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Breaking through cracked mirrors
The short stories of Janice Galloway
Josiane Paccaud Huguet, Université Stendahl-Grenoble III

"It is language in excess of meaning, women in excess of any male determination, that produces the disease in the imaginary that narrative attempts to cure... if the reality of female sexuality threatens language, the narrative is concerned to smooth over this reality and to leave men and meanings uncontaminated by bodies or sounds."
C. MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word.

Modernist narrative, as is well known, has thrown into the toilets the creams and unguents which give classic realist texts their finely smoothed texture, and chosen instead to expose in crude daylight the cracks of language and human experience. Being a Scottish Writer and a woman surely endowed Janice Galloway with a privileged insight into the reality of fragmentation which we find both as a motif and a structuring principle in her collection of stories, significantly entitled Blood. My aim here is to explore these modalities, taking it for a working hypothesis that the cast of characters, the places and events in the different stories are variants on a pattern which I will in the last analysis relate to the <<play of energy>> underlying narrative desire.1 As the title story suggests, the chief concern is about the loss of one's wholeness, with the fear and violence of exclusion which it engenders in social and language codes. What emerges here is a voice speaking from the dislocations of womanhood, <<that sweet thorny place>, (Toni Morrison): a voice which, like Woolf, Joyce and Beckett, chooses to shatter the delusion of narrative as a mirror held up to nature. We are made to see that there is no such thing as nature out there awaiting to be rendered by words, that gendered identity is an ideologically loaded construct. And that we needn't after all be afraid to crack open the falsely protective shell of words or narrative, since what we encounter is the infinite chain of signifying forms and differential meanings. Instead of repressing the otherness of life and language, Galloway celebrates it in her playful experiment with form which reveals the tragedy of a universe left gaping over a core of darkness. In the drive among the wreckage better to tear up painfully the plaster on the cracks, than break through the wall and die hopeless like her figures of disinherited humanity.

Wasteland, crack-lines, and fear
In the fictional world of these stories, the desolation of landscapes - whether exterior or interior - signifies much more than the experience of local colour (contemporary life in Scotland) or << feminine >> perceptions - fields so far << reserved >> in the sense of Indian reservations, for female novelists. Galloway's texts speak to those who try to read the contemporary world through eyes no longer blindfolded; they invite us to leave the old befeathered ego in the closet and listen to the hidden determinants of subjective experience. If the typical image of modernist experience is <<the two-second encounter at some busy urban cross-roads>>, (Eagleton, 21), Galloway completes the image in her own terms:

... a straggling T junction split the erratic paths of children and women following the ground home with headscarves and late shopping (32)

As one of her female narrators indicates, it is the private voices of women and children, so far unheard or covered by the traffic noise, which we are now made to hear. Their world is the Eliotic wasteland transposed to the postmodernist zone 2 : a school which has no gate, <<just a gap in the wall with pillars >> (4), an old woman's flat with a scent of the grave, << a faint cloy of earth and cold meat >> (48), photos of an aircraft shot down n in 1944, lying among trees and smoke << like a dinosaur carcass >> (153). A world of decomposition, therefore, of cracked mirrors which can no longer reflect the image of full subjects, where doors and windows tear open over the craters of experience. Last, but not least, a world devoid of any authoring or authorizing truth:

I stopped because there was no help for it and stopped peering out at the strip of visible sand searching for what I couldn't see ... Thinking there is something more to make sense of, something more to come... There was still no answer. ( 25)

The crack, however, opens not only in the topography of the city of the dead for which Glasgow seems to be a fit metaphor. It is also written in the fault-lines of human bodies, more particularly female bodies whose reality Joyce was the first writer to joyfully uncover: Galloway in her own bitterly witty way; reveals this body as the locus of projection for male fears.

In the imaginary representations of these stories, the mouth with its threatening morality is the crack-in-the-face, loaded with connotations of loss and death. An old woman manages to make <<a slack oblong of her mouth with lips parted and some teeth showing in the divide>> (49) for a smile, before she swallows the pills that will lull her to eternal sleep. But it is in the title story, << Blood >>, that the metaphor is more fully explored with its inherent sexual implications. From the outset the scene at the dentist's reads as a substitution for the sexual act, in terms of cruel domination. 3 As the dentist triumphantly pulls a bloody lump out of the girl's creaking jaw, blood makes <<a pool under her tongue.' Symptomatically enough he gets rid of the problem on his female assistant who gives the girl a sanitary towel which she puts up blushingly to her mouth. She walks heroically back to school, unable to relieve herself since she knows that girls don't spit in the street.

A male rule with a textual revenge, however, since we are offered a lengthy description of the slimy pad in her mouth, of course reminiscent of Molly Bloom's concern with bodily flows of all sorts. It is no surprise to find that the blood from the cracked jaw metonymically heralds t he other flow for which it is a metaphor. The churning in the girls guts warns her that she will have to visit Mrs McNiven, the Cerberus of the senior girls' purgatory: instead of going there for two sanitary towels, however, she decides to use <<that horrible toilet paper>>. The subsequent visit to the girls' toilets obviously reads as the female counterpart of the toilet scene in Ulysses (5-6). But this isn't the whole story: she wants to forget the miseries of her double loss by going upstairs to the music room where she will play something <<fresh and clean>>. She plays so well that a female-shy cello student comes in, asking her to continue. As she is about to say <<It's Mozart>>, she feels her own blood welling up and spilling over the piano and floor. Fear and guilt follow as the student shuts the door hard behind him. Now we grasp the full bitterness of Mr Gregg's joke about the student, <<afraid of the girls and who could blame him haha>> (7). The student is the product of certain cultural habits whereby paternal advice consists in initiating a son into mistrust with the words.<<Trust nae cunt>>. (16)

The misogyny of cultural representations also lies at the core of another story; << Fearless>>. Fearless is a mythical figure w ho in the citizens' eyes embodies the unpredictability and arbitrariness, the otherness of life. We are told that like Marley's ghost he <<just appeared suddenly, shouting threats up the main streets>>, (110) at people who just had to avert their eyes. On a symbolic level, Fearless is a figure of death, who comes unexpectedly at you and won't bear being looked at. 4 In the perspective of the community's imaginary representations, however, things take on a different shade: his disturbed state is ascribed to the fact that his wife e left him - <<After all, you had to remember his wife left him. It was all our fault really>> the female narrator concludes (113). None of the men therefore tries to calm down his angry invectives against women. One day he chooses the girl's mother as his victim: the girl wonders what it is that can be threatening: <<what did he think we were plotting, a woman and a wean in a pixie hat ?>> (114). She looks back in anger, swings her foot at him, and he limps away. The allegorical value of the episode is disclosed at the end of the story:

