Feminist narrative ethics: tacit persuasion in modernist form

IN HER RECENT Feminist Narrative Ethics: Tacit Persuasion in Modernist Form Katherine Saunders Nash makes a highly fascinating major comment on narrative desire in A Glastonbury Romance. In her reading, JCP innovates on plot dynamics to create an “erotics of progression,” which calls for feminine reading practices, as opposed to the masculine models of narrative desire and reading associated with renowned literary critic Peter Brooks’ insights (Nash 117-121; 126-129). I find it impossible to do justice to the full implications of Nash’s conclusion—or to argue with it, for that matter—within the limits of the present article. Let me simply point out that as far as Glastonbury is concerned, I find the Brooksian model of narrative desire—with due respect to Brooks’ self-proclaimed limitations, as far as modernist texts are concerned—not only applicable to JCP’s text, but also a very fruitful theoretical context for its interpretation. Indeed, in my reading elsewhere of Glastonbury, I tried to demonstrate how Powysian heroes—and the Powysian narrative—can be defined as narcissistic precisely because they keep evading the fulfilment of desire, the motive force of storytelling in Brooksian terms, and thereby are able to prolong narratives almost ad infinitum. That said, Nash’s provocative ideas made me take another look at the issue of narrative desire in Powys from a slightly different perspective—the novels’ own. That is, I briefly inquired into how the Wessex novels reflect on (their heroes’, their own) desire in their metafictional excerpts to find that Powys is shockingly aware of desire’s crucial role in shaping narratives in an actually rather Brooksian manner. As to reaching the object of desire, however, the same excerpts suggest an implied author ever so cunning in avoiding it—maybe for the mere pleasure of being able to write on. But first things first: what exactly does Brooks mean by narrative desire, in what sense is his model of narrative desire masculine, and how is one to understand Nash’s claim for JCP’s innovativeness in that light? Relying on Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s ideas, Brooks argues in Reading for the Plot that the “question of identity [...] can be thought only in narrative terms”(33), whereas “it is in essence the desire to be heard, recognised, understood, which, never wholly satisfied or indeed satisfiable, continues to generate the desire to tell, the effort to enunciate a significant version of the life story in order to captivate a possible listener”(54). Thus, the ‘engine’ of both story and story-telling is desire: the longing to reach the object of one’s desire, in general, on the one hand, and the desire to formulate a meaningful and therefore “transmissible” version of one’s life(-story), on the other. The prime mover of narratives is the object-cause of desire—a lack (37-61). Accordingly, prematurely fulfilled desire—such as finding the object at home by incest—short-circuits desire and brings an untimely closure to the narrative, making all further story(-telling) impossible (103-9). Therefore, in the Brooksian context both characters’ and readers’ attitude to the fulfilment of desire is ambivalent: while this (reaching the