1. Are the clothes of fictional characters themselves fictional? This is a question that makes me think of Aristotle’s lecturing method, which begins by asking other questions of the question, getting further by the making of problems out of problems that we didn’t even see on our way to what we suppose is an answer. In this case, the question we could ask in response to our question is how could fictional characters have real clothes? Fiction, on this reading, is a universal solvent – once it is introduced into the world, times and places themselves become fictions, their addresses, their faces, their gestures, their voices – all are led like lambs to the slaughter into the fictional void. This is fiction as a dream. Nothing in a dream – not the tree the dreamer sees, not the voice the dreamer hears – exists outside of the dream.
Yet another set of questions, though, question this analogy. For why should we take the fiction and the dream as somehow ontologically equivalent? The dream is not collective – its privacy is its very condition of possibility. Waking up is, among other things, waking to the collective. Here we approach the Wittgensteinian problematic of a private language. “The sentence, „feelings are private, is comparable to the sentence: one plays solitaire alone.” But of course the cards, the gestures, even the time carved out to play solitaire is not a matter of the player’s own act, all the way down the line. Similarly, any sentence with feelings in it – sensations, Empfindungen – supposes some biological structure, some longform evolution.
In a similar way, ficition is always in the collective. It exists as writing, or telling, or images in a movie or video. It thrusts itself into the collective. It “borrows from reality” – to use a common image. The act of borrowing, of not fully paying for, is an interesting transactional metaphor for fiction-making. “Something borrowed” is part of the ensemble of the wedding, according to American folklore. Borrowing hovers on the borderline of thieving – of simply taking. That something borrowed is ritually part of a public declaration of, among other things, sexual activity, says something – but what? - about the connotative field in which borrowing is placed. Borrowing is, contra classical economics, not the same kind of thing as selling. It speaks to a more primal economics of gift giving.
Often, when a writer “borrows” a character from reality -from some real instance of a person – that person feels hurt, or injured. Recently, Hélène Devync, the ex-wife of novelist Emmanuel Carrère, accused him of “borrowing” her for his book, Yogi, an auto-fiction, and thus of violating an agreement he signed not to borrow her. An instance where ontological speculation meets the scandal sheet.
2. There are fictions in which the fictitious character is a piece of clothing – most notably, Gogol’s The Overcoat. H.G. Wells probably was not thinking of The Overcoat when he wrote “The Invisible Man”, but the logic is similar – in the one case, a piece of clothing becomes a real character or at least spirit, while in the other case, clothing of some type or making is necessary to make a person visible (a person who is intent on finding a way out of the invisibility in which he is trapped.
In the Overcoat, the clerk at the center of it, Baschmakin, aka Akaky Akakievich, has a name connected to the Russian word for shoe, bashmak, as the narrator points out – but the shoe is thrown in there as just an odd other thing. In fact, the whole point of the clerk is to be just on the point of recognizability, like a puppet, but not past that point – not to the point where his appearance becomes a positive value:
“… a clerk of whom it cannot be said that he was very remarkable; he was short, somewhat pock-marked, with rather reddish hair and rather dim, bleary eyes, with a small bald patch on the top of his head, with wrinkles on both sides of his cheeks and the sort of complexion which is usually described as hemorrhoidal…”
Yet, no sooner than we are given a somewhat comic description of his complexion than we are back to his genealogy, and particularly his shoes. “Both his father and his grandfather and even his brother-inlaw, and all the Bashmachkins without exception wore boots, which they simply resoled two or three times a year.”
In the shuttling between peripheral clothing items – shoes – and the non-remarkable clerk himself, with the ridiculous complexion and a name that is equally ridiculous, a field is created, or a life, so to speak, in which peripheral clothing items seem to intrude, with a dreamlike insistence, on the “unremarkable”. What kind of vocation suits an unremarkable man best? Gogol again, in a stroke, finds Akaky’s vocation: as a copyist. A pure copyist. The one time he is given a document that requires a bit of editing, he almost collapses. Marking is a torture for an unremarkable man.
