CC BY
12УДК 821.111
Grafova Olga Igorevna
PhD (Philology), Senior Lecturer, Linguistics and Translation Department, Perm State University 614990, Perm, Bukirev Str., 15 Тел.: +7(342)2396283 E-mail: grafova.olly@gmail.com
Senchuk Anna Vladislavovna
Perm State University 614990, Perm, Bukirev Str., 15 Тел.: +7(342)2396283 E-mail: anna.senchuk25@gmail.com
A. S. BYATT'S THENEXTROOM: DOMESTIC SPACES, LABOUR AND ITS MANY GHOSTS
The article centers upon the poetics of the short story «The Next Room» written by Antonia Susan Byatt, a key figure in contemporary British Fiction. The title of the story immediately sends the readers to the space of the house, specifically to "the next room", where the voices of the protagonist's dead parents talk, and states the main theme of the story and several persisting motifs and images of the short story. The authors of the article investigate thoroughly the critical works of foreign and Russian literary theorists concerning the short story and the collection of stories «Sugar and Other Stories» (1987), into which «The Next Room» is included. The article investigates the motifs of the story that are mostly evident in it: motifs of life, labour, woman's identity, death, memories, family and different roots, of teeth, of family, of cacti. A lot of philosophical and literary works concerning the genre of the ghost story (to which this story belongs to) were analyzed to reveal the peculiarities of the genre in the fiction of the writer. The authors investigate domestic spaces and their limitations, image of the house of a family which is haunted by the ghosts of the dead, and identity of a woman in the domestic space and out of it. Critical and philosophical works on various adjacent topics helped the authors of the article to deepen the understanding of the story as well as to widen the "horizons " of its perception. Key words: Byatt, short story, ghost story, motif, domestic space, roots, home, ghost.
Introduction
A. S. Byatt's short story The Next Room is the 4th of the 11 stories included into the collection of stories under the title Sugar and Other Stories [Byatt, 1995, p. 57-84], which was first published in 1987 and is the first collection of stories written by the writer. This collection of stories and the short story itself were widely acclaimed by the readers and investigated by the critics abroad [Campbell, 1997, 2002; Rallo, 2005; Hadley, 2008; Sorensen, 2002; Steveker, 2009] and in Russia
[Торгашова, Бочкарева, 2006; Конькова, 2010; Дарененкова, 2012; Пузырева, Варламова, 2015], but still there are some themes just stated that are here to be investigated and revealed. In this article we aim to go deep into the critics' and philosophers' views to investigate the peculiarities of the short story as a ghost story with the reference to some important resources on the topic [Gordon, 1997; Roseneil, 2009; Abao, 2013; Downey, 2014] and to research the topics of domestic spaces analyzing some important works in this sphere [Geyh, 1993; Briganti, Mezei, 2015; Soon, 2015] to make it a comprehensive analysis of the poetics of the story.
Main part
The notion of domestic space in Byatt's short story The Next Room is closely connected with several persisting motifs found in the text: that of roots, whether it be roots of a tooth that needs to be removed and that will never grow back, roots of cacti carefully grown by one's deceased father, or the familial roots tying us to metaphysical domestic spaces even when we are not physically present in them. The narrative works as to defamiliarize the domestic space, to lift the perceived veil of homeliness and comfort to reveal the discomfort, alienation and disquiet that characterize familial life and one's ever so uneasy relationships with one's family members [Campbell, 1997].
Explored in the story we see the subject of how space mediates the relationships we build with the people we share our domestic spaces with: the protagonist thinks about her parents through the material remnants of their lives; her memories are tied directly to her father's garden, the drawing room her mother occupied while sick, their empty clothes. Especially interesting are her musings on the subject of cacti: the uncanny reproduction of the plant, the horror-esque descriptions of its parts and their multiplication reveal a queasy, restless feeling of disgust produced by familial bonds and interactions [Soon, 2015]. That aspect invites a psychoanalytical reading: the protagonist regrets the estrangement of her father and blames her mother for being the cause of it. Various bodily functions of the protagonist's parents are described in a similar manner to the repulsive images of plants and removed teeth. The protagonist frets the prospect of there being an afterlife for that would make it impossible for a life to end cleanly, for the bonds that tie us to people and places to be severed.
