3 - Passages: Unstable Forms of Desire

Summary

The Female Gaze

Not that I’ve dismissed the possibility my brother is dead. We have discussed what is possible, what is not. They say there's every chance. No chance at all.

In Passages, Quin's logic of three re-emerges as a woman and her male lover search for her lost brother across a Mediterranean landscape. That this book's position will be one of ambivalent ‘possibility’ is evident from these opening sentences with the push and pull between opposite statements that ‘there's every chance. No chance at all’ ‘my brother is dead’. This structure, where apparently opposing positions or perspectives in fact coexist, underlies the quest narrative in Passages. Like Three – and indeed Berg – the direction of the narrative resists linear trajectory and either/or binaries to offer up a more expansive both/and space of ‘possibility’, of ‘what is possible’, where statements or an outcome can be true, false and/or indeterminable at once.

Passages ends mid-sentence with the possibility of ‘the sea that soon perhaps we will cross’ (108) and no full stop, like Berg. And, like Three, Passages is a split form text. It is divided into four sections: two told from the woman's perspective in run-on prose that moves between first person and third person free indirect style, and two in the form of the man's annotated journals. Although these perspectives and forms are distinct and separated out, they also echo and reverberate with each other – like the several diary forms of Three – to offer multiple and often conflicting versions of the same events. In Three, Leonard and Ruth pore over an archive of documents, recordings and objects left behind by S in their unsuccessful search for the ‘truth’ of what happened and their desire for some kind of contact with her. But rather than the static location of Three in ‘the Grey House’ in England where Ruth and Leonard have been left by S, Passages is a text of transit and the shifting locations of hotels and trains. In Passages, the clues or documents relating to the missing brother are so few that even the existence of such materials is unclear – ‘I remember where I came across his signature, that perhaps wasn't there at all’ (2) – and his voice is absent from the text, so that here the desired third character entirely eludes the narrative and cannot be located at all.