“The gap between you and the other”: writing, the body, and gender in Glen Duncan’s Love Remains
British novelist Glen Duncan’s early novel Love Remains was reissued in 2006, alongside his most recent and much-admired “bigger work”, The Bloodstone Papers. Perhaps a critical reconsideration of the earlier, shorter novel is in order. First published in 2000, Love Remains was described by one critic as “by far Duncan’s finest book” (Arditti 2003) and was generally well received, if perhaps not understood in all its complexity.
Primarily a story of love gone wrong between its two young protagonists, Nicholas and Chloe, the work sits both significantly and uncomfortably within its apparent “love story” genre. Significantly, from a feminist perspective, because it is a male writer’s genuine attempt to investigate the difficulties of relations between the sexes without recourse to ready-made misogynistic explanations. Uncomfortably, for some readers, because it does not allow us the more usual generic resolutions and reassurances. One reviewer states:
this self-consciously portentous and delicate love story was never built to withstand … a metamorphosis into a wholly different kind of novel (Clark 2000).
The “wholly different kind of novel” to which Clark refers is that part of the couple’s story which follows, or spirals out from, a stranger’s rape and near-murderous slashing of Chloe, while she sits at home alone on the very night Nicholas is unfaithful to her for the first time. This event, derided by Clark as “one of the most outrageous plot developments I’ve ever encountered”, and “extremely unlikely” (2000), colours and shapes every other element of the novel, reconfiguring the reading experience.
Until it occurs, we are certainly already aware that something has gone awry with the romance, as the narrative moves back and forward between a dejected and self-destructive Nicholas in a textual “present”, and the account of his lost past with Chloe, without full explanation. It is this total reconfiguration, the very “excess” of the triggering event, that apparently so disconcerts Clark. Complaining that the book is “stilted” and “disjointed”, she asserts: “there was a much simpler tale trying to be told, instead of which we get two unfinished novels oddly conflated…” (Clark 2000)
It is, however, arguable that those tensions, that heterogeneity, the reviewer feels as a threat to “good” structure, are precisely the important matter under exploration in the book; that the manner in which Love Remains departs from its apparent “delicacy” is wholly deliberate and aesthetically justifiable, not simply a failure in skill on the novelist’s part. We might consider how the book’s formal approach — its refusal of “finish”, or the kind of organic, whole “smoothness” Clark seems to lament — arises intrinsically from a commitment to recognising specifically sexual difference and its implications for modes of writing.
The concept and motif of difference are central to this novel, committed as it is to unflinching scrutiny of heterosexual interactions from both male and female points of view. As Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 208) tells us:
There remains something ungraspable, something outside, unpredictable and uncontainable, about the other sex for each sex. This irreducible difference … involves a remainder, an indigestible residue, which remains unconsumed in any relation between them.
This is uncannily echoed in Duncan’s description of his two lovers early on in the relationship, before things take a disastrous turn:
The dark spaces under the quilt were alive with tiny signals that there was an intractable difference between them, no matter how deeply they looked into each other’s eyes, no matter what boundaries of each other’s bodies they blasted; there was still something unattained (40).
We may see a gesture toward recognition of this unattained “remainder” in the very title of Duncan’s novel — Love Remains — for all its ambiguity. The title may of course be read as a declarative sentence insisting on an optimism the book itself calls into question (the romantic strand), or as a faintly macabre evocation of what is left after the death of love, recalling the expression “human remains” (the anti-romantic). But these “remains” may also be understood as the unassimilable residue evoked by Grosz and interrogated, throughout Duncan’s novel, by means of a focus on the body.
If it is true that, as Grosz argues, philosophy since its very inception “has established itself on the foundations of a profound somatophobia” (1994, 5), that “the body is the disavowed condition” of all knowledges (1994, 20), it should not be surprising that a novelist who is also a philosophy graduate (British Council 2007) might choose the body as site, or start and end point, for his radical re-investigation of intersubjective knowledge. As Duncan’s Chloe, abandoned by Nicholas after the rape, tells us while “recovering” in hospital,
There aren’t any abstract questions. There’s just bone and skin and blood. The body’s the last particular that destroys all generals. The concrete that out-argues all the abstract (142).
