"Walter Raleigh, Triangular Love" in Severance

IMAGINATIVE DISTORTION IN “WALTER RALEIGH,” SEVERANCE

THE FANTASY OF TRIANGULAR LOVE

Robert Olen Butler is best known for his Pulitzer prize winning collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.  The collection of stories adopts a multi-cultural perspective on the lives of Vietnamese refugees who settled into New Orleans after the Vietnam War. Several iconoclastic works followed the Pulitzer: Intercourse and Severance, and although they continued to expand upon the concept of the short story as a representation of the intermeshing frontiers between myth, folklore and history, the narrative framework of these memory clips became more and more contracted. Indeed, Butler’s micronarratives, like Salman Rushdie’s, literary sagas (Midnight’s Children, Booker Prize, 1981), challenge conventionally accepted distinctions of genre and reality. In both cases the fiction is on the periphery of conventional writing techniques.  Following in the wake of Rushdie, Butler creates a discursive space that is suspended between historical reality and fantasy. In this way, the micronarrative switches between historical veracity and dreamlike worlds where an imaginary understanding of cultural identities prevails.  The “life flashes” in Severance raise the question of the relationship between fiction and reality and how this dichotomy is linked to the fantastic. 

If we consider the definition of fantastic as “remote from reality” - “improbable and exaggerated,” the two incipits which Butler placed at the beginning of Severance, point to the fact that he based his theory of the “life flash” on an unrestrainedly fantastic concept. Butler quotes research from Dr Dassy D’Estaing and Dr Emily Reasoner, a fanciful physician and speech therapist, to justify the fact that he limits each micronarrative to exactly two-hundred and forty words.  He quotes the imaginary Dr Dassy D’Estaing as having stated in 1883: “After careful study and due deliberation it is my opinion the head remains conscious for one minute and a half after decapitation.”[1]  Secondly, he refers to the non-existent Dr. Emily Reasoner, as having affirmed that: “In a heightened state of emotion, we speak at one hundred sixty words a minute.”[2] Inspired by the intersection of these two imaginary postulates, Butler limits the life flashes in Severance to two-hundred and forty words; the approximate length of time memory would continue to inhabit a decapitated head. Butler goes on to note that the stories are more about life than death. Each miniature narrative in Severance captures the flow of thought that rushes through the mind of a freshly decapitated head in less than two minutes.[3]

Butler’s miniature short stories take up no more than one page, switching from historical veracity to dreamlike worlds following a process of imaginative distortion. The sixty-two micronarratives in Severance give voice to a vast range of figures; both mythical and historical. Starting from the dawn of civilization - with a pre-historic man decapitated by a saber-tooth tiger in 40,000 B.C, moving on to the Medusa, decapitated by Perseus in 2000 BC, extending through the Golden Age of Greek and Roman Antiquity, panning out over the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the French Revolution, and finally culminating in our postmodern epoch when the writer himself is decapitated in 2008.  To get into the heads of his decapitated characters, Robert Olen Butler, goes through a creative dream storming process, which allows the writer to enter into a state of suspended primal consciousness. In From Where You Dream, Butler explains that the aim is not to reorganize the contents of the unconscious, so much as to maintain this primitive state of consciousness, similar to the unconscious, in order to unshackle the pent up creative process: “The artist is comfortable only with going back to the way in which the chaos is first encountered – that is, moment to moment through the senses” (12).

This stage of what Butler calls “dreamstorming”[4] corresponds to the period during which the writer accesses material, which lies dormant in the core unconscious self.  This creative writing material will become the character’s voice in the life flash where desires, and memories circulate randomly, bubbling up and down the stratum of human consciousness, heedless of spatial-temporal barriers. By collapsing spatial-temporal frames, Butler creates a story-telling space infused with a sense of immediacy. This is furthered by the stylistic choice of eradicating periods, a great deal of punctuation, and by having the character speak entirely in the present tense.[5] The time marker “now” and the insistence on the present tense voice, “I am, I have”, all contribute to a sense of primal bodily presence. In this way, the memory clip anchors the story firmly into the moment of telling so that the reader feels a sense of immediacy.  The story unfolds upon layers and layers of memory which zigzag from past, to present, to future, at random so that temporality is blurred. Constantly shifting meanings run parallel to each other, then cut across each other, only to remain unresolved. This narrative process of imaginative distortion corresponds to a willful subversion of formal syntactic and temporal conventions, and thus inaugurates a period of increasing stylistic changes in Butler’s short story writing.  As a result, the creative writing process in Severance starts by severing with conscious reality, so that the writer can tap into the deepest desires of his character’s yearnings.  As Butler notes in From Where You Dream, “Most of the time, good fiction comes out of an inspiration that includes an intuition of yearning. In your unconscious, in your dreamspace, a character presents herself to you. She is a product of your own deepest white-hot-center, but she is an other.” (42) A case in point, is “Walter Raleigh,”[6] the micronarrative understudy in this paper, which reads as a memory trip, suspended between history and fantasy. The one page memory flash covers approximately ten years in the life of Raleigh, adventurer, poet, soldier, courtier, writer and spy. It focuses on the golden period, when he was the royal protégé of Queen Elizabeth, gallivanting between the court and his expeditions to Colonial America[7] and Venezuela.[8]  In the life flash, Raleigh’s memories form interpolated layers of souvenirs in which apocryphal stories, historical anecdotes and myths of the Elizabethan epoch cross over into each other.