My mother is dead, and so, surely, is Fearless. But I still hear something like him; the chink and drag from the close-mouth in the dark, coming across open, derelict spaces at night, blustering at bus-stops where I have to wait alone. With every other woman, though we're still slow to admit it, I hear it, still trying to lay down the rules. It's more insistent now because we're less ready to comply, look away and know our place. And I still see men smiling and ignoring it because they don't give a damn. They don't need to. It's not their battle. But it was ours and it still is... The outrage is still strong, and I kick like a mule. ( I 15)

As I will suggest later, writing is also for Galloway some sort of kicking at the Otherness congealed in the male-oriented representations of life and language. The fear of division and loss, seen this time from a girl's perspective, is the motif of <<Into the roots>>, where the excessive, threatening flow is not menstrual blood but hair. Alice's first salon-cut induces in her a feeling <<as though her head were rising like a cork from the bottom of a sink of water>> (39). A birth which is a separation from her <<still-writhing>> pleat as she gazes at someone else, her new solitary self, emerging in the mirror. What we have here is a playful rendering of the Lacanian mirror-stage in which the human subject meets the otherness of visual/verbal images which are the death of imaginary narcissism and the precondition for the entry into the symbolic order of language. The haircut also clearly reads as a castration, this time at the hands of the mother who then brews a distaste for the relic, the girl's <<precious matted snake-in-the-box>> (60) which one day disappears. The cut, however, triggers <<fresh growth>> (60) which makes people suspicious because they can't see Alice's eyes through the fringe - another excess which again brings penalties on her (60). Years later we see her choking back her fear and plunging her hand into a tree hole full of the now recovered hair.

Looking in the face of Fearless Otherness, knowing that all you have to do is << refuse to look scared and then nothing could touch you>>, is a temptation represented in these stories in the form of the death-drive - a breaking through the wall whose metaphorical equivalent will be the plunge through the cracked mirror of language and its representations.

Breaking through the wall

The passage from wasteland to voyeuristic breaking through into the world of fantasy, is the motif of the story significantly entitled <<Breaking through>>. Janet lives with her mother next to the cemetery wall and to another flat occupied by an old woman, Bessie, and her cat, Blackie. Janet longs for the touch of Blackie's fur whose essence she wants to << absorb >> especially when the cat is on the rug, looking into the fire. The truth of the desire for the touch of death emerges in the shift from reality to what we assume to be fantasy - without any clearcut textual line being drawn however: one day Blackie falls into the fireplace and burns under the girl's eyes until the last that remains of him is << a stink of scorched meat >> (67). A few days later, as Blackie's old mistress thrusts herself forward into the flames, the girl lifts the poker to help her, a gesture of complicity which signifies that Blackie, then the old woman, function as projection spaces for her own desire.

The wall itself materializes in another story: an old couple choose to end their lives by dashing their car into an unplastered brick wall fencing a derelict space where a steelworks used to be. The encounter with death is planned to take place at the end of the <<drive across the bridge and into the wasteland by the steelworks wall>> (106), the focus of a desire which takes the form of penetrating the cracks between the bricks:

Just bricks. Maybe these would plaster it over to make it look better later on... His hands felt dry, coated with dust, feeling for the absent plaster.... (104)

The crossing over into the underworld is the object of another fantasy in <<it u as >>. The stepping over the limits is suggested by the liminal time (nightfall) and place: the girl walks on a grass verge which neighbours the macadam << to the edge of her vision >> (emphasis mine, 33). The trespassing is performed by a rite of passage, a sort of second death, an experience of mutilation willfully controlled and therefore enjoyed as she kneels on the grass, <<overwhelmed... to feel the cling of the cool blades wrap the bare skin, exposed>> (33). Like DH Lawrence's artist figure in a similar experience - Gudrun in Women in Love- she is << near to weeping with the pleasure of it... in panic at the foolishness of her joy>> (33).

We only need to follow the logic of the signifier which leaves the girl standing at a <<now grey privet hedge>> with the <<stubby hardness of cropped branches>> hurting her hand. Her reaching into the underworld of death-in-life materializes with a sickly scent from
underneath the edge, and something shiny under a drainpipe - the unnameable <<it>>. As she digs up a face from the encroaching dirt and mud, the ontological shift from real to possible world occurs - <<There was no need to acknowledge anything unusual in the situation for nothing was>> (34): a built-in comment on the form which the narrative then assumes, and to which I will return later. The girl is both fascinated and horrified at the friendly voice raised from the dead, inviting her into a lost world. She know s at the same time that Uncle George's ghost will live as long as she wills it - not only in the fantasy but also, the critical reader has to infer, in the subsequent narrative: a crucial metafictional comment on the artist's own death drive and fascination for de-composition, alongside with his/her role as puppet-master which is the effect of the instinct for re-composition.

The metaphorical connection between the fascination with decomposition and the dark impulse at the core of the sexual drive, is revealed from different angles in the various stories: the male perspective of repression is crudely and cruelly suggested in <<The meat>>, an episode staged in a butcher's shop with, as central character, a carcass dropping from a claw hook, <<flayed and split down the spinal column>> (108), exposed for everybody's eyes and noses. The narrative center of the story is occupied by the infectious process of putrefaction, until the butcher slices the thing down and throws it to the dogs. The next morning he recovers the remains: the hair and a piece of tartan ribbon <<which he seals in .. a plain wooden box beneath the marital bed >> - a diminutive coffin for a wife butchered, and perhaps also for Scotland murdered, the reader reflects in a chilling retrospective black flash.

The analogy in war between nations and between the sexes is pursued in the long, powerfully symbolic story <<A week with Uncle Felix>>, with a female perspective this time. As Senga
looks hard at the picture of a plane's carcass << dripping wreckage like rotten meat>> (153), she uncurls her hand from the coins in her pocket, her palm smelling of<<stale metal>>. The gesture is the narrative transposition of the unconscious textual connection between wrecked carcass and female body, the very structuring principle of <<The meat >>. Senga's impulse, here, is not to slice down and hide, but to follow the bent of her fascination/repulsion for the living things underneath the crack~wound, through the metaphor of the rotting plums:

... that thick sweet smell like metal ... rotten fruit. It lay and rotted and sugars came and something else, she forgot what ... wanting to look closer, she... reached for the nearest... Dark red, the skin loose and warm. It slipped when you touched, the flesh separate and firmer underneath. Her finger left a dark shape of itself where it melted off the bloom. Grey blue fungus furred one side of a gash underneath, a running sore oozing brown pulp and something else. Something moving. Thick black feelers twitching towards her hand... Black movements flickered at the corner of her eyes... Ants... The grass kept moving, wriggling under her feet. (146)

It is of course not accidental that the scene takes place in her dead aunt's garden with its crewcut green and <<rose bushes pruned back to stumps>> (151), that she then offers herself a private joke by buying nail varnish whose name is <<Sugar Plum>>. What is suggested here is that the initiation into the knowledge of death is concomitant of the discovery of sexuality. since both entail separation from imaginary wholeness and initiation into the reality of difference: the remarkably consistent network of metaphors in Galloway's stories suggests that it is the narcissistic wound resulting from that separation which contaminates the gender relations.

