One with Another

Gail Jones’ latest novel, One Another, opens with two epigraphs. The first is a pithy line from Wallace Stevens’ long poem ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ (1942): ‘Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.’ The second is a heroic couplet from Vladimir Nabokov’s metafictional novel-cum-poem Pale Fire (1962): ‘And then the gradual and dual blue / As night unites the viewer and the view.’  

All epigraphs are exercises in relation. Casting forwards into the work and backwards to its circumstances of composition, epigraphs often trace the genesis or implications of themes or problems that will be elaborated on in the pages that follow. Or else they locate the work within certain lineages: a tracing of affinities aesthetic, attitudinal, or political, which, like a declaration of fealty or love, may also serve to flatter or compromise the author.  

Even if an epigraph appears to be chosen at random, as the literary theorist Gérard Genette observes in his classic work Paratexts, ‘every joining creates meaning’. As it happens, this is more or less what Stevens means when he writes of the strange relations we sense in the nonsense of the world. We are estranged from reality, damned to know it only through the veil of our perception. Into the breach enters imagination, the world remade by the mind (and, in turn, by poetry). Here is the tercet in which the line appears:  

The water’s heaving churn, like the scattering of the stars or the chanting of birdsong, is the supply of our designs and discoveries, our maps and our myths. Nonsense turns to pattern and portent by the ‘joining of physical stimulus and imaginative response’, as the late, great poetry scholar Helen Vendler glosses in her study of Stevens, On Extended Wings (1969). Every joining – wave to wave, star to star – creates meaning. 

In a different way, Jones’ second epigraph also takes relation as its theme. The 999-line poem that comprises part of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, presented as the work of a poet named John Francis Shade, begins with the speaker looking out his window as evening falls. Pulling the curtain onto the growing night, the speaker seems to double himself and the objects in his room, as the ‘dark glass / Hang[s] all the furniture above the grass.’ He thrills to the illusion that his chair and bed sit on the snow-covered lawn, ‘out in that crystal land’. Duplicated on either side of the glass, he and the objects are also out of place, inside turned outside. Unshivering in the night’s chill, they are still slowly absorbed by their surroundings. ‘And then the gradual and dual blue / As night unites the viewer and the view’: darkness thickens, spreads, softens all edges, shutters all gradients. The couplet is itself a hall of mirrors, in which rhyming doubles – gradual and dual, night and unite – seem to morph with the scene as it resolves, rather dissolves, in momentary black togetherness.  

Most obviously, these epigraphs signal Jones’ modernist inheritance. One of the most important and prolific literary authors working in Australia today – One Another is her tenth novel, and the third she’s published since 2020 – Jones receives from the modernists the reflexivity and lush surface effects of her prose, her preference for image over plot, and several of her key preoccupations (time, interiority, trauma, empire, art). Reflecting the depth of her erudition and her habits of intensive research, Jones’ writing is richly intertextual, returning repeatedly to the modernist canon and moment – a moment held open in her fragmentary scenes, charged with life and continuity, even as her writing extends and reimagines the modernist project.  

The now of modernism, its grasp on and interface with the present, is one of One Another’s key conceits. Opening with Stevens and Nabokov – rendering strange relation in, well, strange relation – the book’s focus is then split between two principal characters, though the boundaries between them are by no means secure. The first is Joseph Conrad, referred to as Joseph; the second is a young student named Helen, living in 1992 in Cambridge, England, where she is studying and writing about the author of Heart of Darkness (1899) and Lord Jim (1900). Joseph’s narrative, which spans his childhood in Ukraine and Poland, his two decades circling the globe as a merchant mariner, and his literary career in England, is related in an ongoing present tense; Helen, meanwhile, remains ensconced in the past, her story told as if it has already happened. 

The semicolons with which I’ve sutured the last couple of sentences suggest how Joseph and Helen’s lives are both counterbalanced and intricately bound in One Another. Jones’ interspersed vignettes and shifting tenses produce a lolling, undulating rhythm – this character then that character – which, as we read at the novel’s opening, synchronises with Joseph’s love of ‘ocean flexing with the menace of storm. Swollen waves and rising foam, continuous din, the wash of a wall reaching up, then in a crash descending.’ The close connection between Joseph’s oceanic dreams and the book’s epigraphs is concealed by strategic omissions that widen the gap, superficially at least, between paratext and text. Though we might see Nabokov’s ‘gradual and dual blue’ seeping like ink into the novel’s pervasive water imagery (not least given the prospective grammar of the epigraph from Pale Fire: ‘And then…’), Jones chooses not to include the reference, in Stevens’ poem, to the ocean’s howling rise and fall – one of the arbitrary phenomena that prompts the observation about the world’s nonsense. We can’t hear the near rhyme of ocean and relation that ironically underscores the poet’s impulse to meet formlessness with form.  

