Michal Golis (330988)prof. Mgr. Milada Frankov, Csc., M.A.AJ54013: Britsk spisovatelky na pelomu tiscilet7th May 2014

Narration and Meaning in Penelope Livelys Moon Tiger

In the beginning of Moon Tiger, a dying elderly journalist and history writer Claudia Hampton, the main heroine of Penelope Livelys novel, sets out to use the time she has left in this world to write her most ambitious work - a history of the world. She, however, ends up telling the history of her own life. Claudia says: Im writing a history of the world...And in the process my own. (Lively 5) She takes the reader on a trip through the memories of her childhood days with her aristocratic mother and brother Gordon, her war reporting and love affair in Cairo, the subsequent career of a popular history writer and her complex relationships with the members of her family, all closely intertwined with keen observations on the intricacies and intersections of history, memory and language. Through her reminiscences and reflections on the world, people and history from her hospital bed she is trying to get to the core of her life, if there is some to be found, to make sense of her existence - and through her own existence somehow also that of the entire humanity. It is the purpose of this essay to discuss the ways in which Penelope Lively structures the narrative of her novel in order to illustrate the inherent ambiguity of history and its complex relation to individual human lives, as well as to underscore the conflicts between memory and time, between human relationships and the solipsism of our minds. Wherever Claudia went during her life she was used to being the center of attention as well as the sole arbiter of her actions and decisions; the world revolved around her larger than life personality. Her history books, likewise, revolved around her perceptions, preferences, bias and attitudes as their author she is always the one to have the last word. Herself a part of history, in her writings she can thus shape its forces or interpret its events as she sees fit, to highlight some parts and leave out others with the most important consideration being her personal convictions and integrity. She believes history is, after all, not a set of objective facts and data to be unquestioningly accepted and mechanically transmitted from one generation to another but rather a constant struggle of competing individual voices which try to be heard a view Lively so shrewdly illustrates in the very first sentence of her novel: Im writing a history of the world. (5) It is not the history of the world which Claudia sets out to write, as she believes there is no single history of the world, but a history one of a virtually endless number of parallel histories as seen through her particular eyes and shaped by her individuality. Our own lives teach us that there is almost never a single universal truth, but that there rather are as many interpretations of events as there are observers, all of them claiming to be somehow representative of the objective reality of what really happened and yet all of them different. Reaching for objectivity or striving to see the world through the eyes of others, then, seems to Claudia afutile and essentially meaningless task. Livelys skillful use of multiple narrative voices, multiple perspectives and shifting points of view serves to further underscore this avowed fundamental subjectivity of human perceptions and experience as well as the histories they add up to, and thus in a way justifies Claudias solipsistic attitude to the world, her life and writing. Throughout most of Moon Tiger the reader sees the world through Claudias eyes, even though the feelings of her husband Jasper and their daughter Lisa towards her are also briefly revealed, providing a counterpoint to her thoughts. However, the primary effect the author seems to have on mind in relying almost exclusively on Claudias first person narrative or third person narration from her point of view is not necessarily to use it simply as a way of stressing the unreliability of her narrative voice but to point to the fact that the objectivity seemingly offered by an omniscient narrator is itself largely an illusion. It is not only the individual situations and scenes of the novel which are seen through the eyes of the characters as the most honest way of presenting them (at some points in the novel even the same scene is presented from multiple perspectives in succession). The time sequence the scenes follow, likewise, accentuates the subjectivity of human experience and non-linearity of time. Livelys narrative structure closely reflects the flow of Claudias thoughts and memories, one triggering another in a seemingly haphazard fashion, following associative links and jumping back and forth between various moments of her life, and thus illustrates the mysterious workings of human memory as the center of our identities. Returning to Cairo, Claudia marvels at the familiarity of the sensations triggered by her memories of the place: Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once. (68) Histories, she shows, like the memories they are formed by, consequently cannot by their nature be linear, neatly ordered in a chronological sequence. What might on one hand be considered a novel treatment of time forming a distinct part of Livelys experimental style of fiction is at the same time, as she argues, something people do in their minds all the time. The very line between the past and present is thus much more tenuous than it might seem. Ruminating on the kind of history she should write, Claudia voices the authors thoughts: The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? Ive always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of amyriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water...there is no sequence, everything happens at once. (6) The narrative style of Moon Tiger then comes to resemble a landscape a site where layers of history, distant and recent, freely intermingle with each other, where everything happens at once, juxtaposing past and present as a testament to the arbitrariness and complexity of human mind and memory. (Lively, My hero)[footnoteRef:1] In her latest novel Making It Up Lively draws again upon the idea of great histories lying just below the surface, waiting to be unveiled and complicating the simplistic notion of history as a mere succession of past events: You are looking at mayhem, all over Wiltshire and Dorset and Somerset, those calm green counties with their sleepy villages and the cricket pitches and the primary school playgroundsand the pubs with the hanging baskets that drip petunias and lobelia. Surface veneer, all of it. Dig a few feet and you are into bloodshed. (as cited in Hirst 91) Similarly, Claudias rich and tumultuous life of a war correspondent and a successful writer, as well as the unceasing activity of her mind and vitality of her intellect are lying just behind the face of a slightly eccentric old dying lady, impelling one of the nurses to ask: Was she someone? (Moon Tiger 1) [1: In her parallel between history and landscape Penelope Lively pays homage to and draws upon the work of pioneering London historian William George Hoskins, who first introduced the idea in his book The Making of English Landscape (Lively, My Hero).]

