Hunger art: the novels of Anita Brookner

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

Frances Hinton remarks, "I am famous for my control, which has seen me through many crises. By a supreme irony, my control is so great that these crises remain unknown to the rest of the world, and so I am thought to be unfeeling" (Look 19). Edith Hope says, "The facts of life are too terrible to go into my kind of fiction" (Hotel 28). But they do go into Brookner's. We as readers see beneath the nothing-to-be-seen that defines Brookner's women, so proper, so careful, in the view of other characters in her novels. We see beneath their posturing, too, the awkward retreats and exhibitions which they largely botch. We see to the empty, hungry center, the dwelling place of lack.(6) Brookner's novels would seem to bear out Lacan's famous observation, "There is no woman who is not excluded by the nature of things, which is the nature of words" (Encore, Le Seminare XX, qtd. in Irigary 87).(7)

Brilliantly she writes of that exclusion. Lecturing on Benjamin Constant's Romantic novel Adolphe, Kitty Maule tells her students, "The potency of this particular story comes from the juxtaposition of extremely dry language and extremely heated, almost uncontrollable sentiments.... There is a feeling that it is almost kept under lock and key, that even if the despair is total, the control remains. This is very elegant, very important" (Providence 131). What Brookner says of Adolphe describes her own work, too. Elegantly accoutered and impeccably made up, her novels, like her women, find their truth in limitation, their passion in despair.

NOTES

(1) My thanks to Peter Wirth for pointing out the allusion to "The Call," by Thomas Osbert Mordaunt (1730-1908): Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife! Throughout the sensual world proclaim One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name. (552)

(2) David Galef discusses the literal dimension of this hunger in "You Aren't What You Eat: Anita Brookner's Dilemma": "Brookner's characters, starved as they are from childhood on, are nonetheless trying both to feed others and also fill their own void, the second need neglected by the first."

(3) "Merle" is French for "blackbird."

(4) Elaine Showalter describes the "wild zone" as the "imaginary" of phallocentric culture in her important essay "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness." She writes:

Experimentally it stands for the aspects of the female life-style which are outside of and unlike those of men; ... there is a corresponding zone of male experience alien to women. But if we think of the wild zone metaphysically or in terms of consciousness, it has no corresponding male space since all of male consciousness is within the circle of the dominant structure and thus accessible to or structured by language. In this sense, the "wild" is always imaginary; from the male point of view, it may simply be the projection of the unconscious.... For some feminist critics, the wild zone, or "female space," must be the address of a genuinely women-center criticism, theory, and art, whose shared project is to bring into being the symbolic weight of female consciousness, to make the invisible visible, to make the silent speak. (262-63)