ALAN ROBINSON

James Fenton’s ’narratives’: some reflections on Postmodernism

It has become a critical commonplace that we are witnessing in contemporary British poetry the resurgence of an interest in narrative, most recently exemplified by Paul Muldoon and James Fenton. But the radically subversive character of these ’narratives’ has been less generally recognised than the ludic exuberance which they share with ’Martian’ poetry. For Fenton’s inventive wit, the playfully parodistic surface of his poems and his delight in practical jokes against the reader are the enchantingly facetious counterpart to a profound questioning of the imaginative process, which, as in the fabulation of much contemporary American fiction, renders problematic the boundary between reality and surrealist fantasy. ’ Some of Fenton‘s work responds to the interpretative strategies appropriate to Symbolist poetry, but other poems appear to mark a significant departure in their deliberate inclusion of subliterary genres or modes (e.g. the thriller, detective novel or romance) and in their self-parody and unremitting self-deconstruction. * To explain such experimental works, the associations of the convenient label ‘narrative’ are misleading. For there is little which corresponds in these elusive poems to the conventional notion of a story. Instead the reader confronts either the fragmentary traces of a displaced narrative which must be recovered inferentially, or alternatively a palimpsest of apparently discrete, incomplete fictions, the nature of whose interrelationship remains obscure or conjectural. To signal the divergence of such work from Modernism, I propose applying to it the modal term ‘postmodernist’.

The tentative essay which follows explores some of the difficulties which Fenton’s work presents and attempts to suggest an appropriate framework within which it may be comprehended. The superficially puzzling aspects of Fenton‘s obscurantism are mitigated if one recognises some of the formative influences on his style. I shall accordingly begin by outlining what seem to me to be his principal sources of inspiration, before going on to discuss his more avant-garde experiments.

It would appear that Fenton’s earliest narratives were written under the aegis of Auden. The landscape of ’A terminal moraine‘ is clearly reminiscent of the northern topography of Auden‘s early poetry, while its combination of restless anticipation with a meticulously ordered routine resembles the attitude of the Airman in The Orators, just as the protagonist‘s alienation recalls that of many isolated personae in Auden’s early poetry, such as ’The watershed’ or ‘The secret agent‘. ’The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford’ adopts further stylistic mannerisms

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from Auden. Its metaphorical translation of psychological states into landscape recalls, among numerous parallels, the 'Prologue' to The Orators, 'In praise of limestone' and 'The quest':

The lonely and unpopular Might find the landscapes of their childhood marked out Here, in the chaotic piles of souvenirs. (53-5)

But do not step into the kingdom of your promises To yourself, like a child entering the forbidden Woods of his lonely playtime (88-90)

The Audenesque is further evidence in Fenton's disorientating use of the definite article to give to generic figures a spurious specificity which is reminiscent of dreams in its surrealistically heightened imagery and perplexing implications of an intimate familiarity with otherwise alien figures:

For the solitary, The velveted only child who wrestled With eagles for their feathers And the young girl on the hill, who heard The din on the causeway and saw the large Hound with the strange pretercanine eyes Herald the approach of her turbulent lover, This boxroom of the forgotten or hardly possible Is laid with snares of privacy and fiction And the dangerous third wish. (61-70)

(One notes also the portentous aura of menace in the puzzlingly precise, Audenesque classificatim of 'the dangerous third wish'.) The poem's final stanza likewise draws on Auden for its style (cf., for example, Auden's 'Just as his dream f o r e t ~ l d ' ) ~ and its subject-matter - a projection of Oedipal anxieties into a metaphorical situation of exile and alienation.

Fenton's fascination with menace has experiential as well as literary sources, however: the psychoanalytical anxieties of Auden merge with the recollected horrors of Vietnam, Cambodia and, imaginatively, the German holocaust. The way in which his direct acquaintance with inhuman enormities has fed Fenton's imagination is apparent in 'Children in exile'.6 Here the literal Pisan context of the graveyard in the Campo Santo and the early Renaissance bas-reliefs and paintings of the Cathedral and Baptistery is transformed through the refugee's selective vision and disturbed memories into a Bosch-like nightmare:

Some influence lurked in certain rooms and corners.

He trod cautiously over the dead in the Campo Santo But why was 1 not suffering as well?

And saw the fading punishments of Hell

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And asked whether i t is true that the unjust will be tormented

There are so many martyrdoms in the beautiful galleries. And whether those who suffer will be saved.