The memory clip unfolds in shifting temporal zones, which are not firmly established in the narrative, but it is clear that they refer to the numerous voyages Raleigh made to the Early American Colonies and to South America. Told from the point of view of Raleigh, the narrative crystallizes around a lexical field of nautical terms linked to the conquest of the New World. This period covers more than a decade of Raleigh’s life, encompassing three major expeditions, under the reign of Queen Elizabeth:  1584, 1587 and 1594-1595. Elliptical references to these voyages are evoked metonymically within the semantic field of a maritime conquest: “sails” ; “masted”; “fills my sails”; “I sail back”; “my new world”, which then transform into more specific geographical references:  “the new-found land” and “the place of the virgin”. The latter is a reference to Raleigh’s discovery of the English colony, which he knighted Virginia in 1584, in homage to the Virgin Queen. The last voyage to “the city of gold,” refers to his trip to the Guiana region (1595), which he recorded in his travel records[9] as the discovery of the mythical land of Milk and Honey, El Dorado. Raleigh’s aim was twofold, as was his vision. In practical terms, he sought to establish settlements, which would fortify Elizabeth’s Colonial empire, but he was also guided by the personal dream of discovering El Dorado, hoping it would bring him fame and fortune.  So, in conjunction with his desire to establish colonies in order to bolster the imperial status of England, were more desires, not to say fantasies, of discovering a Golden World in hopes of extracting riches and wealth, which would allow Raleigh to dazzle the queen and anchor himself firmly in her favour.  Stephen Greenblatt evokes this dream as part and parcel of Raleigh’s megalomaniac fantasy:  “On the strength of his belief in his unique destiny to find a mountain of pure gold and redeem his entire life, Raleigh marshaled a thousand men and a fleet and sailed to Guiana with only the slightest chance for success.” (Sir Walter Raleigh 103-104).  

The veracity of this voyage has never been confirmed, so the “the city of gold”, also referred to as “jungles of ancient lands”, probably signals Raleigh’s failed expedition in 1595 to El Dorado. Finally, an allusion to Raleigh’s discovery of tobacco appears in the closing line of the narrative: “I have already prepared the treasure from my new world, this sweet sotweed this tobacco”. References to indigenous products and colonization of the New World contribute to the discursive unity of the narrative’s historical stratum where Raleigh’s voice channels the imaginative synthesis of private and political desires as the trope of the oceanic conquest suggests.  These cultural and historical referents enable Butler to reconstitute Walter Raleigh’s life flash memories through a narrative base rooted in a network of nautical terms corroborating the topos of British colonization, under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.  It thus sets the tone for historical verisimilitude situated in a time frame roughly between 1592-1603.

Thus, the presence of a politicized European topos can be detected via the voice of Walter Raleigh, who becomes the symbol of the Colonial conquest of the New World.  We can trace this political conquest back to a poetic mission in which Raleigh plays the role of poet and propaganda minister - fabricating the myth of the Virgin Queen.  Thus, the poetic conquest of the queen is encased within the primary narrative of the nautical conquest. Images from Raleigh’s nautical expeditions in the New World are embedded within memories of his intimate and privileged relationship with the queen. As courtier to Elizabeth I, he spent much of his time writing elaborate poetry, and even travel accounts, in praise of the queen’s incomparable virtue, thus performing the function of a much needed spin doctor in a hostile court where Elizabeth was surrounded by enemies who were struggling to spread rumors of her illegitimate link to Henry VIII.[10]  An example in point, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, a book that contributed to the legend of El Dorado, and at the same time to the legend of Queen Elizabeth. Raleigh’s Colonial enterprises are evoked in his writing in terms of an imaginative synthesis of private and political, where the golden reign of Elizabeth converges with the Golden Age of the New World of his poetic aspirations. Thus his exaggerated accounts of founding settlements in Virginia, and discovering El Dorado are inextricably linked to the fantasy of uncovering riches still intact in a land yet unmolested by men.

