A Question of Justice: Hilary Mantel’s Experiment in Love
p. 243-252
Résumé
Mantel has written fiction about 1950s North of England, the French Revolution, Saudi Arabia and Africa but a concern with ethics in a post-Christian world is a constant theme. Experiment in Love (1995), like her previous novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), comically dramatizes the difficulties of neighbour-love, the Judeo-Christian ethic debated by Levinas, Derrida and most recently Zizek. Using the distinction between law (droit) and justice, this paper will argue that her fiction offers a singular resistance to ethical universalism, focusing on the particularities of class and ethnicity to call into question any abstract commitment to either love or justice.
Texte intégral
1My current work on Hilary Mantel is work-in-progress, part of a larger project on literature and ethics. In this context, as the abstract confesses, my reading of Experiment in Love constitutes what Derek Attridge calls ‘an instrumental reading’1: finding the ethical themes of justice/neighbour-love that I came in search of. It is also instrumental insofar as it examines the tensions between autonomy and commitment for a conference with that title. And, ‘by opening my own idioculture to possible alteration by an artefact that may share many of my assumptions, but never all of them’ (Attridge 2004, 52) there is a third level of instrumentalism. All readings, it seems to me, are instrumental, since neither reader nor writer can step outside the social relations inscribed in language, genre, and the art institutions of their period, reader and writer are necessarily embedded, implicated, committed, whether in critique or in endorsement. But since, I would argue, commitments are always plural and often contradictory, some, relative, autonomy may be possible.
Autonomy is but another name for art’s purposelessness. Adorno reads autonomy as double: both as art’s loss of a (direct) social purpose, and as art’s refusal of the kind of purposiveness that has come to dominate society.2
2For to read a text is to expose oneself to a horizon of ‘other,’ alien meanings which exceed one’s subjective consciousness. The singularity of literature, the autonomy of the art-work, is that by re-arranging the elements, it makes visible the marginal, the excluded, the alternative possibilities. And while it may have the potential to ‘synthesize what is fractured’ in Adorno’s terms,3 it also calls into question the dualisms he names: concept and intuition, universal and particular, truth-content and ideology, indeed autonomy and commitment. This, I want to argue, is what Hilary Mantel’s novel4 invites us to do—while resisting the instrumental readings I have acknowledged.
3Experiment in Love is marketed as, and can be read as, an example of ‘social realism.’ The cover blurb on both the Viking and Harper Perennial editions, and most reviewers, emphasize the mimetic, the narrative content: the story of northern (Catholic) girls, two working-class, one middle-class, going to a London university hall-of-residence in 1970, the year after Chappaquidick, the year there was an election, and the Tories got in. ‘It wasn’t my fault; I wasn’t old enough to vote,’ the first-person narrator claims on the second page. The novel can also be read as a committed critique of the inequalities of class and gender as more women entered higher education in this period. On the novel’s blurbs, tributes to the author’s ‘sharp wit,’ sense of comedy, and her ‘dazzling acuity for metaphor’ are referred to as decorative, embellishments, additional selling points. I would argue, however, that Mantel’s use of metaphor, simile, semi-colon, parataxis, has a cognitive role which serves to defamiliarise the reader’s experience of the material world of food and the body. Thus carrots cooking in a pressure cooker are described as ‘the muttering that rose from inside, as carrot sang to carrot like mutinous slaves below deck’ (Mantel 1995, 80). Physical changes in the bodies of adolescent girls are compared to ‘[l]ittle girls grew coarse and dark, gangling girls grew svelte: modest girls grew great bosoms and dragged them around like the sorrows of Young Werther’ (Mantel 1995, 127).
4The novel anticipates and ironises the commodification process (book-marketing), through dialogue
‘It would be nice if we went about and talked like an Edna O’Brien novel. It would suit us.’
‘Yes, it would become us,’ I said. ‘We haven’t the class for Girls of Slender Means.’ (Mantel 1995, 18)
and by direct address to the reader:
I don’t know if you understand about restitution. (Mantel 1995, 31)
Now, I wouldn’t want you to think that this is a story about anorexia.