He was a connoisseur among the graves. (53-60)

The hallucinatory vividness of treading cautiously over the dead arises because Fenton has not prepared the reader for a shift from the literal to the metaphorical; hence, for a startling moment, this grotesque experience is mistakenly read as actual, rather than imaginary torment. The time-shift here which blurs present and imaginary past is a major technical device also in ‘A German Requiem‘, whose displaced subject - the holocaust - is a perceptual absence, literally in the devastated urban landscape which has disappeared without trace, metaphorically in the reticent conspiracy of silence of the Germans who lived through i t , and accessible to the poet only through conjecture. ’ Fenton’s attempt to recover it imaginatively is exemplified in section I1 of the poem which builds from the associative link between flowers at a funeral and flowers at a wedding to fuse a modern journey to a cemetery (in which the ’hideous bridesmaids‘ are presumably funeral director‘s mutes) with a recreation of the euphemistic fictions with which Jewish deportations to the gas chambers were veiled by the Nazis (reading ‘hideous bridesmaids’ as S.S. guards). This disconcerting confusion of past and present, literal reality and surrealistic menace which originates in historical experience merges with Fenton‘s debts to Auden‘s early gnomic style and Angst-ridden sensibility in ’A Staffordshire murderer’. ’

Fenton has deliberately made this poem oblique by telescoping into the present the figures of all Staffordshire‘s most famous murderers, surrealistically resurrecting them from shop-window photographs and commemorative Toby jugs (’The pottery murderers in jackets of prussian blue”) into physical presences who could actually threaten the protagonist. Fenton achieves his chilling effects through persistent references to the c1ichi.d topoi of the thriller and the detective novel and by a macabre transposition of supposedly stable, familiar reality into an image of impending doom:

Large parts of Staffordshire have been undermined. The trees are in i t up to their necks. Fish Nest in their branches. In one of the Five Towns An ornamental pond disappeared overnight

Dragging the ducks down with it, down to the old seams With a sound as of a gigantic bath running out, Which is in turn the sound of ducks in distress. (29-35)

The ’undermining’ here is metaphorical as well as literal, as the old coal workings with their fossilised vegetation lure unsuspecting ducks into the tentacular grasp of their branches. Fenton’s wit is evident in the wordplay on ’in it up to their necks’ and the playfully ghoulish transformation of the actual ducks into their

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plastic counterparts, sucked towards the plughole vortex of the old seams. The jocular tone (as in so much of the black humour in ’A German Requiem’) is a way of accommodating the horror, but the uneasiness persists despite the grim jesting.

Fenton has accordingly evolved a distinctive stylistic voice, characterised by skilful modulations in tone and register and an epistemological confusion rooted in disorientating shifts from one chronological period to another and from the mundane to the surreal; the generic instability of his poems accentuates their perplexity. The technical possibilities of this ‘editing technique to make the experience seem more strange’ are extended in ’Nest of vampires’, a fine poem which provides an accessible introduction to Fenton’s more challenging experiments with narrative conventions in ’A vacant possession’. “’ Its metaphorical rationale places it in the Symbolist tradition, but its technique is also analogous to Fowles’s The French Lieutenant‘s Woman in its balance between archaeological reconstruction of the Victorian world and self-conscious commentary on the fictional conventions of nineteenth-century Realism.

The child’s narratorial voice of its first three stanzas describes, with an apparently Balzacian relish in circumstantial concreteness, the bizarre accumu- lation of bric-a-brac which the family has gradually gathered around itself. The tone is matter-of-fact, but there is an implied jocularity in the disproportion between the inherent triviality of what is catalogued and the lavish attention which it commands:

What fell behind the desk, what levelled the leg Of the card-table, what had been presumed lost

Has been f0und.V-9)

The elaborate circumlocutions are bathetic, but not all of this apparent over- loading of information is useless. For in addition to enabling the reader to locate the family socioeconomically and in relation to its colonialist connections, there are perhaps ironic comments on the family‘s financial demise (‘an imperial / Family in its humiliation‘) and, in the exotica of stanza three, some proleptic hints of the kind of material which the child’s imagination transmogrifies. Fenton has economically sketched in the contextual situation of the poem: the ‘bare planks’ and ’white squares’ graphically convey a common Victorian theme - a domestic removal occasioned by reduced financial circumstances (cf., for example, the Sedleys in Vanity Fair or the moral vignette of Robert Martineau’s The Last Day in the Old Home). But there are some difficulties presented by the cluttered contingency of this opening section, whose mannered elaboration rather obtrusively draws attention to itself. In the restricted space of a poem rather than a three-decker novel one presumes that all these details are selected as semantically crucial. But is their purpose merely to authenticate the poem’s social

