Hunger art: the novels of Anita Brookner

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1995 by Ann Fisher-Wirth

I read Anita Brookner with chagrin and fascination. I have never before been addicted to a writer with whose values and vision I so consciously disagree. Every time a new Brookner novel is published, I buy it the day it arrives -- in hard cover, no less. My life remains on hold until the new novel is finished. Yet when I close the book, more often than not I am angry. How can she offer that, I ask myself again and again, as an image of life, of womanhood?

One of the sources of my frustration is Brookner's well-known belief that nice girls finish last -- that, as Edith Hope says in Hotel du Lac, life is a race in which the hare wins every time. There is some truth to this, as there is bitter truth to the line from the Bible that could stand as a text for Brookner's fiction: "Unto every one that hath shall be given ...: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath" (Matthew 25:29). It's just that, in Brookner's vision, there is little acknowledgment that decency, kindness, or generosity could characterize the hare, could coexist with happiness and fulfillment. For all her gifts, for all her brilliant academic and literary success, Brookner writes with the pain of exile. The daughter of Polish Jews, raised in London, she refers to herself in her Paris Review interview as having always been unhappy, having always stood outside, and as "one of the loneliest women in London" (164). And, as she often has her personae say of themselves in their tormented attempts to negotiate a path among the vibrant and self-assured, sometimes she gets it wrong; she lacks the information. Having a rich, eventful life need not demand -- as Brookner seems obsessively to argue -- that one be ruthless, designing, manipulative, self-centered, irresponsible, or showy.

Yet paradoxically, Brookner's limitation are one source of her great strength: hers is not merely a neurotic, but in its cumulative effect a genuinely tragic, vision. All of Brookner's heroines are defined by lack. They exist, by their own choice, almost entirely within the patriarchal structures -- particularly the conventional heterosexual rituals of courtship and marriage -- that offer them only meager satisfaction. Their dream of simple happiness is that expressed by Edith Hope: "to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening" (98). Relentlessly unliberated, they wear their hearts on their sleeves, longing for men who are never worth the intelligent, fierce passion they expend upon them. Unloved or at best tolerated, they devise rituals of camouflage and attempted compensation, trying to make up in painstaking dress, in the anxious preparation of meals for the beloved, in the careful application of the face, for lives they do not have. The cry of one of them, Frances Hinton in the early novel Look at Me, echoes for them all: "Look at me ... Look at me" (20). But as Luce Irigaray points out, the "scopic economy," the predominance of the visual over the tactile that characterizes Western culture, and that is at the base of Freud's castration theory and hence of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory altogether, condemns women sexually not only to passivity but also to nonentity. In the scopic economy, woman "is to be the beautiful object of contemplation. While her body finds itself thus eroticized ... her sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see" (26).

Though Brookner eloquently reveals that behind or within the "nothing to see" there is plenty to see, her novels about the hidden lives of women never really challenge this economy. Her women starve for a glance. The tragedy of her heroines, in fact, is partly the wholeheartedness with which they buy into the symbolic order that excludes them -- excludes them not because they are unattractive, ungifted, or unlovable, but precisely because they want so much to be included. The allegiances are always to the phallocentric order, an order that always rejects and betrays them. Kitty Maule's story in Providence will serve as the type of them all: she chooses England, her father's land, over France, her mother's land; a lonely academic life over life with her mother's family; love for the narcissistic, unresponsive, and fervently Anglican professor Maurice Bishop over any other relationship. The novel ends with what she thinks will be her triumph: she gives a brilliant first faculty lecture, receives a university appointment, and is invited to a dinner party held in her honor by her lover Maurice Bishop. Sure that he will marry her, she travels to the party, thinking, "Soon I shall be where I have always wanted to be ... in this house" (180). Once there, however, she discovers immediately that only she has not known that Maurice has another lover as well, the careless, sensual Jane Fairchild. "I lacked the information, thought Kitty, trying to control her trembling hands. Quite simply, I lacked the information" (182). Irigaray's comment on Freud helps us to a reading of the final moment of Providence, which is otherwise rather obscure. Irigaray writes: "The perfect achievement of the feminine destiny, according to Freud, lies in reproducing the male sex, at the expense of the woman's own. Indeed, in this view, woman never truly escapes from the Oedipus complex. She remains forever fixated on the desire for the father, remains subject to the father and to his love, for fear of losing his love, which is the only thing capable of giving her any value at all" (87). In a terrible moment of clarity, Kitty sees at last what house she has trapped herself in: the house of loss, of woman as emptiness loyal to and longing for the father. "My father was in the army," says Kitty, fighting to hide her dismay as the guests all gather around her. But it is to no avail, because everything she has chosen has been useless. No matter how she courts it, the order of the Father will never be forthcoming: as she tells the guests, "He died before I was born" (183).