SOURCE: Schaub, Danielle. “Text and Image: Overhead in a Balloon.” In Mavis Gallant, pp. 119-39. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998.

Overhead in a Balloon, Gallant's collection of Parisian stories, explores the mentality of her adoptive fellow citizens in the late seventies and early eighties with the sharpness of the best introduced social critic. From an insider's perspective, Gallant exposes the pettiness and superficiality of the artistic and literary world (patrons and creators alike) as well as of the petite bourgeoisie, the upper-middle class, and the impoverished aristocrats. Several of the stories are linked by the recurrence of certain characters: “Speck's Idea” and “Overhead in a Balloon” both stage Sandor Speck, the curator of an art gallery, and his assistant, Walter Obermauer; “Larry,” “A Painful Affair,” “A Flying Start,” and “Grippes and Poche” all allude to a famous American patron of the arts, Miss Pugh, and the last three refer to the rivalry of a French writer and his English counterpart for the favors of Miss Pugh; “A Recollection,” “Rue de Lille,” “The Colonel's Child,” and “Lena” deal with the first and second wives of a literary broadcaster whose recollections are convincingly told in the first person owing to the true feelings or fascination he had, or has, for both. Standing apart are two stories concerned with further established citizens: “Luc and His Father” reveals a son's failure to follow his father's model, and therefore career, by failing the entrance exam securing admission to one of the Grandes Ecoles; and “The Assembly” reports the prejudiced discussion of flat owners in a building after one of them has been molested. The stories prove Gallant's familiarity with French letters, art, architecture, mores, and prejudice over changing demography (most of which appears in The Paris Notebooks).¹

With its emphasis on the world of art, Overhead in a Balloon lends itself to a discussion of the interaction between text and image, and the extra interpretative dimension that interrelation affords. An avid visitor of museums and galleries, Gallant often discloses her appreciation for art (though not for the artistic clique) through descriptions of, and allusions to, paintings and photographs, but she surpasses herself here as she captures the world of culture.² “Speck's Idea” and the title story, more than half of the book, highlight the value and purpose of art in Paris and represent art works that have an impact on the textual interpretation. But several of the other stories not directly concerned with art describe the visual in the decor, such as “Luc and His Father,” “Larry,” and “A Flying Start,” for instance.

Gallant's awareness of the problems posed by the representation of images in fiction and their potential as a source of irony goes back to her years as a journalist and finds an echo in Linnet's ironical consideration of the caption for a picture portraying a bear and a boy eating a bun: “There is no trick to it. You just repeat what the picture has told you like this: ‘Boy eats bun as bear looks on.’ The reason why anything has to go under the picture at all is that a reader might wonder, ‘Is that a bear looking on?’ It looks like a bear, but that is not enough for saying so” (HT [Home Truths], 318). As Barthes would say, Linnet's comment on the picture “is a matter of a denoted description of the image.”³ But she goes beyond a mere denotation; she also takes the image's reception into account. Without any attempt at theorizing, she pinpoints the “terror of uncertain signs” (Barthes 1977, 39), which makes the presence of the linguistic message necessary. In other words, she emphasizes the taming effect of captions, leaving no freedom of interpretation to the readers, who, in this case, are not endowed with perceptiveness or, as Barthes would have it, needs the “anchorage of all the possible (denoted) meanings of the object” (39). Linnet goes on thinking about the mechanics of captions: “You have a space to fill in which the words must come out even. The space may be tight; in that case, you can remove ‘as’ and substitute a comma, though that makes the kind of terse statement to which your reader is apt to reply, ‘So what?’ Most of the time, the Truth with a Capital T is a matter of elongation: ‘Blond boy eats small bun as large bear looks on’” (HT, 318). Both compression and expansion of the caption change the impact of the picture. Compression, in that it takes away the links between the various denoted elements of the composition, reduces the “anchorage,” whereas expansion, that is, the exact pinning down of characteristics, increases it. The irony of the passage here lies in the use of “Truth with a Capital T” in relation to the caption that leaves the field least open to interpretation, that “appears to duplicate the image” (Barthes 1977, 26). Linnet's exposition of the problems of representation calls to mind Barthes's question: “Does the image duplicate certain of the informations [sic] given in the text by a phenomenon of redundancy or does the text add a fresh information to the image?” (33).

By specifically narrowing the scope of interpretation, the linguistic message suits the needs of society, “concerned to tame the Photograph, to temper the madness which keeps threatening to explode in the face of whoever looks at it.”⁴ The overqualifying caption, the elongating text, nullifies the potential effect of the image, prevents the image from affecting the readers in any personal way. The reductive quality of the linguistic sign directs the readers' attention to harmless concepts. As Barthes says, one “means of taming the Photograph is to generalize, to gregarize, banalize it until it is no longer confronted by any image in relation to which it can mark itself, assert its special character, its scandal, its madness” (Barthes 1981, 118).

As Linnet goes on discussing unscrupulous, lyric, or crazy captions, she further prolongs Barthes's observations. Rules obliquely emerge from the presentation of various plausible reactions to rejectable types of linguistic text. The implication is that the person in charge of “what goes under the pictures” (HT, 318) should not elicit reactions from the readers. The neutral, yet all-embracing, text suits the demand: “[I]t is not the business of ‘reader’ to draw conclusions. Our subscribers are not dreamers or smart alecks; when they see a situation in a picture, they want that situation confirmed” (320). For, as Barthes says, “when generalized, [the image] completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it” (Barthes 1981, 118). Told “to admire a contribution to pictorial journalism” (HT, 320) in the back issues of Life, Linnet decides to rephrase the caption: “Boy eats bun as bear looks on. Note fur on bear” (320). The tautological addition to the already reductive text ridicules the task of the caption writer and of the readers. As Barthes would have it, the readers can only “subject [the Photograph's] spectacle to the civilized code of perfect illusions” delimited by the text, rather than “[confronting] in it the wakening of intractable reality” (Barthes 1981, 119).