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milieu or are they to be regarded as metaphorically significant? I t is a recurrent problem in Fenton's poetry. For expectations of formal and

thematic coherence lead one to try and reconcile all the data of the poem into a meaningful pattern. Like the poem's narrator in his desire to 'come across / A clue' (42-3) the reader seeks to discover a covert meaning beneath the surface of the text, but one suspects that Fenton, unlike most Modernist poets, regards such a procedure as misguided. He has remarked that 'An enormous number of bits in my poems have an element of practical joke'; the conscious opacity of his poems seems designed to mock the reader's pursuit of arcane significance, tempting one into comic excess of overinterpretation. "

There is a parallel here with the parodistic nature of much of Muldoon's poetry. In a conscious reaction against the pressures imposed on a Northern Irish poet to write work of political relevance, Muldoon offers the following tongue-in-cheek statement:

The Frog

Comes to mind as another small upheaval amongst the rubble. His eye matches exactly the bubble in my spirit-level. I set aside hammer and chisel and take him on the trowel. The entire population of Ireland springs from a pair left to stand overnight in a pond in the gardens of Trinity College, two bottles of wine left there to chill after the Act of Union. There is, surely, in this story a moral. A moral for our times. What if I put him to my head and squeezed it out of him, like the juice of freshly squeezed limes, or a lemon sorbet?"

The poem seethes with the kind of latent significance which critics adore. Should one see an indirect allusion to the Troubles in the 'small upheaval / amongst the rubble'? How far should one explore the punning sexual and political analogies in 'the Act of Union' (cf. Heaney's 'Act of Union')?" Is the location in the Protestant Trinity College politically significant? Muldoon playfully invites such debate in lines 13-14, offering an implicit reply in the grotesquely literal squeezing of the frog and poem for significance in lines 15-18. The poem parodies its own putative sententiousness, but also the over-ingenious hermeneutical probings of any critic who would see in poetry more than a game with language.

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Fenton adopts, I feel, a similar stance. His poetic corpus divides between the committed writing of a former International Socialist and ludic postmodernism which exultingly parades its own artifice and apparent senselessness, in an implicit rejection of engagement. His polemical targets are the self-perpetuating ingenuity of the critical industry and also the seriousness of the High Modernist rage for order, which desired to elevate the imaginative structures of art to a socially redemptive role in an era of cultural disintegration.

A good example of Fenton‘s amused trapping of critics is provided by the reference in line 47 of ’Nest of vampires’ to the ’empty’ villages and in lines 49-51 to ‘a demented beggar / Who mutters about the mouldiwarps / With tears in his eyes’. Fenton has explained that this refers to John Clare‘s attitude to the Enclosure Act, but

The period is deliberately confused. Did you notice John Clare making an appearance? Well, the idea of that is that you have someone coming on rather like in an Ealing comedy film, when you suddenly recognise some famous character actor under a great pancake of make-up, and you think ‘Oh, that’s old so-and- so’. Part of the inspiration for the poem is that passage where Clare says ‘and hang the little mouldiworps like to traitors every one.‘“

Yet to adopt this authorial hint as a key to the poem would be unwise. As with T. S. Eliot’s in-joke against Aldous Huxley in the guise of Mme. Sosostris in The Waste Land, the esoteric, riddling element is unintelligible to a reader who is outside the author’s social clique or whose reading does not coincidentally overlap with the author’s. Instead the uninitiated reader of ’Nest of vampires’ will probably fit this disturbingly melodramatic figure into a comprehensible pattern of literary projections of the child’s anxieties; the unrecognised allusion assumes a new function independent of its original source. But the revelation of its origins suggests an important caveat. For just as the period in which the poem is set is ‘deliberately confused’, so its local details are frequently taken over as ’found’ structures from ultimately unrelated sources, drawn into a new collocation which in this poem is significant, but which in ‘A vacant possession’ by contrast appears arbitrary. The distinction in this respect between ‘Nest of vampires’ and ‘A vacant possession‘ suggests an important difference between Modernist and post-modernist aesthetics.