II n'y a pas de rapports sexuels

Jacques Lacan's famous provocation - <<There is no such thing as sexual intercourse>> - might serve as a comment on the unbridgeable fault-line in Galloway's representation of gender relations. A fault-line in turn dividing the very language of these texts which introduce us to the impossibility of smooth textual relationships, since language is the symbolic locus of difference.

For Senga in <<A week with Uncle Felix>', the initial experience of loss originates in a double betrayal, the death of her father with the inherent loss in language representations, alongside her mother's invectives against the other sex. Like her fictional sister in <<Frostbite>> who looks vainly about in search of << a man who would be shamed by her struggling on her own >> (20), Senga is a figure of orphaned childhood - << Dad. The word never felt right>>, she muses (emphasis mine, 165). The only thing she wants to ask from her dad's brother, Felix, is <<What was his spit?>> - an arrestingly ambiguous sentence meaning <<What did he look like ?>> but also pointing to the threatening, phallic connotations of <<spit>> . One needn't go too far to find a confirmation of this second reading: during the week Senga has been to the local museum where, alongside with the war photos, her attention focused on some farming tools. Now farming - husbandry - is a common enough metaphor for the sexual act since it is the tracing of lines and opening << cracks >> in the mother earth. Among the tools she sees a bridle with a flat iron spike for the horse's mouth, with a telling joke on the card next to it: <<For wives who scolded or told lies>> (153). Senga's question, therefore, is double-edged: it involves curiosity about one's origins, and sexual curiosity as well. We shouldn't be too surprised to read that Senga <<suddenly suspected the answer, about her father's spit, that it was something too terrible to know about >> ( 176). Once more she is punished for her curiosity when she is given the answer: in her dad's words <<obligingly>> quoted by Uncle Felix, she <<was ..a mistake... But just fun,>> ( 1 76): a confirmation that her existence was neither authored nor authorized, and a warning about her place in gender positions.

It is inscribed within the unconscious logic of the text that she should then become her uncle's sexual toy: before he tries to abuse her, he gives her his dead wife's string of beads on faded red velvet - an obvious sexual symbol - as sweat (another bodily flow) heads under her arms. The scene closes on the remark that she is going to be a <<wanton little thing>> just like her mother. What is at stake here is male denial and projection in the face of the reality of the crack torn open by death and sexual difference: as is always the case, it is all women's fault in all the senses of the word 5 . The implacable logic runs on, since she is offered a box of stinking plums as a farewell gift. (179).

Thus the latent equation rottenness/sexuality/guilt in a male-dominated world, is the female inheritance in a story where <<It was all my fault>> returns like a leitmotif. Uncle Felix's house is a place of man smells - the <<salty smell of socks>> (155), <<a thickness of sauce and spice>> (133) - where Senga is <<shared>> by the men of the household. She also discovers in their magazines images of female sexuality as seen by men - painted nails, make up, huge breasts - alongside the reality of her own body: as the forbidden pages tear open between her fingers, she breaks sweat. The consistency of the symbolic imagery suggests that her trespassing into her dead aunt's garden and into her uncle's room as well as the guilt, are sexual and determine the pattern of her further actions: as she opens her bedroom window, the frame cracks and she is stung by a wasp from the plum trees. Her finger now looks <<curled like a claw>> and she feels punished for her curiosity: she shouldn't have torn open the magazine/cracked open the window/been to curious about her father's spit.

In the economy of gender relations, the loss which is supposed to be on the side of womanhood, is that which authorizes the existence of its opposite equivalent, i.e. male narcissism - a recurrent trait in the stories. Self-sufficiency, wholeness are figured by Tony who looks <<good, assured. masculine, relaxed in his ownership of the place>>, (118) ln <<Bikers>>, Big Jim <<radiates cleanliness>> (78) and the conversation between bikers is a fine example of myth-making which authorizes the passage from <<wee boy>> to grown man Just like Barthes' DS in Mythologies the bike is the domesticated divinity which confirms phallic power. The conversation is

a ritual by heart: components of tea-ceremony, delicacy for Zen brothers in black leather robes... Their minds will be clean, prayers for gods that will one day run smooth as silk, purr like kittens, run like dreams.(79-81)

As can be expected, the complementary subjective position is the misogyny in the politics of language and cultural representations whose aim is to repress the destabilizing otherness.

Men, in the world of Galloway's stories, want neither to see nor to hear. Symptomatically, the dentist shows all his fillings when he grins at his spectacles which he wipes with a cloth while his assistant gives the sanitary towel to the bleeding girl. Lack of empathy tainted with sadistic pleasure are latent in his <<Sandra'll get you something to stop making a mess of yourself>> (3). The student who used to pretend that he couldn't see girls when he went by them on the stairs, glances at the blood flow and shuts the door hard. In the story ironically entitled << Need for restraint >>, a girl who protests against street violence and people << practicing mass avoidance >> (82), is silenced by her male companion's imperious <<Nothing to do with you>>. She feels <<clumsy, inept, female... at fault somehow>> (89); the words jam in her mouth, as for her counterpart in <<Nightdriving>>

I opened the door shouting I'M COMING TOO... but the wind blotted up in my mouth and I knew there would be no answer. There would be no answer because I couldn't be heard. ( 124)

The power of the word, instead, lies in the force of repression exemplified by the bleeding man's words of thanks to the girl who rescued him -<<Keep away from bastart women, thats
what yi do >> (28) , by the sexist jokes - the dentist's << Redheads bleed worse than other folks haha>> (3), or the <<fatuous and obscene things some men assumed a lassie carrying a violin case was asking for>> (27. Notwithstanding the animal metaphors for calling girls, <<hen >> at best, << cow>>, at worst. The sexist felt-tip drawings on the girls' toilet door in << Blood>>, are accompanied by the comment in block letters, <<girls are a bunch of cunts,>> (6) which leaves the girl ashamed and helpless. 6