There have been too many of those, whole novels about moony girls, spoilt girls, girls who dwindle away to wraiths and then blow up like party balloons. No: and yet partly it is a story about flesh, about the bodies that contained our minds. [...] Let us say then it is a story about appetite: appetite in its many aspects and dimensions, its perversions and falling off, its strange reversals and refusals. That will do for now. (Mantel 1995, 69)
I must now tell you about our life at the Holy Redeemer; but first of all
I must tell you about how we came to be outfitted for it. [...] Outdoor shoes/Indoor shoes/Gym shoes. (Mantel 1995, 112)
If this were a school story for girls, of the kind that have gone out of fashion now, I would be telling you that she was the most popular girl in the form In fact, I have to report. (Mantel 1995, 129)
I don’t know if you’ve ever been on the site of a disaster. (Mantel 1995, 241)
5The ‘I-you’ addresses punctuate the narrative, stage it as a story to be told, by a narrator who worries about the order of what is to be narrated, that the reader may be satiated by certain genres or topics, that non-Catholic readers may not have the same understanding of words (like ‘restitution’), and may not have had sufficient experience of disaster sites! The dialogic strategy foregrounds the voice of the narrator, which while it seems to ‘naturalize’ the account (‘l’effet de réel’, as it were) also emphasizes its status as ‘storytelling’: that this is not, or not only, a mimetic representation of ‘the real’ but a reflection on fictionality and representation. By invoking previous narratives of girls’ lives (Edna O’Brien, Muriel Spark, Jane Eyre, What Katy Did, Malory Towers), the text ironically acknowledges the laws of genre; by presenting a narrator whose mind is full of quotations (from Byron, Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner, and the Scottish poet, John Davidson), lines learnt in the course of her upwardly-mobilising education, the text depicts the artist’s role as bricoleur, that s/he uses pre-existing materials, bric-a-brac. In short, that the literary event or invention, by affirmation or negation, depends upon tradition.
6The narrative structure highlights such questions: the first four paragraphs, and the last six of the novel—in the present tense—frame an account of the past which cross-cuts between scenes from childhood, school, university; friendships and enmities culminating in the Shoah image (Mantel 1995, 242) when one of the students dies in the fire.5. The ending of the novel is itself a parodic reference to the conflagrations at the end of Jane Eyre and Girls of Slender Means, both cited in the text. In this frame, this bracketing of the story, the question of writing is posed in two different images, both of which since they relate to questions of autonomy and commitment, I will quote in full:
1. I found myself this morning, staring so hard at the page that the print seemed to blur; as if somewhere in the fabric of the paper, somewhere in its weave, I might find a thread which would lead me through my life, from where I was then to where I am today. (Mantel 1995, 2)
2. My breakfast table is as far as a table can be from the french-polished object at which I toiled at my homework in my parents’ house, on those winter nights when it was too cold for me to be kept upstairs. It is a blond table, a bland table, a table which shows the great beauty of its natural wood, and my touch glides over it with a sensual assurance that I can never feel in the presence of another human being. I trace with my nail the lovely line of the wood’s exposed heart, its graceful curves like the fingerprints of those giants on whose shoulders we stand. I place my forefinger on the knots in the wood, those knots that, though they run against the grain, seem more satin-like, more glassy that the wood itself: I think of my life, and the lives of the women I knew, and I say, tapping decisively on, that is where we went wrong, the dark and swirling node, just there, that is the very place. But then in the dappled sunlight, filtered through conifers, the wood seems to dissolve beneath my fingers. The angles of the white room soften and melt around me; and the past runs like water through my hands. (Mantel 1995, 249-250)
7While the first images (of the page, print, paper etc.) pose language in terms of narrative, as a ‘thread’ which will connect the past to the present, the metaphors of the table and wood in the final paragraph of the novel, set up a more complex and resistant model of writing. The table is traditionally used as an example of the philosophical problem of the subject-object relation, the independent existence of matter. ‘Think of a kitchen table then [...] when you’re not there,’ as Andrew Ramsay explains to the painter Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.6 Hence whenever the painter thinks of Mr Ramsay’s work, ‘Subject and object and the nature of reality,’ she focuses her mind ‘upon a phantom table, one of those scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted’ (Woolf 28)—a table remarkably like the one at which Carmel sits at the end of Experiment in Love. The Greek word for wood, hyle, which can also mean ‘forest’ is used in Aristotle’s Metaphysics to mean ‘matter’; with its natural and cultural aspects, wood thus acts as a conceptual prototype for any material. The table/wood imagery in this passage thus offers a complex, parodic set of intertextual allusions which effectively subvert ‘the notion of the work of art as a closed, self sufficient, autonomous object.’7 The questions of justice and the neighbour, which I will discuss next, are in this artwork framed by questions about epistemology, language, and intertextuality.
