- 1 Celestial Seraglio (1929), a novel about schoolgirls in a Belgian convent; Spleen (1930), the story (...)
- 2 To the best of my knowledge, the text has been commented only once, by Sophie Cavey. In the first c (...)
- 3 Most of the articles published so far have focused on Spleen: Jane Garrity, ‘Olive Moore’s Headless (...)
- 4 ‘Woman as Uncreative Artist. Art is a masculine prerogative’ (386), ‘Woman as Uncreative Artist. Wo (...)
1‘Civilisation is the distance man has placed between himself and his excrement’ (339). The first aphorism of The Apple Is Bitten Again (Self Portrait) captures Olive Moore’s pithy turn of mind, and sets the tone for the whole text. The Apple is Bitten Again was the last book published by Moore, an obscure modernist author, whose work was retrieved from oblivion some twenty years ago. It was published in 1934 after three novels: Celestial Seraglio (1929), Spleen (1930), and Fugue (1932).1 The Apple is Bitten Again (335–418) is not a novel but a disparate collection of aphorisms, a ‘selection from [her] notebooks’ (336). The table of contents indicates that there are sixteen notebooks; the first eleven ones are grouped together (Notebook Number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven. Observation, Comment, Thought [337]), while each of the following ones focuses on a specific topic. The selection as a whole includes a number of recurrent themes, with aphorisms and longer passages on a range of subjects, including England, art, religion, women, humankind, and the ‘creative artist’. These are interspersed with a number of various trivialities and witty statements. What can explain the relative neglect of Moore and of this book in particular2 is not the downright acerbic tone of the selection but her shocking misogynistic views, as well as her disregard for the masses—some of the critics who have delved into these issues have found it hard to swallow this bitter pill.3 Moore was no doubt a ‘difficult feminist’ (Cavey 2022, 6) and a misanthropist, but she was not desperate as is evident from the final sentences in The Apple is Bitten Again: ‘I love life. I would not barter with the most illustrious dead the privilege of being alive; my feet above ground, my eyes in their sockets’ (418). Her rejection of her own era, which she called ‘the Sentimental Age’, was fierce and lucid, but she lived life to the full. This is one of the many paradoxes to be found in the text; the main one being her assertion that women cannot be ‘creative artists’ while viewing herself as one. If, on the one hand, Moore voices essentialist beliefs that amount to blunt assertions of boundaries4, on the other hand some recurrent themes as well as the formal characteristics of The Apple Is Bitten Again justify the idea that the ‘creative artist’ is, in her opinion, the one who transcends boundaries and favours a thought in constant motion. In that sense, Moore fits into ‘the orbit of modernism, because early-twentieth-century writers were themselves so preoccupied with border crossing such as cosmopolitanism, synaesthesia, racial masquerade, collage, and translation’ (Mao & Walkowitz 2006, 2). In fact, a study of her work in general, and of The Apple Is Bitten Again (Self Portrait) in particular, fits into ‘the vertical expansion’ that the New Modernist Studies began in 1999, ‘a vertical expansion . . . in which canons have been critiqued and reconfigured; in which works by members of marginalized social groups have been encountered with fresh eyes and ears’ (Mao & Walkowitz 2008, 737–738).
2Taking as my starting point a quotation (in Italian) to be found in the text—‘Who makes a book does less than nothing if the book made does not remake the genre’ (Metastasio, quoted 380; my translation)—I will mainly focus on the formal characteristics of this modernist text, in order to show that this deeply experimental work aims at crossing boundaries, be they generic, linguistic or textual. After looking at her critique of England, Woman and Mankind, which is based on the very notion of limitations, I will analyse how hybridity and heterogeneity are presented in the form of this modernist book so as to challenge categorisation, and finally I will delve more precisely into the choice of aphorisms as a way of abolishing static frontiers and borders and favouring displacement, in particular the displacement of the readers and their polarised certainties.
3The objective of this first part is to show that although Moore was an essentialist in some respects, in particular as far as gender was concerned, she was nonetheless very critical of people’s lazy acceptance of social categories and ontological boundaries.