It is the very possibility of relating the genders that is foredoomed in these stories: a one-night lover's kiss stretches a girl's lip <<till it splits>> (38). In <Blood,> the <<tearing sound of the doorseals>> seizes her stomach as the cello student comes to her (8). The bloodflow in her mouth dooms to failure the only chance she is given to speak: no better metaphor could have been penned about the disease in the imaginary produced by <<language in excess of meaning, women in excess of any male determination >> (Mac Cabe), which in turn calls for the threat of castration both at the hands of men, and women - in <<Into the Roots>>, we are told that Alice's hair had always been excessive, that her mother << tore out the knots and condemned them, spitting, to the flames. The longer it got, the more wayward it became >> until one day << enough was enough>> (19). Alice's resistance to the dominant prescriptions is signified by the fact that she won't take part in the << tedious chants of births, marriages, turns-up-for-the-books>> her mother wants to inscribe her in. Instead she becomes a scandal herself when she moves in with a man and lives <<in sin>>. She reverses that which had been imposed on her when she promises herself a haircut for the week when she breaks with him - << butcher the whole lot short because he had liked it long>> (61). The haircut with a revenge is a fictional representation of the pattern of repetition-with-reversal which, as I will try to demonstrate, is the very nerve of narrative desire: the choice in narrative strategies w ill be to peel the paper from the walls, leaving the cracks and craters exposed, like the narrator of << Plastering the cracks>> (90).

Speaking out from a place of one's own

The beginnings of the writer's gesture of response stems in the though is radiated like a reversal of perspectives, the choice to speak from the locus of women. The narrator-focaliser in <<Frostbite>> finds herself the corridor. (6). unwilling addressee of the bleeding man's narrative:

A man's story about what he would call a bad woman, and he would tell it as though she wasn't a woman herself, as though she shared his terms. As though his were the only terms (20)

The first person narrator of <<Fearless >> steps in resolutely with her own terms:

women shouted their weans in at night with HERE'S FEARLESS COMING ... weans made caricatures ... and men? I have to be careful here. I belonged to the world of women and children on two counts, so I never had access to their private thoughts voiced in private places: the bookie's, the barber's, the pub Maybe they said things in there I have no conception of(112)

What we should be wary of in our turn, is the fallacy of pseudo-omniscient viewpoints in << realist >> narratives, with their falsely totalising vision of truth. The vantage point of first person narration will provide a different focus on the private places from which women speak - for example the girls' toilets. Just as Senga stretches in her bedsheets .<to use up all the space deliberately>, (136), similarly' her creator uses up all the narrative space allotted by the sheet of paper. The language of these stories is far from something << fresh and clean >> to make us forget the discourse of the body; it sounds more like << the low echo coming through the wall >> to which Senga enjoys listening,<<rocking on two legs with her eyes closed>> (107): it is not <<communication >> between full subjects, therefore, but something like the sign language through the bedroom wall of <<Plastering the cracks>>7.

Along similar lines, narrative becomes a symbolic <<room>> and place of one's own, both for Galloway's personified narrators and, at a second remove, for their creator. <<Nightdriving>> is an allegory about the empty darkness of the postmodernist landscape where no one answers, where a young woman goes out to listen to the music swelling up in the night, where the only thing to do is keep driving on treacherous and twisting roads, steep <<like the sides of a coffin>>, among the <<husks of broken cars>> (127). Driving - like commanding a ship for Conrad's narrators in the heart of darkness - is an apt metaphor for authoring narrative and authorizing significance, even though it now has to be among the rubble of modern civilization. It is highly symbolic of course that the girl in << Blood >> tries to focus past the dentist's knuckles to the cracked ceiling, and to patch the lines up into some recognized pattern:

She was trying to see a pattern, make the lines into something she could recognize, when her mouth started to do something she hadn't given it permission for(1)

What is that << something she hadn't given it permission for>>, if not the necessary and impossible articulation of Otherness in discourse which always exceeds the speaker's intention, so wittily figured by the bloodflow in her mouth ? The absurdist fantasy of <<it was>> should be read as an attempt, both in the language and in the representation, to give a shape to that which exceeds symbolization, i.e. the Lacanian Real which by definition recedes into formlessness as soon as it is named - hence the textual resistance, the blanks and fractures in the text. Like the young woman in << Plastering the cracks >, the narrator sets herself the task of re-opening the cracks and digging out <<it>> - a buried face revived from the dead. She operates delicately with her finger - like the novelist , careful to crack open the shell of words and sentences -, as <<the silt crumbled and parted fairly dryly to slide out of the cracks it had claimed >> (34). The figure raised from the dead, therefore, is literally the object of its creator's desire - <<He had no awareness that he was dead and she would not let him know... She knew he wouldn't live far away>> (35). What the fantasy represents is that the existence of << it >> is authored by narrative desire - a desire for mastery/authority over a lost object that eludes one's grasp in an indefinite metonymy.

We now need to return in more detail to << Blood >> in which are figured, emblematically again, two modes of subjective positions: the former as repression of the truth about loss - <<the mortal hole at the centre of the mother of all life>> (D. Sibony), the latter as willful exposition, and therefore temporary mastery. What is foremost is that these two modes are correlative of two radically opposed politics of language and representation: on one hand, the << realist >>, neurotically controlled mode 8; on the other hand, the modernist modes which choose to reveal the gap, alongside the ideological truths inherent in language choices. 9 The lost tooth with a strangely twisted root extracted from the cracked jaw, speaks about the reality of loss and its correlate, guilt. It is important to quote the passage here:

It had a ridge about a third of the way down, where the glaze of enamel stopped. Below it, the roots were huge ... The twist was huge, still bloody where they [the roots] crossed ... Hard to accept her body had grown this thing. Ivory. (7)

I wish to draw attention here to two key signifiers, <<enamel>, and <<ivory>>. As she begins to play the piano, the girl places the tooth near the keyboard: the scenic and textual contiguity between the tooth and the keys suggests the metonymic connection between loss and artistic production/symbolisation, since piano keys are made from ivory; i.e. elephant << teeth>>. But this isn't the whole story: the episode provides a crucial insight into the relationship between language production and repression. This connection is made by means of the textual/semantic ellipsis, literally covered by the flow of words:

It's Mozart - before she remembered.
Welling up behind the lower teeth, across her lips as she tilted forward to keep it off her clothes. Spilling over the white keys and dripping onto the clean tile floor. She saw his face change, the glance flick to the claw roots. (9)

What is textually missing here is of course the repressed word, i.e. <. blood >, which should be the grammatical subject of <<welling up>> and spilling over>>. At the same time, the hole left by the missing signifier is filled by words in a way which is truly iconic of the necessary repression of loss, preliminary to the emergence of narrative. This is where the << neurotic >> mode fits in, as the textual correlate of the girl's attempt at <<patching something together and pretending one doesn't bleed>> 10 - <<You could get past things that way, pretend they weren't there>>, she concludes, as she tries to be something else: a piece of music >>(8). What is implicit here is a conception of art/writing/music as a social alibi for repressing one's and others' bodily fears. Galloway, however, is determined to strip the plaster and reveal the cracks.