8The neighbour theme, which in Mantel’s previous novel, is used to pose questions of cultural identity and difference, is here narrativised in the stories of Carmel, Karina and Julianne, to pose questions: about reponsibility, love and justice. The neighbour is first flagged in the reference to a placename, Chappaquidick,8 where Ted Kennedy was convicted of leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury; it is raised again in conversation between Lynette and Carmel (Mantel 1988, 91-2) and repeated in several references to the legal case of Donoghue v. Stevenson, where a snail is found in a bottle of ginger-beer (Mantel 1988, 161/169). Donoghue v. Stevenson is one of the most famous cases in British legal history, from which it was established that although there was no contract between the vendors of the ginger-beer and Donoghue, they owed her a duty of care, and were thus liable. The decision of the House of Lords founded the modern tort of negligence. Carmel quotes this case from memory to a fellow student who is worried that she will be shirking her responsibilities in letting her room-mate use their shared room to have sex:
[Carmel] ‘You’re not responsible for Sue.’ ‘Aren’t I?’
‘Who then, in law, is my neighbour?’ Claire looked closely at me. ‘The snail in the ginger-beer bottle,’ I explained. It’s a case I’ve learnt. 1932. ‘Who then, in law, is my neighbour? The answer seems to be—persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question’. Lacks resonance, doesn’t it?
‘Do you have to learn it off by heart, like that?’
‘No. I just prefer to.’
Claire shook her head. ‘We’re all responsible for each other. Don’t you think, Carmel? Don’t you think we ought to be?’ (Mantel 1988, 169)
9Claire, unlike Teddy Kennedy, Carmel and Karina, later tries to act out her Christian conviction ‘as if she were the last recalcitrant drinker in a closing bar’ (Mantel 1988, 244). While Lynette pragmatically defines what is due to the neighbour as an ethics of ‘enlightened self-interest’ (Mantel 1988, 92), the ethical commitments derived from Christianity are here imaged as ‘a closing bar’. As Carmel, unable to care for her neighbour Karina (or herself), sinks deeper into anorexia, the questions continue to circulate: who is my neighbour? does the second commandment fall with the first? and if there is no moral law within, by what laws does one live? And what is justice?
10The legal question ‘Who then, in law, is my neighbour?’ cited in the text is of course a version of the New Testament question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ (Luke 10: 29), itself an interpretation or midrash on the injunction in the Torah (Leviticus 19: 18) to love one’s neighbour as oneself. It features also, of course, in the Good Samaritan story in Luke (10: 30-35) and as a commandment in Matthew (22: 39) and Mark (12: 31). The neighbour question has a particularly dense history in both theological, legal and political terms, usefully summarised in The Neighbour: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, by Zizek, Santner & Reinhard.9 If the question of Neighbour-love has been central to the Jewish tradition—in the Talmud and Midrash, Maimonides through to Rozenzweig, Levinas and Derrida—, it has also been central to Christian thinkers as diverse as Augustine, William of Ockham, Catherine of Siena, Luther and Kierkegaard (Zizek et al., 4). Indeed, it has been central to relations between Judaic and Christian traditions and Islamic—in the Middle-East since 1948. All the terms of the commandment, ‘love,’ ‘neighbour’ and ‘self’ are open to interpretation. Does the injunction apply to the neighbour as a member of the same community? or just to friends? to strangers? to all human beings? Is it particularised or can it be universalised? For although both Nietzsche and Freud have produced fierce critiques of an ethics based on neighbour-love, the biblical texts have remained an important resource. And one of the several achievements of Experiment in Love, is the way in which it asks about the relevance (as continuity and/or difference) of this biblical commandment to secular democracies at the end of the twentieth century—and for women in particular.