Gallant's attitude to the first pictures of concentration camps falls within Barthes's second option, that of allowing the photograph to open up new vistas and to display reality in its true light. Asked to write the captions and a text of 750 words, Gallant decided that “there must be no descriptive words in this, no adjectives. Nothing like ‘horror,’ ‘horrifying’ because what the pictures are saying is stronger and louder” (iHancock, 39). What she sensed then is that “the Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence—as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence” (Barthes 1981, 115). What actually came out in the special issue was a severely tampered-with version of Gallant's captions, full of “adverbs and adjectives smothering the real issue, and the covering article, which was short, was a prototype for all the cliches we've been bludgeoned with ever since” (iHancock, 40). When she inquired about the reasons for the alterations, she heard: “Culture! Our readers never went to high school and you're talking about culture? All the Germans are bastards and that's that” (40).⁵ This reaction definitely reduces the pictures to some almost innocuous images of the concentration camps, indeed denies the universal lure of fascism. The text and the captions thus minimize a terrifying reality. But Gallant rejected, and still rejects, the lie: “But that wasn't that and it still isn't” (40). To her, the travestied version reads like the following dichotomy: the picture tells a story; the text smothers it. The text should enhance the photographic message, not tone it down; it should reflect, not limit nor distort, the message.

Gallant's early career as a journalist undoubtedly awakened her perception of the complex relationship between picture and text. Her fiction gives examples of double layers of text: Linnet Muir reveals that in Canada, as in other countries with split-up communities, the titles of art works are “identified in two languages” (HT, 299), even when they do not call for translation. Behind the doubly printed text, and the accompanying comment to the effect that a house “had on display landmarks identified in two languages … as if the engraver had known they would find their way to a wall in Montreal” (299), lies the ironic smile of the bilingual speaker. The physical presence of both titles, not only on the engravings, but specifically on the printed page in Gallant's book, ridicules the flat refusal to open one's mind to others, the cold refusal to understand others, even where no misunderstanding can exist.⁶

Descriptions of, or allusions to, images abound in Gallant's fiction and journalism.⁷ Her story “In the Tunnel” re-presents a painting of Judas, after he hangs himself, and several paintings of Jesus in an abandoned chapel somewhere on the Riviera. As Mary Condé rightly notes, the painting of Judas “controls the narrative,” “drawing together the story's themes of politics, nationality and cruelty.”⁸ The idea of punishment pervades the whole story, securing an inescapable link between text and image, the more so as the biblical reference inherent in the painting adds another layer of contextuality.⁹

Another example of pictorial control of the narrative can be found in “Bonaventure.” Several engravings adorn the walls of the pavilion in which the protagonist, Douglas Ramsay, is put up: once again, the story is centered on the punishment of Judas as well as on the last photograph of the late artist Moser, looking “like a famous picture of Freud going into exile” (HT, 145). The visual reflects the insidious acts and words of Katherine Moser, the artist's widow, for in the narrative past and present, she is seen subjecting all around her to the idea of punishment. To mention but two key instances, Katherine imposed a severe diet in the countryside on Moser, who abhorred both healthy food and nature, and she inflicts on Douglas Ramsay exhausting excursions to force him to enjoy nature (which he equally abhors) and art. As Douglas realizes while visiting an exhibition of impressionist paintings (164) that, owing to ill health, the painters were dependent on their wives, Katherine snaps back that he had better rest, reproducing the pattern of relationship she had with her late husband. In fact, she mimics the overprotectiveness of the painters' wives and also reenacts the sacrifice of Douglas's mother, who looks after her invalid husband, a situation that plagues Ramsay.

Only when faced with the prospect of being left alone with Katherine “at the chalet [with] the incomprehensible language of birds, and the cat with its savage nature, and the cannibal magpies, the cannibal jays” (HT, 166) for a whole month does Ramsay manage to break the spell of punishment. At the pension to which he escapes from Katherine, he finds in a drawer a forgotten sketch “of a naked and faceless woman wearing a pearl necklace” (169). A reminder of the “headless statue of an adolescent girl … [with] small breasts, slightly down-pointed” (164), which delighted him as an incarnation of Anne, Katherine's adolescent daughter, the drawing seems to anticipate Ramsay's final discovery: perhaps he was mistaken; perhaps he needs the nursing of a woman, whose identity has yet to be determined, as suggested by the featureless face on the drawing.

With the presence of Judas etched indelibly in the readers' memories, the text reflects the image, stressing the similarity between Ramsay and his spiritual father (the late Moser), between Ramsay and his biological father (spiritually dead owing to his wife's equation of chastisement with justice). The final words provide evidence that Ramsay's attempt to disclaim heredity, both biological and spiritual, has failed: he too will be trapped—indeed he has been all along—in a retributive system in which he cannot have the upper hand. The images in the text thus reverberate with punishment and retribution, two ideas that the text illustrates at different levels.

In other stories, oil paintings, photographs, and posters impress a sense of duty and obligation. In “Thank You for the Lovely Tea,” for instance, oil portraits of dignitaries and donors adorn the walls of the Catholic convent school where Ruth is a boarder, and a photograph of the late king and queen hangs in her classroom, powerful reminders of the school's cultural, ethical, and religious values that turn the place into a prison. On an outing, beyond the reach of the system's stern-looking representatives—both living and pictorially represented—Ruth and her friends can revel in harassing her father's lover.

Conversely, one could argue that in “Luc and His Father,” the oil portraits of public servants, a photograph of his father's graduating class, and a picture of his mother overwhelm Luc, a French youth, so much so that they exert a negative influence on him. The Jesuits who run the “examination factory … able to jostle any student, even the dreamiest, into a respectable institute for higher learning” see through him and warn his parents that they should see to his lack of adjustment.¹⁰ Reflecting her husband's manly talk to Luc, the mother replaces the photograph of her husband's graduating class with a framed poster of Che Guevara, bought on the advice of a salesman according to whom Che Guevara “had no political significance … had become manly, decorative kitsch” (OB [Overhead in a Balloon], 78). Ironically, the father objects to the photograph of Hitler tacked near his son's bed because “he [does] not want Luc quite that manly” (79).

Trying to escape his stifling background, Luc takes a fancy to a young woman he has met at political meetings. In the long run, the politically correct Jesuit counselor—he wears “a small crucifix on one lapel and a Solidarnosc badge on the other” (OB, 82)—having read his letters—equally correct in such an overbearing institution—manages to ruin Luc's chance of escaping his milieu, which is after all based on false values. Back home, after hearing of his girlfriend's engagement to a cousin, Luc receives one more pictorial message; another picture of his mother adorns his desk, “a charming one taken at the time of her engagement. She wore, already, the gold earrings. … Her expression was smiling, confident but untried” (98). The implication of the text leaves no doubt about the intended message; the photograph highlights Luc's parents' socially correct—though perhaps unhappy—choice of each other, emphasizing Luc's incorrect, hence unsuccessful, choice. A clear sign of wealth, the gold earrings, his mother's “talisman” (97), confirm the rightfulness of Luc's parents' claim, crowned by the smile. The radiance of the smile displays no sign of life's inscriptions, no unpleasant subtext of trying experiences (like her son's failure, for instance).

