Housekeeping, more than any other work I’ve read recently, brims with Derridean themes, from its tropic structure, to the particulars of the metaphors, to the characters and their actions themselves. Not in the sense that it begs for deconstruction, but that it appears to be a novel format for presenting the same themes Derrida does in Of Grammatology, especially as they relate to the constitution, dissimulation, and breaking-apart of sexuality and presence, albeit in relationships and memory.
This is rather hastily written, overly-verbose, and could probably be reduced to the space of four paragraphs. But it’s a break from Kant. Thank God.
Transiency
Transiency derives from the Latin transire, meaning to pass or disappear with time, to be passing over a site, a place, to be ephemeral, to be absent in a succession of presences; and is formed by coupling the present participle of transire - transiens – with the suffix ence, denoting further the possession or state-of-being transient. Transiency denotes the possession of an unpossessable and ungraspable quality, the being a thing which is never fully present to an onlooker, and perhaps even disguised and hidden from its owner.
So, to retrogress from transiency as a disseminating, symbolic notion, into a quantified concept (as many analysis of Robinson’s Housekeeping attempt), terminating at the junctures between Sylvie’s sense of self and Lucille’s (the Social’s) sense of Sylvie – that is, where her unstable, dynamic personality meets Lucille’s observation of homelessness, of transiency as a social mark of instability and unkemptness (where Lucille then intersects the larger, social world, with its “notions of piety and good breeding, and…a desire, a determination, to kep me [Ruth], so to speak, safely within doors” (183)] is to sever transiency from its textual possibility of performing a redemptive function in the novel, as it does for Ruth. Georges Poulet, after examining the phenomenology of the consciousness of the author present to the reader, asks: “What is this subject left standing in isolation after every examination of a literary work?” Standing: like Sylvie through Ruth. Is it abstraction and form, or text and structure? But if the former, the form is disintegrating at its edges and drifting like ash. Or, perhaps, something “exposed in its ineffability and in its fundamental indeterminacy…[a mind haunting the reader by its] transcendence of mind” (72) (after the experience of a totality constituted by an experience of its disparate, discreet, composite pieces)? But even Poulet’s author reaches this boundary at the point of the subject’s comprehending the totality of the works of the author; and likewise, is a trace of the presence of the author, of the subject, of a commanding intention, which is merely of greater magnitude.
This is, I think, the role of transiency in Robinson’s portrayal of Sylvie as a transient. Not to insert a sociological critique of critics of homelessness, or portray the transient’s “lighter side,” but to expose, in a radical form, by pursuing the subject of the self to its most extreme territories (to see from the inside the trace of the outside), the transiency latent within Ruth, Lucille, even the townswomen, residing in these outermost regions, and thereby exposing the more subtle dissimulation of transiency into their respective personalities as the precondition of their personhood (as Lucille’s entrance into society; as Ruth’s acceptance of transiency).
Dissimulation
First, transiency is described, in a culminating passage, as “Cain [becoming] his children and their children and theirs, through a thousand generations, and all of them…[remembering] that there had been a second creation, that the earth ran with blood and sang with sorrow” (193). Since “Cain himself was a creator, in the image of the creator” through his murder of Abel. This violent creation driving (mechanizing) time irrupts in Sylvie’s character as the “force behind the movement of time,” – “a mourning that will not be comforted” (192) – that which composes the effervescent presence of every character. As such, the mimicry of “every gesture” “a hundred, or a thousand times,” of “that shock…[spending] itself in waves” – which is God’s laws, the unknown ramifications of the originary act – is both the source of a godlessness in the loss of God’s presence; and the streaming of “blood” and “sorrow” through the earth (193).
That this transiency – a primordial transiency – is constitutive of experience in general implies, or functions as an analogy for, the experience of loss as the transiency of remembered acts moving through Ruth’s consciousness, since “[memory] is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it’ (194), “[but] every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself…[as] the perished, whose lack we always feel, [who] will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long” (195). This explains the notion that transiency is the primary structure, to Ruth, of living and presence. The palpitation of presence [Sylvie could, "it seemed to me," "remain transient here" and hence "not have to leave" (103); conversely, Sylvie "did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence" (195)] as the threat (or being) of absence and the promise of presence’s return [Ruth says: "She [Lucille] would have remained untransfigured. We would never have known that her calm was as slight as the skin on water…We would have known nothing of the nature and reach of her sorrow if she had come back” (198)]: the “body [retaining] the formality of posture on learns when one sleeps on park benches” (138); the movement into a “current that made us sidle a little toward the center of the lake” (149); all these are marks of transiencies and shiftings of presence which mark the eliding of absence into a presence, and the presence constituted by the absence; the very threat of movement requiring a posture continually attenuated to movement.