As a consequence, Raleigh’s semi-apocryphal accounts of conquering territory, yet unplundered, in the New World and South America, were, at the same time, allegorical stories about the secular cult of the virgin Elizabeth.  In 1582 Raleigh was liberated from the Tower, and pardoned by Queen Elizabeth for having married Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting.  During this time he transformed the queen’s highly vulnerable status as an unmarried and childless stateswoman into that of a remote and beautiful, yet inaccessible lady. For Raleigh, adulation of the queen was a survival tool since he was an isolated figure at court. In his tactful love poems: The Phoenix Nest,[11] Raleigh emulates  the queen as the mythological Diana. Associated with virtue and purity, in association with the celestial spheres, the historical Tudor queen is metamorphosed into a mythical untainted body of supreme virtue.[12]  The mystification process played in favor of Elizabeth; allowing her potentially disastrous sexual disadvantage, with no inheritor for the throne, to be transformed into a supreme political tool in which she was immortal in the eyes of her subjects. The memory flash evokes the topicality of this mystical legal fiction in which Elizabeth incarnates the symbolic nexus of power as an immortal goddess and Virgin Mother.  It harks back to epic poems, like Ocean to Cynthia,[13] where the body of the queen figures as an extension of a fertile, unspoiled land from a prelapsarian epoch. Thus, the memory flash can be read as a palimpsest, allowing fact and fiction to merge on a metafictional level which promotes techniques of illusion, all the while exposing the “truth” of the Virgin myth.  As such, Butler’s fiction mimes the imaginative distortion at work in Walter Raleigh’s writing, where the political conquest of the New World and Raleigh’s poetic conquest of the Queen coalesce. They open up on an embedded politico mythical representation of the conquest of the New World (for Elizabeth’s Colonial empire); and the conquest of new myths to incarnate Elizabeth’s supreme political and moral virtues. 

The imaginative distortion of the body, body politic figure resurfaces in the Queen’s mocking words when she refers to herself as fertile, unspoiled land from a prelapsarian epoch:  “call your new-found land the place of the virgin, Virginia, to my lifelong state”. In 1563, Queen Elizabeth had addressed Parliament in similar terms: “And in the end, this shall be for me sufficient that a marble stone declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin” (Neale 1:49).  This topical reference corroborates the representation of Queen Elizabeth’s body as a symbolic displacement of the pristine New World territory and refers back to Raleigh’s body, body politic conquest of the queen in his poetic discourses, resonating into the embedded framework of the memory flash as an instance of imaginative distortion. Butler’s writing technique taps into the mass of mystical-legal fiction produced during the Renaissance, preoccupied, principally with the representation of the body of Elizabeth as undefiled.  This image resurfaces in Butler’s micronarrative, where Elizabeth incarnates the national cult of the Virgin, metonymically linked to the unspoiled British colony: Virginia. At the same time, Butler subverts this topos of purity through symbolic displacements alluding to the sexual conquest of Elizabeth’s body.

In placing the nautical conceit at the center of the story, Butler allows the central signifier of the conquest to secrete a web of fluctuating meanings which ebb and flow throughout the memory clip. An embedded structure emerges within the narrative, suggesting we can read it on different levels: from the nautical, to the political and poetic, but above all it resonates with signifiers linked to the carnal conquest of Elizabeth. The memory flash is firmly anchored in a nocturnal setting corresponding to the Renaissance, and bright torches indicate the onset of night. We soon discover that this chiaroscuro backdrop corresponds to the Queen’s bedchamber. Raleigh’s memories are voiced in the present tense, so as to create a sense of immediacy, as we are plunged, in medias res, into the clandestine rendez-vous of Elizabeth and Walter. A certain level of intimacy between Elizabeth, and her protégé - nineteen years younger than she - is suggested through the possessive case: “my dear old queen my Elizabeth her lips brittle her body smelling sharply beneath the clove and cinnamon from her pomander”. Elizabeth’s pungent body odor is associated with perfumes sought out during the Colonial conquest.  Pomander spices circulated on 15th and 16th century voyages over the cinnamon route and the clove route of the Indian Ocean.  Most highly prized of all luxury goods, only the aristocracy could afford to adorn their chambers with pomanders, a ball or perforated container of sweet-smelling substances placed in a closet, drawer, or room to perfume the air.[14] Thus, this Elizabethan artifact contributes to reinforcing the verisimilitude of the discursive register, channeling meaning within the particular aristocratic community of the story, and at the same time informing the cultural historical topos of colonialism in which the narrative is anchored. In the same way, “besmocked”, describing the queen’s nightdress, gathered around the collar to create pleats, provides a discursive object indicative of Renaissance culture. Intermittent pieces of short utterances from the queen appear in italics so as to sustain her presence in the memory flash.

In association with Elizabeth’s body, Butler introduces the nautical signifier to create the fantasy of a carnal conquest which occurs in the queen’s royal chambers: “she “has asked me here at last and I am masted for her”.  The pun on “mast" points to the metonymical displacement of a ship’s mast onto Raleigh’s body, and substantiates his role as the queen’s paramour in the memory flash. Nautical terms linked to the exploration of new lands: “fills my sails”; “jungles of ancient lands”, in association with “I am sated”, give an erotic tilt to the referential level of discourse.  The core nautical signifier forms a bridge linking the historical facts of Raleigh’s politico-colonial conquest of the crown with the topos of his carnal conquest of the queen.  

