Michal Golis (330988)

prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, Csc., M.A.

AJ54013: Britské spisovatelky na přelomu tisíciletí

7th May 2014

Narration and Meaning in Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger

In the beginning of Moon Tiger, a dying elderly journalist and history writer

Claudia Hampton, the main heroine of Penelope Lively’s novel, sets out to use the time

she has left in this world to write her most ambitious work - a history of the world. She,

however, ends up telling the history of her own life. Claudia says: “I’m writing a history

of the world...And in the process my own.” (Lively 5) She takes the reader on a trip

through the memories of her childhood days with her aristocratic mother and brother

Gordon, her war reporting and love affair in Cairo, the subsequent career of a popular

history writer and her complex relationships with the members of her family, all closely

intertwined with keen observations on the intricacies and intersections of history,

memory and language.

Through her reminiscences and reflections on the world, people and history from

her hospital bed she is trying to get to the core of her life, if there is some to be found, to

make sense of her existence - and through her own existence somehow also that of the

entire humanity. It is the purpose of this essay to discuss the ways in which Penelope

Lively structures the narrative of her novel in order to illustrate the inherent ambiguity

of history and its complex relation to individual human lives, as well as to underscore

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the conflicts between memory and time, between human relationships and the solipsism

of our minds.

Wherever Claudia went during her life she was used to being the center of

attention as well as the sole arbiter of her actions and decisions; the world revolved

around her larger than life personality. Her history books, likewise, revolved around her

perceptions, preferences, bias and attitudes – as their author she is always the one to

have the last word. Herself a part of history, in her writings she can thus shape its forces

or interpret its events as she sees fit, to highlight some parts and leave out others with

the most important consideration being her personal convictions and integrity. She

believes history is, after all, not a set of objective facts and data to be unquestioningly

accepted and mechanically transmitted from one generation to another but rather a

constant struggle of competing individual voices which try to be heard – a view Lively

so shrewdly illustrates in the very first sentence of her novel: “I’m writing a history of

the world.” (5) It is not ‘the’ history of the world which Claudia sets out to write, as she

believes there is no single history of the world, but ‘a’ history – one of a virtually

endless number of parallel histories as seen through her particular eyes and shaped by

her individuality.

Our own lives teach us that there is almost never a single universal truth, but that

there rather are as many interpretations of events as there are observers, all of them

claiming to be somehow representative of the objective reality of what really happened

and yet all of them different. Reaching for objectivity or striving to see the world

through the eyes of others, then, seems to Claudia a futile and essentially meaningless

task. Lively’s skillful use of multiple narrative voices, multiple perspectives and

shifting points of view serves to further underscore this avowed fundamental

subjectivity of human perceptions and experience as well as the histories they add up to,

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and thus in a way justifies Claudia’s solipsistic attitude to the world, her life and

writing.

Throughout most of Moon Tiger the reader sees the world through Claudia’s

eyes, even though the feelings of her husband Jasper and their daughter Lisa towards

her are also briefly revealed, providing a counterpoint to her thoughts. However, the

primary effect the author seems to have on mind in relying almost exclusively on

Claudia’s first person narrative or third person narration from her point of view is not

necessarily to use it simply as a way of stressing the unreliability of her narrative voice

but to point to the fact that the objectivity seemingly offered by an omniscient narrator

is itself largely an illusion.

It is not only the individual situations and scenes of the novel which are seen

through the eyes of the characters as the most honest way of presenting them (at some

points in the novel even the same scene is presented from multiple perspectives in

succession). The time sequence the scenes follow, likewise, accentuates the subjectivity

of human experience and non-linearity of time. Lively’s narrative structure closely

reflects the flow of Claudia’s thoughts and memories, one triggering another in a

seemingly haphazard fashion, following associative links and jumping back and forth

between various moments of her life, and thus illustrates the mysterious workings of

human memory as the center of our identities.

Returning to Cairo, Claudia marvels at the familiarity of the sensations triggered

by her memories of the place: “Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash

with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever

lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside

the head, everything happens at once.” (68) Histories, she shows, like the memories

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they are formed by, consequently cannot by their nature be linear, neatly ordered in a

chronological sequence.

What might on one hand be considered a novel treatment of time forming a

distinct part of Lively’s experimental style of fiction is at the same time, as she argues,

something people do in their minds all the time. The very line between the past and

present is thus much more tenuous than it might seem. Ruminating on the kind of

history she should write, Claudia voices the author’s thoughts: “The question is, shall it

or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an

interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me.

There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin

and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water...there is no sequence, everything

happens at once.” (6)

The narrative style of Moon Tiger then comes to resemble a landscape – a site

where layers of history, distant and recent, freely intermingle with each other, where

everything happens at once, juxtaposing past and present as a testament to the

arbitrariness and complexity of human mind and memory. (Lively, My hero)1 In her

latest novel Making It Up Lively draws again upon the idea of great histories lying just

below the surface, waiting to be unveiled and complicating the simplistic notion of

history as a mere succession of past events: “You are looking at mayhem, all over

Wiltshire and Dorset and Somerset, those calm green counties with their sleepy villages

and the cricket pitches and the primary school playgrounds and the pubs with the

hanging baskets that drip petunias and lobelia. Surface veneer, all of it. Dig a few feet

and you are into bloodshed.” (as cited in Hirst 91) Similarly, Claudia’s rich and

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In her parallel between history and landscape Penelope Lively pays homage to and draws upon the work
of pioneering London historian William George Hoskins, who first introduced the idea in his book The
Making of English Landscape (Lively, My Hero).

