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Постмодернистская интерпретация архетипическихстранствий и истории в романе Дженетт Уинтерсон “Страсть”

Пиняева Елена Вячеславна
старший преподаватель кафедры английского языка отделения языковой подготовки Института общественных наук Российской академии народного хозяйства и государственной службы при Президенте РФ (Москва), el.pinyaeva@yandex.ru

Pinyaeva Elena Vyacheslavna
Senior Lecturer at the English language chair of the Department of language training at the Institute for Social Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Moscow)

Abstract: This paper examines Jeanette Winterson’s “The Passion” through the lens of various analytical perspectives including Frye’s and Campbell’s myth criticism, Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian theory of archetypes, Taro symbolism, and Hutcheon’s concept of “historiographic metafiction”. Immensely committed to a postmodern subjectivity, Winterson’s fiction demonstrates its incredulity towards both history and myth traditionally seen as totalizing grand metanarratives. The paper argues that Winterson’s emloyment of parody in a fictional reconstruction of the well-known historical figures’ lives subverts stereotypical perceptions of an objectively represented historical reality, while her metafictional ironic rewriting of two most common patterns of the mythological heroes’ quests – Ulysses’s and Theseus’s journeys – disrupts the hierarchy between the high epic genre of the classical myth seen as a global intertextual inheritance and the novel. Winterson’s contesting of the boundaries between fiction, history and myth enables her to intervene into unsettled expectations to celebrate an ethics that acknowledges postmodernism’s scepticism and indeterminacy.
Keywords: historiographic metafiction, historical discourse, parody, intertext, rewriting, monomyth, archetypal quest, individuation of the self

Winterson’s third novel “The Passion” (1987) calls into question issues about fictional artifice and objective historical reality, as it is immensely shaped and fueled by intentionally unreliable narratives. It adopts a typically postmodern form that Linda Hutcheon has defined as “historiographic metafiction” [11, p. 5], the novel genre that incorporates “theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs” [11, p. 5] with the purpose of ironic reworking of both forms and contents of the past. In postmodernism, history tends to be seen as an ideologically biased discourse whose existence suggests textuality, since all factual historical data – chronicles, testimonies, diaries and memoirs – are normally retrieved from only but written texts; for they “cannot escape complicity with some meta-narrative, with the fictions that render possible any claim to ‘truth” [11, p.13], their genuine authenticity seems to be no longer eternal and unchallengeable, but is rather considered in terms of our ever changing perception of historical past. Moreover, the literary constituent appears to form an unavoidably integral part of any historical narrative, since the latter is created with the use of language, which is always equivocal, allegorical, and figurative, and, thus, prevents to produce what is termed as “scientific discourse” that rather tends to include references to only actual empirical world than to systems of signs that are “ready-made textual units” [19, p. 159]. From this point of view, history due to its hybrid identity seems to become an intertext, a discourse “upon which fiction draws as easily as it does upon other texts of literature” [11, p. 142], while all historical knowledge is claimed to get the status of second-hand knowledge as it is constructed on debatable hypothetical assumptions and controversial subjective interpretations; as a result, the latter reject a possibility of any unambiguous and unitary explanation. In this kind of metafiction, the action normally disperses the conventional center and moves the margins into the multiple, unstable, and borderless “centers” of the fragmented narrative, with a linear chain of historical events being destroyed, and with the closure given unpredictable endings.