The effect of Jones’ epigraphs may be ‘more affective than intellectual’, as Genette writes of epigraphs more generally. They evoke a mood or an atmosphere, while also credentialling One Another as a literary work and Jones as an author of literary fiction. Yet in reading this novel, I found myself irrepressibly drawn into its rabbit-warren of intertexts. It is just this kind of reading practice Jones seems to invite through her work: a practice of strange relation, in which ideas, texts, and images are held together by the soft connective tissue of association and collocation. 

This may be too convenient, a mode of criticism tailor-made for me. I sometimes think that my only real skill as a critic is in drawing connections, making things relate. Like Jones’ protagonist Helen, who, after she loses her precious, in-progress manuscript about Conrad, takes to arranging and rearranging the index cards that hold her handwritten notes for the project. The cards are, Helen likes to think, a row of handkerchiefs pulled from a magician’s sleeve – or, perhaps, the pleated pages of a leporello. ‘The cards reminded Helen that by instinct she was unsystematic, that the appeal of images, not syllogism, held special sway. This next to this, and strung together. Always more meaning than one might expect.’ Also like Jones herself, who in the essay, ‘A Dreaming, A Sauntering’ (2006), asked, ‘What might it mean to take the fragment or the trace as a paradigm of knowledge and to assume that assemblage, not reconstitution, is our critical task?’ 

That my approach to One Another is likely to be at least partly a projection is, in fact, in keeping with the model of literary history that Jones theorises and practises in the novel. A ghostly double hovering in glass, a young woman in Cambridge who believes she can think and dream as, or for, a deceased modernist author: both figure the forms of fantastical attachment and substitution through which Jones tests the parameters of narration, specifically the narration of literary histories and literary lives. 

How close can, or should, we get to the texts we read, the authors we study? How close can we not help but be? In the case of a novelist of ideas like Jones, the question of the narratorial status of the work – what kind of document we are reading, who is speaking and at what distance from the characters and events they describe – is crucial. These are questions of space as much as of voice, and they inhere even in Jones’ epigraphs: the text en exergue, off the work or at its edge; the text which is and isn’t the text, its strange relative. For it’s often not clear to whom we should ascribe a text’s epigraphic art. The epigraph’s effects, as I’ve suggested, redound to the author, but as Genette points out, it’s usually possible and even

One Another intervenes in ongoing debates in the academy around the affective and political stakes of literary scholarship – the anxious pitch of which surely reflects the fact that literary studies is being choked by manufactured austerity and the cynicism and soullessness of neoliberal capitalism. (In April, the Times Higher Education reported that one in three universities in the UK were making redundancies of academic and professional workers. At the Welsh institution where I work, the mood is frankly ominous. In the week I sat down to write this piece, several new permanent hires promised in my department were pulled by management at the last minute – an action I find difficult to understand as anything other than an egregious failure of ethics and professionalism, wasting the time and resources not only of my colleagues and me but, even worse, of job applicants, precarious, early-career academics who scarcely have anything to waste.) Engaging the principles and forms of literary scholarship in a moment of crisis, One Another offers a defence of – even an inducement to – the pleasures and revelations of imaginative, immersive, idiosyncratic forms of criticism, secured through the union of reader and text in the spirit of strange relation. A defence of thinking and writing with. Of one with another.  

The manuscript Helen loses is not the thesis on Joseph Conrad she is meant to be writing for her doctorate at Cambridge University. It is, instead, an ‘antithesis’ composed of ‘fragments of a life intersected by literary-critical notations’. Grieving its loss, which feels like a theft, Helen takes consolation in ‘the knowledge that it was unpublishable – too fanciful for the scholar, too scholarly for a general reader’.  

Lost manuscripts are uncanny objects. They are never entirely gone, not only because what is lost may yet be found, but also because a text is not a singular, hermetically sealed thing, however tightly its pages may be bound. It never fails to open onto a constellation of other texts, whether in the form of draft materials, notes, ephemera, like the index cards Helen shuffles in sad remembrance, or through its participation in the thick relationality of literary histories and futures – what Mary McCarthy, in a famous 1962 review of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, called ‘a forest of associations, a forest in which other woodmen have left half-obliterated traces’.  

