Circles within circles, wheels within wheels....

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Dear Tara and Anthony,

As I continue to make my way through a re-reading of Chapter 6, I’m compelled to write about another aspect of Young’s prolific inclusions and cyclonic repetitions: the lexical contradictions present on almost every page, including those in Chapter 6.

You will recall from my previous post that in this chapter we find pregnant Madge on the bus with her new husband, Homer, and our heroine, Vera Cartwheel. While Homer sleeps and Vera looks on, Madge is assaulted by images of her romanticized past and her almost inconceivably dismal future as wife and mother.

Certainly, Madge’s identity crisis is profound: Who is she to Homer? The thin, dancing girl, “so light and free,” prior to her pregnancy and marriage? Who is her rival for Homer’s affections—her former dancing girl self or the dying Jacquiline White, “that old high school cheer leader?” Are they one and the same? Madge is bitter and resentful of her circumstances but at the same time she recognizes the inextricable oppositions inherent in living:

“She shook the powdery dust out of her coat, the dust settling back again upon her shoulders, just in that single instant, for everything was self-contradictory, it seemed, as she was, and perhaps life must always have, so long as it is life, these double motions like the progressions of delicate planets, circles within circles, wheels within wheels, orbs within orbs, and death should not be simple.” (p. 120.).

One of the most persistent contradictions in the novel is the opposing conditions of birth and death, each seeming to precipitate renewal and demise as both points on a continuum, and as simultaneously existing states. Madge’s father always had blamed her for killing her mother by being born, just as Madge claims that she “died” upon being impregnated.

“All her life had been this poor parody of life, this sad pretense she could no longer countenance nor endure, for she was dead, and she had died at the hour of her birth. Should the dead give birth to the living? Should the child give birth to the mother? It was this feeble imitation of herself—and who was she, poor little Madge…?” (p. 130).

Madge’s drunken father drowns after she turns him out on a night so cold it “cracked the stars.” He had entered her bedroom and mistaken Madge for her dead mother, telling her one minute that she was never born; the next, that she was never killed. (p. 154).

I’m not sure whether it’s more accurate to say that these contradictions enhance the novel’s repetitions or vice versa. However, it’s clear that they work in synergistic tandem to layer the rich, digressive prose and envelope the reader within it.

Anais Nin, Young’s admirer, and close reader, says in her Introduction to the 1979 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, that the novel is a canto to obsession, and she quotes Young:

“To get hold of a character I may have expanded it too much but if I shortened it it would not be an obsession, and obsession is what possesses people. If I removed the repetitions, I would remove one of the motifs of life itself.”  

Surely the same can be said about any possibility of disregarding Young’s many contradictions. Impossible! For within these oppositions nests the essence of life!

Yours,

Lori