Similarly, Winterson’s self-reflexive metafiction reveals its contradictory nature in its strikingly subjective interpretation of historical reality: though it obviously boasts of increasingly original references to recognizable historical personages and events, it is still engaged in a deliberately subjective revision of history. In other words, it is both metafictional, since it identifies its own status as an artefact, and historical, as it carefully reproduces local and culture-specific character of the real historical past through its textualized, and, thus, already interpreted remains. Winterson’s metafiction emphasizes the role of subjective storytelling by subverting links between lies and truth in historical discourse; moreover, her exploration of this seemingly paradoxical claim that historical narrative embraces both fiction and fact proves to be only but intentional, and her radio interview in which she once communicated her attitude towards this issue holds the clue: “People have an enormous need … to separate history, which is fact, from storytelling, which is not fact … and the whole push of my work has been to say, you cannot know which is which” [10, 1990]. Her extremely unconventional narrators’ refrain, “I’m telling you stories. Trust me”, corresponds to celebrated historiographic metafiction’s assertion, that the two modes of writing “both been seen to derive their force more from verisimilitude than from any objective truth; [that] they are both identified as linguistic constructs, highly conventionalized in their narrative forms, and not at all transparent either in terms of language and structure; and that appear to be equally intertextual” [11, p. 105]. By valorizing fragmentation, alienated otherness, de-centrality and subjectivity,   Winterson’s  metafiction reveals its disbelief in the liberal humanist totalizing “master narratives” [16, p. 7], all those socially structuring systems such as history and myth that were created to unify and systematize our perception of reality; but instead it prioritizes more marginal in their effect little narratives that have always been neglected by officially recorded History. At the same time, Winterson’s metafiction does not deny the notion of “truth” itself, but rather problematizes its origin by questioning “whose […] truth gains power and authority over others” [11, p.18] in the process of making broadly acknowledged historical facts out of experiential events of the past; in so doing, it privileges the recognition of multiple truths, “truths that are socially, ideologically, and historically conditioned” [11, p. 18].

Winterson’s metafiction presents parallel narratives of two little witnesses to the Napoleonic wars of 1804-1815, at the most dramatic period in Hegelian World History, when depicting the inglorious defeat of the French Grande armeé during the Russian campaign as the apocalyptic end of history. Winterson’s metafiction does not contain any traditional historical accounts of Napoleon’s military failures and triumphs that might correspond to the canons of conventional historiography; nor does it include a standard record of the most notable historical events that constitute the background of the epoch. Though the plot setting and the subject matter of “The Passion” justify Napoleon’s discursive presence, its main emphasis, however, is on “untold histories” of the marginalized eccentrics whose alienated otherness is defined by their class, gender and notorious deviation from the traditional sexual norms. One is the naïve French soldier Henri who abandons his family to follow his passion for Napoleon and serves him in the distinctly humble position of the chicken-neck wringer, while the other one is the webbed feet casino croupier Villanelle, a Venetian boatman’s daughter with an extravagant taste for transvestism who can miraculously walk on water; the latter breaks the conventions of realist narrative, and represents the text’s unconscious that re-combines historical discourse through its intricate magical lenses. Though it is not only Villanelle’s freakish body and her ability to live without a heart that interrogates the nature of the “real”; the elves, goblins, and the odd ghosts of the Venetian uncanny also explicitly play on the metafiction’s increasing tension within fantasy; even Henri’s narrative, which claims the validity of its indisputably reliable perspective, undermines the authenticity of historical discourse by inverting hauntings and hostilities of the real world into grotesque-like fantasies that perplex the confines of difference, regularity and distinction: “I’ve seen soldiers, mad with hunger and cold, chop off their own arms and cook them. How long could you go on chopping? Both arms. Both legs. Ears. Slices from the trunk. You could chop yourself down to the very end and leave the heart to beat in its ransacked palace” [21, p. 82].Moreover, his narrative immensely demonstrates its adherence to the principle of non-selection, since it destroys any trace of hierarchy in embracing both big and small-scale historical events; consequently, it imparts a sense of extra subjectivity to the narrative, and causes further fragmentation of historical discourse. “The Passion” may be said to intertwine two interdependent mirror-like mini-narratives that “belong to the domain of the suppressed, and highlight the postmodernism’s claim that the marginal, the non-totalizing, the local are given reassertion, as the centre does no longer exist” [18, p. 129] owing to these irrelevant narrators’ peripheral perspectives that challenge conventional omniscience in their apocryphal histories. These mini-narratives that build on isolated fragments seem to displace official history by restoring what has been forgotten, censored, overlooked and lost; at the same time, their mirage-like apocryphal versions that balance between the real and the imaginative add the trace of verifiable spectacular supplement to the officially accepted historical documents.

