Knowledge That Died in the War

Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch: a Novel

Young ConaLee comes from a part of West Virginia hill country where people don’t need, or know, one another’s last names. Therefore it isn’t strange that she doesn’t know hers, or her mother’s Christian name. When the aggressive interloper that ConaLee knows only as Papa (though he isn’t her father) tires of ConaLee’s family, he deposits them at the lunatic asylum in Weston, ConaLee must maintain the illusion of post-Civil War respectability that she’s mastered.

Author and professor Jayne Anne Phillips’ novels focus on lonely souls wandering an America they don’t understand. She won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, which focuses on the loss of knowledge that follows war. Phillips’ characters spend the story pursuing information, and the healthy closure that come with it, and several times come perilously close to finding it. They never know how close, though, because unlike we readers, they have only a limited perspective.

Yanked out of the only life she’s ever known, ConaLee wants to protect her mother from more harm than she’s already experienced. ConaLee blames herself for her failure to ward of Papa, a Confederate deserter and sexual predator. This self-blame is certainly unfair, since she’s only thirteen. But the wider world ConaLee experiences at the Weston lunatic asylum [sic] makes her realize how small and uninformed she is, leaving her desperate for any momentary understanding.

Her mother passes as Miss Janet, a well-to-do who keeps her secrets zealously. Glimpsed from her perspective, though, the story changes. Her husband, ConaLee’s father, enlisted at the start of the Civil War, believing that valorous service would grant him status. They ran from ignominious beginnings, after all, and live in constant fear of capture. Service would grant both of them a legal name and freedom from the hunt. Sadly, he just never came back.

John O’Shea, the asylum’s Night Watch, knows that isn’t his real name. Wounded at some distant battle, he lost all memory before the War. He earned a pseudonym and discovered a talent for helping those who, like him, lost mental capacity through trauma or abuse. He continues searching for his past identity, feeling the gnawing sensation that someone, somewhere, waits for him. We know, as readers, who that is, but his wounded memory remains slippery.

Jayne Anne Phillips

Overseeing everything is Dearbhla (pronounced “Dervla”), a patient watchwoman who is half doting grandmother, half Irish swamp witch. She longs to restore ConaLee’s sundered family and exorcise Papa’s damage, but without better skills, she remains an observer. She wanders throughout the Virginias, seeking the lines of knowledge which war severed, always one step removed from finding it. Readers see how close she comes, always doomed to mishear a valuable clue or to miss something important.

Phillips’ narrative might meet the criteria of “postmodernism,” since it deals with the finitude of human knowledge. Her characters stumble blindly, always just barely failing to glimpse the truth, because they don’t understand their place in the narrative. Because they don’t know it’s a narrative. We readers understand we’re reading a novel, and therefore we grasp the importance of the many missed clues. But meaning is something readers impute, not something these characters naturally have.

Novels like this turn on degrees of disappointment. Characters are condemned to repeat the patterns of dancing right up to the precipice of understanding, then dance away again, never realizing how close they came. We wait on tenterhooks to see when the characters will realize what’s obvious to us, knowing that when they do, some other form of disappointment will follow. The limits of human perspective, and the fallibility of human memory, keep them blind.

The narrative voice reads more like a prose poem than a novel. Or like several braided poems. ConaLee, home-schooled on the books her mother can afford, mostly Dickens and the Bible, speaks in a lyric voice which differentiates her from more pragmatic characters, like the asylum doctor. O’Shea, a complete tabula rasa, has a plainspoken patter, a strict noun-verb voice bereft of ornament. War has changed how characters speak, leaving them with outdated, peculiar voices.

Human beings, Phillips implies, exist within a broader tapestry. But seen from inside, we never grasp the part we play, the thread we leave behind. Meaning comes only when we view the story from outside, which individuals can never do. Knowledge is something we create, not something that exists. And, as characters change names like shirts, even our identities come from our actions, not our beings. Someday, looking back, we’ll glimpse what it all meant.