SOURCE: "Blown Figures and Blood: Toward a Feminist/Post-Structuralist Reading of Audrey Thomas' Writing," in Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature, University of Ottawa Press, 1987, pp. 221-27.

Blank pages, comic strips, quotations, jokes, dreams, rhymes, newspaper clippings, ads, etymologies, multiple selves, silence: what we have traditionally referred to as the writing of Audrey Thomas is obsessed with the contextual, contradictory meanings, and meaninglessnesses, of words, with the ways subjectivity is represented, in fact present only, in and as language. When I say "the writing of Audrey Thomas" then, I mean to point out the duplicity of the phrase. The words "the writing of Audrey Thomas" may refer to those texts which, because of our particular ideology of literary production, we say have been written by Audrey Thomas, or they may suggest that writing in fact speaks the historical figure Thomas as much as it does "you" or "I." In an important sense, what we call "Audrey Thomas' writing" is a writing "about" a necessarily fictional self. But I want to point out the literal sense of the metaphor "about" which suggests not a centring on but a marginality. As we all are, "she" is constructed around and out of many discourses. The "I" speaks, not as the voice of personal experience, but as the shifter, as the absent presence within the text.

To call the "I" an absent presence or a lack which constitutes subjectivity is to describe what is very often the "subject" in and of "Thomas' writing." But the theory of the constitution of the self as a constitution of division, partialness, absence, is more exactly (obscurely?) articulated in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Lacan's theory of the self is, I think, implicit in Thomas' work and undermines not only the assumption which so many readers bring to "novels" like Mrs. Blood (1970) or Latakia (1979), that they are "purely" autobiographical, but the entire concept of an autobiographical writing—a writing of the biological self.

In The Subject of Semiotics, Kaja Silverman stresses that the Lacanian subject is almost entirely defined by lack. It is a subject which speaks only by becoming aware of its radical différance, its ex-centricity, its "other" ness from itself. In Lacan's formulation, the subject speaks, not out of a sense of essential self-hood, but out of an awareness of its continual loss of stable identity in speaking. In Thomas' work this self-alienating sense of self is played with in the dual Mrs. Blood/Mrs. Thing voices of Mrs. Blood, in the Isobel/Miss Miller voices of Blown Figures (1974), and in the Munchmeyer/Miranda voices of Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island (1971). I find it troublesome therefore that so much attention has been paid to what are called, without question, the autobiographical aspects of Thomas' work. As Anthony Boxill has concluded, for example, "in spite of the basic dissimilarity between the characters … one always has the feeling that Audrey Thomas' work is substantially autobiographical." What is the status of the "dissimilarity," of the difference, in a Thomas text? Who is the "one" unified self who "feels" that the work is autobiographical? What is "substantial" about a writing as full of blank pages as Thomas'? I suggest rather that, as current psychoanalytic and deconstructive theory does, the writing of Audrey Thomas asks us to reread our notions of what constitutes not only the "self" but concurrently the autobiographical self.

Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island is a piece of writing which insists that the self is multiple. "I" speaks for and as Munchmeyer, Miranda, Munchmeyer as "author," Miranda as "author," and so makes us aware that it is, if anything, sexually indifferent. Blown Figures is constructed out of scraps of writing from newspapers, dictionaries, nursery rhymes, and so resists the authority of "one" who would speak. Latakia explores the ways that "letters"—languages—are based on and created out of absence: that we "write" to those we love not only when they are absent, but also because they can never be (in the Lacanian sense) fully present to us. Within this context, Thomas' writing may be read usefully in terms of much French feminist theory which asserts that "woman," like the self, is a social construct and not a natural phenomenon. Jacques Derrida writes

it is no longer possible to go looking for woman, or for woman's femininity or for female sexuality. At least they can not be found by means of any familiar mode of thought or knowledge—even if it is impossible to stop looking for them.

Julia Kristeva makes the same argument when she says, "in 'woman' I see something that cannot be represented, something that is not said, something above and beyond nomenclatures and ideologies."

In postmodern texts, Kristeva sees attempts to signify this phenomenon of writing through tests of the "limits of language and sociality … without reserving one for males and the other for females." Attention must be paid, Kristeva says, to the "particular aspect of the work of the avant-garde which dissolves identity, even sexual identity." An exemplary piece of avant-gardist or postmodernist fiction, Blown Figures shows the ways in which, as Michael Sprinker explains,

every text is … a weaving together of what has already been produced elsewhere in discontinuous form; every subject, every author, every self is the articulation of an intersubjectivity structured within and around the discourses available to it at any moment in time.

