242
PARTISAN REVIEW
stooped, like an ancestral memory." The evocation of Wordsworth's
field of daffodils could not be plainer-confirmed, should need be, by a
labelled reference to his leech gatherer on the next page. Similarly, a
verbal evocation of Millet's painting seems implied. The people as
plants, the play on barelbarren echoed in Janet Bird's husband's
reference to her as barren, are both suggestive of themes developed
throughout the novel. And, observing, Frances realizes that the women
and children were engaged in clearing the new school playing field and
that they were enjoying their activity:
"It
was a voluntary effort, a
communal effort" (118). So why, she asks herself, had she seen
something so different. "For what she had seen had been an image of
forced labor, of barrenness, of futility, of toil, of women and children
stooping for survival, harvesting nothing but stones."
The mistaken allegory of her fantasy doubles for the correct
allegory of her cousin Janet Bird's life of meaningless, pointless labor.
Rural toil may have changed its form, but repetitive, untransformative
action persists. The passage typifies one characteristic facet of Drab–
ble's stylistic technique. It combines relatively privileged literary
references with metaphor and symbol in an apparently transparent
discourse that blends the most concrete references, both ordinary and
arcane, with naked declarations of significance: neither the allegory
nor the bare survival .nor the meaninglessness are left to chance. The
combination of elements produces an illusion of significance or
meaning. But Drabble comes very close to reducing the meanings of an
older fictional tradition with which she associates' herself to arbitrary
signs, the multiple referents of which results in confusion and contra–
dition rather than overdetermination. Her eclectic verbal acquisitive–
ness almost seems intended to make surface out of depth, texture out of
meaning, without fully relinquishing the moral and emotional identi–
fications upon which the older tradition relied.
Emma Evans, in
The Garrick Year,
reflects, "Poetry is one thing
and living another, I said to myself at the age of eleven, and I steered
clear of poetry for the sake, or so I thought, of the other thing." Drabble
seems unable to forsake the one for the other, yet equally unable to
forge a new relationship between the two. In her novels, the poetry and
the living jar in uncomfortable ways that go to the core of the novels–
that center where form and content, tone and consciousness should
meet. Her chosen signs are not innocent: they promise referents. But
her work remains deadlocked on a deep divorce between sign and
referent. She is, moreover, culturally aware to the point of trendiness.
From
A Summer Bird Cage
on, the novels have a literary veneer that
functions with considerable independence from the life of the charac-