The last scene—the father's tête-à-tête with his son—stages the father's final attempt at taking Luc back on to the right path while disclosing the old man's melancholy perception of his son's romance. Showing his determination to forgo such foolish thoughts, he turns to his wife's picture. By stating, “I always admired that picture of your mother” (OB, 100), that is, by setting a model, he annihilates any hopes he might have cherished for a spontaneous, fully gratifying relationship for his son, indeed for humanity at large.

In “Larry,” another father, the elder Pugh, checks on his son, the title character, during a short visit in Paris and takes that opportunity to advise him about marriage, in spite of his own erring married life. After a failed attempt as a sculptor, Larry looks after a large, opulent house in the Huitième Arrondissement for the summer. In the course of the conversation, Larry's father announces his intention to bequeath a portrait of himself to his son. Larry's remembrance of the painting—“[his father] appeared to be elegant and reliable, the way things and people are always said to have been when one looks back at them” (OB, 116)—points to its unreliability, indeed reflects a general tendency in the story itself. The narrative reveals everyone's unreliability, starting with the rich landlords, who pilfer from hotels, then Larry, who breaks into their liquor cabinet, and finally his father, whose “sudden inclinations” (114) pass before morals or his family's interest. Just after the narrative voice reports that “shutters [are] bolted, curtains drawn on the streets with art names: Murillo, Rembrandt, Van Dyck [sic]” (113), as if art were reduced to names, the father expresses his views of art: “I suppose you found out there wasn't much to art in the long run” (113). With its indirect allusion to the ill-valued worth of art, the statement reinforces the unreliability of the portrait; it is further confirmed by Larry's memory of the mark left when the father, walking out on his wife, took the painting off the wall—“a blank place on the wall” (117), probably the truest image of him. The father's worthlessness is incidentally substantiated by the allusion to the allowance his rich daughter and art benefactress, Maggie, pays him “to keep away” (113). Larry, who envies his half-sister's wealth, is outraged that she should leave her fortune to an arts foundation when he, the would-be artist, could benefit from her support.

“A Flying Start” gives a good picture of the maneuvers performed by other would-be artists to win the favors of Miss Mary Margaret Pugh, an American patron of the arts and the Maggie of the previous short story. Most of the story consists of a section of the memoir that the French author Henri Grippes writes to recapture with questionable reliability the period when his English rival, Victor Prism, was the protégé of Miss Pugh. Recalling Prism's hesitant steps to be admitted by his patron, Grippes focuses on the impression that “an oil painting of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian” (OB, 124) made on Prism: “He thought of mile upon mile of museum portraits—young men, young saints pierced with arrows, with nothing to protect them from the staring of women but a coat of varnish” (124). Often represented as a beautiful youth wounded by arrows, the Roman martyr sentenced to be shot to death by archers for converting many soldiers in his cohort appears in the foreground virtually naked, as in Antonello's painting. The compelling observation of the painting results from Prism's projection in the pierced naked body of his own vulnerability, not to say ordeal, when braving Miss Pugh's analytical stare. Ever so often ill at ease with his pretended vocation, Prism cannot avoid catching a glimpse of the painting, a reminder of his predicament. Prism's obsession with the painting finds its mise en abyme in his unfinished novel staging his alter ego as the male character and Miss Pugh as the female character: “Christopher seemed to leave a trail of sawdust. There were arrow wounds everywhere. He did not know what other people thought and felt about anything, but he could sense to a fine degree how they thought and felt about him. He lived on the feelings he aroused, sought acquaintances among those in whom these feelings were not actively hostile” (125). Prism's plight comes to an end when another mental vision of “museum rooms full of portraits of St. Sebastian, with nothing for protection but a thin coat of varnish” (128) makes him think of the two schools of art conservation. Reviewing the claims of both—the one refusing to restore the original color, the other restoring it whether or not the painter had originally taken fading into account—he has a flash, draws “a blank sheet toward him” (128), the symbol of a new start, and writes: “Are we to take for granted that the artist thinks he knows what he is doing?” (128). Grippes notes that “at that moment, Prism the critic was born” (128). The juxtaposition of Prism's question and Grippes's statement no doubt conveys Gallant's sarcastic view of the literary critic whose sudden vision gives him or her a new vocation, but without the tools.

Funnily enough, Prism secures the favors of Miss Pugh when, asked to give an opinion of Picasso, he represents Picasso in a picture of the mind that helps him focus his anger at the unconceited yet frightfully rich painter whose money he could put to better use. Reminiscent of Larry's feelings toward his half-sister, the young man's anger causes Miss Pugh to compare her half-brother to Picasso, not for his artistic talent but for his looks, which sentences him to sisterly oblivion. Ironically, Prism's visualization of the artist, rather than his works of art, deprives the question of its metonymy and art of its value.

The slippage from art to artists finds its reflection in “A Painful Affair”; Miss Pugh does “not believe in art, only in artists” (OB, 109). Miss Pugh's devotion to art is thus questioned, the more so as she considers that “in art deception is a rule” (125). The irony, though, lies in the contemptible controversy that separates her two protégés at the time of the commemoration of her centenary, proving that she should not have believed in artists either. Further evidence lies in the appraisal of her belongings that gives them “an aura of sham” (106); no matter what convictions Miss Pugh held, she was exposed to deception over and over again.

Deceit also flourishes in “Speck's Idea” and “Overhead in a Balloon,” two stories that highlight ways in which art is consumed, used, disposed of, and discussed in an illusory manner.¹¹ “Speck's Idea” concerns the title character's attempt to bring fame to his name and his art gallery. “Overhead in a Balloon” stars Speck's Swiss assistant, Walter Obermauer, in his peregrination through life, religion, and art. In both stories, text and image weave a web of meaning where the image, consisting of real or fictitious paintings, book covers, and films, reflects the message of the story, which in turn conveys the characters' attitude to pictorial creation, and to art in general. By merging with, and in, the text, images and the imaginary create a meaningful network that throws light on the reception of art in both stories, and on the selfishness of human endeavor.