The narrative contiguity betwe en the enamel of the tooth, the ivory of the keys and the unstoppable blood flow, is suggestive of what underlies cultural productions: underneath the fine arts/culture, lies the butchered elephant's blood, whose remains have been aesthetized into ivory keys. 11 Similarly, the feminine body in << Blood >> is revealed as a suffering body under the varnish of civilisation, the locus of repression in which cultural productions are rooted. The guilt and shame, as is well known, are the victim's reward:

They would be here before she could do anything, sitting dumb on the piano stool, not able to move, not able to breathe, and this blood streaking over the keys, silting the action ... The unstoppable redness seeping through the fingers at her open mouth. (8)

The logic of Galloway's writing, it now appears clearly, stems from a desire to recorder the underlying experience of fragmentation and, just like Joyce, to restore the reality of the female body with its holes and losses. What is foremost, however, is that the episode metaphorizes a structural issue which goes far beyond the scope of a narrowly <<feminist>> reading: what is at stake here is the truth of difference - in gender, race, nationality; age - and the return of the repressed from which cultural productions and layers of <<protective>> language are nurtured. The functional analogy between the elephant tusk and the girl's tooth suggests that the companion text to <<Blood>> might well be <<Heart of Darkness>>. The artistic utterance of Janice Galloway in its turn proceeds from dumbness, from the unstoppable bloodflow to the inkflow seeping through the artist's fingers and from her open mouth a truly illuminating insight into the urge and urgency of writing.

The excess of meaning in human bodies and in language, is no longer covered but on the contrary exposed. In these stories the purpose of ordinary conversation seems to be to plaster the cracks of experience, like the pain of loneliness for the old woman at the moment of the health-visitor's leaving << Someone increases the volume further. We begin to appreciate the artistry of the health-visitor in this professional and crafted leavetaking>>(48). Such artistry and craft in language choices is of course irrelevant to Galloway's own art which chooses to shatter the falsely protective layer producing the << pretty functions >> (Conrad) of bourgeois realism. It is surely no accident if one of the rare examples of positive relationships in these stories occurs between a female narrator and the man <<with some terrible speech defect>> whom she has hired to plaster the cracks in her bedroom:

I hadn't been able to hear him right. No, that wasn't it. I had heard perfectly well. It was more that I didn't seem able to get to the bottom of what he was saying. I couldn't work out a meaning. It reminded me of a habit I had got into as a child... on long bus journeys. I would let the engine noise sink me into a kind of hypnosis till the sound lost its significance. Then when people spoke their words became simply noise, disembodied from sense... conversation became at once incomprehensibly foreign and deeply soothing; threatless music to block out exteriors. I encouraged it. But when it began to affect me unbidden I was frightened and stopped practice by sheer effort of will. (95)

Words stripped of communication purposes, then, become <<deeply soothing>> .. <<threatless music>>, by a practice of willful exile which is preliminary to the novelistic impulse, itself an impulse toward mastery of the flow - symbolic this time.

1t is in <<Into the roots>> that the structure of narrative desire is best illustrated. At some point in her maturation as grown up, Alice decides to remain from now on on the brink of the flow of life:

She stopped walking... [and] trying to make up lost ground ... Relief rubbed into her shoulders warming affection for the disappearing figures ahead. Let them go... Alice stood and watched the familiar backs retreat as in a mirror. (61)

This subjective position, I would suggest, symbolizes the artist's exile and working on the fault-line between the living and the dead. Alice then moves towards a broken tree split and blasted to the sky, towards

.. . an eyesocket of a hole, with a swollen lip of bark and moss that only made the wound seem more raw. It would hurt, but had to be done... Choking back her fear, Alice thrust out and plunged two clawed fingers into the hole. It was full of hair. (63)

The clawed fingers, of course, duplicate the form of the dentist's pliers and the hairdresser's scissors. The gesture is literally a repetition with a revenge of these <<castrations>> of which she is now the agent, no longer the sufferer, and which allow her to recuperate the lost hair/her. What is also figured here is the creator's headlong plunge into the split/black mouth/crack.

One important aspect of Galloway's politics of writing, is her response to the dominant positions in language and representations. The little girl whose mother is attacked by Fearless feels the violence of language, the pressure of the <<loud, jaggy words which came out of the black hole of his mouth>> (114) even though she doesn't know the meaning. What matters is that when she dares turn and look at Fearless he stares back, and then << the words had stopped >> ( 114).

What is clearly suggested here is that the response consists in looking back in anger and speaking out, making oneself heard with a revenge for those who couldn't be heard before.

Il n'y a pas de rapports textuels: fractured form

Galloway's politics of writing bears the symptoms of the discontents of our civilisation, for reasons which Terry Eagleton has fully stated in an essay entitled <<Modernism, Myth, and Monopoly Capitalism >>:

...the ways that liberal humanism defined the human subject just aren't working any more ... Fewer and fewer people can see themselves as the autonomous, sharply separate, strenuously self-regulating agents of their own historical destiny, whatever might have been possible for Walter Scott. Fewer people, too, can trust in the essential readability and intelligibility of the object, which is
now typified by the opaque, fragmentary, impenetrable commodity. And nobody can muster much faith any more in progress and historicity - modernism belongs with an epochal shift in our notions of temporality, with a refusal to believe that the world is any longer story-shaped, that it has an immanent causal logic which art has then only to represent ... Modernism as a movement cuts indifferently across cities, societies, art-forms, languages, national traditions. Released from the oedipal constraints of a motherland, it was able, from the vantage-point of some polyglot metropolis, to cast a cold eye on all such national heritages. (Eagleton, 22-23)

Hence, I would suggest, the resurgence of a Scottish modernism such as practised by Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and Janice Galloway: it is literally ground-breaking, and set up against the ideologically loaded forms nurtured by bourgeois narrative which is still well and alive in the British <<motherland>>. But of course the questions that modernism raises are structural: simply the thickness and resistance of the plaster varies according to many parameters, among which gender roles in a given society. As I already hinted, it is the stripping of the plaster that is at the core of Galloway's artistic concerns.

