There is an odd significance
beginning to make itself felt and I must stay open to it. I must
understand it when it has finished unfolding itself to me. I see
that now, and that I must put together each incident to form a
whole. I must not look at things separately.(121)
The narrator of Emshwiller's
"Peninsula" is apparently talking to herself, but these
words might also be an admonition as to what reading this story
-- and perhaps all of the author's fiction -- necessarily entails.
"Peninsula" dates from before 1974, the year of publication
of Joy in Our Cause, in which it was reprinted. The significance
that is "unfolding itself" to the narrator, though heavily
dependent on the connections she needs to "form a whole"
and however strongly it insists that no one incident be taken in
isolation from that whole, is not of the cosmic, Pynchonesque variety
endemic to literature contemporaneous with "Peninsula."
This "odd significance," while arguably more mysterious
if intro-cosmic than the significance one seeks in Pynchon, is strikingly
domestic (though certainly not domesticated). "Peninsula"
teases us with a mystery that the narrator finally chooses to avoid
elucidating. At narrative's end she tells us she "is beginning
to see the pattern" and that she is "a part of it."(127)
She leaves it to the reader to see what she has begun to see. She
has learned that "it is more interesting to try to understand
this slowly revealed pattern" than to think about the hand
lying on the Persian rug in her living room and "whatever obligations
I may have toward it."(127)
The narrator privileges one
pattern, in other words, over another which would explain the significance
of the hand lying on the rug and the reason that her father, mother,
brother, daughters, and maid deserted her. She gives us fragments
with which to assemble a story of how she came to be alone, but
while she tells us that we "must not look at things separately,"
the whole to be formed from these fragments is not what a reader
could call "plot" precisely because the pattern of connections the
narrator is beginning to see, rather than the pattern of connections
that readers can use to construct a plot, is "more interesting to.
. . . understand".
Although the narrator withholds
data points and connections that would allow us to solve the mystery
of the hand on the rug -- that would, in fact, enable us not to
take it in isolation from the pattern in which it could be seen
as part of the whole, she lavishly provides the materials for discerning
other patterns. The very first thing she tells us is her preference
for one kind of connection over another:
Do you realize we are all
connected by telephone wires? I do not mean that our voices go
through the wires to each other, though, of course, that is true,
but that we are physically connected by the wires we talk through.
We are actually physically wired to every house with a
telephone as though there were a roadway set out for wingless
birds. Except for the underground wires in some cities, a bird
could walk from a house in New York to one in California, so,
when we speak to someone, no matter how far away, we are wired,
literally, ear to ear. We are connected, we are touching through
wires, across whatever difference.(117)
The narrator muses at length
on the comfort her awareness of this "connection" grants her; she
returns to this (now dated) image repeatedly throughout the narrative.
This "connection" she celebrates is the material concretization
of what is ultimately only an impersonal abstraction. She loves
that the connection of wires provides a line for birds to walk and
sit on and acrobats -- girls holding pink parasols, boys white poles
-- to dance on; they are for escape, travel, and art, not a direct
means of communication. This distinction is underscored when she
admits that she would like to "get away from the telephones altogether."(118)
"Actual telephone conversations can sometimes be quite distressing,"
she says.(118) When she describes the obscene calls she receives,
we must acknowledge that the direct, person-to-person (albeit disembodied)
connection of an isolated woman contacted by someone from the world
outside can take the form of an intrusion into her most personal,
private space. The technology of wires enabling "physical" connection,
on the contrary, demands nothing of her personally but is simply
there, confirming her connection to the rest of the world -- and
underscoring her assertion that the house she lives in is on a peninsula,
not an island (as her husband had always insisted): and by implication
that she -- as the Jefferson Airplane joked in response to
John Donne's line of verse around the time of this story's publication
-- is (metaphorically speaking) a peninsula, not an island. Ultimately,
the technology of wires provides her with an escape route off what
may in some mysterious, figurative sense be an island after all.
