ABSTRACT
To see, to notice, to watch, to look on: in this, the opening paragraph of ‘One off the Short List’, the first story in A Man and Two Women, the relations mediating the group are almost entirely visual. It is a shifting network, where subjects and objects of the verbs interchange in a visual chain, where he watches Barbara who watches Johnson whose attention is all for the unknown girl. The two terms of an opposition might be unambiguously marked by either positive or negative value, and the narrative account be the struggle to eliminate the latter. Alternatively, the narrative may conclude without a definitive resolution in favour of one or other of the oppositional terms, in which case ambiguity enters the signifying circuit as an important factor mediating the relations of the opposition. The recurring patterns and their variations are one key to reading the order in which they are inscribed, that of the logic of the narrative.