Narrative voice suggests that the exploit of bedding the queen is by far the most dangerous of any Raleigh has accomplished: “her bedchamber is black as pitch so she is but a shadow no torch she cried as I entered upon pain of death”.  His self-ironical tone, hints at a note of failure: “now we are arranged thus my own nakedness perhaps too quick”.  Trading irony, for irony, Elizabeth responds: ”call your new-found land the place of the virgin, Virginia, to honor my lifelong state”. The queen’s imperative statement, brimming with jubilant irony, reminds us that she is making love to Raleigh while promoting herself as virgin territory.  Her voice sustains a tone of erotic authority as she cries out: “oh sir oh sir you have found the city of gold at last”. All of this contributes to the bawdy tone and jocular register of indicative of imaginative distortion which plays on metonymical displacements linking the Queen to an historical-mythical El Dorado, a land of Cockaigne, to be exploited to its fullest.

The conflation of these carnal and geographical references to the sexual body and the Colonial body politic contributes to the process of imaginative distortion in which the conquest of the mythical lost Empire of Gold, with its sensual attributes of milk and honey, is extended over to the oxymoronic representation of Elizabeth, as plundered immaculate flesh. The conflation of geographical topoi: “place of the virgin” and  “city of gold”, are displaced onto Elizabeth’s body, so as to transform her into the center of a symbolic nexus of desire in Walter Raleigh’s life flash.  Associated with the exotic spices of the New World: “clove and cinnamon”, Elizabeth embodies the unchartered territory Raleigh is about to enter:  “and I flinch but her smock does rise and I find the mouth of her Amazon”.  The metonymy of the “mouth of her Amazon” illustrates Butler’s playful reconstitution of ribald Elizabethan humor since the topical reference to the Amazons reads as a displacement for sexual preliminaries. This salacious remark conceals an embedded image taken from Walter Raleigh’s Discoverie of Guiana in which he relates an encounter with the Amazons of Ewaipanoma who were said “to have their mouths in the middle of their breasts.” (69) The conflated sexual attributes of the Amazons are transferred over to the female body in the memory clip; as such they contribute to formulating a framed narrative, which corroborates the fantasy, or fear, of insatiable female appetite.  The topos of the male conquest is thus subverted in the memory clip, as the attributes of the conqueror are displaced from Raleigh to Queen Elizabeth who undergoes a metonymical transformation into a mythical warrior, imbued with omnivorous libidinal forces.  

Following the process of imaginative distortion, the micronarrative ripples through different levels of meaning (historical, political, mythological, sexual), to finally erupt in a conflated image of Queen Elizabeth, whose multiple identities converge with those of Walter Raleigh’s young wife, Elizabeth Throckmorton, better known as Bess.  If we reconsider the love-making scene, it becomes clear that Butler has interjected Bess’s voice into the queen’s discourse to form an interpolated narrative sequence where fact and fantasy merge.  In this way, we can hear the voices of Bess and Elizabeth reverberate in the interjection: “swisser swatter”, a deformation of Sir Walter, expressing sexual satisfaction. This celebrated interjection is a topical reference to an anecdote recorded in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives where he relates the story of Bess who was leaning against a tree, moaning ‘Oh sweet Walter, Sweet Sir Walter.’ The historian notes that as “Raleigh brought her closer to the brink of pleasure it turned into ‘swisser swatter.’”[15] This sexual pun surfaces in the life flash through the process of condensation and displacement when queen Bess utters “oh swisser swatter”.  As such, the salacious anecdote, placed in the mouth of Queen Elizabeth, completes the process of imaginative distortion in the memory clip by opening the story up to another layer of embedded fiction: the fantasy of a ménage à trois where Bess, the wife, and Elizabeth, the spinster queen/lover form a conflated subject. 

Butler brings on this synthesis through syntactic and semantic ploys, which contribute to giving the impression that Bess and Elizabeth are one and the same character, when in fact they are unique historical individuals, separated in age by a good twenty-five years.  Bess is thus manifested in the embedded consciousness of the “old brittle lady”, Elizabeth I. The function of this embedded discourse - where Bess’s voice has been substituted for the queen’s - is to transform Elizabeth into a figure emblematic of female desire, rather than chastity.  All of this corroborates the fact that Elizabeth’s multiple selves and voices are encapsulated within Bess, the court’s budding beauty, Elizabeth Throckmorton. The memory frame thus connects a series of fantasies relating Walter Raleigh’s erotic exploits to apocryphal accounts of lovemaking with Bess/Elizabeth.  In this sense, Butler’s writing process creates a porous narrative layer where fact and fiction can intermingle and coalesce.  The text can thus be read as a palimpsest onto which has been grafted a compelling fantasy of a ménage à trois between Walter Raleigh, and the Virgin Queen, who doubles for Walter Raleigh’s young wife.   It is precisely this conflation of female desire, which forms the white-hot center of narrative voice in Walter Raleigh. 

