The Beginning of Spring: Chapter 25
What a strange chapter this is, and so late in the book! Even used to the small mysteries Penelope stitches into her narratives, the lack of pages there between our right-hand fingers can’t help but unsettle: does she have time to fill us in on the meaning of these jarringly dreamlike happenings? Did they even really happen?
But before we even get to the dreamy conclusion to the chapter, we must deal with what at first feels deeply different in the first five pages: copious description. The extreme efficiency with which she deploys details stands in stark contrast to the more florid efforts of most recent (English and American) literature. These first five pages, though, stand in stark contrast to her usual concision. We get the dacha, the nearby town, liquids and foods, the bath house and dacha, the forest, the rain, the trees, and then the old caretaker couple sleeping “like the dead”.
So, then, what exactly is Penelope up to? Note how the close of each paragraph flows into the open of the next. Selwyn to the workers in the industrial town near the dacha; bread and tea to the tea and foodstuffs; protective liquids (vodka, vinegar) to cleansing liquids (bath water, urine); carpenters to plank veranda; grass to forest clearing; rotting bark to young trees; life and growth to spring rain; birds (which eat and spread seeds) to flying seed-bracts; fallen trunks, sepulchres, beetles (with their hints of death) to the darkness and the silence likened to death. This is all about the cycles of death and life, echoing the very title of the novel. We’re being subtly reminded of this theme, the ebb and flow that extends to human relationships as well, and reminded too that life must ever and only spring from death and decay.
And it’s at this point, we wonder, is it that true love for Lisa has sprung from the decay of Nellie’s leaving, or is there another turn yet to come?
I also wonder whether the description that opens Chapter 25 is also Penelope having a little metafictional fun, as her whole approach to fiction is built on precisely these sorts of organic-yet-surprising connections between the building blocks of prose (paragraphs here, chapters in her novels).
And then, after the nature-obsessed opening to Chapter 25, we get Dolly awakening in the dark of night to find Lisa about to leave. With her usual cryptic affect, Lisa brings Dolly along into the darkness, walking far, leaving behind the dacha and what is known. First hands (hands?!), then ghostly figures appear near the trunks of the trees. The passage is disorienting. Is Dolly even awake? It seems so mystical and dreamlike. But looking back at the open of this section, yes, Penelope seems to indicate clearly that she is indeed awake. If Penelope is sneaking in a dream-sequence, it would be a stark break with her narrative approach to this point. Surely she wouldn’t do that so late in the game? Note also how the jarring plunge into multi-page description at the open of the chapter now pays off by deepening the sense of isolation and dark. Without the understanding of the dacha as the center of an uninhabited yet teeming circle this scene wouldn’t work nearly as well.
Lisa’s words are particularly… dislocating: “I have come but I can’t stay. You came, all of you, as far as this on my account. I know that, but I can’t stay. As you see, I’ve had to bring this child with me. If she speaks about this, she won’t be believed. If she remembers it, she’ll understand in time what she’s seen.” Cryptic. Pregnant. Is this a dream? Are they ghosts? Revolutionaries? Forest spirits?
So what are we to do as readers? As previously mentioned, Penelope’s left us with mysteries before, always circling back to (obviously or subtly) the solution. We sense this may have something to do with revolution (and don’t miss that word’s built-in element of circularity and cycles and renewal). We can’t help but bring some historical awareness to our reading. But it’s so open. And there’s so little book left. Perhaps as Lisa suggests, we must just remember it, and in time we’ll understand what we’ve seen.