The High Modernist long poem, for example The Waste Land or the early Cantos, has a discontinuous surface reminiscent of collage in its abrupt juxtaposition of passages strikingly divergent in register, rhythm, imagery and context. But the superficial fragmentation is grounded on an implicit metaphorical or narrative structure (in Eliot’s case the Grail legend and fertility rites, in Pound’s the concept of the nekuia and parallels with The Divine Comedy, The Odyssey and Ovid‘s Metamorphoses) which accommodates the centrifugal tendencies of the local details into an ordered pattern. The formalistic

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pleasure of this kind of poetry is analogous to that of analytical Cubist or Vorticist canvases, which exploit the perceptual tension between the suppressed structure and the coruscating picture surface with its planar fragmentation, multi- point perspective and tonal and textural contrasts. But with later Modernist long poems, such as the Cantos from Section: Rock-Drill onwards or Williams’s Paterson, the implicit structure of coherence is either lacking, or alternatively is impotent to contain the seemingly arbitrary indeterminacy of the work with its accumulation of ready-made material. The result is a poetry which is resistant to critical efforts to reduce i t to the kind of readily assimilable pattern which could be inferred from High Modernist long poems. This recalcitrant fragmentation is, I feel, characteristic of an emergent tendency in postmodernist writing which parallels the deconstructive preoccupations of much contemporary literary theory, albeit in a dismissively jocular guise. It is, I believe, a distinctive feature of Fenton’s utilisation of found material which, like Dada, deliberately questions established semantic conventions. A brief digression on ‘The kingfisher’s boxing gloves’ will, I hope, clarify this point. ’’

The poem’s title and subtitle offer important clues to Fenton‘s methods. The acknowledgement, ’after Baudelaire’, suggests that the poem is an imitation, yet there appears to be no specific debt to Baudelaire’s work save in a general thematic similarity with Baudelairean exoticism and the quest for a paradisal idyll. l6 Instead possible wordplay on ‘bourres’ invites scepticism about Fenton‘s supposed allusions; for the verb ’bourrer’ can mean to ‘cram‘ with useless, undigested information, while the phrase ’bourrer le crfne au public’ means to systematically delude about the true nature of a situation. One should therefore regard the French phrase as a deliberate spoof, inviting one to embark on a futile pursuit of sources. And indeed this initial practical joke is characteristic of the poem’s irrationale. In style ’The kingfisher’s boxing gloves’ recalls an amusing dream poem by Auden, ‘The month was April, the year’ which is a similar hotch-potch of distorted fragments of reading, and in method and content Keith Douglas’s hallucinatory poem with the suggestive title ‘Negative information‘.

‘The kingfisher’ can be naturalised as a dream poem and this is certainly the most straightforward way to resolve its difficulties. Its critical interest lies, however, in the light which it casts on Fenton‘s methods elsewhere. For its narrative incorporates in a collage-like arrangement fragmentary found material from bewilderingly diverse sources, parodying the narrative cliches of thrillers and adventure yarns and indulging with seeming arbitrariness in references to (among others) Lear’s Nonsense Songs, Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Keith Douglas’s Alamein to Zern Zem, Joyce’s Bloom in ‘Nausicaa‘ (’For this [relief] much thanks‘), Kipling’s The Light that Failed, Neil Armstrong‘s famous remark on the first moon-landing, with perhaps reminiscences of Auden’s

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expressionistic dramatic collaborations with Isherwood. But , unlike High Modernist poems, recognising such 'sources' does not help one to interpret the poem's bizarre surrealism. The references have no covert, cumulative significance; they remain merely an entertaining assemblage which amuses by its rapid shifts in direction and tone and which exults in its deliberate disorganis- ation. Such disjointedness is of course to be expected from a poem which Fenton classifies as belonging to 'The Empire of the Senseless' and hence categorises as verbal play. It becomes disconcerting, however, when adopted as a structural principle in 'A vacant possession', which Fenton does not classify as 'Senseless' but which, unlike 'Nest of vampires', frustrates the reader's High Modernist expectations of formal coherence.