It will be no surprise to find that many of the stories are third person narration with internal focalisation into, and from a girl's now transparent mind which becomes a fragmented locus of visual, perceptual and mental consciousness. The composition of <<Blood>> indicates that Galloway has fully integrated the heritage of Woolf and Joyce: the rending/rendering of consciousness is Woolf's, whereas the <<obscenity>> is Joyce's. We move from Bloom's voice (interior monologue) to the represented thought of a mind sifting the discourses of others. Galloway fully exploits the possibilities offered by the technique of Free Indirect Discourse 12 by embedding male discourses within a female focalising conscience - thus she provides an alternative to the man-centered version about a <bad woman> in <<Frostbite>> 13. Her female focalisers are Molly Bloom's late-twentieth century companions, with an equal concern for the bloodflow to which must be added a narrating voice's will-to-mastery over its metaphorical substitute, the inkflow.

The other dominant narrative mode in the stories is retrospective first-person narration, with the classic split between naive experiencer and now-all-knowing narrator figure, resolutely and consistently female, wilfully playing on the game of imaginary identifications. 14 <<Two fragments>> is a craftily arranged piece where, again, the theme repeats the structure: it is a story about two fragments - a granny's lost eye and a father's lost half-fingers, itself fragmented into two levels, a framing narrative and a framed story. In the embedded story the first-person narrator, a grown woman, becomes a <<you>> - the little girl listening to her mother's comic and dreadful tales of castration/mutilation. What is worthy of note is that these tales are presented as female alternative fictions covering the grim truth of facts exposed in two lines: the father lost his finger in the army, the grandmother's eye was taken away by the explosion of impure coal <<given>> to the miners' families by the coal-board. Now it is the mother's bitter voice which is heard through the daughter's in a fiction wilfully subverting the factual truth in order to suit a child's want (40) - pointing therefore at the very truth of narrative desire. In the mother s narrative the Black threatening mouth is no longer any woman's fault, but the father's on two accounts: first because he drinks his pay - therefore his family's living - and secondly because his two missing half-fingers are the result of his own greed: one night he was so hungry that he ate his own fingers for chips with salt and vinegar (40). It is no longer here a question of smoothing the excess in women's bodies, but the truth of the harsh realities -war, British colonialism, poverty. Thus, the tale ends with the grim nursery rhyme lines

Fingers for the army
An eye for the coal board
A song and a dance for the wean. (45)

Thus the force of narrative desire still aims to soothe the cracks of experience, but this time not for the dominant class, or gender.

It is the consolation of narration as unifying process which is also the structuring principle, the driving force of the three unrelated fragments of <<Nightdriving>>, in the absence of unity of time, space and character or of voice consistency. Elsewhere this force disintegrates in favour of merely scenic presentation in the pieces entitled <<Scenes from the life No....>>, symptomatically in jumbled order :N'°23, 29, 26, 2l, 27. What is worthy of interest here is the focus on the fictional narratee as perceiver/voyeur/participant and to a certain extent, creator therefore never innocent. The scenes are infused with topographical references which metaphorize the range of subjective positions for the implied reader, overtly determined by narrative manipulations. 15 We are also meant to note scents or sounds, to advance on the stage and to return to our vantagepoint (53), to doze when we are not interested, to afford <<a little sentimental soft-focus >> (54); we are even asked to wonder when we should break in or leave, to name a character now that it has become substantial enough (55), or to question its paper substance - <<It is difficult to discern where paper stops and flesh begins >> (56).

The narrative intention and design, therefore, is to defamiliarize the reader by shattering the nicely polished surface of narrative. The same strategy can be found in the language of these texts: one of the favourite devices is the foregrounded use of thematisation in the opening sentences of the stories, producing the effect of our entering a world already constituted - from which we are therefore alienated from the outset. 16

In true post-modernist manner, Galloway also explores and subverts the potentialities of genre, language and typography. <<Fair Ellen and the wanderer returned>> is a subverted ballad, re-written from the perspective of a female focaliser. All the clichés are there, the man at the center of the woman's vision, the <<we need never be separated again>>, but they are systematically deconstructed. As is the case with the Ballad of the Croppy Boy in Ulysses, it is not the sentimentalising voice of the good people that we hear 17, but a voice <<full of splinters>> revealing the dullness of the waiting years and the drudgery of a late marriage of reason in the beloved's absence. When the wanderer returns the now grey-haired Ellen holds him in a <<long, black look>> (74) and her own narrative cuts <<through his words like a knife across meat>> which takes away << his right for self-pity>>(75). Similarly, I would suggest, Galloway's narratives cut through words and sentences to reveal the ideological substance of gender positions in the cultural codes.

Elsewhere the reader is taken to the cutting edge of the word and to the private edge of subjectivity in ways which are reminiscent again of Joyce or Beckett. Thus Galloway is able to exploit the polysemy and resonances of the most insignificant word - like <<it>>, in <<it was>>. The story is built around the structurally doomed attempt to give a name and a shape to the nameless thing, to death and loss - significantly, the title bears no capital letter. The syntagm <<it was>> decomposes into separate units, combines into new ones, radiates into different semantic fields according to its textual position which symptomatically resists reproduction for the purposes of the present essay, because of the blanks and typography. 18 The <<it>>, then, substantializes into a cast character, a loving figure of the past, Uncle George who now <<lives>> in the girl's fantasy. The topography, which is here an essential element of significance, functions as a reminder that signifiers are not things out there, but forms - even though empty ones like the blank spaces which create an essential semantic void: the repetitions and the blankness are more significant than the <<it>>. Thus we are made to see the <<itness>> of that most neutral word in the language, the empty repository of many cultural representations - the most sensational being the Freudian <<it >> which is not alien to the episode here. 19

The opposite equivalent of the blank is the defamiliarised use of capital letters that invade and occupy the textual space in a way which metaphorically duplicates the violent force of male voices overheard by a girl at the bus-stop:

dancin boys DANcin so we jist looks right then he's ach moan up the DANcin an fuckin away so we FOLLOWS him right w e FOLLOWS him aff the bus up the STAIRS man these STAIRS fuckin STAIRS to the hoose fourth fuckin flair christ and in the lobby right and he STARTS right he STARTS wi this WEAN fucking wean in the livinroom sittin this lassie christ pickin her up fuckin PICKIN her up.(30)

What's foremost here is that the textual arrangement of the block letters makes up a sort of sub-text with its own patterns and formal repetitions which are in their turn the sign of the female focaliser's appropriation and re-inscription of the discourse. It is no surprise either to find that Galloway's representation of discourse follows the now classic Joycean tradition which consists in rejecting inverted commas (<< perverted commas >> Joyce), since they are ideologically loaded markers of hierarchy and control in the representation of other's discourse; besides their presence, by, fostering the illusion of voices quoted from the life, masks the homogenising force of narrative. The narrative form of Galloway's stories, once more, is homogenisation with a revenge since now it is the male voices that are digested into the melting pot of narrative, with some symptomatic points of resistance like the Scottish idiom.