Another space that is important in the short story is that of a lavish hotel Joanna occupies near the end; there, she feels, it is impossible for spatial ties and roots to burst out from the other side, there one can truly be free and ultimately alone. Spaces such as expensive hotels bear no marks of their past tenants, or, as Joanna refers to them, 'users'. Hotels are first thought of not as dwellings but as instruments, functional and space-less, effectively muting the subjectivities that briefly come into contact with them and instead creating a pleasant mental static that does not express anything or intend to do so. However, that is proven to be false in the following passages: Joanna keeps hearing her parents' bickering in the next room. That makes the most important statement of the story: our domestic spaces are not tied to physical buildings, rooms or objects. Although the presence/absence of others might be felt most acutely while surrounded by the spaces they dwelt in and the belongings that now almost exude their scent, the domesticity persists in our mental spaces: the next room is right there, a wall away from wherever you are. We are tied not to the floorboards and curtain rods of our childhood homes, but to our memories, emotional and mental structures built in no small part by our familial relationships [Briganti, Mezei, 2012].
At first The Next Room appears to be a story about a haunted house: space is marked by persisting negative qualities of the departed, not horrifying in the sense of terrorizing bloodthirsty spirits but rather in the sense of the familiar as uncanny, the homely as staging the everyday traumas of familial life [Soon, 2015]. There is a comparison that is drawn between the allegedly haunted lavish hotel that the protagonist is staying at in order to escape the voices of her dead parents and the house in which those parents dwelled. The ghosts of her parents were not threatening, they did not try to drag her to the terrifying realm of spirits and the undead; what was unsettling about them was rather the promise of an afterlife spent within the confines of the next room, shackled to the metaphysical space of bickering, repressed anger and communication failures. Her initial hypothesis that the spirits were tied to her 'ancestral' home proven wrong, she finds she has no other choice but to accept the daunting reality that she may never escape her familial attachments, never rid herself from the traces her parents had left on her subjectivity.
Another ghostly space described in the story is the industrial regions of the UK where the workers who were left behind by the 'optimization' of labour have proclaimed themselves walking corpses. There we can see the topic of communal haunted spaces, the socio-economic iteration of a literary trope, far too real to be enjoyed from a safe distance. The narrative that the protagonist herself believes in, that of perpetual human progress and the transformative potential of human ingenuity, is the narrative that obscures the reality of human suffering caused by the so-called optimization, writing off the lives and fortunes lost to achieve its goals [Gordon, 2008]. An interesting parallel can be noticed between the ghosts of industrial workers and the briefly mentioned native Americans - they too have been conveniently removed from the pages of history, their deaths a 'necessary price' to pay to further the human progress, itself revealed to be the retrospective narrative construction used to obfuscate the reality of those unwillingly sacrificed for it.
Derrida's notion that we must live with our ghosts turns into an unsettling reality for Joanna. Originally used to counter the western culture's promptness to consign its ghosts to oblivion, we see how the notion transforms into something itself uncanny when the ethical choice of whether to care for one's ghosts is taken away and the responsibility assigned without bothering to ask for one's consent [Derrida, 1994]. However, this theoretical framework may push us towards understanding precisely why Joanna might be haunted by her parents in such a worrisome manner: enveloped by the persistence of the past, she is unable to exit the metaphysical space that always has the next room adjacent to it; she cannot exit that space in order to reflect on her life and relationships, she feels she carries it with her, that it is inscribed on the marrow of her bones, written in her genes, that it is her blood and presence that puts her inside the haunted space. It is the inability to deal with the ghosts, to separate herself from them that causes the haunting, that creates a persistent space of the uncanny.
Through the feminist lens, the motif of being stuck at home offers a lot of potential for research: the feminine subjectivity here is in some sense captured, subjugated and consigned to the inescapable domestic space [Abao, 2013]. The fact that the protagonist had to care for her ill mother for twenty years sacrificing her career ambitions in the process, after which she still finds herself unable to escape the domicile she has always wished to leave behind becomes that much more haunting from a feminist perspective: the exhausting work of caring for a chronically ill family member almost always falls on the shoulders of women, and much like the forgotten labour of
industrial workers written off by optimization, it is in a sense ghost-work: there is always a daunting feeling of the inescapability of the end, be it the imminent demise or the ever-nearing layoffs [Downey, 2014]. When one engages in this kind of labour, one must preemptively accept the inevitability of it ending in failure, the lack of appropriate compensation as well as the universal invisibility.
