“JOSEPH WALKING,” “MIKE HANGING,” “Alma Writing,” “Roxanne Recording,” “Allen Mourning,” “Carlotta Painting”: three men and three women in their early thirties caught in actions that define them for a moment or for a lifetime. In Contract with the World, written in the late 1970s and first published in 1980, Jane Rule undertook a bold narrative experiment: to tell a story through six characters, shifting the point of view with each chapter. Each chapter immerses the reader in the sensibility of the character who names it, we must see and feel the world through each in turn. While some of the characters already know, desire and/or loath each other, most of the links among them are serendipitous. Joseph’s therapeutic morning walks gradually create connections, if not bonds, among them. Apart from age, they have little in common except that they work at being artists or artisans; Roxanne, Allen, and Carlotta reshape the world through their unique perspective in sounds, photographs, and paint. Alma would write and Mike would sculpt, but they fail as artists. Joseph has no pretensions and instead prints or speaks the words of others. A modest man, he is overcome by the wonder of the ordinary.
Community, art, desire, the power and limits of language, the miracle of the everyday: the themes explored in this midcareer novel are hallmarks of Rule’s work and had a special resonance for Rule’s readers in 1980. By the late 1970s, newspapers such as The Body Politic in Toronto (for which Rule started writing a column in 1979) and The Gay Community News in Boston had become cultural institutions for the communities they served. And those communities were deeply invested in fiction—as a way to explore and celebrate long-repressed identities, to recover the past, and to imagine the future. Small presses were publishing new fiction that was unlikely to be accepted by mainstream presses and recovering classic lesbian texts, such as the pulp novels of Paula Christian and Ann Bannon. Contract with the World is the first of Rule’s novels to thematically incorporate gay communities, institutions, and politics. Rather than privilege gay identities and idealize community, Rule created characters, straight, gay or bisexual, who are all capable of intolerance, pettiness, and overblown egos as well as sensitivity, generosity, and genuine talent. Alma’s narcissism and class privilege shape her lesbianism as profoundly as brutality and deep-seated conventionality mark Mike’s heterosexuality.
In the novel that preceded Contract with the World, The Young in One Another’s Arms (1977), Rule had explored the importance of community-building. Individuals, especially vulnerable people, need connection and mutual support to survive. But Rule always maintains an outsider’s perspective, she goes against the grain and against the season. Groups risk developing a mob mentality, attacking anyone whose difference seems to threaten their self-definition. The loose community of outsiders in The Young in One Another’s Arms bond in resistance to brutal state power. In Contract with the World the Surrey suburbanites who attack Carlotta’s portraits of the main characters and those close to them become an unthinking beast, bent on expelling all representations of values that don’t conform to their own. Allen sees their attack, ironically, as a vindication of the power of art.
The politics of art that Allen values is the power to challenge, to confront complacency and to make us uncomfortable. Carlotta’s portraits achieve their power by presenting her stark, unflattering vision of her friends. She doesn’t try to promote a particular political view, but she tries to make the viewer look directly into the faces of others who don’t mirror them. And that, too, is the power of Contract with the World: moving from one character to another, taking the part of each one whether we like them or not, we must reexamine the hidden clauses of our own contract with the world. The reader who looks for simple affirmation will be disappointed, but the reader who is willing to risk the discomfort of self-examination and, possibly, growth will be richly rewarded.
Marilyn Schuster
Smith College
January 2005