The Secret Country: Decoding Jayne Anne Phillips' Cryptic Fiction (Costerus New Series 165)

298 Pages·2007·1.1 MB·English

by  Sarah Robertson

The Secret Country

Decoding
Jayne Anne Phillips’
Cryptic Fiction
COSTERUS NEW SERIES 165
Series Editors:
C.C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen
and Erik Kooper
This page intentionally left blank
The Secret Country

Decoding
Jayne Anne Phillips’
Cryptic Fiction
Sarah Robertson
Amsterdam-New York, NY 2007
Cover Image: Nigel Oddy
Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
“ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2140-2
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Printed in the Netherlands
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CONTENTS
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Prologue 1
Chapter One 16
Accessing the Secret Country
Chapter Two 41
Nameless Implications: The Haunting Vestiges
of the Paternal Past in Machine Dreams
Chapter Three 69
A House Divided: Class Divergence in Machine
Dreams
Chapter Four 90
Preparing for Take-Off: Autochthony and Flight
in Machine Dreams
Chapter Five 111
Structures of Retrospect: The Inescapable Past in
Fast Lanes
Chapter Six 145
Dislocations: Retracing the Erased in Shelter
Chapter Seven 164
Fantastical Remembrances: Sexual Desire in Shelter
Chapter Eight 181
Leaving the Fatherland: Emasculation and Exodus in
Shelter
Chapter Nine 207
The Experience of Separation in MotherKind
Chapter Ten 227
Textured Memories: The Remnants of a Paternal Past
in MotherKind
Chapter Eleven 241
Almost Magical: Once upon a time … in MotherKind
Conclusion 262
Bibliography 271
Index 280
PROLOGUE
Remembered landscapes are left in me
The way a bee leaves its sting,
Hopelessly, passion-placed
Untranslatable language.
Non-mystical, insoluble in blood they act as an opposite
To the absolute, whose words are a solitude, and set to music.1
Charles Wright’s poem aptly captures the impact of region on the
individual consciousness. Injected into the bloodstream those
“remembered landscapes” remain achingly present, their
inconstruable nature continuing to haunt. Indeed, the lingering
presence of region shapes much of Jayne Anne Phillips’ writing.
Phillips, born in 1952 in Buckhannon, West Virginia, is the author of
three novels, Machine Dreams (1984), Shelter (1994), MotherKind
(2000) and two collections of short stories, Black Tickets (1979) and
Fast Lanes (1987). Each of these texts involves a return to the West
Virginia of Phillips’ childhood. The somewhat regressive nature of
her work creates a tension between the apparent desire to leave the
region and a simultaneous need to “redeem that past”, to try and
“make it live again and save something of it”.2 In interviews, Phillips
repeatedly employs the word “redeem” which carries attendant
notions of both freeing oneself of burdens, and of reclaiming a place,
effectively freezing it in time.
Phillips’ backward glance takes the form of what Raymond
Williamsdefines as a “structure of retrospect”, a feeling that involves
“a deep and melancholy consciousness of change and loss”.3 For
Phillips, the death of her parents, as well as the changing landscape of
her hometown as commercial franchises including “malls and chain
restaurants” replace the traditional main street stores, all contribute to
her feeling that “West Virginia is lost to me”. The Appalachia of her
childhood has now become “mythic territory, powerful beyond any

1 Charles Wright, “All Landscape is Abstract, and Tends to Repeat Itself”, in
Appalachia (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998), 19.
2 Thomas E. Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, Appalachian Journal: A
Regional Studies Review, XXI/1 (1994), 187.
3 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (2nd edn, St Albans: Paladin,
1975), 79.
2 The Secret Country
boundaries”.4 Her feelings of loss, and the subsequent mythologizing
of the past, raise questions about how Phillips negotiates the past in
her fiction. Naturally, her own departure from place, and her
development as a writer, shadow any return that she makes to West
Virginia. In effect, Phillips and her work are situated in-between
places and times.
In his discussion of Thomas Hardy’s writing, Williams describes
the positional stance of the writer who lives in the “border country”, a
borderland “between custom and education, between work and ideas,
between love of place and an experience of change”.5 Despite her
break from region, Phillips still remains in a “border country”. She
claims that “I still feel myself seeing things as a West Virginian and
really using the language that I used a child”.6 Just as her past shapes
how Phillips “perceives things”, so too, inevitably, does her
education, as well as her experiences outside of West Virginia,
inform her retrospective accounts of that place.
Williams’ notion of “the return of the native” can be usefully
applied to the complex nature of Phillips’ literary return to
Appalachia. For Williams, such a return “has a special importance to
a particular generation, who have gone to university from ordinary
families and have to discover, through a life, what that experience
means”.7 Phillips, a child of the baby-boomer generation during the
1950s and 1960s, was born into a culture in which “upward mobility
… was an implicit but very real demand”.8 In her work, mothers are
the key force behind the social advancement of the children whilst the
fathers reflect a more stable attachment to place and to labour
practices. The parental divide re-enforces the collision in Phillips
texts between “education and social solidarity”: a collision that
creates conflicting maternal and paternal legacies.9 Indeed, the
economic imperatives behind both Phillips’ attachment to, and

4 Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 185.
5 Williams, The Country and the City, 239.
6 Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 186.
7 Williams, The Country and the City,241.
8 Fred Pfeil, “Makin’ Flippy-Floppy: Postmodernism and the Baby-Boom PMC”,
in The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook, 1985, eds Mike Davis, Fred Pfeil
and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1985), 265.
9 Williams, The Country and the City,245.
Prologue 3
departure from, place shape much of her fiction, often acting as a
burden for her central characters.
Phillips addresses the burdensome weight of the past when she
states that for herself, as well as for her fictional characters, the return
home “has to do with settling issues. In many cases these are issues
that have been inherited.”10 Her notion of inherited issues, issues that
are “insoluble in blood”, is intertwined with her emphasis on regional
haunting. As Donaldson and Jones suggest:
Texts are marked by the same seismic tremors as is ideology itself …
texts echo, like Quentin Compson’s haunted body, with conflicting
names and stories. In the American South, texts, like their writers
and like the excessively gendered culture that speaks through them,
are deeply riven. And if texts haunt bodies, bodies can nevertheless
produce new texts that remember, disremember, and lay old ghosts
to rest.11
The “haunted” bodies in Phillips’ work are certainly separated along
gender lines as her mothers struggle with the burden of remembrance,
while her fathers carry the conflicting weight of having
disremembered aspects of their past. Their children often assume the
responsibility of laying their parents’ “old ghosts to rest”. Home and
family, then, are troubled sites in Phillips’ writing.
For Phillips, “Family politics is the screen through which we
experience place”.12 As a result, place and family cannot be regarded
separately in her work, as each informs the other. In her treatment of
family, Phillips’ work brings into focus Faulkner’s Jason Compson
for whom “blood is blood and you can’t get around it”.13
Interestingly, Phillips, who resists classification as a southern writer,
repeatedly cites the influence of Faulkner on her writing.14 In
addition, her name appears, however cursorily, in recent

10 Bonnie Lyons and Bill Oliver, “The Mystery of Language: An Interview with
Jayne Anne Phillips”, New Letters: A Magazine of Writing and Art, LXI/1 (1994),
117.
11 Susan V. Donaldson and Anne Goodwyn Jones, Haunted Bodies: Gender and
Southern Texts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 7.
12 Douglass, “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips”, 184.
13 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (London: Vintage, 1995), 243.
14 See Sarah Robertson, “An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips”, European
Journal of American Culture, XX/2 (2001), 68-77.