Line Breaks: Belletristic Writing, Reality, and Academia

On a winter evening in London, two women come into a boot shop, accompanied by a dwarf. The women smile with rosy benevolence and tell the shop girl that they have come to find shoes for 'this lady.' 'This lady' - the dwarf - looks around with a sullen expression on her face: she resents her escorts' charity and yet, unable to venture out alone, she has no choice but to submit to the insult of their help. The shop girl pushes up the little stand and the dwarf unlaces her boot.

Here an odd thing happens. Rather than being humiliated by the attention of the shop girl and the stares of the clientele, the dwarf thrusts her foot proudly onto the stand, as though demanding that everyone look. For her foot is beautiful, fully grown and perfectly proportioned, arched and aristocratic. She looks down on it with triumph and satisfaction. Contemplating her foot, she forgets all else, and believes herself, for the moment, beautiful. Now she will give herself over to the ecstasy of trying on shoes. Suddenly full of self-confidence, she will order the shop girl about; she will try on pair after pair; finally, she will lift up her skirts and do a little dance before the mirror, pirouetting wildly across the floor, craving to be noticed. A word of praise from the shop girl sends a flare of ecstasy over her face. She would stay in the shop forever. But her escorts have other lives to lead and finally succeed in ushering her out of the store. As she goes out the door her happiness fades, her knowledge returns, her shoulders fall. She is a dwarf once more.¹

So begins Brian Phillips' essay 'Reality and Virginia Woolf' - with a recounting of a story within Virginia Woolf's 1927 essay 'Street Haunting.' Phillips' essay appears in the fifty-fifth anniversary issue of The Hudson Review, a magazine outside of academia whose chief readership is not definitively academic. This story-within-an-essay-within-an-essay serves as a metaphor for belletristic writing in literary journals. This writing - in its specific location - exists both within and outside of scholarly writing. Stemming from an open (even 'creative') impulse, but combined with scholarship's search for truth and knowledge, the 'reality' of belletristic writing in literary journals always remains in the realm of literature: open to debate, open to multiple readings, and waiting to be read again and again.

Why publish a piece of serious literary criticism outside the realm of academia? Does the context of a journal whose audience comprises 'general' readers change the 'meaning' of a scholarly article contained within? And, similarly, are articles like this written differently when intended for such a publication? Might a shifting of intended or assumed audience allow (or even induce) a greater multiplicity of arguments, viewpoints, or conclusions for this kind of piece? What does it mean to read belletristic writing on literature in situ of actual poetry and fiction? How might the context alter the content?

In the thirty-ninth issue of Conjunctions - a literary journal out of Bard College known for its avant-garde writing - we find John Clute's essay 'Beyond the Pale.'² This essay is offered as a postlude to the Conjunctions issue as a whole, and also as a look at Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from a decidedly different perspective than that taught within ivied halls. Clute begins his argument by placing Heart of Darkness within a tradition of 'adventure writing' that he refers to as the 'Club Story.' Here, a tale is 'recounted orally to a group of listeners foregathered in a venue safe from interruption.'

The Club Story plays with what Clute describes as 'the conversation between time past and time present.' He explains that the Club Story frame 'bears within it a double relationship to time, for it bears - like a Mask enclosing its Twin - a tale which...