Language, the Distorter: A Lacanian Look into The Death of the Heart by RUTH HALL
Bowen was putting out fiction as Lacan was beginning to publish. In my research, there is no direct link between them, but the points Lacan raises about language — about the limits of language — speak to the question at the center of Bowen’s 1938 novel, The Death of the Heart (DH). In this work, Bowen is an author writing about writing — writing about language. It is a self-conscious pursuit and a bold one, too. Writing after the Irish Civil War that shook the foundations of her home and the First World War that forever changed the nature of the world, Bowen navigated a moment of pressing historical crisis. This essay proposes that in a novelabout the restless and frozen London elite, Bowen asks herself if fiction-writing is a valid means of navigating through historical crises — especially if language is so unreliable that it, by nature, distorts.
Beginning with language, in her essay on writing, “Notes on Writing a Novel” (Notes) Bowen considers what makes good fiction. The first item on the list is the most important: plot, which she says is “diction” pertaining to a larger “language of action,” (Notes np). Just as diction is about choosing the right words, plot is about choosing the right actions to communicate story. For Bowen, intentionality about plot and story is important because “The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie,” (Notes). It is not a new idea that the novel lies but characterizing it thus and not just as make-believe implies something manipulative. That in the specificity of “diction,” one is choosing to mislead.
This is not the only example in Bowen’s meditations on writing where we see this idea of the novel as a lie. We see special repetition of the word “distort” throughout Bowen’s notes on writing. In her section on plot, she describes the stuff that becomes story as “A mass of subjective matter” and as the “distorted results of ordinary observation,” (Notes np). More examples appear in a section on scene (which is derivative of plot). But in the section on dialogue, we see this most damningly represented. Writing about the demands of artfulness in composing dialogue, she clarifies: “art in the celare artem sense. Art in the trickery, self- justifying distortion sense,” (Notes np). If fiction-writing is lying or trickery, that places the writer in an adversarial position to the world around her. And an ironic one too, as for Bowen the purpose of writing is fundamentally about truth. For every mention of the novel as the deceiver, there are two or three references to the poetic or transcendent truth at the core of all good writing. As she says, the poetic truth is what justifies the novel’s trickery.
If we look at this next to Lacan, who argues that the process of learning language fundamentally alienates you from your desires and Self, we might see this vision of language (language as spoken, language of the unconscious, and even Bowen’s language of action) as almost an aggressor. There have been many a “nostalgic” view, as writes Fink, which equate the pre-language state of human evolution with some kind of utopia, before language “could taint or complicate a man’s needs or wants,” (6). If language is the interiorization of other people’s desires and using language in storytelling is deception, naturally one must wonder if novels are really the medium for commenting poetic truths. How can language faithfully communicate the truth at the core of Bowen’s pursuits when language (inevitably filtered through her as the author) may be incapable of accessing objectivity at all? For a writer, this question is imperative. The legitimacy of their whole project depends on what answer they find.
The novel's curiosity is mediated chiefly through its young protagonist, Portia Quayne, and her use of literacy. Portia’s diary reveals something about how Bowen is exploring language within the novel. In her essay “Women and Language in the Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen,” Harriet Chessman writes, “Portia’s diary represents the characteristic Bowenesque yearning for a language which is transparent, not opaque, which contains the ‘truth’ as opposed to the shadows and lies of the dominant discourse,” (Chessman 80). This idea is essentially Lacanian. The shadows and lies of the dominant discourse which Chessman describes in this quotation call to mind what Bruce Fink calls the “mOther tongue” (Fink 11) — essentially that the language we speak from birth, while we are intimately familiar with it in the linguistic sense, is necessarily foreign to us in the way that it is composed of signifying elements pertaining to the “discourse and desires of others,” (11). At the start of the novel, Portia’s naïveté allows for language to contain utopian possibilities we know cannot exist in the real world. As we follow her through the sections The World, The Flesh, and The Devil, we follow the mOtherification of her language. In each section, the utopian possibilities of Portia’s language become fewer as she interiorizes those social values she is supposed to ‘know.’ First, as the world exposes her to the mores of this time and place (as learned in school and by her de facto governess Matchett); then, as Eddie’s presence/discourse complicates the nature of desire for heri; and finally, in the confrontation with St. Quentin over her diary that culminates in Portia’s flight from her brother’s home. This motherification of language is the education at the core of DH as a ‘novel of education.’