A certain nostalgia for full meanings among some critical schools will have it that fragmented form is <<meaningless>>. It is, in the sense that modernist/post-modernist modes of writing do not nurture their readers with stable truths or rounded character patterns in the way of the <<Victorian melodrama... Hearts and Flowers >> which the girl in << Frostbite >, finds herself parodying (26). I could suggest for my part that Galloway's writing is an outstanding example of living, ever-changing significance. It is neither minimalist verse, nor over-transparent language, two <<excesses>> represented by the modes of the bikers 'conversations:

They chant in minimalist verses, machine-shop precise to make patterns of tappets and points and overheated coils... BIC JIM seems to have paused for thought while our attention has been elsewhere and the mood has altered. His brow has darkened and when he speaks now it is no longer poetry: it is far too comprehensible. (79)

Galloway's prose, in its turn, will have its own cutting edge, making us see and hear words that are, like <<a tearing sheet>> 20 , drawing attention to their power to signify rather than mean in a conclusive manner. The circular form of the long short story <<A Week with Uncle Felix>> is in this respect significant; here are the opening and closing sentences:

<<Clementine >>
The buzzing came clearer by degrees.
Duncan humming through the engine noise, the same bit over and over. ( 130)

Duncan started whistling <<Clementine>> as the stink of plums began rising from the boot. ( 179)

As is usual in modernist narrative the circularity in form is symptomatic of the absence of conclusive meaning and answer. On the other hand the recurrence of the signifier <<buzzing>> in two crucial episodes suggests the relation between narrative form and the black silence at the core of the girl's initiation into sexuality and death - <<They said nothing about her father ... The turntable started buzzing.>>(150). Language has lost its protective layer here, it reveals nothing but loss and absence. 21 The narrative in places becomes like the turntable, but with many unheard tunes and unexpected sounds for the reader's/listener's relish.

The similes and metaphors open an unconventional field of predominantly feminine, or domestic experience: the painted borders of windows flake <<like late-in-the-day eye-liner>> (32); fair Ellen stands << stiff as an ironing board >>(71); the claw root of the tooth is <<like a deformed parsnip>> (2), hair strays out fuzzily <<as though [she] had been plugged into an electric socket >> (59), a haircut reveals a long neck that <<had grown up in the dark like a silent mushroom >> (59).

The musical composition is overheard in the play of alliterations and assonances that make the text resonate with harmonics - <<the cold tap spat water>> (6); <<scented stock wafted up sickly from underneath it>> (33), <<goodnight kiss hissing like escaping gas,' (176), among many others. It is of course symptomatic that the musical patterns are better heard in non-referential passages as if the singing sounds were meant to be a consolation for the loss of referent. If we come close to poetry at times, the genre however remains story-telling, resolutely self-reflexive, baring its own devices - among which the two founding principles of narrative which are metonymy and repetition.

An apparently anodine sentence like the following is rich in metafictional implications:

Two-storey council terraces with frames of paint borders round the windows, flaking like late-in-the-day eyeliner, lined the opposite side of the road; (emphasis mine, 32)

It is the slightly modified repetition <<liner>>/<<lined>> which gives here the text the energy to run on after the pause signified by the comma. The repetition has for effect of reminding the materiality of the signifying form. It is also a tell-tale example of the fact that meaning proceeds by resemblances and differences (we move from noun to verb, from one sound/graphic pattern to another close form), that it is fabricated by metonymic contiguity - i.e. syntagmatic development along the line of narrative. Thus we shift in a self-reflexive moment from eye-liner to line of house, to line in the text: another illuminating example that a signified must always have been a signifier before it becomes a signified.

Not only do Galloway's texts point to the process of metonymy at work, but also they rely on metonymy as a working principle in the generation of significance, especially in places where the meaning resists as in the following passage:

His hands felt dry, coated with dust, feeling for the absent plaster... on the way back he noticed the petrol light, orange dot on the dashboard as he was approaching the wall... Then, for no reason he could think of, he remembered the book.... He watched the wall in the rear-view mirror. (emphasis mine, 104-105)

It is the textual contiguity between <<dashboard>>, <<wall>> and << book >> that makes the reader suddenly grasp that the old man has found by an unconscious association the mode of his intended suicide - dashing his car into the steelworks wall - described in a biography of Koestler borrowed from the library. It is only in the light of these textual connections that this otherwise obscure piece of narrative can make sense.

I have focused earlier on the crucial metonymic connection between the ivory of the tooth and of the piano keys, itself metaphorical of the relation of cause and effect between loss and creation. The passage is worth considering again from the angle of the metonymic connections it establishes and denies at the same time, as if the cultural unconscious were trying to cover its own tracks:

The tooth... It had a ridge about a third of the way down, where the glaze of enamel stopped... Ivory. She smiled and laid it aside on the wood slate at the side of the keyboard, like a misplaced piece of inlay. It didn't match. The keys were whiter. (emphasis mine, 8)

Galloway's artful craftswomanship is at its best here: on one hand the passage establishes the crucial unconscious connection enamel/ivory/keyboard/keys, whose key function in the process of significance is playfully signalled by the very redundancy of the word. On the other hand the text seems as it were to divert us from that connection by a double denial (<< misplaced>> <<it didn't match>>) which, I would suggest, is a perfect example of the Freudian negation which consists in saying the contrary of what one actually means: the tooth is not at all misplaced, it does match within a pattern of significance, yet that pattern must not be directly accessible. The incongruous contiguity of tooth with piano key is both crucially relevant, and contrary to all standards of bourgeois good taste; the student's glance of recognition and rejection testifies to the simultaneous presence and repression of the
latent signified under the overt layer of meaning. It is in this sense that skilfully handled narrative can speak the manifold truth of signifying forms - this is also, I would suggest, where Galloway shows her artfulness and artistry.

Galloway's stories, therefore, are symbolic centres rather than slices of Scottish life or womanly experience. They speak from the very locus of late twentieth-century experience to those who are no longer seduced by the Victorian Hearts and Flowers. The most fitting metaphor for the creator's choice to reveal the gap under the wall paper, can again be found nestled in one of the stories:

It was light and dark at the same time and the walls were moving. They were sliding and changing colour in huge suppurating spots.... In the middle of the textured ceiling there was a glittering ball of mirror chips, rotating and sparkling light that turned on the wall in formless, spreading blobs. (90)

Thus the modern creator can only take us among the rubble of the fairy tale castle and make us see/hear the stifled suffering and cries. After the shattering of the smoothly reflecting mirror, it is always a consolation to find out that the mirror chips glitter and send out sparkles of light in the night of this world - as the poet Aragon once said, << Le verre n'est jamais si bleu qu'a sa brisure>> 22. It is in this sense that Galloway's writing deserves, like her contemporary William Gass, the term of poetic prose.