Nevertheless, the blurring of past and present and transgressions of chronology combined with the absence of an authoritative narrative voice does not necessarily have to represent fragmentation of meaning and destabilization of human identities. Marcus Hartner argues that the jig-saw puzzle setup of the novel does not deny the creation of meaning but rather activates the process of cognitively reassembling the pieces in a causally and chronologically coherent manneran increasingly complex but causally and temporally commonplace understanding of the protagonists psyche, identity and biography emerges (189-190). The notions of identity, meaning and time, albeit largely problematized and subjectified by Livelys narrative style are thus affirmed rather than diminished or destabilized, and placed at the center of Moon Tiger. It is paradoxically in war, where people are turned into statistics or statisticians, swept away by history that for the first and probably the only time in her life Claudia seems to have become fully human. It is in her memories of the time she spent in Egypt as a war correspondent and her tragic love story with Tom Southern, a young tank commander, that she eventually seems to locate the center or focal point of her life. On one hand she shows the uniqueness of their relationship, saying that her brief affair with Tom was probably the first time she made somebody feel happy: I have made people angry, restless, jealous, lecherous...never, I think, happy (120). The happiness Tom feels is thus a wholly new, strange and unforeseen occurrence for Claudia an error even or a crack in the scheme of her previous (and subsequent) life - something outside of her control. And it is in this serendipitous occurrence that she seems to have found her concealed need for deeper human connection as well as managed to free her sexuality from her repressed youthful incestuous desire for her brother Gordon. However, like that of the Moon Tiger, a mosquito repellent standing beside their bed, a silent witness of their love, a premonition of death and a symbol of the relentless passing of time, its green coil burning away bit by bit, the glow of Toms life was extinguished in the war, leaving behind memories like a heap of grey ashes. Yet, on the other hand, as a cynic could note, may it not be that, apart from their brief but intense and passionate love affair, it was especially Toms untimely death what made him so special throughout her later life? Through his death he became a blank slate on which Claudia, albeit emotionally devastated ever since, could inscribe her deepest desires and which she could shape and mold like the stories and characters in her books. After all, Lively makes it quite clear that, had he survived, Claudia would not probably be very likely to live out Toms domestic fantasies of peaceful family life on a farm. Nevertheless, in spite of her imperiousness, strong self-professed individualism, emotional detachment from most people and her absolute zero tolerance for uninteresting people regardless of who they are (she was never able to form or show any deeper feelings towards her only daughter Lisa), the points which truly stand out the most in Claudias story are almost invariably moments of genuine human love and connection. The main axes which her life revolves around are formed by intense relationships, whether it be with her beloved brother Gordon as her the love of her life, alter ego and a faithful intellectual sparring partner, her deceased lover Tom Southern or with Laszlo, a Hungarian student who she takes cares of as of the son she wished she had. In his diary given to Claudia after his death Tom Southern writes of human experience: Even if it were expedient I couldnt say now what came before what, where we were when, how this happened or that, in the mind its not asequence just asingle event without beginning or end in any proper sense simply acontinuity spiked by moments of intensity that ring in the head still. (196) True love and deep human bond, Lively seems to argue, are then the only things through which people can at least to a certain extent anchor the constant flow of experience, mitigate and transcend the essential isolation and solipsism of their minds and perceptions and through them their lives. Even though Claudias story is one hand a treatise on non-linearity and subjectivity of history stemming from its rootedness in individual minds, perceptions and memories, on her death bed she comes to realize that it is through human connection with others that one transcends the isolation and individualism which the subjectivity of human minds may otherwise lead to. The kaleidoscope of Livelys narrative, it seems, is not a reflection of chaos and disintegration of human existence but, conversely, of its deeper order and meaning.

Bibliography

Hartner, Marcus. Narrative Theory Meets Blending: Multiperspectivity Reconsidered. In: Jrgen Schlger, and Gesa Stedman (eds.) The Literary Mind. Tbingen: Narr, 2008. Print. 181-193.Hirst, Kris. The Archaeologists Book of Quotations. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2012. Print.Lively, Penelope. Moon Tiger. London: Penguin Classics, 2006. Print.---. My Hero: W.G. Hoskins by Penelope Lively. The Guardian. 25 Nov 2011. Web. 8