The narrator poses a list of
questions she claims not to know the answers to. Where has her family
gone? How had she failed them? Did she marry too young? Did they
have an accident that "wiped them all out silently and quickly,"
or did someone come at midnight and murder them? Or did they, perhaps,
murder her? This last question she particularly likes.
Yes, they have left me half
dead here, all of them driving away over the gravel that sounded
like ice as they left. They have murdered me with their backs turned,
taking away even the little black dog that was mine, taking away
the setter that was his, and the hound, and the two myna birds,
and every small bit of life except these wild birds that sit so
blackly upon the wires and that have never belonged to anyone.(118-119)
The narrator has clear and vivid
memories of the many places she made love with her husband. And
yet she asks
How old was that brother of
mine, I wonder, twelve or sixteen? . . . Sometimes it seemed I
saw him in a mirror and he was my other, my male, self, my face
atop his bony body, the real me, and never had I been so lovable
as in him as he walked barefoot in the woods or came inside the
house bringing the smell of the woods with him.(122)
The reader wishing to construct
a plotted story might consider any number of conventions: the Gothic
heroine abandoned in a large house on an island (or peninsula) after
some mysterious calamity that oddly spared her; the insane woman
with a persecution complex; the ghost of a murdered woman haunting
an isolated deserted mansion. But the tone of the narration cannot
support them and what the narrator tells us of her current existence
and actions contradicts the scripts of all the conventions we can
call to mind. A ghost, for instance, does not put the dead mouse
she finds on the kitchen floor into the garbage and then take a
"cold chicken leg and a hard-boiled egg from the refrigerator for
[her] breakfast."(123) And later she tells us outright that "they"
haven't murdered her and she hasn't cut them up and hid them in
the cellar; and for some reason we cannot believe she is lying (except,
perhaps, by omission).
And yet we must ask,
is the narrator lying and if so, to whom? Who exactly is the narrator's
addressee? Sometimes the addressee seems to be herself. And yet
her first sentence begins "Do you realize"(117) and her tone is
one of constantly explaining and exhorting and expounding. Perhaps
most significant, the narrator's list of questions not only serves
to pique the reader's desire to learn the backstory rather than
providing the means for piecing it together, but also insidiously
brings the reader to identify with the narrator -- making us suspect
the narrator of being disingenuous. She presents herself as a quaintly
old-fashioned girl, one who may have married a very rich man "too
young," who "brought my family with me when I married. . . . I was
daughter, sister, wife and mother all in one and even to this very
ornamental house I was an additional ornament."(120) She describes
herself "languish[ing] by the garden doors in green brocade"(120),
"waiting up and down the hallway in a little feathered hat"(120).
She has "dancing shoes" and recalls that she "used to dance balanced
on [her] toes"(119). What could such a traditional, conjugally,
and familially-cherished woman have possibly had to do with the
hand on her rug? By offering competing explanations she seems to
be saying that she, like the reader, doesn't know anything, either.
She and we share the same quest for answers.
As for the "friendly, perhaps
beloved hand" on the rug -- "It was like a person whom one cannot
remember the name of or exactly where one is used to seeing them,
a person met completely out of the usual context."(126) All that
she will confidently assert about the hand is that "it was certainly
not his"(126) and that "the hand belongs distinctly with the mouse.