With its "blowing of figures," Blown Figures is a writing concerned with and aware of the inevitable shifting of identity in the slippage of the signified. Isobel's recognition of linguistic shift makes her aware of the always present "other" possibilities available on the paradigmatic chain. On a typical, and otherwise blank, page in Blown Figures, for example, are the words

cild-child. My cild was killed. My child was chilled. In my womb, the cild-hama, the child curled like a shrimp or a sea-horse and clung to the slippery decks.

Barbara Godard has noted that one of Thomas' most common metaphors for the problematic nature of language is "travelling in foreign countries, adrift on the cross-cultural confusions and the multiple meanings of words." In Blown Figures and Mrs. Blood the foreign countries include the textual surfaces of Africa, the unconscious, and the "real" world that we, in the twentieth century, all inhabit and are inhabited by. In each case, the "universe" is represented as fragmented, disjointed scraps of writing. The self is available as that which is absorbed within and created out of a culture that, like the reader, is "present" only in discourse. Isobel's story is one of "otherness" in this important sense: written out of others' words (in newspapers, dictionaries, letters), the writing reminds us that all "our" words are others' words, all our "selves" are always already "other."

Like Blown Figures, Audrey Thomas' first published short story, "If One Green Bottle …" (in Ten Green Bottles 1967), narrates, in a convoluted, fragmented way, the story of a "fall" from physical and mental health, the fall into (which is?) language. In so doing it represents a very early example of the postmodern world of writing that we encounter in her later work. Like Blown Figures, "If One Green Bottle …" self-"deconstructs," as it were. Both wrestle with the interrelations between madness and articulation, insanity and aesthetics. One of the narrating voices in "If One Green Bottle …" speaks of our attempts to organize the continuum of experience; for example,

that's it, just the right tone … Abstract speculation … It's so simple really … all a question of organization … of aesthetics. One can so easily escape the unpleasantness … the shock of recognition.

In Latakia Rachel articulates the desire, suggested here, that language have a transparent relation to the world:

I want a palette, not a pen. I have to say that such and such is "like" something else—I have to take the long way around when what I really want to do is dip my brush directly into the ocean, the sky, the sun … and transfer it all to canvas.

With these words Rachel expresses a desire that the "landscape" around the story become self-present. But in fact the narrative form (or lack of it) in "If One Green Bottle …" re-enacts Rachel's desire to sacrifice "the subject as subject, to a study of the changing effects of light … shape, tone, movement (or lack of it), not STORY." Of course, both Blown Figures and "If One Green Bottle …" point out that for postmodernist writing of this kind, the subject is the form.

In "The Exploding Porcupine: Violence of Form in English-Canadian Fiction," Robert Kroetsch suggests that

Violence, physical violence, proposes an ending…. We must resist endings, violently. And so we turn from content to the container. It is the form itself, traditional form, that forces resolution. In our most ambitious writing, we do violence to form.

Kroetsch has also suggested that the "ultimate violence that might be done to story is silence." In terms of Thomas' work I recall all the pages in Blown Figures empty but for a single line, a comic strip, a newspaper clipping, a joke, or I think of all the elliptical gaps in "If One Green Bottle…." These are silences in the midst of story; this is violence done to form.

The "one green bottle" in the title of the short story refers not only to the incomplete line in a children's song. It suggests not only the bottles of formaldehyde embryos the narrative voices recall with horror. It also, and simultaneously, signifies the "one green bottle" which is story as coherence, preserved, precariously, on the "shelf" which has been raised up (reified) as the text. If story should accidentally fall, which, with each fragmented line, it seems prepared to do, then what?

Like the woman in the story we each experience the miscarriage: the miscarriage of narrative (the blowing of figures). Like her, we suffer a loss of "meaning." The shift from lines like "This is the house that Jack built" to "we are the maidens … that loved in the hearse that Joke built" reminds us that language defines itself and us by difference, that meaning is always threatened by loss. Where there was an expected pregnancy and plenitude (in the womb or between the covers of the book), there is, after much "labour," only emptiness, what the narrator calls "this nothing." Like the woman who recalls that Mary had a sign, a "voice … the presence of the star," perhaps we too would be "content with something far more simple." But "dumpty-like" the story "refuses to be reintegrated." Like the woman losing her child, we are left incomplete, open, scarred. "If One Green Bottle …" is a narrative of proposition that we are invited to complete, then. What might traditionally be called a "story" is, in this case, a space of multiplicity, of many stories, none of them finished. As one of the voices in the narrative says, "the whole thing should have been revised … rewritten … we knew it from the first."

Like Blown Figures and "If One Green Bottle …" Latakia too is fragmented, but in an extremely calculated, self-conscious way. "Your books are absolutely self-centred," struggling writer/lover Michael accuses successful writer/lover Rachel. But in Latakia the question of self, like the question of language, is problematized again by the narrative form. In what ways is a "novel" written entirely out of letters to an/other, absolutely self-centred? Or is the self always and only created in "letters" to others?