The absence left by Helen’s lost manuscript is felt at a formal level in One Another. Joseph’s perpetual present and Helen’s unfolding, un-linear past are narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator, but Joseph’s sections are set up as reconstructions and reminisces of Helen’s antithesis – or more properly as approximations of them. When Joseph dreams at the book’s beginning, he dreams as Helen dreams him, or how she once dreamed him in the pages she accidentally abandoned on a bus. Under the shroud of the manuscript’s loss, the tenderness and pathos of the present-tense prose bear traces of effortful remembrance as much as of Helen’s acute psychological investment in Conrad’s life and writing. Likewise, at certain points, sections of narration hew to the text of Helen’s index cards – giving us obsession in a more matter-of-fact register. We read about the author’s life in lists: cities he lived in as a child, countries he visited as an adult, illnesses he suffered. A few pages later, these sections are confirmed as a transcription or dramatisation of Helen’s acts of assemblage: ‘Helen sorted again through her index cards and arranged them in thematic sequences. Places he lived in. Ships. Illnesses.’  

The effect is to make Joseph’s narrative feel there and not-there – as if the words we read are revenants of other words, a ghostwriting of a text that doesn’t exist or can no longer be directly accessed. It is as if the novel is not the novel, even though it can only be the novel. The narration in this respect stages an offering in the wake of loss. And in the poignant impossibility of this substitutory act, in which writing stands in and cannot stand in for other writing, the narration serves again to redouble Helen’s labour: her efforts to imaginatively conjure Conrad as a living, breathing person – to have him be ‘tenderly revived by biographical attention’ – compound the sense of separation they want to ameliorate. We feel the distance between the writing we read in the place of the writing we don’t, just as Helen feels the distance between herself and the long-dead author who is the subject of her cathexis.  

There is almost a text nested in this text, in other words, like a shadow of Nabokov’s metafictional puzzle (or its near rhyme, ocean to relation). This may explain the studied quality of the narration, which could be seen to evoke Helen’s self-consciousness and earnestness; some of the descriptions with their sinewy, involuted quality were a little difficult for me to chew (‘air … thick with dew and subdued’, ‘monologue in monotone’, ‘tesserae arbitrariness’). Helen is Joseph, as she realises; she vitalises him according to her own feelings and needs, which connect, among other things, to her unprocessed grief over the death of her father. (Stevens on avoidance in The Necessary Angel [1951]: ‘A poet writes of twilight because he shrinks from noon-day.’)  

Helen’s relation to Joseph parallels the relation that structures it, that of the omniscient narrator to Helen (and also, of course, to Joseph). Proceeding on these two tracks, Jones’ novel works as an extended meditation on the relation of narrator to character, which turns on its use of free indirect discourse, the blending of third-person narration with a character’s psychological perspective. Itself a styling of relation, one with another, free indirect discourse is sometimes thought of as a layering of consciousnesses – a ‘dual’ or ‘double voiced’ language, to borrow the terms of literary theorists Roy Pascal and Mikhail Bakhtin, respectively – in which the narrator cedes control to a character, letting them ‘speak’ for themselves. This is essentially what Helen wants to do when she tries to narrate Joseph ‘intimately, as if from the inside’. Yet Helen knows that this is a game of pretend. Likewise, free indirect discourse is always, as the literary scholar Paul Dawson has written, ‘a narratological performance of the kinetic flow of a character’s thought’. By their use of free indirect style, the omniscient narrator – and, at an important remove, the author – actually flaunt their insight and power.  

Indeed, rather than being a question of voice, free indirect style is probably better understood as a question of distance or focalisation: the measure of the narrator’s closeness to a character’s interiority. By affecting a collapse of narrator into character, character into narrator, Jones’ narration emphasises the risks of fantasies of substitution – in art as in life. Brigid Rooney has recently argued that Jones’ writing is marked by ‘chiasmatic configurations’, crossings and recrossings, through which she ‘visualises self and other relations as at once interdependent and marked by difference: yearning for communion is qualified by the obdurable gap between self and other’. In One Another, when Helen’s horrible ex-boyfriend, Justin, commits a series of violent acts that redirect his angry possessiveness of her onto other people, the novel underlines the ‘obdurable gap’ of human difference through its transgression. The spectre of Justin’s acts of violent displacement complicates and compromises Helen’s will to project herself onto ‘her Joseph’. It draws attention to the gendered logic that underpins her desire to ‘protect’ the child version of Joseph who lives in her writing, as well as her passivity, at least for a time, in enduring Justin’s callous and domineering presence in her life.  