We see the inverse of Portia’s ‘utopian’ literacy in St. Quentin’s novels. Which is not to say that St. Quentin’s work is dystopic, per se, but that it comes from a man whose language is completely mOthered. Harriet Chessman writes about St. Quentin with a sharp sense of observation, suggesting “his novels attempt no referentiality,” (80). They do not strive to describe something true because he is unwilling to taint the purity of his fiction. St. Quentin seems preoccupied with artifice overall. Chessman points out that even style, which he concedes is necessary to writing, contains something “phony” for St. Quentin (Chessman 80; DH 8). In his confrontation with Portia at the end of the novel, he suggests that being observed makes performers out of people (328). In this confrontation with Portia, Bowen appears to yield the ethical high ground to St. Quentin. Though St. Quentin is characterized as untrustworthy throughout the novel, in this his words have a ring of truth — or at least of authority. Bowen, a writer writing a novelist, imbues him with a facet of her own legitimacy. In composing true, complete fiction, St. Quentin escapes the possibility of misrepresentation. Bowen wants the reader to think about how this, ironically, might be the most honest way to make a living out of telling ‘lies.’
Of course, St. Quentin’s function in the novel is to foil Portia; to be her antithesis so that they might bounce off one another in some revealing, dialectical way. But for all Bowen yields to him in the novel (which is a great deal), she does not agree with him in her personal, creative life. In her notes on writing she asserts, “Wholly invented scene is [...] unsatisfactory (thin),” (Notes np). The way St. Quentin does fiction, in attempting no referentiality, does not approximate reality in any satisfying way at all. If the object of fiction is, like Bowen suggests in her notes, to arrive at a poetic truth, the thinness of St. Quentin’s approach almost certainly fails. In some way, his writing fails to capture the utopian possibilities of language by rejecting them entirely. Not only in how it comes from his own mOther tongue, but in the wholesale rejection of truth. Ironically, St. Quentin’s ‘honest’ fiction cannot contain the ‘truth’ in the way that Portia’s phony diary does. Through St. Quentin, Bowen appears to make a universal declaration about the cruelty of distortion only to contradict herself.
Having elaborated how language and story are being interrogated in this novel, I must turn now to the second key component of the question Bowen asks. If novel writing is being evaluated here as a means of commenting on or processing historical crises, we must look at how history is represented in the text. Here, I will do this in two ways. First, we must identify the historical crisis of the novel; then, we must look at the combination of language and history in the historiography in the text. Damian Tarnopolsky, in the essay “‘How Much of Nothing There Was’: Trying (Not) to Understand Elizabeth Bowen,” frames the issue concisely. His work deals in the negations and contradictions inherent to Bowen’s work, and he identifies one such negation intrinsic to late modernism that appears heavily in DH. He writes, “If one follows this suggestion of the text, [...] her characters have a sense of living in a hollow time, with no solid connection to the past or sense of a secure future,” (Tarnopolsky 120). Through the thoughts of several characters in the novel, I will elaborate upon this assessment.
Much of this feeling comes to us through Thomas Quayne, Portia’s elder brother and guardian. He communicates a suspicion of history and an abstract longing to pertain to it in the larger sense. Early in the novel he describes history as “Shady [...] Bunk, misfires, and graft from the very start. I can’t think I can’t think why we make such a fuss now: we’ve got no reason to expect anything better,” (DH 36). Some of this might be attributed to disillusionment after the war. In the literary world, we often attribute this angst to the postmodern period due to the technology and destruction of the second world war. But late modernism, between the wars, deals with much of this, too. The scale of destruction and violence in the First World War (and the following global pandemic) left the world bankrupt and battle-scarred. With Portia, Thomas has the following exchange:
“But at one time, weren’t people braver?”