It is not only the employment of the fantastic that disrupts historical discourse in Winterson’s metafiction; it is also the intentional use of parody that significantly helps contradict the officially-supported version of history by supplementing the mainstream of historical record with marginalized, censored, and half-forgotten narratives that constitute the “dark areas” of alternative history. By creating the tension between the official and the apocryphal, or radically dissimilar, versions of history, parody initiates both transformation and renewal, and finally promotes alternative ways of interpreting history. The dislocated narratives that form the context of historical representations are given unexpected reference and meaning, while the real historical figures are exposed as “fabricated”; the latter’s textualized existence alters the self-conscious narrative that combines history with fantasy, claiming to revive what has been overlooked, lost and suppressed. Thus, General Bonaparte with his infatuation with chicken occupies the unknown, or “dark areas” of officially acknowledged history, seemingly in conformity to the demands of traditional historical narrative but actually parodying it. Similarly, the narrative that embraces mostly unrecognizable details from Joséphine’s apocryphal life reveals her different identity that both challenges and rewrites previous historical representations, and fills out the “dark areas” constraint at the same time. The story of her passion for exotic flowers functions as a verifiable document to the official version of history: “Strange to think that if Bonaparte hadn’t divorced Joséphine, the geranium might never have come to France. She would have been so busy with him to develop her undoubted talent for botany. They say she had already brought us over a hundred different kinds of plants and that if you ask her she will send you seeds for nothing” [21, 155].

If to judge by its title, which refers to the original passion of Christ in the New Testament, Winterson’s metafiction may be said to relish on intertextual relations in a Kristevan sense. By using parody, pastiche, direct quotations, reminiscences, and other intertextual techniques, “The Passion” alludes to many literary texts, ranging from T. Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure” to J. L. Borges’s “The Lottery in Babylon”. It begins with an epigraph that presents the lament sung by the Chorus of Corinthian women to Medea in Euripides’ eponymous tragedy, after she finds her position of a refugee in the Greek exile threatened with the discovery of her former husband Jason’s treachery; Jason whose affection for his wife has never been genuine breaks his vow on marital fidelity to her, although Medea, being a sorceress, once aided him in overcoming the sleepless dragon which guarded the Golden Fleece, a symbol of kingship and absolute authority. The lamentations of the Chorus, which remains sympathetic to Medea’s tragic plight, reveal the way of how she abandoned her family and home to sail away with Jason, the leader of the celebrated Argonauts. Thus, the mythical discourse gets its introduction in the epigraph to Winterson’s metafiction, which points unambiguously to two parallel quests initiated in both cases by the protagonists with the aim to possess a unique thing – in Jason’s case it is the Golden Fleece, an object that can confirm the latter’s rites of passage and his status of the rightful king, while in Medea’s case it is the hero’s heart; her love for Jason, self-destructive and insanely possessive, being caused deliberately by Eros’s evil spells. Jason’s perilous adventures in search of the fabulous Golden Fleece are reproduced by Henri’s grief-stricken soldier travels across Europe motivated by his all-consuming passion for Napoleon, while Villanelle’s miraculous loss of her heart to a woman nicknamed “the Queen of Spades” and her marriage to the disgusting supplier of meat to Napoleon’s army suggest rewriting of Media’s homeleaving and her subsequent psychological distress triggered by Jason’s infidelity. Thus, both Henri and Villanelle, like their mythological predecessors, or their “archetypes” [12, p. 94], if to borrow C. G. Jung’s term, undertake their quests in the search of the “desiring self for a fulfilment” [9, p. 193], which is reminiscent of Campbell’s symbolic portrayal of the process of individuation, or of the individual’s archetypal journey into adulthood; the Golden Fleece brought back from Jason’s archetypal quest to Colchis may be seen then as the symbol of the “force of soul” that has been “stolen, mismanaged, disguised, disrupted, pre-empted or trodden upon” [7, p. xlv], which, as its consequence, demands detours and inspirations in pursuit of its original status quo. Moreover, both Henri’s and Villanelle’s strikingly complementary mirror-like narratives form the double quest pattern which recalls W. Blake’s shared unity of “a male and female figure, moving in opposite directions” [9, p. 322] in his poem “The Mental Traveller”; the latter does not refer to the narrators’ travelling on foot from Russia to Venice, but rather indicates to their psychological maturation experienced at the time of their hazardous journey: “I travell’d thro’ a land of men, / A land of men and women too; / And heard and saw such dreadful things / As cold earth-wanderers never knew” [2, p. 499].