I must not let myself think of it alone."(127) The hand "tells a
wordless story, answers all questions if one wished to consider
it, to face it."(127) But she "will not face that hand" because
"I'm sure it tells too much."(126-127)
The narrator suggests that there
are two possible patterns to be discerned. One of them is the "pattern
of whiteness and twoness, of strange phone calls, lights upon police
cars and white, hard-boiled eggs."(127) The other pattern holds
the dead little mouse and the hand on the rug. I'd like to propose
a third pattern, one the narrator does not seem to notice. By calling
the story "Peninsula," the author draws attention to the narrator's
statement that "If there ever was a difference between us, that
was certainly the only one, whether this was an island or not, for
he could seem as young as I was."(121) According to the narrator's
description of herself and her husband, they held sharply (and traditionally)
gendered roles. Cars come and go freely from the mainland to their
home; the narrator knows that she can leave the peninsula by the
road -- or even by a line of stepping stones crossing the "little
river."(121) The second element of my proposed pattern is the image
of the telephone wires connecting every house in the country, the
image with which the author begins (and ends) the story. The third
element is her brother's resemblance to her, he being her other,
"male" self: "Never had I been so lovable as in him as he walked
barefoot in the woods"(122). The fourth element is the enigmatic
smile her husband once observed on her face after they made love
in a grassy hollow and which she herself cannot "fathom" whenever
she happens to look in a mirror or into a nocturnally reflective
window:
such an isolated me, a me
who wears a strange smile. . . . Did he know? Had he guessed
something then, and if he were here now could he tell me what
he really thought of that smile so that I, too, might get some
idea of what it was about? Yet it does seem to me that I used
to know what was in my head at those times.(124-125)
The last element in my pattern
is the item held by the narrator when in the last sentence of the
story she ventures out onto the telephone wire. The narrator genders
the item when she fantasizes the boy and girl acrobats earlier in
the story, such that the girls hold pink parasols, the boys white
poles. The narrator puts on her dancing shoes and carries a white
pole (actually a white piece of molding). Before venturing out,
she imagines walking out on the wire, "miraculously stepping over
the crucifixion, Christ hanging there below [her], each upper wire
at the ends of the crosspiece coming from a palm of his hand and
the lower wire piercing his side."(127) Her Christ "looks like one
of those acrobat boys that walk the wires at night."(128) "I feel
young," she says. "I am young and I am beautiful."(128)
Stories aren't always like jigsaw
puzzles containing a full complement of pieces or like an algebra
problem requiring one to solve for X. But when I put together
all the pieces I've selected for making a pattern, the story I find
myself constructing is one the narrator has not suggested. In this
story the hand is a red herring, perhaps an image hallucinated or
dreamt by the narrator or a magic-realist symbol. The narrator's
husband and parents are dead. Her brother has long since moved away.
Her daughters are grown up. One day she wakes up and finds herself
all alone on the fist-shaped peninsula and immerses herself in memories
of time long past. Perhaps she does run through the woods for the
sheer joy of movement, or perhaps she only fantasizes doing so.
She receives two obscene phone calls and finds a small brown mouse
dead in her kitchen. Does her sense of her brother as her "male
self" -- her "real self" -- have anything to do with her choosing
a white pole over a pink parasol or with the strangeness of her
smile? Shortly before she ventures onto the wire, she hears the
phone ringing somewhere below. Deliberately she chooses the abstract
network of wires over connection to another human being (who may
well be her obscene phone caller). Does she fantasize stepping over
the crucifixion because she is preparing herself for death? (Significantly,
she imagines the wires piercing Christ's side and passing through
the palms of his hands.) Or do the telephone wires represent an
abstraction like art, which she chooses over whatever the obscene
phone and hand calls represent? And is that why she chooses the
white pole and imagines herself androgynously merged with her brother?
Likely no amount of puzzling
over these pieces will give me clear answers. My story may well
be wrong, since it requires my excluding the hand as an extraneous
detail. It's possible that a few weeks from now I'll come up with
an entirely different interpretation. And yet I haven't felt a moment
of frustration in all the times I've read "Peninsula" or lain daydreaming
about it in the bathtub. The story's fluidity of style allows its
ten pages to run so quickly through one's reading self's fingers,
like the slipperiest of silk, that the story can be read again and
again and again without exhaustion, one of those rare pleasures
that neither satisfies nor palls.
One's pleasure in a story need
not depend upon narrative certainty. What matters is the reader's
intuition of a powerful underlying logic binding the story's images
and data points. "Peninsula" accomplishes the nearly impossible:
giving the reader a mystery that will always remain deliciously
intriguing without ineptly or spitefully thwarting the reader. Fingering
the story's fabric, handling its images and details and assembling
them into a meaningful whole is what reading fiction is all about.