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want a job. refusing the dream its continuity in what i thought was no man’s land (not Rupert’s, not the King’s), just the trees’. (29) The identification between the narrator and her mother with respect to their fears for their children also relates to their shared actantial function as mothers in the spiral of generation. Throughout, focalization maintains story coherence while permitting the reader to glimpse the actantial functions underlying the dramatic personnae of the individual characters . Thus, although the blurring between characters might be thought of as a temporary weakening of the focalization, it is the opposite; strong focalization makes it possible for the focalizer to trace the collective subjectivity that unfolds through and beyond her body, incorporating the difference she made in refusing the patriarchal dream. An ample, scenic rhythm gives a feeling of presence to one critical conversation between Edrys and her mother, which took place in the late 1930s: ‘‘We went to Penang and she said, ‘Mother, I’m so tired of this life, of just wasting my time going out dancing every night, getting engaged to play tennis, somebody ringing up and wanting to take me out to golf. It seems so futile. I want to learn dress designing and dressmaking. I’ve seen advertisements and I’ve written off to England . I won’t be coming back with you when we go on leave.’ This was when we were in the hotel in Penang sitting on the grounds facing the sea just where her wedding photograph was taken a few months later. Isn’t it extraordinary?’’ (29) These embedded words record Edrys’s unsuccessful decision to write her own script. The dialogue occurs in the scene of the narrator’s visit to her maternal grandmother, and within the embedded narration of Edrys’s life. Narrative mirroring (discussed in the next chapter) and a shift to a dramatic , scenic rhythm both mark the importance of this speech, and direct attention to this moment in Edrys’s story, memorializing her unsuccessful but courageous independence speech to her domineering mother. Scenic presentation consistently characterizes the narrator’s interactions with Kit. Their mother-and-son dialogues mirror in a distinct register the structural preoccupations of the poem. Notably, Kit has his own quest, which he pursues in ‘‘boy with tape recorder stalking horses in a field of cows.’’ Kit always acts in the present tense and in dramatic scenes; the one exception occurs when he brings forward his own memories of Edrys and thus, to a limited extent, participates in his mother’s quest (76). That passage has a summarizing rhythm which is gentle and 76 Narrative in the Feminine reflective, unlike the panicky summary of ‘‘close to the edge,’’ which condenses the adventure of Edrys and her daughters at Wild Pear Beach and the later scattering of Edrys’s ashes. Anachrony also undermines linearity and supports the timeless, synchronic mood of the pause. Anachrony is the non-coincidence of fabula and story time. Two types of anachrony, retroversion (flashback) and anticipation, contribute to the temporal complexity of How Hug a Stone. Internal retroversion fills in missing information elided in its sequential place (paralipsis), or it presents an event twice, for example when events recorded in the journal entry, ‘‘June 17, Poltimore village. evening— warm, silent, fragrant with hay & silage, timothy grass (June the worst month for pollen count)’’ (22), are repeated and expanded in ‘‘June near the river Clyst, Clust, clear. Clystmois this holding wet & clear.’’ Internal anticipation also occurs when this journal entry comments on ‘‘Poltimore, Pwyll Ti Mawr, Pool by the Great House’’ and identifies the grandmother ’s actantial function of helper or donor: ‘‘June 21, my grandmother is giving back my early self to me in photographs she foresees drained of meaning in strangers’ hands’’ (22). Another entry, ‘‘under her mothering wing’’ (64), brings together in one image the symbolic, emotional and proairetic codes of the narrative, creating a densely synchronic moment. Much of ‘‘Black Hole at Centre’’ has a timeless, eerie mood, twice characterized as ‘‘surreal’’ (66, 76). ‘‘Pilgrim Cottage’’ summarizes Edrys’s life in a sketch of her years as mother and wife. Verbal structures of recurring gerunds and participles convey an effect of timelessness consistent with the rest of the section: wondering even as a mother was she ‘‘doing the right thing’’? hiding her doubts to wrestle with the angel authority of father, teacher, doctor , dentist, priest. furious, raging at the false front of society, tearing out the placid...

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