Moving between male and female viewpoints, often by means of free indirect discourse in the case of Nicholas, or in first-person, fragmented narration as Chloe thinks, writes and tells the aftermath of her trauma, the text raises all its significant questions through striking, poetic imagery of the body, particularly what Grosz, following Nietzsche, Lingis and others, calls “the body as inscriptive surface” (1994, 138).
From our very first introduction to Nicholas, taking refuge at a bar in Manhattan, where he has fled after the disaster, we see his potential as inscriptive surface — he is “pencilled” (3) by the club’s lasers just as Mickey, the wealthy American sadist with whom he becomes entangled, is “scribbled all over” (4) by the same source, indicating their inevitable alliance, their induction into the same fleeting script. Later, when he has allowed himself to become the object of Mickey’s sexual violence, Nicholas looks down at his body, “his imagination redefining it as a space for the physical text of Mickey’s will” (62) — writing and violence are equated or even fused here, as will also be the case when we come later to Chloe’s immense trauma.
But Chloe, more than once designated a “good girl” by both Nicholas and his father, is already marked at the outset, long before the rape, by the presence of a significant scar left from a childhood burn. Reference to this scar recurs throughout the novel like a musical motif, insisting on Chloe’s vulnerability both past and future — it is “perhaps the size of a hand” (8), suggesting personal intrusion, the “touch” of an evil presence, later made explicit as a writing hand: “[t]he signature in flesh that wasn’t her and which defined her to herself, privately, awkwardly … The scar was someone else’s unwanted hand on her, permanently” (11-12). This scar is the feared obstacle to sexual closeness when the young couple first sleep together, the hidden factor the virginal Chloe must raise beforehand to be sure Nicholas will not be repelled — and the mark of his ability to pass this first test of intimacy. Later, as they are getting married, Nicholas thinks of the scar “which he now loved, brazenly, as the thing that uniquely identified her and her willingness to be vulnerable to him” (52).
As has no doubt been noted of the protagonist’s loss of a breast by cancer prior to the main events of Margaret Atwood’s novel Bodily Harm (1982), Chloe’s scar is also the foreshadowing sign of a later encounter with darkness, a symbolic earnest or down-payment to an exacting Creditor. For Chloe, after her trauma, will become a new embodiment of scarring, the like of which she could never, even with her “own” childhood scar, have imagined before — “all sewn together in black and red seams” (137), her face “rewritten” (138). There is also a foreshadowing of the future state that marriage (indirectly, through its failure) will bring her to, in the nightmare Chloe has on the eve of her wedding, in which, during a dress-fitting, “She was convinced that there were still dozens of pins in the dress, tearing her skin each time something was pulled or hitched or tucked” (48). In the dream she is warned she will look like “a rag doll” (48), she thinks of “Gulliver bristling with arrows” (48), and sees blood flowing from her sleeves onto the floor.
This is evidently a prefiguring of suffering, even martyrdom, reminiscent of commonplace images of Saint Sebastian, or of the multiple pricking points on the female body in Frida Kahlo’s The Broken Column (1944) — but it is also a kind of writing, suggesting the violence of con/in-scription into the state of “wife”, later actualised as the more universal “victim”. When Chloe, convalescent after the rape, sees herself in a hospital mirror, we read: “Stitches: lines crossed out like a tally of days on a prison-cell wall. I’ve been crossed out, she thought. My face has been edited. Cut and paste” (138-9).