4In the first eleven notebooks, Moore targets England and the English, Civilisation and Mankind. Her disapproval of England—and of women—, particularly in notebooks twelve and thirteen, is based on a bitter sense of limitations. Notebook Number Twelve (381–385) is centred on London, Eng. (337, 381) and develops the sustained metaphor of the British Population as a population of ‘Untouchables’ (381). The lexical field of ‘boundary’ abounds: ‘the restrained street-life’ (381), ‘the compartmented classes’ (381), ‘Ours, the mistrustful insular confinement of life chopped-up in rooms’ (382), ‘our water-tight compartment’ (382), ‘restricted movement’ (382), ‘excluded’ (382), etc. Such words can also be found in the notebook focused on women, Notebook Number Thirteen; Woman as Uncreative Artist (386–393): ‘. . . I have never finished a book written by a woman without, for all its charm and excellence, a sense of limitation’ (391), ‘Mentally [woman] is circumscribed, passive, and censorious’ (391), etc. She also denounces all the restrictions to be found in her mother country whether they are disguised as conventions and class boundaries (373, 381–382) and all the constraints imposed on English people by public schools (383), urban settings (345), the family (377), and middle-class morality: ‘[In England], there are laws, restraints, limitations’ (394). What is worse, people in general, and English people in particular, tend to accept social but also ontological restrictions without much ado: ‘What most one distrusts in the human creature is his limitation: his smug acceptance of that limitation’ (357).
5The omnipresence of walls and fences in England explains Moore’s desire to go and be elsewhere (Italy, New York and the Continent—places where she had lived [345, 357, 376, 382, 383]) and also her support of D.H. Lawrence’s ‘mistrust of England’ (401), restlessness, and revolt: ‘He had to an unusual degree that passion for freedom which artists, criminals, and tramps share of all living men’ (401). Although she does not endorse D.H. Lawrence’s choice of subjects (398), she considers him a ‘creative artist’, who was aware and wary of all the walls and limitations imprisoning Man and who denounced them with ‘anger and pain’ (401)—in other words with an intensity of feelings that she praises.
6Moore’s literary essay on D.H. Lawrence presented in Notebook Number Fourteen (394–401) is entitled Further Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, and had been published separately by The Blue Moon Press two years earlier (1932). Lawrence’s denunciation of the limitations imposed by civilisation is captured in a nutshell in the last paragraph of his essay ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine’, which begins with the sentence, ‘Our last wall is the golden wall of money. This is a fatal wall. It cuts us off from life, from vitality, from the alive sun and alive earth’ (Lawrence). It appears that the connection between Moore’s literary essay and the selections from the other notebooks, though not immediately apparent, is partly based on the feeling of rebellion and the urge to transgress social and moral norms the two authors shared. Moreover, in Notebook Number Fifteen; The Apple Is Bitten Again (403–412), which is the notebook following the literary essay, Moore’s contempt for man is grounded on his arrogance, his hubristic separation from all the other creatures and the boundaries he has erected between himself and nature: ‘So proud, so limited, that we call man the reasoning being’ (403). She debunks human supremacy (406), points to the similarities between species across barriers (‘the writer . . . discovers that a Brain as fine, as reasoning, has been given to the smallest sentient thing’ [403]) and asserts the fullness of being of each creature, including ‘vegetable[s], flower[s], tree[s]’ (403), in a manner that is similar to D.H. Lawrence’s when he deconstructs ‘traditional anthropomorphic assumptions’ and speaks of the ‘dandelion in full flower’ in his essay ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine’ (Dogerthy 39).
7In the same notebook (Notebook Number Fifteen; The Apple Is Bitten Again [403–412]), Moore encourages man to cross fixed boundaries by relying on reason so as to ‘break from the confines of dreams’ (415), in other words all the religious mythologies that man has invented. Though she demurely acknowledges that she knows nothing of what she is talking about when she writes like ‘a pseudo-scientist philosopher’ (409) and posits that nothing exists without a ‘local brain’ (405), she feels vindicated in doing so because she asserts that the ‘creative artist’ is a ‘Fore-runner’ (409), the one who is able to cross boundaries and transgress norms, unlike the ‘imitative artist’, whose art has ‘its little fence around it’ (357). The ‘creative artist’ is free and knows no limitations (350, 358): ‘The true “creative artist” is defined as an individual who removes themself from the limitations of humanity and forges their own creative and unique path’ (Cavey 2018, 20). He can see beyond what is visible (409) but also beyond the walls erected by ‘class, community or profession’ (350) and can cross the boundaries of convention, decency and ‘polite thinking’ (376)—as Moore herself does from time to time when she lists for example all the good reasons for cannibalism in a matter-of-fact tone, reminding the reader of Jonathan Swift’s irony (345–346), vindicates ‘the Bombing of Non-Combatants’ (350), or writes a crude aphorism: ‘Further distinction. Man opens his arms: woman her thighs’ (389).
