The Detective
The narratological elements of Hangsamanwork towards a dissociated, layered and multi-vocal structuring of Natalie’s subjectivity, and, further, portrays girlhood as an experience that constantly, consciously mediates, unstitches, and restitches its own narrative structure. Patchwork Girl restructures girlhood—or, feminized subjectivity, more broadly—in a far more explicitly dissociated, visibly disjointed way, but both texts are using what I call dissociated focalization to depict the markings of patriarchal trauma on narration and girl-selfhood. I use “dissociation” to refer to both its definition within trauma theory and as a narrative device. Dissociation can, for the purposes this essay, be defined as the breakage or disconnection that occurs between a person and their immediate experience and ability to perceive and feel its sensations, or to register the reality of it, usually when experiencing trauma. As defined by psychoanalyst and scholar Paul M. Gedo, dissociation fundamentally “disrupts the person’s sense of internal coherence. It interrupts internal narratives as well as the person’s ability to convey his or her experience to another via discursive language.”[3]
Simplified, focalization can be understood according to narratologist Mieke Bal’s definition: “Focalization is the relationship between the ‘vision,’ the agent that sees, and that which is seen.”[4]The narrator of a text, then, is not necessarily always the focalizing agent, for Bal and others—and, in Natalie’s case, the distinction frequently and volatilely blurs, moving between a series of third-person narration, free indirect discourse, I-statements, and into an almost reflexive ventriloquism. Within the first few pages of the novel, we glean a sense of this effect in a slightly jarring way: in the middle of an otherwise mundane conversation at the breakfast table with her parents, the straightforward third-person narration shifts from Natalie to something else—or perhaps, another layer of Natalie, exposed at the seams:
Natalie, fascinated, was listening to the secret voice which followed her. It was the police detective and he spoke sharply, incisively, through the gentle movement of her mother’s voice. “How,” he asked pointedly, “Miss Waite, how do you account for the gap in time between your visit to the rose garden and your discovery of the body?” “I can’t tell,” Natalie said back to him in her mind, her lips not moving, her dropped eyes concealing from her family the terror she hid also from the detective. “I refuse to say,” she told him. (Jackson, 5)The picturesque scene, and its relatively standard third-person omniscient narration, fractures, but the strangeness of the fracture is also immediately negotiated and integrated into the narrative so that it feels almost inevitable: “It was the police detective and he spoke sharply, incisively, through the gentle movement of her mother’s voice.” Natalie suddenly exists to the reader not as solely herself but as herself and this “secret voice” the police detective, whose presence overlaps with her own as if acknowledging a distinct and unquestionable limb, its syntax matter-of-fact, that “the” conveying a familiarity—“It was the police detective”—but also seems to quietly mutate and project outwards, rendering her mother a ventriloquist, as the “detective” speaks “through the gentle movement of her mother’s voice.” Here, Natalie’s subjectivity, and her narrative grip on it, grow diffuse, multiplied, as does her own mother’s, indicating a link between the construction of femininity and subjectivity more broadly.
The detective features prominently throughout the novel, initially as a narrative quirk, or simply an homage to the adolescent sensationalizing we are all guilty of at times. But the presence of the detective also suggests a more calculated technique, working to effectively act as a “disturbance to the flow” of the narrative, or an easily located subjectivity, and here we can swerve to Patchwork Girl as a sort of magnifying glass. Shelley Jackson explicitly depicts her monster’s own speech as a series of disconnected voices, pluralized, dismembered and consequently untethered to her own physical form and sensations. Clicking on the “Organs” section, for example, directs the reader to an “urn” that says: “This Urn guards a Heart, a Liver, Lungs, Stomach, Guts, and Veins.”[5]Her parts are separated, distinct, and yet the reader is doing the work of trying to gather and reconnect these organs, which would demand us to consider how focalization possibly functions here, when the reader is the agent responsible for this restitching, when the narrator is not always present in every section, certainly not in the “urn.” The strands of voice in Hangsaman might be read best as separate organs in this way, similarly dismembered and yet somehow still contained, glued together by the participation of the reader, doing the necessary work to join the detective, Natalie, and their uncannily-produced narration together. Shelley’s text is littered with body parts, and clicking on “headstone,” it reads, “Here Lies a Head, Trunk, Arms, (Right and Left) and Legs / (Right and left) as well as divers Organs appropriately disposed. May they rest in piece.”[6] The narrator is invisible in these sections; in other sections, there is straightforward first-person “I” narration, but in these moments, the body parts exist alienated from the monster, with no possessive pronouns or any suggestion of a present narrator. Her body appears as severed bits, as disparate pieces, and the reader must actively exhume the text.
Here, Shelley uses what might be referred to as an “unnatural” narratological method. Though “unnatural” narratological structure(s) comprise a wide field and terminology that is still contested and malleable amongst narratologists, for the sake of this essay, J. Alber and Brian Richardson’s definition is helpful, as: “Texts that feature strikingly impossible or antimimetic elements.”[7]Indeed, the monster’s alienation from her own body and voice troubles the distinction between narrator and focalizer, renders it “impossible” and “antimimetic,” in that what should be inanimate objects (organs) are speaking, but because of the liminal state of the monster, those dead objects are reanimated in the reader’s act of clicking on them. Subsequently, the organs speaking demand a reconsideration of how the reader understands subjectivity and its narrative shape, dissociated in its separation of limbs and voice, narrator and focalizer. It is useful to draw from Ellen Peel’s critique of the aforementioned concept of “unnatural narratology” here. Peel interrogates the very use of the term “unnatural” as a signifier of anything other than often-marginalizing unfamiliarity, and says: “Asking “Unnatural for whom?” would, I believe, make unnatural narratology more consistent, complete, and powerful even if it analyzed narratives from only one culture” (85). Thus, the way that Patchwork Girl seemingly undoes normative “mimetic” storytelling is not necessarily always received as such by the reader. As Susan J. Behrens notes in one of the few thorough analyses of Hangsaman, the detective might embody this “undoing” in its disturbance of smooth focalization and its implications for the double-bladed agency of Natalie: “In the various detective scenes, in fact, Natalie is really both the interrogator and interrogated.”[8] Natalie occupies the positionality and narratological role of the “interrogator” and “interrogated” at once. The disjointed form may be read, then, as reflective of the experience of female socialization and trauma under patriarchy. The dissociative structure of the text, in its visual dismemberment of selfhood into fragments and multiple voices, comes from the mouth and consciousness of a girl-monster, crucially, and so maybe this text is only “monstrous” because we read it through a patriarchal context; the “unnatural” affect of the narratology here isn’t necessarily unnatural to the girl-reader but a visible, visceral expression of familiar feelings.
[3] Paul M. Gedo, “Narrative, Dialogue, and Dissociation,” Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 101 (2014): 71-80.
[4] Mieke Bal, Narratology(University of Toronto Press, 1997).
[5] Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl.
[6] Jackson.
[7] J. Alber & Brian Richardson, A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative (2013).
[8] Susan J. Behrens, “The Essential Self of Natalie Waite in Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson,” Names, vol. 69 (2021).