Thus, the Victorian past is offered to us, through a series of references to popular Victorian novels, photographs, fashion, events and landmarks, as an afterimage, a picture that we continue to see in ‘ghosted’ form. ‘Sixty Light’ is a repetition of the Victorian period, medium for its haunting presence. The exploration of Victorian photography and reading foregrounds memory’s discourse, both its loss and retrieval writing the Victorian period into our cultural memory, and suggesting that it has left myriad traces embodied in texts, images and other material, if transient, forms. Rather than focus upon the problematisation of historical representation, ‘Sixty Lights’ utilises the spectrality of the photograph as a means to explore the uncanny repetition of the Victorian past in the present, and to focus upon the possibility of recovery, the attempt at repayment, even if that which is restored amounts only to the aberrant presence of the ghost. Each posits the historical novel as one means through which the Victorian past can be remembered, if not restored, through the power of language. Thus, in ‘Sixty Lights’ literary text is depicted as an important medium for materialising the past and makes it a culturally worthy text to study.
Her use of these theories of lights also intertwines with another exceptional feat she managed to engineer, the intertextualisation of numerous, novels, essays, myths etc. into her novel. Prominent throughout her novel is the Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, a book with prolific ideas on the effect of photography and objects on memory. He explores two fundamental themes of photography, the studium; the desired message, and the punctum; that accident that disturbs the harmony of the studium. The contrast of Victor and Lucy as photographers: Lucy whom favours the ‘Maculare: stained, spotted, blemished’, the punctum as Barthes would say, whilst Victor favours the ‘immaculare: like the Holy Virgin’ or the studium. Not only does she use theoretical books to instil in the readers a broader sense of understanding to her purpose of the novel, to capture in itself the significance of lights, its effects on ‘seeing’ and its interstitial lucidity, but also adapts narratives and children’s stories in order to give a deeper insight into Lucy. The Princess and the Pea is used to reveal, almost overtly, the sensitivity of Lucy to the light and the world. ‘Lucy was enchanted by the magically sensitivity of princess…the felt the tiniest impressions’ (Pg. 27) this ‘enchantment’ of Lucy to some figure, or idea, is symbolic of a shift, or a revelation, of Lucy as she discovers this deep-settled facet of her own self, as her mother says ‘My princess’ (Pg. 31). This ‘sensitivity’ to the lucidity, the ‘subtle beyond’, carries with her throughout the novel. This intertextualisation of not only theoretical and subjective texts, but also the mythical and imaginative, makes a superiorly prepared and thought out novel, worthy of critical analysis.
This broadly Bildungsroman text, following the birth to death development of Lucy, is not all that it seems, nor does it try to conceal it. Lucy in the present is in a ‘phantasmic dialogue with the past’, personifying this folding of the past into the present, synchronous with her viewing and ‘stepping into the future’. This folding and pleating of time, is portrayed through many forms in the text, photography, at its base, Lucy’s pre-emption of the future, the links between chapters and the recurring theme of ghostliness.
‘Sixty Lights’ raises the possibility of spectral visitations through both Thomas and the spiritualist Madam Esperance, the notion of the past as revenant is largely elaborated through the ghostliness of photography. Rather than the actual ‘ghost’, it is the ghostliness of photography that becomes a metaphor for this revenant past. In Sixty Lights Neville greets the spiritualist’s luminous image, supposedly the ghost of Honoria, with the whispered word ‘ectoplasm’ (Pg.94). He believes ‘it is ectoplasm ghosts are composed of’ (Pg.92), and which Madame Esperance can summon. Barthes deploys the same language to describe photography. This word, ectoplasm, entwines the ghostly image and the photograph as images of an abnormal, or haunting presence. In Sixty Lights the desire to make dead voices speak transforms into the desire to cheat the obliterating action of time and death by creating permanent images, through words and writing, as defences against forgetting. Thus, one of the period’s important technological inventions, the photograph, is proclaimed as ‘the future’ but is, paradoxically, entangled to the past through its yearning for memory-made-permanent.
Lucy is wholly anachronistic, she ‘saw both the past and the future’, as ‘Photographs cracked open time’ (pg.235). This is synonymous with the construction of the novel, connecting chapters to following and preceding chapters; the opening ‘Lucy’ takes us to page 157 where her and Isaac share a bed and he calls her name, the development of Honoria and James, pre-Honoria’s death, are juxtaposed to the development of Lucy and Thomas, post-death, and the seeming misplaced images from her own novel, ‘Special Things Seen’, all act as a metaphor and a medium for a past cyclic, both lost and, paradoxically, perpetuated, continuously repeated in the present. These ‘ruptures’ of time, are utilized by Jones to canvass the non-linearity of time ‘the false liveliness of clocks’, and especially the affect grief and mourning have on the pleating of time. Archetypal of this ‘multitemporal’ construction of ‘Sixty Lights’ is Micheal Serres ‘Conservations of Science, Culture and Time’, ‘the handkerchief represents…concept of time which distance and proximity are stable and clearly define; but crumpled in the pocket the handkerchief evokes a ‘topological’ concept of time in which previously distant points ‘become close or even superimposed’… Modernity, can be imagine as pleated or crumpled time, drawing together the past, present and future.’ In essence, Lucy is symbolic of the anachronistic nature time, a handkerchief crumpled bringing together the lives of her mother, and the future of her child and all the light in-between. This intricate weaving of time, transforms the traditionally conservative and despotic Bildungsroman into a modernist text, it can be seen that this straying away from the mainstream of forms is unconventional and overwhelming, placing the reader in a state of confusion and ‘jump’ state, where time is juggled, but this not only deepens and supports the themes of the novel, but adds another layer, creating the ‘maculate’.