8Thus, although Moore’s stance on women might suggest that she agrees with biological boundaries and considers the ensuing cultural boundaries as logical, it is clear that on the vast majority of other topics she sees herself as a ‘creative artist’ whose role is to transgress boundaries—as indicated by the biblical reference of the title—and to decompartmentalise thought. Moore does not satisfy herself with hammering home the point that this is the artist’s prerogative; she makes it clear through the formal characteristics of her work. The ‘creative artist’ is also the one who discards all the boundaries erected by the literary traditions, which is precisely what Moore does when she uses some of the modernist strategies associated with boundary-crossing.
- 5 ‘Dès que du genre s’annonce, il faut respecter une norme, il ne faut pas franchir une ligne limitro (...)
- 6 Her first poem was sent to publisher Charles Lahr in 1932 to be contained in his annual set of Blue (...)
- 7 ‘City-bound Train. Popular Newspapers. The caterwauling of a great city. The fig-leaf placed agains (...)
9One of the things The Apple is Bitten Again disrupts is the notion of the literary genre, which the reader can no longer cling to as a handhold. Literary genres are supposed to make it easier to categorise works.5 In The Apple is Bitten Again, however, different genres coexist, so that it is impossible to label the work. For example, in the first eleven notebooks the policed borders of poetry and prose are transgressed. The reader comes across two poems (371)6 and also an aphorism that recalls a short poem by Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (364).7 In the last three notebooks, the reader finds a literary essay on D.H. Lawrence (394–402), which is not written in the aphoristic form and was added, Moore claims wryly, ‘for no reason but that [she was] sick and tired of being quoted and plagiarised without acknowledgment’ (336); a pseudo-scientific philosophical notebook (403–412), ‘scribbled under an apple-tree’ (409), in which Moore coins the concept of ‘the Local Brain’ (405); and a series of thoughts on life and death (412–418), culminating in what might be called the writer’s credo, Finale (418). No wonder the reader is baffled by the selection from her notebooks. Moreover, on a more general level, the collection in which so many aphorisms are gathered puts forward the notion of fragmentation, which makes it impossible for the work to fit into a neat category: ‘[L]es œuvres fragmentales sont, à tout égard, des œuvres problématiques, des œuvres qui échappent. D’abord à un genre établi . . .; ensuite à une conception quasi-noble, attestée, de la littérature. Des œuvres qui s’échappent, en ce sens qu’elles échappent aussi, du fait de leur trop grande / disparité à elles-mêmes’ (Van Ruymbeke 10–11).
10In addition to this mixture of genres, Moore also blends lowbrow and highbrow culture as if the better to undermine all notion of hierarchy: popular sayings, aphorisms about cooking and wine (339, 342), etc., can be found side by side with literary quotes. Moore refers several times to Newsreels (343, 349, 363) and the Kinematograph (348), but she also mentions the names of the poets, thinkers and artists she views as ‘creative artists’—W. Blake, H. Stendhal, L. da Vinci, J. Joyce, F. Goya, etc.—and whom she sometimes quotes (335, 395). Such an unorthodox juxtaposition is exemplified by the epigraph to her essay on D.H. Lawrence: ‘On n’est pas né seulement pour boucher des trous. Popular French saying’ (394). Not only may the saying be cryptic at first, but the connection of this epigraph with the literary essay that follows is also unclear. The reader who understands French is likely to be somewhat taken aback by the incongruous juxtaposition of this popular saying and of a literary essay beginning with an allusion to Marcel Proust, even if on a very light tone (394). It is as if Moore was deflating right from the start the authority of her own words about D.H. Lawrence at the very moment when she also asserts the finality of her words (the subtitle of this notebook being Final Word on D. H. Lawrence [337, 394]). Such a gesture of rebellion against the usual literary borders and divisions was a rather common practice amongst modernist novelists and poets (James Joyce’s Ulysses and Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage come to mind). As summed up by Mao and Walkowitz, ‘[i]n the wake of Huyssen’s influential work, scholars have complicated the high-low or art-versus-commodity story in countless ways, noting how modernist ambitions were entangled with the language of advertising and the commodification of the bohemian (Bowlby; Cooper; Wicke), how modernist writers absorbed and remade forms of mass culture rather than merely disparaging them’ (Mao & Walkowitz 2008, 744).