This temporal/spatial movement of presence in Sylvie forms one pole of her constitution as transient (the other is being social). Her sense of (non-self) in the dark, her ability to be, like Ruth (who at this point experiences it as fear), “[deprived] of all perspective and horizon…reduced to an intuition, and my sister and aunt to something less that that” (70): to experience the “life of perished things” as dreams, memories, and deprivations. This (non-)sense of self which experiences only the lacunae, some spot eroded away, is like her being an “effigy” (72) – a figuration, an image¸ of a wholly present, transcendent, self. Sylvie “had fallen silent again in the dark” (71), a “dark night” “like the end of the world” (70) in which Sylvie is presented as gesture ["Wash, wash, wash, Sylvie went on the stove" (70); "Nothing. ‘Sylvie!' I shouted, but there was no sound" (71)] and absence, residing in “my grandmother’s room” (71-72, my italics), and “barely silhouetted” against the “chill of the glass,” “[standing] still,” with a “cold hand” in her pocket, silent and an “effigy” (72). That she is an effigy is, at this point, that she is a relief of herself, an undifferentiated figure of the grandmother, of Helen, of any origin, presented in this selflessness the shape like an origin, cast back into time, of the origin of the family. She could even be the grandmother. Or Helen: “‘Helen,’ I whispered, but she did not reply”; ‘Sylvie!’ I said. But she did not reply” (167). This is the first meaning of transiency: that “any present moment” of others to the self, of the self to others, of the self to the self, there “was only thinking, and thoughts bear the same relation, in mass and weight, to the darkness,” the lake and the darkness of the lake, always a vortex pulling downwards, “they rise from, as reflections do in the water they ride upon, and in the same way they are arbitrary, or merely given. Anyone who leans to look at the pool is the woman in the pool, anyone who looks into our eyes is the image in our eyes…and so our thoughts reflect what passes before them” (166): the faceless shape in front of me could as well be Helen herself as Syvlie,” Ruth recalls, but it must be remembered that Ruth’s “life seemed composed entirely of expectation,” and “expelled into the next [moment] and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows,” the possibility is always that “the next moment might be utterly different,” “and so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention” (166). Transiency is the non-presence in the present, the trace in the memory, demanding attentiveness to the present, because all is transient.
The second transiency is social, and this transiency is easily quantified. But again, to interpret Sylvie sociologically is to miss the import of the first transience into the social mark of perpetual homelessness, of perpetual transience, of transience irrupting into an attempted entrance into the social. Sylvie is described as causing a “sharp embarrassment,” winces and “irritation” (51), “trashy” (104), a scuff upon the reputation of the ordinary [the social: the "ladies" (181) and Lucille after her determined entrance into the social (the dissimulation of transiency)]; a deprivation requiring the reformation of Ruth beyond her transfiguration in the experience of the extremity of the self as transient as death: “it is in the nature of water to fill and force to repletion and bursting…[Thus] my skull would bulge preposterously and by back would hunch against the sky…Then, presumably, would come parturition in some form, though my first birth had hardly deserved that name…[A] true birth [and a] final one…[But] could such a birth be imagined?” (162).
Sylvie, embodying transiency, thus commands the site where all growth (transition) can occur; but her domination of the house to Ruth and Lucille (“That’s Sylvie’s house now” (123) says Lucille) is also this living-beneath the possession and command of the transient. Hence, the dissimulation of transiency (as a precondition for being-transient or repelling-transiency) into Lucille (“We have to improve ourselves…Starting right now!” (123), Lucille says) comes to mark the most direct affect Sylvie has upon the characters in the story. If this house is this site, the place where transience moves in Ruth and Lucille’s lives (and Sylvie’s), and Sylvie is a perpetual transience, the closest to transience a person can become without slipping into natality or death, then “[at] Sylvie’s house, my grandmother’s house, [where] so much of what I remembered I could hold in my hand,” Sylvie shows that the “life of perished things” (124) – Helen, the grandmother, the grandfather – need “not also be lost” (124) if they are held in memory, attached to a transience, but a transience whose price is perverse ekstasis, if an ideal sense of self is a sense of another’s concept of the self ["I felt the notice of people all over me, like the pressure of a denser medium"; "I was increasingly struck by Lucille's ability to look the way one was supposed to look" (121)], and if the “gaze” bearing down upon the self (Ruth) is also the gaze which forbids their entrance into common society; but if, as Ruth does, one inverts the equation, then all selves are transients, pushed forwards in the memory of an originary violence and wandering, and the They, the gaze, is a dissembling of this transiency – something necessary, if only for contrast, if only to continue movement, but something also alienated from a terrifying and deeper sense of living. The movement into the anti-social as a forgetting of the social, a displacement of the terms into a-sociality: authenticity as loneliness. Sylvie’s affect.
Bibliography
1. Poulet, Georges. “Criticism and Interiority.” The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism & the Sciences of Man. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2007. 56-72.
2. Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980.