I’m not suggesting that there is any direct equivalence between what Helen does to Joseph and what Justin does to Helen and others in their orbit. Yet the novel, via its tidal flow of scenes, registers the unevenness of Helen’s relation to her beloved author. After all, that relation is not truly of the order of one another, a reciprocal configuration of two or more people in mutuality. Joseph lives for Helen, but she doesn’t live for him. 

Reflecting on her writing practice in her 2006 essay, Jones describes herself ‘walking into impossibility, gathering up fragments’, in a ‘modest journey into symbolic forms of knowing that might … enter the oceanic oblivion of history and retrieve a small significant fragment to cherish and hold dear’. However cognisant and critical Jones is about the risks of imaginative projection – and however much her narratorial strategies in One Another caution us over asserting a correspondence between novelist and character, let alone narrator and character – it seems clear that Jones’ creative project exists in strange relation to Helen’s actions of shuffling and stringing together the fragments of the past, and bearing them as prized possessions. Indeed, it’s difficult not to detect a repetition of Helen’s anxieties over the unseriousness and unscholarliness of her manuscript in Jones’ insistence, in the afterword to One Another, that the novel ‘is not a work of original scholarship’.  

I’ve been wondering over what the space of the novel – her privileged, established form – offers to Jones, and what the designation of this book as not original scholarship licenses or makes possible for her. Playing at the edges of scholarly work, en exergue, the novel enables Jones to reflect on the limits of literary criticism as she playfully exceeds them. In sections of the novel, we see her – via the narrator, via Helen – offer incisive readings of Conrad’s writings. More than that, One Another’s treatment of Conrad can be interpreted in line with current efforts in the humanities to undertake informed, affective speculation about the past or, equally, to practice post-critique, a style of scholarship that seeks to move beyond suspicious and disenchanted modes of reading by combining ‘analysis and attachment, criticism and love’, in the words of the literary scholar Rita Felski.  

Felski’s post-critical work has been discussed elsewhere in these pages, and I was already thinking of it in connection with Helen’s antithesis and the wider project of One Another when I attended an event celebrating the launch of Jones’ book in Sydney. There, during Q and A, Jones mentioned that her friendship with Felski had been important in the writing of the book. Felski writes in the preface to Hooked (2020) that ‘[t]o a certain kind of reader, the pull of Ulysses is stronger than that of Game of Thrones; devotees of Joseph Conrad or J. M. Coetzee are no less fervent than fans of Tom Cruise’. (As an unironic Cruise fan myself, I like to imagine it indicates something of Felski’s attachments that our most ardently death-wishing action star appears in the index to Hooked when Conrad doesn’t.) Yet Felski’s reference to Conrad devotees needn’t furnish an origin story for Helen, because this kind of passionate and possessive reader is one Jones has figured in her work since its earliest days. For instance, in a bio-fictional story from Fetish Lives (1997), ‘Eleanor Reads Emma’, Jones pictures Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl, caught up in Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary much as that novel’s titular character is swept up and led astray by the romances she reads: ‘I am Emma Bovary, she might have whispered to the night, her voice soft and serious and dreamy as Flaubert. She felt the force of synonymity. Of character. Of identification.’  

Jones has long known that reading is relation: an experience, to a greater or lesser extent, of sensuous projection. When I read the line in One Another about Helen’s lost manuscript being ‘too fanciful for the scholar, too scholarly for a general reader’, my breath caught. Only a few weeks prior I’d received feedback that deemed (damned) the fragmentary, gap-ridden, creative-critical book I’d just finished writing to be unscholarly. Every joining – wave to wave, star to star, and, yes, reader to book – creates meaning, though I’m praying that my own manuscript is neither unpublishable nor about to be left on a bus. In any case, what I’ve taken from One Another is a renewed sense that scholarship can accommodate the affective attachments of its author – and that such accommodation can be a way of knowing things that more ostensibly objective modes may obscure. ‘For both Joseph and his biographers’, the narrator reminds us near the mid-point of the book, ‘there will always be an element of the hidden’. From my sleeve, another handkerchief: the ‘scholar’s dark’, in Stevens’ ‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’, is lit only by ‘fluctuations of certainty, the change / Of degrees of perception’. Like Nabokov’s reflected vision of a room laid out in the snow, the truth of the world is a shifting, illusory thing. Through Jones’ writing – which I have no compunction in recognising as scholarly, though I don’t pretend it’s not fiction – it is the hidden element in our knowledge of other people, history, and the world that emerges flickeringly to view. It is a way of knowing, as Jones says, that cherishes small fragments pulled from oceanic oblivion. It is a way of knowing that slides inevitably into gathering darkness, the night’s gradual and dual blue.