In her metafiction, Winterson may be said to exploit “two basic versions of the archetypal hero’s quest” [17, p. 58], as S. Onega justifiably claims; these two versions of the quest include Ulysses’s hazardous adventures on water and land, and Theseus’s descent into the threatening maze of the Minotaur’s subterranean labyrinth. Henri who compares his soldier travels to Ulysses’s mythical quest resembles T. Hardy’s sensitive character, Jude the Obscure, for he detests pain and sufferings brought on animals, and T.S. Eliot’s modern hero J. Alfred Prufrock as well, a cautious, indecisive, meticulous, and sexually frustrated lonely man haunted by his failures in his carnal love affairs and inability to act, and his ceaseless feeling of enforced isolation being intensified by his habitual odd wanderings “through certain half-deserted streets” [6, p.13] at twilight: “I like the early dark. It’s not night. It’s still companiable. No one feels afraid to walk by themselves without a lantern” [21, p. 32]; Prufrock, being a genuinely true intertextual hero, associates himself with the ridiculous court jester, or “the Fool” of the court cards from the Tarot, the man whois “glad to be of use”, an “attendant lord” who can “swell a progress”, “start a scene or two, advise the prince”, and be an “easy tool” [6, p. 16] of his master. Henri who works as the Emperor’s personal cook also appreciates the chance to be of use to his immediate chief Napoleon; as “the Fool” of the Tarot, he is shown as an innocent, immature man who “set[s] out on his journey into life entranced by the bright butterfly of sensory experience” [5, p. 48-49]owing to his childish fantasy to become an army drummer in a red uniform. If Ulysses from Homer’s “Odyssey” ties himself to the ship’s mast not to be lured on to the rocks with the siren’s enticingly sweet songs of perverted delights, his modern equivalent from Eliot’s poem Prufrock, on the contrary, assumes that the sirens do not sing to him to cause his imminent death “in the chambers of the sea”, although he has also “heard the mermaids singing each to each”, and has seen them “combing the white hair of the waves” [6, p. 18]. Henri’s highly rudimentary knowledge of the voluptuously seductive mermaids, however, is mostly second hand, and is limited to his army friend’s bizarre tales, which serve an apparently more acceptable explanation for the French soldiers’ irrational mass death in the war: “Patrick says the Channel is full of mermaids. He says it’s the mermaids lonely for a man that pull so many of us down” [21, p. 24].

If Henri is mostly associated with open air and daylight, Villanelle, in her turn, is linked with water and darkness, since her “birth coincided with an eclipse of the sun” [21, p. 51] in a “mercurial city” [21, p. 49] of Venice whose dark dead-end labyrinthine canals bring to mind Theseus’s mythological quest in the intricate twists and branches of the monstrous bull-headed creature’s cave. In her ability to navigate the mysterious maze of constantly shifting Venetian lanes Villanelle resembles Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, the king of Crete, and the half-sister of the Minotaur through her mother Pasiphae, the moon goddess. Ariadne passionately fell in love with the Athenian hero Theseus and helped him slay the monstrous dweller of the Cretan labyrinth by giving him a sword and a magical ball of glittering gems, so that he could escape the gloomy cave by following the glow of her golden thread. Although Theseus swears an oath to marry Ariadne and bring her to Athens with him, he later breaks his promise to do so, for Dionysus, the god of grape-harvest and vegetation, demands from Theseus to leave the princess on the island of Naxos for him. As the god’s wife, Ariadne is believed to accompany admitted initiates through a set of rituals, or secret religious practices, for the Eleusinian mysteries based on the prehistoric agricultural cult, the novices being given powerful psychedelic drugs at an all-night feast full of bacchanalian merriment and dancing. Villanelle who initiated Henri in his role of Theseus into mirth and carnal love with her is thus linked to Ariadne due to her engagement into the playful violation of conventional boundaries that are typical for the Venetian city of masquerades, while Villanelle’s brutal husband recalls the monstrous half-man/half-beast Minotaur owing to his associations with his supplies of meat and horses to the Emperor’s army, and his death is similar to that of the mythical monster, since Henri as Theseus kills him in the liminal maze of the Venetian watery underworld.