The fantasy culminates in an encapsulated image of Queen Elizabeth’s “long fingers scrawling a history of the world upon my [Raleigh’s] back”.  Up until now Elizabeth has functioned principally as the symbolic center of an erotic fantasy.  But behind this sexualized representation there lies another linking her to the that of a playwright, or director, writing her script on the back of Walter Raleigh, who is transformed into a human palimpsest: “her long fingers scrawling upon my back a history of the world”.  As such, Queen Elizabeth is substituted for Walter Raleigh, the veritable author of History of the World.[16] This compressed image represents a final ironical shift in identity.  

The association of Elizabeth with History functions as a powerful reminder of the role she played in determining the fate of men’s lives.  Indeed, Elizabeth recalls the emblem of Fate in Walter Raleigh’s History of the World where an omniscient, capricious and blind feminine will is figured forth as History: “The Mistresse of all men’s life, grave historie/ Raising the world to good or Evil fame/ Doth vindicate it to AEternitie.”[17] In the memory clip, the encapsulated image of Queen Elizabeth, inscribing the history of the world on her lover’s back, can be translated as a living emblem of a feminized body natural/ body politic image.[18] The representation of this metamorphosis - from writer of her own fictions (the national and imperial cult of the Virgin Queen), to author of universal history, suggests Elizabeth has acquired something beyond the whole theatrical apparatus of royal power in determining man’s inexorable destiny, that is to say Fate.  Fate, in emblematic imagery of the Renaissance, was often depicted as the pagan goddess Fortune, allegorically conceived as the ruler of human destiny.  There is something acutely poignant about the fact that Queen Elizabeth was, in more ways than one, the ruler of Raleigh’s life. As a result, the micronarrative can be read on the metafictional level. At the center of this palimpsest of overlapping images and stories is Queen Elizabeth, who embodies the conquest of Imperial Power. She also functions as the master play writer of a stage-play world, and in this sense she contributes to the fusion of personal and universal myths, and historical and fictional narratives in “Walter Raleigh.” 

To put this into perspective, we must not overlook the fact that the allusion to Queen Elizabeth writing The History of the World formulates a passage which is both apocryphal and anachronistic.  The historical deformation of authorship and personal biography feed into the literary process of imaginative distortion. Indeed, The History of the World was completed in 1614: eleven years after the demise of Elizabeth who would expire in 1603, leaving Sir Walter Raleigh in the hands of another fate: King James I, who cared little for the courtier’s literary talent. Imprisoned by James, shortly after the death of Elizabeth, Raleigh would spend years writing The History of the World before he finally suffered the same fate as Anne Boleyn, executed on charges of treason.  Written in the Tower from 1609 to 1614, his History served as testimony to his profound and erudite knowledge of historical events, but his accounts remained constantly shifting and perspective and meaning ceaselessly changed.  This penchant for imaginative distortion, specific to Butler, also applies to Sir Walter Raleigh’s writing. Greenblatt evokes this process, as Raleigh’s desire to shape fact into his own fictions, or in other words - to mould history into a personal myth: “Raleigh kept alive within himself the opposing vision that the role and reality can converge so that by the power of the imagination the world is recreated in the image of man’s desires” (102-103). From this perspective, Raleigh’s historical fictions, much like Butler’s life flash narratives, look to the process of imaginative distortion to carry out their creative impulses.  Butler’s evocation of Walter Raleigh’s memory flash draws on a creative process where fact and fiction cohabit so intimately that their borderlands become inseparable. 

In the closing scene of the memory flash, focalization pans in on Walter Raleigh, who momentarily steps out of the narrative frame: the bedroom, to seek an exotic souvenir from the New World in hopes of enticing the queen’s senses, “I say wait, my queen and I am out her door to the nearest torch”.  He then steps back, or rather “sails back” into the memory frame - in mid-sentence - after having lit up the choice tobacco from his exploits abroad, “I have already prepared the treasure from my new world, this sweet sotweed this tobacco, and I sail back and slip in beside her and we sit and smoke”. There is no period at the end of the sentence to finalize action, feeling or thought. The story remains open-ended, leaving the reader with the impression that the memory is not of a last smoke in the gallows, but rather a white-hot smoke with a lover. In addition, stylistic devices contribute to a sense of immediacy; the use of the present tense and the absence of periods bring on a collapsing of spatial temporal barriers, and add to a pattern of creative destruction eliciting a sense of perpetual semantic renewal.  In this way, the reader can find a space in the living, breathing and carnal moment, shared alongside the historical/fictional Raleigh and his lover, Queen Elizabeth.  With no allusion to Raleigh’s tragic ending, the memory flash succeeds in filtering out parts of reality that don’t fit into the selective memories of yearning.  In this way, focus is placed on the hedonistic pleasures associated with Walter Raleigh who was credited with introducing tobacco into the Tudor court, and in the memory clip the adventurer shares this pleasure with Elizabeth. In this way, Butler’s creative process draws largely on historical fantasy and thus recalls the magic realism of Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children where the fiction writer allows memory the utmost liberty to create:  “It [memory] selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also. But in the end it creates its own reality, its own heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events.”[19]