In “Speck's Idea,” an initial picture of human and political desolation finds its textual counterpart in an imaginary article foretelling many ills if all carry on ignoring the situation. Prompted by this imaginary article, Dr. Sandor Speck, an art dealer seeking prominence and prosperity, looks for ways of bringing about a new era. He then conceives an abstract image without forms or hues by conceptualizing an exhibition based on the invention, on the intellectual creation, of the work and life of an artist—likely to catch on—whose existence he has yet to trace. In other words, the text is based on the presentation of images or paintings that may or may not exist. He eventually decides to display ideal culture—or at least what he believes it to be—by exhibiting the works of a mediocre painter. The text, however, shows that this painter's re-presentation to the world does not really aim to boost a new, more dignified culture, but rather to promote an unsuccessful art dealer. The whole point of the story, evidently, is to make fun of the mercantile art world and of the production of culture in a politically and financially minded society, as comes out through the numerous paintings, drawings, and decorations depicted. The actors of this théâtre de dupes are the artists who produce indifferent works and the consumers who believe they are buying art objects. In between stands the illusionist, Sandor Speck, who tricks artists about what they do, and their customers about what they buy.

At the core of the story lies the basic question of authenticity and validity of both text and image in and beyond the fictional world. The creation of the imaginary artist originates in an authenticated text within the text. The “disturbing article in Le Monde” is presented with exact references between parentheses—“(front page, lower middle, turn to page 26)” (OB, 8)—that confer on it a real character. A sign presumably from the real world, yet belonging to the fictional realm by its very presence in the story, the article, written “by a man who never [takes] up his pen unless civilisation [is] in danger” (8), is meant to unsettle its readers—and supposedly the story's readers too—by mirroring the contemporary decline of society:

Its title, “Redemption Through Art—Last Hope for the West?,” had been followed by other disturbing questions: When would the merchants and dealers, compared rather unfairly to money-changers driven from the temple, face up to their responsibility as the tattered century declined? Must the flowering gardens of Western European culture wilt and die along with the decadent political systems, the exhausted parliaments, the shambling elections, the tired liberal impulses? What of the man in the street, too modest and confused to mention his cravings? Was he not gasping for one remedy and only one—artistic renovation? And where was this to come from? “In the words of Shakespr,” the article concluded, supposedly in English, “That is the qustn [sic].”

(OB, 8)

The picture raised by the successive questions displays culture—fictional or actual, the readers may wonder—as endangered by the commercial and political strongholds that cannot take in values of a different nature. The content of the article curiously recalls a historical harangue: on 15 March 1848, Sándor Petöfi, a Hungarian poet, became a national hero by addressing a crowd in Budapest and preconizing a revolution, indeed calling to arms to save the world and humanity.¹² The provoking questions result in Speck's immediate reaction, ironically so, for by hitting on the idea of the ideal artist agreeable to all, he falls back on the very characteristics abused by the columnist. Indeed, by devising an all-purpose figure, he sticks to philistinism and mercantilism. But then the columnist's mutilation of Shakespeare's name and a famous line from Hamlet reveals his own incapacity to safeguard the world's cultural heritage. This inevitably raises doubts about the identity of the writer: it could easily be Sandor Speck himself, the modern transposition and homonym, at least where his first name is concerned, of the historical figure whose discourse is echoed in less violent, but nonetheless culturally equivalent, words. The problem of the article's authenticity and the identity of its author thus remains unsolved.

Remaining on precarious foundations, Speck then starts elaborating on the life of the “savior,” inventing a series of data, which raise problems of choice over the appropriate representation. A discussion with a Lodge brother eventually leads him to dig out of oblivion a second-rate painter by the name of Hubert Cruche. His surname, an aptronym, immediately creates a multiple image in the minds of the readers; une cruche in French means a jug, jugful, or “fool.” The first meaning alludes to his life being filled up with convenient data pouring from Speck's mind; the second stands for his work being poured out on to the market to satiate humanity's thirst for a renewed cultural message; and the third hints at his being cheated on two levels (an unsuspecting cuckold, he never questioned the motives behind the sale of all his production for a period of 16 years to his wife's lover; and posthumously he is used by Speck, who tries to gain personal recognition through him). His first name, Hubert, le patron des chasseurs, even suggests that without benefiting from it, he offers protection to the East European hunter Speck.

The analogy between Speck and a hunter is further clarified by the existence and name change of another fictional character, namely the protagonist of John Marlyn's Under the Ribs of Death.¹³ This immigrant novel, published in 1957, shows how, in a vain attempt to integrate, Sandor Hunyadi changes his name to Alex Hunter. The parallel highlights Speck's fruitless endeavor and the ultimate reality that he too is a broken man. Apart from being a hunter, Speck also turns out to be a shopkeeper whose small-town mentality finds a reflection in his aptronym: it is appropriate that Speck means bacon in German, since Sandor Speck is the “butcher” of art. Incidentally, taken literally as a very small piece, mark, or spot, the name of Speck would reinforce the futility of the art dealer's enterprise, its worthless achievement. Alternatively, taken as an abbreviation, the name would suggest that the man embodies speculation without being able to assimilate cultural and ideological data.¹⁴

Traces of culture, displayed in paintings, books, and art objects, show that the cultural patrimony has an illusory quality. Nonexistence schools of art, such as the Tirana School, are disclosed (OB, 3); blatantly fake paintings appear in galleries (3, 7, 35); souvenirs and other consumers' objects no longer refer to traditional values but to other, new, equally conventional ones—the Pompidou Art Centre instead of the Eiffel Tower, for instance (44); trivial letters marked by royal stamps are more attractive than real art (28). All these take characters and readers alike into a realm of meanness and decadence.