“Tougher, and they didn’t go round in rings. And also there was a future then. You can't get up any pace when you feel you’re right at the edge.” (DH 36)
Thomas communicates a general resignation to the way things are. Implied in this is that the course of history is beyond anyone’s control, hence why they cannot expect anything better. But he is also unable to conceptualize a future beyond this demoralizing present. Failing to place himself logically within history only perpetuates this problem. The shadow of once-meaningful existence beats down on a generation disaffected.
Thomas’s discontentment with the status quo communicates something more. Clearly, he articulates a resignation to the inevitable misrepresentation within history. When he describes history as “bunk, misfires and graft” (36) he diagnoses its failure (much like language’s failure) to represent the truth or the nuance of things. In a monologue later in the book, Thomas articulates a dissatisfaction with the representation of his class: “The ironical thing is that everyone else gets their knives into us bourgeoisie on the assumption that we’re having a good time. At least, I suppose that’s the assumption. They seem to have no idea that we don’t much care for ourselves,” (118). If bunk is nonsense and misfires are failures, graft implies a deliberate effort. Not only does Thomas believe history might be nonsense, but he also imagines himself actively disenfranchised by it.
Matchett, the housekeeper, diagnoses this problem differently. When talking to Portia about the circumstances of her birth, Matchett says, ““They’d rather no past – not have the past, that is to say. No wonder they don’t rightly know what they’re doing. Those without memories don’t know what is what,” (99). Again, we see this idea of the Quaynes failing to place themselves in history. Matchett goes on to distinguish herself from the Quaynes as “not a forgetter,” (100). She relates this quality of hers to the work that she does, which relies on her observant nature. Consequently, Matchett identifies this rejection of memory as a function of class.
Similarly, in “Jane Austen with Cigarettes,” Alice Mattison identifies in Bowen’s work a “sense of discontinuity, as one time intrudes on the other. In The Death of the Heart the discontinuity is one of class rather than time [...] one class lives partly in a preserved past while the other is limited to the less gracious present (284). Mattison is hasty to dismiss the discontinuity of time in the novel, but certainly the threat of obsolescence intrudes upon the wealthy characters in the novel. They live part-time in a preserved past — but that past is only partly preserved itself. The legitimacy of the Quaynes’ position in society relies on archaic traditions like aristocracy, but their personal historical dissonance gives this an ironic quality.
Mattison highlights how the Quaynes host people with titles (294), and Daphne goes so far as to tease Portia about having “Buckingham Palace plumbing,” (DH 184). The Quayne’s proximity to prestige lends them prestige of their own, but it is a kind of social standing that seems precarious in an era where European monarchies were dropping like flies. This is part of the crisis for characters like Thomas; an anxiety that the time to which this class truly belongs might have passed them by. They are all dressed up with nowhere to go. This crisis does not exist for Matchett or even the Heccombs, who have much more pressing obligations in a busy working life.
To summarize this section, the historical crisis of the novel presents itself in two ways. One, in the way wealthy characters refuse to place themselves in the continuity of history out of anxiety; and two, in the way late modernist society suffered a discontinuity of time as a product of rapid global changes. The failure of the elite in this novel to place themselves in time is perhaps a defensive measure. They maintain a silently negotiated present to maintain the status quo, but that is the reason they are so disillusioned with the state of things as to not “see the necessity” of their lives at all (118).
Moving on to literacy as historiography, we must return Portia’s diary. Where first we looked at the diary as a manifestation of the mOtherification of Portia’s language, in the historiographic sense, the diary is a primary document. It records life as it happens in real time. Subjective experience colors the “truth” of what the diary describes, but the knowledge the diary offers extends beyond the subjective. In the real world, diaries are studied as primary documents. No such legitimacy is given to Portia’s diary by hardly anybody else in the novel, but in a text so preoccupied with history, analyzing the diary as historiographic is essential.
The first character to cede any ground to Portia’s diary is Eddie. His intentions are mostly bad, as the climax of the novel reveals, but what he says in an early conversation with Portia lends much support to the idea of Portia as a historian. Out for tea and discussing the diary, they have the following exchange:
“Eddie picked the diary up and weighed it between his hands. ‘And this is your thoughts, too?’ he said.
‘Some. But you make me wonder if I might stop thinking.’