The metaphorical rationale which in 'Nest of vampires' introduces structural coherence into the surface discontinuity is signalled by the initially puzzling title. What relevance can this melodramatic phrase bear to the apparently mundane event of moving house? One could interpret it as referring to the jealous family intrigues and a struggle for ,inhritance which might be presumed to lie behind the sale of the house (cf. the similar metaphor in Francois Mauriac's Le noeud de uip2res). But more centrally it connotes, I would suggest, the melodramatic imagining which populate the world of the lonely narrator, whose emotionally impoverished life finds consolation in books. Fenton is exploring the disjunction between the preoccupations of adult anxiety ( ' "Stop talking about money. You've upset the child." (31) ) and the private miseries of the child which grown-ups fail to understand. The intensity of the narrator's feelings of conspiratorial persecution is reminiscent of Jane Eyre's childhood nightmares and, like hers, finds expression in experiential analogies drawn from reading. The 'chalk-faced old man' of lines 24-6 recalls the bogey man of many nursery rhymes or fairy-tales, while his pallor, together with the 'wild garlic' of line 20 and the 'evil crimson of the roses' of line 36, fits into the significant pattern of vampire legends. The insecure child's premonitions eagerly appropriate the available vehicle of the 'German song' (32-5) to articulate themselves, just as the nightmare of the broken doll draws in its register on overheard adult conversations, discussing the loss of good looks in middle age:

She's kept her stuffing well over the years But the china face has quite collapsed. (29-30)

What the child is looking for in these legends and rhymes is an explanation for the disturbing upheaval in his family's way of life. He formulates a hypothesis - a fiction - which will offer the 'clue' he requires to comprehend what to him is a mystery. The adult explanations make no sense in his terms; instead he casts himself in the role of a detective, transposing to his actual life fictional situations which appear speciously relevant. The 'real' narrative of the poem

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is accordingly displaced by a series of melodramatically heightened vignettes; Fenton’s dramatic monologue disconcertingly absorbs the Gothic mode and the generic conventions of the nineteenth-century detective novel.

Just as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe initially view their experiences at Thornfield Hall and Villette through the spectacles of the Gothic novel (like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey and the governess-narrator in The Turn of the Screw), so the child here finds his imaginative visions more compelling than mundane reality.

The ’tribal fetish’ of line 13 stimulates associations with Wilkie Collins‘s The Moonstone, realised in the ‘three turbaned Sikhs’ of line 17; the ’secret rooms‘ of line 42 suggests memories of Le Fanu’s Uncle Sifas and The Wyuern Mystery and Collins’s The Woman in White, while the signalling figure of lines 43-5 perhaps recalls The Hound of the Baskeroilfes. The effect is multi-layered: the domestic reality is displaced by the child’s fragmentary fictions, which in their turn suggest to the reader a Jamesian problem in conscience. For the grown-up world is filtered through the apparent incomprehension of a naive recorder. The enigmatic situation remains unsolved, for the adult version which would complement the child‘s imaginative distortions and narrative cliches is never supplied. Instead the reader is left in lines 52-3 with the portentous image of the mirror reflecting the empty lawns - an authenticating, contingent detail, or a metaphor for the semantic absence at the core of the poem?

Absence or vacancy is a central feature of Fenton‘s even more oracular ’A vacant possession’. Initially the poem appears straightforward. The first two stanzas enable one to construct a plausible context: the new owners of this vacant possession are beginning to renovate the neglected grounds of the country house. But after this deceptively accessible introduction the reader undergoes, at regular two-stanza intervals, a series of disorientating shifts in direction which seem deliberately designed to frustrate any attempt to establish a single context, whether literal or metaphorical, which will adequately explain the poem. Unlike many of Fenton’s other narratives, this poem lacks the cognitive structure of the dramatic monologue form. Instead the Modernist rage for order is supplanted by a postmodernist delight in deconstructive irrationale.

The mystification begins in line 11: ’The difficult guest is questioning his rival.’ In making sense of linguistic utterances one relies heavily for clues on what linguists term ‘deixis’, the orientational features of language, such as personal pronouns or adverbials of space and time which help one to construct the spatio- temporal co-ordinates of the speech act. In face-to-face interaction such deixis is often accompanied by demonstrative gestures, which act as a clarificatory italicisation or stressing of significant elements in the utterance. But in written discourse such visual clues are absent and one must therefore rely heavily on internal cross-referencing within the text to establish the context coherently.

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Fenton declines to provide such convenient cross-references. In line 11, for example, the Audenesque use of the definite rather than indefinite article is crucial. It could be read as a generic usage (’the difficult guest whom one will invariably encounter at any social function’) or, more confusingly, as a kind of semantic shorthand. For ’the’ difficult guest presupposes in its specification that the reader will be familiar with this figure from an earlier encounter, but this prior acquaintance has of course not been furnished by Fenton, unless one makes the unwarranted assumption that this guest is either the addressee or is denoted by the ’we’ of line 1. (Such pronominal shifts throughout the poem are a principal means of mystification, as the people to whom they refer remain otherwise unspecified.)

