by Johanna Skibsrud
Charles Yale Harrison’s There are Victories begins with an epigraph from Chaucer’s Death of Blanche: “Ther-with Fortune seyde “chek here!” / And “mate!” in the myd point of the chekkere.” This cryptic reference to one of Chaucer’s earliest poems provides several important clues to Harrison’s complex work, including the suggestion that it is the reader who must uncover the deeper meanings at play in the book—and take up the challenge that it ultimately poses of moving beyond the restrictions, narrative and otherwise, we take for granted.
Chaucer’s poem depicts the encounter between a poet and an anguished knight. The knight tells the poet that he has played a game of chess with chance and lost his queen. The poet at first understands the knight’s story literally and advises him not to distress himself over the outcome of a mere game. But as the poem progresses, the poet realizes that the metaphor the knight employs is a true expression both of the knight’s loss and the constraints of the system that produced that loss—a system the knight continues to participate in and uphold. Where the knight is unable to imagine a way out of that system, the poet is able to glimpse, from the outside, the tragic structure of the knight’s world. He is also able to communicate that tragic structure to the reader, to show us the way that the knight’s world (and our own) is constrained by the limitations of individual perspective and imagination.
Tragedy, as Simon Critchley tells us, is not necessarily about the outcome of a plot, but about predetermined limits of vision and action. The tragic world is defined by “ambiguity, duplicity, uncertainty, and unknowability.” Although the characters in Harrison’s novel want nothing more than the freedom to choose the direction of their lives, they are repeatedly checked by their own limited points of view, the cultural moment in which they lived, and profound imbalances of power, particularly pertaining to gender and economic disparities. “There are no victories,” as one character wisely cautions—and yet at the same time what Harrison offers us is a tale of awakening, and possibility.
Harrison’s representation of the “ambiguity, duplicity, uncertainty, and unknowability” involved in Ruth Courtney’s quest for personal fulfillment allows us to see the way that the restrictions and possibilities of one woman’s life are dependent on a much larger connective web, which includes our own interpretive capacities. The partial—and fatally flawed—awakening that Harrison invents for his female character offers us an important glimpse into the limitations of Harrison’s own imagination, an imagination limited both by his own subjective experience and the moment in which he wrote. Some of these limitations are consciously probed by Harrison, as when Ruth’s lover Walter muses on the novel’s intrinsic reliance on prior models and cultural conventions: “I wonder if anyone can see me from that hotel across the street. Strange, can’t describe a man’s body in a novel. It isn’t done. Now with the female body it’s different. All novelists do it. But the nearest most novelists come to undressing a hero in a love scene is to have him in his shirtsleeves.”
Harrison is interested in exposing the metaphors and mythologies that invisibly construct the material realities of our everyday lives. He urges his characters, and through them, his readers, to think about what is and isn’t “done”—and why. The novel’s interest in transgression remains relevant today, not because of its content but because of its investment in questioning, and potentially overturning, the structures that continue to organize our sense of what a novel—and an individual life—can and can’t do.
Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, argues that the novel form gained in popularity in the 18th century due to changing economic and social conditions. A burgeoning middle class and rising literacy rates, as well as a corresponding interest in individual rights and freedoms, allowed the novel, with its emphasis on everyday events and the complexities of the human psyche, to flourish. Harrison draws attention to the ways we remain tragically blind to how individual freedoms bind us to one another and to misfortunes we can neither see, nor foresee. “It’s easy to be radical,” in other words—as Harrison writes—“with plenty of bail money in the family.”
Ruth’s journey is one of discovery and encounter and, though her personal freedom increases exponentially as the story progresses, she repeatedly runs up against the limits of her own life—uncovering the way in which personal choice is intrinsically connected to cultural conventions and ideologies. Although, for the most part, Ruth remains willfully ignorant of the connections between her personal and economic security and their social costs, Harrison asks his readers to attend closely to those relationships. Behind the wealth Ruth inherits from her Uncle, she sometimes supposes—as Harrison writes—that “there were men and women working to produce this income, but the picture was romantically misty and rose colored.” Harrison does not allow his readers to remain misty-eyed and emphasizes the limits of both individual perspective and empathetic response.
Repeatedly, throughout the novel, our heroine is told to “close her eyes,” as well as to “live her own life.” Despite these warnings, Ruth discovers that “her own life” is inextricably tied to the lives of others, that every choice she makes is contingent upon the choices and movements of others, and that her own (real and apparent) freedom is restricted by an overarching structure from which she can’t escape. There are Victories impels us to realize now, nearly a century later, that this constricting structure includes the novel itself. Ruth’s life and choices are inevitably delimited by the fact that they were dreamed up by a man living and writing in a specific place and at a very specific moment in time (Montreal and New York in the 1920s and 1930s). To read this novel today is to challenge ourselves to read past and through the lines imposed on Ruth, both by the fictional society that shaped her, and by her real-life author. It is to ask: Can we read past the structures imposed by a male author on his female character? Can we imagine for her another kind of freedom, and for the story another kind of end? “Live your own life” falls very flat, after all, when it is imagined as a radical removal from the lives and freedoms of others. Can we imagine a freedom that is simultaneously neither an exemption from commitment and relation, nor a mere acceptance of established systems and structures?
Toward the end of the novel, Ruth recalls “the high hopes, the taut romanticism of her youth” and understands herself to be the victim of “an enormous fraud in which nearly all the forces of society and some of Nature seemed to have conspired against her.” It is evident to the reader, however, that Ruth’s cruel fate has less to do with a “conspiracy of nature,” and more to do with “all the forces of society” and their constraints on the human imagination.
At one point, Walter listens to Ruth play the piano and is struck by the power of the music he hears, as well as by a premonition of danger. “This was tragedy,” he thinks as he listens, “but not the tragedy of crawling mortals; this was sound, but surpassing in beauty the sounds of Nature herself.” By contrast, Harrison’s novel is a tragedy very much of mortals. It is a story of mortality, of the way that our choices and ideals are structured by and rest upon human labor and the structural limits of our points of view. Harrison’s novel asks us to attend to the ways that its characters’ paths and relationships, their “victories” as well as their losses, are restricted by material circumstances and the particular moment in which they live. It asks us to recognize—like the poet from Chaucer’s story—the strength of the external forces that repeatedly check Ruth’s movements and thwart her capacity to “live her [own] life.” But it also encourages us to recognize that we are in fact an intrinsic part of the social structures governing our “Fortune.” If “there are victories,” they are won only when we are willing to read ourselves as part of the story; when we are able to glimpse (as we do with any good tragedy) just how much is at stake when we fail to acknowledge the essentially contingent nature of our lives.