The Review of Contemporary Fiction

What Goes without Saying: Collected Stories by Josephine Jacobsen
Monique Dufour

Josephine Jacobsen. What Goes without Saying: Collected Stories. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996. 335 pp. $29.95.

Each story evicts characters from their everyday lives, where everyone spoke the language and roads took their predictable course according to memories and road signs. Whether in their homes or in hotels on tropical islands, Jacobsen’s characters are suddenly outsiders, estranged from the power of language and reason to name, explain, and control. They are left turning over words like “heal,” “importance,” and “pleasure” in their mouths, and finding language emptied out of content, unable to describe their thoughts and circumstances. Most of these stories begin in medias res, many of them during repuscular hours, or at the edge of oceans or cliffs. A women is trapped in her own bathroom, a journalist is maimed in a verdant Guatemalan forest, an old woman is robbed in her row house. In some stories, characters silently conspire. In “The Glen” Jesse finishes her husband’s unspoken plan to urge his retarded daughter, Cora, to eat the poisonous mushrooms in their wooded yard; she would recognize them as the same that Alice in Wonderland ate. In other stories characters remember their ties to the world beyond them, but always at a price. In “The Jungle of Lord Lion” Mrs. Pomeroy spends the last of her savings on a trip to Boudina, where she plans to luxuriate for a few months in an inexpensive room by the sea and to wait to see what her cancer will do. When Mrs. Chubb, a rich woman staying at the same inn, tells her, “You cannot have a white girl and a black boy playing together half naked, unless you are a fool,” Mrs. Pomeroy insults her. Although Mrs. Pomeroy expects that the dignified African innkeeper, Mrs. Heatherby, will turn out Mrs. Chubb after she overhears the conversation, it is Mrs. Pomeroy who is asked to leave. As she looks out the window, she sees the same view, the same stars rising in the sky over the ocean where she had been content. “She could not remember her own anger or fear, though they were there, somewhere within her knowledge. She had understood the terrible components of joy. Alive, and breathing, Mrs. Pomeroy stood there in the wet soft air, looking into the darkness.” Many of Jacobsen’s best stories end in such stillness. Although some early stories linger on excessive poetic descriptions, the collection accumulates in force and effect, as it consistently struggles to understand the limits of language to make the world safe and whole. [Monique Dufour]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction What Goes without Saying: Collected Stories by Josephine Jacobsen Monique Dufour Josephine Jacobsen. What Goes without Saying: Collected Stories. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996. 335 pp. $29.95. Each story evicts characters from their everyday lives, where everyone spoke the language and roads took their predictable course according to memories and road signs. Whether in their homes or in hotels on tropical islands, Jacobsen’s characters are suddenly outsiders, estranged from the power of language and reason to name, explain, and control. They are left turning over words like “heal,” “importance,” and “pleasure” in their mouths, and finding language emptied out of content, unable to describe their thoughts and circumstances. Most of these stories begin in medias res, many of them during repuscular hours, or at the edge of oceans or cliffs. A women is trapped in her own bathroom, a journalist is maimed in a verdant Guatemalan forest, an old woman is robbed in her row house. In some stories, characters silently conspire. In “The Glen” Jesse finishes her husband’s unspoken plan to urge his retarded daughter, Cora, to eat the poisonous mushrooms in their wooded yard; she would recognize them as the same that Alice in Wonderland ate. In other stories characters remember their ties to the world beyond them, but always at a price. In “The Jungle of Lord Lion” Mrs. Pomeroy spends the last of her savings on a trip to Boudina, where she plans to luxuriate for a few months in an inexpensive room by the sea and to wait to see what her cancer will do. When Mrs. Chubb, a rich woman staying at the same inn, tells her, “You cannot have a white girl and a black boy playing together half naked, unless you are a fool,” Mrs. Pomeroy insults her. Although Mrs. Pomeroy expects that the dignified African innkeeper, Mrs. Heatherby, will turn out Mrs. Chubb after she overhears the conversation, it is Mrs. Pomeroy who is asked to leave. As she looks out the window, she sees the same view, the same stars rising in the sky over the ocean where she had been content. “She could not remember her own anger or fear, though they were there, somewhere within her knowledge. She had understood the terrible components of joy. Alive, and breathing, Mrs. Pomeroy stood there in the wet soft air, looking into the darkness.” Many of Jacobsen’s best stories end in such stillness. Although some early stories linger on excessive poetic descriptions, the collection accumulates in force and effect, as it consistently struggles to understand the limits of language to make the world safe and whole. [Monique Dufour]

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