©Josiane Paccaud Huguet 1993

1. It is rather in terms of textual energies that I wish to offer my reading of these texts, in the lines presented by the Scottish writer, Kenneth White: <<I can conceive of national culture at most only as halfway house...I radically put in question, both from a socio-political point of view and from that of psychology and creativity, the ideology of identity - I think and work rather in terms of a play of energy>> (Scotland, history and the Writer, Etudes écossaises #1.5)

2. I am referring here to the definition of postmodernist modes of representation and writing offered by Brian McHale's excellent study, Postmodernist Fiction.

3. <<He put his knee up on her chest getting ready to pull, tilting the pliers...she couldn't see his face... The bones of his hands were bruising her lip>>; note the needle <<big as a power drill>>.

4. "Most folk ... went out of their way to avoid his maybe-squinty eyes or pointedly NOT LOOK when they heard the clink and drag ... like Marley's ghost, coming up the street ... he stopped, checking out a suspicious back, reinforcing his law" (112)

5. See Eugenie Lemoine-Luccioni's remarkable study on the question of gender representations in Occidental societies, Partage des Femmes.

6. <<Impossible to argue against, so you made out it wasn't there, swanning past the word CUNTS thought it radiated like a black sun all the way from the other end of the corridor.>>

7. A fine illustration of Lacan's <<lalangue>> (that which in the language sings out to our desire, a trace of the maternal idiom) as opposed to <<la langue>> ie a coded body of prescriptions.

8. Colin MacCabe usefully defines neurotic desire in these terms: <<The neurotic refuses to accept that meanings, both sexual and linguistic, are constituted by difference, and, instead, demands constant identities uncontaminated by the world of absence and loss. It is the same refusal and the same demand that dictates the meta-lanaguge of realism>> (24)

9. <<The subject is no longer a full unity but a constant set of displacements inaugurated by a primal ( but never original) exclusion (castration) from a world that was never full until it was empty - whose emptiness we continually attempt to fill.>> (74)

10. <<It would be good to get out of here, get to something fresh and clean, Mozart and the white room upstairs. She would patch something together and just pretend she wasn't bleeding so much, was her hands and be fit for things. The white keys.>>

11. It is surely no accidental if musical instruments often include animal remains - elephant tusks for piano keys, goat guts for violin strings, horse-tail and mother of pearl for the bow...

12. Or, more appropriately, <<Represented speech and thought>> - a terms coined by Ann Banfield in her linguistic study , Unspeakable Sentences.

13. As in the following passage: <<It was impossible to tell if they were serious or not. The dentist turned back grinning at the spectacles he was holding between his hands. Sandra given you a wee special there. Least said haha. Redheads eh? Oh Roooobeeee, not looking, wiping the same lens over and over with a cloth.>> (3)

14. or example in Fearless - the fallacy of imaginary identifications is bared by an effect which dislodges the reader and forces us to critical distance halfway through the story: the introductory <<you>> is potentially a referring both to the narrative voice and narratee, whereas the <<he>> refers to the object of the narrative, Fearless. It is only after a few pages that the <<you>> splits into a first person narrator, am <<I>> who claims the reality of her subjective and cultural position. The possibility for the reader to identify is thus denounced and dispelled: we are forced into the position of a critical reader who should always remain exterior to the representations of persons in the narrative.

15. We are ein turn offered the positions of external focalisers (<<our eyes have become accustomed to the decibel level of light>>; uncertain of vision (<<We may assume a wedding photograph>> (47), <<to far and at the wrong angle to read>> (55), voyeurs (<<Feel free; she cannot know we are watching>> (47), sympathisers (<<Ah. A little weight drops from out necks>> (54).

16 <<It was more serious than I at first supposed>> begins Plastering the Cracks (90); <<and he was missing the kids and couldn;t sleep>>, opens Nightdriving, without even a capital letter. <<They'd planned it for his sixty-fourth birthday>> in Later he would open his eyes in a strange place wondering where she, where the <<it>> remains non-symbolizable.

17. See this writer's essay, <<My eppripfftaph, discours nationaliste et parole du sujet dans Ulysses>>

18. I will make a clumsy attempt at the same here: we begin with a transparent <<It was toward evening>> to <<then the glitter of it caught her eye>> separated by blankcs from <<There was/something shiny in the earth>> which leads to <<she knelt to pick it up/It was a face/(blank)/it was (blank)>> (33-34)

19. Elsewhere a textual blank and sudden change of line signifies the girl's and the text's stumbling into the world of fantasy: <<she opened them quickly and found herself standing at the now-grey privet-hedge of one of the smarter pebble-dashes on the corner...>> (33)

20. <<KETL. A word and a sound like a tearing sheet made me turn abruptly. KETLHENIH. The fat man crammed the living-room doorway>> (94)

21. After she has torn open the pages on her uncle's magazine and discovered the reality of female sexuality, we are told that <<there was nothing to hear except the buzz of the overhead bulb>> (157)

22. <<Glass in never bluer than when it breaks>> (my translation)

Cited works

Banfield Ann, Unspeakable Sentences, London: Routledge,1982.

Barthes, Roland, .Mythologies, Paris: Seuil, coll. Points, 1957.

Eagleton, Terry <<Modernism, myth, and monopoly capitalism>> in News from Nowhere, n°7, Oxford English Limited, Winter 1989: P 19-24.

Galloway, Janice, Blood, London: Secker and Warburg, 1991.

Lemoine-Luccioni, Eugenie, Partage des Femmes, Paris: Points, Seuil, 1971.

MacCabe, Colin, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, Londres: Macmillan,1978.

McHale Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, New York: Methuen, 1 987.

Paccaud-Huguet, Josiane, <<My eppripfftaph: discours nationaliste et parole du soujet dans Ulysses>> in Ideologies dans le monde anglo-saxon n° 4, Université Stendhal, Grenoble, 1991, p.75-92.

Sibony ,Daniel, <<Hamlet as a writing effect >> in Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. S. Felman, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,1982.

White, Kenneth, << Scotland, history and the writer>> in Etudes ecossaises n° I, Université Stendhal, Grenoble, GDR Etudes ecossaises, 1992, p. 5-20.