Women are largely the ones that have to accommodate the cycle of life: caring for the ill, organizing their funerals, carrying children and bringing them up [Geyh, 1993, p. 103-122]. One could viably claim that the reason that the western culture can so successfully remove the inconveniences of human life from its discursive field is because the feminine labour, enclosed in the domestic space, withdrawn and underrepresented in the mainstream culture, tends to the needs of life and death, however terrifying and exhausting that might be [Downey, 2014]. This enclosure, then, the story posits, does not only have to do with the reality of work one is supposed to complete nor with the space one is consigned to, but rather it permanently transforms one's mental space to mimic that of one's confinement; the trauma associated with carrying out this work for several decades (as in Joanna's case) is what causes the haunting. The protagonist dreads the afterlife spent in domesticity, as that makes her realize that her work can never truly be done: once distorted, her subjectivity cannot return to 'normalcy' [Roseneil, 2009]. We see in Joanna a hope that now, after her mother's death, she can finally start living her life as she sees fit and not having to redefine her entire existence to suit the needs of her sick mother; however, she discovers that even in her absence, her mother occupies her mental space both in psychological and metaphysical terms [Ibid.]. Quite like the begrudged industrial worker who has no hope of finding another place for himself, Joanna is unable to let go of her past experiences and familial ties. She is, in a sense, correct that the haunting permeates her presence, yet the reason might not be genetic determinism.
Joanna's confinement is characterized not only by its mental dimensions, however; the years that she had to spend caring for her sick mother also narrowed the physical horizons of her existence: being now in her late fifties, she can never go to faraway countries teeming with adventure as she did in her youth. Coincidentally, this is the reason why she goes to Durham, a city in the northeast of England that was home to flourishing coalfields just until the seventies. The city itself can be seen as a ghostly space: its ancient landmarks next to new steel mills, layers upon layers of history that never lose their sickening continuity best illustrated by perpetual human suffering that had to do with what could be called bonded labour [Gordon, 2008]. Joanna tried to hear their ghosts as she keeps hearing those of her parents, yet finds herself unable to do so. And instead of ghosts, she has to deal with the living dead - workers who have been laid off due to optimization of labour and who now have no hope for the future, preemptively declared dead by the unyielding economic progress.
Conclusion
Spaces in general, then, and especially the domestic spaces, are seen as marked by the labour performed within them, transforming the mental spaces of those who participate in the said labour. Haunted spaces, the spaces where ghosts are born, appear not as an answer to a singular hideous crime or an indefensible injustice, but as a result of forced transmutation of the workers' subjectivities [Gordon, 2008]. Living with the ghosts created by one's labour becomes a ghostly continuation of such labour: even when the material work is finished, one has to deal with the
consequences both material and psychological, and cleaning up a mental space in which one has spent a large portion of one's life may prove impossible as the horizons of hope and possibility are narrowed in the result, impeding one from exiting such a space wherever one might find oneself physically present. The boundness to these spaces can be illustrated using the metaphor of plants putting down roots; however, to quote Joanna's mother, sometimes "the earth is poisonous" [Byatt, 1995, p. 63].
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Графова О. И.
Кандидат филологических наук, доцент кафедры лингвистики и перевода, Пермский государственный национальный исследовательский университет
Сенчук А. В.
Пермский государственный национальный исследовательский университет
ФИЛОСОФИЯ ПРОСТРАНСТВА В РАССКАЗЕ А. С. БАЙЕТТ «THE NEXT ROOM.»
В статье исследуется поэтика рассказа «The Next Room» Антонии Сьюзен Байетт (Antonia Susan Byatt), которая по праву считается одной из ключевых писательниц современной Великобритании. Уже само название рассказа («The Next Room» в переводе с английского языка означает «следующая», «соседняя», «другая» комната) отсылает читателя к пространству дома, в особенности «соседней комнаты», в которой беседуют голоса ушедших родителей героини, и обозначает его главную тему, отсылая к ряду связанных с ним мотивов и образов. Авторы статьи подробно исследуют критическую литературу зарубежных и российских литературоведов, посвященную исследуемому рассказу и другим рассказам сборника «Sugar and Other Stories» (1987), в который входит рассказ «The Next Room». В статье исследуются те мотивы рассказа, которые выходят на первый план: мотивы жизни, труда, женской доли, смерти, воспоминаний, семьи и разных корней, зубных, семейных и кактусов. Авторы статьи обращаются к широкой философской и литературоведческий базе по жанру ghost story, к которому можно отнести исследуемый рассказ, выявляя особенности проявления жанра, характерные для творчества писательницы. В рассказе также исследуются темы домашнего пространства и его ограниченности, образ дома семьи с ее историей и вечно населяющими его призраками, а также женской идентичности в рамках дома и за его пределами. Привлечение большого количества критической и философской литературы позволяет углубить понимание текста, таким образом «расширяя горизонт» читательского восприятия рассказа.
Ключевые слова: Байетт, рассказ, мотив, философия пространства, дом, привидение.