- 8 In a few cases, however, the words are written in italics, namely when they are inserted within an (...)
11Another way of crossing boundaries, also often found in modernist fiction and essays, is the mixture of several languages, what is sometimes referred to as ‘literary translingualism’ or multilingualism (Taylor-Batty 5). There are several sentences or passages in French, like the aforementioned French popular saying (349, 363, 364, 375, 379, 400–401, 407) or in Italian (335, 354, 371, 380, 392) in The Apple is Bitten Again. These sentences are not always written in italics or in inverted commas so that visually the readers cannot know in advance that they are about to stumble over words in a foreign language that they may not understand. It is as if the borders between the three languages did not exist, all the more so as in some cases multilingualism is present within the same sentence. This is not anecdotal since one of the aphoristic statements reads as follows: ‘It is not War we need end at these farcical heart-searing Conferences. It is frontiers. Conferences to abolish frontiers would automatically abolish wars’ (351).8 Moreover the words, phrases or sentences are never translated and no footnotes are added. Since they are often to be found in aphorisms or aphoristic passages, the meaning of these inclusions is hard to infer. Moore could be accused of not really paying attention to the ‘Many’ she wanted to offer this selection to (336), especially when the passages in a foreign language are long—as is the case when she quotes sixteen lines in a row from a notebook of aphorisms and reflections by Stendhal (379). How could such a practice be accounted for? She may have enjoyed slapping some of her readers in the face without them knowing it, as when she seizes the opportunity of saying crude things with gusto: ‘O merda, o berretta rossa!’ (392—an Italian swearword) or simply have enjoyed the sheer musicality of some foreign sentences: ‘(comedite, amici, et bite, et inebriamini, carissimi!)’ (397). One could also consider that these words correspond to what Antoine Compagnon calls ‘the intimate lexicon’ of the person writing in a series of notebooks that may not have been intended for publication from the onset: ‘mon lexique intime, un dictionnaire polyglotte ou idiolecte, mon encyclopédie personnelle’ (41). One should not forget that the subtitle of The Apple Is Bitten Again is Self Portrait. One may remember that Moore had spent years as a young girl in a Belgian convent, and then had studied in Paris and Italy (421); she spoke both languages fluently and The Apple Is Bitten Again shows this well. One could also envisage that these sentences, written in a foreign language, are a dig at what Moore viewed as the parochialism of London (‘Neat London, efficient, dull, parochial’ [381]). Having spent many years abroad, she was more inclined to look at England from the outside and to compare her country with others. Thus, interspersing her aphorisms with foreign words meant undermining the so-called monological system of the English language, its stability and narrow-mindedness: ‘Writing is, for the polyglot, a process of undoing the illusory stability of fixed identities, bursting open the bubble of ontological security that comes from familiarity with one linguistic site’ (Braidotti quoted in Taylor-Batty 78; Braidotti sees the polyglot as being a ‘nomad in between languages’). In any case, the use of multilingualism breaks down categories and boundaries.
- 9 What follows is an outright—and I would say dishonest—rejection of Woolf’s ideas.
- 10 This is Gérard Genette’s definition of what he calls ‘hypertextuality’: ‘Toute relation unissant un (...)
- 11 ‘One woman, meaning well, bit an apple. Circumstances are against her (she was ahead of her times)/ (...)