Evidently we are here in the realm of a “metaphorics of body writing” (Grosz 1994, 117), in which the body is seen as produced “as a text which is as complicated and indeterminate as any literary manuscript” (Grosz 1994, 117). In this patchwork state, Chloe’s recovering body is seen as anti-birthed, monstrous — “there’s a dark place tight around you then you come out it’s an anti-birth you come out to find that you’re dead” (135), and indeed the salvaged parts recall Frankenstein’s monster[1] — rather than giving birth herself, as she had once hoped to do, she is the new creature thrust back into life. (Just like Frankenstein’s monster, too, she will exact her revenge.) Later, out of hospital, and contemplating her scars, Chloe considers their permanence, and whether she can really continue living:
It wasn’t clear to her that her body could carry this new forced message. He had written; she still had the power to burn the book (222).
The paralleling here of “book” with book invites us to consider the link between the subject matter of Love Remains and its own construction as a novel. Just as Chloe experiences a radical and decisive rupture with previous self and body, the text undergoes an explosive shift as it moves from romance narrative — with its evocations of Jane Eyre, the couple spending an early intimate short break in Brontë country — to a more brutal exploration of violence, isolation, alienation and vengeance. While “good girl Chloe” before the rape was never entirely “whole”, her early scar being symbolic of her status as marked (wo)man and indeed Woman, after this pivotal event she is, like the narrative itself, a set of fragments, her face “an identity they’d scrambled to recover” (269). Far from accidental, the shift from the conventional story, “boy meets girl, they fall in love and then out of it” (Clark 2000), to a bleak, “disjointed” vision of elemental horror and aloneness, is the very point of Duncan’s undertaking.
What this undertaking involves is signalled within the novel itself, in a conversation held between Chloe and Nicholas after breakfast in bed on a Sunday — ordinary intimacy well before the Event — as she flicks through the morning papers. Chloe notices a report that the “London Ripper” has left another victim, and as they discuss this, Nicholas recalls an earlier conversation with a superior at the literary agency where he works.
Beyond the ugliness such stories brought into their view was the tacitly pondered question (tacitly pondered by Chloe; sensed in her by Nicholas) of how much Nicholas had in common with violent rapist-murderers merely by virtue of sharing their gender. Nicholas had discussed this with Anthony Caswell-Brooks…
‘All men are potential rapists,’ Anthony had declared when Nicholas had brought the subject up over a pint of Boddington’s. ‘Point-of-view exercise. Try it.’
‘What do you mean?’ Nicholas had asked.
‘Next time you read a rape case in a newspaper, or hear one on the news, ask yourself whose point of view the narrative gave you. Always the rapist … It’s his heart you feel beating in your chest … Point of view, mate. Try it. ’S why men can’t fucking write about rape except in distastefully titillating ways: cos they’ve all got it in them’ (80).
If there is an engine to this narrative, it is located here, in the question of men writing about women’s suffering, the accusation of inevitable complicity. The significance of this passage — far beyond the simple proleptic “planting” of the serial rapist, so that the reader is unconsciously prepared when Chloe is attacked — is highlighted in an early review of the novel in The Independent, titled “In between the sheets”, and subtitled, “Can men write about rape? Some can”. In this review, the fusing of author and male character, Chloe-as-woman and Chloe-as-textual-consciousness, is made explicit, in order to praise Duncan’s skill at overturning the pronouncement made by the Caswell-Brooks character:
In defiance of his own character [sic], Duncan writes about rape brilliantly. He fully inhabits the female perspective, taking a scalpel to Chloe’s consciousness as surely as the rapist took a knife to her flesh (Arditti 2000).
One wonders how Arditti, himself a novelist, could have meant this as a compliment, redeploying as it does Duncan’s own metaphors of occupying conquest (“fully inhabits”), incision for invasion — even if a scalpel is associated with healing, it is also the tool of the vivisector, and is paralleled here with rapist’s knife — writer-as-rapist, writer as intruder upon female intactness. It begs the question of whether Duncan’s own text has even been understood, praising the author’s competence-equal-to-a-rapist when it comes to entering female consciousness!