‘No, I like you to think. If you stopped, I should feel as though my watch had stopped in the night...’” (DH 135)
Here is the first direct parallel made between Portia’s diary as the output of her thought and history. Eddie finds comfort here in the idea of her thinking, as it keeps time like a clock. The comparison to his watch stopping in the night evokes disorientation; like the way that Thomas’s disconnection from history provokes directionlessness in him.
We know Portia writes prolifically in her diary. At the time of this conversation, her diary is already half full. Even on days she does not have much to report, she leaves a blank page to denote that the day had indeed happened (135). And this is the literal documentation of the days, but what proves especially interesting in the historiographic sense is how Anna engages with the diary as a primary document.
Towards the end of the novel, Anna admits to Thomas in front of St. Quentin that she had been reading the diary. Where at the start, she described the diary to St. Quentin as “distorted and distorting” (7), by the end she confesses that Portia “has got us taped” (399). She even uses the diary to inform her perspective of Portia when trying to assess where the young girl might be. By the end of the novel, some legitimacy is given to Portia’s diary, but always in the context that it is an act of aggression. The way Anna engages with Portia’s diary follows Anna’s own historiographical impulses. Despite her resentment towards Portia for creating the account, Anna returns to it again and again; perversely engrossed with a book about her life that gives her a “disagreeable feeling about being alive,” (399).
Anna’s historiographical impulses are consistent across the novel. When engaging in Portia’s diary, she seeks out an external analysis of the life she leads. Beyond the diary, though, Anna’s historiography comes as a collector of texts. If Portia produces a text with her diary, Anna curates them in a private collection of letters. This behavior is distinguished somewhat from Portia’s writing because there is a passivity to collection that active observation does not have. There is no possibility of distortion where there is no action — in this sense, Anna absolves herself of the sin of which she accuses Portia.
We learn about the letters in act three, when we see Anna quickly lock a letter away in her escritoireii where she keeps her whole collection after suspecting that she might be caught with it. In her internal monologue following, she suggests that the letters are her own way of measuring her life (322). This is different than having written herself, not only in the sense of action but in the sense of memory, too. The letters she collects are not her memories. They come from the outside. Matchett says that those without memories “don’t know what is what” (99) and we see this in practice here. For Anna, the passage of time and her mental state must be measured against what she has saved. Earlier, the novel tells us experience means nothing “till it repeats itself,” (DH 9) and these letters are how Anna decides if it has. It is clear, though, that this passive collection of outside memory cannot replicate her own feelings.
Here, Anna is trying to balance the impossible. Her anxieties about misrepresentation are at odds with her very human need to find a sense of self within her personal history. This is part of the feeling of crisis for the people of her social class. We see it manifest in frustration for Anna. She questions the behaviors that have led her here, and if they were worth it: “being so nicely nonchalant, for saving people’s faces, for not losing one’s hair,” (323). These are social graces she interiorized as a product of her own confusing education, long before Portia’s. Then, she thinks: “Suppos[e] she were to throw this pack of letters at Portia, saying: ‘This is what it all comes to, you little fool!’” (323). Anna sees a futility to Portia’s approach; perhaps one that comes from Anna’s own resignation to the passivity of nonchalance, of saving face, of locking one’s letters away.
If Thomas communicates the historical crisis more directly, Anna suspends herself in her own history through her literacy above all else. ‘Suspend’ here in the sense of hovering above, touching no sides. It is more than a rejection of past or future, it culminates in a historical consciousness so ineffective that it fails to transmit a meaningful present at all. Thomas says earlier in the novel that “we’ve got to live, but I doubt if we much see the necessity,” (118) which is paralleled directly at the end of the novel by Anna, who reveals that reading Portia’s diary gave her a similarly disagreeable feeling about life (399). When Anna closes and locks the escritoire, she effectively closes and locks the door to her past. The feeling it brings out in her is not relief from not being caught with the letters; it is the loneliness of alienating herself from her own history.
The problems Anna and Portia face as the historians of the novel are similar. Each find that the feeling of historical crisis present in their social class is crushing. Portia arrives at this conclusion through action: keeping her diary and learning her mOther tongue. Anna, conversely, arrives at this conclusion through inaction. Despite all her efforts to conform to the demands of her class, its suspension in time leaves her alienated and deeply unfulfilled. They make different choices with this same information. Portia leaves. Anna does not.