The metaphor of the labyrinth is a helpful one in describing the structure of Latakia. Rachel is lost (and found) in the labyrinth of words and letters which is (a) Latakia. Near the end of the book, the definition "Labyrinth: a maze, a place full of lanes and alleys" is marked off, by straight lines, from the text that precedes and follows. All of the segments/fragments of the letter/narrative are, like the bordered spaces in which they occur, "defined," limited, so that, rather unlike the labyrinth metaphor, the narrative looks as if it "fits" together, puzzle-like, less uneasily than the haphazard structure of Blown Figures. These two opposing metaphors—the metaphor of the puzzle and of the maze—which may each be used to describe the structure of Latakia, suggest that there is an interesting tension within this piece of writing, a tension that is present in Thomas' work generally in fact, which may be described in terms of two different theories of language. While one, the puzzle metaphor, suggests that language is fully meaningful, the other, the labyrinth metaphor, suggests that language consists of an outward, disseminating, infinity of absence and deferral.

Shirley Neuman's and Robert Wilson's description of the labyrinth metaphor in Labyrinths of Voice is helpful at this point. They write

sometimes the voices are simply illustrative; sometimes they are indications that some other mazewalker, recently, or years ago, arrived by other paths at the same juncture. Sometimes the voices concur; often they dispute with us about the path to take. There are always echoes in the maze.

Many voices speak in the labyrinth of Latakia. There are the echoes from other pieces of Thomas' writing—the "Horizontal Woman" from Mrs. Blood, bits of the Africa of Blown Figures, the Greek "mirror writing" of "Rapunzel." There are the echoes of Michael's words to Rachel, Rachel's words to Michael, Michael's words to Hester, Hester's words to Michael and Rachel, and so on. The novel is not constructed with or through a direct authorial voice—a voice that would address the reader and imply that an intended message was being adequately transmitted—but with a series of "echoes," an intertext, or labyrinth, of voices. It may be that the book is the longest love letter in the world, but because it is produced as a letter posing as a book posing as a letter, there is an important sense in which not only can it not reach the one addressed (there are many echoes in the maze), it cannot speak for/with the author(ity) it posits. Like Michael, the voice of the narrator/letter writer becomes both persuasively present and yet notably absent from the letters we are offered.

Because Latakia is made up of "letters" to Michael and Michael also writes to and receives letters from both Rachel and Hester, there is the sense in which all one can ever give is language. The following passage from Latakia suggests that writing is an attempt to "fix" our "selves," permanently, to and for the ones we love:

In the Poste Restante, there is a pile of love letters for a guy called Karl Reicker. Practically every day another letter comes in. They are decorated with red heart-seals and little kisses. Obviously Karl is not where he is supposed to be.

But in writing (and in rereading/"receiving" our own writing) we discover that "we" are not where we are supposed to be either. Language functions not as a medium through which our selves and our intentions are channelled but, as Christopher Norris writes, as a "signifying system which exceeds all bounds of individual 'presence' and speech." Anne Archer calls the ending of the novel—which "closes" with the words "the best revenge is writing well"—a "cheap shot" and criticizes the voice for being "self-justifying." But the words at the end of the novel may be re-interpreted to suggest that the phrases "writing well" and "self-justifying" are linked in a more complex way. If we agree with Lacan that the self is both formed at, and recognized as a lack at, the moment of entrance into language, then the only place in which we can be "self"-justifying or, as Michael describes Rachel earlier in the book, "selfish"—literally, like selves—is in language, in "writing well." It is only at the site of language that we both have, and have not, selves to offer one another.

Blown Figures, "If One Green Bottle …," and Latakia each make us aware that selves, like texts, are formed at the gatherings of "scraps" of writing. Like writing, identity is never original. "My" words have always already been said. "I" already am "other" than my "self" when "I" speak. As Lacan has phrased it, "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think." At its most ambitious, Thomas' writing points out the ways that "her" writing is not her own, that sexual and textual identities are constructs of many overlapping, disagreeing discourses. The self as text is a palimpsest of shifting, layered languages. Significantly for feminist theory, Thomas' anti-representational, transgressive writing suggests that the differential relation that has existed between men and women, like the relation we have assumed exists between self and other, is not a difference between but a difference within. In speaking, "men" and "women" are both constituted as selves only by speaking as other(s). The possibility of a new relation exists precisely because human-sexual relations are intertextual. Thomas' writing speaks for "women," that is, for "men" and "women," when it suggests, with Helene Cixous, that:

everything is word, everything is only word … we must grab culture by the word, as it seizes us in its word, in its language…. Indeed, as soon as we are, we are born into language and language speaks us.