However, Winterson’s protagonists do not manage to attain a sense of a new harmony through their symbolic descent into Hell; moreover, their quests, which do not have a fixed goal, take on an indefinite character, and their homecoming becomes neither triumphant nor distinct, while their violation of taboos and their consequent rebellion do not beget any conventional creative impulses: instead of making his escape from a hostile fluid space of eternal transformation, Henri ends his days imprisoned on the Venetian island of San Servelo in a hospital for the mentally ill, and communicates with the haunted ghosts that belong to his past, with the voices that are of his “own making” [21, 147], while Villanelle, in refusing to marry Henri, stays in the marginal role of a lesbian eccentric whose metaphysical wanderings turn to a “form of travel which is no longer based on the coherent, conquering self, being transposed instead to that mercurial […] exploration into a feminine multiplicity, a “travel along the blood vessels” to “the cities of the interior”, “another place whose geography is uncertain” [20, 143]. This rewriting of the modern mythical hero-deed suggests that the cook is not assured any secure homecoming either; being a Frenchman, he meets his inglorious death in the Venetian subversive labyrinth, in a floating wasteland of exile, decay and abjection; moreover, a parodic imitation of his anti-heroic quest undertaken in pursuit of his egoistical self-interests – “I’ve never been one to mind anything that didn’t have something in it for me” [21, 127] – lacks Henri’s patriotism, and, thus, is not given any transcendental significance. Since Winterson’s protagonists stand in opposition to their communities and transgress against what is regarded as a natural or sacred order, their challenge does not hold the promise of their canonical transformation into mythopoeic figures that normally reach a higher form of communal recognition. In other words, they do not act as culture heroes, or creative agents that represent the reigning symbols of their groups, but rather as weak and indecisive dissident outsiders intent on striving for the psychic inward journey instead, as the case with Henri and Villanelle suggests. In this sense, they behave in accordance with the modern myth pattern, since “today no meaning is in the group – none in the world: all is in the individual, [when] one does not know toward what one moves” [4, 359]. Moreover, the choice they make does not symbolize the conventional victory of consciousness owing to their vulnerability to either emotional distress or to their posttraumatic neurotic distortions. The cook, in his turn, does not experience any significant transcendence in the course of his anti-heroic quest: his explicitly grotesque and craven figure, which epitomizes sexual perversion, parodies the ritualistic stages in the tradition of a rebellious monomyth. Consequently, each of them fails to complement and fulfill their individuality when undertaking their archetypal quests for individuation of the self. If to apply C. G. Jung’s interpretation, the three protagonists thus can be seen as the different and autonomously existing facets of an individual seeking for wholeness, or for their self-individuation, with Henri functioning in the role of “conscious” (he is endowed with the Father’s “light” side), Villanelle that of “spirit” (she represents the alchemical “anima mundi, imprisoned in matter” [13, 177], or the Christian Holy Ghost), and her lascivious husband, the cook, that of “shadow” or “unconscious” (he stands for the Father’s “dark” emanation), as is suggested by his vicious nature and his connection with his supplies of meat and horses; in this sense, the three protagonists are not able to accomplish the process of their self-individuation, since they fail to overcome their split, “issues from a source that is both light and dark” [13, 178], or the conflict begotten by their unresolved duality, the latter being accomplished in a fourth principle, the acknowledgement of which brings about a comforting “reconciliation of opposites and hence the answer to the suffering in the Godhead which Christ personifies” [13, 176].

The self-fragmentation, which Winterson’s protagonists explicitly experience, can be interpreted by using Freudian and Lacanian imagery as well. In accordance with Freud’s theory, there can be found three basic stages in the psychological development of the self that Winterson’s protagonists pass through during the process of their self-individuation, the primary changes being concerned with the object of their instinctual desire: the stage of infantile narcissism, when a sense of the crucial difference between “self” and “other” is not available, since the child who still does not become egocentric is not capable of perceiving the notion of “self” as rigidly opposed to the whole world; the Oedipal stage of attachment to love objects, when the child starts to identify himself with the primal “other”, or the father, who becomes the inhibiting agent of external law by forbidding incest with the child’s mother and threatening with castration, the child’s behavior being determined only by satisfying cravings for pleasure and a yearning for immediate gratification; and the stage of psychological maturation, when the adult can appreciate deferred gratification, with “the pleasure principal” being postponed and subordinated by “the reality principle” [8, 4], the latter is interpreted as the triumph of reason over impulse. In other words, the third stage in the psychological development of the self can only be achieved if the individual is able to accept the necessity to endure the pain of delayed gratification of a desire, and no longer lets himself be ruled by his longing to obtain pleasure, but recognizes the principle of circumstantial reality. If to take into consideration Lacan’s most significant improvement to Freud’s theory of the self, as M. Bowie suggests, the transitional stage between the child’s narcissistic stage of self-love and the stage of attachment to the child’s love objects, which he calls “the mirror phase” [3, 105], can be also acknowledged as “the reified product of successive imaginary” [3, 114] in the analysis of the psychological development of the self; at this phase, the child is able to recognize his own image in a mirror and perceive it as a separate or alienated entity before his social determination is revealed.