Although the novel is based on a Bildungsroman structure, it is written in a post-modernist perspective. Post-modernism, fundamentally, is a move against modernism, its stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.
‘Sixty Lights’ is a highly ambiguous title. The sixty chapters of the novel, sixty lights that resonate in her mind and the festival of lights, the birth of Emma, are all interpretable from the title. It is evident that this novel encompasses all things light. Thus, it is uncanny that the novel, so surrounded and encapsulated in light, begins the novel in darkness. This dark introduces two binary themes in the novel, light and dark, and life and death, which shall be explored furthermore.
Light is constantly referred to, constructed and resonated throughout the novel. Lucy uses it to form her passion for photography and her sensitivity to the world. The opening scene opens in the darkness, broken first by sound, followed by a string of sensual chains. ‘Insects struck at the mosquito net, which fell silver and conical, like a bridal garment around them’ introduces light to the novel and also light to Lucy ‘a small flare of light’. This light follows Lucy throughout her life, till her death bed, where she was ‘anticipating, more than anything, and abyss of light…’ It is metaphorical of her ability to ignite like a ‘magnesium ribbon’ through the hardships that befall her, whilst being symbolic of the importance of ‘seeing’ in the world of the reader; it is as much an opening to the world of Lucy as it is to the personal lives of the readers. Alternatively, and equally as justifiable, Lucy is seen as a lighthouse, the light beneath the dark, ‘But the desert light’, she said, ‘is scintillating’… Thomas too thought about it many years later… [when he tried] To recover his dead sister’s face, drifting over the surface of the desert.’
Although light fills novel, darkness fills the empty spaces creating a full-hearted, well-rounded novel. This opposing shade acts as a medium through which grief and mourning manifest and are expressed. In contrast to Lucy followed and enshrouded by light, Thomas is her reversal. This darkness encompasses Thomas from early in the novel, it is when his sleep-walking is betoken, and in has a pinnacle and lasting impression on him, ‘The impersonation of himself was more fearsome than his father’s face appearing on the hallway mirror. The dark around him was welling, as though it would swallow and cover him. Darkness in bucketsful…[it] was the hypnotic confirmation of a solitude that he would carry throughout his life’ (pg.38-39). This epitomizes the grief that he ‘carries throughout life’ and is created by this ‘welling’ of the darkness around him.
This dichotomy is not only used to be symbolic of the grief and mourning, but it also ties into her ‘light writing’ and helps to develop ‘snapshots in prose’, images layered into the construction of her sentences. This layering of light and darkness fashions the characters within the novel and adds another interesting layer to this tiered novel, although it can be seen as a highly cliché use of light and dark as forms of representing the inner aura of characters, it is sophistically executed and allows for the discovery of that extra inkling of light after multiple reads, making it worthy of critical study.
‘Sixty Lights’ is everlastingly imprinted by life and death, juxtaposed to each other and evident as two of the only things certain in life; people will live and people will die. These two concepts are recurring in all her works and play a key role in each. The poignant fact of Lucy’s short life, presented to us at the beginning, ‘her own death – in a few years time, at the age of twenty-two.’ (Pg.42), is an introduction to the novel and to the steadfast nature of death. There are two key juxtapositions that occur in the book, in terms of life and death. The opening introduces us to Lucy, and the growing life within her, the ‘tiny baby hand in the darkness’, which is then juxtaposed to the revealing of her death at the ‘age of twenty-two’. Secondly and more strongly presented is through the death of Honoria as she harbours new life. This cogent juxtaposition forms the foundation of the novel, the unescapable nature of life and death.
In many ways, Lucy and Thomas are binary oppositions; they oppose each other in terms of the era they reflect. Firstly, their rituals are unanimous but their sense and reaction to grief are in stark contrast, ‘bereavement settled as an abstract quality of distortion’. Lucy’s reaction to grief stems to that of distraction in the form of destruction, converting any bereavement into a form of relinquishing her humanity and inflicting damage, becoming in a sense the cause of death. Thomas, on the other hand, follows the endemic form of grieving and ‘burst into tears…[and] disappeared for a whole day.’ These contrasting forms of grief swathe, which Jones values, the multiple ways in which ‘bereavement settles’. This broader understanding and acceptance of life and death create a sense of consciousness within the novel, one, which speaks to the reader in ways of the personal and social, moulding this novel to that beyond the norm, making it of superior worth, a novel worthy of inclusion of the HSC Prescriptions List.
Stand alone, each of these layers in the novel work as ultimately simplistic and used themes, although they do stand out as original in their representation. The success of ‘Sixty Lights’ as a worthy text does not simply come down to the quantity and quality of the themes, these are all in great quality and numerous quantities, but as many argue, for quantity, more is less, if the quality is superior. But one cannot simply say, the novel is not worthy of text due to the vast amounts of knowledge it holds, due to the fact that it is so intricately, delicately and sophistically interwoven and interconnected that it is of supreme worth, its punctum does not disturb the harmony of its studium, but give it the greatest level of exposure, falling together with the utmost textual integrity.
‘Sixty Lights’ is a modernist text, of a Victorian lady, from a post-modernist perspective. The only way such a feat, such a mesh of the three vastly differing literary forms, could only have been achieved by the textual integrity of Lucy, the conduit between the three. She is a woman, living in the present, viewing the past and future simultaneously through the lens of her perspective, motivated by the light beneath the lampshade (Lampshade: a hoop around an untellable story), a palimpsest unveiled.
by
kanesolly (student)