This conversion of fact into fiction and reality into fantasy in the memory clip of “Walter Raleigh” mirrors Butler’s creative writing process in Severance where narrative voice has a liberating function. It opens up on narratives which play with the potential of creating mediated realities, and in the case of “Walter Raleigh,” the memory flash provides new channels for expressing the imaginative synthesis of private and political desires. Furthermore, although the micronarrative is ostensibly about Walter Raleigh, it reads more as a testament to liberating repressed female desire. Bess, the surrogate lover, serves as a liberating agent for the queen’s unprofessed yearnings as we can see from the subtle process of displacement which allows Bess to fill in for the longings Elizabeth was compelled to repress, or conceal, in order to ward off the dangers of being associated with “the Great Whore,”[20] Anne Boleyn. 

Severance, a collection of micro-narratives by the Pulitzer writer, Robert Olen Butler, emanates from a writing technique similar to Salman Ruhsdie’s  “magic realism.”  Following in the wake of Rushdie, Butler creates a discursive space of imaginative distortion for characters suspended between historical reality and fantasy.  In the case of “Walter Raleigh” which is understudy in this essay, the micro narrative consists of precisely two hundred and forty words, which are enunciated at the moment of the character’s beheading.  In this way the collection of micronarratives in Severance crosses the line of consciousness and unconsciousness, appearance and disappearance of life, so as to crystallize in a moment of living death. As a result, the technique of imaginative distortion in Severance inaugurates a period of increasing stylistic changes in Butler’s short story writing. Fictional and historical characters intermesh through the process of condensation and displacement creating new frontiers in the technique of micronarrative writing: revisiting myth and history through the technique of imaginative distortion.

 WORKS CITED

Butler, Robert, Olen.  A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. New York: H. Holt, 1992. 

---.From Where You Dream: the Process of Writing Fiction. Ed. Janet Burroway. New York: Grove Press, 2005.

---. Severance. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006.

Erickson, Carolly. Brief Lives of the English Monarchs. London: Constable, 2007.

Freud, Sigmund. Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin, 1991.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Sir Walter Raleigh, the Renaissance Man and His Roles. London: Yale University Press, 1973.

Kantorowicz, Ernst, H.  The King’s Two Bodies, a Study in Mediaeval Political Theology.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Neale, J.E.  Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1559-1581, 1584-1601, vol. 1-2. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965.

Raleigh, Walter.  The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana.  London, 1596.  Edited by V.T. Harlow. London, 1928.

---. The History of the World. Second Edition, London, 1614. 

---. Ocean to Cynthia, in The Courtly Poets from Raleigh to Montrose. London, 1870.  Reedited by Agnes Latham, Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, London, 1952.

---.The Phoenix Nest. Oxford, 1953. Edited by Helen Estabrook Sandison.

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. New York: Knopf, 1981.

Seamen, Donna. “An Interview with Robert Olen Butler,” Web, Bookslut, February 2007.

   ILLUSTRATIONS

Elizabeth I bestriding her kingdom like a Colossus in the Ditchley portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts, the younger, National Portrait Gallery,

[1] First incipit to Severance.

[2] Second incipit to Severance.

[3] In Donna Seamen’s “Interview with Robert Olen Butler,” he, affirms: “Severance isn’t about the blade or the ax, or even death, but about life: the phenomena of life passing before our eyes” p. 5.

[4] This in-between-state, analogous to the unconscious, can be attained through a process that Butler calls “dreamstorming.” (See Butler, From Where You Dream, pp. 23-28). As Freud has demonstrated, the most favorable environment for the unconscious voice to surface occurs in dreams where our unfettered desires and fears are free to express themselves. (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 691). 

[5] In order to facilitate the flow of language, the period is not used in Butler’s micronarratives, each of which resembles a long sentence. For this reason, in citing Severance, I have taken the liberty of limiting the use of brackets which would quickly become extraneous in my essay. In addition, my punctuation is always placed outside quotation marks, signifying the absence of periods in Butler’s memory clips.

[6] Reference to the “Walter Raleigh,” is invariably p. 93 of Severance.

[7] The Colonial expeditions correspond to 1584 (North Carolina and Virginia), and 1587 (Roanoke Island). 

[8] His maiden voyage to Venezuela (El Dorado) corresponds to 1594-1595 and his last trip took place under the reign of King James (1616). 

[9] His account of his voyage, The Discoverie of Guiana, published on his return, is the most brilliant of all the Elizabethan narratives of adventure, but contains much manifest romance.

[10] Having divorced Anne Boleyn, beheaded on trumped up charges of treason and immorality, Henry VIII went on to claim that his daughter, Elizabeth, was illegitimate.

[11] Praised be Dianas faire and light, Praised be hir powre, by which all powres abound […] In heaven Queene she is among the spheares, Is ay she Mistres like makes all things pure, Eternitie in hir […]  In her is vertues perfect image cast.” Walter Raleigh, The Phoneix Nest, pp. 10-11. 