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tumultuous life of a war correspondent and a successful writer, as well as the unceasing

activity of her mind and vitality of her intellect are lying just behind the face of a

slightly eccentric old dying lady, impelling one of the nurses to ask: “Was she

someone?” (Moon Tiger 1)

Nevertheless, the blurring of past and present and transgressions of chronology

combined with the absence of an authoritative narrative voice does not necessarily have

to represent fragmentation of meaning and destabilization of human identities. Marcus

Hartner argues that “the jig-saw puzzle setup of the novel does not deny the creation of

meaning but rather activates the process of cognitively reassembling the pieces in a

causally and chronologically coherent manner…an increasingly complex but causally

and temporally commonplace understanding of the protagonist’s psyche, identity and

biography emerges” (189-190). The notions of identity, meaning and time, albeit

largely problematized and subjectified by Lively’s narrative style are thus affirmed

rather than diminished or destabilized, and placed at the center of Moon Tiger.

It is paradoxically in war, where people are turned into statistics or statisticians,

swept away by history that for the first and probably the only time in her life Claudia

seems to have become fully human. It is in her memories of the time she spent in Egypt

as a war correspondent and her tragic love story with Tom Southern, a young tank

commander, that she eventually seems to locate the center or focal point of her life. On

one hand she shows the uniqueness of their relationship, saying that her brief affair with

Tom was probably the first time she made somebody feel happy: “I have made people

angry, restless, jealous, lecherous...never, I think, happy” (120). The happiness Tom

feels is thus a wholly new, strange and unforeseen occurrence for Claudia – an error

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even or a crack in the scheme of her previous (and subsequent) life - something outside

of her control.

And it is in this serendipitous occurrence that she seems to have found her

concealed need for deeper human connection as well as managed to free her sexuality

from her repressed youthful incestuous desire for her brother Gordon. However, like

that of the Moon Tiger, a mosquito repellent standing beside their bed, a silent witness

of their love, a premonition of death and a symbol of the relentless passing of time, its

green coil burning away bit by bit, the glow of Tom’s life was extinguished in the war,

leaving behind memories like a heap of grey ashes.

Yet, on the other hand, as a cynic could note, may it not be that, apart from their

brief but intense and passionate love affair, it was especially Tom’s untimely death

what made him so special throughout her later life? Through his death he became a

blank slate on which Claudia, albeit emotionally devastated ever since, could inscribe

her deepest desires and which she could shape and mold like the stories and characters

in her books. After all, Lively makes it quite clear that, had he survived, Claudia would

not probably be very likely to live out Tom’s domestic fantasies of peaceful family life

on a farm.

Nevertheless, in spite of her imperiousness, strong self-professed individualism,

emotional detachment from most people and her absolute zero tolerance for

uninteresting people regardless of who they are (she was never able to form or show any

deeper feelings towards her only daughter Lisa), the points which truly stand out the

most in Claudia’s story are almost invariably moments of genuine human love and

connection. The main axes which her life revolves around are formed by intense

relationships, whether it be with her beloved brother Gordon as her the love of her life,

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alter ego and a faithful intellectual sparring partner, her deceased lover Tom Southern or

with Laszlo, a Hungarian student who she takes cares of as of the son she wished she

had.

In his diary given to Claudia after his death Tom Southern writes of human

experience: “Even if it were expedient I couldn’t say now what came before what,

where we were when, how this happened or that, in the mind it’s not a sequence just

a single event without beginning or end in any proper sense simply a continuity spiked

by moments of intensity that ring in the head still.” (196) True love and deep human

bond, Lively seems to argue, are then the only things through which people can at least

to a certain extent anchor the constant flow of experience, mitigate and transcend the

essential isolation and solipsism of their minds and perceptions and through them their

lives.

Even though Claudia’s story is one hand a treatise on non-linearity and

subjectivity of history stemming from its rootedness in individual minds, perceptions

and memories, on her death bed she comes to realize that it is through human

connection with others that one transcends the isolation and individualism which the

subjectivity of human minds may otherwise lead to. The kaleidoscope of Lively’s

narrative, it seems, is not a reflection of chaos and disintegration of human existence

but, conversely, of its deeper order and meaning.

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Bibliography

Hartner, Marcus. “Narrative Theory Meets Blending: Multiperspectivity Reconsidered.”

In: Jürgen Schläger, and Gesa Stedman (eds.) The Literary Mind. Tübingen:

Narr, 2008. Print. 181-193.

Hirst, Kris. The Archaeologist’s Book of Quotations. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press,

2012. Print.

Lively, Penelope. Moon Tiger. London: Penguin Classics, 2006. Print.

---. “My Hero: W.G. Hoskins by Penelope Lively.” The Guardian. 25 Nov 2011. Web.