11The characters of Carmel and Karina are used to embody these questions about the neighbour/ friend/ enemy/ stranger. Although they are, literally, neighbours, insofar as they inhabit the same street, share the same class and religion, from infant school through to university—they are radically different. Their mutual antagonism, punctuated by moments of symbolic violence and other moments of solidarity, is comically presented. The neighbour relation is a relation of contiguity—not choice—and since their neighbourly ‘friendship’ has been enforced by Carmel’s mother, there is a sibling element to the relationship. When Carmel, aged eighteen, arrives at the university hall of residence and IS offered a choice, of room-mate, she opts for a high-school friend, a witty medical student Julianne, in preference to her former neighbour. Karina is forced to co-habit with a ‘stranger’ (Mantel 1988, 20) with tragic consequences. Carmel admires Karina’s room-mate, Lynette, she makes a friend of this stranger, someone outside her class and community, someone kind, wealthy and generous—with a lizard-skin handbag and a fox fur-coat—and with whom she talks ethics.
12In Muriel Spark’s Girls of Slender Means, a Schiaparelli dress rather than a fox fur-coat is rescued and the victim of the fire is the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, not a Jew incinerated at the hands of her Eastern European neighbour. Lynette’s Jewish identity is thus a significant fictional move. Carmel’s dawning suspicion/ realisation is staged as a Levinasian encounter with the ‘face’ AND the body of her former neighbour:
Karina turned her head, looking where I looked. Her eyes fell on the key fob. She reached to retrieve it. It slithered from its pocket. It clattered to the ground. It lay in the road. I stooped to pick it up. Karina put her foot on it. Crouching, I looked up into her face. Then a gust of wind came bowling along the street. [...] It took Karina’s vast nightgown and pasted it against her body. I looked up, along her bulk. My head was in the shadow of her great belly. She must be five months, six months gone. She must have been pregnant before we ever saw London.
I squatted at Karina’s feet. I saw the classroom, our first classroom; smelt coal and milk and baby-skin. [...] I saw Karina with her doll, the baby doll in the back of the lorry. Her tongue between her teeth; mother and baby, out for a tow.
I saw my foot swing. I saw it catch the lorry’s underside and hurtle it into the air. I saw the rubber trajectory of the pink pseudo-flesh, and the baby face smashed down on to the hard floor. (Mantel 1988, 245-6)
13The ‘Karina’ she now encounters is not the familiar neighbour, but an unknown other, something excessive: pregnant and possibly a murderer. The law student, at this point, acts: not to voice her suspicions to the law, but to grasp the proffered hand and run away from the burning building. As with the Donoghue v. Stevenson case, the reader is directed ‘to the acts or omissions which are called in question’:
Has a crime been committed? ‘After all, I said to myself, I dont know that she is a murderer.’ (Mantel 1988, 246)
Is this psychological, a ‘restitution’ for the childhood action when her foot smashed Karina’s baby doll?
Does the grasping of hands symbolize a re-integration of the once abjected Karina?
Is it that her duty is to the living, not the dead? A consequentialist ethic: ‘If I speak out, you’ll give birth in Holloway.’ (Mantel 1988, 246)
Is it betrayal of the law (le droit) (Carmel’s Chappaquidick) and a beloved friend OR an enactment of a different idea of justice?