12Transtextuality is also very much present, suggesting the porosity of the boundaries between texts, as the definition given by Gérard Genette indicates: ‘tout ce qui met [le texte] en relation, manifeste ou secrète, avec d’autres textes’ (7). The ‘creative artist’ may be an individual who believes in the values of his or her own ideas and thoughts, but who nevertheless belongs to a network of thinkers and artists whom he or she rejects or, on the contrary, admires. Transtextuality can be found in The Apple Is Bitten Again under varied guises. The literary essay on D.H. Lawrence is an example of metatextuality although the essay is more about Moore’s criticising what other critics, in particular those she refers to as [Lawrence’s] ‘Apostles’ in a derisive manner, had written about the writer, than a commentary on his works as such. Intertextuality is present through the quotations from the works of W. Blake (394, 402), L. Da Vinci (335), L. Carroll (379), Stendhal (379), A. Renoir (401–402) or V. Woolf (one of the headings reads as follows: ‘Five hundred a year and a Room of One’s Own’ [386]9). Hypertextuality10 is hinted at in the title of the collection, The Apple Is Bitten Again, with the explicit reference to the Bible and the unequivocal comparison between Eve’s defiant gesture and Moore’s own writings in several passages (403, 404, 412).11 Moore, however, fails to refer to another hypotext, an obscure one, the mention of which could be fruitful. In Notebook Number Thirteen; Woman as Uncreative Artist (386–393), Moore expresses her opinion that woman can only create fiction, based on emotion, and not true art, based on ‘universality, curiosity, impersonality’ (386). She chafes against ‘that warm menstrous (sic) flow of womanly prose’ (388) and is particularly scathing about Katherine Mansfield, whom she accuses of doing little more than ‘twittering’ (‘Twittering, twittering, female twittering’ [387]). Before becoming this ‘twittering’ artist, whose style Moore disapproves of, Mansfield had written a collection of fifty aphorisms in 1911, which were to have been published in the magazine, The New Age. The editor of the magazine, Orage, was deeply influenced by Nietzsche, which explains the pervading ‘epigrammatic in-house style’ (Mourant 2020, 103) of the magazine. Mansfield’s aphorisms were lost for years, only to be unearthed by Chris Mourant in 2012 and released in an appendix to a book he published in 2019 (281–284). The title of Katherine Mansfield’s collection of aphorisms is ‘Bites from the Apple’. According to Chris Mourant, Beatrice Hastings had been the guiding influence behind the composition of these fifty aphorisms, and Moore was to meet Hastings in the twenties and thirties (Mourant 2016). Thus, the title of Moore’s collection cannot have been a coincidence. Although by 1934 Moore had no qualms about disparaging the short-story writer’s style, she may have felt some connections between the aphorisms Mansfield had written in 1911 and her own ones. Indeed, ‘in “Bites from the Apple”, man is characterised as a fixed, fallen and limited species without hope of redemption’ (Mourant 2019, 70)—ideas Moore would have whole-heartily concurred with: ‘Too late! Man has thrown his chance away; does not deserve another; could not take it were it given him’ (414). Besides, Moore’s own collection of aphorisms published in 1934 undoubtedly harks back to Hastings’s ‘version of woman-hating feminism’ (Mourant 2019, 75), in the same way as Mansfield’s aphorisms had done at the time, an indication which may be illuminating for her readers since it helps them place her in ‘a conception of individualism that is rooted in dissent and protest’ (Cavey 2018, 30).
- 12 ‘Yeats’ refusal to choose either the one or the many, his celebration of the conflict itself, is pe (...)
- 13 Van Ruymbeke underlines the crucial influence of Nietzsche: ‘le philosophe allemand est en effet à (...)
13The aim of the second part was to show that in order to back up her contention that the ‘creative artist’ is the one who is set on transgressing boundaries, here literary ones, Moore makes use of some of the modernist strategies associated with boundary-crossing (the mixing of genres and cultures, multilingualism, and transtextuality) in this experimental work of hers. The network of influences—in particular the tutelary figure of Nieztsche—previously mentioned may also have something to do with one of the defining features of the modernist generation, namely ‘the celebration of conflict’ (Bell 23)12 and with the choice of the aphoristic form in order to put forward the notion of plurality and versatility.13
- 14 ‘I spend days reducing 500 words to 50. I loathe the easy and skip-shod’ (Moore 1933, 421).
14As already said, Moore likes condensation, while she loathes ‘female twittering’ (388). She chisels her sentences, values Blake’s compact style (394), and opts for pithy comments and trenchant statements: ‘One must go straight to the point in stone and in words. A sentence, like an arch, must be hewn in a line, bearing the full weight of its thought’ (374).14 The only thing she wants to be judged on is ‘the texture of [her] thought and the disposition of [her] sentences’ (392, 422). No wonder the aphoristic form and the epigrammatic style appealed to her. I would like to try to show that the choice of the aphoristic form also partakes in the undermining of categories, boundaries and normative ideas.
- 15 Here, a cromlech is a megalithic stone circle.
