparatus of the Dark” to be, for a brief, accidental moment, exposed to those who otherwise have no access to the mysteries of the divine. Through destabilized metaphor, our poet approximates revelation.

Dickinson places herself in competition with God by offering up this exposé. As Claudia Schwarz notes in her article “Dickinson’s Journeys Beyond Time,” “Whereas God has the power to give and to take away, the poet’s imagination transcends the boundaries he has set up and even turns his concepts upside down” (94). Just as science was challenging—albeit queasily—God’s hegemony, Dickinson, too, shifts the focus from God’s power to nature’s mutability and contingency. To an almost blasphemous degree she places herself in the role of its record-keeper and even, at times, as its creator. We see this in poem 787, in which she claims that had she the seed, her own “bloom” would surpass the bloom of sunset (Dickinson 351). Humble, in a way, because she admires the “Efflorescence” of sunset while admitting she isn’t equipped with the right material to enact her one-upmanship. But it takes nerve to suggest that with the right tools she could out-create God. In The Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne, Evan Carton notes how paradoxically Dickinson makes herself powerful: Dickinson’s language, he contends, “…exercises its power as it seems to announce its impotence; and… intricately involves itself with its object while ostensibly opposing itself to it” (83). Sure, the mountain, “Indicating by no Muscle / The Experience,” doesn’t expend effort to create so gorgeous a sunset. But, insists the poem’s speaker, with the right “seed,” her “…Purple Sowing / Should endow the Day / Not—a Tropic of a Twilight— / Show itself away—.” Though it might take effort, her sunset wouldn’t be something that died in twilight, but would be an efflorescence worthy of the day. Like Carton, Kohler notes that, “…it is precisely in the act of laboring for and against itself, of claiming success and incapacity, that Dickinson’s metaphor locates meaning” (82). Cynthia Griffin Wolff, in Emily Dickinson, agrees with Schwarz that Dickinson’s poetry turns God’s concepts “upside down,” and even invites her readers to share the power: her verse, Wolff says, though the poet herself is mortal, can, “…confound death and transcend time by springing to life anew for every reader. Her poetry, then, stands as rival creation to God’s” (185). It is this brazenness that, despite her reclusive life, makes Dickinson one of the world’s most beloved iconoclasts.

Dickinson throws her gauntlet not just before God, but before all prevailing 19th century notions of the very purpose of knowledge-gathering. Previously, scientists assumed that, sans a priori assumptions, close observation would reveal the “intelligent design” behind the world’s outward variability. Instead, scientific observation was again and again undermining its theological end. Literature, Dickinson suggests, can mend this rift. She seeks, in Kohler’s words, a way to “…redress the growing rupture between empirical methods and spiritual truth” (61). Dickinson uses what, in “Emily Dickinson: Metaphorical Spaces and the Divided Self,” Simon du Plock calls her “paradoxical pronouns—often grammatically or generically unstable” (275) to celebrate the dual (and often multiform) nature of all things; metaphorical, rhetorical, and literal (and these become quite tangled: a sunset is at once real, the signified, and a metaphor of a bloom; her written bloom is a facsimile of that metaphorical bloom, but also, in the subjunctive, outblooms the real sunset’s bloom, etc.) Her poems breathe life into the inanimate while exposing the mechanisms behind the omnipotent. Kohler contends that an unstable Dickinson metaphor can, “…accommodate the incongruity that erupts amid her repeated efforts to make words adhere to their referents” (77), which goes a long way to explaining Dickinson’s obsession with the limits of knowing: with half-obscuring and half-revealing (like her shadowy diner with His—Her?—effulgent cutlery). Literature can bridge the split in epistemology, but only imperfectly—in the way an asymptote approaches its axis.

In Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Stairway of Surprise, Charles R. Anderson comments upon her keen sense of the bounds of human perception:

What seem like objects to the limited mortal view are really aspects of nature as process, nature going down to the “death” of eternity. And conversely, what man sees as process and change are the illusory pictures cast by the immutable on his time-trapped senses (134-5).

