Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist B ...

for Hazzard, most of whose early stories have been collected or incorporated into the longer novels—these works remain enclosed in the time of their first publication, anticipating in a way Hazzard’s subsequent literary renown and detailing a writerly biography that is itself prospective, yet to become substantial. However, in a manoeuvre that comes to seem characteristic of Hazzard’s highly particular relation to the matter of her biography, this sense of prospect and anticipation is not uncomplicated. The narrator of “Sir Cecil’s Ride” observes that it is narrative authority and self-inscription that are at stake in precocious retrospectivity: (speaking of the eighteen-year-old protagonist) “How could she talk of the past, who had no past to speak of?” (30). The slippery purchase of early writing on the facts of a life is, of course, a truism of biography; nonetheless, it confers particularity and a resonant indeterminacy on the prospective/retrospective orientation of these early works.

This question of the play of (autobiographical) prospect and retrospect, together with the confounding of proper sequence, is particularly important in relation to Hazzard, arising in connections frequently drawn between her biography and her fiction. Her fiction is resolutely complex in its engagements with time, most notably through the audacious prolepsis of The Transit of Transit after an opening chapter where attention is drawn in every sentence to the daily processes and events through which truth is either revealed or obscured, readers are told that the hero “would take his own life before attaining the peak of his achievement. But that would occur in a northern city, and not for many years” (12). That revelation is, by the novel’s end, buried in the weight of narrative detail and accreted clues, with the effect that the event anticipated, having acquired its full weight and significance only in the final pages of the novel, is not told—or rather, is not retold—at that point but left hanging, beyond the scope of the novel’s events. A crucial part of reading The Transit of Venus is that readers cannot be confident of the status of what they are reading because its significance has been obscured by having been disclosed out of sequence, improperly, and through apparently inconsequential details, even while they are being reminded of the importance of full knowledge.