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.” 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.” 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.
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” 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. 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,” 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 and Venezuela. 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 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. 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, 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. 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, 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. 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.’” 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. 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.” 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. 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.”
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,” 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,
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