In such a context, Speck can safely adopt, and persist in, a purely mercantile attitude. His approach to art encompasses only commercial, speculative concerns: “He knew one thing—art had sunk low on the scale of consumer necessities. To mop up a few back bills, he was showing part of his own collection—his last-ditch old-age-security reserve. He clasped his hands behind his neck, staring at a Vlaminck India ink on his desk. It had been certified genuine by an expert now serving a jail sentence in Zurich” (OB, 35). Art becomes merely a commodity to be sold in order to make a living. The oxymoronic disclosure about the “genuine” Vlaminck adds to the debasement of aesthetic values. Other allusions to dubious transactions (7, 14) reveal that where money is concerned, Speck does not shrink from any criminal offense, be it faking (7, 14) or stealing (3, 14) a painting, or even making something up from start to finish such as an art school or even a painter (3, 8-11). Besides, his recollections of the parting argument he had with his second wife confirm Speck's commercial approach: “In her summing-up of his moral nature, a compendium that had preceded her ringing ‘Fascist's, Henriette had declared that Speck appraising an artist's work made her think of a real-estate loan officer examining Chartres Cathedral for leaks. It was true that his feeling for art stopped short of love; it had to. … For what if he were to allow passion for painting to set alight his common sense? How would he be able to live then, knowing that the ultimate fate of art was to die of anemia in safe-deposit vaults?” (29). The comparison with an estate agency loan officer establishes the real nature of Speck's job. He does not, in the least, care about the artistic quality of what he sells; only budget matters concern him. The two questions hinting at an unlikely weakness caused by genuine enjoyment prove to what extent art has sunk low, not “on the scale of consumer necessities” as Speck would have it, but at a more elevated, disinterested level where art is appreciated for its own sake rather than tucked away for fear of robbers in search of marketable goods.

Because speculators have invaded the market, Lydia Cruche, the painter's widow, acts as a shrewd businesswoman, flinching at no stratagem available to raise the value of her inheritance. Rather than being a cruche, she takes after Croesus, king of Lydia, and cleverly tricks Speck into supporting her own financial hopes. Calling to mind two real artist widows, Lydia Cruche behaves like a leech sucking its prey's blood. Like Magritte's wife, she makes sure that all her husband's works will sell well, as she has already shown that over a period of 16 years she could manage to secure just that. Alternatively, like Utrillo's wife, who kept her husband as if on a leash because of his addiction to alcohol, Lydia is a tough opponent in financial transactions. By pretending to be a Japhethite, a member of a sect rejecting the graven image as creation rivaling God, and thus regarding artists as impostors, she feigns a lack of interest in a retrospective of her husband's works—in other words, she refuses the kind of meat Speck offers her, the better to chew afterward. Eventually, by calling on the services of an Italian dealer, she manages to put Speck in a weaker position—the hunter thus gets hunted by the very wife of the hunters' patron saint.

Of course, Speck suffers from the ups and downs of his enterprise. An art dealer, he expresses his emotions through visual images taken from books, films, and paintings and through mental images. Visual references to the landscape (OB, 5, 46) offer a transposition of his feelings, at times also compared with actual paintings (23, 43, 45). Even films or cartoons (5, 46) reflect some emotional state of mind, and a series of pictures evoking Parisian society and emerging from Speck's imagination, perception, or recollection (12-13) clarify his moods. An unexpected source of pictures, his emotions add up to the overall artistic parody. On leaving Lydia Cruche after his defeat and the wreck of his car, Speck has to take a bus back to central Paris. While waiting for the bus, he equates “the dark shopping center with its windows shining for no one” to “a Magritte vision of fear” (45), a metonymy that reflects Speck's feeling of betrayal. His feelings, expressed through imaginary or real artistic images whose source is made clear by description or allusion, contribute to the visual qualities of the text.

Similarly, political ideas are rendered through images. Although camouflaged under the innocent sounding name of Amandine—a name redolent of sweets or exquisite chocolates—the shop opposite Speck's gallery conveys a clear political message. The pictures, book covers, and other pieces on show clearly indicate that the shop owner favors the French fascist movement called Jeune Europe:¹⁵ “On the cover of one volume, Uncle Sam shook hands with the Russian Bear over prostrate Europe, depicted as a maiden in a dead faint. A drawing of a spider on a field of banknotes (twelve hundred francs with frame, nine hundred without) jostled the image of a crablike hand clawing away at the map of France” (OB, 6). These sarcastic attacks on American hegemony, the power of the Soviet Union, and the greed of Jewish bankers were the usual fare of wartime German propaganda. At this stage, the readers may share the amused contempt of the implied author—not to say of the author herself—for such views, as the bookseller's name, Chassepoule (hen chaser), seems to point to his trivial pursuit.

As for Speck, he does not question such fascist ideals, for he refuses to take positions or to get involved. In fact, when he looks for a location for his art gallery, he looks for a “safe place” (OB, 1-2) politically. However, though he remains neutral, he does not altogether abstain from thinking of the multilateral political reception of his invented painter, thereby giving another poor picture of artistic endeavor: “Left, Right, and Center would unite on a single theme: how the taste of two full generations had been corrupted by foreign speculation, cosmopolitan decadence, and the cultural imperialism of the Anglo-Saxon hegemony” (9). Out of commercial motives, Speck struggles for everybody's agreement, which stresses the weakness of his political arguments. As Janice Kulyk Keefer remarks, “French politics is a crazy salad” (1989, 186) of contradictory positions, and its blatant leanings toward nationalism bear a strong resemblance to World War II right-wing opinions. The same applies to Speck's imaginary show, for which he dreams of enjoying everybody's approval, though he cannot avoid expressing his preference:

He could see the structure of the show, the sketchbooks and letters in glass cases. It might be worthwhile lacquering the walls black, concentrating strong spots on the correspondence, which straddled half a century, from Degas to Cocteau. The scrawl posted by Drieu la Rochelle just before his suicide would be particularly effective on black. Céline was good; all that crowd was back in vogue now. He might use the early photo of Céline in regimental dress uniform with a splendid helmet. Of course, there would be word from the Left, too, with postcards from Jean Jaurès, Léon Blum, and Paul Éluard, and a jaunty get-well message from Louis Aragon and Elsa.

(OB, 10)

The emphasis laid on people championing extreme right-wing ideas is inescapable: three sentences are devoted to Drieu La Rochelle—a man of letters who was to be executed by firing squad after World War II for collaborating with the Germans—and to Céline, whose major anti-Semitic and pro-German writings during the war earned him public condemnation and incarceration in Denmark. Only one sentence is devoted to left-wingers: the pooh-poohing way Speck speaks about them proves that he adds them as an afterthought to please everyone. In fact, the readers feel that he rather agrees with fascist ideas, especially in the light of the insult proffered by his wife on leaving him and his own disparaging remark to Lydia Cruche after she has tricked him into accepting her demands.