14The novel offers all these interpretive options—and more. The meaning of Carmel’s act depends on everything in the text, what has gone before and comes after (and other texts). The reader is invited to reconsider all the accumulated ‘clues’ provided, to re-visit and revise previous interpretations and attend to contradictions, i.e., that Carmel’s action is presented as over-determined by heteronomous factors (mentioned above) AND as an autonomous act of freedom:
A good many things went up, in the blaze at Tonbridge Hall. My love affair, and my anorexia, and my hopes of being the first woman prime minister: my cousin’s duffle coat, and my notes on the Carbolic Smoke Ball. Julia lost her medal, but has no doubt won another since; the Segals lost their daughter. (Mantel 1988, 248)
15Gillian Rose uses parataxis ‘placing propositions one after another without indicating relations of co-ordination or subordination between them’ as an example of language’s critical self-reflection.10 Mantel here, as often, uses parataxis to disrupt/undermine hierarchies of significance.
16The neighbour theme is foregrounded, whereas ‘justice’ is mentioned only three times: in the distribution of food (Mantel 1988, 41); that it is one of the Cardinal virtues (Mantel 1988, 65), and in relation to Karina:
She did not believe in justice, or at least she acted as if justice were a luxury [...].
She was, as Julianne would say later, a peasant. I saw this, but I never thought she would revolt. (Mantel 1988, 127)
17In this comment, justice is linked explicitly with class relations: justice as the system of laws imposed and enforced by the dominant social forces, what Derrida calls ‘le droit’ and distinguishes from another idea of justice:
on the basis of an infinite ‘idea of justice,’ infinite because it is irreducible, irreducible because owed to the other, owed to the other, before any contract, because it has come, the other’s coming as the singularity that is always other. This ‘idea of justice’ seems to be irreducible in its affirmative character, in its demand of gift without exchange, without circulation, without economic circularity, without calculation and without rules, without reason and without rationality. And so we can recognize it, indeed accuse, identify a madness. And perhaps another sort of mystique. And deconstruction is mad about this kind of justice. Mad about this desire for a justice. This justice, which isn’t law, is the very movement of deconstruction at work in law and the history of law, in political history and history itself, before it even presents itself as the discourse that the academy or modern culture labels ‘deconstructionism.’
18While Karina’s act may be described as a rebellion against law as ‘droit,’ Carmel’s act remains enigmatic. The story’s ending resists any closure of meaning. There is no resolution of the issues of either neighbour-love or justice. In the closing six paragraphs, Carmel is now ‘willing to serve herself’ as she writes in the ‘bourgeois invention’ of the dining-room (249). A seemingly well-adjusted character, the trauma has been worked through. Is it that she can love herself now that she has experimented in love for the neighbour. A ‘happy ending’? The greatest good for the greatest number? That interpretation is again qualified/ resisted by signalling her recovery in terms of ‘class markers’: the well-stocked freezer/ my small silver teapot/the china cup, etc. These open up another possibility: that Carmel has simply graduated into the world of the Sophys and Rogers that she once laughed at; that her ‘cure’ is merely a form of class integration and that she has lost her politics along with her cousin’s duffle coat. The critique of injustice in this novel is as committed as any in Brecht: ‘FEMINISM HASN’T FAILED, IT’S JUST NEVER BEEN TRIED,’ Carmel thinks (75) but there are no solutions posed. Only questions to the reader who, I think, is NOT asked to choose between these questions or answers, but to hold them together. For as Bernstein says, arguing that sympathy and compassion ‘play a large role in Adorno’s “ethics”, an act of compassion is neither randomly contingent nor universally legislated, but rather the undoing of the duality presumed by those alternatives’ (Bernstein 1993, 201).
19Experiment in Love, I would argue, works to undo ethical dualities, and to call into question all such dualisms—including perhaps that between autonomy and commitment.
Notes de bas de page
1 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).
2 J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993) 199.
3 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970; Minneapolis: Minnesota U. P., 1997) 168.
4 Hilary Mantel, An Experiment in Love (London: Viking, 1995).
5 I am using the word Shoah in the broad sense used by the Israeli deputy Minister of Defence, meaning simply ‘disaster’ or, in another language, ‘naqba’
6 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Penguin, 2000) 28
7 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York and London: Routledge, 1988) 125.
8 Hilary Mantel, Eight months on Ghazzah Street (London: Viking, 1988) 2.
9 Slavoy Zizek et al., The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
10 Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor Adorno (London: Macmillan, 1978) 13.
Auteur
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Jean Radford
Independant Scholar
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