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\A Necessary Collaboration\: Biographical Desire and Elizabeth Smart
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Journal Article
\A Necessary Collaboration\: Biographical Desire and Elizabeth Smart
2007
Overview
[...]it is predominantly a poetic rendering of her inner life, which is characterized by her desire for her lover and her agony when he eventually abandons her. [...]because the narrator goes unnamed, the text implicitly proposes what Philippe Lejeune has called a \"phantasmatic pact\" with its reader, under which the narrator gains an ambiguous status akin to that of the speaker of a lyric poem: she may or may not be taken to be an incarnation of the author (27). [...]the desire to locate Smart in her novel is a particularly melancholic one, as critics become producers of texts themselves, creating a paratextual discourse that constantly attempts-and necessarily fails-to install the author at the centre of discussions about her text by treating the text as a monument to her. Upset at the depiction of the narrator's parents, her act of critical commentary in 1945 was to buy and burn the six copies of By Grand Central Station that she found in an Ottawa bookstore. [...]according to several accounts, she subsequently used her political influence to have Prime Minister Mackenzie King ban the book's importation into Canada (Sullivan 229). Not only is he geographically peripatetic, but he moves about in his various erotic affiliations, to the extent that he is defined by his mobility and transformative capacity, a \"hermaphrodite whose love looks up through the appletree with a golden indeterminate face\" (20). Because Smart's presence in the text is similarly phantasmatic, By Grand Central Station frustrates the desire of readers who would prefer to have a stable sense of the book's referentiality Catherine Belsey contends that \"Part of the intensity of love is the desire to know the truth of the other's desire, to be certain,\" but, she says, \"paradoxically, such certainty would be the death of desire\" (37, original emphasis).
Publisher
ESC: English Studies in Canada
Subject