In her intentional employment of Lacanian “mirror phase” symbolic imagery, Winterson demonstrates Henri’s self-fragmentation, when he recollects his refusal to watch his reflection in his father’s shaving mirror; moreover, while recalling the scene from his early childhood, Henri refers to himself in the third person, as if he is viewing himself from the neutral perspective of another acting agent and is feeling out-of-body experiences: “I see a little boy watching his reflection in a copper pot he’s polished. His father comes in and laughs and offers him his shaving mirror instead. But in the shaving mirror the boy can see only one face. In the pot he can see all distortions of his face. He sees many possible faces and so he sees what he might become” [21, 26]. Henri’s illeistic impulse, as it follows from the cited passage above, might be thus contributed to his personal experience of Lacanian “mirror phase”, which corresponds to Freud’s stage of primary narcissism, when the infant seems to be fascinated by his own image thrown back from any of a reflecting surface; at this stage, Henri is capable of producing a distinct shift from a fragmented experience of his image reflected in his mother’s copper pot to the perception of a holistic image of himself based on the idea of unity, the latter being symbolically reflected on his father’s shaving mirror, in which he can observe only his single face. Henri’s obviously felt preference to watch all possible distortions of his image in his mother’s copper pot symbolizes his experience of the final stage of the pre-Oedipal complex due to his attachment to his mother. At the same time, Henri’s unconscious longing for a state of fragmentation and discord points to his rejection of the idea of an identity built on the binary oppositions of the symbolic order with the rigid signifiers it imposes on the recognition and construction of the self. As he represents his childhood memories in retrospect, he still seems to be obsessed by the possibility of having his body in disintegrated pieces, since he can rather anticipate in it not the traumatic loss of the self, but the whole cluster of potential identities.

Although Henri shows his unwillingness to identify himself with the image reflected in his father’s shaving mirror, i.e. he rejects his father as his je-ideál, he has to find an appropriate substitute for the “superego” figure if he is to reach his maturity stage. Like other increasingly numerous adolescent French recruits, he finds his “ideal-I” symbolic identification in the all-powerful and authoritative father figure of General Bonaparte; as Henri comments of his enduring attachment to his Lacanian je-ideal and France’s fanatical devotion to the Saturnlike warrior who sends his adoring soldiers to the slaughter house to satisfy his imperialist ambitions: “All France will be recruited if necessary. Bonaparte will snatch up his country like a sponge and wring out every last drop. We are in love with him” [21, 8].Henri’s reflection on his all-consuming passion for his superior explicitly includes Lacanian “mirror phase” symbolic imagery: “When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. […] And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer” [21, 154-5]. Moreover,  the title of the first chapter, “The Emperor», evidently points to General Bonaparte’s identification with the fourth card of the greater arcana from the Tarot, which describes him both as “an unbending tyrant [and] a powerful ally [who] must be relied on for his strength, and not for his judgement” [5, 62], according to A. Douglas’s insightful interpretation; in other words, he may be regarded as the ultimate symbol of the warlike totalitarian patriarchal world ruled and rationalized by reason, will-power, persuasive force and logic.