[12] See, Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Raleigh pp. 54-55.

[13] “There is much debate as to the date of publication of Raleigh’s poems.  There is also some question as to whether the poems were even written to the queen, but in general scholars tend to agree that they were conceived during Raleigh’s first imprisonment and were addressed, though never sent directly, to the queen. Ocean to Cynthia was first published from the holograph at Hatfield by Archdeacon Hannah in his edition of The Courtly Poets in 1870. John Hannah, The Courtly Poets from Raleigh to Montrose (London, 1870).

[14] Old French pome d'embre, from medieval Latin pomum de ambra ‘apple of ambergris’. 

[15] Integral quote: “leaning against a tree, moaning ‘Oh sweet Walter, Sweet Sir Walter,’ as he brought her closer to the brink of pleasure; and as the danger of their being discovered increased, so did the moaning which turned into ‘Swisser swatter.’” p. 256.

[16] The History of the World (1614) was intended to outline historical events from creation to modern times, drawing on the Bible, Greek mythology, and other sources. Raleigh dedicated it to the young Prince Henry, his patron and supporter who was trying to secure his release from prison.

[17] See Stephan Greenblatt, Walter Ralegh, the Renaissance Man and His Roles, Chapter 5, note 4.

[18] See Ernst Kantorowicz,  p. 9 for a full explanation of the King’s Two Bodies which “form one unit indivisible, each being fully contained in the other. However doubt cannot arise concerning the superiority of the body politic over the body natural.” 

[19] Rushdie, p. 43.

[20] See Carolly Erickson, Brief Lives, regarding the defamation of Anne Boleyn’s reputation, pp. 232- 233.  

Selected Bibliography

Fiction manuscript prize awarded by Technikart magazine at the Salon du Livre, (March 2011). A Darker Shade of Light, collected short stories.

Poésies in Imaginaries II, Repérages, Presses de l'Université de Nantes,  1996.

Poésies in Imaginaries II, Repérages, Presses de l'Université de Nantes,  1997.

“Wanted” in Short Story, University of Texas at Brownsville, 2006. 

“The Predator” in Short Story, University of Texas at Brownsville, 2009.

“Nothing to Lose,” in Short Story, University of Texas at Brownsville, 2012.

“Around the Curve” Bridges: a Global Anthology of Short Stories, ed. Maurice A. 

Lee.Charleston: Temenos Publishing, 2012.

“A Darker Shade of Light ” in Resonances-Femmes, Presses de l'Université Paris 8, 2012.

“Around the Curve” in Bridges : a Global Anthology of Short Stories, ed. Maurice A. Lee. 

Temenos Publishing, 2012.

“The Intruder” in Upbraiding the Short Story: a Global Anthology, ed. Maurice A. Lee.  

Charleston: CreateSpace, 2014.

“Going off the Deep End,” Short Story, University of Texas at Brownsville, 2014.

“The Grim Reaper” in Global Anthology on the Short Story, ed. Maurice A. Lee.  East China 

Normal University Press, 2016.

“Pussy Kate; Schmoozy” in Global Anthology on the Short Story, ed. Hengshan Jin,  (Chinese/English), East China Normal University Press, 2016. 

“Trick or Treat” in Journal of the Short Story in English, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 

2016.

« My Double Life » in Anthology of Fiction from around the Globe : The Radiance of the Short Story », ed. Maurice A. Lee and Aaron Penn, University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, 2018. 

LITERARY CRITICISM

Books

Le Théâtre Romantique en Crise (1830-1848)  William Shakespeare et Gérard de Nerval, 

Harmattan Critiques Littéraires, 2005. L’ouvrage a été retenu pour concourir pour le prix de la SAES.

Books, collaborative

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, contributor: “Shakespeare and Nerval,” eds. Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells, Oxford University Press, 2002.

La Nouvelle anglo-saxonne, initiation à une lecture psychanalytique, en collaboration avec

Claude Maisonnat et Patrick Badonnel, collection Hachette Supérieur, 1998. 

ARTICLES 

“Gérard de Nerval, porte-parole de la réforme dramatique shakespearienne,” in Cahiers Gérard de Nerval, Mulhouse, 1994.

“The Rhetoric of Rupture in John Hawkes’ Second Skin,” l’université de Clermont-Ferrand, 1995.  

“Shakespeare as the French would have him: Voltaire and Nerval ” in The Shakespeare Yearbook, Shakespeare and France.” Edwin Mellen Press, New York, 1995.

“Figures of Persuasion in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare “Presses Universitaires de Nancy, l’université de Nancy, 1996. 

“Mourning and Melancholy in Carson McCuller’s The Sojourner,” “Psychanalyse et Ecriture,” l’université de Nice, 1997. 

“Signifiying the Sutured Self ; an Anatomy of  Mock-Epic Rituals in Jere Hoar’s  Body Parts -A  Memory of 1944 ”Journal of the Short Story in English, Les Cahiers de la Nouvelle, Presses de l’université d’Angers, 1998.