It would appear that Fenton’s presupposition of familiarity depends on his adoption in stanzas three and four of a narrative clichl.. The romantic quarrel has a histrionic quality (the theatrical pacing of the man, the woman’s careful striking of a sculptural attitude) reminiscent in register of romantic fiction and in gestural description of innumerable films of the 1930s and 1940s. The hackneyed nature of the material renders it comprehensible, even if the generic shift is disconcerting, but there are puzzling details which it is difficult to accommodate. Is the ’rival’ of line 11 a second male whose presence remains conjectural, or does it denote the woman, implying either a bisexual menage-a- trois or a non-amatory kind of rivalry? Why, in lines 13-14, are we given the apparently irrelevant information that in the water-butt there are innumerable invisible micro-organisms? Is this to foreground the inherent selectivity of focus of any narrative, or is it of metaphorical importance? Similar questions could be raised about the elaborate reference in line 20 to the bitten thumb, which by its protracted detail implies a portentous significance, but may be bathetic rather than symbolic. The important point is that Fenton is deliberately tantalising the reader, who remains unsure what generic conventions of inter- pretation to apply. The vital contextual information which would help one to interrelate the narrative fragments is withheld and instead the reader is over- loaded (as in the opening of ‘Nest of vampires‘) with apparently irrelevant trivia which tempt one into overinterpretation if one wishes to overcome their indeterminacy.

The frustration of the reader becomes more overt in stanzas five and six. The elaborate description of the day’s excursion conveys little more than that they have driven round in a circle (a metaphor for the reader’s disorientation?), while stanza six offers merely a vacant panorama (another joking metaphor for the semantic absence in the poem?). The supposed extracts from letters in stanzas seven and eight likewise obfuscate rather than enlighten. The contradiction in lines 36-40 between the macabre subject-matter and the jocularly affectionate register may be read either as disturbingly manic or as surrealistic black humour.

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In conjunction with the previous letter's references to 'memory' and 'murdered friends', the 'noose' is perhaps a dreamlike projection of this persona's feelings of guilt at having slandered or let down friends, imaged as a kind of metaphorical murder. But this psychological interpretation depends on a conjectural inference that the murders are metaphorical rather than literal. There are of course insufficient contextual and generic clues to make a semantic judgement with any confidence.

As I argued earlier, 'A Staffordshire murderer' and 'Nest of vampires' likewise counterpoint melodramatic or surreal imagining against the world of mundane reality. But there the reader is able to discover an explanatory rationale for the epistemological contradictions. What renders 'A vacant possession' so discon- certing is that its rationale is much more difficult to find. A possible structure is available if one sees a wordplay in the title: the possession might be of the ghostly variety. The poem would accordingly comprise a pageant of fragmentary episodes from the history of a house. The persona of the final two stanzas might then be regarded (like Eliot's Tiresias) as the unifying consciousness of the poem's psychodrama.

But there appears to be in Fenton's selection of material an irreducible privacy of reference which tauntingly deconstructs such efforts at thematic linking. What is the explanatory significance, if any, of the references in lines 41-5 to the irrationality of religious faith? What is the chronological relationship between this passage and the twentieth-century house party of the poem's final two stanzas? Are these located in the same environment and concerned with the same personae as the opening of the poem? The deictic clues which Fenton offers are inadequate to resolve such questions and, as if to give structural prominence to the futility of all the reader's efforts at interpretation, the poem concludes with an explicit enigma:

something I left in my bedroom. What can i t have been? The window is wide open. The curtains move. The light sways. The cold sets in.

The theme again is displacement or absence. One could attempt to naturalise the final sentences by reading into their vacancy, in a Mallarmean fashion, the fleeting traces of an imaginary plenitude. '' But i t appears that their role is to resist such reassuring Symbolist conventions; instead they recalcitrantly insist on their semantic irreducibility. The chillingly vacant room could be offered as a metaphor for postmodernism, were i t not that such figurative strategies have been resolutely deconstructed in advance.