In the course of his narrative Henri gradually shifts from enormously admiring the French Emperor – “I was waiting for Bonaparte” [21, 15] – to thoroughly despising him, which might be an intrinsic nature of abiding passion, to being tolerant of his flaws: “What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?” [21, 147]. Henri’s sharp disillusionment with General Bonaparte, however, turns for him as unpalatable truth that must be only but accepted: after spending eight horrible years of devastating wars in the Grande armeé, never attempting to question his superior’s orders, he stays in the same utterly undemanding job of chicken-neck wringer, being entirely neglected by Napoleon, to admit eventually the inescapable fact that his long lasted passion for the Emperor is condemned to be unrequited: “He was in love with himself and France joined in. It was a romance. Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life” [21, 13]. In other words, Henri’s narrative suggests that the object of worship seems always to be a fiction, the idealized projection of the beloved onto the non-existing other: “I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself” [21, 158].However, only when Henri rejects his “mirror phase” infatuation with his commanding officer, he is able to experience the adult passion for the elusive Venetian croupier and feel the distinction between the narcissistic love for his je-ideál and the mature love for the other that symbolizes his freedom from his “superego” represented in the figure of Napoleon: “Her. A person who is not me. […] My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else” [21, 158].

Significantly, Henri’s remark that he has been for eight years in the French army corresponds to the double-loop pattern in the arrangement of the Tarot cards in their sequential order, forming the shape of a reclining number eight, the symbol of the infinite universe, while the major arcana of the court cards, or Tarot trumps, represents certain stages in a system of his symbolic initiation, which indicate the grades that the Fool’s journey takes through his life, or along the cards’ interlocking structure. Henri’s passionate quest for psychological maturation interpreted in card symbolism tallies with Jung’s theory of self-individuation, and also with the process that confronts the Freudian “ego” in the development of his own psyche. The fact that Henri constantly rewrites the war journal during his isolation on the rocky island, or in Jung’s term, he reveals “the patient secret, the rock against which he is shattered” [15, 117], and thus is engaged into a self-healing therapeutic activity, proves that he is a genuine myth-maker due to his ability to transform the most disturbing experiences of his life into archetypal stories that might “bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul” [4, 359]. 

Similarly, Villanelle reveals her self-fragmentation and her need for Lacanian je-ideál, resembling mythological Narcissus, by showing her preference for the split reflection of her twisted image as it emerges on the shimmering water of the Venetian lagoon: “I catch sight of myself in the water and see in the distortions of my face what I might become” [21, 62]. Villanelle finds her “superego” in the mysterious figure of the Venetian lady called the Queen of Spades, in a mature, more refined, exquisite and improved copy of herself. The lady’s marital status, however, requires medieval courtly love adoration and her treatment as an object of divinity, with her superiority becoming evident in Villanelle’s attitude towards her je-ideál; for this type of courtly love that praises an experience between hedonistic sexual desire and highly elevating spiritual attainment, the motif of the lost heart, developed in the 17^thcentury metaphysical canon of John Donne, is regarded dominant, and Villanelle, in her turn, explicitly alludes to this tradition by using the conceit in a manner strongly reminiscent of Donne’s sensual imagery: “If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away” [21, 76]. In the course of the novel, however, Villanelle’s heart proves to be stolen literally, being encapsulated into the Queen of Spades’ miraculously throbbing jar; Villanelle’s comment that she lost her heart eight years ago creates symbolic imagery that tallies it with the Tarot, and signifies her experience of individuation process in a Jungian sense.