Nature—God—shows us only a bit at a time, and shows it to us provisionally. And art, because it self-consciously creates an incomplete replica of its referent, is more suited than science or religion to approach “the immutables:” Truth, Revelation, etc. Perhaps that is why Northrup Frye, in The Educated Imagination, cautions us that without literature “…something goes dead inside us” (48), because the formal mechanisms by which we find truth—science and religion—speak in absolutes, whereas our minds apprehend only fragmentarily. Dickinson describes the artistic process best in poem 1263, when she urges us to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant— / Success in Circuit lies” (Dickinson 495). We must approach truth asymptotically, she tells us, else “every man be blind.” Dickinson embraces the paradox syntactically as well as rhetorically by creating an infinite loop within the reader’s mind. We have “truth” in the middle of the first line, equated with the Circuit that “lies”—the terminal word of the second line. Of course the denotation of the word “lies” in this context is “rests,” but the reader must also confront “lies” as truth’s opposite. Similarly, the word “slant” recalls a number line on a Cartesian coordinate system, elegant, infinite, while “circuit” evokes an ellipse… a known, limited, closed system. Du Plock comments that Dickinson seeks to “…satisfy our increasing need to have our intelligence resisted” (279), and this poem, with its paradoxes, does just that. It suggests we use our own limitations to glimpse the infinite; and lie to tell the truth. What better metaphor is there for art in general—for literature?

There is mischief in Dickinson’s metaphors. They’re pranks on the whole epistemological paradigm shift and its polarizing effects. And through her metaphorical roguery, her poetry synthesizes two prevailing worldviews—the randomness and chance that science reveals, and the spiritual Truth that religion espouses—and does so with pathos, humor, and humility. She understands something that neither side alone does: that divine truth can be found in nature’s very unpredictability, so that even as we lose truth as an unchanging entity, we gain something richer and truer to the human sensual and spiritual experience; we gain, in Kohler’s words, a truth that “…is true only insofar as it is of use to a person and… because usefulness is determined by constantly changing methods, needs, and environments, truth is always in the process of being made and remade” (84). Dickinson spent her life writing and rewriting, hardly considering the fruit of her labors. She, almost more than any other poet, privileged process over product. It was the labor itself that sustained her—and that continues to sustain us in a world that, despite our best efforts, can never be quite disclosed.

Cited Sources

Anderson, Charles R. Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Stairway of Surprise. New York: Rinehart and Winston. 1960. Print.

Carton, Evan. The Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. 1985. Print.

Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press. 1999. Print.

Du Plock, Simon. “Emily Dickinson: Metaphorical Spaces and the Divided Self.” The International Conference of Psychology and the Arts. Univ. of Porto. 26-28 July 2013. Presentation.

Frye, Northrup. The Educated Imagination. Concord: Anansi Press. 1997. Print.

Kohler, Michelle. “The Apparatus of the Dark: Emily Dickinson and the Epistemology of Metaphor.” Nineteenth Century Literature Vol. 67, No. 1 (June 2012): pp 58-86. Print.

Schwarz, Claudia. “Dickinson’s Journeys Beyond Time.” Arbeitenaus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Vol. 32, No. 1 (2007): pp 83-99. Print.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. Boston: Addison-Wesley. 1988. Print.

A Small Island Is Not a Country

History and Landscape in Jamaica Kincaid's "Song of Roland"

Jamaica Kincaid foregrounds a love story in “Song of Roland." But the love story quickly becomes a backdrop for the story’s true preoccupation: the highly charged power asymmetries roiling beneath its surface. Political and gender struggles leave traces in the flesh and behaviors of the characters, so that the struggles become larger, more elemental than the characters, who are often only partially aware of them. Even the island setting—its topographical features and its moody weather—becomes a character of sorts, with agency and motives, almost more real than the unnamed protagonist and her lover. Despite the story’s surface, its undercurrents concern power: power’s uses and power’s limits, and the way power is exercised by the powerless.

Most of the story is told in iterative time. The narrator and her lover meet again and again in an ongoing tryst, lending the romance a sense of the timeless, the mythological. Three exceptions, each including pages of sensual detail, anchor the narrative specifically in time and place: first, when the lovers meet during a rainstorm (indeed, the rainstorm seems partially responsible for their meeting). The narrator’s dress is plastered alluringly against her body; she must take shelter beneath a gallery. Her mood—which we eventually recognize as one of her chief coping strategies—is one of sublime desolation: “I was standing under the gallery,” she says, “enjoying completely the despair I felt at being myself” (147). She is receptive, in such a mood, to the aesthetic pleasures of romance. It seems as though Roland is as well, for she manages to communicate with him over a din of sadness: the people around them, speaking loudly of “…their disappointments… for joy is so short-lived there isn’t time to dwell on its occurrence” (148). The narrator derives her power from her ability to turn sadness and squalor into transcendent beauty so as not to be subsumed by it—she possesses the power of the artist.