In the end, however, the readers wonder who has tricked whom, for Sandor Speck expresses his triumph in two powerful images in which the landscape reflects his elated mood and where the cartoon picture he imagines visually proclaims his victory as the hunter taming the wife of the hunters' patron saint and Speck's second wife, too: “He opened his eyes and saw rain clouds over Paris glowing with light—the urban aurora. It seemed to Speck that he was entering a better weather zone, leaving behind the gray, indefinite mist in which the souls of discarded lovers are said to wander. He welcomed this new and brassy radiation. He saw himself at the center of a shadeless drawing, hero of a sort of cartoon strip, subduing Lydia, taming Henriette” (OB, 46). Although this picture clearly establishes Speck's confidence, it still raises doubts as to the real intentions of Lydia Cruche, who could change her mind once again. For in the courting game on which Speck has embarked, no one knows who will get the upper hand, as the people involved in it have radically different interests.

In “Overhead in a Balloon,” the paintings displayed by the text also illustrate an aspect of French culture, namely the general decline of upper-class Parisian society as further exemplified by the experiences of Walter, a lonely art gallery assistant. As he befriends a mediocre French painter with a chain-link name—the distinctive token of nobility—and eventually moves into the flat of the painter's family, Walter is confronted by the way in which French aristocracy establishes and maintains—or rather cripples—human relationships. This unfortunate situation, reflected in the paintings of his new friend “Aymeric Something Something de Something de Saint-Régis” (OB, 59), is a source of daily, though unconscious, suffering. Walter is indeed unable to decode Aymeric's paintings, even though they suggestively disclose the social behavior of the French aristocracy, and by extension of his own family too: “Now he painted country houses. Usually he showed the front with the white shutters and all the ivy, and a stretch of lawn with white chairs and a teapot and cups, and some scattered pages of Le Figaro—the only newspaper, often the only anything, his patrons read. He had a hairline touch and could reproduce Le Figaro's social calendar, in which he cleverly embedded his client's name and his own. Some patrons kept a large magnifying glass on a table under the picture, so that guests, peering respectfully, could appreciate their host's permanent place in art” (49-50). The description “poses the problem of representation within the represented universe of the narrative … by embedding one Art form, that of the picture, within another, the narrative.”¹⁶ The embedding functions on different levels: it reflects, as Sturgess argues, the characters' environmental subordination (47), but it also mirrors their superficiality. While depicting done-up country houses, Aymeric confines his attention to their conventional facades and external signs of wealth, much in accordance with the accepted conduct of his family, whose affected politeness conceals their real nature and inclinations. Moreover, the actual presence of the patron's name and his own on the reproduction of Le Figaro textually and pictorially announces their eagerness to be publicized. Beyond mere publicity stands the ultimate necessity to bridge the gap left by their shallow and empty lives. The image of the magnifying glass to decipher the represented text metaphorically confirms the pressing need to inflate the values of the bourgeois patrons encoded—a meaningless endeavor that does not fool those capable of interpreting the signs. Aymeric's minuscule signature on his paintings—a combination of the pictorial and the scriptural—finds a verbal echo in the reference to his voice, which is described as a “signature that [requires] a magnifying glass; what he [has] to say [is] clear but a kind of secret” (52). The analogy offers a symbolic reinforcement of the aristocracy's ambiguous need to be seen, yet not ostentatiously.

Besides reflecting the characters' shallowness, the description of Aymeric's painting mirrors the story's structuring process, evidencing metafictional self-reflexiveness. The painting actually reveals what Gallant does when devising her story: she too shows the facade, the surface of things, its hotchpotch of disconnected details and her characters' lack of culture and obsession with fame and moving in the best circles. Her ironic vision “overhead in a balloon” gives the story her stamp as well as ridicules her characters, whose names are embedded in the description of a kind of vanity fair. The visual thus mirrors the organizational principle of the text, adding a further layer of complexity.

Further textual and visual intermingling occurs in the description of the inflated picture story about the art gallery: “It happened that one of the Paris Sunday supplements had published a picture story on Walter's gallery, with captions that laid stress on the establishment's boldness, vitality, visibility, international connections, and financial vigor. The supplement had cost Walter's employer a packet, and Walter was not surprised that one of the photographs showed him close to collapse, leaning for support against the wall safe in his private office” (OB, 50). The fictitious magazine article combines both modes of representation, whose fictional description ridicules the undertaking by verbally stressing the paradoxical message of weakness hidden in the pictures. Pictorial and scriptural presentations thus work at cross purposes, thereby adding an extra ironic layer of meaning. The irony culminates in the insight into the financial burden of the enterprise, whose foreseeable disappointing outcome manifests itself as only Aymeric, prompted by his gullibility, pays an eager visit to the gallery. He imagines the place as packed with anxious buyers: “The accompanying article described mobbed openings, private viewings to which the police were summoned to keep order, and potential buyers lined up outside in below-freezing weather, bursting in the minute the doors were opened to grab everything off the walls. The name of the painter hardly mattered; the gallery's reputation was enough” (50).

But his actual experience as sole visitor affords a contrast to this illusion, not only in terms of numbers but also in terms of the outcome: “Aymeric showed courteous amazement when he heard just how much a show of that kind would cost. The uncultured talk about money was the gallery's way of refusing him, though a clause in the rejection seemed to say that something might still be feasible, in some distant off-season, provided that Aymeric was willing to buy all his own work” (OB, 51). In spite of the basic differences between these two pictures—the one imaginary, the other real (as real as fiction can be)—both evoke financial transactions and a purely materialistic approach to art. Some artists are businessmen whose talent ceases to be of aesthetic value: they and others alike take a purely pecuniary interest in art. The comparisons of Aymeric to Degas and Picasso—implicit in one case, explicit in the other—can therefore not be qualitative; denoting a purely matter-of-fact concern, the analogies only establish a parallel to Degas for not being married and to Picasso for having added his mother's maiden name to his own. No artistic similarity can be discerned. All neglect quality; money rules all. At least both text and image convey this idea.

