Dialogue Between Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall" and O’Brien’s "Good Form." III

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Enaudeau says that representation does not have neither a before or an outside and as every representation begins with substitutes, meaning signs, it never begins actually (33).

Now, see how the soldier goes on:

…twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough. I remember his face, which was not a pretty face, because his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present… But listen. Even that story is made up. (179)

The narrator is making a point and, in these terms, happening-truth is not relevant in conventional ways. It is possible that by attributing himself the label of “responsible” he means we are, along with him, responsible ourselves for what we get from reality. His words contentiously speak out a pretended reality and even though these tell of the absent of what they represent, they bring it on with them, paradoxically (Enaudeau 31-33).

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The relationships among a plethora of concepts pave the road from the real objects to their signs; these relationships, indefectibly, vary with the subjects, the local physical space and the temporal physical space; how possible is it getting the same formula twice in life? Hereof, those relations are unrepeatable, and so are they indefeasible, unbreakable, and impossible to analyze accurately. There are too many representations to deal with and their number increases unremittingly.

O’Brien appeals to the feelings of responsibility and grief of the reader as he turns himself over their own; his story-truth, therefore, will be brought about by his saying. Through the narrator, we get that the form of the tale is justified: he must provide us with a fake reality and make sure we know it is that way; then we will find out that a work of fiction is worth reading it because of what we represent out of it and not because of its commitment to fact. In both O’Brien and Woolf, readers, hence, will reflect upon their own devices for representation and will assess the complexity just as the narrators: a mise en abyme. We abstract concepts from concrete situations; the travels from induction to deduction and vice versa always start at the niche of representation: the hollow space where an object separates from its sign, leaving that trace that comes to existence only through self-effacing (Derrida 21).
O’Brien, in his text, provides us with a new encyclopedia where story-truth is not committed to fact, and this is so even when it parts from the autobiographical. The etiological character of a work of fiction is gotten from the primary sense of communication, therefore: to communicate what we conceive of the world, as we are not able to communicate the world itself. About this, Eco asserts that when in Little Red Riding Hood, we consider unreal the possibility of the child’s surviving ingurgitation, it is because either by intuition or formal knowledge we are aware of the contradiction to the second principle of thermodynamics; however, he indicates that this is, in fact, data from our encyclopedia and so, by changing our encyclopedia, we shall allow different data (186). Then we should finally reconcile with this bifid plot.

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“Good Form” creates a web of illocutionary signs and perlocutionary effects present along its discourse through the illocutionary force of non-happening events that will arise in the readers mind both a realization of fiction and the “twisting effect of an impression” (Eco 278). The impression of responsibility and grief are there, present and felt by the reader; as they have witnessed it, along with the narrator, through his locutions: the least important is its factuality. That is, readers cooperate with the text in order to complete it (Eco 87-89). Hence, the text proposes at least the co-existence of two truths: story-truth and happening-truth.

Pavel, referring to Kendall Walton, explains that when we read a story, we participate of the fictional events by projecting a fictive self who attends the imaginary events like a member who is not allow to vote; that is he is contemplative. This fictive self accepts the encyclopedia proposed by the story. This spectator experiences horror, fear, or tenderness and love, for example, but this person’s real self is not, however, going to react: by calling the police, for example, before the presence of a murderer, for it is known that this murderer is absent in reality (107). This seems too obvious to be told but the point being made here is that these two selves co-exist in one: again, the duality of stance appears to be a leitmotif in the theories of representation and in metafictional texts.

Both stories’ narrators are recalling a past upon missing visual account. They are able to get the truth out of a fact they have not watched completely and so this assertion places sight in a secondary position, for they are more aware of what they see the less they use their eyes; they are able to discover feelings they share with given fictional situations. The woman seeing the mark on the wall is not watching it completely, for example, so she is able to theorize upon its nature. To represent is to substitute what is absent, says Enaudeau (27). While memories take place around the object—the dead man on the trail, the mark on the wall—, the space for difference opens: there is the trace Derrida spoke about being the absent part of the sign’s presence (21). In this way, the dead man and the mark are metaphors of signs. These signs stand for something else the observers are not aware of; in so doing, they use imagination to link the thing watched and its origins. This sign inasmuch as it is a word means from reality a representation. Both stories acknowledge a deceiving character of language, which fits a metafictional intention.

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Thanks for reading this part 3/4.

Click to check due references in the first part: Dialogue Between Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall" and O’Brien’s "Good Form."

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