As for his uniform: “He gave no thought at all to his clothes; his uniform was-well, not green but some sort of rusty, muddy color. His collar was very low and narrow, so that, although his neck was not particularly long, yet, standing out of the collar, it looked as immensely long as those of the dozens of plaster kittens with nodding heads which foreigners carry about on their heads and peddle in Russia.” A Nabokovian question emerges: can we find a description and natural history of these plaster cats? But no – this is a quest best reserved for other objects – for instance, the German hat worn by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. There, we can look up an actual haberdashery, Zimmerman’s, in St. Petersburg and clap our hands together and rejoice in our little bit of knowledge, our encyclopedic entry, our monad of great price. These plaster kittens, though, seem intended to throw us off.
Indeed, in the case of Raskolnikov’s hat, which we meet on the first page, the whole problem with it is that it is remarkable. And Raskolnikov, planning out his crime, wants to blend in, wants to be Akaky Akakievich-like.
In this sense, Raskolnikov is the opposite of Gogol’s clerk. He is always being remarked. Wheareas Akaky Akakievich dies of being remarked – that is, of wearing his new overcoat, the making of which, with linings included, has been recited by Gogol in the approved epic manner. And of course the overcoat is the death of the clerk - it makes a mark, and in so doing, goes against the very existence of Akaky Akakievich. As he goes out at night in his overcoat and experiences – well, experience, you might say – he violates the terms of his character contract, and naturally wanders into a shadowy area where men with “moustaches” – dimly seen – steal his coat away. This precipitates the last bit of business of the mortal clerk, his attempt to find justice, that is, to have the theft taken seriously. And then the brainfever, and then the death.
“Several days after his death, a messenger from the department was sent to his lodgings with instructions that he should go at once to the office, for his chief was asking for him; but the messenger was obliged to return without him, explaining that he could not come, and to the inquiry "Why?" he added, "Well, you see, the fact is he is dead; he was buried three days ago." This was how they learned at the office of the death of Akaky Akakievich, and the next day there was sitting in his seat a new clerk who was very much taller and who wrote not in the same straight handwriting but made his letters more slanting and crooked.”
A mark – but such a little mark! As for the overcoat, we see, in the sequel, how the ghost of Akaky Akievich exacts a certain justice by taking, in a way, the overcoat of the Person of Consequence – who is so remarkable that he doesn’t even need a name. By the end of the story, the overcoats have doubled – like Dead Souls filling out a list of serfs sold to another remarkable/unremarkable character.
3. In a rollicking attack on D.H. Lawrence as prophet and psychologist entitled “Lorenzo the Closet Queen”, Angela Carter takes the profusion of clothes – and in particular stockings – that Lawrence heaps on the Brangwen sisters in Women in Love to be indicative of Lawrence’s woman problem. “I should like to make a brief, sartorial critique of Women in Love, Lawrence's most exuberantly clothed novel, a novel which, furthermore, is supposed to be an exegesis on my sex, trusting, not the teller but the tale, to show to what extent D. H. Lawrence personated women through simple externalities of dress; by doing so, managed to pull off one of the greatest con tricks in the history of modern fiction; and revealed a more than womanly, indeed, pathologically fetishistic, obsession with female apparel.”
It should be said that Carter also takes Lawrence, at the time she is writing the essay – 1975 – to be the greatest English novelist of the twentieth century. 1975 marks a moment in the trajectory of the “slump” in Lawrence’s reputation, which Lawrentians typically blame on “feminists”. Carter, I think, has another explanation for Lawrence’s rise” “Lawrence's three best novels, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love, form, together, the most moving and profound account of the creation of the twentieth-century British intelligentsia -- British, not exclusively English, of course, because the intelligentsia, itself a new phenomenon in Britain, recruited from all the grammar schools in Wales and Scotland, as well as England. It absorbed colonials and refugees from Europe besides.Those three novels describe the birth of the upper working, lower middle, upwardly socially-mobile-via-education class as a force to be reckoned with.”
It was a class that saw itself in those novels.
