Written in three weeks in a Paris hotel when Mansfield was desperately ill, ‘The Fly’ is a story about death, the anticipation of death, and the challenge of survival in its aftermath. It’s a tiny story that contains three distinct frames, in each of which time has a different dimension.
In the first, Woodifield, an elderly ex-employee, a stroke survivor, very frail, revisits his former boss in his plush office. We are given to understand that this is a frequent occurrence, and both a trial to the boss but also an opportunity for self-congratulation, and the expression of small acts of kindness. He is older but in good health, well-to-do, and the apparent master of his circumstances.
Towards the end of some inconsequential chat, Woodifield mentions in passing that his daughters had visited his son’s war grave in Belgium, which happens to lie near the grave of his boss’s son. He leaves soon after.
Now alone, and devastated by this unforeseen turn of events, the boss locks his office and sets himself to weep, his only means of catharsis. Tears, however, won’t come, and he is forced to remember his son and intended heir, in all the vividness of his youth and promise.
In the final scene he is distracted from his grief when a fly drops into the inkpot on his desk. He watches as it torturously crawls out and cleans itself, before saturating it again, not once, but three times. In doing so he enters several conflicting mood states, each characterised by dissociation.
The brilliance of this story lies in Mansfield’s piercing acuity, her control of time as an experiential phenomenon, and her masterful brevity. Is the story about the implacable burden of memory? Or about the illusion of certainty in a manifestly precarious world? Or does it suggest that the true realisation of cruelty must rest in its final outcome? The reader is left to seek a hypothesis.
First published in The Nation and Athenaeum in 1922 then in the collection The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories, Constable and Company 1923; it’s available to read here
A Personal Anthology 