15The selection from her notebooks is anarchic with autonomous entries seemingly haphazardly juxtaposed. For example, here is a list of the titles under which groups of aphorisms can be found in Notebook Number Three (344–348): Little Brother; Disposing of the Body; Standing in Covent Garden remembering the South; Cannibalism, More Cannibalism. Artistic-emotional; Girl Guides in Passing hold-up a Tram; Definition of a Fool; Under-water feature Reel; Illustrating Joy; To pedants and sentimentalists who bemoan the Vulgarisation of the world through the Kinematograph in particular and Machinery in general; The Grin; Final Judgment. What are the connections between the different titles and as a result between the different groups of aphorisms? Can the separations between the different groups of aphorisms be filled with conjunctions? Should they be filled at all? (Long 198, 204). While analysing fragmentary writing, Thomas Van Ruymbeke comes up with the image of the cromlech (‘cercle de pierres éparses ouvert à tous les vents et sans centre’ [29])15, which perfectly fits the impression conveyed by the aphoristic fragments to be found in the selections from Moore’s first eleven notebooks. The work does not present itself as a coherent whole, but as fragmented and full of spaces in between.
- 16 Cavey analyses the frequent slippage from the first person to the third person and reaches the conc (...)
16The readers may, however, be guided somewhat by the various titles in italics that demarcate the different sections but it remains that they are faced with a jumble of thoughts and miscellaneous notes, all the more so as no date is given. Sixteen notebooks are mentioned but no indication is given whatsoever as to their date of completion—notebook number twelve excepted. Neither do the readers know on what grounds the selection was made. It reads like a collage or an assemblage, which undermines the idea of homogeneity. The predominant feeling conveyed by the sundry notes—in particular in the first eleven notebooks—is a feeling of sheer heterogeneity, even cacophony because of the different tones—light, playful, good-humoured, mocking, ironic, cynical, wry, sarcastic, sardonic, etc. Thus if this is a self-portrait, it resembles a cubist one, likely to baffle any reader. It is also a self-portrait that has nothing to do with outward appearances and everything to do with the inner complexities of the writer’s mind: ‘Le texte, constellé de visions fugitives, apparaît alors comme la photo en l’état de sa pensée, de son univers intérieur, fidèle journal de son intimité mentale’ (Van Ruymbeke 56).16
17Admittedly aphorisms and aphoristic statements have been said to favour closure and self-containment and have been associated with a gesture of authority. The thinkers and critics who have worked on the form remind one that, etymologically speaking, the word ‘aphorism’ comes from the Greek word ‘aphorizein’, which means ‘to mark off, divide,’ (from apo ‘from’ + horizein ‘to bound’) (Lisse 210–211; Derrida 1987, 519; Boyiopoulos 6). This is particularly the case of ‘bad aphorisms’, those that are sententious (Derrida 1987, 418), but this may also be in keeping with the vision of the artist as an independent individual, who does not conform and voices his ‘final’ views on certain subjects (356). In fact, in Nietzsche’s perspective, aphorisms have been conceived as an extreme form of individualism and subjectivity (Van Ruymbeke 37).
- 17 The image of the ‘archipelago’ is not unlike that of the ‘cromlech’, with the added notion of a com (...)
18What is more, the impact of any aphorism is different when the aphorism is to be found amongst other aphorisms or in a list of aphorisms, whether the latter is numbered or not. According to Jacques Derrida, who stresses ‘the aphorism’s independence and its interdependence’ (Long 193), this form allows for movement and fluidity and while the notion of a stable frontier is asserted it is also debunked at the same time (‘45. Il y a toujours plus qu’un aphorisme’ [Derrida 1987, 517]). Similarly, Maurice Blanchot distinguishes between four types of fragments and refers to those Nietzsche made use of in the following manner: ‘Le fragment lié à la mobilité de la recherche, à la pensée voyageuse qui s’accomplit / par affirmations séparées et exigeant la séparation’ (Blanchot quoted in Lisse 211–212). Following suit, Maebh Long shows how this form encourages ‘thinking archipelagically’,17 shifting in value systems, avoiding static frontiers and triggering off fluidity (Long 190–205).
- 18 Van Ruymbeke associates fragmentary form and subjectivism: ‘En ce sens, la forme fragmentale est le (...)
19I contend this is the case of the aphorisms and epigrams that Moore honed in The Apple is Bitten Again. Most of the time, she does not impose closure but, on the contrary, welcomes changes and nuances, asserting her right to eschew definitive answers, unlike what could be expected in a more traditional essay. Moore defends her right to be versatile: ‘A human soul should perplex by its range. It should be a labyrinth in which none has yet wandered without losing himself’ (359; see 357–358).18 Thus heterogeneity prevails as suggested by several characteristics of the collection.