The second instance of specific time occurs when the narrator has a confrontation with Roland’s wife. While the older woman hurls exaggerated invective at her—“…[she] called me a whore, a slut, a pig, a snake, a viper, a rat, a low-life, a parasite, and an evil woman” (151)—she keeps herself emotionally distant from the insults and blows, safe within another source of her power: her youth, beauty and indifference. “I was then a young woman in my early twenties,” she confides, “my skin was supple, smooth, the pores invisible to the naked eye” (151). While Roland’s wife, enraged, rips the narrator’s dress from her body, listing the names of his other lovers, the narrator coolly observes that “The impulse to possess is alive in every heart, and some people choose vast plains, some people choose high mountains, some people choose wide seas, and some people choose husbands;” adding, significantly, “I chose to possess myself” (152-3). The narrator is assured victory over her body and mind—unlike the other battlegrounds over which the characters fight and exhaust themselves.

The story’s ultimate scene sets the narrator and Roland facing the sea that can’t free them, with their backs to the island that traps them, the “…small world we were from, the world of… steep mountains… covered in a green so humble no one had ever longed for them, of three hundred and sixty-five small streams that would never meet up to form a majestic roar… of people who had never been regarded as people at all” (155). The narrator looks in the direction of the horizon. She can’t see it but knows it’s there, and she likens this unseen limit to the limit on her love for Roland. It will end, she’s foreseen, like the island’s three hundred and sixty-five streams: “[it would]… spill out of me and run all the way down a long, long road and then the road would come to an end and I would feel empty and sad…” (149). The island’s geography serves as an extended metaphor for the emotional limits it imposes on its inhabitants.

These three specific scenes, set within skeins of recursive time, do little to make the romance more concrete. Instead, what they highlight is the story’s preoccupation with themes of power and powerlessness. From their first meeting, the narrator asserts that Roland, “…was not a hero,” and unlike the emblem of chivalry to which the story’s title alludes (Childress), “…he was a small event in someone else’s history” (148). In her tenderest explorations of love, the narrator employs the language of war and conquest: “When our eyes met,” she says, “we laughed, because we were happy, but it was frightening, for that gaze asked everything: who would betray whom, who would be captive, who would be captor…” (148); Roland’s mouth, she asserts, was “…like a chain around me” (148); when he kisses her breasts, she can’t decide “…which sensation I wanted to take dominance over the other” (152); and when Roland’s wife confronts her, she tells the younger woman, “…[Roland’s] history; it was not a long one, it was not a sad one, no one had died in it, no land had been laid waste, no birthright had been stolen; she had a list, and it was full of names, but they were not the names of countries” (152). In this story, a romance is a conquering, with a victor and a loser. The lovers have been robbed of country, history, birthright and even personhood (a people “…who had never been regarded as people at all,”) and their attempts to reclaim are enacted on one another’s bodies. In this way the subtle shadow of colonial slave heritage stretches over the story, as inevitable as the weather (which, as the narrator asserts, is, “by now beyond comment” [148]). If the story’s landscape circumscribes, its history binds with an even tighter chain.

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The narrator triumphs because she refuses Roland’s “silent offering” (154). She remains in control of her fertility, which Roland wants—without understanding his want—to plunder, like he plunders the wombs of the ships whose lading he steals. She is so confident in her victory, she can empathize with her would-be possessor: for “…no mountains were named for him,” she says, “no valleys, no nothing… no history yet written had embraced him” (154). She can see that his need to conquer women is a proxy to remedy the shame of these losses, and that he can’t fully understand the “small uprisings” within him that urge him to all this small-scale conquering. Roland, like the narrator, wants a story of his own. But once again, as in times past, he has been hijacked by history. He has only the narrator—the artist—to sing his small and humble song.

Cited Sources

Childress, Diana. “The Song of Roland.” Calliope. March, 1999. Vol. 9 Issue 7. Web.

Kincaid, Jamaica. “Song of Roland.” More Stories We Tell: The Best Contemporary Short Stories by North American Women. Ed. Wendy Martin. New York. Pantheon Books. 2004. 146-55. Print.