But this is not simply a case of unfortunate wording: Arditti has correctly identified the source of the novel’s power, its “sore point” so to speak. It is as much a book about writing, specifically the difficulty of the male writer, as it is about love or suffering. Here for once the male writer is made the issue, in a way we are more accustomed to see happening with the usually “marked” gender, in the loved and hated term “woman writer”. Here, the male writer will be held up for scrutiny, both in his textual alter ego, Nick — who though not a writer is employed at “representing” them (78), and whose name itself suggests incision, as well as a potentially diabolical likeness — and in the attempted “point-of-view exercise” that constitutes the novel Glen Duncan himself is writing…
Nicholas’s angst over possible complicity in women’s suffering at first seems abstract and technically paranoid (“how much [he] had in common with violent rapist-murderers merely by virtue of sharing their gender” [80]), for he has not (yet) enacted violence against Chloe (later their sexual relations will show a degree of violence [91]), and it might seem strange that she would even “tacitly” ponder this, as she has no reason to suspect him of anything so extreme as rape and murder, even if she has sensed the contempt he often brings to sex (41). He has also concealed from her his “[m]ost significant memory” (28) from when he was seven, watching and feeling sexually aroused by an eleven-year-old called Michelle mounting and bullying another girl, a girl with some sort of disability, foreshadowing similar scenarios in Duncan’s later novel Weathercock (2003).
This memory, not shared with Chloe, sits uncomfortably among those aspects of the “intractable difference”, the “something unattained” (40) that nonetheless colour Nick’s self-concept and his view of Chloe as “better” than he is, throughout the novel. But his angst is further honed by the recollection of Caswell-Brooks’ assertion about male complicity. There is, of course, a vast difference between persistently, culturally and personally, operating from within an inherited viewpoint (that of male privilege and power) and actually raping someone — the difference between imagination — willed or involuntary? — and enactment. But in Duncan’s novel, the narrative logic is dreamlike, or akin to magical thinking: that element of the mundane, the ordinary if unpleasant — “I commit adultery against my wife” — is deliberately conflated with the extreme — “She is raped and nearly murdered”. There is no logical connection between the two, except insofar as Nick leaves Chloe alone that night, but this is hardly the cause of what happens to her, which is essentially random. Indeed, we might argue that Nick’s choice to return home that same night, rather than stay away, is what saves her life.
The element of cautionary tale — the one night you betray her will be a night you regret forever — is perhaps what induces critics like Clark (2000) to protest at “outrageous” improbability. On the face of it, there is nothing at all unlikely, statistically, about a woman being raped and or knifed, and narratively, as I have noted, the reader was quietly prepared for it by the novel’s previous mention of the “London Ripper” in the news. Rather, it is the fearsome magical conflation — it is somehow Nick’s fault, all males are rapists, and so on — that might provoke a sense of the ridiculous. Unless we accept that the novel’s exact aim is to break open this conflation, to subject it to examination and to ask what it means for (male) writers, we may be left gawping at the apparent non-sequitur and miss its ramifications: this is not a matter of faulty plotting…
Faced with what has happened to Chloe, and having seen her to hospital, Nick runs away, abandons her. If he has often pictured her as something whole despite her early scar, something essentialised (101) connected to “luminous archetypes” (104), and self-contained as the small ceramic jar (which significantly breaks on the night Nick has violent sex with her [91], and which reappears, glued-together, on the night of the rape [128], imaging Chloe’s later patchwork body), then on that terrible night, he has seen his fantasy turn unsustainable. He has always been aware that, in their interactions, “her body brought only its own portion of truth to the encounter. There were other portions, hidden, elsewhere” (40), but he depends on her portion for his self-completion — as Chloe realises:
He’s incomplete. He wants me to complete him. He wants love to complete him. It doesn’t. Sex with the person you love is supposed to be the point of fusion, the place where you’re relieved of being imperfectly yourself, the place where the gap between you and the other is closed. And if it isn’t… If it isn’t then you’re left with yourself, alone, and the knowledge that the other’s love is no escape. He wants to disappear. Into me. He thinks I’m whole. He wants to hide in me (41-2).