20As already mentioned, there is no chronology; neither is there an order since the aphorisms are not numbered. They seem to be juxtaposed by chance, and disjunction prevails. In ‘L’aphorisme à contretemps’ / ‘Aphorism Countertime’, Derrida asserts: ‘9. L’aphorisme ou le discours de la dissociation. . . . Rien n’y est absolument assuré, ni l’enchaînement, ni l’ordre. Un aphorisme de la série peut arriver avant ou après l’autre, avant et après l’autre, chacun peut survivre à l’autre’ (1987, 520). Thus, there is no sense of organisation or coherence, no desire to see a project through to the end or to reach closure because there is no logical line of reasoning leading up to an inescapable conclusive assertion, which would necessarily simplify things.
- 19 ‘Il y a lieu d’y voir le produit de retours incessamment renouvelés, de recommencements, sous des a (...)
21Besides, some of the sections in the first eleven notebooks have the same headings written in italics: Pre-Sentimental Age (353, 360, 363, 371, 374); On Death (342, 366, 373); Art (350, 355, 366); Genius (355, 356); On Woman (343, 377); Pain (339, 366), etc. The spatial (and probably temporal) interstices between the similar titles suggest that any aphoristic statement written under the same title is in fact simply provisional. As explained by Long, ‘[a]phoristic thought is both / and; it neither dissolves nor enshrines difference but rather demands a complex negotiation with difference that alters as contexts change. The plurality of aphorisms prevent [sic] thought from being saturated by binary logic’ (Long 203). As a consequence, all the aphorisms under the same heading qualify each other, destabilise the frontiers established by the previous ones, compelling the reader to go back and forth so as to weigh up the differences and the nuances (after all, the word ‘repetition’ means ‘looking twice’: ‘[t]he potential for understanding is registered in what re-sees, or re-registers’ [Elias 136]). None of these aphorisms is definitive, although, taken independently, they do sound as if they were. That almost everything is provisional is only logical since ‘a thought [should be] of itself perpetual motion’ (359).19
- 20 ‘[T]the “double look” created by an aphorism opens up a space for dialogue between competing ideas (...)
22The very fragmentary form of The Apple Is Bitten Again is in keeping with Moore’s desire to spread ‘the oil of doubt’ (375), to sabotage the smug consensus of the English middle classes, and to prod the readers out of their apathy: ‘The aphoristic is not an orderly segmentation or taxonomy, but a recognition of complexity and a rejection of overtly policed boundaries’ (Long 204). Not only are some of the aphorisms grating, shocking or downright provocative—as indicated by the first one: ‘Civilisation is the distance man has placed between himself and his excrement’ (339)—but the reader’s brain also reels from all the sudden shifts and ‘ethical somersaults’ (Boyiopoulous 4). The readers are bound to be nonplussed by ‘the labyrinth’ of this self-portrait. It is as if they were both Moore’s plaything and her silent addressees, who witness the author bent on asserting and self-questioning herself by the same stroke (409). They may be displaced, shaken out of their inertia and self-satisfied acceptation of limitations; they may have to ‘think in contrasting ways simultaneously’ (Long 200)20 but since centrality has been dislodged by multiplicity, boundaries by space and fixity by movement, this could only entice them to embrace ‘[t]hought, greatest of all adventures a man may know’ (418).
23As summed up by Jane Garrity, one of the few scholars who have studied Moore’s works, the latter is too unpalatable to enter the canon: ‘Moore stands little chance for incorporation . . . because her experimental style and biting prose . . . does (sic) not fit snugly into Persephone’s middle-brow realist aesthetic and the press’s appeal to genteel, accessible, and non-threatening femininity’ (quoted in Cavey 2018, 14–15). Since the end of the twentieth century, however, under the impetus of Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, the canonisation process that took place after World War II has been called into question, and the New Modernist Studies have stressed ‘the fertility of questioning rigid . . . delimitations’ (2008, 737), be they spatial, temporal or ‘vertical’, and urged the inclusion of new texts. It is high time to break down the boundaries that have kept Moore, one of the ‘hitherto little recognised enclaves in the privileged areas’ (Mao & Walkowitz 2008, 737), in limbo, if only to pay tribute to her desire to do the same.