What expectations are appropriate to this kind of poem? Fenton's work ap- pears analogous to John Fowles's novels in its generic incorporation but simultaneous parody of the narrative structures of such popular forms as the

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romance, thriller and detective novel. Such conventional material is a useful semantic shorthand, but its hackneyed blatancy destabilises the aesthetic distance, preventing the reader from comfortably locating the text within a single comprehensible framework. Like Fenton, Fowles deliberately introduces incomplete fictional threads, only to expose them as deceptions; Sarah Woodruff's elaborate fabrications and Conchis's theatrical games manipulate the reader as much as the other characters within the text. But the game-playing has an underlying seriousness. As in the memory games of Pinter's N o Man's Land and Old Times where 'truth' becomes unverifiably relativistic, reduced to obsolescent fictions designed to gain psychological power, Fenton succeeds in subverting our familiar empirical confidence in reality. The resolute discontinuity of his poems induces in the reader a disconcerting epistemological confusion. In self-consciously deconstructing any pretensions to the formal coherence of Modernist poetry, Fenton is extending the possibilities of the narrative poem, in a process of generic redefinition which gleefully adopts uncertainty as its structural principle and rejects the overtures of interpreters seeking to accommodate its opaque fragmentation. The generic eclecticism of his work resembles that of postmodernist architecture; '" such apparently arbitrary inclusions are, however, not insignificant. Rather they indicate, I would suggest, the incipient emergence of a distinctive kind of 'narrative' poem, some of whose conventions this article has attempted to adumbrate.

Notes

Compare Muldoon's fabulation in 'Immram', W h y Brownlee Left (1980), 38-47, and 'The more a man has the more a man wants', Quoof (19831, 40-64. Compare Muldoon's 'The big house', Mules (1977). 15-16, which indulgently spins a yarn, exploiting with evident enjoyment the narrative c1ichC.s of Gothic fiction and the detective novel, only in its final qualificatory line, which contradicts line 10, to playfully dismiss itself as fabrication by drawing attention to the unreliability of its artifice. See James Fenton, The Memory of War and Children in Exile: Poems 7968-7983 (Harmondsworth, 19831, 92-3. Line references in individual poems are incorporated wherever possible into the text. Compare W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (1976). 41. See TheMemory of War, 81-4. Compare The English Auden: Poems, Essays arid Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (1977), 61 and Auden, Collected Poems, 414-15, 224-31. English Auden, 148. The Memory of War, 30-7. The Memory of War, 10-19. The Memory of War, 58-61. Notice the characteristically sinister wordplay here on prussic acid.

James Fenton's 'narratives' 93

10

11 12 13 14

15 16

17

18 19

20

See 'An interview with James Fenton', Poetry Review, vol. 72, no. 2 (June 1982). 21, and The M e m o r y of W a r , 44-6. See 'An interview with James Fenton', art. cit., 18. Muldoon, Quoof, 29. Compare Seamus Heaney, N o r t h (1975). 49-50. 'An interview with James Fenton', 21. Fenton is presumably thinking of Clare's 'Remembrances': 'Inclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain / It levelled every bush & tree & levelled every hill / & hung the moles for traitors.' See John Clare, The M i d s u m m e r Cushion, ed. Anne Tibble and R. K . R. Thornton (Ashington and Manchester, 1979), 370. See T h e M e m o r y of War, 96-9. Compare particularly 'Le Voyage' in Charles Baudelaire, a E m r e s cowipletes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec (Paris, 19511, 196-201. See The English Auderi, 130-5 and The Complete P o e m of Keith Dotiglus, ed. Desmond Graham (Oxford, 1978), 79. See The M e m o r y of W u r , 47-9. Compare particularly 'Ses purs ongles tres haut dCdiant leur onyx', in Stephane Mallarme, a E m r e s c-orriplhtes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris, 1945),

See Charles lencks, 'Late-Modernism and Post-Modernism', Late-Modern Arcliitec- tiire (1980). 10-30; The Lurigiiuge of Post-Moderr? Ardirtec-titre, 3rd ed. (1981), vassirri.

68-9.

GARETH REEVES

Daily bread Shopping was a campaign: up one side of the High Street, each kerb and level known by his stick, then the difficult cross-over - 'Why are they so damn quiet these days, they creep up on you,' as he vaguely parried a car - then down the other, shop by shop.

But when he passed you by, in summer beaked with a green eye-shade, he had not necessarily missed you; he did not want your guiding hand or to stop for a chat ('If you say "How do you do" they go and tell you'); you were deliberately seen through.