If Chloe has represented for Nick something of a return to the womb, then his arrival home again on the night of her rape becomes the moment of his decisive metaphoric expulsion from the womb by miscarriage or traumatic birth: he must leave. There is the strikingly endometrial image of the blood-steeped carpet in their home (128-9), Nick’s initial foetal weightlessness (129), floating “at the doorway in the air that was water” (130) and the moment at which “[h]is gravity returned in an axe-blow and he found himself leaden, flat on the floor, struggling to get to his elbows and knees” (130). During the experience he has seen “with angelic clarity the pointlessness in the human habit of connecting anything to anything else” (129).
Rupture and disconnection: Nick’s temporary Godlike vision unseats his dream of wholeness, just as that dream was threatened by Chloe’s desire for a baby, a will, in fact, which Nicholas feels as “an expanding presence whose goal [is] the occupation of all available space” (114). His sense of threat is further exacerbated by — once again — the reductive sarcasms of his superior at work: “’Love lifeboat,’ Anthony told Nicholas. ‘Once the kid comes, you’re out’” (109). This is fed by Nicholas understanding Chloe’s very different vision of their future: “ … he was merely instrumental to conception. She didn’t want him. Perhaps she had never wanted him. She wanted the thing beyond him. The child” (106).
Though a standard, even clichéd motif, this echoes especially Brangwen’s realisation in The Rainbow, a novel explicitly invoked in Love Remains: “She was with child, and there was again the silence and distance between them. She did not want him nor his secrets nor his game, he was deposed, he was cast out” (Lawrence 1984 [1915], 55). It is as if Duncan is demonstrating, with Simone de Beauvoir, the severe limitations of the vision of love Lawrence before him has analysed:
What D. H. Lawrence says of sexual love is generally valid: the union of two human beings is doomed to frustration if it is an attempt at a mutual completion which supposes an original mutilation; marriage should be a combining of two whole, independent existences, not a retreat, an annexation, a flight, a remedy (De Beauvoir 1988 [1949], 497).
But for Nicholas, it seems, there is no room in the womb for anyone but himself, and this cannot last. He is also like a phantom limb (of Chloe’s?) persisting after loss or amputation — as Grosz tells us, the phantom limb “usually feels light and hollow”, “[p]atients refer to its ‘husklike’, weightless and floating character” (1994, 71), all of which recalls Nick’s traumatic disturbances in body image after the rape and his separation from Chloe — “as if his insides had been removed and replaced with helium” (128), and his problems with space and scale: “Sometimes several hours would pass without any distortion. Other times he spent a whole day negotiating thousand foot drops off the pavement, or ceilings high enough for aircraft to pass under” (55-6). Chloe too, in the hospital, learning that he has abandoned her, sees Nick in these terms; losing him seems only a relative pain under the circumstances: “If the body was on fire, how much could it feel the amputation of a limb?” (157).
Nick’s body, now labile and powerless, seems in excess of requirements. (Only late in the story, after allowing himself to be beaten and anally assaulted by Mickey and her group of sadists, does he experience beauty, peace and purity, a feeling of connection.) As an experience of his inessential status, it is Nick’s discovery of his own infertility, a kind of gilding the lily perhaps on the author’s part (not only does Nick not want to make a baby, he can’t, and that’s final!) that tips him over into his night of adultery with Nina Cole.
Nina Cole, who works as Nicholas’s assistant at the literary agency, will prove to be one in a long line of “bad girl” characters in the Duncan oeuvre — all sexually assertive, some overwhelmingly egoistic or even cruel, and all counterweighted to a greater or lesser degree with the “good girls” (Hope versus Alicia in Hope; Violet versus Penelope in I, Lucifer; Deborah versus Natalie in Weathercock, Scarlet not quite so pitched, but still weighed against, the much more watery Janet Marsh of The Bloodstone Papers). Indeed, one suspects that the males in all these novels have some share in what Ott (1998), referring to the protagonist of Duncan’s first book, calls “a major-league dose of that old standby, the madonna-whore complex.”