Other textual and visual elements confirm this view while stressing the loss on the human level. For instance, Aymeric's assumption “that a show, a sort of retrospective of lawns and Figaros, would bring fresh patronage, perhaps even from abroad” (OB, 50) highlights the artist's greed. On the other hand, such a retrospective would imply a vast collection of quasi duplicates—a reflection of French superficiality and ostentation. With these sets of doubles, triples, and quadruples, Gallant brings out in bold a peculiar aspect of art, namely that when artists have a good subject matter, they sometimes paint it over and over again—as exemplified by modern painters (such as Monet, Cézanne, Magritte, and Munch, to mention but a few) and ancient painters alike. In addition, yet another set of images comes to mind with the reference to the kind of country houses Aymeric is “called in to immortalize” (50): “a done-up village bakery, a barn refurbished and brightened with yellow awnings ‘Dallas’ had lately made so popular” (50). The allusion to Dallas, with its flashy ranches and mansions, not to mention the characters' decadent lifestyle, reinforces the mercantile perception of art and the deterioration of human relations it seems to involve.

The allusion to the film is far from coincidental, for the family watches the serial in semireligious silence on a television set with a display of buttons that act as so many barriers to true communication. A mise en abyme in an admittedly different genre—that of the New World—the serial illustrates the nature of relationships within the family circle.¹⁷ Robert, Aymeric's cousin, even goes so far as to announce his wedding in the middle of an episode, as if he were talking about a trivial fact. This recalls similar utterances in Dallas: Robert's announcement taking place in front of “a bright, silent screen” (67)—the image of failed communication—echoes the hollowness of human relations conveyed by the television show. Robert's careless attitude to human relations is further visually exemplified in his finger drawings of the flat and its new boundaries once he has decided to evict Walter: “‘We will have to rearrange the space,’ said Robert. He traced lines with his finger on the polished table and, with the palm of his hand, wiped something out” (70). A symbolic and ephemeral picture of exclusion, the drawing signifies the annihilation of human emotions and the need of living space; anyway, it cannot appeal to anyone from an aesthetic point of view. As such it recalls Robert's attitude when he conducts an explanatory session on the extended family's dreams: in godlike fashion, Robert decides what they mean, often offering a pessimistic interpretation of the animals and violent scenes that people Walter's dreams. The sacred interpretation is based on clues taken from a Bible-like book, whose text and images Robert uses to achieve his ends—instead of offering comfort to others.

Since art and religion no longer fulfill their function, they can neither offer visions of a better world nor bring comfort to souls in want of an ideal. Barthes sees a connection between the images that invade the world and human discontent: “What characterizes the so-called advanced societies is that they today consume images and no longer, like those of the past, beliefs; they are therefore more liberal, less fanatical, but also more ‘false’ (less ‘authentic’)—something we translate, in ordinary consciousness, by the avowal of an impression of nauseated boredom, as if the universalized image were producing a world that is without difference (indifferent), from which can rise, here and there, only the cry of anarchisms, marginalisms, and individualisms” (Barthes 1981, 118-19). Thus the mystically inclined Walter looks for a spiritual message in art, but in vain. His constant attempts at harmonizing art and faith lead him to the gradual discovery of their incompatibility: “Immersion in art had kept him from spiritual knowledge. What he had mistaken for God's beckoning had been a dabbing in colors, sentiment cut loose and set afloat by the sight of a stained-glass window. Years before, when he was still training Walter, his employer had sent him to museums, with a list of things to examine and ponder. God is in art, Walter had decided; then, God is art. Today, he understood: art is God's enemy. God hates art, the trifling rival creation” (OB, 60). Since Walter searches for an absolute in art but cannot find it there, he ends up expressing his aversion forcefully—somehow earnestly echoing Lydia Cruche's pretended rejection of the graven image, therefore bringing to mind other layers of textual and visual reverberations. A Puritan rejecting works of art, he reminds the readers of some Calvinists who objected to the worship of the holy images and destroyed them: “Virtually anything portrayed as art turned his stomach. There was hardly anything he could look at without feeling sick” (66).

An expression of his religious inclination, his physical disgust for visual arts also points to his inability to cope with life. Since most objects, beings, and situations have their reflection in art, nothing he ever witnesses or takes part in can ever please him. At some stage, in a discussion with Aymeric, he discriminates between art and Aymeric's paintings: “‘I hate art, too,’ said Walter. ‘Oh, I don't mean that I hate what you do. That, at least, has some meaning—it lets people see how they imagine they live’” (OB, 54). Walter's feeling of repulsion raises an interesting issue, namely that of art and its meaning. Art, according to him, has lost its significance. However, Walter finds Aymeric's superficial and idyllic picture of society meaningful—an arresting paradox if one considers that “Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.”¹⁸ Besides, the picture Aymeric gives of society goes against Walter's profound wish to establish proper relations with others. His artistic delusion results from his desperate need to belong. Ironically, the human warmth he erroneously seeks in his adoptive family turns out to be a profit-making enterprise for the family and a devastating source of worries for Walter. The misreading of Aymeric's paintings thus suggests that Walter is a prey to the glamorous message French aristocracy conveys in art. A pedestrian character, Walter takes everything at its face value. Contrary to the expected reliability inherent in his Swiss citizenship, Walter Obermauer is a dropout who cannot adjust to the necessities of life. As his name indicates, he is the upper wall without retaining wall, ready to collapse at any excess of weight.

An exponent of materialistic society, Walter shows signs of a spiritual corruption whose origin can be traced to a purely mercantile approach to culture. Built in a slapdash fashion by contractors in search of money, the cultural edifice on which art rests offers no safe ground. Gallant underscores its devastating loss of significance through images reflecting aesthetic degradation.¹⁹ The quest for beauty has been replaced by the mercantile operations of would-be artists and art dealers. In Paris, apparently, the middle ground between weak-willed artists and a gullible public is held by unscrupulous people, who fix the rules of the game as arbitrarily as the ministers of the most exotic religious faiths.

Unlike postmodern photography, which “defamiliarises the images that surround us” “through a demystifying use of irony,” the paintings, drawings, and photographs represented in Gallant's fiction are not necessarily ironical in themselves.²⁰ They become so owing to the interaction between text and image. The irony thereby created is multiple, one mode of representation reflecting the other almost ad infinitum, obviously depending on the readers' ability to see further layers of interrelation. As written texts and images do not have only one interpretation, superimposed decoding adds to their riches. Their multiple readings enhance the ironic impact of representation, the visual reflecting the textual, and vice versa. Because Gallant describes and refers to images that tend to present a rigid message of retribution and punishment, or to reveal ungratifying relationships and unacceptable views, she emphasizes and derides the selfishness of human endeavor conveyed in her stories. Emerging from the interaction between text and image, the characters' innate talent for destruction reduces constructive ideals to nothing. By reinforcing the message of the text on which the image is superimposed, the visual enhances the readers' awareness of the self-inflicted, and therefore ineluctable, human degradation prevailing in Gallant's work.