“Contemporary Prose Tragedy and Shakespearean Tragedy : All the King’s Men; Hamlet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar,”l’université de Chambéry,1999. 

“L’objet de l’histoire enchâssée dans Hamlet et All the King’s Men,” Paris VII, 1999.

“Proportion and Disproportion in Richard III,” Lyon II, Publications universitaires du CERE, Montpellier, 2000.

“La mise à mort de la victime dans Hamlet dans All the King’s Men,” in RANAM Discours de la victim, l’université de Presse Strasbourg, 2000.

“Translating Metaphors and Symbols: Shakespeare as a Medium of Cultural Exchange,” l’ESSE, Helsinki, 2000.

“Le sens de la démesure dans Antony and Cleopatra,” Lectures de Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2000.

“From Roman Propaganda to Mannerism; the Facts of Fantasy in Antony and Cleopatra, Seventh World Shakespeare Congress; Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman World, Leaders, Valencia, 2001.

“Perversion in Othello du père au pervers,” opera libretto, Verdi, Otello, l’Opéra de Nantes, Théâtre Graslin, 2001.  

“Deviation and In-betweeness in ‘The Sea Change’, d’Ernest Hemingway,” Journal of the Short Story in English, Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 2007.

“Fusion and Exclusion in Macbeth, FAAAM, L’écriture du corps dans la littérature féminine de langue anglaise,” Actes des Colloques, Textes et Genres  III, l’université Paris X Nanterre, 2007. 

“Mediating between Competing Systems of Representation in Macbeth,” Actes du colloque international du Centre de Recherche sur les Conflits d’Interprétation, (CERCI), l’université de Nantes, 2008.  

“Body and Yearning in Severance,” Robert Olen Butler, Short Story, ed. Farhat Iftekharuddin, University of Texas at Brownsville, 2009. 

“Writing toward the White Hot Center in Robert Olen Butler’s Severance,” American Literature Association Symposium, Savannah, 2009.

“The Wisdom of Eve, adapté au grand écran par Mankiewicz, ” Nouvelle et Cinéma  (FMSH, CRILA, SERC) la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010. 

“Cultural Interactions between France and the U.S.,”  Florida State University, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, “ The Adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie by Jacques Nichet ,” 2011.

“Orality and the Lost Object of Desire in 'A Perfect Day for a Banana Fish' by D.J. Salinger,” Anglophilia, Merryworld : Leurres de l’Identité, Lueurs du Désir, Lyon, 2011.

“Dramatic Immediacy in Robert Olen Butler’s ‘Anne Boleyn’, Severance” in Short Story, University of Texas at Brownsville, 2011. 

“Expressionism, Depression and Repression in The Glass Menagerie,” “Ecritures et Psychanalyse”, Paris III/V, 2011

“Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie and Jacques Nichet’s Ménagerie de Verre,”  Nouvelle et Cinéma/Short Story on Screen  (SUDS) et (CRILA) 2011.

“The Making of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie,” Tennessee Williams in Europe, A Centenary Celebration, l’université de Nancy, 2011. 

“The Secret of Writing Short Fiction,” Résonances, Saint Denis: Université Paris 8, 2012.

“A Long Way for a Short Story: The Filmic Narrative Mode of The Glass Menagerie,” Journal of the Short Story in English, The Short Story and Cinema, Presses de l’université d’Angers, 2012.

“Introduction to Robert Olen Butler, Journal of the Short Story in English,” The Short Story and Cinema, “Presses de l’université d’Angers, 2012.

“Imaginative Distortion in Robert Olen Butler’s ‘Walter Raleigh’ (Severance): The Fantasy of Triangular Love,” Short Story, University of Texas at Brownsville, 2012.

“The Power of Illusion and the Illusion of Power in Mary Orr's 'The Wisdom of Eve' and Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve,” Nouvelle et Cinéma/Short Story on Screen, Journal of the Short Story in English, Presses de l’université d’Angers, 2013.

“Sacred Profanity and the Trickster figure in ‘Good Country People,” Journées d’Etudes (Flannery O’Connor, New Readings, New Perspectives), l’université de Nice, Sofia-Antipolis, 2014.  

“Conformism and Deviance in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Good Country People’ Ecritures et Psychanalyse,” l’université de Caen, 2014.

“Some Critical Truths about Metaphor and Metonymy,” on “Short Fiction Writers with a Theory: Re-Reading Short, Université Catholique de Lille, 2014.

“Au lit en compagnie avec du divin Marquis” d’Anthony Burgess in La France et moi traduction: Alice Clark et Marc Jeannin. Presses de l’université d’Angers, 2014.  

“The Liminal Zone in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Good Country People,’  in Anglophilia, Merry World, 2015. 

“Seeking a Balance between Tragedy and Comedy, ” an Interview with the author : Lisa Alther in Journal of the Short Story in English, Representation and Rewriting Myths in Southern Short Fiction, 2016.