Though Nina is possessed of the familiar female self-sufficiency that so troubles Duncan’s male characters — “… her sense of moral exemption was derived from her own soul; she didn’t need his allegiance or anyone else’s. She would live and do her will and be beyond all judgement because she was her own final judge” (87), her “wholeness” is clearly not of the recommended kind — Nick likens her directly to “Rochester’s mad wife”, and indirectly to Hannibal Lecter, and the Marquis de Sade (88). This of course is when he is still trying to stave off and deny his attraction to her, faced with Chloe’s enquiries.
That Nina remains little more than a functional player in the narrative — even a projection or creation of the relationship between Nicholas and Chloe — is surely deliberate. Her very name, “Nina Cole”, seems like a garbled fusion of their own two names, Nick-and-Chloe, as if they have bizarrely begotten a third entity — like the erstwhile Bennifer or Brangelina of Hollywood-journalism parlance. Nick’s sexual aberration with her is presented in flashback, and we are told “[h]e retained only isolated images of what had happened” (124). His physical encounter with Nina becomes “the cracked code of mouth, fingers, ribs, midriff, throat” (125). We are to understand precisely the emptiness for which Nicholas is throwing away his commitment to Chloe — or letting go of it, since he allows himself to be preyed upon rather than himself pursuing Nina. He is not to block Chloe out of his mind, he understands, during the act of adultery, but to keep her there:
He wondered how Nina had learned this — but then remembered the years with Chloe, hanging above her, knowing that destruction, a deep force against life, was not part of what she brought to their fucking. It wasn’t learned. It was a nature. Michelle spitting into the riven face of her victim hadn’t taught Nicholas anything. Her actions had just given him the opportunity to remember his nature. He had proposed to Chloe partly in an attempt to escape it (126).
From this we move to a description of Nick’s “wedding-ring finger buried in [Nina’s] arsehole” (126), as if to underscore the desecration/desacralisation that is taking place. Nick has made up his mind, by this point, that the “destruction” in him is natural, not cultural, and acts accordingly. (Nick’s viewpoint is, of course, not necessarily identical with the stance of the novel itself, despite the easy assimilations of the free indirect discourse used so pervasively.) The evocation of the child-torturer of Nick’s memory, Michelle, however, signals an awareness that this “nature” is not gender-specific — rather, it is presented through Nicholas as something mysterious if lamentable, as if certain souls (as Weathercock will later consider) are simply depraved in essence. If Chloe does not share it, that is not because she is female. (This “good girl” image is decisively turned on its head when Chloe herself becomes a murderer in revenge for the rape. One could argue regardless of gender that it is this choice of payback motif, on the author’s part, that might make the work “seriously flawed” to some readers [Clark 2000], or at least less than satisfying, but that is on the moral-philosophical plane, not on the technical or structural levels that Clark critiques.)
The memory of the child Michelle as female sadist, one might almost say, morphs elsewhere into the adult figure of Mickey, the rich widow into whose hands Nicholas falls after running away from the afflicted Chloe. The near-melding of their names (Michelle/Mickey) suggests this — there is a continuity of experience here — and Mickey is simply a more powerful (hence sexual ambiguity of name?), grown-up, and specifically American version of the same phenomenon. She is the cruel and sexually perverse female, a self-generating riposte to the novel’s central question about masculine sexual violence. The depiction of Mickey’s body places her as both animal in nature — she is porcine (4), feline (5); decadent — her hands and feet show no sign of being used for work (5); and factitious, as she has been surgically “tampered-with”, “cosmetically-engineered” (56) — she is cyborg. The markings on her still-female body are presumably those of her own choice, unlike Chloe’s.