Returning to the central question of the novel and this essay, if we look at DH like a question Bowen asks herself about language and history, we can see it being wrestled with dialectically in the text. This happens on a literal level in the actions of the characters and the course of the plot, but it also happens implicitly through the symbolic construction of the characters. If a plot is diction, as she asserts, and its language action, we can see that action conversed and negotiated in the dialectical processes she creates. Anna and Portia as the historians of the novel is one great example already elaborated here, but there are two more that strike me as particularly useful in analyzing the novel. One takes place within the literal events of the story, and the other is more self-referential.
The first hinges around Portia’s choice at the end of the novel to pursue marriage with Major Brutt. Her proposal to Brutt seems childish in its logic — but Portia is a child. And in her defense, for much of the novel she had been playing a sophisticated game that not even the adults around her seemed to be able to keep up with. Bowen makes a deliberate, slightly ironic choice of would-be partner for Portia. In a pendulum swing, Portia removes herself from this bourgeois suspension in time by marrying a relic. Brutt, a man whose make and model are out of date (113), symbolizes idealized pre-war life. When Portia chooses Brutt, she chooses the antithesis of life with her brother. Not only in choosing living memory over that “partly [...] preserved past” (Mattison 284) whose demands are impossible, but also in the choice to remove herself from Thomas and Anna’s social class. The novel asks an unanswered question throughout about what sort of Quayne Portia might become. Will she choose a respectable if not indulgent life of a Quayne like her brother? Or the exiled and tight-walleted existence of a Quayne like her father? But the choice of Brutt escapes this framework entirely; it finds synthesis in the social periphery of both classes. Brutt may travel and live in hotels, but his proximity to the elite world of the younger Quaynes benefits him immensely. The result of Portia’s decision goes unresolved in the novel. We see her reach towards an antithesis in search of some moderation, but the outcome remains ambiguous.
In a more self-referential sense, Bowen asks questions of her vocation in the juxtaposition of two characters. It is not without importance that St. Quentin’s appearances are like bookends framing the main contents of the novel. The plotline of the diary is introduced and concluded through him; a character framed as an expert in the world of writing. His position in this is inherently authoritative. In many ways, he can be understood as a facet of Bowen herself. But naturally, Portia is too. And Bowen offers no complete allegiance to either of them. Bowen, through these opposites, provokes action and conversation which highlights the legitimacies and contradictions of their positions. Chessman suggests that “What manifests itself [in the novel] is a sense of guilt at the act of authorship itself, as well as a fear that no form of language or story can be found that isn’t ‘distorted and distorting’ [Bowen 7],” (Chessman 81). But in many ways, it is too soon to draw an authoritative conclusion on Bowen’s true feelings about the nature of language or story. The guilt certainly manifests in the novel, but a sense of guilt is not an admission of wrongdoing. Even when she gives St. Quentin an ethical high ground in conversation with Portia, the reader never surrenders their emotional allegiance to Portia’s cause. In fact, the conclusion signals to the reader (despite St. Quentin’s authority) that Bowen, like Portia, might be rejecting the adversarial position. Again, if writing is only “distorted or distorting,” (DH 7) that places the writer in opposition to the people and place about whom they are trying to write. Not only by making the writer an aggressor, but by alienating the writer from their personhood, too. The novel ends before Portia’s course can be redirected or corrected. Perhaps this is as much of an “answer” to Bowen’s question to herself as we can really expect.
The ending of the novel (and its lack of true conclusion) signals to the reader that these dialectical processes are still in play for Bowen. We end the novel on an action, with Matchett pressing her hand upon the doorknob to open it (DH 418). There is no real resolution here; we do not know if Portia will return to her brother’s house permanently; we do not know what becomes of her relationship with Eddie or Major Brutt; we do not know how anything goes on from here. That the book ends in the middle of an action suggests a perpetual present. Bowen has not fully answered her own question and by ending here. At least, not for her audience. Forcing a complete answer to the question Bowen asks when the novel forces no neat, traditional conclusion to its own plot would miss the point entirely. Plainly, the meaning is to be found and picked through in the cognitive process of dialectical thinking elaborated in the entire contents of the novel, not the synthesis locked beyond the last page. For Lacan, the dialectic was incapable of revealing absolute knowledge. In the case of The Death of the Heart, that appears to be true as well.