Despite their common gendered identities – both women are inclined to enjoy lesbian sexuality – the Queen of Spades would never leave her husband to endanger her well-being and security; moreover, Villanelle’s strikingly ambiguous queer body endowed with the ambivalent physical anomalies that reveal her hermaphroditic nature – her webbed feet that only the males in a Venetian boatman’s family possess function as the symbolic signifier of a transvestite – makes her “seen both as an object of disgust and horrified fascination” [18, 133], and, therefore prevents her thwarted passion for the Queen of Spades from never being returned. However, her imaginary je-ideál– “this sweet-smelling, seductive woman” [21, 120] is linked with risk and death owing to her strong association with gambling and the Venetian Casino where she beats the professional croupier at a game of cards, and, in so doing demonstrates her ultimate superiority; significantly, her name corresponds to one of the four Tarot cards in the lesser arcana, whose symbolism stands for “her subtlety and keenness of intellect [which] make her a dangerous enemy” [5, 150].Her evil alter ego whose embroidered tapestry gives an image of Villanelle as one of the pinned down insects in the lady’s collection, imprisoned into the fine fiber of its intricately woven net – turns out to be spurious for Villanelle in terms of its intrinsic wholeness and power. The association of the Queen of Spades with dead insects points to her identification with Satan widely known as the Lord of the Flies, while her covert spinning activities create impeccable reminiscences with the mythological Arachne, catching her pray into her spider’s web. The design of her tapestry woven to embrace the whole image of her victim into its frame also makes up a series of relevant parallelisms with the Fates, the three notorious Greek goddesses, who are entitled to represent the predetermined end to a human’s life and spin the individual’s particular destiny; like Atropos, one of the Fates, she is linked to death, hazard and vampirism, as is evidently suggested by the depicted scene, when Henri suddenly discovers “two coffins, their lids open, white silk inside” [21, 119] instead of conventional beds for the Queen of Spades and her husband in their gracious but gloomily looking palace. The fact that their palace boasts of the map with “roads marked that seemed to disappear into the earth and at other times to stop abruptly at the sea’s edge” [21, 119], and thus restores the enchanted mazelike of the dark Venetian waterways, brings to mind a commonly acknowledged association of Venice with the mythological underworld and of the couple’s belonging to the “shadow-land” [21, 97];the latter’s status being perceived as the archetypal “divine couple”, or in Jung’s term as the “syzygy” [14, 58], whose matrimonial bliss symbolizes the unity and integration between the material world and the unconscious, and as the all-mighty malicious spirits of the underworld. The Queen of Spades’ last attempt to captivate Villanelle appears to fail, however; it proves that Villanelle is shown to be able to come to a new kind of alliance with the requirements laid down by the real world: “If I give in to this passion, my real life, the most solid, the best known, will disappear and I will feed on shadows again like those sad spirits whom Orpheus fled” [21, 146].

At the same time, like the true Venetian, Villanelle considers playing games of chance as a metaphor for life and passion, living every moment as the one that brings accidental risk, hazard and luck: “I come from the city of chances, where everything is possible but where everything has a price. In this city great fortunes are won and lost overnight. It has always been so” [21, 90]. Being a compulsive gambling addict, she never ceases to measure life against death, and finds the deepest contentment in always playing for the highest stake: “[T]he Devil’s gambler keeps back something precious, something to gamble with only once in a lifetime” [21, 90]; in her case, it is her heart that has been lost to the Queen of Spades as a wager. Villanelle’s frequently repeated phrase throughout her narrative, “You play, you win. You play, you lose. You play”, proves that gambling for her is a mode of life that she is not willing to change. As a genuine gambler, Villanelle admits that the impulse behind playing at the baccarat table is the ultimate, secretly nourished, seductive, limitless desire to lose, rather than to win, and the need for the transcendent, self-annihilating experience of passion: “Pleasure on the edge of danger is sweet. It’s the gambler’s sense of losing that makes the winning an act of love” [21, 137]. In pursuit of an enticing chance, Villanelle refuses to organize her life according to a meticulously planned project, but she rather seeks an opportunity to “live like a flame” [1, 231], and to consume herself to the point of death, admitting the fact that her obsession with gambling has become apparently irresistible; moreover, the tension her long lasting infatuation creates proves to erase the bitter memory of the lost game when her heart has only recently been an object of the bet: “And the valuable, fabulous thing? Now that I have it back? Now that I have been given a reprieve such as only the stories offer? Will I gamble it again? Yes” [21, 151]. However, Villanelle’s seemingly ambiguous behavior – like any inveterate gambler she repeatedly succumbs to chance only to consign it into oblivion, and through the rupture with it she tends to initiate a new attempt, following the logic of gambling - may be interpreted in terms of the “Freudian ambivalent pattern of repression and satisfaction of the individual’s primal pleasure-seeking instinctual drive” [17, 67], as S. Onega undisputedly remarks; thus, her quest for individuation of the self is condemned to remain uncompleted, since her intention to discover “the cities of the interior [which] do not lie on any map” [21, 150] is made explicit towards the end of her narrative.

The novel’s ending thus suggests the failure of romantic passion to prevent the fragmentation of the self; furthermore, it signifies the protagonists’ failure to complete successfully their archetypal quests for the self. Unlike traditional mythopoeic heroes who act for the others and tend to attain a higher form of communal acceptance, they appear to become the dissident heroes who do not succeed in bringing a new sense of blissfulness, or harmony, to their community; but instead they have to “[carry] the cross of the redeemer – not in the bright moments of [their] tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of [their] personal despair” [4, 362].

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