When Mickey talks of the power that has come to her through inheriting her late husband’s money, Nicholas is “transfixed by the dark red talking mouth, the glimpses of teeth and tongue” and imagines “himself as a tiny creature clinging at the corner where the lips joined, peering into the wet, convulsing cavern” (36). This is more than just a (dare one say) tongue-in-cheek nod to psychoanalytic imagery of devouring females, shrunken male homunculi, the vagina dentata; it is one of the first motifs linking Mickey and her Manhattan and all of Nicholas’s regime of evasion to the oral, to the spoken, in stark contrast to the unspeaking, written world that Chloe, after her rape, has entered. Elsewhere Nicholas hears Manhattan, his ambivalent refuge, designated “Mouthhattan”, and New York satirised as “New Talk” (60). And during a holiday taken when he is still with Chloe, who is getting them away from London and from the looming Nina Cole, Nicholas senses of a muezzin’s song in Turkey: “It was as if time had stopped, replaced by the elemental force of the voice…”, which is then associated with his “essentialist” apprehensions about his wife (101).
We have already considered the ways in which Duncan repeatedly presents the body as a surface for inscription, as coded with messages, signed, written-off or rewritten according to someone else’s designs, and the way in which this is figured in relation to the actual authoring of an actual book. But there is also, in Love Remains, a repeated invocation of that powerful “elemental force of the voice” as distinct from the image of writing. David Musselwhite (2008) in a forthcoming article on Heart of Darkness, neatly encapsulates or recapitulates Derrida’s project of interrogating the way in which “voice” is privileged over “writing” in Western thought, in a summary pertinent here:
What follows from this initial privileging of the voice as opposed to writing — this phonologism or logocentrism — is a whole set of binary and hierarchical differentiations that reside at the heart of the Western episteme: those that privilege the mind as opposed to the body and the ideal as opposed to the real; those that privilege plenitude and presence as against differal and differential play; those that privilege notions of an immaculate and disembodied truth as against the vicissitudes of violence and power. At one with these prejudices that are endemic to Western thought is the privileging of the One as opposed to the Multiple or the Collective, the privileging of the Male as opposed to the Female, Man as opposed to Woman, and the Self as opposed to the Other. The privileging of the voice over writing, is at the heart, then, finally, of Western Philosophy in general and of European ethnocentrism and imperialism in particular.
Musselwhite then goes on to consider the ways in which the Conrad book’s “most radical thrust comes from a destabilization and subversion of the hegemonic privilege of the voice and correlatively of the language and project of imperialism”. Such an approach might also be usefully applied to a novel like Duncan’s Love Remains wherein the “hegemonic privilege” of a masculinist (rather than specifically imperialist) viewpoint is certainly destabilised and subverted. It is the muezzin’s voice with its “elemental force”, mentioned above, that leads Nicholas to feel the words “woman” and “wife” revealed “as ancient essences” (101), but at the same time he is aware of “the ludicrousness” of this. Chloe, with her jaw wired for some time after arriving in hospital after the attack, is literally voiceless and aligned with writing, both as written and writer: when a friend brings her a blank book and fountain pen, we see her (dubious) agency begin:
Chloe had hated her for it, had wanted to stab her in the eye with the silver italic nib.
But then later had found comfort in the smell of ink and paper, just because it didn’t belong in the hospital’s palette of odours. She doodled all over the first pages, aimlessly repeating heraldic, leafy designs, or holding the pen firm in one spot, watching the ink spread in a soft black explosion through the paper (142).
Eventually her writing (again here shown as potentially violent) becomes linked to expression, but even then remains fragmented, volatile, frequently associative rather than syntactically logical. At one point we are told, “She could see all the world for which there wasn’t talk” (147). When finally Chloe’s jaw is unwired, she prefers to continue writing rather than speaking:
…it felt safer to communicate without the intimacy of voice. Her speech was a harbinger of re-entry into the world, and she was afraid of it … As soon as the sounds had left her throat she had felt stripped and visible, walls, floors, ceilings, doors, all transparent. ‘The whole nation’ could see her, could scrutinize her, could ask its unanswerable questions. Voicelessness had shielded her, had diminished what might be expected of her. Now she was terrified of what would be expected: that she speak, describe, make sense of, reassure everyone that she was all right, that nothing fundamental had changed (156).
