 | | moment into mine, and then my head seemed filled with mist and my ears buzzed.
|
| | I saw, that
. It was not hallucination. It was
there
.
|
| | Just think what it means, if that actually happened. Think what must have been going on in the past,
and I never knew
. I remember, now, she never called it "mamma's baby"; it was always "yourn." Think of the future now that they are bothwhat? Gone?
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The mingling of truth and fiction in this narrative is far more complex than the sentimental charm of the writing would suggest. There is, first, the old device of attributing the story to "a friend," whose situation turns out to be exactly that of the author. Then there is the identity and truth-status of that unseen playmate: is this a ghost story, in which the spirit of the dead child appears first to the living half-sister and then, finally, once, to the father? or did the young daughter make it up and then talk her father into a hallucination at the end? or did she invent a being who then turns out to be real? Or did the father make it all upin self-deception, or deliberately, as fiction?
|
And there is another complication.
The Invisible Playmate
was published in 1894; W.V. died in 1901. When the story was written she was still alive, and the death in which it culminates is an anticipation of later fact. The writer's claim that he has "petrified himself against disaster" is wildly and ironically untrue: he has imagined a disaster that had not yet occurred but later did. In thought, at least, he killed his second daughter.
|
Next to this winsome narrative, I now place a sophisticated piece of theory. Paul Ricoeur's distinction between the semiotic and the semantic is useful here. When a text is analyzed as a self-contained unit, as it is by structuralism, its elements are understood only in relation to one another, that is, as "a system of signs defined by their differences alone": this is the semiotic. Semantic analysis regards the text not as closed in on itself, but as "opening out onto other things," and semantic understanding is "to understand oneself in front of the text." Though Ricoeur respects semiotic analysis as a way of moving us from surface semantics to depth semantics, he does not believe that texts are self-contained, for that would be to reduce analysis to a "sterile game." The world we inhabit, for Ricoeur, is not locked up in a prison house of language.
10
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In the texts of Catherine Tait and Elizabeth Prentiss, we find two emotions, faith and grief. Now what will the response be of the skeptical reader
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