What Carter saw in Women in Love, though, was women in stockings. Women in impossible dresses, as well. But always this:
Stockings, stockings, stockings everywhere. Hermione Roddice sports coral-coloured ones, Ursula canary ones, Defiant, brilliant, emphatic stockings. But never the suggestion the fabric masks, upholsters, disguises living, subversive flesh. Lawrence is a stocking man, not a leg man. Stockings have supplanted legs; clothes have supplanted flesh. Fetishism.
The apotheosis of the stockings comes right at the end of the novel, where they acquire at last an acknowledged, positive, sexual significance.
"Gudrun came to Ursula's bedroom with three pairs of the coloured stockings for which she was notorious and she threw them on the bed. But these were thick, silk stockings, vermilion, cornflower blue and grey, bought in Paris."
With sure, feminine intuition, Ursula knows
"Gudrun must be feeling very loving, to give away such treasures".
The excited girls call the stockings "jewels", or "lambs", as if the inert silky things werelovers, or children. Indeed, the stockings appear to precipitate a condition of extreme eroticarousal in Gudrun; she touches them with "trembling, excited hands". The orgasmic nature of the stocking exchange is underlined by a very curious piece of dialogue.
" 'One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings,' said Ursula.
" 'One does' replies Gudrun. 'The greatest joy of all.' "
What is Lawrence playing at? Or, rather, what does he think he's playing at? This sort of camp ecstasy more properly belongs in Firbank, who understood about dandyism in women, dandyism and irony, the most extreme defences of the victim. But Firbank, as plucky a little bantamweight as ever bounced off the ropes, had real moral strength.”
4. Carter’s romp through Lawrence’s romp through the Brangwen’s stockings and undies drawer begins and concludes with a bit about the art of transvestitism, which is what Lawrence approaches and, in her view, fails to pull off. “Like a drag-queen, but without the tragic heroism that enables a transvestite to test the magic himself, he believes women's clothes are themselves magical objects which define and confine women.” The criticism, mind, is not that the drag queen’s art is invalid, but that it, like any art, requires a certain skill and reflection that must suspend the perpetual male attempt to capture women, or define them, by the higher method of letting women capture the performer – a masculine surrender. All reasoning, as Carter admits, that Lawrence would have hated.
The stockings of Lawrence’s characters dreams are products, one should say -in as much as fictional stockings can be products – of a grander thing, something that now wraps the world – the invention of synthetics. In the case of the greens, reds and oranges of stockings, these synthetic dyes caused a limbed renaissance – a flowering of stockings that can be traced in the paintings of the time. Toulouse Latrec, for instance, made a series of paintings of women pulling up their collants – variously translated as hose or tights – which were green or pink or orange.
Whether Lawrence was impressed by this, I do not know. At the end of this life, in an essay on painting, Lawrence makes high claims for another artist – Cezanne – and his struggle to be something other than mental. As always, the latter Lawrence goes to 11.
“Without knowing it, Cezanne, the timid little conventional man sheltering behind his wife and sister and the Jesuit father, was a pure revolutionary. When he said to his models: "Be an apple! Be an apple!" he was uttering the foreword to the fall not only of Jesuits and the Christian idealists altogether, but to the collapse of our whole way of consciousness, and the substitution of another way.”
Lawrence did look intently at his Cezanne’s, and I find something intoxicating about his vision of Cezanne’s apples:
“It is the appleyness of the portrait of Cezanne's wife that makes it so permanently interesting: the appleyness, which carries with italso thefeelingofknowingtheo.ther side as well, the side you don't see, the hidden side of the moon. For the intuitive apperception of the apple is so tangibly aware of the apple that it is aware of it all around, not only just of the front. The eye sees only fronts, and the mind, on the whole, is satisfied with fronts. But intuition needs all-aroundness, and instinct needs insideness.”
Carter’s mockery of Lawrence’s women could be put in Lawrence’s terms, here: we don’t see the all-aroundness of the Gudrun and Ursula’s stockings. And this is not their fault – this is not to be blamed on the sisters, any more than Cezanne’s wife could be credited for her appelyness. He does not see the stockings, the legs, the body, the insideness – he is never completely swept away by transvestite vision.
5. Yes, it is the appelyness of the clothes of fictional characters, or there lack thereof, that is the mystery.
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