Notes

1. Witness her essay on Marguerite Yourcenar, and her reviews of books by or about Giraudoux, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Simenon. Witness also her 1968 Paris Notebooks: from an external observer's standpoint, she describes the évènements de Mai 68, conveying the uproar caused by the students' revolt and the illusion that it would bring about drastic changes to French society. Also with full knowledge, she recounts the Gabrielle Russier case—the affair of a teacher with one of her pupils that ended up with preventive detention, a partial trial, unemployment, and suicide—highlighting the gendered, social, and racist bias of the French legal system.

2. Neil Besner mentions Gallant's recurrent reference “to paintings, to pictures, and to characters watching them” (“A Broken Dialogue: History and Memory in Mavis Gallant's Short Fiction,” Essays in Canadian Writing 33 [Fall 1986]: 95). Her appreciation also manifests itself through the careful pictures she creates as she describes places and people. For a discussion of the way Gallant exploits techniques from the visual arts, see the articles of Lesley D. Clement: “Artistry in Mavis Gallant's Green Water, Green Sky: The Composition of Structure, Pattern, and Gyre.” Canadian Literature 129 (Summer 1991): 57-73; “Mavis Gallant's Apprenticeship Stories 1944-1950: Breaking the Frame,” English Studies in Canada 18 (1992): 317-34; “Mavis Gallant's Stories of the 1950s: Learning to Look,” American Review of Canadian Studies 24, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 57-73.

3. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 39; hereafter cited in the text as Barthes 1977.

4. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Noonday Press, 1981), 117; hereafter cited in the text as Barthes 1981.

5. Ironically, the man who said these words echoed Goebbels, Hitler's minister for propaganda, who is credited with saying: “When I hear the word Culture, I take out my gun.”

6. The titles of the engravings are “Le Petit Palais—The Petit Palais; Place Vendôme—Place Vendôme; Rue de la Paix—Rue de la Paix” (Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories [Toronto: Macmillan, 1981; reprint, New York: Random House, 1981], 299; hereafter cited in the text as HT).

7. Besides social topics, Gallant often chose to cover cultural and artistic subjects in her articles. Among those dealing with art, see “Above the Crowd in French Canada,” Harper's Bazaar, July 1946, 58-59, 128-129; “Fresco Class,” The Standard, Section Rotogravure, 9 November 1946, 12-13; “An Art Curator and His Critics,” Standard Magazine, 12 June 1948, 3, 16, 22; “Art for the Family Pocket,” Standard Magazine, 6 November 1948, 5, 22; “Success Story of a Canadian Artist,” Standard Magazine, 29 April 1950, 18-19.

8. Mary Condé, “The Chapel Paintings in Mavis Gallant's ‘In the Tunnel,’” in Image et récit: Littérature(s) et arts visuels du Canada, ed. Jean-Michel Lacroix, Simone Vauthier, and Héliane Venture (Paris: Presse de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1993), 98, 110.

9. Umberto Eco, La Production des signes (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992), 72-79. See Condé's fine analysis for a further discussion of the various ways in which text and image intersect.

10. Mavis Gallant, Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris (Toronto: Macmillan, 1985), 73; hereafter cited in the text as OB.

11. As Neil Besner rightly points out, the common concern with art is not the only aspect that links these two stories. Indeed, they both focus in different degrees on Sandor Speck, an art dealer, and his assistant, Walter: Gallant examines their place in French society and their political and ideological response to the situation they are confronted with (The Light of Imagination: Mavis Gallant's Fiction. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988, 141).

12. I am indebted to Wolfgang Hochbruck for drawing my attention to the similarity in discourse. See Sándor Petöfi's poem “Magyars, Rise, Your Country Calls You!” in Petöfi by Himself, trans. Watson Kirkconnell (Budapest: Corvina Press, 1973), 29-32.

13. John Marlyn, Under the Ribs of Death (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1957). Again, my thanks go to Wolfgang Hochbruck for reminding me of the name change in the earlier novel, allowing me to exploit the interpretation of the aptronym to the full.

14. Charlotte Sturgess makes such a point in an unpublished paper entitled “Pictorial Representation and Narrative in Mavis Gallant's ‘Speck's Idea’” read in Strasbourg in May 1991.

15. Ronald Hatch rightly remarks that “Speck's Idea” “portrays the sense of disarray arising from a resurgence of right-wing politics in contemporary French society” (“Mavis Gallant and the Fascism of Everyday Life,” Essays in Canadian Writing 42 [Winter 1990]: 37).

16. Charlotte Sturgess, “Narrative Strategies in ‘Overhead in a Balloon,’” Journal of the Short Story in English 12 (Spring 1989): 47; hereafter cited in the text.

17. Mise en abyme refers to self-duplication within the finished work, such as a painting within the painting, representing the latter, or a story within the story, mirroring the latter. The work within the work need not be a certified copy; it may summarize, schematize, transpose, or even announce in different ways what it represents. See Lucien Dällenbach, Le Récit spéculaire (Paris: Seuils, 1977); Jean Ricardou, Le Nouveau roman (Paris: Seuils, 1978), 47-65; Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (London: Routledge, 1980), 53-56.

18. John Ruskin, The Two Paths: Being Lectures on Art and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture (London: George Allen, 1900), Lecture 2, 57.

19. Her views on writers are not any less critical. Witness her satirical descriptions of Prism and Grippes. In “A Flying Start,” Prism attempts to write a novel about himself and his benefactress, rejects the idea, and instantly becomes a literary critic. Grippes, on the other hand, does write, but he only produces mediocre novels about reactionary, provincial young men inspired by his tax collector, Poche, whose figure he changes slightly for the purpose of each new novel, following right-wing ideology dictating linear plots whose end can only be death (148). When Poche disappears, so does his inspiration, and Grippes starts clinging to an image from his past, the figure of a religious woman in gray whom he cannot summon to his imagination “because to depict life is to attract its ill-fortune” (146). Like Poche cornering him with his tax forms, Grippes would like to corner the woman to discover how to use her as a character. Both lifelikeness and pure creativity escape him altogether.

20. Linda Hutcheon, Splitting Ironies: Contemporary Canadian Ironies (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991), 113.