At first glance this passage might seem to support (in Chloe) that belief in the primacy of speech with relation to thought, that phonocentrism, challenged by Derrida (1976) — “the intimacy of voice”, the idea that a true, interior Self is revealed as present through speech while absent in writing and that this self is thereby, in this context of recovery after rape, made vulnerable to the world again. But the passage shows equally a resistance to that order of things which would take even this experience and subject it to the voice, to speech, to all those privileged categories, cited in Musselwhite’s summary, and called into question by this novel. Chloe writes stubbornly: “Mum’s almost hysterical because I’m still writing. She wants my voice back. Liz, too. They all want the voice back because then they’ll know that I’m back. Me. I. Me” (158). It is clear that the resistance maintained by Chloe’s writing is based in a critique of their expectation, an understanding of the non-primacy of voice, the falsity of that imagined interior Self. This understanding has been catalysed by her experience of rape, from which there is no return but only the potential to move forward, if she so chooses.
That moving forward, too, is envisaged in terms of writing, literally through the memory of a teacher from Chloe’s youth who would set essay questions structured as a sentence followed by the word, “Continue” (158). Other people’s speech has become intolerable to Chloe now; only Vicky, the Cockney nurse, and Myres, the laconic detective whose “thin mouth dealt language without ornament” (170) are acceptable company. Vicky’s speech, like Chloe’s fragmentary writing, is an irruption into the otherwise fluent representational, or supposedly “transparent”, language of the novel. Rendered quasi-phonetically, rather than written as standard English, this is no “othering” of Vicky on account of her class background, as is sometimes maintained of such “transcriptions” in fiction. Rather, it is as if the reader is othered in terms of assumptions about speech, made to recognise its dependence upon writing, or its very nature as another kind of writing, at least in her specific instance.
Her specific instance is significant in the wider context because it is Vicky who reiterates the challenge implied in Anthony Caswell-Brown’s assertion, regarding men’s ability to write about rape. The difference here is that Vicky de-genders the idea, universalising it, when she says to Chloe, or “Klow”, of the experience of rape: “It’s just I don’t fink no one’s got the right to say nuffink about it. Know what I mean? … There’s nuffink to be said about it unless it’s you what says it” (167). Though she is of course referring to Chloe’s particular, individual case, the words take on extra resonance in the face of the book’s project of writing about rape, assuming the (female) victim’s point of view, without trivialising or titillating. The use of that triple negative — “don’t fink no one’s got the right to say nuffink” may reinstate a sense of uncertainty in the reader — who does or doesn’t have the right? — but the subsequent clarification puts the “right” firmly in Chloe’s hands, removing the issue from the question of gender.
It is the sufferer, then, who may speak about the suffering, and this is the opening, the gap, the chance that Duncan’s novel takes in its project: that though the male writer may not ever experience a particular suffering in the way a woman does[2], his capacity for human suffering allows for the possibility of at least partial comprehension without appropriation.
Thus the act of writing a novel like Love Remains is not one of asserting authority — “taking a scalpel to [female] consciousness”, to paraphrase Arditti (2000) — but of trying to understand a suffering that may not literally be our own, or even like our own, without succumbing to even the subtlest degree of Schadenfreude, or of sadistic relief that it is not ours. This understanding would mean maintaining respect for that “remainder” of difference between the sexes, while conscious of what nonetheless remains common ground. Such an act requires an unremittingly moral scrutiny of the imagination at work, which Duncan has arguably achieved. When Chloe, frustrated at her parents’ well-meaning inability to understand what has changed for her after the rape, says: “Dear God use your imagination” (225), we may well take our cue from her words.
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited 