To conclude, the goal of this essay was to examine the question at the core of DH for Elizabeth Bowen regarding the validity of language (distorting and complex) and novel writing as a means of navigating historical crises. Here, this was explored first by establishing a theoretical framework through which to look at Bowen’s thoughts on language, with Lacan as the lens. Then, I explored the historical circumstances that provoke this question in the novel, along with the crisis for its characters. Language and history then work together to highlight the historiography driving the conflict of the novel in Portia’s diary. Finally, I established how Bowen reckons with these various conflicting ideas through the dialectical processes in her novel.
The scholarship on Bowen supports a reading of the text which focuses on language or history. This essay brings a specifically Lacanian lens to this analysis, though not a particularly rigorous one. Grounding Bowen scholarship in theory helps to cement her legacy as one of the great modernist writers. Too often, novels by women about women are simplified as ‘domestic’ or ‘romantic’ without considering the ambition of their undertaking, or their relationship to the broader literary canon. Too often, the critical analysis for women writers begins and ends with a comparison to Jane Austen. With regard to DH alone, there is much space for further Lacanian readings. Hegel and Freud come to mind as other immediate examples.
The historical and linguistic focus of this paper struck me as important as the emphasis on the ‘romance’ within this novel from critics or reviewers erroneously characterizes the focus of the novel on Eddie as the object of Portia’s desire and not the diary as the product of Portia’s education. The novel begins and ends with the way language can distort, and what reveals throughout the body are the anxieties of those who imagine themselves distorted. The focus on the ‘romance’ misleads the reader of the true poetic truth of the novel, which is that there is a human need to observe and remember. This novel is about an author in conversation with herself, weighing the merits of the medium through which she navigates the world around her. Whether language distorts so drastically as to be an illegitimate means of analyzing the world remains unclear by the novel's end. A deliberate un-conclusion forces the reader to revisit the novel’s contents to find what insight might resonate with them most. Does this truly legitimize Bowen’s life as a writer? It is not clear, but it must have meant something to her, as her career did not end with DH. The only permanent insight offered by the novel is one Bowen fails to moralize in totality; that people need to use language. They need to use it to write, like how St. Quentin writes novels, and to keep track, like Portia’s diary or Anna’s letters. When they do not, they are very unhappy indeed.
Works Cited
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Death of the Heart. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2000.
Bowen, Elizabeth. “Notes on Writing a Novel by Elizabeth Bowen.” Narrative Magazine, https://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2006/classics/notes-writing-novel- elizabeth-bowen. Accessed 9 December 2022.
Chessman, Harriet S. “Women and Language in the Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 29, no. 1, 1983, pp. 69-85. JSTOR, https://www.jstor/org/stable/441144. Accessed 9 December 2022.
Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press, 1997.
Kuhl, Patricia K. “How Babies Learn Language.” Scientific American, 1 November 2015, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-babies-learn-language/. Accessed 9 December 2022.
Mattison, Alice. “Jane Austen with Cigarettes.” Southwest Review, vol. 89, no. 2/3, 2004, pp. 282-296. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43472531. Accessed 9 December 2022.
Tarnopolsky, Damian. “'How Much of Nothing There Was': Trying (Not) to Understand Elizabeth Bowen.” Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought, and Things, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 113-126. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvrs91jf.11. Accessed 9 December 2022.
i Eddie’s access to and interest in Portia’s diary "alters” the way she writes by making her “not alone” (DH 136). This particular example shows the internalization of the Other discourse through the male gaze. Writing with awareness of Eddie’s expectations of her, Portia takes on the male gaze.
ii It's worth noting that at the start of the novel, Anna gives Portia an escritoire, too. This emphasizes the similarities in their literacy.
RUTH HALL is a junior pursuing a degree in English with a Spanish minor. Selected by Toby Widdicombe.