let one's gaze slide

I read three books by Brigid Brophy, first Flesh, 1962, then The Finishing Touch, 1963, then In Transit, 1969. The first and second books were so different that I thought they must have been written years apart, but then I checked the dates and no.

The difference came down to the distribution of the atmosphere. In Finishing Touch all of the ideas are described by an archness that works as a kind of muting or gesture. You learn fairly quickly that

1. The two women you are reading about are teachers at an exclusive all-girls finishing school

2. They desire, and are sometimes desired by, their students

But the text is not direct. A group of girls passes by the teacher Antonia and it notes that

A butterfly sought the lavender grove.

A network of butterflies, flowers, and dresses is penetrated by the camp sharpness of the teachers' conversations and playful feints at toughness. Antonia bypasses the intoxicating nature of her madeira to describe fortified as "one of the strongest, most vibrant, almost bracing, of words" – (the author will not blatantly explain that madeira is fortified wine).

Brophy's sentences are broken up by ellipses, over and over again, by parentheses, by dashes, by side matters, by words in other languages – there is always some other issue that they want to talk about; there is always this gap that is filled invisibly.

She looked presidingly: from the indifferent face of Madame President's daughter (Antonia was sure, now, such girls were cold) to the baffled face of royalty, staring straight ahead as though air rather than the text could help her understanding, to the cross face of Eugénie Plash – Look away quickly (Heaven grant I am not to suffer a headache today), look back to the text, look down at … and thus, naturally, to let one's gaze slide off the text, slide off one's lap (pleasing though that was to look at), to alight …

The potential for betrayal by a student is so present and inevitable you feel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1961, hanging over everything – also unsaid. Sebastian Groes in British Fiction of the Sixties: the Making of the Swinging Decade, 2016, believes he has found a buried Brodie reference in Flesh, but he may be taking it too far.

But Brophy is not fascinated by Spark's doom of humankind, more interested in the potential for a vibration between saying something and not saying it, or making woman-signs and man-signs about yourself at the same time, sitting in a pretty garden and waxing over strong, fortified features, or teaching 'finishing' when all you really want is to start something.

The conclusion of The Finishing Touch, like the conclusions of Flesh and In Transit, is not the cold, rooted convulsion it is in a Spark; it seems to be something Brophy only does because books have to end at some point: such is the nature of books, and she has to go along with it, but, personally, she would rather not do anything so pointed and forceful as make a finish. Let her go on vibrating; that's what she wants.Or let the vibration vanish in a way that makes the world happy without (somehow without) actually being anything like a halt.

The vibration is there in Flesh but it only exists as individual points that the author makes for you to identify one by one and subsequently connect. You hear that Marcus loves Rubens' women, and then, later, when he has become plump, pleased, and sensuous, he looks at his body and says, "I've become a Rubens woman." So he is both of these points; the thing that looks and the thing it looks at. But his Rubens is not in the manners of the language that creates him and nor is his sensuality or his fat. Flesh is reasoning its vibration instead of feeling it while Finishing Touch is both thinking and feeling. That was what gave me the initial impression that Brophy had finally found out what she was saying. On reflection I don't believe this is true. But I think she knew more about what she was saying. She might have been using Jean Brodie as a guide, to focus herself.

there are different versions

"Plenitude" is a word that I came across in a 1995 interview between Craig Dworkin and Lyn Hejinian, who was (at that point) talking about Gertrude Stein:

… the Making of Americans, in which she categorizes different kinds of people and then realizes that oppositions don't work; she abandons the Making of Americans when she sees that there are co-existing ontological possibilities, that they're always vibrating next to each other, and that there are vast numbers of them. That's something that contemporary physicists can deal with, but contemporary literary critics are driven crazy by that degree of plenitude and then they blame Stein.

Hejinian's 2001 book, A Border Comedy, is 218 pages long, divided into chapters, and through the length of the text she often tells very short stories - sometimes realistic anecdotes, sometimes fairytaleish ones – not trying to present them as if they are components in some larger fictional story (as Schmidt does in Atheists) - though they are always contributing to a larger body of thought.

They never seem to be inevitable.

The driving suggestion of the larger poem-thought is really in that one line: "there are co-existing ontological possibilities, that they're always vibrating next to each other, and that there are vast numbers of them."

At times the stories are set in their own paragraphs, with headings or titles, e.g., The Tale of the Raven on p. 32, and The Plot Unfolds, on p. 76. "The experience of activity must entail episodes," she writes at the start of Book Eleven. Hejinian is a poet who tells you the rules she is operating by as they are being demonstrated by the medium that includes them. Within the poem she is never wrong. Elsewhere she tells a fictional story about rapists who sneak into a dormitory at a girls' school and fall asleep on the spot without committing their crimes. No reason is given. This is where the anecdote ends. One of the "co-existing ontological possibilities" has made itself known by breaking through in the least likely place. "To measure something | One must hunt its intersections," she writes. (Is an ending the place where a story intersects most decisively, cleanly, and obviously with everything that is not itself?)

She hunts but what does she find? The slipperiness of intersections seems to haunt her. What is the connection between the story of the flying woman and the transparent tree in The Plot Unfolds? The plot unfolds to a point where it seems about to develop and then it stops. Is that the joke? It doesn't do anything but perform an unfolding action. Two or three things are described and joined together. If this is what it takes to "measure something" then what is measurability? Someone ("a teller") relates the story of a bird, "Who once shared her many anxieties […] she cut off his head | Then she plucked him and turned him into soup | Soup or soot – there are different versions | Some mild, some vicious, some lewd." The intersection of the bird with the violence done to it keeps shifting. Then there is not one bird but many? Then where -

(Hejinian's language is typically formal rather than colloquial – "lewd" not "rude" – she maintains a distance, and you note that these things in her language "vibrate" separately or toy with "borders" – they do not merge, mesh, mix, or become indistinguishable from one another – so borders and separations exist, she feels, but how …)